Jamie

“The great question is: How can we win America's peace?”—Richard Nixon, Address to the Nation on the War (November 3, 1969)

J. R. and I hopped on the world stage when we walked down the steps of a Flying Tiger 707 at Cam Ranh Bay, a humongous seaside base, 180 miles NE of Saigon. No flowers or open arms, just “You are now in the Republic of Viet Nam.” Commies weren't coming for us, we were coming for them. Neither poets nor conquerors, we were gonna make a statement, even a bad one. Funny people, strange smells, nothing I could have invented. The weather was nice.

A jeep drove us to a two-story barracks. We shared a blank room on a floor with fifty other guys, picked out beds from scattered empties, and lived out of duffel bags. Each morning after chow, the guys in the barracks lined up outside in roll call formation. A bitch box (bullhorn) called out names. Done for the day, if yours didn't come up. Night-time, we climbed a fifty-foot tower to pull guard with no ammo! They trusted us about as much as the VC.

Cam Ranh goes back a ways. The Russian fleet operated it in 1905. The French used it as a naval base during their colonial days. The Japanese Navy exploited it in WWII. Their spooky concrete pillboxes stare out over the water like heads on Easter Island. The U.S. redeveloped Cam as an air, army and naval base: a pair of 10,000-foot runways, a deep-water port, large stores of ammo and petroleum—an open invitation to the enemy to die for, which they often did.

War zone or Twilight Zone, Vietnam wasn’t so bad. Gen. Sherman said ‘War is hell’, but once we settled in, we didn’t want to leave. For the first time in months, we were free from the constraints of daily life. In the morning, we lazed on the sugar-white beach and swam in the warm South China Sea; the sky was blue and the water wet. At the afternoon hop, Asian cats and half-naked foxes did a decent job covering American songs with their accents. Why did they always pick Leaving on a Jet Plane or Green, Green Grass of Home that made us homesick? The traditional Thanksgiving feast with turkey and all the trimmings. It felt very, very good, like home, until a rude voice called our names at the morning formation:

“You are assigned to C Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry of the 1st Cavalry Division currently situated at Fire Support Base Jamie. Get your gear and report back at 1400 hours. May God rest your souls.”

May God rest our souls?

Vacation was over. J. R. and I were picked up in a jeep and escorted to a chopper for our first lift. We climbed in and took seats in the back. The turbine whined higher, the rotor did its thrumming, the nose dipped and we peeled away, flying southwest 170 miles to Bien Hoa for a day of indoctrination and abseil—climbing a tower and rappelling down to simulate bailing out of a chopper with a rope. My harness was attached to a rope with a D-ring which squeezed my gut so hard I thought for a minute that the rude voice would be right after all. Afterwards, I hid the ring in my backpack. Never needed it again, thank God.

The next day we piled into the back of a combat Huey—a door gunner manning a free gun (an M60 hanging from a bungee cord) out an open door on each side. I belted myself into an armored fold-down seat in the cargo bay and nailed my feet to the floor. From fifteen hundred feet (safe enough?) I looked down on rice paddies, farmland and bush. My spirits were high: I was in battle dress holding my M16, the enemy was nowhere. Dreamy, beautiful country passed beneath until I eyed a gritty hundred-yard oval enclosed by concertina wire.

Jamie was the home of artillerists and a small support crew of engineers, cooks, and medics, twenty miles north of Tay Ninh City in the middle of the jungle, seventy miles from Saigon, five miles from the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The isolated compound had a lot less to offer than Cam—a gross understatement! A battery of 105 and 155 howitzers and a mortar section lay in the center, protected by sandbags and wooden ammo boxes filled with dirt. No gate, just a mess tent, an aid station, a tactical operations center and a com bunker. Everything dusty and dirty from chopper blow-by—too primitive for my tastes.

Up until the chopper stuck a landing, the war had been a curiosity. The lights were on now; we were playing army for real. J. R. and I were the new members of Charlie Company, a line outfit staked here to provide round-the-clock security. Wow! This is where I work? It seemed more like a hippie commune: bandanas, beards, flip-flops, no one in charge.

I was assigned to 2nd platoon. After Bob Jackson, Sam Kuehn, and Bobby Parris introduced themselves as my squad members, a long, lean face stalked forward, put the spotlight on me and burst out, “Yo! A new citizen!”

He wiped his face with a towel. “What's yer ideas ’bout killin?”

I looked at him with astonishment. He drew on a cigarette and gave me a mystical smile. “Well, son, ya gotta do your thing and get you som’ gooks while yer here. Get this war over. Gooks dun’ mean nuthin."

‘Son’? I was the same age as he was, both of us older than most.

“Gooks won't bother you none. Let's find some gooks and we'll kill 'em.”

No beads and sandals for this one.

“Guess you could say it's a job to do, that's all. Dun' mean nuthin. Maybe you get killed or kill him. Better off him than me, any day. You see a dead gook, it dun' mean nuthin. Only time you really feel anything is when you see a G. I. messed up. Then sorta hurts you.”

He was dishing this to someone whose name he didn’t know. Was this 140 pounds of fury bullshitting? He left as abruptly as he came. My newfound mates organized my pack and got rid of stuff (still much too heavy):

“Looks like we found a new point man!”

“Where you from, cherry boy?”

“Minnesota.”

“Min-e-so-dah? Min-e-so-DAH get you killed.”

“Bobby, tell him how Killer got his name.”

“Killer?” I said.

“Dunnuck. Sgt. Dunnuck from Virginia, you were talkin’ to. Smelled two gooks swimmin’ in a crater, tossed frags and blew ‘em away with 16.” (I found that immensely interesting, but I doubt they were anywhere near where it supposedly happened.)

“Dunnuck’s a head. You don’ talk with the man. You listen.”

“Where’s your piece? Walkin’ point’s where the action is.” 

They were so pleased about me taking the lead, that I imagined myself in the middle of a highway with a bulls-eye painted on my chest.  

CS Mike was riding around in a junky jeep, firing bursts from his M134 Gatling gun into the woods at 4000 rounds a minute with a great sense of style. He caught me downwind when he sent CS (tear gas) toward the woods. Aargh! Next time, I scurried to the far end.

The dark silhouette of Black Virgin Mountain stood alone and desolate at last light. My first day had come to an end; we slept al fresco under curved corrugated steel sections covered with sandbags.

The following day, I set about learning everything I could. We built a bunker out of perforated steel planking used for runways and landing strips. Stairs led down to three bunk beds, fashioned from ammo boxes. A firing hole in front faced the wire. “Watch the wire,” they said. “You don’t wanna hear ‘dinks in the wire!’ or ‘Tiên-lên!’ [‘First up!’]. Not that a bunker was all that great. At night, rats as big as miniature Chihuahuas ran over my body, looking to get my rations. Took my breath away. Bob took the hint and slept outside.

Not a kind place to be in, but at least the showers were half-way decent.

I didn't join poker games because I didn't want to go broke. Some guys wrote home, others shot the shit. We cleaned our weapons assiduously, especially the machine gunners. The M60 had gobs of parts and fired tons of bullets. During contact, we would be more dependent on them than our 16s. Couldn’t chance M60s jamming.

For the evening's entertainment, we smeared cheese on blasting caps, stuck ‘em in the wire, and hooked up a clacker (detonator) to the caps. When they shot off flares to illuminate the area, we hit the clacker and blew away the cheese-eating rats. Fewer rats… more sleep.

We pulled first light and last light patrols the next week, making gaps in the bales of wire to let ourselves come and go. On my first patrol, someone pointed to a heap of white bones at the wood line, the remains of human wave attacks doused in diesel, burned, bulldozed into a makeshift mass grave, like concentration camps do.

I couldn’t help thinking of Dunnuck’s invective, fraught with desire for vengeance. The way “dun’ mean nuthin” rolled off his tongue… he wanted to possess war; nothing could touch it as far as he was concerned. He was mad, but there was a little madness in all of them. Then it hit me—there was an empty spot in their squad.