A Lucky Thanksgiving

 

         Dedicated to Mike Molina, a brother in arms.

                                                                           

A surprise find...Thanksgiving Day, 1966

      I lucked out, but I didn’t know it at the time. The holidays were nearing, but nobody gave a damn about them. It all started on October 25^th, 1966. Exhausted from the nineteen-hour flight, and a three-hour stopover in Tokyo, we landed at Saigon’s, Tan Son Nhut Airport, complements of Continental Airlines, stewardesses biding us adieu, as if we were going on an exotic vacation.

     The steaming heat outside slapped us awake. After grouping up on the tarmac, a sergeant guided us to the bathrooms, inside, white tiles everywhere, no stalls, no toilets, just a low trough around the perimeter. An old woman stooped over the trough, her traditional Vietnamese dress her only privacy. She didn’t raise her eyes. A young man, a few feet down from her, was just finishing up. We did what we had to and rushed back outside.

     A convoy of trucks and gun jeeps drove us a short distance to the old 90^th Replacement Center, a wild west of a compound, protected by gun towers, a tall fence, and concertina wire. The place was crowded with teenagers in uniform, a lot of guys barely out of high school. The sergeant pointed to a row of tents. He told us to stay at the ready, a convoy would be by to take us to the new, larger replacement center at Long Binh, an hour’s drive away.

     Some friends from Fort Benning and I were sitting on bunks, taking it all in, joking, an attempt to keep the wolves away. They fed us in the mess hall, gave us a chance to wash up, and ordered us outside the compound where the trucks were waiting. They had us in rows. Then this burly sergeant stepped up and said he needed “bodies” to stay behind and pull guard duty for a night. “Any volunteers?”

     Not a one. I shouldn’t have looked up at him. “You,” he said, pointing to me, “join those men over there.” I stepped over to a group of guys waiting under the boiling sun. I felt like I’d been ditched as I watched my friends board a convoy and drive away, escorted by M.P.’s in gun jeeps. The rest of us followed a corporal to a half-wood, half-screened building, where he told us to pick out a bunk and relax.

                                                                                     

Written before Westmoreland's fall from grace

    

     The corporal told me I had 10:00-to-2:00 A.M. watch. He fitted us with ammo pouches and showed us the small armory. He didn’t say much more other than, “You’se want to stay alive, troopers? You'se best walk your post, stay awake, and don’t fall for the dink vendors coming up to wire and selling you souvenirs an’ shit. They ain’t all vendors.” We caught his meaning.

     I’d pulled guard duty in training but never with live ammunition or the realization that someone outside the perimeter wanted to kill me. I slept hard until 9:45, when the corporal woke me. Disoriented, I thought I was home, in my bed. My heart sank when the heat hit me. My brain readjusted. I put on the web gear, grabbed an M-14 from the rack, and headed out to the fence and began pacing the inside perimeter.

     Lights attached to telephone posts cast triangular glows on the ground, like the lights of a concentration camps. I stayed in the shadows. I caught the smell of smoke, dirt, and fish. The noises: low but magnified, muffled voices, faint sounds of the city, and an eerie sound: mortars far off in jungle, and every so often the burst of an M-16, not like a battle, more like warnings to keep away. It was a long four-hour watch, my emotions clashing, the darkness beyond the wire, shadows everywhere, playing with my imagination. It was just the start. At 2:15, I was back in the guards’ tent, in my bunk, no relief from the heat.

     By noon the next day, I boarded a convoy headed to Long Binh to meet up with my friends and receive my orders, to see where they were sending me. I knew I’d been assigned to the 101^st Airborne, but in the army, things can change – fast.

     We slept on bunks in large canvas tents, plywood floors, and flaps for walls, not much protection from mortar attacks. Each morning, guys lined up to get their orders and ship out to their permanent duty stations. I waited. Nothing. Two weeks passed. I was still waiting, a couple of my friends in the same situation. The Army had lost our orders. Really, no orders?

     Long Binh was miserable, a barren, hot, hilly camp. bad food, rationed water, no laundry (not for us, anyway), terrible duty, mostly pouring gas on human waste in large metal barrels and burning it. Later, there was nothing to do but sit around and wait, the sun beating off the tents. On night we went to the mess hall to drink beer and listen to a Pilipino rock band. Later, tucked into our beds, a great light lit up the sky, and an explosion shook the ground. Without weapons, we dropped to the floor and covered ourselves with our mattresses, as we’d been instructed in orientation. We could hear small arms somewhere in the distance. An hour later, it was quiet again.

     The next day, they told us sappers had blown up an ammo dump about a half-mile away. “No big deal,” a sergeant said. “It isn’t the first time. Welcome to Vietnam.”

     When my orders still hadn’t arrived, halfway into November, and the clerks were tired of hearing us bitch, they told us we could fly out to Cam Rahn Bay and work with the engineers building a new military complex and wait for our orders there. They said the camp was on the ocean, the South China Sea. Raised a few miles from the Pacific, I jumped at the chance. About twelve of us took the deal. Other guys decided to wait in Long Binh.

     At Cam Rahn Bay, we worked hard, all day, eight hours, mixing sand, rock, and concrete into a mega-mixer for the concrete slabs. Our bodies hardened. We partied every night, beer and hard liquor at the local EM clubs, really, just tents in the sand. We’d spend weekends on the beach, bodysurfing and frolicking in the warm water. It was heaven. Thanksgiving rolled around.

     Now, probably, I wouldn’t have been writing about any of this except one day a few years ago, I was rummaging through some old file cabinets at home. I found a bunch of military stuff I’d buried away, documents, ribbons, medals, a currency, a Vietnamese bill that said, “Viet Nam, Nam Bong, 5-something. Inserted in the stuff was a Thanksgiving Day menu, compliments of General William Westmoreland.

                                                                                   

Something of a Last Supper

     That’s when it all came back to me, and why I say, I was lucky. Instead of spending Thanksgiving out in the field eating from cans of C-rations, I got to spend Thanksgiving Day in Cam Rahn Bay with the engineers who had the best of everything, a large, clean mess hall, tablecloths, decorations, and, according to the menu I found in my file cabinet:

      Shrimp Cocktail, with sauce and crackers; poultry dressing, snow flaked potatoes; glazed sweet potatoes; cranberry sauce, buttered peas and corn; crisp relish tray; Parkerhouse rolls; pumpkin pie, mincemeat pie, old fashioned fruitcake, fresh chilled fruit, mixed nuts, assorted candy; tea, coffee, milk.

     Of course, my luck didn’t hold out. My orders finally arrived in mid-December, but by God, or maybe by the grace of God, I’ve got to admit, before I headed out to the wilds of Kontum province in Vietnam’s mountainous Central Highlands, I had one of the best Thanksgiving meals I can recall, relatively speaking, of course. How lucky was that?