CHAPTER 15
The team members gathered around the table in the dining area stared at each other incredulously. Was he serious? A sauna? He wanted to build a sauna?
Captain Hughes had struck again! Sometime after Christmas 1969, this idea, which was destined to expand the amenities of the Dinh Quan Surf and Raquette Club, began to take shape. The beach by this time was a legend at the peak of its popularity. As the team members, who all served as the board of directors for the club, listened to Hughes’s idea, we were, to say the least, less than enthusiastic. The initial reaction was a rather disdainful dismissal of the whole concept. There were snickers and some unflattering references to his failed attempt to construct a croquet court.
Hughes was somewhat taken aback at the overwhelming resistance that greeted his sauna idea; the facts that we were experiencing daily temperatures well over 100 degrees and that the humidity was already extremely high didn’t seem to factor into his thinking. His unabated enthusiasm and persistence, however, finally wore us down, although a healthy skepticism remained. He and Lt. Ray Wingo set about designing this new addition to the Surf and Raquette Club.
Enlisting the help of the nearby U.S. engineer company, Hughes and Wingo came up with a conex steel shipping container roughly eight feet by eight feet and six feet high. They constructed wooden benches inside along the left wall and cut away the lower right rear corner with an acetylene torch. A metal box approximately two feet square was constructed and welded into place inside the conex, filling the hole that had been cut out. When completed, it looked like a metal cube sitting in the corner of the sauna. On top of this cube, smooth stones from the river bed were piled. From the outside it appeared that a square bite had been taken out of the right rear of the conex. The bite was the location of the charcoal-fueled fire that we would light every day. It burned beneath the corner, turning the metal cube inside red hot, which in turn heated the stones. The smoke from the fire, prevented by the tight welds from entering the conex, merely drifted away.
Using the sauna was simple. We would douse the extremely hot stones with water, generating steam and raising the temperature and humidity within this steel container—already sitting out in the blazing sun—to incredible levels. Conditions inside became unbearable in record time. The routine consisted of a leisurely session on the beach followed by the purification rite of the sauna. At death-defying levels of heat and humidity, it became a macho thing to see who would fold first. The first person to bail out would swing the wide metal door back and forth, evacuating the steam which had built up inside, and then we would start all over. We had no way of measuring the heat, but it was of hellish proportions—it’s a wonder it didn’t kill us all! When no one could stand it any longer, there would be a race for the cold showers. The whole experienced left us absolutely drained. If the Vietnamese, who made every effort to get out of the sun and heat, thought the beach was a crazy idea, you can imagine their reaction to our sauna!
While the sauna was a success, Captain Hughes’s earlier attempt to add to our amenities—the ill-fated croquet course—was not. In the fall of 1969, right after the monsoon season had passed, Hughes came up with the idea of constructing a croquet course in our backyard, just beyond the beach. Everyone thought this was a marvelous idea and volunteered their own suggestions as to how best to do it. A plan was drawn up that would initially lay out a small court, one that could be expanded in the future. We all had a vision of the Dinh Quan Country Club, with croquet substituting for golf—a perfect companion to the Surf and Raquette Club! Hughes wrote his wife in Panama City, Florida, and had her ship him a croquet set—mallets, balls, wickets, and stakes. Now all that we had to do was construct the course. Shovels, picks and rakes were borrowed from the engineers, and we were set to go.
The following Sunday morning, work commenced in earnest. All of us worked feverishly throughout the day, shoveling, raking, breaking up rocks, filling up holes, lining up materials, chopping brush and weeds, hauling dirt and sand, and so forth. At day’s end, exhausted, we paused to admire our work. It was a disaster! The ground wasn’t level, the area was too small, there was no grass, the soil was full of rocks, and the ball wouldn’t roll straight. In fact, with all the rocks the ball would hardly roll at all. We realized that in the enthusiasm of our planning we had somehow overlooked the critical fact that croquet was intended to be played on a large, smooth, level, grassy area. The area we had selected was neither large, smooth, level, nor grassy; it was an absolute mud hole during the rainy season. Despite Hughes’s urging that it only needed a little more work to be world class, we threw down our tools, abandoned croquet, and turned our attention to badminton. For the next couple days Hughes worked on his own, determined that he would show us all. Despite his efforts, there was little improvement, and slowly even he came to grips with the futility of this undertaking. Quietly and unceremoniously, work on the croquet court stopped. In deference to Hughes, there were no “We told you so’s”; until the sauna idea surfaced, the disaster was hardly mentioned. The sauna’s ultimate success, however, redeemed Captain Hughes and restored his reputation.
The sauna also secured our place in the advisory team hall of fame, had there been one. We were now folklore, and even other Americans began to think we were all crazy! Their curiosity, however, generally got the best of them. A visit to our team invariably meant participating in a ritual lounge on the beach and a steam bath in our sauna. Had there been a late-night talk show in Vietnam, we surely would have been guests every evening!