Racing Back to Vietnam Read online

  TWO

  WHY VIETNAM?

  April 1971

  A couple of weeks before I left Hurlburt Field to head to Vietnam, I was scheduled to attend a mandatory briefing for all airmen being sent to Southeast Asia. This was the final send-off for the troops, and the families of the men being deployed were urged to attend the meeting. Polly was busy packing and tending to our eight-month-old son, John, so my mother, down for one last visit before I shipped out, tagged along with me.

  This briefing was just another box to check; one of the many things you do before being sent on a combat assignment. I had gotten all the right kinds of vaccinations, qualified as an expert with a .38 revolver, gotten a flight line driver’s license, obtained a top secret security clearance, and drawn up a last will and testament. Now, I was going to learn why we were fighting in Vietnam.

  The briefing wasn’t a bad idea, on paper. Although the war had been going on a good six years, many Americans still had little or no knowledge of where Vietnam was located on the globe, much less about its history or culture. For most people, Southeast Asia was a collection of countries that were difficult to tell apart.

  By 1971, the glory and innocence of the early days of the Vietnam conflict were gone. The war was a stalemate; both sides were claiming victory, but only the losses were real. More than fifty thousand Americans had died, and there weren’t a lot of war-hungry hawks left (at least, not among those of us chosen to do the fighting). The public still supported the troops on principle, but the conflict itself had been disowned by virtually every segment of society. It had turned into a war without end or purpose. I certainly wasn’t thrilled to be leaving my family to spend a year in Vietnam, but I hoped I could serve honorably and be as good as the people around me.

  My mother and I arrived at the meeting place, one of those sterile, interchangeable concrete block buildings that populate Air Force bases across the United States. We found a seat in a room with a couple of dozen or so airmen, both enlisted men and officers, and their families.

  Everyone received a copy of a sixty-four page full-color magazine entitled “Mission Vietnam,” produced by the Seventh Air Force. (This was the era of the popular Sunday night television series Mission: Impossible. I loved Mission: Impossible, but I wasn’t sure I felt the same about “Mission Vietnam.”)

  I still have my copy of “Mission Vietnam.” The cover shows an F-4 Phantom taking off at dusk, headed toward the setting sun. The red warning lights on the wings and tail glow gently in the dark, but the twin afterburners look like exploding comets. I knew I was assigned to an F-4 squadron, so the color photo had a certain sparkle and wonder, a glimpse of exciting things to come.

  The briefing was conducted by a couple of lieutenant colonels flown in from Washington, DC. They looked a bit out of place in their blue dress uniforms with their chests full of ribbons. (Florida, like Vietnam, is always hot, and everyone wore either khakis, fatigues, or a flight suit year around; no one wore their decorations.) The colonels took us on a slow and deliberate march through the history of Vietnam. The Chinese communists were an important ally of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, but this was an exception to the historical trend. Trapped by geography on the edge of a vast empire, the Vietnamese had been battling their Chinese neighbors for centuries. That ill will even persists today, with both countries claiming sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

  The Portuguese showed up in the early sixteenth century, followed a hundred years later by the Dutch. The French came next, in the mid-nineteenth century, hoping to save souls and make money. French colonialism was brutal and merciless. The colons, as the French settlers were known, brought the fruits of Western civilization to Indochina, but the natives saw little of the benefits. The locals worked in the lowest echelons of the civil service with no chance of self-government. A large influx of Chinese merchants arriving around the same time helped ensure that the Vietnamese stayed on the bottom rung of society.

  Serious resistance to French rule first arose in the early twentieth century, led by the man later known as Ho Chi Minh. Ho attended the Versailles Conference after the end of World War I to advocate for Vietnamese independence. At the time, Ho was an unknown, barely noticed by anyone at the conference, and the French quickly resumed their colonial domination.

  Looking for a route to independence, Ho hooked up with the communists. One of the colonels repeatedly called him a “Moscow-trained revolutionary” (an accusation that would send chills down your spine during the height of the Cold War). The French held on to Indochina until World War II, when the Japanese invaded the region, an area rich in natural resources critical for the Japanese war machine.

  The French folded early in the war under the Nazi blitzkrieg, leaving an opening in Vietnam. Ho founded an independence league known as the Viet Minh, and when the Japanese surrendered to the United States in 1945, Ho’s forces declared independence and took control of the country. It was a very brief rule; Chinese troops entered Vietnam from the north, British troops came into the south, the Japanese troops were disarmed, and the country was handed back to the French.

  The French effort to maintain control of Indochina, supported economically by the America, was one of the last gasps of colonialism. The United States, traditionally anti-colonial in outlook, was more interested in a stable, anti-communist French ally. What is now called the First Indochina War ended in 1954, when the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell to the Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap.

  There was a lot of pressure for the United States to rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu. Some pushed for nuclear weapons, an urging that President Eisenhower wisely resisted. Ike had learned a lesson that many subsequent presidents have failed to grasp: never get involved in a ground war in Asia.

  The Geneva Accords in 1954 ended French involvement in Indochina and partitioned the country along the 17th parallel, with unification to be decided by an election at a later date. The south was led by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic in a majority Buddhist country. Diem was a nationalist with no history of French collaboration. His government, with U.S. assistance, moved nearly a million Catholics from the North and their communist rulers to South Vietnam.

  By this point in the colonels’ history lesson, everyone in the room was getting a little antsy. Eyes were beginning to glaze over as the briefing dragged on like one of your children’s piano recitals. The colonels took turns standing in front of the screen with a long pointer. They would tap the screen, someone somewhere would push a button, and another image or another table of statistics would appear on the screen. And so the lecture continued.

  Shortly after his inauguration, President Kennedy began sending military advisors to help the South Vietnamese. Diem, his brother, and his infamous sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, proved to be weak, uninspiring leaders. Diem was overthrown in a coup and killed in November 1963, just three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated.

  In August 1964, the USS Maddox, on patrol off the Vietnamese coast, was attacked on two occasions by enemy torpedo boats. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon Johnson the authority to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia without a congressional declaration of war. (Although there is a serious question today as to whether the second attack on the Maddox was real, I don’t recall any doubt at the time of the briefing.)

  In March 1965, thirty-five hundred Marines waded ashore at Da Nang, my future home base. These first American combat units were sent to protect American planes. Six bloody years followed; the Rolling Thunder air campaign over North Vietnam; Khe Sanh; the Tet Offensive; the list goes on. Each day the evening news brought reports of more Americans killed in action. Often, the monthly totals reached into the hundreds.

  President Nixon began withdrawing troops in 1969, turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, looking for “peace with honor”—a process called Vietnamization. With fewer U.S. ground troops, more of the burden fell on air powe
r.

  In the spring of 1971 as my mother and I sat through the briefing, I was more concerned with peace than with honor. There were fewer Americans in Vietnam than ever; even the anti-war crowd seemed a little exhausted, but there was no end in sight for the Vietnam War. There were on-and-off negotiations to end the war, but they didn’t seem to have the same sense of urgency that I had.

  I viewed the Vietnam War as an unwanted interruption in my life. I would have preferred to end my Air Force career on the beaches of Florida. I had a beautiful wife, a son, and an ophthalmology residency waiting for me twelve months down the road. I knew I had drawn a bad lot, but I felt I had to do the best job I could while trying to keep looking forward.

  My mother, on the other hand, was a product of her times. A single parent who came of age during the Great Depression, she worked two jobs to support a family in the days before welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. She had seen her two brothers go off to fight in World War II, watched as the Korean War evolved into a bloody stalemate, and followed the Cold War hot spots of Berlin and Cuba. Just five months earlier, her oldest son had died unexpectedly. Now her next son was headed off to war. Military service was an obligation her generation accepted; it was a price you paid to be an American.

  She wasn’t an expressive person. People of her generation could be loving and stoic at the same time. She always supported me and never interfered in my decisions. As we left the briefing, she shook her head and said, “This is a fight the Vietnamese need to decide. It isn’t worth American lives.”

  She probably would have said much worse, but she didn’t want to unnecessarily burden me. I’m sure she felt the great sadness and anxiety a parent feels when a child goes off to war. The old saying “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child” was as true then as it is today.

  I headed back home to pack for Vietnam, enlightened but unconvinced.

  THREE

  GETTING MY FEET ON THE GROUND

  June 5, 1971

  A week later, we had another rocket attack. It was the same scenario: middle of the night, explosions, sirens, flares, flak jackets, fear, and anger.

  These attacks seemed to be part of life at Da Nang. The next day, everyone was talking about the rockets—how many struck the base, what was damaged, whether anyone was killed. Two days later, no one even mentioned them.

  Most of my time was spent checking in, filling out forms, finding out where various offices were located, and listening with envy as people talked about how short they were, or where they are going for R and R. The whole world seemed to be headed home (or at least to Hawaii) while I was stuck at Da Nang. I’d gotten a DEROS calendar—a sketch of an F-4, scored into 365 parts, sort of like a paint-by-numbers portrait. I’d already colored in six days; only 359 more before I go back to the real world.

  First, a few things about my new home. Da Nang has the same basic buildings as Air Force bases around the world. When the Marines first landed here in 1965, the base was little more than a primitive airfield, but the military had been steadily building for the last six years and the facilities had greatly improved. It was a healthy expansion; the civilian contractors grew rich, and life became easier at Da Nang. By 1971, everything was in place: personnel, mess halls, maintenance, security police, dispensary, and chapel, not to mention the aircraft and the men who flew and maintained them. Large blocks of barracks, vast areas of fuel dumps, and munitions storage were a big part of the war story, but I also found a good library and a movie theater, as well as a base exchange (BX).

  By the standards back home, our BX would have qualified as a first-rate liquor and tobacco store. There wasn’t a huge variety of brands, but the sheer volume of booze and smokes was impressive. Granted, the stuff was relatively cheap, and it had to be tightly controlled lest it end up on the local black market. This was a nearly impossible task; just a few blocks outside the base gates, you could find everything available at the BX and much more, including whiskey, drugs, women, and weapons. Everything had its price on the black market.

  Every new arrival at Da Nang was issued a ration card. It was an egalitarian system, with enlisted men and officers of all ranks having the same limits. Each month, you could purchase three cases of beer, three bottles of wine, and three quarts of hard liquor. If you were a serious drinker and you needed more, you could borrow a friend’s ration card and use his unused allotment. Not that there were many allotments going to waste; at Da Nang, some people drank to remember, some people drank to forget, but whatever the motivation, there were plenty of opportunities to imbibe.

  Your ration card also entitled you to purchase a big item once a year, such as a camera or tape deck. But the selection for these items was meager, so most people preferred to get them by mail from the Pacific Exchange (PACEX) catalog. Cameras, tape decks, brass, ceramics, silk screens, and other items were ordered by mail and usually shipped directly home to the USA. I never got a handle on the value of goods from the East, but they must have been a good bargain; I got regular letters from my wife instructing me to order items for various friends and family members.

  More than any helmet or M-16 rifle, these consumer goods are the artifacts of the Vietnam veteran. Even today, forty-five years later, I can visit someone’s home and tell they served in Southeast Asia. The silk screens and brass have survived well; the cameras are still functional, though no longer relevant in the world of digital photography; the tape decks are obsolete. Fortunately, those ceramic elephants, the tacky trophies of Southeast Asia, are no longer with us.

  Everything you bought at the BX in Da Nang was paid for in Military Payment Certificates (MPCs). In theory, U.S. dollars were prohibited in Vietnam; servicemen were paid not in dollars but in MPC. When you went to the officer’s club, ate at the mess hall, or bought a new pair of boots, you paid in MPC. Then once you left Vietnam to go on R and R or return to the United States, your remaining MPC were fully convertible into dollars.

  It was a bizarre-looking currency, made to order for a wartime economy. There were no coins, only colorful bank notes, ranging from five cents to twenty dollars. The bills were smaller than U.S. notes, were more cheaply made, and tended to wad up in your wallet or pocket.

  The basic idea was that without U.S. dollars in circulation, the local South Vietnamese currency (the dong) would remain stable. Since it was illegal for unauthorized personnel to possess MPCs (so went the theory), the dong would be unchallenged. Not

  surprisingly, the local merchants refused to go along with the system. Everywhere in Vietnam, MPCs were a respected and well-used currency, surpassed in value only by the U.S. dollar.

  The real danger to the local black market came when a new series of MPCs was issued and the old notes became worthless. Conversion day (or C-Day) was unannounced and was supposedly classified. Military personnel were restricted to base as they exchanged their old MPCs for the new series, while the nightclubs, prostitutes, and other entrepreneurs were left with worthless currency. Again, that was the theory; it rarely worked out that way, since the smart black marketers usually managed to get the early word and avoid being caught on C-Day with expired MPCs.

  The MPC conversion only really affected me when I out-processed from Vietnam, and headed back to the U.S. The government had a savings bank for military personnel in Vietnam that paid a generous ten percent interest (about three or four percent better than most banks were paying at the time). I had managed to scrimp and save, accumulating nearly $10,000. A few days before I left, I went by the base bank (which was actually just a trailer) to pick up a check to take home, only to find out that my savings were in MPCs, not dollars. If I wanted the money, I had to take cold, hard cash. I stuffed the $10,000 in currency (I think it was all in $20 bills) in my pocket, enjoyed being flush with cash for a few minutes, then went next door and converted the sum to more sensible traveler’s checks.

  The 366th Dispensary, which is where I spent most of my days, was a series of interconnected modular buildings. There were t
hree or four flight surgeons, as well as three or four general medical officers on the staff, each with an office in the main unit. Attached to the rear was a small hospital with about twenty-five beds. My office in the one story modular complex had a desk and examining table, but little else. The previous occupant had kindly left a poster on the back of the door to my office that read, “Today is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” This seemed as good a way as any to look at my upcoming twelve months at Da Nang.

  For the first several months of my tour, our hospital served as an aeromedical evacuation unit, an important link in the complex system of medical triage and evacuation. U.S. troops injured in combat were evacuated by helicopter to field hospitals. Since it was nearly impossible to move the wounded overland in Vietnam, these “dust off” choppers provided the critical first step in the process. If you could get an injured soldier to a medical facility alive, he had a 99% chance of surviving.

  Once the wounded soldier was stabilized and the logistics were worked out, he would come to our unit at Da Nang for a few days before being flown out to hospitals in Japan, Okinawa, or the Philippines. Sick and injured patients were evacuated, as were any combat casualties. We saw a lot of accidents, as well as respiratory infections, hepatitis, and dysentery. There were a variety of ways to lose your life in Vietnam; more than ten thousand Americans died from non-combat causes.

  Our hospital and our air evac unit were in the same wing and were staffed by the same nurses. I would make rounds twice a day, writing orders and doing the things you do for any sick or wounded patient. I always tried to strike a positive note and offer words of encouragement to every patient. It wasn’t particularly difficult to do; no matter how bad the problem, everyone perked up when they were reminded that they were going home.

  The aeromedical evacuation system itself was a complex form of triage. Some patients were priority, some were urgent, and some were routine; our job was to take care of them all. We had to make sure they were stable enough to handle the long flights.