by Ed Miller
When I received my written orders the morning after induction, I learned that I was going to Gulfport, Mississippi, for four weeks of boot camp. I felt a jolt of excitement—I assumed I was going to fly there from South Carolina, and I had never been on an airplane. But I was wrong. I was destined for the road again. This time packed onto a Greyhound bus for a twenty-hour slog south to Mississippi.
On arrival, we suffered through buzz cuts and were issued uniforms, underwear, and many other items, which, when properly packed, completely filled up the single duffle bags we had been issued. Since we wouldn’t need the civilian clothes we had worn to boot camp, they gave us boxes and Uncle Sam paid for our civvies to be sent back home. When we attended our first classroom instruction the following morning, the base’s commanding officer welcomed us and then proceeded to inform us that he knew we had all joined the Seabees to stay out of Vietnam—and to be fair, Seabee literature showed that they were stationed all over the globe, including places like Alaska and Italy, so I’d hoped to end up somewhere like that. He said that while he applauded our fine decisions, he could guarantee that every goddamn one of us was going to Southeast Asia. The man must have known what he was talking about because within six months, we all shipped out.
The four weeks of boot camp flew by. We learned to properly make our bunks—yes, to have a coin bounce when thrown on our bed—how to fold our clothing, and how to pack the other items we’d received. We had to practice packing until we knew how to fit every article inside our duffle bags. We spent most of our days in various classes, learning about the Seabees. We were not going to go out and kill people, but we needed to learn how to stay safe amid the violence, including how to manage the possible assault of tear gas. For practice, we had to don gas masks, and then enter a fifteen-square-foot building filled with clouds of tear gas. Our instructions were to take a very deep breath with the mask on, then pull it off and count to ten before running outside; they wanted us without the mask for ten seconds so we could feel what it was like to be in a tear gas attack. Those ten seconds were awful, and most of us could not even count to one before we choked and scrambled out of that hellhole. On the first try, the instructor must have not spoken clearly, because many of us pulled our masks off and then took a deep breath. Those who screwed the pooch had to do a practice maneuver a second time, so, by God, we learned to take the deepest breath before removing our masks.
We were inducted into the Seabees to build things, but not because we were all in tip-top physical shape. To shape up, we marched some on the grinder, which was a large, paved asphalt lot, maybe five acres, and had the occasional run. When they made us run, quite a few of us dropped like flies. The Marines and Army drill sergeants would have punished those who dropped out, but most of our instructors were older inductees and couldn’t have cared less. Another part of our exercise required that every now and then, probably twenty of us had to lift a telephone pole onto our shoulders and walk a couple laps around the grinder. Twenty men and one pole? Light as a feather.
When boot camp ended, I finally got my airplane ride, taking an Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport plane from Gulfport to Ventura, California, which was the closest airport to our Seabee base in Oxnard, California. During military training in California, I drove one of the troop-hauling tractor trailers, or cattle cars, as we called them, when we went into the hills each day to play soldier. The hills of southern California were quite small compared to those of Black Mountain, so I wasn’t at all bothered by the drive and thankfully never experienced the “pucker factor,” which was probably best described by a guy named Frank I met in later years. In his words, the pucker factor is when you get so scared that “the ass puckers so tight that you couldn’t drive a nail up it, even with a big hammer!”
After our training in the hills, when the troops would board the cattle car to travel back to our base, some of them would ask me to try to make them fall over, so I would gently rock the steering wheel from side to side as I drove. We may have been training for men’s work, but many of us were still kids at heart.
The average age in our battalion was between eighteen and twenty-one, but there were at least a dozen older fellows, guys who had enlisted because they needed a big change in their lives, such as getting away from a nasty divorce, or because of a court order to either join the military or spend a couple years in jail. Most of the latter were hard drinkers who never smiled or smiled too often. (We tried to stay away from the creeps.) The older guys tended to be a pain in the ass to us younger soldiers, but the ones who were also rated EO sure as hell knew how to operate bulldozers, graders, backhoes, front-end loaders, and scrapers. Some of the older fellows who were good at their jobs became good instructors, mentors even, imparting their brass tacks wisdom to many of us younger equipment operators.
One part of our military training was learning how to throw hand grenades. On our second day of this training, a fellow soldier didn’t throw his grenade far enough over the wall and a small sliver of steel flew back at us and got stuck in my arm. My inquiry asking if I was eligible to receive a Purple Heart fell on deaf ears.
We also learned the proper use of a Colt 45 handgun and M16 assault rifle. I had learned to shoot shotguns and rifles while growing up, but the M16 was unlike anything I had fired before. During my first training to use the weapon, I learned to hold the gun down, so the muzzle wouldn’t walk toward the sky. The Marine gunnery sergeant was quite adamant about us holding it down since there’s no point in shooting above your target.
All of us had to qualify in the proficient use of each weapon, and my file noted that I qualified well, good enough to become a sharpshooter. I’m sure I could have gotten an even better mark than this, an expert level mark, as the day before qualification day I shot at the expert level and did so on many other days too, but we were permitted to visit the enlisted men’s club the night before qualification day, and that California beer must have messed with my eyesight. I’m not clear what happened to the guys, and there were many, who were unable to shoot straight enough to qualify. Probably nothing, since we all went to Vietnam anyway.
We spent several months getting familiar with new models of earth-moving equipment, and attending more classroom instruction, the majority of which taught us how to interact with, and be tolerant of, the citizens of South Vietnam. We were warned what not to do, what not to do, and what not to do. We were not to disrespect the Vietnamese people. We were not to go into any unauthorized area not protected by the US military. And we were absolutely not to have sex with Vietnamese women.
After we completed training, they let us travel home for a few days, and on our return, injected us with enough vaccines to protect us from every disease known to man. We felt like pin cushions, although we realized the necessity. Then, just a few days later, we boarded airplanes and headed west to the war. The experience started with a bang. At Vietnam’s Da Nang airport, we were walking down the plane ramp and onto foreign ground at the very same time that two fighter jets lifted off the tarmac and unleashed a roar that scared the shit out of me. I instinctively hunkered down, sure the place was getting hit with rockets, mortars, or something else that would take our lives before we even got going. No one called me a sissy for this, and no one pointed at me and laughed. Many of us reacted this way.
Without any real threat, we entered the Da Nang airport terminal to retrieve our duffle bags. We were dressed in clean utility uniforms, and our boots were all spit polished. Everything about us was green—our uniforms, our experience, our complexions. We’d been drinking heavily for most of our twenty-four-hour plane ride. I don’t remember who happened to be the highest-ranking officer on our flight, but somehow, he knew most of us had smuggled bottles of fine bourbon, gin, vodka, and scotch onto the plane. He had to punish us for breaking the rules and sneaking in contraband, so he forced us to forgo the mitigating graces of proper cocktail mixers. I can thank the awful combination of fine bourbon
and orange juice for my sorry state.
Walking through the huge Da Nang terminal, I saw a dozen Army soldiers sitting on the floor and leaning against a wall. The fellows looked the exact opposite of us Seabees. While we were fresh and wide-eyed, with clean, barely used uniforms, they were dirty. They wore no socks in their jungle boots and clearly hadn’t shaved for a long time. They didn’t look directly at us, or at anyone else. All of them had what we soon learned to be the thousand-yard stare. They didn’t smile or frown, and didn’t speak to one another or us. They were silent and displayed no emotions whatsoever. I didn’t think I had lived a sheltered life up till then, but this sight was very unnerving and unlike anything I’d ever seen. I’m sure they were headed home—and I badly wished I could have gone with them.
Our tasks in Vietnam would include rebuilding Highway 1, building numerous bridges and buildings, rebuilding airstrips, and cementing landing pads for helicopters, among other endeavors. For my first six months there, I was one of two Seabees who had the best job in our battalion of 850 men. For at least four days each week, I drove tractor trailers hauling supplies from the central, coastal city of Da Nang, which was Vietnam’s biggest city and had the second largest military installation, to our base camp, Camp Haines. It was a journey of only seventy-five miles north of Da Nang, but it was slow. Prior to our battalion, Mobile Construction Battalion 10 (MCB-10), renovating Highway 1 into a forty-foot-wide super highway, the road was a muddy path about one-and-a-half lanes wide, which meant that you had to damned nearly stop each time you encountered another vehicle coming toward you from the opposite direction. And you had to drive carefully as the road wound through the middle of numerous towns and hamlets, including those of the large city of Huế.
Despite these annoyances, what made it so that we had the best job were the absolutely spectacular views that part of the trip offered. The road north of Da Nang began at sea level and wound for thirty miles over the North Trường Sơn mountain range. At the top of the mountain was the Hải Vân Pass, which literally means “Ocean Cloud Pass” and is South Vietnam’s most dangerous mountain pass. It is some fifteen hundred feet above sea level and the view from there was breathtaking. Waves crashed into the sheer cliffs along part of the mountain, and rolled up onto white sandy beaches toward the bottoms of both sides of the mountain. At fifteen hundred feet, you could also see Vietnamese sampans—flat-bottomed boats used for fishing—and US naval vessels sharing the same waters. I never got tired of making the trip.
If you drove empty, going southbound from our camp, or fully loaded, going northbound from Da Nang, you would travel across a bridge going over a calm, clear blue bay filled with sampans. There was a fifteen-mile ascent to the top of the pass, and the sampans diminished in size each time you saw them as you drove through the numerous switchback curves. The switchbacks also let you see the vehicles that were ahead of yours, so you could be prepared. The higher up you drove, the more you could see the widening of the South China Sea below, and the military naval vessels anchored many miles out, punctuating the water.
At the top of the Ocean Cloud you felt like you were literally on top of the world. Those last few miles before the summit, you could let yourself imagine, just for a moment, that you had escaped the ugliness of the war. But you were slapped back to reality at the top of the mountain when the sight of the concrete and sandbag bunkers dashed your quiet serenity and brought you back to reality. On the drive down the other side of the mountain, if you kept your eyes focused left, toward the ocean, the drive was similar to the ascent, but when you looked straight ahead, your view was overtaken by Da Nang.
Guardrails had been installed on the majority of the road’s ocean side, but it didn’t take long for me to see that they weren’t very effective. Most every trip revealed new evidence of a vehicle having recently crashed through the guardrails. Due to the sheer drop-offs, practically every vehicle would have hurtled toward the ocean at the bottom of the mountain. I couldn’t help but imagine, depending on where the vehicles broke through the guardrails, the drivers’ horrifying final rides. I just hoped it wasn’t other servicemen who were plunging to their deaths.
On our initial trips south from our camp to Da Nang, the other driver, Baker, and I were surprised to find all traffic stopped at the bottom of the north side of the mountain. We learned that this was because it was deemed too unsafe for single vehicles to travel across the mountain—the risk of enemy fire was too great—so traffic would be held to allow an entire line of vehicles to move as a convoy. Armored personnel carriers and jeeps equipped with machine guns were interspersed throughout the convoy to provide some semblance of security, and every day, one convoy traveled north and one traveled south, typically in the midafternoon. If drivers arrived early, they would have to wait in line until it was time for the convoy to proceed.
One of the biggest drawbacks to having to travel up the mountain as part of the convoy, at least in my case, was that because it took an entire day to make the seventy-five-mile trip, by the time we reached Da Nang, we had always missed the northbound convoy. This meant we had to wait until the next day to head back to Camp Haines; down one day and up the next day. The silver lining was that this allowed us to spend two nights each week in Da Nang, which had abundant shopping, numerous forms of entertainment, and excellent Army, Navy, and Marine enlisted men’s clubs. This was a far cry from what we had back at our camp in the boonies. The enlisted men’s clubs were large and usually had live music. If I was lucky enough to spend a weekend in Da Nang, which could happen if I arrived late on a Friday and my return load wasn’t available for loading until Monday morning, I could usually enjoy a USO tour show, live entertainment sponsored by the United Service Organizations. I once missed a Bob Hope show by one day. Most of the USO shows were fantastic, with good-looking, scantily clad girls dancing while musicians performed popular songs. It was all good fun, but it made us think about what we had left behind in our hometowns.
While this time spent waiting at the convoy point was good drunk fun, it didn’t allow a quick turnaround, and since Baker and I were the only drivers assigned to the Da Nang supply runs, it was imperative for us to turn around as quickly as possible each time. It would have been better for everyone if we didn’t have to wait, so one day Baker and I went to our higher-ups and explained that we lost hours waiting, which they already knew, and pointed out that it had been many months since there had been enemy activity while traveling through the Hải Vân Pass. Our good officers explained the issue to our battalion’s captain, and within days, we each had a signed order that allowed us to travel anywhere in I Corps at any time. I Corps was the northernmost part of the four geographic military sections, or corps, that South Vietnam was divided into. It stretched from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) north of Quảng Trị to just south of Da Nang.
Shortly after receiving our new orders, Baker and I both happened to make our initial “travel anywhere” journey the same day. At the convoy point, we presented our orders to Army Military Police (MP) soldiers, but they said they didn’t care what the orders read. One said, “You crazy-assed Seabees WILL be convoying with them, so get your asses back in line!”
Well, this MP was unaware that a person should never say no to Seabees, or really any Marines. Rather than getting our asses back in line, we requested an audience with that MP’s sergeant. After one short radio communication, the fellow was told that our orders actually did mean “anytime, anywhere.”
He scowled at us and with obvious disgust said, “Fuck it, go ahead,” and then told the other MP to let us go over the mountain by ourselves.
This situation, being out of the ordinary, garnered a lot of attention from other convoy drivers, both military and civilian. As we drove ahead, many of them were standing outside their vehicles, and a number of the guys shouted support for us Seabees, such as “Way to go,” “Good luck,” or “You lucky SOBs.” However, interspersed with the well-wishers were dri
vers who hurled invectives such as “Hope you get shot, you sorry bastards,” “The VC [Viet Cong] will skin you alive,” or, our favorite, “Seabees are a bunch of crazy fuckers.” I don’t know how Baker handled the accolades, but I was smiling and waving to everyone as we drove past them. And we didn’t have a single problem as we made our thirty-mile drive up and over the mountain.
With an early start, our new anywhere, anytime order made it possible to make one round trip to and from Da Nang and another one-way trip back to Da Nang before the road closed at dusk. I’m not sure whether we had anything to do with it, but about two weeks after going over the mountain alone, both north and south convoy points were done away with, and traffic went up and down the mountain at any time from dusk to dawn.
There were two drawbacks to not having to convoy across the mountain. The first was that we didn’t have several hours to sit, drink beer, and shoot the breeze with fellow soldiers. The second was that it was much harder to relieve yourself while driving because your vehicle was going faster, so you really had to remember to “go” before you headed up the mountain. It wasn’t at all difficult to go when your vehicle was going slow, which I assume is due to the Department of the Navy having had the driver’s comfort in mind when it selected our tractors.
The tractors were efficient, referred to as “multi-fuelers” because their engines could be configured to burn different types of fuel, and equipped with notched, pull-out throttles, which when set, would allow the truck to maintain its speed without using the accelerator. It was an early form of cruise control that came in mighty handy while you were traveling up the mountain at five miles per hour after having enjoyed numerous beers waiting in the convoy line. As the throttle held the truck at a steady speed, the large, wide running boards made it easy for a soldier to relieve himself when the urge came along. It really wasn’t all that hard to drive with your right hand as you stood on the running board and held the door open with your knee. With your left hand free, you could unzip your britches and complete your maneuver. On some of the switchback curves quite a few other drivers could be observed utilizing this system.