1 2 A Volunteer From America By Bob Mack 1ST Signal Brigade Nha Trang, Republic of Vietnam 1967 – 1968 3 Dedicated to those that served ©2010 by Robert J. McKendrick All Rights Reserved 4 In-Country The big DC-8 banked sharply into the sun and began its descent toward the Cam Ranh peninsula, the angle of drop steeper than usual in order to frustrate enemy gunners lurking in the nearby mountains. Below, the impossibly blue South China Sea seemed crusted with diamonds. I had spent the last two months at home, thanks to a friendly personnel sergeant in Germany who’d cut my travel 5 orders to include a 60-day “delay en route” before I was due to report in at Ft. Lewis, Washington for transportation to the 22 nd Replacement Battalion, MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam). Now I was twenty-five hours out from Seattle, and on the verge of experiencing the Vietnam War at first hand. It was the fifth of July 1967. Vietnam stunk. Literally. After the unbelievable heat, the smell was the first thing you noticed, dank and moldy, like a basement that had repeatedly flooded and only partially dried. Or like a crypt… The staff sergeant was a character straight out of Central Casting, half full of deep South gruffness and Dixie grizzle, the other half full of shit. He paced back and forth while we stood in formation in the hot sand. “Welcome to II Corps, Republic of Vet-nam,” he said. Then he gave us the finger. “Take a good look at it, boys. It’s all you gone get for the next 12 months. Any of y’all come here with orders?” A few of us raised hands. “Well, throw ‘em the fuck away. Them orders don’t mean diddley. The way it works is if the Cav gets shot up this week and they need people, you gone to the Cav; if the 4 th Division needs people, you gone to the 4 th . Only place you ain’t gone go is the Airborne, less you already been dumb enough to jump out a perfectly good airplane. Y’all gone form up here after morning chow. You gone form up here ‘fore evening chow. In 6 between, you gone pull detail. Y’all hear you name called, means you got orders. The rest of the time, you on your own.” The sheer number of civilians that worked on the Cam Ranh base surprised me, but the same was true, I learned, of almost every other American installation in- country. “Half of ‘em are VC,” one salty old-timer told me. “And the other half are related to the first half. You just got to keep your eyes on ‘em. That’s the way it is over here. It ain’t safe nowhere.” I was headed about 35 klicks north to Nha Trang. “You one lucky sumbitch,” the old sergeant said. “It’s safe up there.” A dozen of us boarded a transport that would drop FNG’s (fuckin’ new guys) at all the stops between Cam Ranh and Quang Ngai. Arriving at Nha Trang after dark, I checked in at a station for new arrivals located inside the air passenger terminal. A sleepy G.I. scanned the papers on his clipboard, made a phone call, and said, “Wait out front. Somebody’ll be along for you.” I went outside and spent the rest of the night swatting mosquitoes and listening to the sporadic thump of artillery and some occasional chatter from automatic weapons. Safe. At dawn, a deuce and a half (2 ½ ton truck) picked me up. The driver was a cheerful PFC (Private 1 st Class), who said he was always happy to meet anybody 7 who had more time left in-country than he did. We drove off the airbase and rolled north, parallel to the sea. He pointed dismissively at a Vietnamese woman relieving herself by the side of the road: “Fuckin’ gooks. You’ll get used to seein’ that .” We turned onto a trash-strewn dirt road lined with areca palms. Plywood shanties with beer can roofs pressed against old French villas slowly decaying in the shade. A half-mile further was an intersection where a White Mouse (nickname for the Vietnamese police because of the color of their helmets and gloves) directed mostly military traffic, and elegant ladies with sunglasses and dainty parasols strolled past street vendors lugging bamboo shoulder poles. Just beyond the intersection was a checkpoint guarding the entrance to Long Van base—my new home. 8 Bunker Rats ats. RThey were as ubiquitous as the clap, and even harder—in fact, impossible—to get rid of. I had grown accustomed to burning buckets brimming with feces (a man hasn’t lived till he’s hooked a can of simmering crap through a hole in a latrine wall in 100+ degree heat), pissing into a bamboo tube stuck in the ground (necessary, because if the crap got too wet, it wouldn’t burn), setting the legs of cots into C-ration cans filled with motor oil to keep voracious red ants from 9 climbing up for a bite, chasing amiable little gecko lizards off tiny shards of shaving mirror, mandatory group ingestions of large orange malaria pills that precipitated sudden intestinal cramping and frenzied gallops for the nearest shit- can (they issued those abominable pills weekly at formation, then checked under everybody’s tongue to make sure we’d swallowed), after-dark crashes into the fence wire by unidentified flying bugs as big as birds—all of this I had accepted as the cost of doing business in the war zone. But it was difficult adjusting to the goddamned rats. At Long Van, the rats lived in the bunkers and in the wooden frames of the troop tents, and dug tunnel complexes between the two of which even “Charlie”—a master burrower himself—would have approved. I used my mosquito net mainly to keep the little bastards from crawling over me while I slept—I could hear them all night long, scratching in the wood a foot from my head. The Viets considered 10 rat to be fine dining (the “ham” & cheese sandwiches at Suzie’s Bar were especially suspect—those we washed down with Ba Muoi Ba (“33”—Vietnamese beer) so the formaldehyde could finish off any surviving bacilli), but the rodents had no fear of humans. One morning, I watched a pair of playful foot-longs frolic around on a pillow while its owner was at chow. Another time, I saw one amble out from under a bunk and take a seat between a guy’s jungle boots—which the guy happened to be wearing. He shook a copy of Stars & Stripes at the beast, but the rat just grinned and wagged its tail. So he stepped on it. Sorry about that . The only thing that did seem to scare the rats was mortar fire (local VC did not have access to the more frightening 122mm rockets at this time). This made bunker rats even more troubling than tent rats, because the only time we ever went into the bunkers (except for the pot-heads, who used them as smoking lounges) was when we were being hit—and mortar barrages were usually unnerving enough without the added stress of anxious rodents belly-flopping onto your head in the dark (I was once caught on a shit-can during the registration round sequence of a mortar attack. When “Charlie” started to walk his rounds in instead of out toward the helicopter park, I stopped in the middle of business, and hobbled off to those unhappy shelters with my pants locked around my ankles— that was worse). 11 Bubonic plague in Vietnam was first recognized as such in Nha Trang in 1898. The offending organism is named Pasteurella pestis (also called Yersinia pestis ), and is spread by our good friend rattus rattus , then transmitted to humans by parasitic fleas. The Pasteurella pestis organism causes, among other things, symptomatic hemorrhagic spots on the skin. The dark color of the spots combined with a high mortality rate to give the disease its “popular” name during the Middle Ages—the Black Death. Despite all the rats, I never heard of any Americans who became infected (we took plague shots regularly), although I did witness a tent mate turn bright yellow one day, the whites of his eyes coloring up like ripe lemons. I sent him off to the medical tent and never saw him again. But I digress… In order to keep our burgeoning tent rat population under control, we spent a few hundred piastres on a predatory mousing cat, supplied by the betel nut chewing laundress who did our wash in the Dong Bo River, (Dong Bo rinse was probably responsible for much of our perpetually sour body odors). Mama-san guaranteed that our area would be cleared of vermin within a fortnight. At least that’s what I think she said—it was hard to tell. The plan might have worked too, except some of the guys began feeding the cat snacks from their care packages. He gained five pounds, and afterwards spent all his time lazing on a bunk while the rats banged away in the woodwork. 12 A few months after the Tet Offensive, we evacuated Long Van and moved to an area east of the Nùng cantonment (ethnic Chinese mercenaries) on the edge of Camp John McDermott next to the Nha Trang airbase, where we were housed at last in rat-free wooden barracks.