Ironic, I thought later, considering the way things turned out, how it was in an aircraft that I received my baptism under fire. So it was only a few rounds and they weren’t exactly aimed at me. But even one bullet coming anywhere near you in the air was enough to get you court-martialed for destroying government property by putting skid marks in your skivvies. It wasn’t like you could jump in a hole or hide behind a rock. Up there, you were exposed.
The Dominican Republic wasn’t much of a war, as wars go. A few of our guys got hit, but the only people I knew to get killed were rebels. The division commander, General Palmer, issued a directive that the 82d would search and secure three square blocks a day from the rebels in the city. When GIs took twelve square blocks one day, he made them give back nine of them. I suppose orders were orders and fair was fair.
“I’d go anyplace with the Eighty-second,” he reportedly exhorted. “They’re born killers.”
My duties as rigger were almost nil. What there were kept me largely confined to the airport at first. Occasionally, I heard gunfire banging in the city as paratroopers flushed bad guys out of hiding, but nobody was shooting at me. It was a good war, as Bill Mauldin, the World War II cartoonist, said through his characters Willie and Joe, as long as nobody was shooting at you. I was bored. If this was war, then it was highly overrated as an activity.
Later, when most of the fighting moved to the southeast quadrant of the city, we riggers were appointed as guards to the labor buses. Each morning a bus drove the twenty miles from the airport to downtown Santo Domingo to pick up indigenous civilian laborers to do the menial work of the 82d’s buildup of supplies and forces. They dug holes, unloaded aircraft, moved boxes, cooked. . . .They were returned downtown by the same bus at the end of the workday.
Three guards were assigned to the bus for each trip. One soldier rode on the roof while the other two took front and back inside. The bus was a rickety “chicken bus” painted in fading psychedelic colors with a plastic Jesus on the dash, a crucifix hanging from the rearview mirror and a portable radio blaring Spanish music. The buses were never shot at when they were loaded, but they became prime targets on the trip into town in the morning and the trip back to the base in the evening. The driver, a local, floored the gas pedal and the vehicle careened and screamed and knocked and complained at full speed along the macadam road through the countryside between the airport and the city.
None of us rigger guards were combat vets. We didn’t know to look for muzzle flashes. When the bus took a sniper hit, that was how we knew the direction of the shooter. We opened up on bushes and trees with full automatic, returning two hundred rounds for every eight or ten we received. The driver scrunched down behind the wheel and just kept going hell-for-breakfast while we guards rocked ‘n’ rolled with our M16s. It was good sport since none of us was ever hit and we never knew if we hit them or not.
One afternoon we had just dropped off the laborers downtown when a .50-caliber machine gun opened up from a nearby intersection on a sandbagged GI emplacement. A sniper with the .50 was hiding in a top floor of the building diagonally across the intersection and pinging at our guys. The other two guards and I maneuvered into a safe position to watch the action. We saw our GIs returning fire, but couldn’t see the sniper’s position because of the angle of the street.
A troop driving a quarter-ton jeep with a mounted 106mm recoilless rifle came roaring up the street in response to a radio request. He talked to the sergeant at the emplacement, who pointed and gestured and informed him of the situation. Then he cranked down the barrel of his gun to about the right level, turned the jeep backward and snaked around the corner into the intersection behind the sandbags, gun already pointed.
He shot off a spotter round, followed immediately by the Bang! Whoosh! and Crump! of a high-explosive shell that wiped out the entire corner of the building in which the sniper was concealed.
All of us cheered mightily.
Santo Domingo was my introduction to war, a rather sanitized version of it. None of my buddies was wiped out or mangled. I saw no blood and guts and eyeballs. Mostly, for me, it was just hanging out for about six months. I received my overseas ribbon and returned to Fort Bragg and garrison duty where a couple of older hands showed me the ropes on how to get out of KP and guard mount. There was always a way out if you looked for it.
I bought a special helmet liner and new poncho, pistol belt, and ammo pouches. I put aside one uniform on which I measured every single patch according to regulations. I kept it starched so stiff it would stand on its own. My jump boots were so spit-shined you could see to shave in their reflection. I was one short little strac trooper.
I made battalion Soldier of the Month, which carried an automatic promotion from private E-3 to specialist fourth class, or Spec 4. Two months later, I made battalion Soldier of the Year. That gave me E-5 buck sergeant rank. I went from E-3 to E-5 in two months. No more KP, no more guard mount. A different world opened up once I became an NCO. It wasn’t bad bucks for a single guy, and being a rigger on an eight-to-five work schedule wasn’t bad duty. I thought about reenlisting for my E-6 stripe and a big re-up bonus.
By this time, of course, Vietnam was becoming a consideration. I even knew where to find it on the map. Guys were filtering back from tours there and telling their “no shit, there I was” stories. LBJ had sent in 3,500 Marines in March 1965, followed by the 173d Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne, and the 1st Air Cavalry. The “big build-up” of U.S. forces in Vietnam was on. On December 31, 1965, there were 184,300 U.S. servicemen in-country; that figure rose to 385,300 twelve months later. It was a real war this time, no Santo Domingo with a few rounds popped into the belly of a C-130 or the sides of an old laborers’ bus.
I figured the odds. I had watched all these young second lieutenants running around giving orders. Most of them, in my opinion, were dumber than dirt. I was as smart as they were, probably smarter. I could do what they did. I could be an officer and a gentleman by act of Congress.
The way I figured it, Officer Candidate School and branch training would eat up almost a year. The war should be over by the time I finished training and received my commission. There I’d be—a first lieutenant, an officer and a gentleman drawing the big bucks, hanging out at some posh stateside post chasing skirts and sipping suds at the O Club. Talk about having it made.
I reenlisted for six years, received my bonus, bought a new car, went home on leave to Maryland and applied for OCS when I got back to Bragg. There were only a couple of things I hadn’t figured on. One was a blonde. The other was how long this war was really going to last in Vietnam.