Jamie

The great question is: How can we win America's peace? 

—Richard Milhous Nixon, Address to the Nation on the War (November 3, 1969)

Strangers in a Strange Land

November 19, 1969. J. R. and I took a small step onto the world stage when we hopped off a Flying Tiger 707 at Cam Ranh Bay, 180 miles North East of Saigon, on a bright sunshiny day.

The communists weren't coming for us; we were coming for them. Neither poets nor conquerors, we were gonna make a statement, even a bad one. We weren't exactly gung ho, but we had been tasked to stop communism here and now, before it spread. At least the weather was nice.

They directed us to a two-story barracks, home until new orders came; you can't go anywhere in the army without orders. We shared a floor with fifty guys and picked out beds from the many empties scattered around. Our clothes and equipment were stashed in duffel bags because lockers were nonexistent. Replacements like us checked in and out every day.

Every morning after chow, the guys in the barracks lined up outside in roll call formation while a bitch box (bullhorn) called out 10-15 names. If you didn't hear your name, you were done for the day.

We lazed around, swam in the South China Sea at the beautiful white sandy beach. Old concrete pillboxes (emplacements) on the beach stared out at the ocean like the heads on Easter Island.

Cam Ranh's military history goes way back. The French used it as a naval base during colonial days. The Russian fleet operated it in 1905. The Japanese Navy used Cam in WWII. The U.S. destroyed most of the Japanese facilities in 1944 and didn't return until 1964 to redevelop the site as a humongous air, army and naval base – the main base in Viet Nam.

The Bay's two ten-thousand foot runways, deep-water port and large stores of ammo and petroleum were open invitations to the enemy. They accepted our offer to die often, without any effect on us.

Ah, let's go to the hop—Danny and the Juniors

At the afternoon rock concerts on the base, the Asian cats and half-naked foxes did a decent job covering American songs like Leaving on a Jet Plane or Green, Green Grass of Home, despite their accents. How they picked the very songs that made us homesick, I'll never know.

Nighttime, we pulled a couple of hours of guard duty in one of the fifty-foot high guard towers. We had guns in our hands again, but no ammo! They didn't trust us.

What use is guard duty without ammo?

Even the traditional Thanksgiving feast with turkey and all the trimmings was very, very good.

Was this a war zone or The Twilight Zone?

After two weeks, our names were called at the morning formation,

You are assigned to Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry of the 1st Cavalry Division currently situated at Fire Support Base Jamie. Get your gear and report back at 1400 hours. May God rest your souls.

May God rest our souls? WTF?

J. R. and I were picked up in a jeep, driven to a chopper and flown west to 1st Cavalry Division in Bien Hoa for a day of indoctrination. To practice abseil (bailing out of a chopper by rope in a combat assault), we climbed up a fifty-foot tower and rappelled down. My harness was attached to a rope with a D-ring. The harness squeezed my gut so tightly I thought I would die. Afterwards, I stashed the D-ring in my backpack. Never needed it again, thank God.

Huey (Doug Howe MP 146th Aviation Company RR)

Jamie

The next day we piled into the back of a Huey with a gunner manning a free gun (a modified M60 machine gun attached to overhead with bungee) at each door. When it landed, we were members of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, twenty miles north of Tay Ninh in the middle of the jungle, five miles from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

I eyed Jamie, my new home away from home. The hundred-yard oval was enclosed with concertina wire. No gate, no structures, nothing but a mess tent. Everything dusty and dirty from chopper blowby. Far off in the west, Black Virgin Mountain was barely visible.

This is where we split. I went to 2nd platoon and J. R. to 3rd. Until now, the war had been a curiosity, an unknown, a head trip. No longer. The lights were on now.

After introductions to Bob Jackson, Sam Kuehn and the rest of my squad, I ventured,

Can you use a hand like me on the ranch?

Still shittin stateside chow, Jody? 

No, I've been here two weeks.

Sgt. Dunnuck came over—"Killer," for tossing grenades and pumping 16 into NVA taking a bath in a bomb crater.

Gooks won't bother you none. Let's find some gooks and we'll kill 'em. 

 Everybody listened to Dunnuck,

Guess you could say it's a job to do, that's all. Don't mean nuthin. Maybe you get killed or kill him. Better off him than me, any day. You see a dead gook, it don't mean nuthin. Only time you really feel anything is when you see a G.I. messed up. Then it sorta hurts you. 

Favorite phrase?

It don't mean nuthin.

No beads and sandals for this one and—don't, don't, don't take baths in the bush. 

Me in a B-52 bomb crater

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for I am the baddest motherfucker in the valley.—Anonymous

I was the FNG (fucking new guy), an old geezer at twenty-two. The guys explained what to watch out for, how not to get shot or better yet, how not to get someone else shot. They did the talking and were so pleased about me sharing point that I imagined myself in the middle of a highway with a bulls-eye painted on my chest.

Our squad slept in the open or under curved corrugated steel sections covered with sandbags until we built a decent bunker out of ammo boxes and runway steel plates. A firing hole in front faced the wire. Stairs led down to three bunk beds we had made from ammo box wood. But it wasn't completely satisfactory. At night, I could hear pitter-patter and feel rats running over my body like miniature Chihuahuas. It took my breath away. Bob took the hint and slept outside.

We jerry-rigged a can with holes as a shower head. Our showers were warm, courtesy of ol' Sol.

A fire support base is home to artillerists and they counted on a company like ours to provide twenty-four/seven security. A battery of 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers and a mortar section sat in the center of the compound, surrounded by piles of sandbags and ammo boxes filled with dirt. I overheard that Agent Orange (a dangerous herbicide) had been used to clear the base and keep the jungle back.

We made gaps in the concertina wire during the day to let our patrols come and go. The formidable-looking wire was not so secure because the enemy's favorite method of breaching the wire and penetrating the base was to throw ladders or woven mates over the wire or throw themselves on the wire and let their buddies climb over them.

I didn't join the poker games because I didn't want to be broke. Some guys wrote home, others shot the shit, but we all cleaned our weapons assiduously, especially the M60 gunners. The M60 had gobs of parts and fired tons of bullets. During contact, we were more dependent on it than on our M16s. We could not chance it jamming.

The dark silhouette of the Black Virgin Mountain stood out clearly in the blood red sunset. For the evening's entertainment, we took the cheese out of our C rations, smeared it on blasting caps and stuck them in the concertina wire. We hooked up wires to the blasting caps with a clacker (detonator). When the base shot off flares to illuminate the area at night; you hit the clacker and blew away the rats eating the cheese—don't tell PETA.

A small support crew stayed at Jamie. CS Mike was a real joker, driving around in a junky minigun jeep before dark, firing random bursts from his M134 Gatling gun into the woods at 4000 rounds a minute with a great sense of style or dispensing CS (tear) gas into the distant tree line so it would blow through the woods. I always kept track of him because I couldn't handle the blowback. Whenever he got upwind, I scurried away.

We pulled first light and last light patrols at Jamie for the next five or six days. On one of my first patrols, somebody pointed out that the skeletons piled up at the wood line were the remains of human wave attacks against Jamie. They had been doused in diesel, burned, and bulldozed into this appalling mass grave.