(Author’s note: This continues my autobiography of my experience as a Christian and how my time in Vietnam has played an integral part of who I am today. Part 1 of this saga was published on this blog on October 9, 2010.)
Part 2 – Southeast Asia
I spent maybe three or four days at Oakland Army Terminal, during which the normal drudgery of hurry up and wait was made a little bit more fun for me and a bus load of other GIs who had volunteered to give blood at the San Francisco blood bank. You see, if we gave our pint of blood, then we would be on light duty for then next 24 hours! What better incentive was there? So, we assembled to board our OD green bus and headed off across the Bay Bridge towards downtown San Francisco. We arrived a little while later, donated our blood and then loaded up again on the Army bus, driven by a civilian Army employee, to head back across the bay to Oakland. However, the driver, before even starting up again, asked us if we would like to see Haight-Ashbury Street. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haight-Ashbury) To a man we all said yes! And off we went, in our khakis, and in our OD green Army bus, to the center of the known world for the Flower Children, the Love Generation, the Summer of Love (but this was February). What a trip! We didn’t want to go to Vietnam, and the Love Children didn’t want us to go either! Amazingly, looking back on this mind-blowing scene, we were on each other’s side, GIs and Flower Power as one!
Well, we finally got back to Oakland, and the next day, after a couple of miscues and more hurry up and wait at Travis AFB, I was on an Eastern Airlines stretch DC-8 charter headed for SE Asia. I distinctly remember that as soon as we were off the ground, and the no smoking light went off, this long tube we were sitting in almost instantly acquired a blue haze atmosphere from all the cigarettes that were lit! We refueled in Honolulu at Hickham AFB, again at Wake Island (I remember thinking to myself as we came closer and closer to the whitecaps under the aircraft on our final approach that “There’s gotta be a runway down there somewhere!”) and again at Clark in the Philippines. As we reached the coast of South Vietnam the pilot announced to us in the cabin that if we looked out the right side of the aircraft we would see Vietnam for the first time. As we all moved to that side of the cabin, the DC-8 made a significant attitude shift banking right! (Too much weight on that side I think.)
On February 15, 1968, I was celebrating Tet with most of the other Americans in Vietnam by ducking mortars and rockets that had been thrown at all allied forces by Charlie and Papa Ho since the end of January. If the Army had told us that this was happening, I would have tried to catch a later flight!
This is what I wrote on this blog in November 2007 about those first few days in Vietnam: “On 18 February I was assigned to pull sentry duty (without any kind of a weapon, however!) at the 93rd Evac Hospital at Long Binh. My job was to stand by a door and just monitor who came and went. I don’t remember what the entrance was, but there were a lot of people coming and going. I had not been on duty very long when, all of a sudden, there was a terrific whoomph! and the air was transformed into a fog of dust!
“Turns out it was Tet. And the enemy had just hit the hospital with a rocket attack. I don’t remember if there was more than one explosion, but I imagine there were multiple rockets and mortars; these lasted pretty much all night. As I was laying flat on the ground (must have been a basic training learned reaction) my thoughts were “Oh shit!” and “Welcome to Vietnam!”
“Later on, after my shift, I went back to the barracks to try to get some sleep. That was a little difficult, what with the VC attacking, the gunships that were in the air all around and the huge amount of adrenaline that was being pumped through the bodies of all us new guys. At about 3:00 in the morning there was a HUGE explosion when the VC blew up the 12th Combat Aviation Group’s ammo dump where 8 pads detonated with a total ammo value of $2,774,348 (in 1968 dollars).
“I have had a picture in my mind of the massive explosions that night, but I had never seen a photo of it. Last week, at http://www.nonags.org/members/raffia/, I found a photograph, which is published here and is remarkably very close to what I remember.
“Later that day, my name was finally called and I was on a C-130 on my way to Nha Trang, and the 17th Group HQ. They told me I was assigned to the 225th at Phu Hiep (I responded “Phu What?) and not long after that I became a member of the Blackhawks .” (http://225observer.blogspot.com/2007/11/welcome-to-vietnam-or-how-i-celebrated.html)
I ended up serving twenty-eight months with the 225th (several of our company spent much more than the one year there, Rob Jensen and Dennis Wert come to mind), during which time I became friends with many guys who have remained my friends over these past four decades, having reconnected with them beginning in mid-1998 because of the marvel of the Internet. Some of you are reading this now! We all had a shared experience that was unique and has bonded a lot of us together for the rest of our lives. Stay tuned for the next installment in my story.
To Be Continued...
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