The night I got back from visiting Bobby Pappas, I went up to the rooftop bar at the Caravelle. There was the usual crowd of reporters, businessmen, officers, and the random misfits stuck in Saigon, like me and Ben Hur.
Many of the correspondents were complaining about the official daily press conference at the Rex Hotel, which they’d started to call the “Five O’Clock Follies,” and from which they’d give Ben Hur and me the headlines each day. They weren’t exactly objective about it. They especially hated Thursdays, when the US press spokesman would state the body counts, with the NVA and VC always having higher casualties, and us “winning” the “score.”
They didn’t seem to respect Westmoreland, especially since he’d showed up at the embassy “in his crisp, clean uniform,” as Don North of ABC News put it, minutes after the heroic young MPs and marines had retaken it and before the reporters arrived, to whom he declared: “The enemy’s plans have run afoul.”
One reporter griped, “Westmoreland is asking for two hundred six thousand more boys to be sent over! Meanwhile, the Senate is holding hearings to determine whether the Gulf of Tonkin incident that started the war even happened.” On Aug. 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox was in international waters off the coast of North Vietnam, yet close to Hon Me Island in the Gulf of Tonkin when three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats manned by three brothers and North Vietnamese Navy sailors approached. Captain John J. Herrick of the USS Maddox ordered its gunners to fire warning shots first. The NVN sailors fired back with torpedoes and machine guns; four Vought F-8 Crusaders then took off from the nearby USS Ticonderoga and attacked them as they headed back to shore. Ten NVN sailors were hit; four died; the USS Maddox sustained only a single bullethole. On August 4, USS Maddox sailors monitoring their radar and sonar in bad weather thought they picked up signs of imminent attack by NVN torpedo boats and the perceived boats were fired upon. Captain Herrick later cabled Washington that the signals were probably caused by rough seas and the weather and not actual boats. But that was enough for President Johnson and the US Congress, which five days later passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution giving LBJ the power to unilaterally order military action. By February 1965, his Operation Rolling Thunder planes were carpet-bombing North Vietnam.
Another added, “Westmoreland and LBJ still believe the whole Tet offensive is a diversionary tactic to distract them from Khe Sanh in the North! It’s the exact opposite! LBJ says he doesn’t want Khe Sanh to be his Dien Bien Phu, and he can’t even pronounce it!”
Dien Bien Phu was the site of a decisive victory by the Vietnamese Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, over the French in 1954. The defeat in what is known as the First Indochina War (1946–1954) led France to withdraw from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (Indochina) after nearly a hundred years of colonial rule, and Vietnam was split in half at the 17th parallel after the Geneva Accords, with the Communists controlling the north, leaving us where we were today.
“Can they really believe that General Giap put the whole country under siege to take attention away from one border spot?!” another journo wailed. I didn’t have an answer for him.
Journalists covering Vietnam exerted a lot more influence than even Edward R. Murrow had during the Second World War. Pundits called the conflict in Vietnam a “television” war. The speed with which reporters could deliver their stories to the papers or on the air back home added to their influence. The Associated Press and other wire services and big newspapers were now able to transmit reporters’ updates within seconds on teletype machines. NBC’s Saigon Bureau television crews would pass their footage to staffers on medevac flights flying to Yokota Air Force Base, six hours away in Japan. Then network staffers at the Tokyo Bureau met the plane, grabbed the footage, rented time on a communications satellite, and had it on the evening TV news twenty-four hours after the fact: vivid, powerful footage of the embassy takeover and other Tet battles.
The members of the press were arguing with one another, when suddenly there was a gigantic explosion about twenty miles away to the northeast. Some people who’d been on the street said they felt the impact through their shoes. It shook the whole city of Bien Hoa, six miles away. The night sky lit up orange, and a huge mushroom cloud rose, like an atomic bomb. Some soldiers there thought the NVA had gotten hold of a nuclear weapon. This set off a chain reaction of fireworks that got bigger and bigger—boom! Boom! BOOM!—as VC satchel charges blew up and entire pallets of artillery ammunition ignited. With each successive explosion, I knew it had to be Long Binh, and Bobby Pappas was in the middle of it all.
The correspondents tore out of there to find out what the hell happened, and I prayed. I hoped to God that Bobby was in his bunker under the ground, but I didn’t see how he and the other guys could escape harm in such a conflagration. I had to go there and check if he was alive and all right. I tried, but I couldn’t make it there that night. At my hotel, I couldn’t sleep, resolving that if the worst had happened, I would accompany his body back to New York. But how would I break the news to his wife? Jeez, they had a baby. It was not a good night.
At first light, I hustled up with a convoy that was speeding straight to Long Binh on Highway 1A, the long spine of Vietnam that the French had built from the southern tip at Nam Can to China, 1,400 miles north. Along the way, we saw refugees hurrying south and military trucks and ambulances speeding north. Besides Long Binh, the VC had also blown up the fuel tanks at Bien Hoa airfield six miles north, pounding it with rockets and mortars.
As Bobby had explained, Bien Hoa was a huge, strategically key air base; home not only to the Air Force’s Third Tactical Fighter Wing but also the army’s 145th Aviation Battalion, and navy and marine units as well. More than five hundred supersonic F-100 Super Sabres and other fighter jets, Hueys, and AH-1 Cobra gunships filled the tarmac. General Giap knew he could cripple air support of our combatants on the ground, not to mention our bombing of North Vietnam, if he could obliterate the airfield. There were rumors that he himself was running the Tet offensive out of a church in Bien Hoa. Since the base also served the South Vietnamese Air Force, I could see Giap getting extra pleasure out of that.
Chopper pilots had managed to lift off, and they were still engaged in a firefight with the Vietcong entrenched at the base of the airfield. Fighter pilots, however, were stymied by the tons of shrapnel and debris scattered all over the tarmac. Under fire, airmen and GIs cleared one runway, and the F-100 pilots took off, circled, and starting bombing Bien Hoa airfield. It’s believed to be the first time that US pilots performed an airstrike on their own base.
We arrived at Long Binh, and the truck stopped at the gate. One of the GIs whom Bobby and I had hung out with was on guard. I was relieved to see him alive. Maybe it was a good sign, I thought.
The Long Binh base, where most of the soldiers resided, was on one side of Highway 1A, and on the other side stood the ammunition depot. I walked over, not knowing what to expect, and nervous. Inside the depot, the place was a wreck. There were huge bombshells, some detonated, some not, strewn for acres, looking eerily like piles of bodies. Concertina wire dangled like birthday ribbons, and buildings stood charred and in ruins, as soldiers were working fast to rebuild downed guard towers. The communications bunker was right in the center of it all. I walked in and—I’ll never forget it—amidst all the chaos, there was Bobby, with not a smudge on him. He had survived the night in the bunker with two or three other guys. Instead of a smile and a hug, he gave me one look and started ranting and raving:
“You son of a ***&&%%##! You said this freakin’ war was over! Look at this place! Does it look like this freakin’ war is over?!”
I was so happy to see my friend safe, sound, and normal. He’s pissed off at me? That’s great. I knew he was okay. I thought, Here’s my Bobby—there’s nothing wrong with this guy.
“Bobby,” I said, “can’t you take a joke?”
He shook his head and laughed.
I had believed that we were winning, because I’d believed what our leaders were saying, and I wanted Bobby to feel better about where he was. But our leaders had told us Charlie was losing the war. Then they pop up all over the country? Tet changed everything.
He was as glad to see me as I was to see him. Bobby proceeded to tell me what happened.
“At around three o’clock in the morning, I needed a cigarette, so I went out of the bunker. I looked over, and I saw the rockets go into the air base. The rockets—they looked like shooting stars—they must have hit some munitions or a fuel tank, because I saw a couple of big fireballs, and I said, ‘Oh boy, we’re gonna get it next.’ Sure as s—, we took a couple of rockets in the depot, but nothing blew up that time.”
He took a breath and continued: “I got a call on my radio saying that the Long Binh ammunitions depot and Bien Hoa Air Base were going on alert as of midnight. It wasn’t the highest alert; it was the second highest. They had intel that something big was going to happen, but I don’t think they were expecting anything like what happened. There was supposed to be a truce, but General Giap pulled off a coordinated attack all over the country. Everything got hit, and we were not prepared for it.
“Our personnel are mostly ammo specialists, pilots, motor pool, cooks, construction specialists, medical personnel at the hospital, guards at the prison. But of all the personnel, we only have a small reaction force with the 52nd Infantry, and the 576th Ordnance Battalion has its own reaction force of another thirty-two guys. Those guys went outside the perimeter to fight, and part of my job was to coordinate gunship support for them out there.
“The VC blew up tons of ammo here at the depot—we’ve got to have lost millions of dollars’ worth of ammunition. Some of it was started by rockets, and some by VC sappers who had gotten in and placed bombs on the pads of ammunition, and they went off. They think a single 122-millimeter rocket hit one of the pads of ammo—you’ve seen them—the pads were about half the size of a football field. It started a chain reaction.
“All the unexploded ordnance blew up. We had put berms around each ammo pad, about eight to ten feet high, so that if any pad exploded, the force would go upward to reduce casualties. When the rockets came back down, they hit a pad of flares, and that exploded like fireworks. Then those descended, and started fires all over the depot. There were only eight guys in the depot fire department, but they were leading the way to try to put out all the fires. The rockets and mortars kept coming in from outside the perimeter, and we were getting a ton of sniper fire.”
“What about casualties?” I asked.
“There were definitely casualties. Four officers were killed. The VC had a direct hit on the officers’ hootch. There would have been a fifth, but the chaplain had left it not thirty seconds before. He was the only one from that hootch who survived.”
Bobby paused for a minute. He had known most of the officers.
“I was in the CP, the command post, which was pretty much underground. It was made of thick metal shipping containers about four foot by eight foot, six of them in each row. On top of that, we had a bunker of sandbags over seven feet deep, because supposedly the 122-milimeter rockets could penetrate seven feet. That’s why I’m here talking to you.”
As if it had just dawned on him, he asked abruptly, “What the heck are you doing back here, anyway?!”
“Well, I went back to Saigon, and I saw a big light up north. I asked an MP what it was, and he said, ‘They blew up the Long Binh ammo dump.’ I came back to make sure you were okay.”
A call came in over the radio:
“Guerrilla through the fence line. Guerrilla through the fence line.”
“Holy s—,” I said. “Give me a weapon.”
“What are you gonna do with it, shoot the monkey?” Bobby asked.
“What?” I was confused. “You mean a sapper dressed in one of those Year of the Monkey costumes?” Nineteen sixty-eight was indeed the Year of the Monkey, which comes around every twelve years.
I searched around the bunker for a gun.
“Here,” Bobby offered. “Do you want my survival knife?”
“Sergeant,” one of the other soldiers interjected, “I think your friend thinks the guard said guerrilla. It’s gorilla, sir, as in ape!”
“They don’t have gorillas in Vietnam!” I said.
“I know that,” said Bobby. “But have you ever seen the gibbons or macaques here? And those amazing red-and-yellow-and-blue doucs, too. They’re huge. Some of our less sophisticated guys call them all gorillas. We’ve had a family of ’em in the jungle around the perimeter trying to get in all day. They were probably as freaked out by the explosions as we were. And hungry.”
I was still a little nervous. Bobby affected a scared voice.
“Hey, Clyde, you don’t think it could be Batutut, do you?”
Clyde paused dramatically. “Could be, Sergeant, could be. There have been sightings!”
I had heard about the tall, red-haired Bigfoot of Vietnam. But they were merely busting my chops.
“Okay, Pappas, now you owe me a beer!”
The three of us laughed, and we went out again that night. I didn’t see a guerrilla, I didn’t see an ape. The enlisted men’s bar was open, and they let us back in. I was so relieved that Bobby had survived the attack. I would have stayed with him another couple of days, but I had to hurry back to Saigon.
“Okay, Bobby, it’s take two, as they say in the movies. I’ll see you back in Doc Fiddler’s before you can say ‘Unique New York’ three times fast.”
“‘New Yeek You Nork,’ as we say in Inwood. Thanks for coming back up, Chick. Thanks for giving a damn.”
“Slan abhaile.”
“Hey, I’m Greek, remember? Don’t gimme that Gaelic stuff.”
“Okay, safe home. See you soon, buddy.” I gave him a big hug and slapped him on the back.
I had to check in at the consulate, or the consular official might think I’d gone missing and be glad of it and throw away my paperwork.
I hitched a ride with some GIs who were headed to Saigon in a jeep. We were driving along the road through the countryside, past fields, mostly. I was daydreaming when out of the tall grasses—boom!—came a loud blast and—whoosh!—a mortar flew right behind our heads, missing those of us in the backseat by four or five feet. The driver floored it and sped to Saigon. My ears were ringing, but I was glad to still have them, and my head in between.
I was also grateful that Bobby was still alive. I was grateful Tommy Collins was still alive, guarding a POW camp outside Qui Nhon. I was praying that Rick and Kevin and Richie and Joey were okay. I was glad Johnny and the seamen and the folks I’d met in Saigon were okay.
Once I was back there, I stopped into the Notre Dame Basilica to light some candles and say prayers of thanks and hope. The church was so beautiful inside, with its white stucco arches with every brick and tile from France, and stained-glass wildflowers around saints in every window. I felt a bit of peace for the first time in a while. I guess the Buddhist monks were going for the same feeling by burning incense five times a day at their roadside altars.
Meanwhile, Long Binh continued to receive regular rocket and mortar fire, and sniper and machine-gun fire. Bobby survived that, but not everybody did.