Hysterical Journey to Historic Places

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THERE’S A SOLDIER IN A HUT……



With a bullet up his butt,



Take it out,



Take it out,



Like a good boy scout.







We were all given a month’s leave at home before reporting to Oakland Army Base for processing to overseas duty. For some of us it would be the last time we ever saw our families. During that month the siege at Khe Sahn took a lively turn, the embassy in Saigon was assaulted and nearly overrun, heavy fighting broke out in the streets of Hue. The 1968 TET Offensive had fetched loose in a big way much to the surprise and chagrin of our war leaders who had been bragging that the war was about over. Thobe and I would be right in the middle of it.







My folks drove us up to Oakland and dropped us off at the processing center where thousands of men were being rushed off to join the fray. There were more soldiers there than we had ability to transport. President Johnson’s infernal profiteering scheme was working out for him. Thobe and I were put on standby in a huge warehouse full of bunks. Hundreds of soldiers were waiting to be called for departure. We waited, and waited, and waited. We had only the uniforms we were wearing, and nothing else. Not even personal shaving gear. We were not allowed leisure to leave for any reason because our names might be called at any moment. That warehouse was like a prison. It had maybe a dozen toilets for use by all and no showers. It was not intended for long term habitation. It did have one pool table for entertainment. The line of guys waiting their turn to play was insanely long. I waited in that damn line for five hours one day and when it was my turn to play the other guy sank the eight ball on the break and won the game. I never even got to chalk my cue stick.







Thobe was called late in the morning of the fourth day we were there. We shook hands, grinned at each other, and once again I thought I had seen the last of him. My name was not called for three more days. My uniform and underwear were positively reeking by then, and I gleefully boarded the bus that would take me out of that dreadful place. Just before we left the warehouse we heard a news report that the passenger terminal at Bien Hoa Air Base had come under mortar attack and several men waiting to come home were killed. I worried about Thobe. It would be just like him to blunder into a situation like that on his way to go pee.







At Travis Air Force Base I hopped aboard a chartered commercial jet that was attended by a few comely, but senior, flight attendants who would tolerate no nonsense from a plane load of lustful young men going to war. We made an overnight flight and landed in darkness on the Island of Oahu to refuel. Shortly after we got back into the air the comely, but senior, flight attendants began bringing us some cold airline pancakes for breakfast. Officers and NCOs sat in the front of plane and all of us privates sat in the back. The officers and NCOs got served warm pancakes, but by the time we got served the pancakes had long since ceased to be warm. The air had begun to get a little turbulent and when I went to open my syrup we took a hard bounce and syrup fell in my lap. It made a helluva mess and the comely, but senior flight attendants could not be bothered to bring me a rag to clean it up. By the time they finished serving breakfast the syrup had soaked through my trousers and was seeping into my underwear.







A few hours later the pilot announced another refueling stop on Wake Island and we would soon be commencing approach. Twenty minutes later we had descended to a few hundred feet and could see white caps breaking on the waves. Those white caps were getting closer and closer and there was no sign of land anywhere. Right when I thought for sure we were going to crash into the sea the plane touched down, the flaps were engaged, engine thrust was reversed, and the brakes started screaming. The plane shuddered to a stop about 20 feet short of plunging into sea at the other end of the tiny runway. The further west we came the hotter and more humid the day became. I got a two dollar hot dog for lunch from a PX concession stand. It was the only building I saw on the island. I badly wanted to find a latrine so I could wash the syrup out of my crotch. My pants were stuck to my skin like glue, but we were called to board the plane before I found one.







After an impressive takeoff in which we barely cleared the waves we headed off toward Clark Air Base in the Philippines. It was another routine refueling stop. Everything there went smoothly. The general commanding air operations at Clark was Benjamin O. Davis Jr, the fierce old Red Tail from Tuskegee. A range of gorgeous mountains rose up behind the air base. They were kind of forbidding though because of fighting that took place there during the Spanish American War, during various political upheavals, and during WWII. I later heard that there were still cannibals living in those mountains. It was getting uncomfortably hot but I had finally found a latrine and got the syrup mostly cleaned up. It had begun to itch on Wake but had since begun burning.







The next stop was Bien Hoa Air Base in Vietnam. The end of the runway was under attack when we landed there. It was another impressive screecher like we had seen on Wake but more so because we were going faster. Soon as the plane stopped and the door opened a guy in full combat gear stuck his head in and hollered, “Alright you slackers, welcome to Vietnam, follow me and run like hell”. We stampeded off the plane and between a double row of soldiers facing outward with rifles locked and loaded and made it into the terminal. It was the same room we had heard about in the news report back in the warehouse. The blood had been mopped up, but there was shrapnel damage everywhere. The hole in ceiling where the mortar round struck had not yet been patched.







From the terminal we were quickly ushered into army buses and taken through the town of Tam Hiep to the 90^th Replacement Battalion on Long Bihn. The buses had screens on the windows to protect us from hand grenades, fire bombs, and thrown rocks. The 90^th Replacement Battalion was the processing center where we would be given new uniforms and unit assignments. I arrived there on the afternoon of February 21, 1968 and had not been in a shower since the evening before I left home in Santa Maria on February 12. I was a mess and ashamed of my appearance. An officer named MacDonald braced me about it and I carefully explained to him that under ordinary circumstances I took pride in my uniform and tried to do it honor by wearing it well. Then I told him about the warehouse prison, and the syrup mess. He thought the syrup story was hilarious and ushered me to the front of the line for uniforms and then over to the showers. Everywhere he went he had to repeat the story.







I was very much looking forward to a nice hot shower, but much to my chagrin I learned that hot water heaters and flush toilets simply did not exist on army posts in Vietnam. The damned syrup had given me a pesky rash that soon got a fungal infection that has plagued me ever since. The quartermaster contracted laundry service to Vietnamese Nationals and they washed our clothes right there in the Dong Nai River. When your laundry was returned the pockets had collected a load of river sand and buttons were often broken from being smashed against rocks. Our skivvies had been exposed to fungal spores infected our crotches. It was a huge problem and those infections were treated with a variety of salves and powders available at the PX but they didn’t work. Many of us stopped wearing underwear and when those inflammations flared into full blossom the best relief was to simply to cut out the crotches in our trousers and allow the machinery to dangle in the fresh air.







We got assigned to temporary quarters, had our supper, and had begun to relax and enjoy the pleasant tropical evening when the Viet Cong attacked an ammo dump nearby. My first night in Vietnam was spent hunkered down in a bunker with no rifle and little sleep. Next morning I was assigned to the 159^th Engineer Group right there in Long Bihn. We rode in a truck over to the group headquarters and got our battalion assignments, and the truck dropped us off at battalion headquarters where we were assigned to companies. I ended up in Company A, 92^nd Engineer Battalion (Construction). We were part of the 20^th Engineer Brigade.







President Johnson was constrained in his massive troop buildup plans by a limitation on the number of divisions that could serve in Vietnam. In true corrupt Texas style he and his henchmen at the Pentagon simply reorganized the structure of brigades. Engineer battalions were organized into groups, and brigades came up to division strength. There was nothing about the Johnson Administration that was not based on lies, deception, or corruption. Its goal was nothing more than personal enrichment and the world paid for it in blood.







One of the fellows who rode in on the truck with me was named Gene Torpey from New Jersey. We processed into the company together. I wanted to get it over and done with soon as I could so we could get to work riding around on heavy equipment and having fun. Torpey suggested that the sooner we got done processing the sooner we would go on the duty roster and begin doing scut work.







We ended up over in the 62^nd Battalion’s enlisted club drinking beer all afternoon, eating bad pizza and losing hand after hand in a poker game. We finished processing the next day, and found out that Torpey was right. We were the lowest men on the totem pole and began doing scut work. What we quickly learned was that for every piece of heavy equipment the army had there were at least 20 operators.







My first duty assignment was with the Peneprime Detail. Peneprime is the sludge that is left over after everything useful has been extracted from crude oil. It was very much like roofing tar and might be the same thing. It was a useful sealant in road construction, and on artillery pads, and the aviation companies liked it for dust abatement on landing pads for helicopters. It was also used to make asphalt. Peneprime came to us in 55 gallon steel drums that weighed 482 glorious pounds each. The drums were held horizontally in a stockpile and had to be manhandled fifty yards over to an apparatus called a kittle. It was a storage tank with a good stout pump. Twenty-three barrels would fill it up. The barrels were rolled to the front of the kittle and lifted upright by hand. The bung was wrenched off, the barrel was shoved onto rails inside the kittle, and the bottom of the barrel was pierced with a pickax to make it drain. When the 8^th barrel was shoved in to position at the front of the kittle the first barrel was pushed out the back. As the filling process went forward a small lake of spilled peneprime formed at the entrance to the kittle. The lake coated the barrels as they were rolled into position to be lifted. From that point onward everyone who touched the barrel was marked by it. It got all over your hands, arms, face and in your hair. It got on every article of clothing you had and quickly ruined your only pair of boots. It could not be washed off your skin except with diesel fuel and could not be laundered out of your clothing. After a week in the peneprime yard you looked disgusting. It was unavoidable.







Two men earned themselves the distinction of being permanently assigned there. Their names were Dennis Smith and Douglas Payne. Dennis was given the moniker of “Peneprime” and Doug was given the moniker of “Pigpen”. Both of them hated that job but they were such screw ups that they couldn’t do anything else. Pigpen grew surly and was always on the fight. Peneprime wanted more than anything to go into combat and volunteered for every opportunity that came along. Engineers were often recruited to be door gunners on helicopters or to drive armored personnel carriers. If you could operate a dozer you could surely handle an APC. Peneprime Smith never passed muster with those opportunities though so he kept on loading the kittle and dreaming about glory in sad disappointment. It took most of the morning for them to fill the kittle up and the truck would come along and pump it out in about ten minutes.







I had only been in Vietnam for about three weeks before I was called out of the afternoon work formation and told to report to the orderly room. Oh crap. I thought I had somehow gotten myself into big trouble, but much to my surprise I had a visitor.







My cousin, Jim Forsberg, had come to see me. He was a captain in the Ninth Infantry Division, a company commander, and had had just been awarded the silver star. His tour was up and he was on his way to the 90^th Replacement Battalion for out processing. Jim was interested in our comfy sleeping arrangements at Long Bihn and asked for a look inside our barracks. He probably wanted to see about getting a similar arrangement for his own troops when they were not in the field sleeping in mud. We were sleeping on ordinary canvas army cots with thin mattresses. We did have sheets and pillows under our poncho liners. Jim seemed a bit disappointed. Our sleeping arrangements were probably no better than his. It was a brief visit that made me sort of a celebrity for the rest of the day. I was glad to see that Jim was okay, he had been in some heavy fighting. Another cousin, Bud Irwin, had served a tour in Vietnam back in 1965 as an Air Force officer. Bud had begun sending me care packages and I had offered to share what I had left with Jim but he politely declined. Bud sent me damn nice care packages he knew just exactly what to put in them. Bud was on my dad’s side and Jim was on my mom’s side and they both had a passing acquaintance with one another. They had both narrowly escaped being killed in the same mid-air collision over Germany.







Company A was situated on the south perimeter of Long Bihn at the highway junction leading down to Bearcat. The Ninth Infantry Division was headquartered at Bearcat and that is where Jim had just come from. Thobe was also posted at Bearcat with the 595^th Light Equipment Company. They were attached to 86^th Engineer Battalion. Most of the Engineer Battalions had a spare company attached. The 41^st Bridge Company was attached to the 92^nd Battalion. Company A was responsible for mounting guard in three bunkers along the perimeter every night. They were four man posts. Two men stood a two hour watch while the other two slept. Two of the bunkers were occupied by two men during the daylight hours. For those four men it was a 24 hour post. Pigpen and Peneprime both loved to volunteer for the 24 hour guard mount because it kept them away from the kittle. They did it so often that the yard got shorthanded, hence I was added to the merry crew. I worked hard down in the peneprime yard and wore my stained uniforms with a certain amount of dignity.







All of us on the duty roster pulled our fair share of guard duty. We all carried our M-16s faithfully when required; we cleaned them often, but had never fired them. Ammo was scarce and valued like gold. Engineer outfits at Long Bihn were a low priority for getting any at all. Most of the ammo we got had to be bartered for. Send the peneprime truck out to spray a heliport and come back with five cases of rifle ammo.







The monsoon season started out with an unbelievably heavy deluge on a night that I happened to pull a 24 hour guard watch. Long Bihn was built on top of a formation of laterite clay that prevented the rain water from percolating in to the ground. The heavy rain sought low areas and then began to form a lake around our guard bunkers. As the lake grew it forced all of the creepy crawlers to seek high ground. All night long we could hear woodsy creatures dropping onto the floor inside the bunker. Next morning the rain had finally stopped but there must have been a hundred snakes, rice paddy leeches and frogs in the bunker along with a few surly rats. We began killing them and tossing them out the door. A local kid came by sell us some cokes and watched us kill the snakes. Once in a while he would point at one and say, “Him bite, you die”. Most snakes in Vietnam are deadly poisonous. Bamboo vipers were near the top of that list. Their fangs were in the back of their mouths and they had to chew on you a while before they could inject poison but if you allowed that to happen you were likely to fall over dead within two steps. We called those snakes Two Steppers. We did not find any of them in the bunker that morning but they were around. I did not much care for the 24 hour guard stations and only volunteered for it twice to appease Pigpen. Pigpen was in the other 24 hour bunker. It was on ground high enough that snakes were not a problem in. He would have loved to kill the snakes. I could see him watching us kill them and knew he very much wanted to abandon his post and come join us. He was like a chained up dog when a bitch was in heat nearby. During lunch he offered to switch posts with me for ten dollars. I told him we had already killed the snakes but he wanted a closer look at them. The lake soaked into the ground within a couple of days but the monsoon rains came every afternoon like clockwork until September. One day I decided to take a shower in the rain and got all soaped up good, but the rain stopped like somebody had turned off the faucet. Not another drop fell and I had to wipe the soap off with a towel.







My other 24 hour guard tour was also eventful because of a snake. After lunch we noticed that traffic along the highway in front of the bunker had stopped and was backing up in all directions. We called up the orderly room and told them we had a situation developing and pretty soon reinforcements came down. What stopped the traffic was a huge King Cobra in the road. It had reared up fifty feet away from us, flattened out its hood and was busily keeping the onlookers at bay. An officer in the Army of the Republic of Korea came up to see what the delay was, saw the snake, went back to his jeep for a machete, came back and chopped the snake’s head off with one quick stroke. The Korean guy took the snake home for dinner and a hungry dog made off with the head. Vietnamese dogs are like dingoes; nothing but a hammer blow can kill them.







Sometime near the end of March an opportunity came up for me to take over the battalion fuel truck. It got me out of the peneprime yard for good, and it was an important job because I had to keep fuel in the battalion generator. If that generator ran out of fuel and shut down the whole battalion would lose power. Every light would blink off, we would lose radio communication with remote job sites, and our beer would get warm. Everyone would hate that. Problem was I didn’t know how to drive the damn truck. I did okay with it the day Sergeant Henry rode with me out to the fuel depot and showed me how to acquire a load of fuel. He showed me how and when to shift gears too, but the first time I tried it on my own I got confused about the gears and rode the clutch until it exploded.







I broke down right in front of WAC Compound. It was where all of the girl soldiers and the donut dollies lived. The Donut Dollies were Red Cross volunteers who were sent out to improve the morale of troops by visiting with us and bringing us donuts and playing games. All of them were young and lovely and smart and very personable. All of us loved those alluring girls and they were treasures, but had to be closely protected. They were sensitive about anyone lurking nearby and I was not there two minutes before a military police sergeant rolled up behind me in a jeep. He figured me for a dollie stalker and ordered me to move on; I told that there was nothing I wanted more than to be going about my business but the truck was broke down. Everybody within a mile could smell that burned clutch but him. He called up my unit on the radio and arranged for a tow vehicle and waited right there until we were gone. Back at the motor pool the fuel tanks and pump were quickly moved onto a different truck and I had to fill up the generator by hand with jerry cans that day. The jerry cans I left at the generator as a backup fuel supply. Nobody had thought of doing that before. I finally figured out the shifter and stopped riding the clutch and became a decent enough truck driver.







One day I was filling up the dozers down in Company C and ran into Dennis Coger. He and I were in training both at Fort Ord and Fort Leonard Wood together. He told me that he came over with Danny Rathbun and that Danny was in Company D. I never saw Danny but heard about him from time to time. He was notorious for running over his own rifle with the earth mover. He did it twice. The army policy was to promote all privates to PFC soon as they got to Vietnam. Torpey and me, and probably Coger and Rathbun too all got our mosquito wings on the same day.







Base bay for a pfc was $137 plus $65 combat pay. I started in saving $175 dollars every payday by keeping it in the company safe. We were not paid in money. What we got was called Military Payment Certificates, or MPCs. It looked like Monopoly money, but was honored wherever we could find to spend it. The black market for American currency was a thriving operation because the economy of Vietnam was so poor. Their basic monetary unit was the piaster and was valued at 118:1 to the dollar. The piaster was further broken down into units of dong; one hundred dong per piaster. Most things in the local economy cost the citizens a few dong. When we bought a coke from them for 25 cents in MPC they could roll it over for about 250 dong. They had plenty of war profiteering on their own.







Company A was ordered to get flu shots in early April to prevent us from getting Asian flu. The serum we were given was green and every single one of us came down with a serious case of Asian flu at the same time. Our whole company was put in quarantine for a week except for those who had mandatory duty. Sick troops kept up the guard mount, and I still had to keep the generator full of fuel. My illness was less severe because I had just gotten over a flu virus at Fort Leonard Wood. It was a damned miserable week for all of us. The mess hall continued to operate because we had hired Vietnamese Nationals to pull kitchen police and they didn’t get those dreadful shots. None of us had much appetite that week though.







In April Company A was ordered to deliver some air compressors and track mounted rock drills that we could spare from our quarry operation to the 362^nd Light Equipment Company who had a rock quarry on the Black Virgin Mountain near the Cambodian border not far from Tay Nihn City. We would be part of a supply convoy to our base at Cu Chi. Cu Chi was the headquarters of the 25^th Infantry Division commanded by General Alexander Haig. He sited his base at Cu Chi because of its proximity to the Viet Cong stronghold we had been affectionately calling The Iron Triangle. Haig unknowingly built his base squarely on top of a huge Viet Cong tunnel complex. The tunnels were put in by the Japs during WWII to protect a huge rubber tree plantation owned by the French. It had been nationalized by the Viet Mihn when the French were driven out of Indochina after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The corrupt government of South Vietnam eventually sold the rubber farm to a French company called Michelin who engaged what later became the Viet Cong to protect the plantation. The Viet Cong used the Jap tunnels to do so. Those tunnels were a huge pain in the ass to us. Anyone who owns Michelin tires should realize that they come at a dear price in the blood of American soldiers.







I was pulled off the fuel truck to ride shotgun as a spare driver. My pal Torpey was a truck mechanic and threw his tool box into the load also to ride shotgun and act as a spare driver. He was a fine truck driver. Our convoy rolled out of Long Bihn early enough in the morning to get through Saigon before the streets got crowded. Traffic congestion in Saigon was worse than Saturday night in Tijuana. Company A trucks led the entire convoy. One of our officers commanded it. When we got through Saigon the officer thought he might be lost and pulled over to check his maps just as day was breaking. It was a beautiful morning and while we were parked the street urchins swarmed out to sell us what goods they had. I bought a plastic water buffalo hide billfold from one of those kids. While I was busy with the kids, the driver I was with dozed off behind the wheel. All of the trucks ahead of us in the convoy pulled out and neither one of us noticed they were gone until the officer came back in his jeep mad as hell. The driver’s name was York. He normally drove the peneprime truck. He probably wished he was back at Long Bihn driving the peneprime truck still by the time that officer got done hollering. He ruined a fine comfy nap.







There were quite a few battlefield remnants along the highway to Cu Chi. There was a shot up APC beside the road that had been abandoned and three Vietnamese families were living in it. A dozen of our soldiers had probably died in that APC. We stopped beside the road again up on the rubber plantation so that the Cu Chi trucks could be brought together and sent on their happy way. Torpey and me were posted as pickets out in the trees to keep the Viet Cong from sneaking up to ambush the trucks. Two other spare drivers went off to guard the other side of the road. I am sure we must have scared the Viet Cong to death. We continued on to Tay Ninh without incident and spent the night with the 362^nd.







It was a beautiful old imperial city but it was close enough to Cambodia to be under constant threat of attack. Those guys we stayed with were a bit frazzled by that situation. All was peaceful the night we were there though. The Viet Cong probably phoned ahead that Torpey and me were last seen headed in that direction. Next morning we refueled our trucks, dropped our loads off at the rock quarry and started heading back to Long Bihn. The guys at the quarry did not look anywhere near as frazzled as the guys in Tay Nihn did. One of them told me that, “Hell, the only time they ever come under fire is when their stockpiles get low”. That was when I realized that quarries were low priority targets with the Viet Cong.







The Company A trucks were on their own during the return trip. We got through the dreaded rubber trees without mishap. We were pretty small potatoes for an ambush by then. Our trucks got separated in the Saigon traffic and York got lost. He might have done so on purpose. He wanted to see the marketplace at the Newport Docks and drove us right straight to it. He had heard that a prudent man could sometimes locate a bargain on stereo equipment there and wanted to look for a bargain of his own. What he found was a little brown and white puppy.







It looked like a Brittany mix and York took to that pup like it was a long lost lover. York gave the old lady two dollars for it and she took it out back, clubbed it to death, put it in a sack and gave the sack to York. That old lady thought we wanted the pup for supper. The Vietnamese are fond of a dog supper. They like cats too. York dropped the sack off over the edge of the dock on our way back to the truck. While we were gone some kids looted our truck, and stole all of our cigarettes and my camera. We rode back to Long Bihn in silence and got there ahead of the others. They had gone back to look for us. The officer in the jeep was pissed off at York again, but York wasn’t the sort who cared much what an officer thought. His enlistment was about to expire. Three weeks later he was back home in Pennsylvania.







Another short timer named, Diedrick, took over the peneprime truck, and a newbie named Henry Capps from Indiana arrived to replace York on the duty roster. Diedrick was a fine soldier from Corpus Christi, black as the Ace of Spades, and would have been a snappy dresser if he had civilian clothes to wear. He did have about 20 different fatigue uniforms that were custom tailored. Capps came from an affluent family and was a spoiled brat and a cry sissy. His dad got sick of his lazy bullshit and made him join the army. Then when he found out that his son was going to Vietnam he took out a big life insurance policy and hoped like hell he would collect on it. Capps was an actual truck driver and took over the fuel truck and I was assigned to run the sprayer on the back of the peneprime truck.







Capps quickly became the object of Pigpen’s hostility and the two of them had several lively fist fights. Pigpen was much stronger from wrangling those heavy barrels of peneprime, but he was a clumsy pugilist and seldom landed a telling punch. Capps might have been a whiner but he turned out to be a nimble combatant. I suspect he was probably bullied all through grade school. So was I, and here he was being bullied again by Pigpen. Most of us rooted for Pigpen, but I rooted for Capps and actually won a quite few dollars from Peneprime Smith by betting on Capps. You couldn’t really hurt Pigpen much unless you hit him with a fire axe. Capps never did much damage but he often won the fights. Pigpen didn’t have much wind.







Me and Diedrick were ordered to temporary duty at Phu Cuoung. The 41^st Bridge Company was putting a new bridge across the Saigon River there and Company A was building a new road to cross it. It was a large project. Diedrick and I were sealing the shoulders of the road as it was being prepared for pavement. Diedrick had to keep going back and forth to Long Bihn to get another load of peneprime and needed a shotgun rider, but I seldom went with him. There were always others in the company who needed a short visit to Long Bihn. Mostly they needed medical care. There were plenty of friendly girls around that job who for only two dollars were glad to provide a lonely soldier far from home and loved ones with all of the venereal disease that suited him. I took the place of the shotgun riders on the road crew until they got back. It was a fine road we were putting in but the Viet Cong were not much pleased with it. On a fairly regular basis they would attack our road crew with harassing fire.







The road crew was staying in a compound beside the river with the bridge company. The first day we got there Diedrick and I went to report in and get billeting and I’ll be double-damned and dipped in brown sauce if the officer in charge of the bridge project was not LT MacDonald who had helped me out with the syrup problem. Next morning at breakfast he stopped by the table where me and Diedrick were eating and gave me a small bottle of syrup.







Right beside our compound the Army of South Vietnam had an artillery battery. They were liable to break loose with a fire mission at any time of the day or night. Me and Diedrick were billeted in an open sided garage not a hundred feet from those ARVN guns. One night an explosion woke us up and we thought it was just another fire mission that the ARVNs were entertaining us with, but when rubble started falling down on the tin roof of the garage we knew we were under attack. Nobody ever bothered to tell us what to do if that ever happened. We both knew better than to wander around aimlessly so we grabbed our rifles and scampered off in opposite directions to find a hiding place. I found a sturdy looking trailer to crawl under and was trying to lace up my boots when I realized the trailer was loaded with gasoline. Any tracer round that happened to hit that gasoline would quickly prove to be disastrous to me. I saw a dozer parked nearby and crawled under that instead. Diedrick was beneath the dozer parked right behind it. I could hear him cussing. He was a short timer and had little patience with that sort of thing. Engineers go nuts in a firefight. They will shoot in every direction until they run out of ammo and seldom hit an enemy or even come close. They spared the gasoline trailer that night though by some miracle of providence. Two ARVN soldiers were killed by the rocket propelled grenade that woke us up. The next evening at sunset a couple of jets made an air strike on a position just across the river. It was a thing of beauty to behold; the jets diving down with guns and rockets blazing and dropping their bombs. I don’t know what damage they did but the rocket attacks stopped. On Sunday LT MacDonald called a day off and we had a picnic with some steaks and plenty of beer.







The Saigon River has a strong current and the bridge company had a pretty powerful utility boat that Lt MacDonald liked to water ski behind when he was drunk. That afternoon he was out there skiing and ran over a dead body floating down the river. The boat pulled it ashore. It had been in the river for a few days. It was all bloated up and fish or rats had been nibbling at it. The Lieutenant went to round up some ARVNs to attend to it. While he was gone those of us standing around began poking at it with sticks. The sticks pierced that poor devils skin and bodily gasses escaped. The smell of it made me sick. It was a good party until that happened;



me and Diedrick returned to Long Bihn a week or so later. His enlistment was done and he went back home to Texas. Before he left he gave me a dozen or so of his tailored uniforms. Most of them were not covered with peneprime stains. I became a snappy dresser too.







It was inconvenient for the road crew to come back to the river for lunch so we commonly purchased sandwiches from street vendors in town. We called them monkey sandwiches because we could never figure what kind of meat they contained. It might well have been monkey. It might have been dog, or rat, but I think it was probably pork often as not. Those sandwiches had plenty of very hot chili pods. They were so hot it made you want to cry for your mama. I got so I liked them and still enjoy a spicy meal.







I have a friend from high school named Henry Leon. Henry joined the army a few months before Thobe and I did. He went through basic training at Fort Bliss and then up to Fort Lewis for advanced training in the clerk typist school. After training he was posted at Fort Lewis and finally came down on orders to Vietnam. We had been writing letters back and forth so he knew where I was at. By some odd chance Henry got an assignment out of the 90^th Replacement Battalion to Headquarters of the 20th Engineer Brigade at Bien Hoa Air Force Base. It was only a short distance away from Long Bihn so I found my way over there one day and we had a visit. He worked in a place that had flush toilets, by god. All the rest of us everywhere in Vietnam had to use outside privies with honey buckets. Those honey buckets had to be dragged out every day and the contents burned with a mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel. It was an odious chore that we gladly turned over to Vietnamese Nationals to perform. During my visit with Henry we decided to take our R & R together down in Sydney Australia. He worked in the message center and could arrange the allocations. He would get an allocation for Thobe too of course. The brigade sergeant major, that jackass, recognized me as an interloper in his office and came over to brace me about my uniform. The army had recently switched over to subdued patches and mine weren’t so I was out of uniform. I explained to him that I had just come from a duty location where subdued patches were not yet available. He asked where that was, so I told him I was at Phu Cuoung. He told me to get it taken care of before I went back there and then warned me to be careful of snipers. He said that one had recently been killed out there. I thanked him, promised to get my uniforms attended to, went to take another leak, flushed the toilet six times and went on back to Long Bihn. It was the first time I had heard a toilet flush since the warehouse in Oakland, and I would not hear that music again until I got to Darwin, Australia.







The army had been integrated since 1947 but there were still instances of racial bias in the military. At Long Bihn my entire chain of command was black, all the way from Diedrick to the battalion commander. No white man was in a position of authority over me. Our operations were a model of efficiency but we had more men, because of President Johnson’s nefarious war profiteering scheme, than there were jobs to do. I was one of several others who were carried as excess baggage on the personnel roll. All of us on that list were white soldiers. As I got to looking at that situation I noticed that there were not any black privates in Company A. They had been differentially being promoted, and not one of them ever served on the peneprime detail.







Most outfits in Vietnam carried forth civic action projects. The 92^nd Engineer Battalion supported an orphanage located over by the Dong Nai River Bridge. I went out to the orphanage with Sergeant Henry one time to purchase a pig for a company barbeque. His job was to pay for the pig. My job was to drive the truck and load the pig. Fortunately the pig had already been killed and prepared for the pit. A whole pig large enough to feed 200 hungry men is a cumbersome burden for one person to carry. On another occasion I drove a five ton dump truck out to the orphanage with a load of scrap lumber. A Vietnamese wood worker out there was an adept furniture maker. Every piece of that scrap lumber was put to good use. Men at the remote job sites did their part in support of the orphanage by trying to supply a steady flow of Half-American babies to be raised there. On my way back to Long Bihn I came up behind a couple of Lambretta pickup scooters. One was passing the other on a long curve and I swung out to pass them both. Just then a deuce and a half coming toward me happened to also be passing a Lambretta pickup scooter. Rather than meet in a head on collision both of us swerved back into our own lanes and all Lambrettas, half a dozen chicken coops, a pig, and about twenty passengers bounced grinning out into the rice paddies. Neither one of us dared to stop. The first thing every driver is taught is not to stop in those situations. I did report it to Sergeant Henry when I got back to the motor pool. The only thing he asked me was if I stopped.











After Diedrick left I was afraid I was going to be assigned to drive the peneprime truck but fate intervened on my behalf. Sergeant Henry, my big old black platoon sergeant, pulled me aside one day and said, “Shagnasty, you are a loader operator aren’t you?” He had started in calling me Shagnasty after Oliver Shagnasty, the Red Skelton character. Sergeant Henry was the guy who had come up with the monikers of Peneprime and Pigpen. Thankfully my nickname didn’t stick. Henry only had nicknames for those on the peneprime detail. I answered back, “Yes sergeant, that’s a fact. I’m a damn good one too”. He told me to pack my duffle bag and report to the orderly room. Our rock quarry out at Xom Tam was short on loader operators. Yahoo, I was leaving Henry’s platoon.







The rock quarry was located near the hamlet of Xom Tam. As the crow flies it was about five miles west of Long Bihn across the Dong Nai River. The quarry was operated by the 159^th Engineer Group and manned by soldiers from the 92^nd, the 62^nd and the 169^th Battalions. It was a hodge-podge of men that must have been a nightmare to administer. It wasn’t my problem though. Soon as I got there I headed to the first hooch I saw (all barracks in Vietnam were called hooches, I don’t know why), dropped my duffle on the first empty bunk I found, and then ran off to report for duty. I was anxious to finally get started. The officer in charge pointed me towards a loader in the motor pool and suggested that I go down to the pit and begin loading some dump trucks. I saluted smartly and actually ran to the loader. That officer must have thought I was nuts, but I could tell by his uniform that he had never been around any peneprime. I climbed aboard the loader, fired it up, lifted the bucket and roared off in a cloud of dust. Hell, I didn’t even know what a pit was; much less where to find one. I thought it would be a place like the Million Dollar Pit back at Fort Leonard Wood, but it wasn’t. I saw a line of dump trucks ahead and just followed them into a hole in the ground. When they stopped I stopped, but there were several berms pushed up down there and I didn’t know which one to load from. I headed for the biggest berm I saw. It was full of big old rocks. Some of them were half the size of the kittle. They looked like a bit of a challenge but I thought I could lift them and began to try. One of the drivers stepped over and raised his fist in the air. It was the universal signal to stop. He climbed up on the loader and said, “Not here private. We want that material over there.” That berm had much smaller boulders in it that would fit into the hopper feeding the primary crusher. The big boulders would require further blasting. I loaded those trucks all afternoon. It was the best day of my life.







I returned to the motor pool towards sundown, parked the loader where I had found it and was surprised to see an armored vehicle parked beside my hooch. Inside the hooch I found myself amongst a nest of mechanics. In a perfect world I should have sought out the equipment platoon quarters but Xom Tam was pretty far from being perfect. They showed me where I could wash up, and we all went down to the mess hall for supper, then over to the club for a few beers. The armored vehicle was called a duster. It looked like a tank with an open turret and had twin 40mm cannons and a machine gun. The duster was designed as an anti-aircraft artillery weapon and was a holdover from WWII. It was attached to the Second Field Forces and provided security to our little compound every night. It was a comfort to have around. A squad of Viet Cong dwarfs could have overrun us at any time without the duster being there. The 3 man crew always stayed with the duster every night because they were always on call for emergency deployment to a downed chopper site or whatever. After breakfast they took off back where they came from, wherever that was: but we would see them again before supper.







I continued to bunk with the mechanics but reported to formations with the equipment platoon. It was all jolly good fun for a week or so and then the regular loader operator returned from his R&R in Hawaii and I found myself once again relegated to the excess personnel roll. I was assigned to operate a variety of equipment and sometimes the loader. I liked driving the Euclid 20 ton dump truck, but it had terrible back up visibility. One day I was backing it up under a conveyor belt at the crusher to catch a load and take it to stockpile. You need a guide on the ground to help you back a truck that size into position and I had one, but could not see him. I backed into the conveyor belt and wrecked it, and never was allowed to drive that big truck again.







One day the donut dollies found their way out to Xom Tam and they rode around in their jeep to our job sites. We laughed and joked with them and they seemed to be paying close attention to me. I was sitting on a gravel pile and thought I was particularly witty and charming that day. When the girls left I started in bragging about it until someone pointed out that I was wearing my crotchless trousers that day and all of my machinery was flopping around loose in the breeze.







One day I was driving a loader down in the pit and an unfortunate thing happened. Everything on a Hough H-90-CM front end loader operates under hydraulic pressure. The hoist and bucket controls are hydraulic and so are the steering and brake systems, and the transmission. It has large powerful engine that sends power through torque converters to the drive wheels and also drives the hydraulic pump. When you engage the hoist and bucket controls simultaneously it decreases power to the drive wheels and prevents the engine from stalling as you obtain a loaded bucket. The hydraulic pump gets heavy use and sometimes they wear out. On July 17 I was loading some trucks down in the pit but the controls were sluggish. I knew that the pump was about to go out, but the primary crusher had to be fed or the whole operation would shut down. On my own initiative I went off to add more fluid to the system hoping it would make the pump last through the day. What happened was that the additional fluid caused the pump seals to blow out and the whole pump failure was blamed on me. In the real world I could have consulted the platoon sergeant or the motor pool sergeant, but this wasn’t the real world. It was Xom Tam and both of those luminaries had gone off to Long Bihn in search of more whiskey and condoms. When the platoon sergeant got back he had my promotion to Specialist 4^th Class. The back of the truck they used was loaded with fence posts and concertina wire.







Xom Tam did not have a perimeter fence. I spent the next six weeks leading a detail to erect one. Concertina wire was called that because you could stretch it out like an accordion. It didn’t play music but it had a million ways to make you sing out in pain when the rusty barbed wire bit into your flesh. Apparently all of us who worked on that fence were up to date on their tetanus shots because nobody got sick. We weren’t even given gloves to handle that deadly wire. I figured out how to build the fence as I went along. It was a five strand fence; two strands deep and stacked with two more strands and another strand on top. It was simple to build once you knew how far apart to set the poles and how much to stretch the wire and how to wire it all together. Every few feet I set an empty beer can with some gravel inside to make it rattle when the fence was jarred. It was a warning system to alert defenders inside the wire of a Viet Cong probe against the perimeter. Each can had to have just the right amount of gravel. If it was too light the wind would blow it, if it was too heavy it wouldn’t rattle. A new commanding officer had been sent to Xom Tam. His name was LT Nemechek and he much admired the craftsmanship that I put into my fence.







Sometime along the way my old pal Henry Capps found his way onto the excess personnel list at Xom Tam too. Apparently he had allowed the battalion generator to run dry one time too often. He didn’t have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot and could not even be trusted to keep the spare jerry cans full. I saw plenty of him on the fence detail. One day we had run out of concertina wire by mid-morning, I thought about setting in a few more posts but the good citizens of Xom Tam were known to steal them. I excused the rest of the detail and Capps came up with a plan to lure a stray village goat onto the compound, kill it, butcher it and have a goat meat barbecue. It was his birthday. The wily goats were too smart for us though. If we had killed one of their goats the mess hall girls would likely have poisoned us both. Capps was glad to be at Xom Tam because it kept it him away from Pigpen.







One day the first sergeant summoned me into Long Bihn. I was worried that he was going to award me with a reduction in rank as disciplinary punishment over the hydraulic pump on the loader. That whole thing had blown over though. What he wanted was for me get my money out of the company safe and start up a savings account at the bank. Chase Manhattan had opened a branch office on Long Bihn. The army had decided to issue a new series of payment certificates because the old ones were being counterfeited and sold to the black market. After close of business that day all of my savings would be worthless. I had 1200 dollars in the safe and forty-five minutes to make it to the bank. The Xom Tam driver knew where the bank was and took me over there with ten minutes to spare. We had to spin by the other battalions and pick up other guys who desperately needed a bank run that day. The bank allowed us to set up payroll allotments for direct deposit into our new accounts. All of us chose to do so. We had good reason to trust the bank with our money more than the army could be trusted with it.







The fence was finally completed and I was wondering what sort of mischief would come my way next. At the evening formation the platoon sergeant handed me a technical manual entitled Explosives and Demolitions Handling and Operation. He advised me to read it carefully. I would be joining the demolitions squad tomorrow morning. Blowing things up with dynamite turned out to be the best job I ever had in my life and I had a good aptitude for it. There isn’t really much to learning quarry demolitions. The real expertise comes from the drillers who figure out a blast pattern calculated to feed a primary crusher with a capacity to crush 75 cubic yards of rock per hour. If it takes two weeks to drill a blast pattern, the blast would need to produce about seven thousand cubic yards of rock. A pattern drilled 21 feet deep on six foot centers would require a blast pattern of 111 holes. A flight of drill steel is ten feet long so two flights, three couplers and a drill bit would produce a hole about 21 feet deep. A pattern that was 4 holes wide and 28 holes long could be blasted out of a ledge approximately 10 yards wide and 33 yards long. Once the pattern was completed it needed to loaded and blasted on the same day. To load the holes a twenty five foot long bamboo tamping pole was used. We loaded the holes with military grade dynamite at twenty percent strength. Each hole was charged with an electric blasting cap with a delayed fuse. The caps with the fastest delay went into the row of holes nearest the pit wall. Those rocks needed to be broken first. The next two rows of holes got caps with a couple of milliseconds slower delay and they broke next. The slowest delay went into holes furthest from the pit wall. Dynamite explodes with a force equal in all directions but is directed to the path of least resistance. The last row of holes blasted directed the entire blast outward from the bedrock. Twenty percent dynamite would not explode fast enough to overrun the delays.







A case of dynamite held two dozen sticks and each stick was 10 inches long. The tamping poles were used to push the dynamite firmly against the walls of the hole. Usually about eighteen sticks would fill a hole. The holes didn’t need to be loaded clear to the top. The top of the hole was packed with drill chips to provide a minute amount resistance. The first stick that went into the hole carried the blasting cap. Each cap was circuit tested before it went in. If the cap failed the hole would not explode. The caps had two wires that were both 25 feet long. Both wires were a different color but each delay was color coded. When the last hole was loaded the caps could be wired together. It was important not to cross wire those colors to the next delay because a jumped delay would disrupt the firing sequence. When wiring was completed the entire circuit was tested again. If the circuit was intact we piled into our truck, turned on our siren and evacuated all the personnel and equipment from their work areas. When everyone had reached a safe location the demolitions sergeant primed the magneto in his charging box, took one final look around and pushed the plunger home igniting what was called the primary blast.







In a perfect world if three cap delays were used there would be three rows of broken rock in the pit when the dust settled. Xom Tam was far from being perfect though and that did not always happen. The first primary blast that I worked on was a large one and it went terribly wrong. Only about half of the holes exploded and dynamite and about fifty short circuited blasting caps were scattered from hell to breakfast. Those caps were pretty dangerous. It was a gigantic mess. I was afraid it was something I had done wrong, but it was finally traced to a broken wire between the box and the blast. The sergeant had somehow neglected to check that wire; probably because one of us had his manometer. The blasting wire that went out from the box carried a hefty jolt of electricity. It was a heavy gauge specialty wire that was extremely hard to come by. It was only used for primary rock blasting and each time it was used falling rocks would break the wire. We would continuously repair the wire, but it kept getting shorter and shorter. The sergeant kept getting closer and closer to the blast. Our sergeant was a short timer and the blast that went bad was the last one he made. He was replaced by a red haired specialist fifth class from Florida named Lonnie Godley. Lonnie was a barrel of laughs. The last time that short reel of blasting wire was used was from inside a guard bunker only about fifty yards away from the blast. As the newbie on the demo crew I was given the honor of setting that blast off. Being that close to half a ton of exploding dynamite would normally kill a person, but it was thought that the bunker would deflect the shock wave, and it did, but I was deafened in my right ear for a week. Both of my ears have been ringing loudly ever since. A rock half the size of a car came crashing down right on top of the bunker. I suspect if it had been ten pounds heavier it would have crushed me and Capps both. Capps had chosen to join me inside the bunker as his position of safety. I let him give me the all clear signal when the plunger went down. Both of us got completely showered with dust from the sandbags and I am sure Capps is probably hard of hearing too. He was close to the door. We had to use ordinary commo wire for our blasting after that. It would carry the load and was easier to splice when it got broken but we would need to decrease the size of our blast patterns because of the smaller wire.







No equipment was allowed in the pit after that primary blast failed until we could make it safe. Loose dynamite we could find on the floor of the pit was gathered up and set afire. It would make a hot flame but would not explode unless you tried to stomp it out. The damaged pit wall was the most dangerous area. Many of those rocks still contained dynamite with unstable blasting caps. We cleared that area by making secondary rock blasts against them using C-3 plastic explosive. A secondary blast is a small charge used to break large rocks into pieces small enough to get through crushing. C-3 was the plastic explosive in use a generation before C-4 was developed. We used tons of C-3 in secondary blasting at Xom Tam. It was quite old and had begun chemical decomposition, but still worked fine. It was a nitrate based explosive that smelled somewhat like mothballs. When you used C-3 it would cake up on your hands and stain them yellow. For a while we were scared to smoke with our hands stained like that. Nobody ever blew off any fingers from smoking though. It was delicate work setting those secondary charges on the loose pit wall rocks. There were other rocks containing dynamite buried beneath rubble in the pit and we couldn’t reach them. John Landis was our best dozer operator and he managed to push the big rocks into a separate berm. We broke them all up without incident and pit operations returned to normal. Capps had been trying to cross train on dozers and was down in the pit working up some training hours when he ran over a charge we had missed and set it off. It didn’t break the track, and it didn’t hurt Capps. Hell, he would soon be half deaf anyway.







The secondary blasts were fun. There were no holes to load. Just press the plastic explosive onto the big rocks in such a way that it would take good advantage of existing cracks in the rock. We normally used C-3 for our secondary blasts. Upon occasion we experimented around with TNT, or with C-2, or even with loose dynamite. TNT was developed for use in underwater applications like depth charges and torpedoes, but it produced toxic fumes and could not be used underground. C-2 came in thin sheets and was just not practical for much of anything. There was no need for using delayed fuse caps in a secondary rock blast. Ordinary electric caps would do the job. Those caps had two ten foot long wires insulated in brown plastic. They were cheaply made and more often prone to be defective. When the wires were spliced together and circuit failed to close, then the bad cap had to found and replaced. Sometimes we didn’t use electric caps at all if there was standing water in the pit for instance, or a chance of lightning strike. A handy alternative was detonation chord with concussion caps. Det Chord, as we called it, was made out of an explosive substance called RDX and packed inside narrow plastic tubing. It came coiled up in spools like wire. Det chord was developed as a fast fuse. RDX blew off at 28 thousand feet per second so it could not be used with delayed fuse caps. Handling C-3 all day often resulted in a fierce headache. We called them nitro headaches. They seldom lasted more than a week.







And so it went: drilling, blasting, maintain our drilling equipment, turn our dynamite, and pull guard duty every third night. It was a comfortable routine. Occasional details were pulled that included placing new sandbags around the commo bunker and constructing and sandbagging new guard towers. On those occasions my pal Capps was assigned to help. It meant I would have to work twice as hard because Capps would barely lift a finger in any job.







The demo crew made one trip over to the camp at Di An to blast the lids out of some spare 55 gallon drums they had and wanted to fill with dirt as sort of an oversized sandbag. The Ninth Infantry Division had moved to Di An from Bearcat in order to put the squeeze on the Iron Triangle. They had a hundred or so barrels and did not want to have to bother with the hammer and chisel method so they sent down to Second Field Forces for help with that problem. We were glad to help out because of the duster support we got. Me and Mike Tersigne and Jerry VanCamp grabbed up two rolls of detonation chord, some crimping pliers, concussion caps, black powder fuses, and fuse igniters. We got our helmets, flak vests, rifles and ammo and off we went over to Di-An in our deuce and half with the siren. One of their sergeants showed us to the barrels they had and I’ll be damned if they weren’t old peneprime barrels. Some of them I recognized because Pigpen was fond of scribbling FTA messages on them with a stick when he was bored. I sometimes wondered what happened to those empty barrels after we stacked them up behind the kittle. They were known to mysteriously disappear. Blasting those lids out did not take long. We just circled the lip of each barrel inside the rim with det chord and packed it with mud from a nearby rain puddle. Tersigne set the chord, Van Camp brought over the mud and I did the packing. When the barrels were ready we crimped a short fuse into a cap, taped the cap into a fold in the det chord, attached the igniter, hollered out “Fire in the hole” and let it rip. All of the lids were cut perfectly. The sergeant came out and gave us ten cases of rifle ammo to give to our first sergeant at Long Bihn. When got back that afternoon LT Nemechek called up Company A and spoke to the first sergeant. He told him that we got the ammo promised, but we were going to keep five cases at Xom Tam. Some of it we used to test fire our weapons. It was the first time many of us ever fired our weapons.







One day a soldier drove out to Xom Tam in a five ton dump truck with “Catch Me If You Can” painted across the front of the hood. His uniform bore no markings, no name tag, and he wore no insignia of rank. He had unit designations properly painted across his front bumper but they were no doubt fictitious. He stuck out like a sore thumb as a military entrepreneur who was sent out from wherever he came from to acquire things needed somewhere else through trade. He asked to speak to the officer in charge and LT Nemechek agreed to provide him with five loads of gravel from our quarry for a 50 caliber machine gun, some ammo and a tripod. He left the machine gun with us that day, and he left the tripod with us after his third load and the ammo after his final load. The whole deal took three days. “Catch Me” would drop by from time to time to see what other trading opportunities might come up. He could get about anything except a new roll of blasting wire for us. One day our mail truck driver bought a grease gun from him for 50 dollars MPC. A grease gun is a 45 caliber hand held sub-machinegun that looked like a grease gun with a stubby barrel. It dated back to WWII. He had to drive back and forth to Long Bihn every day and run errands through the whole 159^th Group. He wanted a weapon that was easier to get ammo for than our M-16 rifles were. He proudly carried that grease gun around with him on his rounds for a couple of weeks, but one day stopped beside the road to go pee. He tossed the grease gun, locked and loaded, through the open side window on his truck, but it the glanced off the steering wheel, hit the floor boards and began firing by itself. It fired the entire magazine in every direction from inside the truck. The driver hit the dirt and miraculously escaped getting shot with his own gun, but he had some tall explaining to do about our shot up mail and the damage to his truck. Catch Me heard about it and quickly brought us a new truck that he stole out of the PX parking lot on Long Bihn. All we had to do was change the lettering on the front bumper and nobody was the wiser. I never heard what Catch Me did with the shot up truck he drove off with. We never saw him again. Somebody must have finally caught him.







One night I happened to be pulling guard duty in our main bunker where the 50 caliber machine gun was placed when the duster was called out to secure a downed aircraft. It was not a situation that pleased them. As they passed down the roadway in front of us a few minutes later they decided to send us a salute with their 40 mm cannons blazing. Those rounds passed by without causing any damage but one round happened to strike a Vietnamese monastery that was across the road behind us. We wanted to fire a return blast back at the duster with our fifty but none of us could figure how to cock it in time. A short while later some ARVN policemen stopped by with an interpreter to speak to LT Nemechek. The head clerk at gospel mill next door had lodged a complaint against us for that senseless duster attack on his facility. LT Nemechek rounded up a few of us to accompany him over there for the interview, so we grabbed our rifles, locked and loaded them and off we went. LT Nemechek glibly passed the buck off to Second Field Forces for those damages, and the priest countered that his church had suffered other damage from falling rocks that surely was our fault. He pointed out several holes in the roof. LT Nemechek agreed to patch the roof soon as he could acquire the materials to do so. On our way back he mentioned to the interpreter that we had long suspected that the monastery was a Viet Cong hospital. The interpreter passed that information along to the ARVN cops. Those cops took that accusation seriously and returned in force a few days later to interrogate the good citizens in the hamlet of Xom Tam about alleged Viet Cong activity. There was a peaceful old rice farmer living there that the cops dragged outside, beat a confession out of and murdered. His death troubled my conscience for many years. I felt I had played a part in it by seeing the entire episode from beginning to end. I saw the duster fire their guns, I was present at the interview in the monastery, and I had seen that peaceful old man go along the road in front of the rock quarry dozens of times. I doubt that he had political convictions of any kind. Most Vietnamese simply wanted to live at peace, love their families, and be left alone to chew their betel nuts, eat eels in fish head sauce, and hunker down funny to rest when they got tired. President Johnson saw to it that they couldn’t do any of those simple things. War is good business, invest your grandfather.











Beer was commonly available all over Vietnam, but the consumption of alcohol was viciously regulated and could only be purchased in small amounts with a ration card. Even so it was only sold to those of us over the age of 21. Officers and senior NCOs were the only ones old enough to buy it. The rest of us simply resorted to drug abuse. Rice whiskey, however, could be purchased through the black market from the local economy if a supplier was found. It came in small square medicine bottles and it tasted like something out of a honey bucket, but it would knock your hat plumb off. One of the crusher operators at Xom Tam got his hands on a bottle of that moonshine and went AWOL to Saigon for three days. When he came back he got a reduction in rank for the AWOL, but he was part owner of his own rock quarry. He took a few of us by there to see it one day. It was located a few miles upriver from us. When he sobered up he had buyer’s remorse and was hoping to sell us his interest in it. When the communists finally took over South Vietnam that enterprise would have been nationalized.



Possession of rice whiskey was considered a serious affront to military order and discipline and if you were caught with it you would likely have to pull a stretch of bad time at Long Bihn Jail. We called that place LBJ in honor of our Commander in Chief who rightfully belonged there himself. The silly alcohol policy brought many thousands of our soldiers to serious substance abuse problems. Private Hedrick, back in Long Bihn was such an avid tippler that he took to guzzling down cough syrup and mouthwash. It led him to bowel incontinence. His alcohol craving could not be satisfied with beer alone. By age 20 his liver was already as big as a basketball. For his own good he should have been given a general discharge and returned to his home in the Carolinas where he had been enjoying his daddy’s moonshine since kindergarten.







Lo and Behold, Henry Leon actually did come up with Rest and Recuperation allocations for Sydney, Australia. Henry would arrive two days before me, but we would have some time together. Thobe’s allocation was sent down through the 86^th Battalion and got stolen. Henry sent him another one and Thobe saw Australia a couple of weeks after we had both returned. Thobe did not stay very long at Bearcat. He was just there long enough to sever the main power cable to the whole post while cutting a ditch with his road grader. That cable had several hundred color-coded wires bundled together. They all had to be matched up and individually spliced by flashlight at night. He was not a very popular man among those tasked with doing the splicing as they were being cursed at by the commander of the Ninth Infantry Division. Thobe’s whole outfit was sent down to the Mekong Delta right after that happened. They were given some pretty dangerous and crappy assignments that they did well and took pride in, of course. I was sad that we missed our connections in Sydney but Henry and I had a blast. I boarded the plane at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon and flew overnight to Darwin, Australia for refueling. We got off the plane to go take a leak and exchange our MPCs for money that would spend in Australia. Some of us were overjoyed at the sound of a flushing urinal and stood there flushing them over and over again. When we landed at Sydney we were not allowed to wear our shoes inside the terminal for fear of spreading contagion from Vietnam. We were not allowed to wear civilian clothes on the plane and were not allowed to wear our uniforms in town. We had to change into civvies at the airport and pack away our uniforms in our baggage. Civvies were hard to come by in Vietnam. Guys who had already been to their R&R usually came back with civvies that often enough ended up in a sort of unit clothes bank. I ended up wearing a dead man’s trousers and shoes to wear at the airport and a shirt borrowed from SGT Webb. Neither the shirt, nor the trousers, nor the shoes fit me. I ended up billeted at a place called the Bayview Apartments on Rushcutter’s Bay not far from the Sydney Opera House. First thing I did when I got there was fill up the bathtub with the first hot water I had seen since leaving Santa Maria. I fell asleep soaking in the tub and when I woke up the water was cold and muddy. I got out of the tub and went shopping for clothes of my own up in Kings Cross. I had dinner in a noodle joint and was served by an Asian waitress with a Cockney accent. Her first words to me were, “Yank right? What’ll it be, mate?” I nearly fell out of my chair in laughter. It was not at all what I expected to hear. Next morning I finally got ahold of Henry. He was billeted at the Coogee Bay Hotel clear out on the other side of town. He agreed to meet me at the Bayview and I went out for breakfast and was approached by a prostitute. I had my new clothes on and was a snappy dresser I guess. Yanks stuck out like sore thumbs and we were known to be flush with cash and were easy marks for industrious working girls. Most of them had straight jobs and prostitution was just an amusing sideline to them until they got married. I gave her fifty dollars for a hairdo and my address and asked her to bring a friend along for Henry. She promised to meet us that evening after she and her friend got off work and freshened up. When Henry showed up we went out for some booze, some mixer and some snacks. We went for ride on one of those double decker green buses and got lost. We had to take a taxi back to the Bayview. Taxis are subsidized as public transportation in Australia and passengers are each charged one flat rate whether they are going across town or across the street. The fare was about a dollar and half. On the way back all of the traffic just stopped in the street and the driver turned up his radio so we could listen to the running of the Melbourne Stakes. Horse racing is a big deal among the Australians and the Melbourne Stake Race is the biggest race of the year. Henry and I returned to the Bayview, took showers and started in drinking our whiskey, eating the snacks, and waiting for the girls to show up. Of course, they never did. We had been admonished that sort of thing frequently happened and we were disappointed but not much surprised. Henry spent the night snoring peacefully on the couch and the next morning we got up, grabbed a taxi and went out to see what was going on at Coogee Bay. We went out to stroll along the beach for a while and then went back to the hotel for some lunch and started in drinking beer in the bar. They served Resch’s Dinner Ale and we both became quite fond of it that day. We continued drinking it far into the night. Just as we were almost getting drunk from it some friendly bouncers escorted us up to Henry’s room and wished us a good night. Henry didn’t have a couch in his room. Next morning a maid gently woke me up from a peaceful snooze in Henry’s bathtub. Henry had already got up and checked out. He had to catch a plane back to Bien Hoa and had missed his morning shower. I took a taxi back to the Bayview, did some Christmas shopping for my family, boxed up my purchases for shipment, and then nearly got run over by traffic crossing the street to the post office. Traffic operates on the wrong side of the street in Australia. It is a dirty trick they learned from the British. I took another taxi down to the harbor and got on a harbor cruise and rode around on a boat. That evening I spent clubbing in Kings Cross. The next morning I met kind of a pretty girl in the park across the street from the Bayview. She was an American girl working her way around the world and had a job working in the laundry room at the Bayview. She was adventurous enough to agree to a date with me that evening. We spent our time together cozying up with each other and finishing off the rest of the snacks and whiskey and cozying up some more. After I met her in the park I decided to take a walk through town and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get propositioned again by the same prostitute as before. She had a pretty short memory. When I mentioned that they had done a decent job on the hairdo she realized who I was and offered to meet me after work. She said that she and her pal could not get past security at the Bayview the other night. I had already made the date with the American girl though and politely declined her offer of romance. Many Australians are kind of a hatchet faced looking people with prominent hawk billed noses. The prostitute was one of those and I presume that her girlfriend was at least equally as homely. Girls who consorted with Yanks were taken a dim view of by Australian men. Next morning I gave the pretty American girl a final lusty hug and got a taxi for the airport. It was my turn to go back to Vietnam. She was from Columbus, Ohio. We wrote back and forth as long as I was in Vietnam, but I lost touch with her after that. She may have moved on to Fiji.







When I got back to Xom Tam LT Nemechek was gone. He got promoted to First Lieutenant and became the executive officer at Company A. His replacement as officer in charge at Xom Tam was my old pal LT MacDonald. It can be a pretty small world sometimes.







We sent up another primary rock blast and when we turned to watch it go up what we saw was a helicopter veering nose up straight into the sky. They are not meant to be flown that way. A few days later LT MacDonald got a terse message from 159^th Group Headquarters admonishing us to also look into the sky before we dropped the plunger. A couple of days later a Huey came over slowly circling our whole quarry. It dropped Chu Hoi leaflets on us until they were ankle deep everywhere. Those leaflets fell like snow; thousands and thousands of them. We had to police up every single one of them by hand. I still have one of them. It served us right though. After that we carefully looked for helicopters flying over before dropping the plunger. We didn’t need to be picking up anymore propaganda leaflets.







Big changes were taking place at Xom Tam. The Vietnamization Program had begun. It was intended to teach the ARVNs work that would lead to the withdrawal of some American forces. When we heard that ARVNs were coming to Xom Tam to learn how to operate our cantankerous old 75 yard crusher all of us got drunk as hell for two days and then LT MacDonald dropped a bombshell on us. The ARVNs would be operating our crusher at their own quarry and we were getting a new 225 yard crusher. LT MacDonald had come to Xom Tam to build a new headwall for the primary crusher and set the new machinery into operation. We were also no longer going to be a cooperative 159^th Engineer Group endeavor. The new quarry would be operated by Company A of the 92^nd Battalion and the 92^nd would be devoted strictly to road building. The language barrier prevented us from actually communicating with the ARVNs they had to just watch what we did and learn our bad habits and we had plenty to them. The ARVNs were running a 25 yard crusher at their quarry and just their crushermen came over for training. They were led by a crafty old sergeant major named Trahn. Trahn could speak English and French and was full of stories. He usually came over on his Lambretta motor scooter so he could hang out in our club, get drunk and tell them. Trahn had a swivel mount attached to the handlebar on his scooter. He could mount his M-1 carbine on that swivel and when he got done with his stories he would wobble over to his scooter fire it up and wander on down the road firing at anything that moved in front of him. He must have terrified everyone in the hamlet.







Christmas was drawing near. Some wiseacre got on television back in August with the happy news that Christmas gifts sent to Vietnam would be going over by boat. They needed to be sent early because it would be a long trip. He could’ve advised the viewers to send beef jerky, or canned chili, or even sardines in mustard sauce, but what he said was to send fruit cake. Starting around Thanksgiving tons of fruit cakes began arriving in the mail all over the country. I got 32 pounds of it myself. So did everyone else at Xom Tam. At first we could trade them to prostitutes who came each evening to bring enlightenment into our lives. We could gift them to the Nationals who came each day to attend to our kitchen chores, burn our honey buckets, bring a sense of orderliness and cleanliness to our hooches, or barber our hair. Pretty soon they got sick of fruit cake too; the goddamn things were everywhere. Trahn was actually fond of them and we were glad to load him down with five or ten pounds of it every night when he tottered on home. He had 50 hungry ARVN mouths to stuff with fruit cake. Pretty soon even Trahn had enough of them and pleaded with us to stop giving them to him. We even tried eating some of it ourselves. The mechanics made us a fine Christmas Tree out of an old broom handle and it had branches that had started out in life as welding rods. The whole thing was painted olive drab. It was the only paint we had; they made decorations for the tree out of can tops from the mess hall. Of course all of the presents beneath the tree were fruit cakes.







On January 12 LT MacDonald handed me an envelope containing my promotion to Specialist Fifth Class. It had been sixteen months to the day since I had joined the army in Los Angeles. A short while later my hold baggage orders came through and I was a short timer too. On February 13^th we were advised that Viet Cong troop strength had been increasing and our alert status was raised. Half of us at Xom Tam were posted to the perimeter each night along with the ordinary guard mount. By then we had disassembled our 75 yard crusher, the new headwall had been completed and some of the components for our new crusher had started to arrive. The new hopper looked like a barn. On February 17 I left Xom Tam for the last time. Processed out of the company the next day, and reported to the 90th Replacement Battalion. My tour in Vietnam had come to an end. It was a tough year.

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Photos

LONG BIHN
The 92nd Engr Bn cantonment on Long Bihn was so heavily doused with Agent Orange that nothing much will grow there yet. My exposure to Agent Orange came through breathing the dust. It has left me with a cardio vascular disease that causes shortness of breath.

PHU CUOUNG
Shortly after it was completed the bridge we had built over the Saigon River at Phu Cuoung was destroyed by Viet Cong sappers and had to be rebuilt. It has since been widened to carry more traffic.

XOM TAM
This quarry is much larger now than we ever thought it might become. Apparently it is still in operation.

20 TON EUCLID DUMP
I liked driving that yellow truck but was allowed to do so after I backed it into and wrecked a conveyor belt. The tower in the background was our main guard bunker where we set up the .50 caliber machine gun that none of us knew how to fire. Xom Tam was originally a train station built by the French. Our guard tower was once a water tank for steam locomotives.

AFTER THE BLAST
If you look closely at the bunker on the hill you can see a boulder about half the size of a car on its roof. It is the bunker where me and Capps almost got squished in and where I suffered the ringing in my ears. The monastery is in the trees to the right.

BAYVIEW APARTMENTS
My lodgings were on the fifth floor on the right side and overlooked a swimming pool in the back.

CONSTRUCTION OF NEW GUARD TOWER
We were sand bagging it that day.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
Crimping a blasting cap onto a det chord fuse with my teeth. It is what crimping pliers are for, you dummy. If I had bitten that cap hard enough to detonate it the explosion would have ripped out my jaw and my left hand.

FEEDING TIME
Local kids sorting through our garbage every morning to see what was edible. Old honey buckets were used to store their prizes in. There were no schools for those kids to go to. They had no playgrounds. This picture has always made me sad.

FUEL TRUCK
The Long Bihn fuel truck and our demo truck side by side in the motor pool at Xom Tam. I do not know why the fuel truck made the trip.

GOOD TIME TO GO PEE
Several of these stations were scattered throughout the compound. This one was near the orderly room.

HONEY BUCKETS
Human waste incineration. Xom Tam did not enjoy modern conveniences. Sergeant major Trahn's ARVN rock quarry was at the base of the hill in the background.

HOOCH MOUSE
This was the girl who kept our hooch orderly and our boots polished. Each of us paid her two dollars per month. If ten guys lived in the hooch she would get twenty dollars or about 2360 piasters. It was a decent living and easy duty. The prostitutes that came by each evening probably made ten times that much.

JOLLY GOOD PLACE TO MEET A HOOKER
This little park with the fountain in it was not far from the BayView. That American guy with no shirt on is apparently transacting a little monkey business of his own. I did some business beside that fountain myself.

LEAFLET
This is one of the propaganda leaflets that the helicopter dropped on us shortly after we nearly blasted him out of the sky

MECHANICS HOOCH AT XOM TAM
This was my home in Xom Tam. Nobody ever bothered to put many sandbags around it. All of our roofs leaked from being hit by falling rocks. When it rained we had to move our bunks to a dry spot. Rainwater was what the hooch mouse used to mop the floor.

NEVER A GOOD SIGN
When both of the loaders were down for repair at the same time the crusher could not operate.

NEVER ENDING CHORE
Can you imagine an American woman ever doing this sort of work?

PRIMARY ROCK BLAST
This was the first primary we made after I returned from R&R in Sydney. Still had unexposed film in my camera. As primaries go this was a small one. That fellow in the mid-ground set off the blast. In an ideal situation we would have enough wire to reach back to the demo bunker where I took this picture from.

VIET CONG
This poor old devil was the Viet Cong suspect the ARVN police murdered in front of his home in the hamlet. He was out gathering firewood that day and giving some kids a ride back from the dump. The monastery was in the trees in the background. The cops murdered him because he probably gave them a little back sass. There was plenty of senseless brutality in that war wherever you looked.

Comments

[Richard Lindquist]

92nd Engineer Battalion
I joined the battalion at Ft Bragg in August 1966. We left for Vietnam in May 1967. I took command of A Company in December 1967 and held the position till May 1968. I am retired now and live in Florida.

[DoubleBarreledBob]

You would have turned over command of A Co right around the time I was assigned to Xom Tam.

[Richard Lindquist]

Dump trucks and machinegun tower
I renmember when the Euclids came in and we had to train drivers and mechanics up on them. I forget if we had three or four of the dump trucks. Were you there when the VC put an RPG through the water tanks on the shower thinking it was the MG tower?

[DoubleBarreledBob]

Water tower
I do not remember the water tower ever being hit by an rpg.

[Richard Lindquist]

Fuel trucks
A Co had two fuel trucks. I kept one at Long Binh and one at Xom Tam to fuel the crushers, generators, and other equipment there.

[DoubleBarreledBob]

Fuel Truck
Oh dear. I do not recall the fuel truck at Xom Tam being permanently assigned to us. All of our equipment needed to be fueled though. The demo crew had an old pipeline truck that burned gasoline. I do remember gassing that truck up using a 55 gallon drum and a hand pump. We had a maintenance crew that worked nights out there, I guess they were the ones who did the fueling. Many times as I stood the guard mount at Xom Tam I do not recall ever seeing that two man maintenance detail do any fueling.

[Richard Lindquist]

Xom Tam
I have a nice B&W aerial photo of the crusher set up at Xom Tam if you would like to see it.

[DoubleBarreledBob]

Xom Tam
Sure. Send the photo please: [e-mail]

[DoubleBarreledBob]

Euclids.....
We only had one Euclid while I was at Xom Tam. I drove it once without any training being given and promptly backed into the conveyor belt at the crusher. Both support arms were bent and the whole thing had to be repaired. It was pulled out of service and parked right beside the hooch that I had been staying in. There was a guy on the ground directing me as was backing up, but I could not see him and did not know he was even there. Luckily I didn't back over him.