CHAPTER 7
The road ahead was blocked temporarily by an ancient bus bulging with people, live chickens and ducks, produce, and baskets and bags of all sorts. It groaned in protest as it inched its way through the congested village street. As it moved on, we turned left into the district headquarters on the eastern edge of the village. My first reaction was utter disappointment. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this sure as hell wasn’t it! The compound was small, rundown, and dirty, with only a tangled web of rusting barbed wire separating it from the highway. A determined troop of Girl Scouts could have overrun the place! The compound ran parallel to the road for about a hundred meters and extended roughly eighty meters rearward, with rock formations making up the western and northern boundaries. To the east was the National Police compound. Beyond that, except for a Buddhist temple and the village high school, both of which stood alone, it was open.
On the south side of the road, opposite the district headquarters, was another military compound housing the 621 Regional Force Company, one of the district’s five RF companies. Adjacent to that compound was a very crude military hospital—“infirmary” might have been more descriptive, although in retrospect I believe even that term may have been generous.
The district compound itself contained a dozen or so buildings, the most impressive being the district headquarters, a yellowish stucco building directly opposite the gate about fifty meters from the road. To the left of the headquarters building were several others, mostly wooden and tin structures. However, sitting prominently in their midst was another stucco building, the District Intelligence Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC), from which the infamous Phoenix Program operated. To the right of the headquarters was a smaller stucco building that served as the district chief’s house, and behind it were several more wooden structures that housed the officers and men assigned to the headquarters.
To the far right were the compound’s well and the American advisory team house, a low rectangular building approximately forty-five feet wide and eighteen feet deep with an asphalt shingle roof. It was built on a concrete slab and had wooden clapboard walls up to about four feet and screen wire from there to the ceiling. An extension on one end provided a small radio room and an extra bedroom. A 4-foot-high stone wall had been erected across the entire front of the structure, ostensibly to protect the team from rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) or other fire from the highway. I often thought it would be a pretty poor RPG gunner who couldn’t put a round above the wall and through the flimsy screen right into the team house.
In front of the house were a graveled parking area, a smaller wooden building that served as an overflow bunkhouse for engineers working the highway or for other American visitors, and a wholly inadequate team bunker constructed of rock.
First impressions? Perhaps—with a stretch of the imagination—a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there!
Not surprisingly, the inside of the team house did little to change my opinion. Entering the screen door directly into the 16-foot by 18-foot combination living room, dining room, and kitchen, I noted two sofas and two cushioned chairs along the walls; dominating the left side of the room were several smaller tables pushed together to form a larger dining room table, which was surrounded by eight folding chairs. I soon learned that this was an all-purpose table—a place for dining, game playing, planning, preparing reports, letter writing, and other assorted activities. A white sheet, which served as the movie screen, hung casually on the wall behind the table.
On the right side, a counter extended out from the wall, separating the kitchen area from the rest of the room. Pots, pans, small appliances, and limited foodstuffs were stored on shelves beneath the countertop, and a variety of canned goods were stored on shelves along the rear wall. A simple electric refrigerator was on the rear wall.
From the back door I could see a lean-to–style metal roof extending rearward from the right side of the exterior wall and under it several wooden work surfaces that served as washstands. To the left were an 8-foot by 12-foot storage shed that housed a large freezer and the bulk of the team’s food supplies, and a small makeshift tower topped by an aircraft wing tank from which water flowed for the open-air shower. In the center of the “backyard” was a small wooden outhouse, a “one holer,” with a “piss tube” protruding from the ground nearby. Finally, about thirty meters to the rear was a shed housing the generators that supplied power to the entire compound.
The rest of the house consisted of a tiny 6-foot by 10-foot radio room and small individual rooms for each team member. There were seven bedrooms inside and one—accessible only from the outside—in the small addition that had apparently been tacked on after the house was built. The rooms were small (roughly seven by eight feet), with only enough space for a bunk, a footlocker, a small table, and a chair. There were no doors, so strips of beads or colored plastic hung bordello-style in the doorways to provide some semblance of privacy. Small as the rooms were, they nonetheless afforded each team member his own coveted private space.
The district senior advisor’s room, which was in the right rear corner of the building, was slightly larger—a luxurious 8 by 10 feet. It had a built-in bed consisting of a table-like platform topped with a mattress and enveloped in a mosquito net. Two storage drawers were built under the bed, a small table and chair stood sentry in one corner, and a round chair woven of colored plastic strips—which looked to me like one of the conical straw hats worn by the Vietnamese turned upside down and mounted on legs—sat in the other. A goose-neck lamp sat on the table, and an oscillating fan mounted on the wall struggled futilely against the oppressive heat. A Playboy centerfold, apparently the parting gift of a previous senior advisor, was thumb-tacked to one wall. Miss February’s “come hither” welcoming smile seemed appropriate for the occasion. The only thing missing was a framed needlepoint piece proclaiming “Home Sweet Home.” I chuckled to myself, reminded of Victor McLaglen’s great line from the classic western movie She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. As the burly veteran cavalry sergeant, he greeted the returning John Wayne with, “Welcome home, colonel darling!” Though I was just a major, it seemed to fit. Be it ever so humble, for the next fourteen months, this was to be my home.