Phillip Cole Manor was eighteen when he became a soldier during the Vietnam War, where he drove a 5,000-gallon fuel tanker. He experienced both the 1968 and 1969 Tet Offensives. During those times, North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong forces attacked towns and cities in South Vietnam, breaking the ceasefire that had been called for the Vietnamese holiday of Tet, the lunar New Year.
The Vietnam War is often cited as an example of an ideological war fought for all the wrong reasons in all the wrong ways. A Vietnamese independence war fought to liberate the country from French colonial rule after World War II disintegrated into a conflict fought by the U.S. against North Vietnam in order to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Altogether, Vietnam suffered through thirty years of war before the U.S. withdrew in 1975.
In 1969, the last year Phillip spent in the U.S. Army, the number of American soldiers fighting in Vietnam peaked at over half a million. Yet that year was also the beginning of the United States’ long, protracted withdrawal from the war. In January, newly elected President Nixon declared that America needed to become a peacemaker, although his public speech belied covert actions to escalate the war. Nevertheless, he did initiate troop withdrawal as early as July of 1969, a withdrawal that continued in intervals until the war ended in 1975.
TWO HUNDRED GUYS in Class-A uniforms crowded onto a T-tailed commercial Boeing 727. Most of the guys only packed a shaving kit. I didn’t bother. At eighteen, I didn’t have anything to shave.
The fear inside the plane was thick as stink. We’d all seen the news clips showing battle scenes, the dead and wounded, coffins being unloaded from planes. We’d also seen old WWII movies where troops were mowed down as soon as they hit the beach. More than two decades later, what had changed? Not much. We were khaki-colored cattle being shipped off to slaughter.
In 1968, American troops in Vietnam had escalated to 537,000. I wondered how many of us would make it to our twenty-first birthday. I’d enlisted in the Army to avoid the draft. The recruiter said if I enlisted I wouldn’t get shipped to ’Nam. One of many lies. But what could I do about it? I wasn’t even old enough to vote. The voting age wasn’t lowered from twenty-one to eighteen until 1971. Hell, most of us weren’t legal drinking age.
One of the guys smuggled aboard a fifth of Jack Daniels whiskey. No need for a glass or ice. He drank straight from the bottle. By the time we reached our cruising altitude, he was flying pretty high himself. We called him Cheerleader. “Awright you fuckin’ lifers, you asked for this crap.” As if we weren’t scared enough, he’d shout, “We’re all gonna die!”
If an NCO (Non-commissioned Officer) tried to reason with him, he’d stand up, brandishing the bottle. “What’re you gonna do? Draft me? Send me to Vietnam?”
We cheered at that.
Just last month we’d been in Jungle Training at Fort Lewis, Washington. What a joke. We crawled on our bellies in the dirt shooting at each other with blanks. It was more like playing war with my third-grade buddies during summer vacation. But this was real. Seventeen hours in the air with nothing to do but smoke cigarettes and wonder how I was going to die. If someone had offered me a parachute, I swear I would’ve jumped.
Thankfully my buddy Ike was in the seat beside me. We’d met during Jungle Training. Ike and I were the same five feet, eleven inches tall and a skinny 120 pounds. We both had brown hair and eyes. We told the guys we were cousins. They bought it.
Ike had just turned nineteen and joked about being my elder. We talked about a lot of things on that flight—family and girlfriends. Friendship is a lifeline in war.
The intercom sputtered. “Ladies (they must’ve been in the cargo compartment) and gentlemen. Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for landing,” the pilot said.
This rattled the Cheerleader. “We’re all gonna die!”
More applause.
The pilot made it sound like we were on vacation. “We’ve reached the tropical paradise of South Vietnam. The temperature is 87 degrees and the humidity is a balmy 98 percent.”
Then he added, “Ground fire is light to moderate.”
I glanced at Ike. Stillness had fallen over all of us. We were in our dress uniforms, without weapons. Surely we’d be issued rifles before deplaning? I thought about all the things I hadn’t done in my life, wondering if I had missed them forever.
The tires screeched and the door opened. Steamy heat slapped us in the face. The stink was unbearable. Burning diesel, open sewers, rotting fish. Welcome to Vietnam, man.
A SERGEANT STOOD on the tarmac. “Fall in!”
Cheerleader did just that. Fell on his face.
The rest of us hustled into formation, four rows equally spaced. In uniform, we all looked the same, like sitting ducks. And still no guns. Who was running this war anyway?
We were marched to an area designated for troops in transit, where we traded our dress uniforms for jungle fatigues—baggy olive-drab long-sleeve shirts and pants with cargo pockets. We were allowed to roll our shirtsleeves to the elbow. It only took an hour to sweat through my shirt and the crotch of my pants.
I spent the first night in a long, barebones building called a hooch. The walls consisted of boards and sandbags about four feet high. From there, wire screen rose to a tin roof. Distant gunfire and explosions kept us awake. But no one spoke. What was there to say? We were all afraid of dying in a war we didn’t fully understand.
The next day I bought a few things at the PX: talcum powder for my sweaty crotch and patriotic stationery. The stationery was red, white and blue with a small map of Vietnam in the corner. I focused on Cam Rahn Bay. It was about halfway between the southern border of South Vietnam and the DMZ, or De-Militarized Zone.
But this DMZ was heavily militarized. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had been working on the Ho Chi Minh Trail for years to facilitate the transport of troops and supplies. The U.S. military put up a series of bases surrounded by barbed wire, electrified fencing and land mines. Some of the war’s bloodiest battles had occurred along the DMZ. Guess they should’ve renamed it the HMZ: Heavily-Militarized Zone.
Two days and still no guns. I hadn’t visited the latrine. I was scared shitless.
THIRTY GUYS PILED into the back of a deuce-and-a-half, an open cargo truck the length of a moving van. A canvas roof covered the cab. I sat next to Ike, consulting the map on my stationery. “Damn,” I said. “We’re heading north.”
“Without weapons,” he added.
“F.U.B.A.R.,” another guy said.
Translation: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
As we drove, cities shrank to smaller towns. Some civilians stared at us. Others pointed and laughed. “Beaucoup cherry boys!”
We stopped at Qui Nyon for chow and a bunk. The next morning, five of us headed to Anh Khe. We loaded into the back of a three-quarter-ton pickup truck with a rag top.
Ike looked nervous checking my map. “Farther north,” he said. “We’re running out of South Vietnam.”
The countryside became more spread out as we headed toward the mountains. Rice paddies butted against thick wooded areas. I kept thinking, Charles could be hiding anywhere. Waiting. Charles, Chuck, Charley, VC, Gook, Slope, Dink, Flathead, Rice Grinder, Zipper-Head-that’s what we called the enemy and worse. The only good gook is a dead gook. The Army drilled it into us.
The driver must’ve seen the looks on our faces. He passed back his rifle. One rifle for the five of us. Lousy odds.
IKE AND I were assigned to Line Haul, meaning we’d be driving fuel tankers. Our company was responsible for hauling fuel from Qui Nyon as far north as the DMZ. Most of it was pumped through pipelines.
When the lines were blown up—which was almost daily—trucks took over. Tankers and pipelines were some of Charlie’s favorite targets.
I WAS HAULING jet fuel: a 5,000-gallon tanker truck in an eight-truck convoy. Like everything else in the army, my truck was OD—short for olive drab. Capitalized to show its importance. “If it ain’t green, paint it.” Even our skivvies were OD.
Our trucks all looked the same. Folding chair type seats with thin cushions, upholstered in OD. Real boxy looking. Still, my rig was bitchin’. I’d wedged a cooler between my seats and filled it with Cokes and Pabst Blue Ribbon. A two-gallon jug of Kool-Aid was strapped to the passenger seat. I chose my truck because it had a bullet hole in the door. Good luck—or so I convinced myself.
I carried four frags (fragmentation grenades), two smoke and one incendiary grenade. A bandolier of ammo was slung over a “T” handle on my windshield. I’d traded for some of it. Stole the rest. My M-16 hung close to my right hand, easy to reach. Quick access meant everything. A split second could save your ass.
The road on the Mang Yang was steep and winding. A real bitch, both uphill and down. On both sides of the road: jungle, jungle, jungle. Dense clumps of elephant grass grew higher than my head. Sometimes the vegetation was so thick I couldn’t see thirty feet on either side of my truck. Then we’d pass bombed areas where the U.S. military had dropped Agent Orange and Napalm.
Napalm was bad ass: a rolling fire bomb of gasoline and colorless plastic. Heat inside the burn zone ranged from 1,800 to 3,600 degrees fahrenheit. No survivors in the zone. Outside the zone, jellied gasoline clung to human skin, melting flesh. Reports documented civilians being boiled to death in rivers heated by Napalm.
THE TREES IN the burn areas looked ghostly, tall charred sticks. Charles could always find a place to hide, even if it was behind a boulder with his helmet sprouting weedy camouflage. The VC loved to hit convoys, especially when we were fully loaded and pulling uphill. Our eyes never stopped searching for anything out of place—a blown-out patch of asphalt might mean landmines had been planted. The shoulders were dangerous because it was harder to know if they’d been disturbed. I never left the road.
My portable radio was tuned to AFN (Armed Forces Network). They played everything from Ricky Nelson to the Doors. “This is the end, my friend…” A line I couldn’t get out of my head.
I GLANCED AT Ike’s truck, three up, and those behind me as the miles rolled by. I ticked off the days until I could go home, wondering if I’d make it. Sometimes I just blanked everything out. Feeling nothing was better than being scared all the time.
I slowed down, driving with my knee, grabbed a beer and popped the top with my church key. By now I was nine months into a twelve-month tour. That made me a short-timer. The shorter I got, the higher I got, the quieter I got.
Jackson sped up. Dumb bastard was on the shoulder. He pulled up alongside me. “Throw me a beer!”
I tossed it through his open passenger window. “Good catch!” I yelled.
As he cut in front of me, I read what he’d painted on the back of his truck:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil. For I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.
I laughed and drained my beer. I was reaching for another when something caught my eye at eleven o’clock. A blinding flash of light and a deafening crack. Mortars. One after another. Shit. I figured the VC would be trying to cut us off.
Our gun truck stopped to return fire. Their fifty- and sixty-caliber machine guns lit up the hillside. The rest of the convoy kept hauling ass. Fear and adrenaline. Everything was happening fast, but seemed like slow motion.
I really needed a latrine now. I was shitting bricks. Another explosion! The last tanker got hit. Harold, the FNG, Fucking New Guy, from Phoenix. We didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. Pedal to the metal. It was all we could do—we were powerless to do anything else.
The enemy disappeared as quickly as they attacked. Charlie was like a ghost vanishing into the jungle. Hit and run. Another ten miles, and we were attacked again. No matter how prepared you think you are, it still catches you off guard.
The truck three ahead of me burst into flames. I knew who was in the truck, just like I knew who was in every other truck. Our guns returned fire. Then suddenly it was quiet again.
I slowed, letting the others pass me. They kept their eyes on the road. But all I could do was stare at the slow burn of Ike’s truck. I didn’t care what anyone said, I had to tell him good-bye. I grabbed my M-16 and walked to the smoking skeleton of metal. Smoldering tires burned my eyes. More smells. I was going to be sick.
I felt alone and guilty. I was alive and my best friend was dead. The protective metal soles of his boots were all that was left—welded to the floorboard.
Ike just evaporated. He’d caught his ride out of ’Nam on a five-thousand gallon Molotov cocktail.
IN THE LAST YEAR, I’d seen more than anyone should of death and destruction. I’d driven past hundreds of dead and dismembered bodies. Men, women, children. Mangled body parts, torsos without limbs. Human jigsaw puzzles, but none of the pieces matched.
And the smells—they haunted me. Something was always burning. Dead bodies and human waste. It was impossible to escape the stench. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get rid of it. I once washed out my nose with lemon juice. Nothing worked.
Even today, after more than forty years, a trigger goes off in my head if I see or smell blood. Those smells come back. They haunt me. Vietnam has forever programmed my brain.
The war had sucked the life out of me. It stole my soul at nineteen. I felt dead inside, just like the burning hillsides and rotting corpses. Teenage soldiers, their hair turning gray overnight from what they’d seen. Sitting for hours staring at nothing, with empty faces. They didn’t seem to care about anything. We called it the thousand-yard stare.
The flight back to the world was quiet. No Cheerleader. No Ike. Most of the guys slept. Some wept. The rest of us just sat and stared. I was one of them now.