It was quite a site, my friend rolling through with his ape at the wheel, sitting high on several cushions. The orangutan didn’t quite have the reach to shift the gears and operate the brakes and gas. My friend, who sat behind him in the driver’s seat, did that. But the animal could recognize a curve when he saw one and maneuver that jeep right around it.
In fact, the monkey, which was named Francois after a famous French Formula One driver at the time, became so confident of his driving skills that he began to “curse out” and flip off pedestrians — usually old mama sans burdened down with a yoke of rice across their shoulders — who got in his way.
Alas, this monkey was soon to meet his fate, too. I hear he bought the farm one day when he ran the jeep over a mine.
My friend had stopped by the side of the road to take a whiz and before he knew it the idling jeep somehow slipped into gear with the monkey manning the helm. The monkey became so excited about being all alone in the jeep that he veered off the road and onto the shoulder, where the VC loved to plant their crude homemade bombs.
716th Flour and Shower
(Tall Tales from the Rear Area)
Mishaps of a klutz, from stateside to war’s door.
Jacob Jingle
Washington
An AKW Books eBook
Published by Kalar/Wade Media
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011 by Jacob Jingle
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by AKW Books, an imprint of Kalar/Wade Media, LLC, Washington.
You are granted a non-exclusive license to this work. You may make copies or reformat it for YOUR OWN USE ONLY. You may not resell, trade, nor give this work away.
Created in the United States of America
First Publication: September 2011
Contributing
artists:
Photo by author
Pig by
rikkis refuge used under Creative
Commons license.
Monkey by Jean-Marc Strydom (SouWest)
This is mostly a work of fiction. All of the “non-public” characters and incidents are a product of the imagination of the author and any resemblance to any real person, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The name “AKW Books” and the AKW logo are trademarks belonging to Kalar/Wade Media, LLC
As far as I know, only two quartermaster officers in our battalion met with disaster. One was run over by a Red Cross donut truck. The other one died laughing.
Dedication
To Leon, Ken, John, Tom and Pete
Preface
No, this is not a book on proctology.
Loosely autobiographical, 716th is about a mostly fictitious, dysfunctional supply unit stuck in the middle of a crazy, unpopular war.
While madness and sadness rage around them in South Vietnam, the men of the 716th Quartermaster Company stumble and fumble their way through their mission: to feed, clothe, provide showers for, and gas up troops in the field. And, sadly, to collect their bodies when they fall.
Unlike other Vietnam novels, “716th” isn’t all that bloody. In fact, only two members of the 716th were actual casualties in the war. One was run over by a Red Cross donut truck and the other one died laughing.
In addition to numerous outlandish pranks, screw-ups and mayhem, 716th readers will be enlightened on a number of topics, including a glimpse at the real Ho Chi Minh and an authoritative discourse on common misconceptions about the GI dog tag.
The book’s author, Lieutenant Jacob Jingle, goes to Vietnam an insecure man, infested with feelings of his own very limited worth and multiple shortcomings. A pitiful soldier to say the least.
He comes home worse. No big Hollywood metamorphosis here.
That said, Lt. Jingle is jubilant that he did not have to kill anyone in Vietnam. Wait, take that back. He did zap a number of cockroaches, but they were already half-dead from eating army food.
While 716th is more fiction than fabric, some of its characters, all fictitiously named, are composites of people the author has known, and military personnel he’s served with. All military units referred to are also fictitious.
Jacob Jingle
(You think I’d be stupid enough to use my real name?)
Author
Salem, Oregon
1
OPENING NIGHT JITTERS
As long as I’m able to fog a mirror, I’ll never forget my first night in South Vietnam.
Just hours before, our unit, the 629th Quartermaster Company, had disembarked from the troopship U.S.S. Gen. J. C. Breckenridge in QuiNhon Harbor. Needless to say, everyone was very jumpy.
We had heard tales of Vietcong attacking at night, and that newly arrived rear area support units, like ourselves, were especially prey.
I didn’t learn until later that the Vietcong, or the National Liberation Front NLF as they called themselves, were instructed, in true guerrilla style, never to attack a larger force. And most VC units were much smaller than a typical, full-strength, American army rifle company of 150 or so men.
“guerrilla” is actually Spanish for “little war”.
Now whether or not you’d call our quartermaster company a real “force” is debatable. But we did have the bodies, around 160 men — some of whom were even very adept at loading their weapons and pulling the trigger by themselves (properly aiming the rifle was another matter altogether) — to visually pose a threat.
True, we were not located in the steamy jungle, where the VC made their fleeting homes and did most of their hit and run fighting, but we were out in the country and not quartered in the safety of heavily secure, nearby QuiNhon either.
NOTE: During the January 1968 Tet Offensive, which was Vietnam’s version of Gettysburg, Qui Nhon itself was attacked and came under rather heavy fire. By then I was back home trying to re-learn how to enjoy cockroach-free food.
That first night and for several weeks after, everyone lived and slept in tents buffered all around with sandbags. Eventually, more permanent housing was built.
If I recall, we had four guards stationed around the perimeter of our company area. Each of the two posts was manned by a 30-caliber machine gun. Whether or not the crews could hit a bull in the butt with a bucket of billiard balls, I haven’t the foggiest. But it was too late to worry about that now, anyway.
I recall that we all turned in around 10 p.m. I should say, tried to turn in. No one could sleep, and there was a lot of nervous talk flying around. One guy, Lt. Pierson, was already counting the days before he rotated back home.
“Just think, only 336 days and a wake-up.” (the 28-day Breckenridge voyage counted towards our one-year tour) “Hope I can last that long.”
“You won’t,” cracked Lt. Miles. “You’ll probably get blown apart over here and the only thing they’ll send home is remnants of your pecker.”
“Never happen,” chimed in Capt. Donahue, our company commander. “He can’t even find his dick now, when he’s in one piece.”
“Very funny, sir,” Pierson shot back.
“Look at it this way, gentlemen,” I said, “at least we aren’t bivouacked out in the jungle somewhere.”
“Maybe not, but those combat guys have it made,” said Pierson. “They get to use Claymore mines.”
Now the Claymore anti-personal mine, which is a concave, plastic compartment containing hundreds of little ball bearings and positioned just above the ground, is about the most hideous small weapon in the U.S. Army arsenal. When triggered, the steal balls come flying out in a wide arc, ripping anybody and anything in their path to shreds.
I always found the words of warning embossed on the business end of each Claymore rather ludicrous. They simply say: “This side towards the enemy.” As if you were describing to a 4-year-old how to put on his underwear. I’m wondering why they didn’t put a similar warning on rifle muzzles, too. “This end towards the Vietcong.”)
“We can be thankful we don’t have any Claymores,” said Donahue. “Our guys would probably put them out ass-backwards and we’d all be blown to bits.”
(While we fortunately never had to use real Claymore mines to fend off the enemy, there came a rather hilarious time several months into my South Vietnam tour when the devices, after undergoing modification, helped us with a real problem in our ration yard. More on that later.)
Eventually the chatter faded as we all drifted off, our first day in this enchanting but tormented country coming to a close.
Now I’ve always been a light sleeper, and was the last to fade out. It must have been about 11. All was deathly quiet as I slipped into slumber.
Then, about three hours later, a building pressure in my groin brought me out of my deep sleep. I had to pee.
Now for me, nocturnal emissions of the urinary kind were nothing new. For years I’d had to get up and pee in the middle of the night at home. (My doctor told me I must have a small bladder; I was too young for prostatitis.)
But this was not home. And our tent was a good 200-foot walk from the latrine.
Two things ran through my frenzied mind: “What if the sentries mistake me for a Vietcong and open up with those 30-calibers? Worse yet, what if some VC sees me walking out there, all alone in my nice white skivvies, and picks me off? They’d probably give him an extra fish head for that.”
I couldn’t help but start getting mad at my parents for endowing me with a small bladder. It’s bad enough that they had also bestowed on me another small body part, this one directly involved with human reproduction.
I looked at my watch. It was 2 a.m. No way could I wait another four hours, when it would be light and the entire company would be out and about.
Brainstorm! I’ll just take a whiz outside the tent and quickly duck back inside.
Wrong! It would be just my luck to be caught by the corporal of the guard. I couldn’t just say, “I was afraid to walk to the latrine, corporal.”
Well let it not be said that I am a coward. I decided that if I was going to spend the next 336 days worrying about peeing in the middle of the night I was going to be a nervous wreck when it came time to fly home. So I made the plunge.
No sooner had I stumbled out of the tent, than I confronted another obstacle that paralyzed me with fear: I couldn’t see a damn thing! Even with my glasses on. A moonless night didn’t help.
I envisioned that VC again, this time with ample Vitamin A in his system and peering through his AK-47 sights, saying, “Here comes a slow moving, four-eyed G.I. out of the officers’ tent. Pop him and maybe I’ll be rewarded with two extra fish heads!”
It was then that I conjured up visions of my mom and dad making love and mom saying, “I hope our children have better eyesight than we do.”
I can’t complain though. It was my extreme myopia that was responsible for me being in a quartermaster unit and not crouched in the jungle, waiting to ambush a patrol of hapless Vietcong.
My need to pee soon began to overtake my fear of being zapped and I trudged on towards the latrine, moving ever so slowly so as not to stumble over anything like a tent peg or an M-48 Patton tank.
I was about half way to the latrine when suddenly I bolted at a ferocious, loud blast just a few feet in front of me. Whew! It was only Sgt. Thompson farting in his sleep. Too bad the army couldn’t have harnessed that kind of firepower when he was in Korea. We would have been out of there a lot sooner.
Before long I was in no man’s land, half way between the latrine and my tent. Too far to turn back now. Had to go for it. I was about to cross the Rubicon. My bladder was really paining me now, and it wasn’t helped out at all by Sgt. Thompson’s air shattering eruption.
Finally, I’m at the front door of the latrine. Hopefully, there will be somebody else in there to keep me company. No such luck.
I opened the door, and felt my way to the nearest hole.
“Ahhh …nirvana.” I sighed as I relieved myself. This wasn’t so bad after all. Piece of cake. I’m actually enjoying this!
But just then came four startling words that have been heard in war zones ever since the dawn of time: “Halt, who goes there!”
“It’s only Lt. Jingle taking a pee,” I was about to blurt out, when suddenly I heard the burst of a 30-caliber machine gun. Exploding grenades soon followed.
They say that the moment before you die your whole life flashes in front of you. I only had one such flash: the news reaching my friends and family that I was gunned down by friendly misfire my first day in South Vietnam while taking a leak. How embarrassing. Didn’t even get a Purple Heart. Just a yellow pair of shorts.
No sooner had this thought raced through my mind than the firing stopped. Once again it was deadly quiet. Apparently none of the ordnance landed even close to me or the latrine.
“What’s going on here?” I said to myself. “Surely I can’t be dreaming.”
I ventured slowly out of the latrine and found that almost the entire company was now up. And what I was seeing was quite hilarious: grown men in their shorts, some with rifles and fixed bayonets, some with helmets on, running around like a bunch of confused laboratory mice.
“Some VC were shot!” shouted one of the men. “Go get Capt. Donahue!”
By virtue of my genetically flawed bladder I was the closest officer on the scene and decided to take action into my own hands.
I proceeded to run towards one of the guard stations where I heard the fire and explosions coming from, blackness all around me.
When someone did light a Coleman lantern someone else yelled, “Douse that light, you jerk-off!” The light went out.
Finally I got to the guard post, there to find two trembling soldiers, a private and a corporal.
“What’s going on here?” I yelled.
“VC, sir!” rattled the corporal. Out there about 50 meters. I think we got them.”
“Well let’s go take a look, soldier,” I said in true John Wayne fashion.
The guards and I were not alone as we cautiously ventured out in front of the sentry post. A number of enlisted men, including a few sergeants, were right behind us, walking slowly. Just then Capt. Donahue came running up and almost knocked me over.
“What the hell did you do now, lieutenant?”
“I think the guards may have killed some VC, sir.”
For the next few minutes, we startled men carefully felt our way in the almost total darkness looking for dead or wounded men in black pajamas. Nothing.
Then suddenly one of the guards yelled out. “Over here!”
He was pointing to a clump of brush that was moving.
“Come outta there!” shouted Capt. Donahue, not realizing that if it were a VC, he probably would not have understood English.
Nothing happened. The captain then poked his carbine into the brush and moved it slowly aside as the men hovered around him. “We’re in your hands, sir,” they must have been thinking.
Then, after a few seconds of prodding, the enemy was exposed. But he didn’t come out with his hands up. He came out yelping and limping.
Embarrassingly, the first casualty our unit inflicted on the enemy — our first battle ribbon for meritorious action above and beyond the call of duty — was a Vietnamese potbellied pig.
Just then the tension in the air melted away with the sounds of laughter. And it was just what was needed to neutralize all the stress that had been building up inside the men from the moment we had landed.
Fortunately, the medics were able to patch up the squealing animal, which suffered only a few shrapnel wounds.
But that isn’t the end of the story.
Turns out even after we almost killed it, the weird little pig chose to hang around. We couldn’t get him to leave the company area. And it was kind of embarrassing.
I remember whenever Capt. Donahue expected a visit from the brass he would order us to hide the pig. “I don’t want anybody outside this company asking us how we acquired that ugly little thing!”
It wasn’t long, though, that word about the potbellied pig and the false alarm got out to other units in the area. It was then that the CO gave the okay to let him roam the company area as if he owned it. He was now our official mascot.
* * *
But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Sort of like putting the cart before the potbellied pig.
Before I take you any deeper into my Vietnam experiences, I have to tell you I didn’t just wake up all of a sudden on a troopship steaming to South Vietnam. Any normal guy would probably have avoided it.
You see, I was always something of a screw-off. In grade school … high school … college … and especially in the army. And it was a SNAFU (situation normal, all fucked-up) in the army in 1965 that earned me passage on the Breckenridge.
So let’s flashback. I’ll start with the day I first reported for duty at a basic combat training installation in the Deep South, a fort where thousands of soldiers were doomed to be killed in a faraway land from the day they entered the front gate.
2
REPORTING FOR DUTY
As I took the MP’s salute — one of my first as a freshly minted second lieutenant — I looked around and said to myself, “So this is where I’ll be spending the next 22 months of my life.”
Man, was I wrong. As usual.
I returned the salute and drove on.
It was early January, 1965. The scene was Ft. Polk, Louisiana, close to 200 acres — 11 square miles — of military installation carved out of the Pelican State’s huge Kisatchie National Forest.
All I really knew about the place was that before it became a major military installation it was the epicenter of the famous Louisiana Maneuvers held, just prior to our entry into World War II. Among those who participated in the mock battles, which put numerous combat and support units — over half a million men — to the test, were General George “Blood & Guts” Patton and General Dwight David Eisenhower.
If you saw the movie “Patton,” the colorful, but foul-mouthed, general slammed Louisiana quite harshly in the closing line of his famous opening monologue. Whether he actually made the remark, I don’t know, but it was just like him to have said it.
Personally, I found Louisiana to be one of the most charming of the 30 or so states I’ve been in, but too hot and humid for me to live in year around.
One misconception a lot of people hold about my first duty station is that Ft. Polk, which began its existence as Camp Polk, was named after our eleventh president, James Polk. That’s not the case. The post actually got its name from Episcopalian Bishop Leonidas Polk, President Polk’s third cousin, who fought as a Confederate general in the Civil War.
To his devotees, General Polk was known as the “Fighting Bishop.” Sadly, due to a Union artillery shell that exploded not far from him while he was campaigning in Georgia towards the close of the Civil War, the good bishop was not able to continue his earthly ministry after the war. (Blown all to heaven, you might say.)
Back to January of 1965, a month and a year that will stay always stay etched in my mind.
Though at the time I checked into Ft. Polk we had over 16,000 American advisors — all volunteers seeking a risky but faster path to promotion — in South Vietnam, the “real war” had not quite officially started and was almost nowhere to be found in the news.
Subsequently, little did I know that I would soon be a part of the wholesale madness, sadness, and occasional hilarity that would be unfolding over there.
And little did I know that, like most men and women who served in South Vietnam, whether in the infantry or the combat support services, I would come back from there a changed man, and that I would be writing this book much later on in life.
3
WASHOUT
To be embarrassingly honest, at the dawn of 1965 I felt like quite a failure, and I’ll tell you why.
Only a few weeks before, I had graduated from Officer Basic Quartermaster School, which is located at Ft. Lee, Virginia, about 20 miles south of Richmond near Petersburg. Now while I was taking classes on everything from running a mess hall to learning how to align tires on a jeep, I did something that to this day baffles me. I volunteered for jump school.
For those of you who haven’t served in the army, jump school, which is held at Ft. Benning, Georgia, is where you go to train for two weeks to be a paratrooper. Jump school is where you “go airborne!”
At that time you had to make five jumps to graduate. I assume it’s the same today.
For some strange reason I thought it would be kind of neat to hurl myself out of a plane and earn the right to wear the prestigious insignia of the sky soldier.
I scoffed at my jealous chairborne army buddies who kidded me with, “Only two things fall from the sky: bird shit and parachutes.”
I passed the physical exam for airborne school at Ft. Lee all right, which really wasn’t all that tough. (As I recall, I had just finished a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, grits, toast, orange juice, and coffee before running the required mile — in my brand new jump boots — in under eight minutes.) Ft. Benning was to be an entirely different story.
Before I reported to Ft. Benning, I flew home to Salem, Oregon for Christmas leave. When I broke the news I was going to paratrooper school, my parents flipped. Turns out they didn’t have to worry one single bit.
After Christmas, I flew to Pennsylvania to spend a few days with an Ithica, New York schoolteacher I had met while at Ft. Lee. She was visiting her folks in Indiana, Pennsylvania over the holidays.
I remember being shown around Indiana and learning that it was where acting legend Jimmy Stewart was raised, and where he worked in his father’s hardware store.
I also remember watching the 1964 Rose Bowl game between Michigan and my alma mater Oregon State. I was so proud of the Beavers and was hoping they’d do themselves proud on national TV.
Turned out that was not to be the case. The Wolverines clobbered the Beavers 34-7.
Needless to say, I was feeling a little down as I boarded the plane to Ft. Benning, via Atlanta, three days later.
When I look back on those early days in the army, I recall how fascinating, yet somewhat unsettling, it was being away from home, all alone, for the first time in my life.
I remember being in one airport in the South, waiting for my flight, when I looked around and said to myself, “You know, you don’t know a single soul in this huge terminal, and you’re over 3,000 miles from home! It was both scary and exciting.”
Say what you will about the military, the training and the travel do help most young men and women just entering the real world gain some confidence in themselves.
Then there was me.
No sooner had I begun the first day of paratrooper training, when I ended up spraining my right shoulder practicing PLFs (parachute landing falls) and washed out. Just like that. I think I lasted about 17 minutes.
The wall we were jumping off of was only three feet tall. Man, I felt really embarrassed about that. My 15-year-old sister would have made it further through the training than I did!
Now I suppose I would have made it to the next step in training if the wall had only been two feet tall, but the last I heard, airborne troopers usually jump from around 1,000 feet, not two feet.
I did meet a man a number of years later who also attended jump school about the time I did. He said he made it all the way to the point where you jump out of a tower 60 or 70 feet in the air and free fall for awhile before a static line attached to an overhead cable stops your descent. He told me he got scared and told the sergeant he didn’t want to do it and walked off. I didn’t feel so bad.)
While I failed miserably at airborne school, those few minutes learning how to hit the ground without breaking a leg would come in awfully handy later on in South Vietnam.
4
MORE OF THE SAME
It didn’t bother me much at the time, but I know now that the airborne school washout was one of several I’ve incurred in my life that have had a negative bearing on my psyche.
Take high school baseball for example. I tried out for pitcher and actually was quite enthusiastic about it. Only problem was, I was about as coordinated as a centipede with 100 left feet. I couldn’t throw a curve ball and had no fastball to speak of. I tried a forkball once but hit a guy not far from where his propagation glands are located. I was worried that I may have severed a branch on his family tree with that pitch. That was scary.
Despite all this I did get to pitch in a few games, inconsequential ones, I assure you, and actually struck out three batters once in three innings. After that it was all downhill. The only time I got off the bench was for the Star Spangled Banner.
My older brother was the real star of the family. He lettered in football and track. He was also an Eagle Scout, and is now a Jesuit priest. I didn’t get past Tenderfoot and stopped going to Mass years ago.
In high school, I not only failed on the baseball diamond, I was also what you would call a major disruption to the educational program.
I attended Serra Catholic High School in Salem, Oregon, an institution run by some really great priests and brothers — the Franciscans.
Not nearly as strict as the Jesuits, the Franciscans were still no pushovers. Their disciplinary program centered around the issuance of demerits for improper behavior. Get so many and you’re out of school
While I never earned enough demerits to get thrown out of Serra, I led my class, and I believe the whole school, when it came to collecting the little pieces of orange paper that had a box checked off for your particular offense — e.s. late for class, talking back, disrupting the class, etc.
I was told after I graduated that the good fathers were dolling out so many demerits to me that the school seriously considered saving money by buying a printing plant. I mean, I was in the principal’s office so often that visitors to the school thought I was part of his staff.
“I see you in here one more time,” the principal yelled at me one day, “and I’m going to start sending your parents a bill for rent!”
So here I am, not all that confident about myself, looking for a car outside the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia; a car that would take me some 500 miles across the Deep South to Ft. Polk, my first permanent duty assignment.
Now I’ve had troubles with cars all my life, but for some reason the 1962 Ford Galaxy convertible I ended up buying was one of the sweetest running machines I’ve ever owned. I just loved it.
Little did I know that I wouldn’t be enjoying it that much, and would end up having to sell it a few months later — and almost getting cheated by the buyer.
I had some great times in that car. One was when my girl friend from Ithica flew into New Orleans to spend the weekend with me. I had no sooner picked her up, top down (the car’s, not hers) when it began to rain.
Now coming from Oregon’s soggy Willamette Valley, I’m used to rain. There, it’s either raining or trying to rain from mid-October through June. I’ve said all along that instead of the western meadowlark, Oregon’s state bird should be the rainbow trout.
But in the Deep South, when it rains, the skies open up and it just dumps! Then, a few minutes later it’s all over and in an hour it’s practically dry again.
I don’t think my car ever did fully recover from the burst of rain. What’s worse I almost never got paid for it when I was forced to sell it before leaving Ft. Polk.
Turns out that the guy who bought it, some Spec 4 with larceny in his heart, ended up trying to stiff me on the payments. I’m sure he thought that once I boarded the troop ship to Vietnam, he could forget about me.
What he didn’t know, was that my dad was manager of the Salem Credit Bureau and very used to dealing with deadbeats.
My dad prevailed and I did get my money. I can’t help but wonder, though, if the car ever fully dried out after that rainstorm and, if not, the guy thought he had gotten screwed with a moldy convertible.
5
CAUTION! FALLING FLOUR BAGS
When I arrived at Ft. Polk I was assigned to the central logistics unit on base. It was housed in a large wood building and staffed mainly by civilians. In essence, it was a civilian quartermaster unit.
Now the Quartermaster Corps is not exactly part of what army folk call the “combat arms.” In fact, there’s a joke going around in the army that in all of the wars in which this country has been involved, there have only been two quartermaster officers killed in the line of duty. One got hit with a falling flour bag and the other one died laughing.
That’s not even close to the truth, but it does illustrate how my unit in Vietnam got dubbed the “716th Flour & Shower”.
You see, the Quartermaster Corps is involved with the supply of all kinds of things, such as army clothing, fuel, food, and even showers in the field … well you get it.
At Ft. Polk, I happened to end up with a desk job in an organization that was in charge of supplying all of the units at the installation with everything from fatigues and boots to typewriter ribbons. Ft. Polk’s main mission at the time was to serve as a basic combat training (BCT) center. During the Vietnam War many of the young soldiers who trained there ended up across the pond. Sadly, many never came back.
While I was stationed there, Ft. Polk constructed some Vietnamese-like villages that the young troops got to practice in. (Today, Iraqi villages have replaced the Vietnamese ones.)
My BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) roomie (we actually only shared a very small bathroom), a first lieutenant from New York by the name of Dick Gower, was a company commander for one of the training units.
At that time, a regular army infantry company was usually made up of four platoons of 40 or so men each, three rifle platoons and a crew-served weapons (read “30-caliber machine gun/mortars”) platoon.
Now Lt. Gower, who hailed from Upstate New York, was a great guy, plus he wore the insignia of the airborne trooper. I must admit I was a bit jealous.
During my rather short stay at Ft. Polk I used to get together after a hot and sticky day’s work with Lt. Gower and another lieutenant from New Jersey, Jim Nibold. We always met in Lt. Nibold’s room because he had an air-conditioner.
Now Lt. Nibold, a jovial man who’s family was in the oil distribution business, loved the Beach Boys, as did I. Neither of us knew a surfboard from a slab of Oregon plywood but we loved those surf guitar licks just the same.
Later on, I was to run into another fan of the Beach Boys, only this time I wasn’t living in the safe confines of a BOQ.
Also later on, I was to learn that the mere mention of “Beach Boys” would cause all hell to break loose in my unit in South Vietnam.
6
HOW COOL!
You often hear about people who have experienced strange things, like bumping into someone they haven’t seen in years shortly after talking about them, or meeting someone thousands of miles from home who once lived in the same house they did. (The latter actually happened to an uncle of mine.)
But I have to tell you about something that happened to three of us lieutenants who decided to drive to New Orleans for a weekend, something that is right up there on the you-gotta-be-kidding list.
Before leaving in Lt. Gower’s non air-conditioned Volkswagen, we loaded up with beer at a grocery store in Leesville, a little town close to the post.
Later, as we drove along Interstate 10, we were all feeling pretty good, when we realized that we should have brought something along to keep the beer cold. (It’s not unusual for Louisiana in the summer to be in the high 90s with matching humidity.)
Deciding warm beer was better than no beer at all, we were approaching Baton Rouge when the unbelievable happened: out of the bed of a pickup that we had been following for several miles wafted a styrofoam ice chest, lid and all!
Well we came to a screeching halt, scooped up that ice chest, and loaded it with the remainder of our beer.
Lt. Nibold made the comment: “You suppose if we’d been talking about women, one of those inflatable women would have popped out of that pickup?
7
SCREW UP, SHIP OUT
It took me decades to learn that I am not an office type. But before that, I quickly found out that I am not an armed forces office type.
And I don’t do well with numbers and other complex things. For proof of the latter, go to my college transcript and look for the physics, accounting, and statistics grades given me. Oh, and throw in organic chemistry.
Which is why the desk job at Ft. Polk turned out to be a disaster, one that eventually got me in trouble and punched my ticket to Indochina.
Now at the time, Ft. Polk kept track of all of its supplies with IBM punch cards. I had only a very vague idea of how they actually worked.
After being on base for a few months, I was notified by my commanding officer, a light colonel, that there was to be an “M-Tex”, or some totally officious-sounding army inspection like that.
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but knew at least that it involved something like a fort-wide test to see just how well we had inventoried all the supplies on base and how efficiently we could move them to the units on base when requisitioned. So I just let it slide. Not too bright. But don’t forget, I hate abstract work and really had a hard time figuring out how those punch cards kept track of what was being stored and where.
Well, before I knew it, the M-Tex was in full force and our department was failing miserably. For the life of me, I don’t know what it was that I did or didn’t do that contributed to the poor grades given our unit, but I was in the colonel’s doghouse.
I’ll never forget the dressing down he gave me, his eyes flaring, fist pounding the desk, neck veins bulging. Imagine how this was all contributing to my already low sense of self-esteem.
Now the colonel was not a bad looking man, but when he flew into his rage at me, his facial features took on a totally eerie, distorted look. I couldn’t help but think he looked like something from outer space. Thus, my nickname for him: Space Face.
As it turned out, my punishment at the hands of Space Face was actually a relief, a way to get away from all the stares that were coming my way.
The good colonel showed me to a little room, gave me some templates that let you draw all those totally boring symbols you see on totally boring flow charts, and told me to get to work laying out our department’s very own flow chart. I mean, this was not an assignment you see depicted on the History Channel’s “Famous Military Moments” or anything like that.
I wasn’t at my new assignment long, when I got a postcard from a lieutenant from Pennsylvania whom I had met at Ft. Lee quartermaster school. This was the same guy who introduced me to the Ithica schoolteacher, who he went to Penn State with.
He had been assigned to Subic Bay in the Philippines. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he wrote on the card that he was seeing a lot of supplies coming into Subic Bay before heading out to a little country north of him — South Vietnam.
Soon after that, I was handed reassignment papers that directed me to report to a new quartermaster company forming up on the base, and it was headed to the same place.
Needless to say, I didn’t say goodbye to Space Face and he didn’t say goodbye to me. But we hadn’t seen the last of each other.
When I look back now, I owe a lot to Space Face. If I hadn’t pissed him off, I probably would never have been assigned to a unit forming up for South Vietnam, and thus would not have a launching pad for this book.
So, if you’re still around, Space Face, thanks. Sort of.
8
MAD (food) SCIENTIST
I barely got out of college my first time around.
I went to Oregon State University because a high school friend was going there. My major? I had no clue for the first three years.
I started out in pharmacy, switched to business, then decided I was going to get a degree in food science, which is essentially a study of food processing.
It took me five years to graduate, and I came out with a most impressive 2.18 GPA.
Now I am definitely not a scientist. Oh I did okay in basic chemistry, but when it came to organic chemistry, microbiology, physics, food engineering — I was totally lost.
I learned really fast that I was not a food scientist in the summer of 1963, when I was hired on as the quality control supervisor for a small berry packing plant in Woodburn, Oregon.
Oh, I did the QC work okay, actually kind of liked it.
But then one week, some guy, a real egghead, came in and set up a rather elaborate system for extracting flavors out of blackberries using a convoluted vacuum chamber. I mean, this thing had tubes and pipes and doomaflidgits coming out from every which direction.
It was definitely not part of my job description, but I was put in charge of running this machine from Purgatory one day.
To make a long story short, it wasn’t long before I had berry concentrate flying all over the place. Seems I wasn’t keeping my eye on the pressure gauge and didn’t notice when the vacuum was suddenly lost.
The juice really hit the fan. I don’t how many thousands of dollars worth. I felt totally horrible, and knew I was going to get canned.
Well that didn’t happen, but I did get a good dressing down by the general manager, and went back to counting mold spores in strawberries.
Now you may be asking: What does all this have to do with my assignment to a brand new unit forming up to go to South Vietnam?
Well as you’ve seen, I have a propensity to screw up an awful lot, and I guess what made me add this episode to my book, is that I was hoping in early 1965 that for once I would finally prove myself.
Turns out when I got to the new unit, I quickly fell back to my old ways.
9
RUN FOR COVER!
I can still remember rather vividly what raced through my mind the moment I found out I was being assigned to a new unit preparing to ship out to Vietnam.
Up until then, even as a kid in grade school, I loved war movies. That’s because they weren’t all that realistic. You hardly ever got a real sense of the mayhem and terror present during the heat of combat. You never heard what weapons really sounded like when they were fired. And since all the actors were firing blanks from their rifles and side arms you never saw the kick that real weapons deliver when real bullets — and not blanks — were fired.
But most of all, in all the war movies I went to as a kid and young adult, I never saw what it really looked like for someone to have his intestines blown out, never saw an infantryman’s face splattered with blood when his buddy next to him took a direct hit.
Today, thanks to moviemakers like Steven Spielberg and Oliver North, people have a much better understanding of how utterly terrible and maddening combat can be. And I can’t help but think that the films these two men and others have made must somehow turn any sane person against war. (Note: I said “sane” person, if you get my drift)
All that said, the first thing I thought of when getting the news I was shipping out, was of me running for my life in a huge supply depot somewhere in South Vietnam that was being bombed by Chinese pilots flying Russian MiGS. That’s the honest truth.
We had rumors that the Chinese were about to enter the war in support of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, but for some reason I did not envision hordes of quilted North Korean soldiers attacking us, like they did American troops in Korea. I just saw the planes dropping bombs, napalm and who knows what else.
When you think about it, for Chinese soldiers to wear those heavily padded uniforms they wore in frigid Korea would have been insane in 100-degree South Vietnam.
Having a rather vivid imagination, I’ll tell you something else I thought about. Something that embarrasses me to this day because, as it turned out, except for one or two occasions, I was never in any real danger in South Vietnam.
I envisioned one day while driving back to the BOQ from my new unit, a little old woman in black pajamas on an ammunition line in some North Vietnamese factory. At that very moment she was putting the finishing touches on a brand new, shiny AK-47 round that some Vietcong sniper would some day implant in my brain. I even wrote a little self-pitying poem about it but have since forgotten it.
Shows you how crazy some people think, especially when they’re afraid they’re being sent to their doom.
Unlike many career soldiers, I did not see my assignment to South Vietnam as a career-building move, where I would be promoted on the battlefield to a captain or something like that. I just wanted to go over there, keep my nose and genitals clean, and get it over with. I had no intentions whatsoever of staying in the army past my two-year ROTC commitment, and I’m sure that Uncle Sam (I actually did have an “Uncle Sam”) had no intentions of courting someone like me when my tour was up and it was time for my discharge.
(NOTE: “Tour” is probably one of the worst words you can use to describe time spent in a combat zone. To me, a tour is a pleasant experience: a trip to the Bahamas, or a jaunt through a museum. It’s not something you take where you’re in fear of getting zapped all the time!)
I never did ask the other officers in my company how they felt about being sent to South Vietnam. I’m sure they had some worries, especially those who were married. And it didn't help any to go home at the end of the day, turn on the TV and see what was happening over there.
10
OOPS! SORRY, COLONEL
The Vietnam-bound unit forming up at Ft. Polk that I was assigned to, was the 629th Quartermaster Company. We were what is called a “service outfit”. That means that the soldiers in the four platoons that made up the 629th provided other support units with needed manpower.
If a ration yard needed more men, they’d call the 629th. If a gasoline dump needed more men, they’d call the 629th. If the military police needed help guarding prisoners, they’d call the 629th.
Now if an artillery unit was being overrun by the enemy, it definitely would not call the 629th, that is unless they had just run out of sand bags and needed several hundred cases of canned corn for protection.
No, we were not fighters, but lovers — and some of us couldn’t even do that right.
There is one nice thing about the army, however, and that is that you get to meet people from all over the country.
As it turned out, two officers I had met while at Ft. Lee — Lt. Pearson and Lt. Samuels — had been transferred from other army installations to take over two of the platoons in the 629th. A third lieutenant (not to be confused with a second lieutenant), Lt. Reese, was a local Cajun already assigned to Ft. Polk. I was the platoon leader for the fourth platoon.
The CO (commanding officer) of the 629th was Captain Donahue, an interesting man with an obsession for a particular Beach Boys’ song.
The executive officer, or XO, of the 629th, Bob Miles, was a first lieutenant from New Jersey, whom I became good friends with before being assigned to the unit. His prior job was to oversee the clothing supply center at Ft. Polk. He had done a good job there and I immediately started to wonder if he had screwed up, too. He had not. It was just that the army was yanking soldiers from post duty everywhere to fill out units shipping out across the pond.
* * *
A little aside here: You know how music will send your memory back to a specific place and time?
This always happens to me when I hear the Temptation’s great hit, “My Girl.” The very first time I heard that song was when I was talking to Lt. Miles one day at the clothing supply center. I think the song had just been released a few weeks earlier.
I’ve since heard the song dozens of times and every time my mind shoots back to Ft. Polk.
The same thing still happens to me today whenever I hear “(I Don’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and “Ferry ‘Cross the Mersey” by Jerry and the Pacemakers.
Also, whenever I hear a helicopter overhead, all of a sudden I’m back in South Vietnam.
* * *
Really eager to make a good showing in the 629th, I knew I was going to be assigned to lead one of the platoons. That being the case, I was bound and determined to get to know all of the 40-some men in my unit and be a good leader for them.
Things went well at first. I met with my platoon sergeant and the four squad leaders. I then tried to have a talk with each of my men, but that was rather difficult because many were on leave before being shipped out.
I myself took 10 days leave to visit my folks and friends in Oregon before shipping out to South Vietnam. One of the highlights of that leave was a party my fraternity brothers threw for me in the chapter house in Corvallis.
The house was supposedly off limits during summer break, but nobody gave a rip, especially me.
Before I took that memorable leave I had a great chance to shine in the 629th … but, sad to say, I totally blew it again.
It evolved like this:
The officers of the 629th learned that a lieutenant colonel from post headquarters was going to come out to christen the new company and bless its colors, so to speak.
Now normally the CO (commanding officer) of the company is there at the front of the unit when the flag is presented to the company. But Captain Donahue was due to be home on leave when the ceremony took place. So was his XO, Lt. Miles.
That left me the next in command. And my leave wasn’t to commence until a week after the presentation of the colors.
That puts me out there with the colonel with an entire company of men behind me.
While I partially cherished the opportunity to look good during the ceremony, I couldn’t help but think back to ROTC summer camp, 1964, at Ft. Lewis, Washington, near Tacoma.
ROTC summer camp is where college officer candidates go for their “boot” camp, and I use the term lightly because the future second lieutenants do not go through anything near what the basic recruit goes through at a real boot camp.
What makes ROTC summer camp so unusual is that because some of the cadets will be getting their gold bars right after graduation, they will all of a sudden outrank the sergeants who had trained them for six weeks.
Because I had graduated from OSU and would be getting my commission at ROTC summer camp, I was one of the cadets scheduled to lead the training company for one day.
The cadets came from universities all over the Western U.S.
My first assignment on the day I was to command the cadet company was to get up in front of the unit, about 175 men, and announce the training schedule for that day.
To make it easy on the young company commanders, the ROTC cadre, which consisted of a regular army NCO for each platoon and a regular army captain as CO, made out a list of what each was to say.
I don’t mind telling you that even though everything was spelled out for me I became very nervous about getting up in front of all those guys, many of them gung-ho high achievers, and telling them what was in store for them.
Needless to say, I tossed and turned all night before the dreaded event, even though I felt confident that I had memorized every single letter in the announcement I was to make. I timed it. It took about a minute and 10 seconds.
Well much to my surprise, the next morning when it came time to mount the little platform placed in front of the company I found the courage to leap up aggressively and bark my first command, which was to around 160 cadets standing at attention.
“At ease!”
When I saw all the cadets do exactly what I had just ordered them to do, I must say I was suddenly filled with confidence … as well as a little power.
“This is not going to be so bad after all,” I said to myself.
“Good morning, gentlemen!” I bellowed.
“Good morning, sir!” came the collective reply.
I was loving every second of it.
Now on the day I was to lead the company, half the day — the morning — was to be spent at the rifle range. In the afternoon the cadets would be tested for what were called leadership reactions.
Essentially, what leadership reactions consisted of was putting cadets on the spot by giving them an unrehearsed mission in a simulated combat setting and then evaluating how they reacted under stress.
As I mentioned, I had the two parts of the training schedule nailed and WAS NOT going to screw up. Or so I thought.
“Today’s training schedule will consist of two parts,” I barked out.
“In the morning you will report to the rifle range with your weapons for four hours of live fire at 100 yards. (Filled with bravado, I then threw in a little line of my own.) “Gentlemen, those rifles better be clean if you want to score well. Understood?”
When I was not met with a chorus of “Yes, sir!” I knew I had overstepped my bounds and began to crack.
I thought I had these men eating out of my hand. Only a few seconds to go, though, I rationalized.
Let’s see … the leadership reactions bit and I’m outta here.
“Uh, next … we will — uh — in the afternoon you will report to Captain Ogilvy in the forested training area. There, you will be individually evaluated on your — uh — erections under fire.”
At first the entire company — as well as a major and a captain who were observing me that day — stood completely frozen. Then the cadets let loose a collective roar that could be heard all the way to Seattle. The other officers and NCOs soon joined them.
I could have crawled down a 155-mm howitzer tube (that’s what the army calls a barrel on a cannon), I was so embarrassed.
Leader of men? I think not!
Taking the laughs as a sign that I may have some latent comedic talent didn’t even cross my mind. I was totally shattered.
Now before going back to Ft. Polk on the day the 629th got its colors I’d like to tell you how I fared at Ft. Lewis when it came time for my leadership reaction evaluation. It wasn’t too flattering.
My time came in the afternoon. I was given a small detachment of cadets and told that I was in enemy territory in a heavily forested area on a reconnaissance patrol. My mission: to scout an enemy fortification ahead and then get back to friendly territory with the information.
Under no circumstances was I to engage enemy troops who were patrolling the area. My only mission was to gather the information and then beat feet back to our lines. “This is a recon patrol and nothing else,” the evaluating officer told me.
Sounds easy enough, I thought. I mean, I had five guys with me, we each had pad and pencil and would all take notes on what we saw.
As we proceeded in the direction of the “fortification” I was waiting any second to see some kind of structure looming out of the trees. When I did see it I was ready to give the command for my patrol to hit the dirt and inch forward to record what we saw.
But there was one giant hitch.
Turns out that on the way to our objective the patrol suddenly came across a “wounded” enemy soldier slumped up against a tree. He was out cold but breathing. (In real life the man was a regular army corporal assigned to the post and only playing that he was wounded.)
Comforted to know that this was only make-believe, I was nonetheless startled and knocked off guard to find this so-called wounded man who stood between my objective and me.
The patrol stopped dead in its tracks, more than a little dumbfounded.
“Well, what are you going to do, cadet Jingle?” the officer accompanying us said. “You’re in charge.”
He appeared that he was about to write something on his clipboard, no doubt how I was going to react.
I just stood there. Duh.
The evaluating officer grew impatient.
“I’m trying to go over my choices,” I trembled.
“Well let me help you a bit. You gonna just leave this wounded enemy here and advance toward your objective? You gonna take him along? Or are you gonna kill him? And if you kill him, how are you going to do it? Remember, your job is to scout the enemy fortification without being detected and get back with the information.”
I quickly went over my choices. If we tied and gagged the man and just left him there I knew I would receive a poor grade. That’s because there’s a chance the wounded solder would be found by his comrades, who were also patrolling the area, and he’d tell them of our presence.
And we really couldn’t drag him along because it would slow down and jeopardize the mission.
Kill him? I had to ask myself, if this were all really happening, could I give the order to do that? I don’t think so. And if we did kill him, we’d have to do it with a knife so as not to be heard, and stabbing to death a wounded guy lying against a tree didn’t seem all that civilized to me.
“Well, Jingle?” queried the officer.
“Sir, I would ask him if he wanted to enlist in the American army,” I said, trying to get a laugh while stalling for time.
The line did manage to get some chuckles from my patrol mates but not the evaluating officer.
“C’mon, Jingle,” we’re wasting time.
“Sir,” I said, “I simply do not know.”
And that was my honest reaction at the time. I also knew it meant a bad score for me in the leadership reaction course. But since I was headed for a supply job in the army, I pretty much knew they wouldn’t kick me out of summer camp for screwing up an infantry-type test.
I never did ask the evaluating officer what the proper decision would have been in that particular instance. I knew I’d never get an answer because cadets were known to pass the solution of the “problem” along to other cadets about to undergo the same situation. All in all, I believe there were about a half dozen scenarios in the leadership reaction course.
If you’re like most readers, you’ve probably already asked yourself what you’d do under the same circumstances had you been leading a reconnaissance patrol and found a wounded enemy soldier.
There are no easy answers, unless you’re a psychotic killer or a blathering idiot.
Back to the presentation of the company colors at Ft. Polk, with me at center stage again.
Since I didn’t have to say much I knew I couldn’t mess things up as badly as I had at Ft. Lewis. But the day was still young.