A white friend of mine saw them, and he took off at a high speed, and he did get that tag number. And some of the state troopers came out here and helped me put some of the fire out.
The Marine Corps never did nothin’ to them at all. Three of them got transferred or discharged, although they were supposed to be held pending an investigation. Being a sergeant major in the goddamn Marine Corps for 17 years, I know damn well that when a person is awaiting disciplinary action, he can’t be transferred, discharged, or do a damn thing. I got pissed off. I’ve fought for 30 years for the Marine Corps. And I feel like I own part of this ground that I walk on every day, especially this that I own. So I went to the Naval investigator, and he said a report was turned over to the commanding officer. He said he talked to these guys who were trying to destroy my family and myself. He said they told him they didn’t understand how a nigger could be living this way, sitting out there eating on a nice lawn, under that American flag I fly everyday.
I went to the deputy sheriff, an old buddy of mine, and he got hold of the boy who was still on the base. He told the boy I didn’t want him to serve no jail, I just wanted him to pay the damage he did. The boy’s daddy telephoned me from Tennessee about he didn’t have no money. I ain’t never heard a white man beg to any black man like that in all the days of my life. A Southern white man. Well, he paid it.
You know, when they threw those grenades at my family, my friends, and my home, I thought back to the time the Ku Kluxers came and took Mr. Sam Brewster away. I was nine or ten at the time.
We heard all these cars blowin’ horns. My grandfather said, “The Ku Klux is comin’.”
My grandfather had a pistol. If the Ku Klux had known he had a pistol, they would have pitched camp at our house till they found it. Grandma and Granddad kept it in the top drawer of the chifforobe. He went and got that .44, turned out the lights, and looked out the door to see what would happen. The rest of us jumped under the bed and waited to see whose house they gon’ bust into and who they gon’ take away and beat up.
Mr. Sam Brewster lived four doors away. There was a lot of hollering and screaming going on. We heard a shot. And he was dragged out. They took him up to Lookout Mountain. Tied him to a tree. Took a whip, and beat that man like you never seen the like before. They thought he was dead. But he got loose and came back and laid down on the front porch of my grandfather’s house.
I don’t know for sure why they did it. But I think it had something to do with the store owner across the street—this white man—and Mr. Sam Brewster’s wife. She was a real high yellow type. In fact, her family looked white. You couldn’t tell the difference to save your life. The store owner wanted Mr. Sam Brewster’s wife, and in those times you weren’t suppose to do nothin’ about it. But Mr. Sam Brewster was a big strong type, and he wouldn’t have it.
The next day the store owner’s arm was bandaged. That’s how we knew he was Ku Kluxer. And that evening, they burned his store down—the Negro people did.
Whenever the Ku Kluxers would come, I would be terrified. It was the damnedest thing. And I thought about that many times when I was overseas, and I had those beautiful machine guns. I would just wish to hell I had somethin’ like that back in Alabama when those sonofabitches came through there. I would have laid them out like I did those damn Congs. The same way.
I just don’t see how black people survived down there in those days. I just don’t see it.
Staff Sergeant
Don F. Browne
Washington, D.C.
Security Policeman
31st Security Police Squadron
Tuy Hoa
November 1967–January 1968
Air Force Special Elements Activity
U.S. Air Force
Saigon
January 1968–November 1968
We thought we were really shit-hot.
There were eleven of us. All Air Force security police. It was a unique organization. It was called the Air Force Special Elements Activity. Our primary duty there in Saigon was to escort VIPs who worked in the American Embassy after curfew hours. But there were several other jobs.
The Army took care of the exterior of the American Embassy compound. The Marines took care of the lobby of the main building, the Chancery. We took care of everything else. So when the American Embassy was hit during the Tet Offensive and six Viet Cong got inside the Chancery, we had to go in and clean ’em out.
It was a suicide mission at the Embassy anyway. I don’t see any other reason for it. What was the purpose of them blowing a hole through the wall in the building and going inside? They had to realize that once they went in, they’d never come out, I would think. But then, Asian philosophy is strange.
I was career Air Force when I got to South Vietnam in 1967. And I was rather pro-military. Vietnam, as I was told and as I read at the time, was about us trying to prevent the Domino Theory, you know, the Communists taking South Vietnam and then the Philippines and marching across the Pacific to Hawaii and then on to the shores of California.
My folks are both ministers in Washington, D.C., and they had always wanted me to go into the ministry. I started singing in the church where my mother was the pastor when I was very young. And I still sing. I’ve won the Air Force worldwide competition for top male vocalist four times. But I never felt the call to be a preacher.
I went to Howard University on a football scholarship, and I was starting fullback right away. We were rolling along there with a three-game winning streak, and we ran up against Morgan State. And they taught us how to play football.
I didn’t do anything academically that first year and flunked out. After knocking around at a job as a laborer for a period of time, I decided that maybe the service could do something for me. It was July 1959. I’d always wanted to be in the Air Force. I was just fascinated with planes. I’m in seventh heaven when I’m flying even as a passenger. I wanted to be a pilot. But I could not pass the physical because of my eyes, and, truthfully, I couldn’t pass the written exam. I became a security policeman.
My first job in Vietnam was bunker security guard out on the perimeter of the air base at Tuy Hoa. We were there for three months protecting the F-100s. Through some disagreement with the host commander, the Korean troops decided that they would no longer provide security on the outer perimeter, so that burden fell on the security police, too. And we had to formalize search and destroy teams, and go out looking for Viet Cong encampments. Because at night they would attempt to penetrate the base.
I remember the first night we went out. I guess maybe 15 of us. We were at least 1 1/2 miles from base. And without any warning, you just begin to hear whistles go by you. Then you hear the shots. So the sarge told us we were being attacked.
I learned how to love mother earth. Not knowing from which direction the projectiles were coming, you just hug the ground and lay tight. And you shoot at sounds. If something moved in front of you—something caused by the wind, maybe some rodent running through—you fired at it.
I’m sure the incoming didn’t last longer than five or six minutes. But it seemed like an eternity. Then we pressed on.
When we arrived at an encampment, it was totally empty. These VC were pretty smart. They weren’t going to sit there and wait for us.
A couple of weeks later, we more or less surrounded a camp. There was a very brief fire fight. We went from hut to hut. All we found was these two guys sitting in the corner, all huddled up, in this hut. They were not armed. I’m almost ashamed to say these were very old warriors. In excess of forty years old, although to tell the age of a Vietnamese is difficult. I guess they simply couldn’t escape fast enough. We just turned them over to the ARVN for interrogation.
When we reported to the special contingency at the Embassy, we wore fatigues with no insignia, no ranking. They didn’t want your rank to be known. Our names were on an access roster with just your name and social security card number.
We worked out of the Embassy basement, a
nd the civilian who was in charge of us had an ammo cache in the back of his home in downtown Saigon that would sink half the city.
Besides escorting the VIPs to their different homes around the city, we had several side jobs. Like running escorts, training guards for the homes of the VIPs, doing background investigations on Vietnamese employees.
Every week money was brought into the country at Tan Son Nhut airport which had to be delivered to the Embassy. It was one of those things you didn’t ask questions about. But it was supposed to be millions of dollars for the Embassy payroll. I imagine they did other things with the money, too. We had an armored car in front and one in back. And here’s this Volkswagen bus in the middle with the money. We’re flashing lights and telling everybody to get out of the way and all that, escorting it downtown to the bank to be counted and then from the bank to the Embassy.
I had one special job. To train Chinese Vietnamese or Chinese Nungs to guard these homes of the VIPs. Most of the people that we recruited came up from the Cholon district, which was south of Saigon. The Nungs were supposed to be known for their fighting capability, their aggressiveness, their tenacity and whatever. And in the evening hours, we would make regular post checks on these folks when they became guards.
One day one individual walked into our training camp that we had in Gia Dinh. He was much taller than the average Vietnamese. This guy is almost 6 feet. But he’s a super guy. Dressed well. We gave him the baggy fatigue uniforms, and he immediately went out and had them tailored. We were teaching hand-to-hand defense and combat techniques and weapons firing. The whole spectrum. And this guy was number one in everything. He was kicking our behinds in the hand-to-hand combat.
About the time that this guy graduated, the guard quit who was guarding the house occupied by this real big wheel who handled money for USAID. He had a chauffeured driven car, and the chauffeur had a shotgun. So what better troop to put on that house than this new 6-foot Vietnamese? So we put him on there.
The policy was then that when you hire these folks, you get a Vietnamese detective to run a background check. We had a Vietnamese detective firm on contract to the Embassy. Most of the people we caught were really just draft dodgers, trying to stay out of the South Vietnamese Army.
About two weeks after the tall Vietnamese went to work, I get a call from the detective agency. Their office is downstairs from mine in downtown Saigon. The detective says, “We have a problem. Could you come down and see me?” I went right downstairs.
He says, “Would you believe that this man is a graduate of the North Vietnamese NCO academy?”
Of course I was flabbergasted.
I called the Embassy and passed the information on right away. They said, “We need to latch on to this guy?” Then I went to the Embassy to brief them directly. And they said, “Good Lord, let’s get over there and get this guy.”
From the time I left my office, went to the Embassy, and got to the USAID guy’s home, the tall Vietnamese is gone. In the meantime the detective had taken it upon himself to call this individual and question him over the phone.
When we got the full record on this guy, we found out he was the top graduate of the North Vietnamese NCO academy. Trained in Hanoi. A North Vietnamese. Really one of their really shit-hot guys.
As I reflect back on that now, I think of how stupid we were.
The guys in the contingent were really pampered. Because of not wanting a lot of visibility, we were given extra money to do this and that. It was something like $500, $600 a month. So I just banked my military check.
And food and lodging was taken care of. We lived together in a villa about 2 miles from the Embassy. We were eating steaks all the time. And the little mama san who cooked for us had her little vegetable garden there. This other brother in the contingent who is from North Carolina wrote home and had some seeds sent back. For mustard greens, turnip greens. And he showed her how to fix greens Southern-style. So living there was a welcome change from a base. We enjoyed it.
We had access to any kind of weapon we wanted to carry. There was no kind of rule that you had to carry any particular kind. I usually carried the Swedish K that you can fold up and put in a briefcase and a 9-millimeter Colt.
Well, we had this white guy we called Brute. He was big, weighed at least 230 pounds, over 6 feet 4. He was the typical example of all brawn and no brains. We had an armored vehicle made with so much armor on it that it would only go about 20 miles an hour. That was our contingent vehicle. We titled it the Beast, but in parentheses we painted the word “Brute.”
Well, Brute carried a little bit of everything. He would have a M-1 carbine, a M-16. He’d have a .38 on one hip, a 9-millimeter on another. A pistol in a shoulder holster under each armpit. And he had a strap of grenades across his chest.
I said, “Brute, stop and think for a minute. You’re carrying all these different kinds of weapons. How’re you going to carry all the ammunition for them, too?”
One evening I had the VIP patrol with Brute. We were going to escort some secretaries home from the Embassy after the curfew. I got on the elevator in the Embassy with Brute, and the elevator would not move. That’s how heavy he was. And this Marine guard said to Brute, “My God. If one round hits you, it would blow up half a block.”
Down in the Cholon district, you had the American commissary. And outside the perimeter of the commissary there must have been hundreds of kids peddling whatever. You have to push them away to get in.
Brute kept saying how smart he is and how he’s going down to Cholon to put one over on these little kids. What he had in mind, nobody knew. We kept telling Brute, “Leave those kids alone.”
One day one little kid ran up to Brute and showed him what Brute thought was a couple of hundred dollars in Vietnamese money. He rammed it in Brute’s pocket.
He says, “You number one GI. Don’t look how much money I have. Police may arrest me. I tell you what. You can have all this money for twenty-dollar MPC.”
All Brute saw was dollar signs.
So he reaches in his pocket and gives the kid the MPC note, and the kid turns his hand loose out of Brute’s pocket and runs. Brute takes out the money to count. I think he had an equivalency of a dollar. Vietnamese money was highly worthless. There was one note worth less than a penny. No matter the quantity, you could get very little valuewise.
Now Brute wants to kill every Vietnamese kid.
When I first came to Saigon in January of ’68, we kept receiving intel briefings that something was imminent. There was some indication that a big Communist push was coming. They had said there would probably be a lot of terrorist activity. They expected a lot of VC to infiltrate the city. Those who were already planted in the city would begin to do their thing insofar as setting off of massive rocket barrages. The purpose of that, as we were told, was to discredit the presence of the United States military. They wanted to show that even after all these years our presence really has not assured a safe environment, not even in the cities. The cities were the ultimate target for what we ended up calling the Tet Offensive.
In the afternoon on January 30, the Embassy guy came by and told us tomorrow’s the day. We had heard this before, so I really didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. But we were placed on immediate standby, which meant that we couldn’t leave the villa.
It was funny. You always have power fluctuations. This particular day, the power went out. And just like any American, when the power goes out, you bitch and complain about the air conditioning. So you open up the windows, and you suffer. And there’s no TV.
About four o’clock in the morning, the squawk came over the radio. There were some fire fights in various parts of the city. We were told to go to our various positions. I went up to the roof. We sat around looking out into the city, and you could see the rockets come in, the afterbursts and all.
Then around six-fifteen the emergency net went off. which entailed a recall of all security officers and related personnel to report to the
Embassy. They said bring the Beast. When they added that, we knew something was wrong.
So we go rumbling down there with this three-quarter-ton truck with half-inch armor plate, tires looking like donuts, and two M-60s, one facing the front and one facing the back.
And the guys who stayed out at the training site in Gia Dinh, they came in from that area.
When I get there, I see this gaping hole in the big 8-foot-high wall that surrounds the Embassy compound. The hole is on the side that runs along the main thoroughfare in front of the Embassy. A Viet Cong sapper team of about 15 had attacked the Embassy around two-forty-five.
I thought to myself, They have really done it. Now they’ve gone too far.
By the time we got there, the Marine guys had already secured the lobby area of the Chancery. The Army had landed a helicopter right on the roof. And the Army had strung a ring of men up around the Chancery. I learned later four Army MPs and a Marine had been killed in the fighting.
Then I heard the Army guys saying, “I believe they got inside. I believe they got inside.”
Then I saw this big powwow taking place of the powers that be. They said there must be some Viet Cong in the building, but we didn’t know how many.
Then our boss came over and said, “Well, Brownie, the decision is that you and your guys have to go in and flush them out.” There was no direct order to take them alive if you can, just get them out of there.
Knowing these sappers are suicidal, I just couldn’t understand why the Army guys couldn’t have done this. They are the experts. We’re the Air Force. We’re lovers.
It was about seven by then.
The plan was to start from the top floor and work down. So here comes Brute with all his equipment to get on the elevator with me and this other brother to go to the top three floors. Another team of our contingent would work the next three floors at the same time.
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