by Dennis Foley
He looked at his duffel bag and decided not to bother unpacking anything but his shaving kit, which was crushed under the four-way folding top flap. He guessed that he would be able to take a shower, shave, and brush his teeth with only the contents of his shaving kit and that he would find and put on his jungle fatigues in the morning before he left. In the meantime he felt like he could use a drink.
The tiny Officers Club was a combination snack bar and Officers Club for the Admin Company officers and all the transient officers who came through the processing unit.
As Hollister entered he was quick to pull his cap off his head before crossing the threshold. The enter-covered-buy-a-round custom was widespread in every Officers Club he had ever been in.
And the last thing he wanted to do was buy drinks for a roomful of strangers.
No one looked up as Hollister crossed the concrete slab floor to the makeshift bar that had been thrown together with three-quarter-inch plywood and then covered with split bamboo to give it a Polynesian look. The workmanship was shabby, and the nails used to make the bar were too big for the bamboo. They had splintered the yellowed strips in several places.
“Okay—Cap-i-tan,” the little Vietnamese bartender said from the other side of the bar. She wiped rice husks from her forearm after pulling a beer out of a cooler.
“Hi,” Hollister said. He looked over her head at the back bar for an idea of the inventory. He was not thrilled to see the old standbys:
Canadian Club—three-quarters full.
Old Forester—full.
Haig & Haig—half full.
Gilbey’s—almost empty.
Seagram’s 7—empty.
Wild Turkey—half full.
There was also a complete array of Suntory, Japanese offerings generally considered undrinkable by most troops.
“Let me have a Jack Daniel’s—up.”
“No hab.”
“What?” Hollister said, kidding. “That’s un-American.”
“This is Ve-nam, Dai Uy,” she countered.
“Oh, guess you’re right at that. What kind of Scotch you got then?”
She reached under the bar, pulled out a new bottle of Black & White, and twisted the screw cap till it popped loose and cracked the paper seal. Before Hollister had a chance to object, she was pouring a few fingers of Scotch into a chipped tumbler.
“That shit any good?”
The voice came from an overweight Transportation Corps captain who had stepped up to the bar next to Hollister.
“Don’t know yet. Haven’t tried it.”
“Gotta watch ’em. They’ll fill American booze bottles with that sorry-assed Japanese stuff.”
With a mock salute, Hollister knocked back the Scotch and made a face. “Seems to be genuine. Watch me for a while. If I drop dead on the floor, don’t drink it.”
The captain looked at the barmaid and pointed a stubby finger at the countertop and then toward Hollister. “Honey, come over here and gimme another one, and pour another tall one for my newfound friend here.”
“Thanks. You just coming or on your way home?”
“On my way home—one more wake-up. I’m so short, I’m next! How ’bout you?”
“Just got here today,” Hollister said.
“Um-hmmm,” the portly officer said as he shook his head. “You’ve been here before. I gotta tell you. Whenever you pulled your last tour, it was the last good deal. This place ain’t the same. It’s about as rucked up as Hogan’s goat.”
“How do you mean?”
“I been in this man’s army, man an’ boy, nearly twenty-two years. And this is the biggest collection of the halt, lame, and stupid I ever seen. We don’t know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, or how we’re gonna get our heads out of our asses to finish up here. Just watch your back, man. Used to be you couldn’t count on the Viets—now you can’t count on anybody but yerself. The whole war’s gotten so big that it is out of control—com-fucking-pletely. It’s bad news—just bad news.”
The words were not reassuring. The last thing Hollister wanted to hear on his first day back in-country was that things were worse. But he had. He waved to the barmaid for another round and quietly killed the few drops in his glass before she picked it up.
Back in the BOQ it seemed to take forever to drift off to sleep. Hollister’s hours of napping on the flight over and the time-zone changes, coupled with the heat of the Vietnam night, kept him from feeling comfortable. After several attempts to sleep, several cigarettes, and a trip outside to the screened-in latrine that serviced two adjacent BOQs he finally fell off into a deep black hole with no dreams or any sensation of the outside world.
He slept soundly for a few hours, oblivious to the jets and prop cargo planes taking off and landing only a quarter mile from his bunk. Somehow his mind knew that it was time for him to start grabbing as much sleep as he could find while it was available to him. He certainly knew that his schedule as a rifle company commander would be barely punctuated by naps and stolen moments of superficial sleep. So he slept and ignored all that was going on around his temporary billet.
Around two in the morning Hollister awoke. His bladder was full again, and his stomach was complaining from the greasy meal he had eaten at the mess hall and the too many drinks at the tiny Officers Club.
He decided against getting dressed, but searched for his shower shoes. He stumbled on the plywood floor as he tried to put them on while he was walking to the doorway. With his index finger he was able to extract the last cigarette from his pack, and he lit it with the matches he had slipped between the pack and the cellophane.
Hollister stopped outside on the steps of the BOQ to get his bearings and take in the night. The planes were still taking off and landing, and the constant whir of distant chopper blades had not stopped since he had arrived.
He looked off in the distance, toward the dark spine of the country—the Highlands. The mountainous terrain was black against the ink-blue sky. Still, the outline was set off by a pair of parachute flares that hung above and behind the first row of mountains west of Cam Ranh.
A tiny shiver went up Hollister’s back as he watched the distant flares sliced earthward under their parachutes. Below them a few tracers sliced up into the sky and burned themselves out. He had spent many nights in those same mountains on his first tour, and not one of them had been either forgettable or uneventful. But that night, somewhere out in the dark, there was a company commander who was holding on for all he was worth, trying to turn the night into day by keeping a steady stream of artillery-fired and air-dropped parachute flares over his company’s position.
Hollister wondered how long it would be before he was again managing a night contact in the same mountain range. It had been seventeen months since he had last humped the rain forest at night with all his senses screaming for input. He wondered if he would be up to it. His mind asked a question he wouldn’t have said out loud: Who would die?
The thought chilled him, but he finally remembered that he was out there to take a piss. He finished his cigarette and walked toward the small latrine.
The inside smelled like all army latrines in spite of the fact that there had been a considerable amount of effort expended during the day by a crew of Vietnamese laborers whose job it was to keep it spotless. He knew they could make it gleam, but they could never remove the smell of urine and burned human waste. It had become the Vietnamese national aroma.
While Hollister stood at the long metal urinal trough, a red-faced, fortyish, pear-shaped major entered the far end of the latrine, selected one of the six side-by-side unoccupied holes on the shitter, and parked his large behind over one.
It quickly became obvious to Hollister that the major was suffering from a fairly serious bout of diarrhea. But then, Hollister thought, any bout of diarrhea was a serious one.
The night sky had picked up a light broken cloud cover when Hollister reached the steps to the BOQ. He looked over his shoulder to see what effect
the scattered clouds had on the illumination being fired for the unit in contact, way off on the western horizon.
He was sorry he looked. The flares were igniting just above the clouds, and all the light was being reflected back upward, instead of down to help the unit in contact. Seeing in the rain forest was not impossible in the dark—unless there was a flare above you creating a glare overhead that didn’t paint the ground with light. Then the dark was darker and the visibility was nil.
Time was starting to race by for Hollister.
As Hollister reached the end of the barracks where his bunk was, he was met with the business end of a flashlight. “You Captain Hollister?” a voice asked from behind the flashlight.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Ah, sir—I’m the CQ runner.”
“You have a name, CQ runner?”
“Oh, ah, yessir. Lester, sir. Lester Simms,” the unsteady voice said.
“Well, Lester, how about getting that light out of my face and telling me why we are having this conversation,” Hollister said, a trace of irritation in his tone.
“The duty NCO sent me to get you. They want you at the orderly room in twenty minutes with your gear, ready to go.”
“What? I’m not due to fly out of here until tomorrow morning. You sure you got the right Hollister?”
“Sir, I’m just a runner. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’—’cept the sergeant told me to come get you. I’m thinkin’ that I’m lucky that you are the onlyest officer on this floor or I mighta had to wake up the wrong guy—I mean the wrong captain, Captain.”
“Okay, Lester. You did your job. Tell the duty NCO that you’ve found one grumpy captain and that when I get over there with all my gear he had better be sure that it is me he wants or I’ll really be pissed.”
“Yessir. G’night, sir. I mean, I’m sorry to disturb you.”
Hundreds of tiny white flying bugs circled the small desk lamp on the duty NCO’s desk. The NCO looked up. “Oh, sorry, Captain. We got a change in plans for you, and you have to be out on the active in ten minutes for transportation.”
“Change?” Hollister asked. “What kind of change?”
“Don’t know. I just got a call to have you out on runway four-five with all your gear. There’ll be a chief minor out there to pick you up.”
The change was a little confusing for Hollister, but he could tell that no amount of questioning would help him figure out what the army had in store for him.
“There’s a quarter ton outside waitin’ for you, sir,” the duty NCO added. “Simms, take the captain’s gear out to the jeep.”
The jeep driver knew even less than the duty NCO. He just had instructions to take Hollister to a certain point on the airfield apron.
As they turned down the flight line, Hollister could see an endless row of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft tied down for the night. About a quarter mile down the row, the jeep lights illuminated a turboprop with a jumpsuited warrant officer standing by one wing tip.
“Mornin’, sir. Might you be one Captain Hollister?”
Captains didn’t rate fixed-wing turboprops. Hollister’s guess was that some VIP was heading out to the division rear and they wanted to fill up the plane—and that was why he was summoned in the middle of the night.
“Right, Chief,” Hollister said as he returned the warrant officer’s salute, stepped out of the jeep, and reached for his bags. “So, who else we waiting for, Chief?”
“You’re it,” the pilot said.
“Me? You might just have the wrong guy.” Surprised, Hollister looked around and saw only the copilot and a ground crewman preflighting the airplane. “How the hell do I rate?”
“I never ask any questions. I leave all that up to the commissioned officers and the Secretary of the Army, sir. I’m just a plain ol’ airplane driver looking to get as many landings as I make takeoffs. I figure if I worry about that part of the war, then the real warriors will take care of the rest,” the pilot said as he made a mock bow and generously waved Hollister toward the open cockpit door of the sparkling, white-over-olive-drab airplane.
Once they reached flight altitude, the pilot trimmed out the aircraft and reduced the engine thrust. The resulting drop in cabin noise allowed them to talk without screaming.
“What’s the flight time to division?”
“Division?” the copilot asked. “What division is that, sir?”
“The Americal. That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?”
“No, sir,” the pilot said as he banked the plane over to a new heading.
Leaning forward, Hollister glanced at the compass. It was one-eight-o. They were heading south, not north, or even west, which was the general direction of the Americal base camp. “Where the hell we going, anyway?”
The pilot looked over his shoulder at Hollister. “You don’t know?”
“Hell, no. The last time I looked at my PCS orders, I was on my way to the Americal Division.”
“Well, sir—you’re on your way to Long Binh now. The new home of Disneyland East.”
“What for?” Hollister asked.
“I have no earthly idea. Ya see, sir, we were mindin’ our own business with not a single flight on the board when we were jerked out of The Singing Nun and told to take you to Two Field Headquarters.”
“Nothing else?”
“No, sir. Nothing else. We’re aviators. All we need is a heading, a departure time, and enough avgas, and we’ll find a straight piece of real estate to roll this baby to a stop.”
Smiling at the pilot, Hollister shook his head and sat back in his seat to try to figure out what it might mean. He had a sudden sinking feeling that he might have been pulled off an assignment to a U.S. unit and diverted to an advisory job. Shit, he thought, after volunteering to come back early and all the hell he had to go through with Susan, to end up as an advisor would really piss him off.
He surmised that it must be his date of rank. He had only pinned on his captain’s bars a month earlier, and there had to be a line of more senior captains waiting to command rifle companies in-country.
Deciding that he wasn’t going to sort it out during the flight, Hollister settled back and watched Vietnam fly by out the right side of the aircraft. The U-21 had nothing if not terrific visibility.
Outside was a part of Vietnam he had never seen. On his first tour he had spent all of his time in the northern half of South Vietnam. He had never been south of Cam Ranh Bay before.
As he watched the countryside roll by, he could see occasional tracers of green and red scratching across the blackened horizon in lazy arcs. And everywhere over the mountains and along the coastal lowlands, the navigation lights of American and South Vietnamese aircraft dotted the skies.
It was starting to sink in that this was not the Vietnam he had left less than two years before. It had grown from under a hundred thousand Americans to more than four times that—populated by a field army with all of the manpower, equipment, and aircraft it needed to win a war.
He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew for sure that this tour would bear little resemblance to his first one.
Chapter 6
IT WAS JUST BEGINNING to glow on the horizon when the pilot put the comfortable turboprop down on the cement runway at Bien Hoa Air Force Base. His mastery of the aircraft was evident in the ease with which he allowed it to sink softly toward the blackened tire marks only to cut the power and kiss the runway with the touch of a surgeon.
As they taxied to a tie-down point, Hollister tried to absorb as much of the area as he could. He had never been to Bien Hoa. He had never seen such a concentration of army, air force, and Vietnamese Air Force planes, jets, choppers, and hangars.
Bien Hoa Air Force Base and the surrounding countryside was completely unlike the Highlands. It was flat as far as he could see in any direction, and there was virtually nothing on the horizon taller than one story, except a lone thirty-four-foot jump tower that was identical to the four tha
t stood on Eubanks Field at Fort Benning.
A sergeant first class wearing a IIFFV shoulder patch stood on the apron waiting for the pilot to shut down the engines. He waved his arms and called out to Hollister as he stepped from the airplane. Normally, a captain in Vietnam wouldn’t expect to be picked up by someone, but in his case it was consistent with the treatment he had been getting since he had been diverted to Cam Ranh. Hollister acknowledged the sergeant with a wave and turned back to the cockpit to thank the pilots and wish them a safe trip back.
As Hollister and the sergeant drove out the gate at the sprawling Bien Hoa base camp and started down the road that connected it to the equally spread out Long Binh Headquarters complex, Hollister tried to find out what was going on. “So, what’s the deal? You have any idea where I am going?”
“No, sir, I was just getting off duty as the G-l staff duty NCO when the sergeant major caught me and told me to come over here and pick you up. I haven’t got any idea what for or how deep,” the sergeant replied. He nodded toward the Combat Infantryman’s Badge on Hollister’s shirt. “But you know how screwed up this place is—just about anything’s liable to happen around here.”
They shared a small chuckle, and Hollister resigned himself to sit back and enjoy the short ride to IIFFV, where he was sure to find out something.
In a fraction of a second Hollister knew he wouldn’t like to have anything to do with being assigned to the massive headquarters. As he weaved his way through the rows of metal desks and listened to the clacking of typewriters and the nonstop ringing of telephones and field phones, he remembered the First Field Force Headquarters in Nha Trang. It had been primitive by comparison with the chaos of the maze he now found himself in.
The sergeant finally stopped in front of an empty desk and turned to Hollister. He looked at the empty chair and then at his wristwatch. “Sir, the sergeant major must be in the can or something. I’ll leave you here, if it’s all right with you?”