CUE: Get Back, THE BEATLES
Hospital stays in war zones seem to all be pretty much the same. Mine, I am certain, was no exception. The medical types seemed to have an atypical military attitude. That is to say, they seemed caring and interested in the emotional as well as physical welfare of their patients, and for the most part were amazingly easy to communicate with. At least that was how it seemed to me, so long as I was in the 12th Evac Hospital in Cu Chi. When my kidney began to function again and it was pretty obvious I was going to get well, I was handed the news that I was not going to be sent home. I was to be transferred to a rehabilitation center in Cam Ranh Bay. This was not the news I had expected, and I said so. In fact, I made a bit of a protest, which suddenly brought the military nature of my world back into sharp focus. I was put into a uniform and shuffled onto a C-130 aircraft and flown away to the north with very little ceremony. I found myself flung, head first, back into the army, which knew me only by number and rank. It was a bit of a shock after having spent such a long time in a small combat unit where I had a name and had become an accepted member of the family. I was once again just a cog in the wheel, with one exception. I was a cog that had combat experience, which made me a commodity that was in demand at that time.
The rehabilitation center was set on the beach right next to the naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. That beach was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen. The sands were soft and white, and the water was a deep blue. At the time, the rumor was that the Hilton Hotel chain had already purchased the area. It was assumed to be planning to set up a tropical resort there, as soon as the inconvenient war business was cleared up. That plan, of course, went south with the fall of Saigon.
I was logged in as a patient and assigned a bunk and a number of exercise classes to attend. Then I found myself in a formation of other recovering cripples, where a familiar question was asked.
“Who in this group is an Eleven Bravo?”
A number of hands were reluctantly raised. The sergeant in charge looked at us with cool eyes and had us fall out. We were ushered to an arms room and issued weapons, then paired up to be the tower and bunker guards for the facility. Here, once again, I felt the isolation from the rest of the army that becomes the familiar ground of the infantry. As we were loaded onto a deuce-and-a-half truck to be taken out to our new guard posts, I remember noticing GIs lying on the beach and swimming in the crystal clear water. I would get my chance to do that, but at the moment I was bathed in resentment for every man in the army who did not wear crossed rifles on his collar. I am ashamed to admit that resentment remains to a certain extent. It is a foolish and completely ignorant emotion, and I take no pride in it. It remains all the same.
The days at the rehabilitation center fade together in my memory. There were all kinds of exercise classes and volleyball games and stretching, along with appointments with the medical staff to check on our progress. Nights were generally filled with bunker guard, which was time spent looking out over the waterfront. There was no real enemy activity around that area, so we simply guarded the waterfront. It seemed pretty silly to me. I had to wonder if anyone had ever stolen a waterfront.
I suppose I had never turned loose of the notion that the medical types would notice that I was still stiff as a board and unable to run or jump and send me home, but no such message came my way. In fact, the opposite announcement was soon to come, with a bit of a twist.
I was sent over to the naval base to get x-rayed just one more time. The doctor in charge was a bit different from those I had dealt with at the evac hospital in Cu Chi. I think it is safe to say that he probably had never been in a position to see wounded coming in from the field, red with blood and still smelling of the conflict. I doubt he had been in a position to discover the depth of his patients'wounds with the sound of the dustoff choppers just outside. I suspect he was a bit removed from all that, therefore his attitude was stiff and distant, and even a bit haughty. He stared at my x-rays for a moment and then scribbled something on a pad. As I remember, he never looked up at me. He simply said, “I've sent three of you boys back home already today. I think I'm going to send you back to duty.” He handed me the note he had just written, and I was ushered out of his presence. I assumed that was the end of it, but I was wrong. It got worse.
As I said earlier, a bit of value was placed on the heads of those who were experienced combat soldiers. I didn't know it at the time, but when a line troop was released as ready for duty, there was a bit of a scramble as to who would get him. Cam Ranh Bay was far north of Cu Chi and the 25th Infantry Division. The rehabilitation center had no obligation or responsibility to send ex-patients back where they had come from. This was pretty unwelcome news to me. Along with my release papers, I was handed orders assigning me to a unit of the 101st Airborne Division, way up in the I Corps area. This was just too much! If I had to go back to the war, I wanted to be with people I knew and trusted.
I gathered my meager belongings and walked out of the rehabilitation area. There was a fairly busy chopper pad across a barbed-wire fence, just to the north of the hospital. I had spent weeks watching the helicopters come and go from there. Now I saw it as my chance at a ride home.
I crawled over the wire and began asking if anyone was going to Tay Ninh or Cu Chi. No one was headed that far south, but I did find a dustoff chopper that was going a little bit south to a fire-support base, so I hitched a ride. It was the beginning of a three-day odyssey that had me hitching rides back and forth across the narrow country of South Vietnam, in all sorts of flying machines. No one ever questioned my motives or my right to climb onboard any aircraft that had room to take me. The secret seemed to be that so long as I was headed toward an infantry company or a combat area, I was welcome to go. So it went, until I finally reached the base camp of Tay Ninh and the rear area of Charlie Company, 1st of the 5th.
When I got to the company orderly room, I found 1st Sergeant Strain was in residence there. This was unusual, for during my time in the field, he had never spent much time back in the rear areas. Everyone there was surprised to see me. They were under the impression I had been sent back to the States. At first I was a bit confused that they would have lost track of me like that, then it hit me how many had been wounded and killed during the big attack in Cambodia. Not knowing what happened to so many was not strange at all.
Strain asked me what kind of shape I was in and looked me over with the trained eye of an experienced first sergeant. He made me bend over and try to touch my toes, and poked around on me a bit. It was obvious he was not pleased with what he found.
The company was split into two units, doing duty here and there until they could replace the tracks lost in Cambodia and get enough replacements to make a full compliment. Captain Meilstrup was due to be rotated out in a couple of days, and everything was up in the air, so I was assigned to man the radio in the rear for a few days, until Sergeant Strain decided what to do with me.
I settled into my position in the rear echelon fairly quickly. There were a number of men there whom I knew from the field. Lurch was acting as the noncommissioned officer in charge, and Larry Grubbs, who had taken my place in sniper's school, was now acting as the company arms man, or gunsmith. I moved into a bunk in the arms room with Grubbs and felt that this might be OK for the rest of my time in Vietnam.
Life in a base camp was so different from life beyond the wire that it took a little getting used to. I had been in a couple of hospitals for some time, so it was a little easier for me, but it still was a far cry from life with the company. My days and nights were split up. Some days I took radio watch during the day and relayed normal radio traffic to and from the company. Some nights were mine to sit on the radio and monitor what may be happening in the field and help with supply and dustoff calls when battalion could not do so. It was somewhat hard to sit and hear men I knew speaking in strained voices that came to me through the scratchy speakers of the radio. I listened as they dealt with deadly moments out there in the dark, knowing that there was nothing I could do but listen.
The base camps were huge and filled with all the support facilities of a whole infantry division. They also had entertainment and creature comforts for those who lived and worked inside the wire. The comforts were stark at best, but they were comforts none the less. One night, when I was not assigned to duty in the radio bunker, I went with Grubbs and Lurch to a club for a beer and a movie. The club was only a tin building with a bar and a few tables, but the movie and the beer were real enough. While we were sitting there watching Boris Karloff in a really bad horror flick, we began to hear the dull reports of rockets hitting the ground. Sirens began to wail, and we could hear choppers winding up and taking off, trying to clear the ground in an attempt to escape the attack. I looked around and discovered that the room was filled with rear-echelon types who were sitting and staring at the movie screen, giving little notice to the approaching sounds of explosions as the rockets began to hit closer and closer. I was squirming in my seat before some of the men rose from their tables and started leisurely walking toward the door, in the direction of the nearest underground shelter. The explosions grew louder and closer, but no one seemed to be hurrying at all. Then a huge explosion seemed to go off just outside, and everyone in the room fell to the floor, piling on top of each other in a heap. The knot of sweaty, green-clad men lay on top of each other on the floor until the explosions seemed to pass and get farther and farther away in turn. Then, without a word being said by anybody, the whole bunch rose and returned to their tables. The whir of the projector still running and the awful dialog from the movie were the only sounds that could be heard. No one left until the movie was over. When we did exit the tin building, it was impossible not to notice a huge hole in the ground, just outside, that was almost as big as the building itself.
On that night I gained a new insight into the life of those who lived inside the wire. Unlike the tracks, which moved and changed positions each night, the base camps were huge, stationary targets for the Viet Cong. Tay Ninh base camp was often called Rocket City because of the frequency of just such attacks as I experienced that night. Consequently, the rear-echelon troops who were stationed there were forced to live with the specter of huge rockets coming down on their heads as an everyday possibility. At least when we were out in the bush, the enemy had to look for us. The rear-echelon types just had to take it and go on with business as usual.
Just as I was about to settle in to this base-camp duty, Sergeant Strain demanded I present myself in the orderly room. When I got there, his face was very red, and he had some official-looking papers in his hand. He clapped his grey eyes on me and asked if I had any idea how many people were looking for me. The jig, of course, was up. My taking my leave from the rehabilitation center and ignoring the fact that I was officially assigned to some infantry company in the 101st Airborne Division had come to light. My reasons for returning to the 1st of the 5th seemed of little interest to the first sergeant, who was faced with a ticklish problem because of my antics. He explained to me in an irritated voice that he would have to give me up if the case were pressed, but that the 101st would probably not press the case if I were in the field on combat assignment. The problem seemed to be that I was still gimping around quite a bit and, despite the fact that the army had declared me fit, was in no shape to go into a combat situation. To send me out to that would risk my life and possibly that of someone who might have to depend upon me. Such being the case, there was only one other possibility of redemption.
Not far from Tay Ninh base camp was the legendary Nui Ba Den, or Black Virgin Mountain. On top of this three-thousand-foot extinct volcano sat the Nui Ba Den radio relay station. Combat companies of the 25th Division were charged with sending personnel to man the defensive bunkers on the perimeter of this tiny base camp in the clouds. As chance would have it, Sergeant Strain was due to transfer two men up to the top of the mountain as bunker guards. The usual practice was to send the cripples and the idiots up there to sit out their time in the war so they didn't hurt anybody else. According to the first sergeant, my physical condition and my stunt of ignoring my orders and returning to C Company without permission qualified me as both. So with a slap on my back and the assurance that Sergeant Strain would also be up there very soon, I was assigned to sit out my remaining wartime high in the clouds, in a fortress that had already been overrun several times by the NVA. If that wasn't a spooky enough prospect, there was the ghost!