(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war as he saw it will continue in The Enquirer daily.)
By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
M-Sgt. Charles McCowan of
the 1st Cavalry Division public information office and myself had been
rather
thoroughly shanghaied out of activities at An Khe by his boss, Maj.
Chuck
Siler, who gave Mac a chore to do in Saigon, orders not to show up for
a week,
and recommended that I go along.
Both of us were tired,
muddy, ragged of spirit and grimly prepared to follow Maj. Siler’s
prescription
for a week of “. . .few restaurant meals, a real bed, a hot shower and
no
regular hours.”
We packed up haphazardly,
caught a jeep ride for about 100 yards (it broke down), a truck ride
for two
miles (it turned off) and walked the rest of the way in the rain to the
air
strip over by the old French fort where the advance guard of the
division had
camped 3 1/2 months earlier.
Capt. Hal Roach had a
Caribou being loaded with other muddy, tired, determined men on a grim
quest
for relaxation in Saigon. We joined
them and I noted that the 92nd Aviation Company was still hauling pigs
and
ducks on some of the runs to Special Forces camps out in the highlands. The last passengers had left their aroma in
the plane.
We whipped over to Qui Nhon,
where it was raining, without incident.
We got out and talked to three Special Forces NCO’s who were
waiting for
a ride, offered them our sympathy but not our airplane seats, and got
back on
the Caribou.
The plane touched down at
Tuy Hoa, a village on the South China Sea whose main industry seems to
be the
preservation of a row of wrecked concrete buildings, mementos of some
action
here during the French campaigns in Indo China.
There was a fairly large
crowd of women carrying things on shoulder poles, men gravely standing
in rows
watching them, and a huge crowd of Vietnamese soldiers who tried to mob
the
Caribou. They were also trying to get
to Saigon.
The stop became interesting
when one half of the crowd on the runway decided the other half had
shoved in
front of them for the privilege of not being able to get on the
airplane first
and commenced shoving back. The
argument was heated and the fiery Vietnamese tempers were
flaring quite
nicely when Capt. Roach took aboard one courier with an official mail
bag and
taxied out.
I hated leaving Tuy Hoa
before I saw the rest of it and I borrowed the crew chief’s headset to
register
a complaint with Capt. Roach.
“Sorry, but we are having
inflight movies and I knew you would rather see a good Tarzan picture
than
watch 73 Vietnamese tankers lose a fight with each other,” Capt. Roach
told me.
I told Mac about the comment
and he almost convinced the courier, who was new in Viet Nam, that the
crew
chief was going to start rolling the projector any minute.
“But I don’t want to see a
Tarzan movie. They had a Tarzan movie
last night at the base,” the courier said seriously.
Mac told him he would fix
that up for him and told the crew chief not to show it.
The crew chief nodded just as seriously and
said he wouldn’t. The courier looked
worried, then.
“Gee, if you other guys want
to look at it, that’s all right. I can
look out the window,” he said.
We were flying through and over cloud
banks and had
an hour to go so it was a very generous
and unselfish offer. We kept him going
on the movie subject for a while and then the
plane set down in Nha Trang.
First complication. The
plane had to go back to Qui Nhon, Capt.
Roach said.
Nha Trang is a confusing
base to those not there very often (as any other base in Viet Nam is). Somebody told us to walk to a big stucco
building and talk to the people there about going down to Saigon. We saw about 200 Vietnamese and American
soldiers and even women and children (apparently dependents of the
ARVIN’s)
there with a huge variety of luggage.
Mac carefully pinned a set of miniature master sergeant stripes to his baseball-style cap, pulled out some orders (he had written them himself, being the administration NCO back at the office, so they were full of fine print clauses for emergencies) and somehow was suddenly standing tall and impressive at the front of the line. (I was way back in line, someplace between a Vietnamese lady carrying a pig in a basket and two 101st Airborne Brigade paratroopers on leave, who seemed to be under the impression that they were at Saigon already. They didn’t like the place and wanted to get on the first airplane out.
Mac talked quietly to a
staff sergeant, looked pained, then took out his pen and carefully
wrote yet
another line into the already-elaborate orders. He
received two slips of paper, hooked a thumb signal for me to
go outside, and met me away from the crowd.
“Had a little hitch up
there. Had to amend the orders to take
care of it. If somebody asks you if you
are some kind of a secret agent, don’t say no and don’t say yes but get
on the
airplane real quick,” he told me.
I didn’t ask any
details. Administrative problems, after
all, were in his special field.
When an Air Force C123
landed, we got on first. Some more of
Mac’s masterful handling of administrative details had arranged for
lunch in a
mess hall which carefully excluded the common herd of transients, a
jeep to get
our gear from the operations building to the airplane, and an argument
from the
paratroopers who wanted to use the jeep to go to Da Lat.
Da Lat was 150 miles or so
west across a couple of mountain ranges and through a regiment or so of
VC, but
not impossible to two determined troopers on vacations, I suppose.
The 101st Airborne lads were
second and third aboard, not because they had any priority but simply
because
they didn’t, and then got off when they heard the plane was going to
Saigon.
“We’ve been there two days already. We’re trying to get out of that place! You guys take our advice, don’t go to Saigon,” one of them told us as he climbed out.
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