CHAPTER 13
“Destroyed” does not nearly do justice to Lieutenant Hughes’s condition. It was his first week on the team, and he had fallen prey to the junior officers of the Vietnamese 18th Division. The Division’s 43rd Regiment was operating in our district, and the regimental headquarters was encamped on the edge of the village about two hundred meters from our team house. The Vietnamese regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Nhut, was a friend and military academy classmate of Captain Xuan.
The occasion of Hughes’s downfall was a party in honor of the new American senior advisor to the regiment. Sensing they weren’t going to be successful in getting to the new, rather stiff and formal American lieutenant colonel, the junior officers turned their attention to the open, innocent, and gregarious Hughes. The technique was one often used against unwary Americans—a nearly unending series of individual toasts. One at a time, the Vietnamese would approach the victim and honor him with a toast. Of course, each toast required glasses to be emptied and held bottoms up to demonstrate to all the sincerity of the toast. It was not uncommon for the victim to be honored ten to fifteen times in an evening. The results were predictable—it didn’t take many of these “honors” before the poor American would either be under the table or draped across it.
I watched with amusement as they methodically worked Lieutenant Hughes. At various points during the evening, I swear I heard them leading him in toasts to Elvis, baseball, and John Wayne! When I left the party, Hughes was standing unsteadily on a bench, loudly telling some tall tale with his “admirers” all gathered round. When the Vietnamese officers finally brought him home around midnight, he didn’t know which continent he was on, much less that he was in the middle of a war zone. Sometime during that evening while staggering around barefooted, he severely cut his foot. Oblivious to the pain, he finally collapsed and was tucked away for the night. It was several days before he could even smile, much less return to normal. It took his foot a little longer to mend.
It would be an understatement to say that the Vietnamese loved to drink. As I think back, I am hard-pressed to recall any of my Vietnamese colleagues who didn’t enjoy drinking. While cognac was the clear favorite, they enjoyed alcohol in any form: Scotch, bourbon, gin, beer—you name it, they would drink it! They also enjoyed drinking games and reveled in their ability to sandbag unsuspecting Americans. In addition to the “toasts” that did in Lieutenant Hughes, a particularly popular, but deadly, after-dinner game in Dinh Quan was one I named Spin the Beak. The rules were simple, in fact nearly the same as those of the American adolescent favorite, Spin the Bottle, except in Dinh Quan nobody got kissed! The Vietnamese version was played by placing a duck’s beak on a plate, covering it with an upside-down bowl, and shaking it vigorously. The plate was then placed on the table and the bowl removed. The person at the table toward whom the beak was pointed won (or lost, depending on your point of view), but instead of getting a kiss, he had to chug-a-lug his drink. I harbored a deep suspicion, born of several severe hangovers, that the Vietnamese had mastered the art of controlling the beak, because invariably when I or one of my team members got drawn into one of these games, we seemed to “win” at a far greater frequency than our Vietnamese comrades!
The Vietnamese love of cognac was one of the vestiges of the country’s many years as a French colony. Cognac was served on every occasion, generally with soda and lime. It was a middle- and upper-class Vietnamese addiction, especially for the officer class. It was so popular that quality cognac was better than currency for opening doors, greasing skids, and generally getting things done. There seemed to be no limit to the magic a bottle of Courvoisier could produce! This passion for cognac made gift shopping for Vietnamese friends easy. The PX in Saigon was stocked to meet the demand and always had a nice supply on hand at bargain basement prices.
The other alcoholic staples of life in Dinh Quan were the local beers: Bière Larue and Ba Muoi Ba, or “33.” These Vietnamese brews were available in the village and considered appropriate for drinking at any time of the day or night. Team members religiously trekked down to a village restaurant on Sunday morning to enjoy a ritual breakfast of egg drop soup and a bottle of “33.” What a way to start your day!
As I recall, Bière Larue (also called Tiger Bière because of the prominent tiger on the label) was the cheaper of the two, came in a larger bottle, and was considered the Vietnamese equivalent to a “red-neck” favorite. Ba Muoi Ba cost more, and to my unsophisticated taste buds, seemed better. Occasionally, you might come across a San Miguel from the Philippines, but these were in great demand and very hard to find.
On one occasion one of the team’s NCOs returned from Saigon with several cases of Fosters Ale, which he had managed to acquire from some NCOs from the Australian Task Force whom he had run across. These beers took on a significance far greater than they deserved. You would have thought they contained elixir from the fountain of youth. Certainly the fact that they were pint size (25 ounces), instead of the normal 12-ounce U.S. beers, added to their attractiveness. They were carefully rationed and strictly accounted for. Each was consumed noisily with exclamations over its aroma, taste, color, and curative powers—some claimed it grew hair and cured warts! Despite the reverence bestowed upon them and their larger size, they didn’t last long, and it was back to Bud and “33.”
American beers were plentiful through the exchange system and were the general favorites of the team members, primarily because they only cost 10 cents a can. Our supply point for this staple was the small exchange in Xuan Loc. The lifestyle of the advisory team in Xuan Loc—air-conditioned trailer homes, a mess hall with fresh meat and real cooks, and physical security—was a far cry from life in the village of Dinh Quan. It was an interesting phenomenon that members of my team used any, often lame, pretext to get to Xuan Loc overnight to enjoy the luxuries, while at the same time members of the province advisory team loved to come up and spend the night with us to rough it and savor “real” advisory life. My favorite visitors were Maj. Bob Boyd, the province S-3 advisor, and George Laudato, a civilian USAID official. Bob and I had served together as captains in the 1st Division, both at Fort Riley, Kansas, and in Vietnam. Bob’s interest wasn’t in roughing it; he just wanted to get away from the province headquarters. George was a genuine character whose visits always brightened up the team.
For a brief period after my arrival, we had a liberal team policy regarding drinking beer. Team members could have beer at lunch and occasionally during the duty day. I figured that with the extreme heat and humidity, it couldn’t hurt. I quickly learned the fallacy of that theory, as I discovered a few members of the team never knew when to quit. Thereafter, beer in moderation was only permitted after duty hours. There were, of course, exceptions to this policy, when special occasions called for team celebrations. Christmas, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Easter, and team members’ birthdays were major events calling for special meals and parties. We were also often included in major Vietnamese holidays and celebrations. The Vietnamese took the best of all cultures and religions, celebrating Christian holidays, Buddhist holidays, and any others they could identify!
For the advisory team, however, the wildest occasions were the “last night” parties for any team member completing his tour and returning “to the world” or to the “land of the big PX,” as the United States was referred to in GI slang. Prior to my arrival in Dinh Quan, some demented mind had established the tradition of getting the departing team member rip-roaring drunk, rolling him in the mud, and then hoisting him upside down to indelibly stamp his muddy footprint on the ceiling of the team house. This generally was preceded by shaving cream battles and food fights, leaving the team house looking like a scene from Animal House. (The Vietnamese had the good sense to find some pretext for leaving these parties early!) You’ve not lived until you’ve had a bunch of drunks dunk you in a 55-gallon water barrel, roll you in the mud, then try to hoist your slippery body upside down to put your footprint on the ceiling—all the while slipping and sliding about on a slimy concrete floor! That experience was more hazardous than going on an overnight ambush with one of the local Popular Force units, yet it was the one we all looked forward to with eager anticipation, because it meant you were on your way home!