Fighting continued in key cities and strategic military bases, most intensely in Khe Sanh and Hue, where US Marines were on the front lines. I was worried about Richard Reynolds, the marine second lieutenant who was on my list, as I’m sure his many brothers and cousins in Inwood were, too. I didn’t know where in hell he was.
He could be in Khe Sanh, a key location near the Ho Chi Minh Trail running inside the border with Laos, where five thousand leathernecks and their army support remained cut off and surrounded by twenty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers. LBJ ordered it to be held “at all costs”—a major miscalculation ten days before Tet, as anyone can see in the Stanley Kubrick film Full Metal Jacket or journalist Michael Herr’s eyewitness account, Dispatches.
Or, Richie could be in Hue, the imperial city on the Perfume River thirty miles south of the DMZ near Phu Bai, where three US Marine battalions and South Vietnamese soldiers were under siege, fighting off ten battalions of Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers, while part of the US Army’s First Cavalry Division battled to reach them.
At first, fighter pilots were ordered not to bomb the ancient citadel, which was akin to the Forbidden City of China, with 160 palaces and temples that General Giap’s forces were using as fortresses, even as they were going house to house executing civilians. The pols didn’t want it to become another Dresden, Germany, where, during the final months of World War II, more than 1,200 British and US bomber pilots destroyed the bell-domed Frauenkirche church and other Baroque landmarks and killed 25,000 people by dropping incendiary bombs which consumed 80 percent of the city in a firestorm. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an American POW in Dresden during the bombing who wrote about later in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five,* was made to bury the bodies. I hoped US reinforcements would reach Khe Sanh and Hue soon and that, wherever he was, Richie would be all right. I worried about Joey McFadden, too—my friend Pally’s younger brother, who was an army private. I had no idea where he was, either.
I knew exactly where Bobby Pappas was, though: at the sprawling Long Binh army base only about an hour from Saigon, near the city of Bien Hoa. Our forces had secured the main road going northeast, and I saw military transports rumbling in and out of town. I realized this might be a beautiful time to find Bobby. He had been my best friend and partner in crime back home. I absolutely had to bring him a New York beer and, hell, give him a great big bear hug, too.
Security would be tight, though. Bobby was a communications specialist at Long Binh, which housed the military’s main ammunition supply depot—the largest in the world. Vietcong sappers had blown up fifteen thousand 155-millimeter artillery missiles at the “ammo dump” the year before, and it took two months to dig up and safely remove the undetonated ones.
Now, with the Tet offensive continuing, it was a tinderbox.
I checked in with the shipping agent’s clerk, Mr. Minh, and told him I would be upcountry for a couple of days. By this point, we were friends, so he didn’t think anything of bending the rules and giving me three days’ pay in advance.
Back out on the road, I hitched a ride northeast to the Long Binh base. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe the huge scale of the place. About fifty thousand soldiers were stationed there, as well as some of the top army generals in charge of planning the logistics of the war. Long Binh had restaurants, stores, an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, a golf driving range, a bowling alley, classrooms, theaters, tennis courts, and nightclubs. Bob Hope had brought his Christmas show there, entertaining the troops, while in the front row, General Westmoreland, Ambassador Bunker, and South Vietnamese vice president Nguyen Cao Ky sat watching Raquel Welch do the frug.
I walked to the depot outside the base. They had to keep it far from all the personnel in case anything happened. There were artillery and mountains of ammunition crates, mortars of all sizes, organized row after row, like pyramids of pyrotechnics. The front gate of the ammo depot was heavily guarded. I sauntered up to the MPs and showed them my seaman documents and my shiny new Saigon-issued passport. I told them Bobby Pappas was my stepbrother.
“Oh, yeah?” said one MP. “Tell us a Pappas story, then. One of those outlandish New York stories he’s always telling that we’re supposed to believe.”
“You mean like the one about the crazy guy who followed us everywhere? And one day he followed us into a supermarket on Dyckman Street, and we handed him a package of chopped beef, and he ran through the aisles with it over his head, screaming, ‘Chuck chop! Chuck chop!’ and that became his nickname?”
They looked at each other wide eyed, and one said, “All right, hop in the jeep. I’ll drive you in myself.”
When we got to the underground communications bunker, the driver told the MPs guarding it that I was Bobby’s stepbrother trying to visit him while my ship was in port. One MP went down and told Bobby that somebody was there to see him, but he didn’t say who. Then they let me go down. Bobby was there with two other guys, operating all the main communications equipment for the depot.
I said casually, “Hey, buddy.”
Bobby turned and bellowed, “Chick?!” He looked at me for a long minute as if he couldn’t process it. “What the hell are you doing here?” My friend looked different: military neat.
“I’m here to see you, man!” I gave him a big hug. “Also to bring you a beer, from all the gang back home. We got together and decided we wanted to show you guys from the neighborhood over here that we appreciate what you’re doing.”
I reached in my pack and handed him a can of the good stuff, and gave out some to the other guys.
“I see my gesture is a bit symbolic—you’ve got bars all over the base!” I said.
“Yeah, but we don’t always have these brands. Anyway, that’s exactly where we’re headed after we have these. But first I have to finish my shift!”
I sat with Bobby as he worked, and we caught up. I gave him news of his wife and kid and his dad and folks we knew back in New York. I told him what I had seen in Saigon on the first night of Tet, and about the CIA Effect that had gotten me through the country. Then the next shift of communications guys came to relieve Bobby and his mates.
“Let’s go,” said Bobby. “But first we’ve got to stop at my tent, so I can give you my extra fatigues.”
We did that, and Bobby even took me to the PX, the post exchange on-base store. I was the only US civilian I could see on the base, and Bobby didn’t want to explain me to every inquiring mind.
“Hey, can I get a fatigues jacket for my compadre here? He came all the way from New York to see me.”
“No problem, Sergeant,” replied the corporal behind the counter. “Name?”
“Chick Donohue,” said Bobby, and he spelled it out. The guy stenciled it on. “What do I put on the right? I can’t put ‘US Army.’”
Bobby looked at me and laughed. “Print ‘Civilian,’” he said. I pulled it on.
“So how are you really doing, man?” I asked Bobby.
“Well, I hope I make it back in time to hear my son say ‘Dada.’”
“Yeah, it sucks that LBJ reneged on JFK’s promise to leave fathers out of this. But at least you’re stationed at a base,” I offered.
“Hey, I’m grateful for that,” he said. “But I’d be a liar if I said the ammo dump next door didn’t spook me every so often. It’s about twenty-two hundred acres big, and we’re surrounded by jungle on three sides. We have everything in the depot: howitzer shells, rockets, flares, hand grenades, mortars—every kind of munitions, we have cases and cases of them.
“We do have thirty-two watchtowers all around the perimeter, and, of course, guards constantly patrolling on the ground. They watch for sappers who would cut a hole in the fence in the dark and then get in and blow up the pads.
“The VC have such a jones for it. All they need to do is detonate one missile in the pile, and the whole thing blows. They’ve already done it two years in a row.” He pointed off into the distance. “And about six miles away is Bien Hoa Air Base, which also has a major bull’s-eye on it. It’s home to the air force’s Third Tactical Fighter Wing, so they have a lot of jets on the airfield, and it’s home to the army’s 145th Aviation Battalion helicopter unit, and navy and marine units as well. It’s where most of our troops first came in. It’s a major target like we are.”
I shook my head. He asked if I was hungry.
“Let’s head over to the enlisted men’s club,” he said. Bobby was a sergeant, but he had been drafted and wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed in the club. “The officers knew I had been a bartender in New York, so whenever they have parties, I tend bar for them for extra money. They always let me eat what they’re eating, too, like shrimp and beef, which sure beats C-rations. Maybe they’ll see this is a special occasion.”
They did. They let us in, and we sat at the bar among the officers, including Bobby’s commanding officer, who was at a nearby table. After a while, I guess in our comfort zone, Bobby and I were swearing as if we were back on the streets. The CO became visibly perturbed.
“Chick, you have to watch your mouth,” Bobby told me. “My CO is a devout Mormon. He even wears the temple garments under his uniform in this heat. He’s a nice man, and he treats everybody fairly, but he hates it when we curse. When my company captain told him he was thinking of promoting me to sergeant, the CO told me, ‘Pappas, you are the most foulmouthed person I have ever met in my life, and you have exhibited a great deal of belligerence at times. Therefore, you would make a great sergeant. I approve.’”
As if on cue, the CO appeared behind us at the bar.
“Sergeant Pappas, I see you have found a drinking partner who is as foulmouthed as yourself,” he said, peering down at my jacket. “‘Chick Donohue’ . . . ‘civilian’?”
Bobby quickly intervened. “Sir, this is my friend here to visit me while his ship is in port. He was at the embassy during the fight to take it back.”
The CO pulled up a stool. He wanted to know all the military details, how our forces had handled the situation—whatever I knew. He had one question after the next and forgot all about the cursing.
“Sir, I think the war is essentially over,” I ventured. “This was the North Vietnamese army’s last shot, and we won. They’ve got to come to the peace table now and start negotiating.”
He seemed happy with that, but I wasn’t sure that even I believed it. I mostly wanted to reassure Bobby, who wanted to return to his family.
I stayed in a spare bunk that night and hung out with my pal the next day in the communications bunker. The following night, we went to the regular GIs’ bar to hang out with Bobby’s best friends on campus. They were sergeants, too. One was from Fresno, California; the other from someplace in Nebraska.
“Can I ask you something, Chick?” said the one from Nebraska. “Is Pappas full of s—, or is he in the Mafia, or what, because his stories are not to be believed.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like, did you two let somebody stay in your apartment because he had worn out his welcome everywhere else, then he got hot so he broke every single window in the apartment, but then it became freezing, so you two went to a bar because it’d be warmer? And when you came home, firefighters were putting out a fire he set because he was cold?”
“One hundred percent true,” I confirmed. “That would be Jimbo. Jimbo was crazy, but not in the Mafia. Now, Mikey, he was in the Mafia.”
We told more stories, drank beer, and had a lot of laughs. I stayed another couple of nights in his barracks, but then it was time for me to go.
“Well, Bobby,” I told him, “unless your CO wants to give me a job for twenty-five hundred a month like the Coast Guard commander does or fly me home on General Westmoreland’s plane, I have to go back to Saigon and get sorted out. Besides, you’ve got your own job to do.”
He nodded. “Yeah, man. I’ll be back in a couple of months, and if you beat me home, we’ll celebrate with Jimbo and Chuck Chop at the Colonel’s!”
“You got it,” I said, and he reached out to shake my hand. I took it and then grabbed both of his shoulders and gave him a good shake.
“See ya’ at Doc Fiddler’s.”