SitRep Negative

Chapter 5: Daily Life

"One day President Roosevelt told me he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'."—Winston Churchill

When I first got to Quan Loi tensions were running high from an incident that had occurred shortly before I got there. A LRRP (Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol) team had been accidentally inserted into Cambodia. The brigade commander refused to send the chopper back into Cambodia to extract them, so they had to walk to the border. Unfortunately they were spotted by an NVA unit and pursued. They raced to the pick-up zone (PZ) where the chopper was waiting for them. They were climbing onto the chopper when the enemy broke into the clearing. As the chopper was lifting off it was hit, probably by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG), the single deadliest weapon the enemy had, basically an anti-tank weapon used against anything they could shoot it at. The chopper crashed, killing all aboard. The buddies of the dead team members vowed to “frag” the brigade commander. Fragging someone meant tossing a live grenade into a hooch while the intended victim was sleeping. Never happened, but the brigade commander slept lightly for a long time after that.

There were similar incidents during my tour. One involved a LRRP team inserted into an LZ with the intent of reconnoitering and reporting on enemy movements. The whole operation was a mess from start to finish. The LRRP’s had previously reported heavy enemy movement in the area, which would usually mean that would not be where you would insert a small team. The brigade commander (affectionately known as Earl the Pearl) didn’t believe them, so he ordered the insertion to proceed. The LZ was hot and everyone was wiped out in a matter of minutes. The command chopper and the gunships spent hours sweeping the area, hoping to find survivors. I was on duty in the TOC listening to the radio traffic when I heard someone ask, “Did you see a flash over there?” One of the choppers flew over and didn’t see anything but then saw the flash on the second pass. Turned out it was a member of the LRRP team who was wounded but who had managed to drag himself off the LZ and was hiding in the trees. When he heard the choppers he used a mirror to flash a light to show his location. He was taken out and hopefully survived his wounds. Pretty dramatic stuff. Again, the brigade commander stayed close to home in his trailer for a long time after that.

Most days in Quan Loi were not that dramatic. During the dry season you had six inches of a fine red dust that infiltrated everything, clogging your skin pores. By the end of the dry season we looked like Indians. The dry season was followed by the monsoon, where the rains would fall nonstop for days on end producing six inches of very sticky mud. You would walk from your hooch (at Quan Loi, a GP Medium Army field tent that held eight to ten guys in cots) to the TOC, and you would gain an inch in height from the twigs and pebbles that were now glued to the bottom of your combat boots thanks to the mud. It was hard to say which was worse, the oppressive heat or the depressing rain. I vote for the rain, because with it came a particularly nasty form of fungal infection that located itself in all the wrong places. The medic used diluted acid as a treatment. Brutal.

A typical day for me began with a breakfast of runny scrambled eggs and toast and juice, along with the daily malaria medication, a large orange pill washed down with highly chlorinated Kool-Aid. Once a week you took a second malaria pill, a small white one, to protect you from a second, more deadly, form of the virus. They could always be found on a plate by the entrance to the mess hall. Lunch and dinner would be standard mess hall fare: meat and potatoes, vegetables and some kind of desert. Honestly, I don’t recall all that much about the food, but I do know the cooks were doing the best they could with what they had. I also know the officers ate a whole lot better than we did, and if we had a visiting general, they could turn out a spread the equal of any you would find stateside.

One thing I got really paranoid about was milk. Some mess halls had cold cereal in those little tear-open boxes, which I would usually choose over trying my luck with the scrambled eggs. Each morning, milk would be put out to use with the cold cereal. Here’s the thing. In that heat, milk lasted about twenty minutes tops before turning sour. You learned very quickly to give an open carton the smell test before pouring the milk over your cereal. (When I got home, I retained this distrust of opened milk, much to my wife’s irritation. She would be cooking and would have the milk out to use when needed. I would walk by and, without thinking, put the milk back in the refrigerator. When she needed the milk, it was gone. Not helpful. To this day, I remain uneasy in the presence of milk out on a counter for longer than two minutes.)

We slept on cots, arrayed in two rows along the sides, with a narrow center aisle. Other than a couple of sets of fatigues, underwear and socks, shaving gear, and books, there wasn’t much else in my gear. Some of the guys had a more settled existence, but I kept myself somewhere near a Spartan level of existence, especially since I moved around so much. There was no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. You shaved using a small pool of cold water inside your helmet. You pissed into a buried 55-gallon drum. (It paid to watch your step at night walking around the compound.) Number Two meant a trip to an outhouse, usually a two-holer. (Talk about up close and personal.) Our showers were pull cords attached to shower heads attached to 55-gallon drums filled with water that was heated by the sun. Even at that, you learned to be quick about it, if nothing else because you never knew when the next rocket or mortar attack might come. If you wanted an ice-cold Coke you found a large block of ice and laid the can down flat on the ice and rolled it rapidly until the can melted a groove in the ice, by which time the contents would be . . . well, ice cold.

Compared to humping the boonies we did okay, except for the frequent mortar attacks, which is why Quan Loi was called “Rocket City.” (Of course, as you read various accounts of other veterans, you discover that half the base camps in Vietnam were called “Rocket City,” usually with good reason.) The attacks were frequent to the point that eventually you became used to them. The target was usually the runway, but they often bracketed the target area or walked the rockets or mortars in from the perimeter. The first explosion woke you up, the second got you running for the nearest bunker, a long rectangular hole in the ground (kind of like a big grave, come to think of it) topped by curved sections of corrugated metal, in turn topped by layers of sandbags.

Sometimes the bunker would be filled with water, and always there were disgusting creatures slithering about. (I spent a week sleeping in a bunker at the behest of a buddy who was going home and didn’t like sleeping in the hooches but also didn’t want to sleep alone in the bunker. So each night we would drag our cots into the bunker. Of course if there was an attack and the other guys wanted in, then it got a bit crowded. But everyone understood what it was like to be short.) As soon as you got settled in the bunker, whoever had smokes passed them around, and then you waited it out. After the attack was over, you trudged back to the hooch and went back to whatever you were doing: playing cards, sleeping, or writing a letter home. Another night in Rocket City.

Some rocket attacks were more unnerving than others. Usually the first round landed far enough away that you had time to react to the fact that a second volley was most definitely already on the way and perhaps now would be a good time to get your ass into the bunker. Sometimes the first volley landed right on top of you, sending dirt and dust and maybe shrapnel raining down from the treetops where the rocket had hit and burst onto the top of the tent. I remember one guy in Quan Loi who was on guard duty when we had a rocket attack. After his shift was over, he went back to his hooch to crash. There, dead center in his cot, was a hole the size of a quarter from a piece of shrapnel. That will definitely get your attention. If you have never seen a piece of shrapnel, consider yourself lucky. Picture a piece of twisted metal that has no regularity to it at all. Instead it is all razor-sharp edges and points, dozens of them. That little piece of shrapnel spinning and whistling through the air can easily slice a man’s hand off or tear a hole right through the gut.

It doesn’t take long to acquire a veneer of fatalism, armor plating against the constant worry of sudden and violent death or incapacitation. We used to go around saying things like “Dead is as old as you can get” or “When it’s your time, it’s your time.” The truth is that death often came with no rhyme or reason. You are unhurt, but the guy standing two feet away gets killed. I’m not saying this happened to me. I was relatively safe most of the time. But I thought about it, especially when those salvos of rockets got closer and closer.