One night, a coast guard officer came into the Caravelle bar, and he looked like he needed a drink.
He had three gold stripes under a shield on his sleeve, indicating his high rank. The officer was an authoritative man with a self-assured bearing, but he looked preoccupied. From what I gathered later, he had big responsibilities for the ships that were in limbo, like the SS Limon and the SS US Tourist: full yet afloat after weeks on the Saigon River, with the Vietnamese longshoremen still on strike and unwilling to unload cargo. Those ships would be highly vulnerable sitting so close to the city’s shore anytime, but now, during the Tet offensive, the risk had spiked. He didn’t say much about it, although he did mention that it was his first beer since Tet had begun. I couldn’t believe I was drinking with a US Coast Guard lieutenant commander. Bars democratize all people.
After about an hour of talking about the war in general and our respective lives on the sea, he came around to asking me what I was doing in beautiful downtown Saigon.
“Well, Lieutenant Commander . . .”
“Call me Frank.”
“Well, um, Frank, at the moment I am looking for a job.”
“Is that right? What was your role on the ship?”
“I’m an oiler, but I can do a lot of jobs in the engine room.”
“Do you have security clearance?”
“I do!”
I guess after talking, he had gotten to trust me, so he said, “I might have a job for you. Up in Qui Nhon.”
Qui Nhon! That’s where I started in Vietnam, where Tommy Collins was stationed. The commander said that a coast guard T2 oil tanker from World War II—the workhorse of the tanker fleet, able to hold nearly six million gallons—was supplying energy to the city from offshore. A very ill seaman had been medevacked out and wasn’t going to recover quickly, he added. This tanker wasn’t leaving, as it provided energy to his boats and even to coastal installations. You worked it while it was anchored in the harbor until it had to go fill up, probably in Malaysia, and come back again.*
“A job!” I said. “I’ll take it!” I was picturing hanging out with Tommy Collins for the rest of his tour and having a good old time.
“You sure you’re willing to risk it?” he asked. “A floating tank of oil sitting there in the South China Sea is a risky place to work.”
“No problem,” I assured him. “My buddy and his mates are MPs there, and they do a good job.”
“I don’t know if you’d like the pay . . .” The commander looked at me out of the corner of his eye, and a sly smile spread across his face.
“It’s union wages, isn’t it?”
“Oh, it’s a bit more than that,” he said. “Twenty-five-hundred dollars a month.”
I nearly spit out my beer.
“Twenty-five hundred a month?!!”
I was in disbelief. I had been earning $300 a month on the SS Drake Victory. This was more than eight times that!
“Oh, and there’s no income tax on that,” he said with a smirk, then sipped his beer. He’d been doling out the info one card at a time just to see my reaction.
“Hazard pay,” he explained. “But you’ve got to commit to eighteen months, and you’ll be sitting on the biggest liquid bomb in Vietnam.”
I thought about the risk for a minute—but only for a minute. I was multiplying eighteen times $2,500 in my head: $45,000. That would equal more than $300,000 today, a life changer any way you look at it. I could buy a little tavern with that kind of dough.
He added, “I don’t want to be short an oiler with six million gallons of oil in the hold.”
One of the things we oilers do is keep tabs on the temperature of the generators at all times. Most ships have two generators; a T2 tanker might have ten 10,000-AV volt generators. This was basically a floating power station.
“Okay,” he said. “Meet me at coast guard headquarters tomorrow at 0800 hours, and we’ll reach out to them. We can fly you up to the Qui Nhon airfield tomorrow.”
I thanked him profusely, said good night to my buddy Ben Hur, and looked forward to a good night’s rest so I wouldn’t be late. I was excited. I guess I would be staying in Vietnam for a while.
The next day, I was down at the pier by seven, content to wait. Frank came in a few minutes later. The commander was busy talking with a seaman, but he stopped when he saw me.
“Donohue!” he exulted. “Great! Let’s get this done; I’ve got a lot on my plate today. Okay, sailor, secure a safe channel to Qui Nhon. Get me the coast guard detachment commander.”
The radio operator said, “Yes, sir!” and hopped to it.
“Moby Dick for Merrimac. Moby Dick for Merrimac.”
“This is Merrimac. Ensign speaking.”
“You have the detachment, sir.”
The commander got on the horn.
“Ensign? Let me talk to the captain. I think we got that oiler for Big Boy. I’d like to fly him up there today.”
There was a pause, and then, in an urgent tone, the ensign said: “Moby Dick, do not send oiler up. Repeat, do not send oiler up.”
“Why the hell not?” asked the commander.
“Charlie still has the airfield, sir. Charlie has the airfield.”
The commander paused, and his jaw tensed. “Affirmative,” he growled.
Now he was mad. He turned and said, “I’m sorry, Donohue, we can’t do it right now. I gotta go.”
They did me a favor. Had I somehow landed on that airfield, I would have become a POW—if I was lucky. I’m also glad I didn’t try to make it there on my own. I knew better by now.
In my mind’s eye, I saw my nice, big bag of money go up in smoke the same as if Charlie had blown it up with a rocket. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to work on an oil tanker anchored off Vietnam right then anyway.