Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  At seventeen I’m still by far the youngest member in the band, and I get ruthless treatment from the rest of them, especially when they see me with a girl. They say the most embarrassing shit, and there are many times I want to crawl into a hole, but I learn a lot about being a young road dog from them. The first time one of the club’s weekly visiting girl singers gives me a blow job, I fall in love. (Not again!) The whole band is only too happy to bust my balls by telling me she’s given them all head as well and not to get too cocky (so to speak) about it. I am crushed. Again, the violins were playing, I had the ring picked out, I’d made a down payment on the cottage by the sea and was just about to mail out the invitations. Well, not quite, but I tell myself I have to stop falling for every girl who smiles at me.

  I’m riding a Vespa motor scooter at this point and have already been in several wrecks, but I’ve managed to limp away from them all. Unlike the cars everyone else in the band is driving, my little Vespa doesn’t have much of a backseat for mating purposes. But I do manage to use it as a sort of “duck blind” so I can have sex behind it with girls I meet at the club, hiding my naked butt discreetly from the busy street as it pumps up and down at two o’clock in the morning after a gig.

  I’m just about ready to go find another, more rocking band when Pete walks in one night and says that we are dropping the cabaret thing. It’s time to learn some Doors, Hendrix, Cream, and Dylan covers, because we’ve just been booked to play Vietnam. The year is 1968—not at all a good time to be traveling that far east. But traveling is now in my blood, and Pete says they will pay us really well. Plus, we will fly through Singapore, a very desirable destination for the young musician, inexpensive-hooker-wise. Regrettably, he doesn’t mention the war, and I, being a very selective reader (I read books, not newspapers), don’t think to ask. So in October of 1968, still seventeen years old, I cluelessly head off to join our U.S. allies at the front.

  We land at the Saigon airport and step out into a bleak, sweltering, soot-soaked Vietnamese afternoon. It looks like a bloody John Wayne movie. I see soldiers with helmets, flak jackets, and M16s everywhere. Hueys, the main troop-carrying helicopter in Vietnam, pump thick, black, toxic exhaust into the sky. We are based out of desolate French villas (with a rat population that’s bigger and smarter than the human one) in the two main cities of Saigon and Da Nang. Wait … I gave up the Whiskey a Go Go and humping in the sanctuary of my Vespa’s shadow for this?

  I truly think we all believed, based on films we’d seen of the Korean War, that this would all be a very safe, Bob-Hope-USO-fully-protected-and-sanctioned-by-the-U-S-of-A-type tour. It most definitely is not. We’ve been hired, I find out much later, by a private American promoter who rounds up gullible bands like us from Australia, the closest Occidental country to Vietnam, and has them play for troops in the rougher, slightly more dangerous parts of the war zone, where the USO will not go. But I am playing music and I’m pretty happy about that!

  It takes us three days in Saigon, a broken city full of Vespas (whoo-hoo!), bicycles, straw “coolie” hats, sandbagged entrances to half-burned-out villas, and really, really skinny cats, before we all get stoned on the local shit. It is my first time ever doing any type of drug, and the first joint offered me for a dollar, by an eight-year-old kid on the street, is an opium-soaked Thai stick. I smoke it. Apart from my three-day bout on the SS Orsova and my quick laps in the Black Lagoon of Belgium, this is the most I have ever barfed in my life. Then we discover the hookers. How else, in a war-torn country like this, can these sweet girls make money? I think. And so I make it my business to be sure they earn a good wage. Or, at least, any money that I have, which isn’t much. The promise of big bucks has been vastly overstated by our fearless leader Pete and has evaporated into the exhaust-choked air like a chicken fart.

  Paul, the band’s bass player, is my main accomplice as we seek out whatever action there is to be had. Two weeks into our tour of duty, Paul and I haven’t eaten in four days. We’ve spent all our money on weed and girls. So we actually stalk one of the skinny Saigon kitties with a half-formed plan of cooking the poor little fur-bag. I will never look down my nose again at airline crash victims who dine on their fellow travelers in order to survive. We (and the cat) are rescued by a Filipino band that happens to be staying at our villa. They take pity on us and put some cold leftover rice outside their door so Paul and I can eat and the cat can go on to have many, many, many more kittens in this Godforsaken hellhole.

  Once my stomach is reasonably full, I turn my attention back to the beautiful local girls, many of whom are an exotic mix of Vietnamese and French. And then God stops smiling and ships us out.

  I thought things were bad in Saigon, but once we start getting dropped off (by Huey helicopter) at firebases in the plains and jungles of South Vietnam, we have a new respect and a healthy yearning for the relative peace of the big city. The firebases generally resemble a really lethal camping ground: some central wooden structures surrounded by a grouping of army-green tents, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, surrounded by coils of razor wire, surrounded by rows of Claymore antipersonnel mines. Once again, not your optimum gig.

  We sleep, unguarded most of the time, on narrow, inflexible army cots covered with the ever-present layer of red dust. The only thing worse than being awakened in the middle of the night by mortars and rockets lobbed over the fence by the Viet Cong hiding under cover of the thick tropical vegetation is having them land around us when we’re playing a gig. We usually perform on the back of a flatbed truck, elevated and highly visible to any enemy snipers or attacking forces.

  If the show is in one of the slapped-together wooden officers’ clubs, our only warning of an attack is the sight of fifty guys diving under their tables for cover. We’re then hustled out to a small sandbagged bunker to wait for the thump-thump of the explosions and the automatic gunfire to cease and hope there won’t be any actual hand-to-hand combat that might involve, possibly, us.

  We can never get clean. It is a constant battle with the wind, heat, dust, oily smoke, and grimy living quarters, so I stop bothering to shower … for about three weeks. I earn the name Pig Pen, and I deserve it.

  Sometimes we play in the afternoons, outside, atop a quickly erected wooden stage or on the back of a truck for a group of GIs sitting around in the dirt, dressed for combat, carrying fully loaded M16s, grenades, and other ordnance. After the show, they head off into the surrounding fields or jungle to begin their daily patrols. We then load our amps and drums into the officers’ quarters, which are sometimes blissfully air-conditioned, and do a set for the NCOs in the evening. We either sleep on chairs and couches in the officers’ mess or go join the grunts in the filthy, roasting tents.

  They’re all good guys, the GIs, and they take us in and make us feel welcome. Every one of them has a great stereo system (courtesy of the PX, the army supply store) and copious amounts of grade A hash and weed. We all get stoned and listen to Hendrix. Eventually they pull out the photos of the girl back home, the car, and the family. Every one of them seems desperately lonely and eager for a connection to the outside world … and it appears we are that connection.

  We get to know and like one group of navy guys (based near Marble Mountain, outside of the city of Da Nang) so well that we come back on a day off to do a free show for them. We agree to stay overnight and hang with them during whatever enemy action they might face. As soon as the sun dives for cover, my bandmates are positioned in foxholes, with an M16-armed guard, around the perimeter of the encampment. I choose the radio shack and the mortar site on top of the only small hill. Not outstanding decisions by any of us, certainly. Of course we are attacked that night. It starts at about 10:00 p.m. and it’s like a laser-light show as we watch the fluorescent-green tracer bullets arcing out into the dark, ominous countryside. I watch as a Huey helicopter in the distance is brought down by enemy fire. It explodes in the trees and burns all night. It’s so surreal that at any moment I expect to hear the director yell,
“Cut! Print!”

  Around midnight, movement is detected close to where I’m hyperventilating next to the radio operators. It is confirmed that there are no “friendlies” in the vicinity of the hillside, so they line up the mortar tube and I throw the mortars down the big-bore barrel. There’s a loud whump as each mortar takes flight, then a shower of lethal red-hot sparks and blistering metal as it lands and erupts in the brush. A radio call comes in requesting a change of trajectory, so I drop more mortars down the tube and watch them detonate, alarmingly close to us. We stay up all night. How could we sleep?

  The next morning we have breakfast with everyone whooping and hollering about the excitement of the previous night like it was some harmless football game where we kicked ass. One of the men we hung with the night before asks me if I want to scare the hell out of my fellow bandmates. After all the crap they’ve given me? Yes, I think so! He gives me what he calls a “dummy” hand grenade and says I can pull the pin and throw it at my friends. It won’t explode but it will scare the crap out of them. Okay! So I have great fun all morning pulling the grenade’s pin in front of an unsuspecting band member, dropping the grenade, and running. Whoever is on the receiving end of the joke laughs in relief and then pounds my arm into immobility with his fist. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a testicle.

  We climb into the back of the “deuce and a half” (the workhorse army truck that brings us and our gear through the jungle and along dirt roads to the bases when it isn’t far enough to chopper us in) and head back to the main city of Da Nang, waving good-bye to the company. My bandmates are sitting around me while I reset the grenade’s pin and pull it once again, as I have done ten times back at the camp. Instantly the top of the grenade becomes white-hot. I drop it onto the floor of the truck with a cry of pain. Pete, who has been watching me with growing anger and apprehension at my cavalier attitude toward a potential weapon of death, scoops up the grenade from the truck-bed floor and hurls it into the already life-threatening countryside.

  There is a loud concussion. Sparks and smoke erupt from where the thing lands, and we all dive for cover as shrapnel whips overhead. We lie there, bouncing along the dirt road, in stunned silence. That is, until Pete lets loose with a string of profanities that, had they not been directed at me, would have impressed me immensely. I think “useless dick-fuck” was definitely in there. I say not a word in my own defense, because I realize how close I’ve just come to killing us all. I figure of my nine lives, I now have eight left—seven if you count my failed suicide attempt. And I learn another lesson: Have respect for things that can kill you.

  The Filipino house manager, who helps us unload the amps from the truck when we get back to our villa in Da Nang, has already lost three fingers on his right hand and three from his left in a (gulp) grenade accident. I somehow manage to slam one of his digit-challenged hands in the truck loading-gate, and he ends up, eventually, losing two more fingers. I am shamed by my negligence and can only repeat “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over, as he wraps his bloody hand and takes himself off to the local doctor. I’m trying to process what just happened with the poor guy as well as the near-death experience in the truck when a bunch of the guys from Marble Mountain come running into our villa yelling, laughing, and screaming. They tell me that one of the mortars I’d fired the night before had found a target. It killed a Viet Cong soldier. Everyone is jumping around and slapping me on the back. I feel sick. Thinking of it now, I still do. All in all, not a real good day for anyone.

  I am not fearless. In fact, I’m constantly thinking, “I could actually get myself killed over here.” But even after the close call with the grenade, I take chances I shouldn’t. My bandmates and I climb inside M48 Patton tanks as they fire their cannons at the horizon. I join the crew of a Cobra gunship on a mission and scream with adrenaline as they fire their Mini-guns (100 rounds per second) and launch their rockets into the jungle below. I blast the bush with automatic weapons and grenade launchers every chance I get. Shoot 50-caliber machine guns that take my breath away and pummel my chest with shock wave after shock wave.

  Every Vietnamese person we see on every street of every town is supposedly the VC, the enemy, once the sun goes down. Still, one night in some small town, I end up with a local girl from the local bar. We walk to her little room through the dark streets, something I know better than to do. After we have sex a couple of times (well, I am eighteen) she pulls out a basin of water and carefully washes my entire body. I feel almost holy. I tell her I really had fun, thanks a lot, and now I’d better find my way back to camp, the band is probably worried.

  She switches personas in an instant and says to me ominously in broken English, “If you leave, I do number ten to you.” In the pidgin dialect employed between the soldiers and the locals, “number one” means “the very best” and “number ten” means “the very worst.” I have visions of her ripping an AK-47, the VC weapon of choice, out from under her bed and drilling my now-satiated testicles with hot lead. I accept her kind invitation to spend the night and curl up beside this crazy-ass woman in a strange bed in a strange town in a strange part of the world hundreds of miles from anywhere I know as home. I hightail it out of there the next morning as soon as the sun comes up.

  The bigger army bases we sometimes stay at also give me my first taste of American-style food. Thanksgiving is a holiday we don’t celebrate in Australia for obvious reasons (no Indians, no Pilgrims), so I’ve never seen a turkey before. Although only parts of the poor little guy are served up to me, he is impressive. I can’t get over the monstrous size of the drumstick. It’s like a chicken on steroids. I carry the Fred Flintstone–sized drumstick around to all the band members, and we’re all laughing hysterically like so many rubes. And the refrigerated chocolate-milk machine that dispenses ice-cold beverages at the pull of a lever? My dad had told me stories of his platoon meeting up with the U.S. Army in New Guinea during the Second World War, and about how amazed he was that the Americans had managed to get steaks and whiskey and even ice cream sent out to them in the suffocating heat of those isolated islands above Australia.

  We get shot at quite a bit, mostly by the enemy, but one night the driver of our truck, with us riding in the open back, drives through a checkpoint in Da Nang. He says later that he didn’t see it; also that it was only an ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) checkpoint and didn’t really count. Well, which was it? The ARVN guard who hails us to stop shouts once, and then we all watch as he aims his weapon at our retreating vehicle. We all dive to the floor in a pile and bang on the driver’s back window as M16 bullets whiz over our heads and spark off the sides of the truck. Our parents might understand us taking a bullet from the enemy, but not from our own side, for Chrissakes!

  We do get free dental work, though, so it isn’t all bullets and bombs. The band is in an army field dentist’s tent outside Phu Bai getting some fillings and extractions when we hear some muffled thumps and the dentist says, “That’s incoming, gentlemen.” Meaning, the base is being hit with VC mortars. We all bolt outside and into the closest sandbag bunker to wait out the attack. There are the usual explosions, screamed orders, and return fire from machine guns and tanks. After the all-clear siren sounds, we head back inside to resume our dental hygiene and find Paul, our bass player, high as a kite under sedation, still sitting in the dentist’s chair, completely unaware that we’d abandoned him and left him a stoned sitting duck. We don’t tell him when he wakes up, either. He’d only be upset.

  The months, the towns, and the “tour” grind onward. Cam Ranh Bay to the south, coastal Nha Trang, once a beautiful vacation spot, Pleiku, Vung Tau, Dong Hoi. Stoned, bored, and scared shitless a lot of the time, Paul and I start writing very trippy songs, inspired, I’m sure, by the copious amounts of cheap pot we are smoking. To supplement our meager incomes, the two of us take to selling cigarettes on the black market. Then we even sell the clothes off our backs and gifts we’d been given by the GIs.

  We fi
nd ourselves stationed in Quang Tri, two miles or so from the DMZ (demilitarized zone, the border between the warring factions of North and South Vietnam), during Tet, the Chinese New Year. The previous Tet had been the time of the big VC offensive in which the enemy had run en masse into every city and town in the south (even Saigon) and killed and died by the thousands. And we have the extraordinary luck of being two miles from North Vietnam for this Tet. I think we’re in enough danger until we get the call saying that the army wants us to fly over the border to play for a platoon on patrol in North Vietnam. They tell us that they will have Hueys all ready and running to take us out of there if any shit hits the fan, which I imagine it most certainly will once we get the guitar amps and PA cranked up nice and loud.

  Thank God we’ve all had enough adventure by this point, and Pete declines. As darkness falls and U.S. flares burst open in the Chinese New Year night sky, illuminating dangerous little figures trying to cross the no-man’s-land between our encampment and their bush, with mortars going out and coming in and tracer bullets crisscrossing through the inky firmament, I truly wish I was safe at home in my bed with Cleo the family dog cuddled up at my side. I have had enough. I think to myself, “I’m going to close my eyes, tap my heels together three times, and whisper ‘There’s no place like home,’ and when I open my eyes again, I WANT TO BE BACK IN KANSAS. Or anyplace but here.” After almost six months, plus a Christmas and a New Year misspent in Vietnam, we finally arrive back in the good old United States of Oz.