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Wagner returned from his R&R to Sydney, Australia, late in the afternoon on the day we went off red alert. Contrary to the dismal picture Bradley and I had painted for ourselves of Wagner being stuck in Saigon defending the air base, he wasn't even in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. Picking up radio reports of the fighting in Saigon on the 30th of January, the Pan Am pilots who were bringing the revelers back from Sydney had detoured the flight to Bangkok, Thailand, another R&R center, where the troops were put up in the finest hotels for four nights at the airline's expense. From Pan Am's viewpoint, the added cost was probably negligible compared to having a multi-million dollar Boeing 707 blown up on the runway at Tan Son Nhut. Wagner was positively glowing as he told us of his adventures during this unscheduled lay over. According to Wagner, girls could be rented for $12.00 per night in Bangkok, and he had invested in one every night he was there, as had most of the other men on his flight. In a bizarre stroke of formality, each renter was required to sign a contract stipulating that the girl chosen was hired as a companion for 24 hours, to be treated as the man saw fit. The agreement also provided that the renter did not have to buy the companion food or beverage during the period, and the document emphasized that the girl was not a prostitute. I had difficulty believing that a whore was not a whore just because two parties signed a paper saying she wasn't, though I supposed it might be so, especially if the covenant served some useful societal purpose. Such has ever been the nature of the juridical craft, from a time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. We partied fairly hard that evening on the 3rd and went to bed late, all of which resulted in my having a recurring dream that seemed to last all night. In the dream, I went to a fortune teller who told me I would be going on a trip, but she never told me, during the many times I saw her, what my destination was. The next morning I interpreted the dream to mean my DEROS was approaching and I would be going home soon, a pleasant enough prospect to be sure. It was on the same day, however, that we first heard the ugly rumors that the army would be extending the service time of draftees beyond their original two years. Also, it was rumored that all personnel in Vietnam might be required to spend more than one year in country. These unconfirmed reports not only made nonsense of my dream analysis, they also paralyzed me with anxiety. It became clear to me in the wake of these rumors that the only thing that had kept my head screwed on straight for the last ten months was the certainty of my leaving Vietnam at the end of one year. My sense of stability was now on the verge of being shattered. I wasn't the only one knocked into a cocked hat by this news. Everyone was angry at the perceived breach of a promise explicitly given to us all, a promise that had lulled us into a resigned acceptance of this tour of duty. Also, I knew that I dare not breathe a word of this to my wife. Ironically, the next morning my hold baggage box arrived at the barracks. Made of wood, this crate measured about nine cubic feet and was intended to be used for shipping home all the personal effects I had acquired in Vietnam that didn't belong to the army. But for those terrible stories about the extended tours of duty, the receipt of this crate would have been a good omen. Yet, as matters stood now, I was convinced it meant nothing. It was becoming very hot during the day again, and electric fans ran constantly at the office but did no good. Also, we were overrun by truckloads of GI's coming to complain about their pay. Because of the extra foot traffic, all of us at the 92d found ourselves trying to do several things at once, and the stress was evident in the way we barked at one another and at our clients, some of whom unfortunately took our short tempers too much to heart. Added to this, the memory of the VC's recent campaign was never far from our thoughts. The strain was bound to come out sooner or later. The night after my hold baggage box arrived, we were startled awake at 3 A.M. by two men cursing and arguing at the other end of the barracks. Since the commotion continued to the point where we had no choice but to get up, Bradley and I walked down there to find out what the trouble was. Apparently, one man, who had the top bunk and who was extremely intoxicated, had decided to stand up on his bed and urinate on the floor some eight feet below. The man on the bottom bunk had been throughly splattered in the process, and he was hopping mad. In fact, he was threatening to kill the other man, and he probably would have done so had his friends let him go. The drunk was so oblivious to his surroundings he couldn't appreciate either the anger he had caused or the danger he was in. Moments later, Sergeant Greesel pushed his way through the crowd, leading two MP's, who immediately took the offender into custody and dragged him away. Bradley and I beat a quick retreat to our beds before Greesel could ask for help with the mess, which obviously was none of our business since we lived so far away. As though we didn't have enough on our minds already, on February 6th our personnel officer called from DBT to advise us that the 14th Engineers had been ordered to move in three weeks by sea to Quang Tri, a city located to the north on the coast, not far from the DMZ. My wall of worry, it seemed, was building ever higher. "That's just great," Wagner said. "We just got settled in here, and now we have to move again." "Yeah," Bradley said, "up near the DMZ too. That's not good." My mind was calculating at a fierce pace: if the move didn't happen for three weeks, that would be close to March 1st. My DEROS was March 23rd. If the battalion went by sea, the relocation would take at least one week, everything considered. That would take me to March 7th or 8th, two weeks before my rotation. "It's clear to me," I said, "that I won't be going with you guys north to Quang Tri. I'm too short. I'm sure Chief Walls will leave me behind, here in Cam Ranh." "Neb'a hop'n, GI," Bradley said sarcastically. "You're just whistling past the graveyard, buddy." Bradley was poking fun at the way the Vietnamese said "never happen" to us constantly, whenever we wanted something. My worst fear was that he could be right. I might not be able to wangle my way out of this move. What a nightmare. Nightmare? The dream, of course. In my dream, the fortune teller had predicted I would take a trip. Well, so there it was, a trip to Quang Tri. When we returned to the barracks that afternoon, everyone was flapping his jaw about the man who had been led away by the MP's the previous night. Sometime during the day he had come back and packed all his personal effects, for it was evident he had cleared out completely. The story was, instead of being disciplined or sent to the stockade, as we had imagined he would be, the man was being flown to Ft. Lewis, Washington, where he was to receive a general discharge from the army and be returned to civilian life. I was flabbergasted. A discharge? After what he had done? It wasn't till later that night, when we heard the rest of the facts, that the pieces fell into place. After the MP's had arrested the man, Colonel Landry had insisted that the offender be brought before him, even though it was still the middle of the night. When face to face with Landry, the man had cursed the army and cursed the Colonel, after which he had offered to piss on Landry just to show the Colonel what he thought of him. Totally incensed, Landry had struck the man in the face with his hand, an impulsive action he no doubt immediately regretted. Of course. That was why the man was receiving a discharge rather than a week in the stockade. A well established tradition made it strongly forbidden for NCO's or officers, especially high ranking officers, to strike enlisted men, a prohibition that was very carefully observed during this unpopular war, when conscripts frequently wrote their congressmen to complain of ill treatment. The result in this case certainly seemed unfair to the rest of us, who did our jobs and suffered in silence. But then again, no one in his right mind would have chosen this way out of the army, entailing as it did such a major stain on the family escutcheon. After all, a general discharge was not the same as an honorable discharge. Many of the men were upset at the perceived injustice of the situation, but I, for one, was too short to worry about it. On February 10th, more word filtered down regarding the battalion's move north. Now, instead of going by sea to an area north of Quang Tri, the 14th was to go by convoy through Da Nang and up to a point on the coast called Wunder Beach, just south of Quang Tri. According to Chief Walls, an advance party had already left DBT for the new location, and the rest of us were to go in two weeks. Part of the battalion's mission at Wunder Beach would be to provide combat support for the 1st Cavalry Division stationed at Camp Evans. The 1st Cav had been Benson's old outfit--too bad he had rotated home already, otherwise he would have been back in his old stomping grounds. Bradley was the first to comment on these new developments. "That's just wonderful," he said. "I've always had a hankering to provide combat support for the 1st Cav." Wagner and I just looked at each other, as though we both knew Bradley was crazy. "Look who's whistling past the graveyard now," I said. Two days later, Altman arrived from across the bay to bring us promotion orders and morning reports, and he was breathless about an incident that had occurred in the small Korean compound located just south of DBT on Q/L 1. A Korean enlisted man had raped a Vietnamese girl one night at Ba Ngoi, the village I had gone to with Steiger and the others. The incident, widely discussed apparently on that side of the bay, had embarrassed the Koreans and outraged the Vietnamese, who were clamoring for justice. To settle the matter, the Koreans' commanding officer had called the accused out at their morning formation and summarily shot him through the heart with a 45. As Altman finished this story, it was evident he was waiting for some stunned reaction from the three of us. "All's well that ends well," Bradley said, trying not to smirk. "Yeah, big deal," Altman said. "You draftees are always complaining about how bad you have it in this army. It could be worse, you know." "Sure," Wagner said, "we could be in for four years, like you." Altman was annoyed we hadn't appreciated his story more. In fact, he was so angry, he threatened to leave without telling us the best news, but we made him relent and share the information with us. Chief Walls had asked Altman to tell us that we pay clerks weren't going with headquarters company to Wunder Beach after all. Instead, we were to be attached to a finance office in Da Nang. "Oh, boy. Oh, boy," Bradley exclaimed. "No living in the boonies. Altman, I could kiss you for that." "Keep back you pervert," Altman said, pushing Bradley away. "Didn't I read something in the Stars and Stripes about a country club at Da Nang?" Wagner asked. "Maybe we could join it." When Altman left us, he was in a better mood than before, but it occurred to me he might have preferred to be going to Da Nang with us rather than to Wunder Beach. I was greatly relieved to learn we would be moving to Da Nang instead of some obscure spot on the coast, next to the 1st Cav. Of course, there was no guarantee the plans wouldn't change again, but for now, at least, I could relax. I decided I should write my wife finally and tell her about the battalion's relocation, since she would find out anyway when I gave her my change of address. Besides, I still hadn't said anything to her about the reassignment orders to Ft. Hood, and withholding all these pieces of information was beginning to give me a duplicity headache. That night I took pen in hand and wrote, saying in part: I sent my hold baggage box on the 7th ofAdmittedly, I had taken the coward's way out in the end and not told my wife about our relocation. I thought it might be better to make sure these current plans held fast for awhile before I divulged them. Besides, after reading what I had written about units being sent north, my wife would be less surprised when she finally found out that we were going too. It was about 9 P.M. when I finished my note home, and Bradley was sitting on his bunk above me mumbling something. "Bradley," I said, looking up at the mattress, "you've been up there talking to yourself and shaking the bed with your fidgets for the last ten minutes. What's going on." He leapt off the bunk onto the floor and sat down beside me. "I think lifers are the most disgusting scum I've ever met," he said. "Greesel and Slatz are in their room having sex with a pregnant Vietnamese girl who can't be more than 14 years old." "You're kidding," I said. "See for yourself," he said. "The door to their little sweat box is open about two inches." I stood up and moved quietly around the outside corner of their room as though I were walking toward the barracks entrance. Bradley was right, their door was slightly ajar. Since no one inside seemed to be looking out, I went a little closer, but not so near that I would get caught if anyone opened the door. By moving my head from side to side, I could make out many of the details inside the room. Sitting on a single bunk against the left wall was a young Vietnamese girl who was completely naked except for a pair of white briefs. Her small breasts were dwarfed by a protruding belly that looked taut enough to explode. She was jabbering and gesticulating with her hands. Immediately inside the door to the left, I could see about one third of the back and right side of someone sitting nude on a chair, who, because of his girth, I took to be Greesel. He was holding a can of beer in his right hand, which was resting on his hairy knee. Slatz must have been somewhere against the right wall, across from the girl, because I couldn't see him, but she kept looking and talking in that direction. I backed away slowly and then walked to my bunk. "Did you see her?" Bradley asked. "Yup," I said. "She's definitely pregnant. But you're exaggerating about her being 14 years old. She's got to be 15 if she's a day." "Don't you think that's disgusting?" Bradley asked. Now was my chance to get back at him for always cracking wise when I was trying to be serious, even at work. It was time to give him a little of his own enchilada. "I didn't actually see them having sex, though," I said. "Maybe she's from the orphanage, and they're just giving her a prenatal pelvic exam as part of the army's civil affairs program." "Civil affairs, my ass," he snickered. Though it hadn't bothered me all that much, Bradley was highly offended by the conduct of the NCO's. The girl must have stayed quite late because she was still in the room when I went to bed at 11 o'clock. As I retired, it did occur to me that her pelvic exam was taking an inordinately long time, though I was obviously no expert in such matters. By mid-February, two of our line companies had pulled back from various outlands because of the battalion move, so we now had three of the five companies in Cam Ranh, with the remainder in DBT. As a consequence of these men being nearby with too much time on their hands, they kept coming to the 92d and pestering us with pay problems, both real and imagined, mostly the latter. We pay clerks from the 14th simply ran too strack an operation for there to be much room for complaint. Nevertheless, the men came and went, driving us crazy. I was luckier than the others, who were still working till 9 or 9:30 on most nights, because Molinari now handled sixty percent of my payrolls, which left me free to attend the evening movies, whenever we had one. On February 15th--just one day off the mark--we enjoyed a screening of The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The damn inspections started again during the third week of February, a sure
sign the enemy's offensive was over. Sergeant Greesel, the child molester, told
us to expect one every ten days, to be conducted by either or both of the
Colonels, Landry and Bishop. The day after our first inspection, I was granted
an opportunity, at least, to take one worry off my list. I received a letter
from home that included a short undated newspaper clipping. It said:
WASHINGTON (AP)--The "There is no senti- Amen to that, I thought. God, what a relief. The letter accompanying the
article also said that my hold baggage box had arrived safely but that it
wouldn't be opened under any circumstances until I was home, for fear "something
terrible would crawl out." Nice attitude.
On February 24th, in anticipation of our departure, the administration at the
92d removed from our files all pay records except those of men in the 14th
Engineers, a cause for some serious partying, which we accomplished that night
with several bottles of Mumm's champagne. Unfortunately, the very next day
Altman told us the battalion relocation had been postponed indefinitely. Well,
not really indefinitely, he said, only until someone figured out what was going
on. Also, the rumor currently was that headquarters company might not move at
all. He told us everything at DBT was a complete mess because the troops had
been packed for three weeks already, having expected to depart by February 20th.
After Altman left, Bradley, Wagner, Molinari, and I put our heads together
for some important decision making. Unanimously, we concluded that the best plan
was to say nothing to our supervisors at the 92d regarding the delayed departure
of our unit. That would save the administrators the needless heartbreak of
having to transfer back to us whole bunches of records that didn't belong to us
anyway. Afterall, the reasoning went, they had just taken away all those
extraneous files. To transfer them back to us now could cause the actual files,
or the soldiers to whom they belonged, to become dangerously disoriented,
clearly an undesirable development, especially in a combat zone. No sir, our
duty in this matter was manifest.
We received a report by phone from battalion headquarters on the morning of
the 26th that a man in the advance party at Wunder Beach had been killed, and
two others injured, when their jeep hit a land mine. It was odd in a way, this
death. The 14th had experienced a number of accidental fatalities in the sixteen
months it had been in country, but this was the first death that had resulted
from enemy action. Not a bad record really--sixteen months in the Nam and only
one KIA. The man who had died was a sergeant E-7 with 18 years of service, a
wife, and two teenage kids. He was on Wagner's payroll, and Wagner said he
thought he knew how to close out the man's pay record, so I told him to go ahead
and do it. "Don't forget to prorate the hostile fire pay," I told him by way of
admonition. One always had to remind these OJT's of that inexplicable rule.
I went back to my business and didn't pay much attention to Wagner, but ten
minutes later, it occurred to me that I wasn't hearing much clattering from
Wanger's typewriter, which I couldn't see, however, because he sat with his back
to me, cutting off my view of his workspace. I walked around and looked over his
shoulder at the voucher he was typing. So far, he had completed only the first
block with the man's name, soundex code, unit designation, and serial number.
"Remember," I said, "below the serial number you have to type the word
`deceased' in capital letters. He didn't say anything, and he wasn't typing
either. At first, I thought he hadn't heard me because I was standing behind
him, but then I realized he had tears running down his left cheek, the only one
I could see. He probably didn't want me to know he was crying. "Why don't you
let me finish this," I said. "I've done this before, so I know all the rules."
Without speaking, he stood up and moved quietly away, not looking at me at all.
I watched his back as he walked directly to the exit and stepped outside. I
stole a glance over my shoulder and saw that Bradley and Molinari were working
away at their payrolls, oblivious to what had happened. I sat down at Wagner's
machine and completed the voucher in about ten minutes, thinking the whole time
how hard this mortality business must be on young guys like Wagner, only 19 or
20 years old. Hell, it wasn't that easy for me, and I had already buried both my
mother and father. Wagner returned twenty minutes later, acting as though
nothing was wrong, and I was content to leave it that way.
On February 27th, when he came from DBT, Altman reported that headquarters
company was not moving north, but some of the line companies were, although
which ones hadn't been decided yet. Hearing this news made all of us breathe
easier, since no one had wanted to relocate, especially me, the short-timer. The
question came up again regarding what obligation we had to report our changed
status to Sergeant Barker. In the hope of prolonging the time until the records
previously taken away were returned to us, I made an executive decision that we
would say nothing to anyone, my logic being that it wasn't our place to
interfere with command prerogatives. In due course, the commanding officer of
the 14th Engineers would communicate our status to Colonel Landry. Until that
time, we would simply lay low. The Chief seemed happy that we weren't going to
abandon him anytime soon, and that, I gathered, allowed him to forget the
problem of deciding who his new companions would be if we left. Although he was
tolerated by other members of the 92d, despite his quirks, no one accepted him
as readily and as unreservedly as did those of us from the 14th, who were merely
attached to the unit rather than being in the unit.
After an evening of celebrating our canceled departure, we barely escaped
another Chinese fire drill. Sergeant Greesel had left his room several times to
complain about noise in the barracks, although it wasn't as loud as it had been
on other occasions. We thought he was probably just drunk and irritable. Around
10 P.M., Bradley and I were lying on our bunks when the sergeant burst from his
room into the barracks yelling, "Smoke. I smell smoke. Everybody outside." When
no one throughout the place paid him any attention, he turned toward Bradley and
me and grabbed the uppermost bar on the foot of our bunk. He began to shake it
so violently, it made my teeth rattle. "Get up," he screamed. "Everybody outside
now." Bradley sprang off his bed, like I had seen him do in DBT the time he hit
Altman, and he landed on both feet with a crash about a yard away from Greesel.
The whole floor reverberated under his weight, and Greesel's face turned ashen
white as a look of terror swept over it. He must have realized that Bradley was
about to punch him silly. He spun on his heel and dashed headlong for the back
door of the barracks, running as fast as his fat belly would let him. Bradley
calmly watched the fleeing man disappear out the door.
"Would you really have hit him?" I asked.
"Probably not," he said, climbing onto his bunk. "But he didn't know that."
The sergeant didn't return to his room before lights out, and we didn't catch
sight of him at all until the next evening, but nothing was said by anyone,
including Greesel, about the aborted Chinese fire drill.
In a shattering phone call I received from the personnel officer on February
29th, we were advised that the whole of the 14th battalion was moving north
within the week, and we were going with it. I had never in my life hated the
army as intensely as I did at that moment. |