I was worried about my other buddies out there. Each day, the journalists at the Caravelle had been giving us our own private news reports.
According to them, General Earle Gilmore Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had flown to Vietnam to meet with General Westmoreland. Wheeler said they were considering mobilizing the reserves to invade Laos and Cambodia, and Westmoreland insisted that he would need those 206,000 additional troops for the job. Under Westmoreland’s tenure, the number of troops in Vietnam had soared from 16,000 in 1963 to 536,100 by 1968. It would peak at 543,000 early the following year. Wheeler said he’d think about it. He ended up going back to Washington and reporting to LBJ that, despite heavy losses, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong were not even close to giving up.
Meanwhile, Clark Clifford, an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had taken over as secretary of defense after McNamara’s exit, and the journos told us that LBJ had asked him to “study the situation.” Clifford went “in the tank” with the Joint Chiefs of Staff for three days, asking all kinds of questions, and he didn’t like the answers. He went in gung ho and came out wanting to pass the peace pipe with Uncle Ho. Years later, he reflected, “We couldn’t win the war . . . and all we were going to do was waste the lives of our men.” Clifford denied Westmoreland his gargantuan troop request and convinced LBJ to halve the bombing of North Vietnam, which led to peace talks in 1968. As the top dogs held their debates, I didn’t know where all my buddies were as Tet raged on in Hue, Khe Sanh, and elsewhere. But the journos said that we had retaken most of the 120 towns and bases that had been invaded during the Tet offensive.
Try though I might at the US consulate, I still couldn’t get the hell out of Dodge, so I decided it might be a good time to try to help Pedro Menchu (not his real name). He was another mariner; I’d found him wandering around Saigon and invited him to join the Caravelle Refugee Roundtable. His country, Guatemala, didn’t have an embassy to help him in Vietnam—it was too busy running its own bloody civil war. In his low-key way, he would tell us about the atrocities against the Mayan Indians and the leftists, but then he would encourage us to go see the incredible Mayan ruins in his beautiful homeland.
Ben Hur immediately nicknamed him Mensch for his mellow personality. We couldn’t picture it, but he’d organized a strike on board his ship, which his captain called a mutiny. In port, Mensch’s own Captain Queeg had handed him over to South Vietnamese police—for a fee. The minute Queeg left the deck, the cops pocketed the dough and told Mensch to scram. Why feed another man in jail when they didn’t have enough food for themselves?
Since then, Mensch hadn’t been able to find work anywhere in Saigon. I guess that because he’d been charged with mutiny, he didn’t qualify for the union per diem I was getting. He was one of the K’iche’ people—the Mayan descendants up in the Guatemalan highlands—and the Vietnamese couldn’t make him out. There were plenty of Hispanic American soldiers who fought in Vietnam—170,000, in fact—but, like me, Mensch wasn’t in uniform. Maybe the South Vietnamese thought he was Cuban. The Cubans were allies of the North Vietnamese; they had military divisions in Laos all along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Arizona senator John McCain, a navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam and spent six torturous years in captivity, said once that the Cubans were the worst torturers of American POWs at his camp, the notorious Hoa Lo Prison, referred to sardonically as the Hanoi Hilton.
Mensch told me he wanted to join the US Army, as he’d heard it provided a path to American citizenship. They didn’t exactly have “Join the Army” signs in Saigon; it would be a bit redundant. I brought Mensch to the Brinks Hotel, looking for a reenlistment officer. Even the officers looked at us as if we were crazy. Who would re-up in the middle of the Tet offensive? It was a little upside down to them. It was like asking for a glass of water while your ship is sinking. But one of them directed us to Tan Son Nhut. So, we headed out to the airfield in the back of a military transport.
When we got there, the South Vietnamese National Police didn’t like Mensch’s looks either. They squinted at his ID and started to scream at us in Vietnamese. Loosely translated, my guess is they were yelling, “Get the f— out of the truck!” There were about twelve of them; some had pistols and some had rifles, and they were all pointing whatever they had right at our heads. Mensch was trembling and looked terrified, which made matters worse.
I said, “Okay! Okay! Calm down! We’re leaving!” They kept their guns trained at our heads.
Once we got out, the military transport took off like a shot. The driver definitely did not want to be involved with this BS. I said very matter-of-factly, “Hey, we don’t want to make any trouble; we’ll come back when you’re not so busy.” As I did, I waved down another army transport—this one headed back to Saigon—and I asked the young GI driving if we could hitch a ride back. The GI looked at the White Mice, then at Mensch, then at me, right in the eyes, and he “got it” and had the stones to act on it. He gave me a knowing nod.
“Sure,” he said casually. “Hop in.” The South Vietnamese cops kept their guns pointed at us but let us climb on board, and we took off. God bless that kid.
Once we got back to Saigon, I brought Mensch to the US consulate and asked Heller, the guy who had helped me, to assist him. He said, “I have enough problems with you, Donohue.” I left Mensch with him, and he didn’t throw him out, so I hope he helped him. For all I know, my Guatemalan acquaintance did join the US Army and rose to the rank of sergeant major.