Bloods (26 page)

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.

If you heard something, you were to yell “Score event.” The guy would call it back to you, and you’d know the noise you heard came from a friendly.

We got to the top floor, and it seemed like there were a zillion offices. You could hide anywhere. This was going to be shaky. Checking all of those offices one at a time. All the closets. Behind every desk.

You talk about doing some tall praying. You didn’t know what to look for. All you knew was that in this building there are some people bent on eliminating the breath in your body. And they know they got nowhere to go.

We would open the doors very carefully. One guy would
go right, one would go left, and the last to come in would come up the middle. That would work fine as long as there were no desks right there at the door. Each room was different. And we didn’t have time to get a floor plan to know how the rooms were set up.

The top floor was very hair-shaking. It took us about a half-hour to clear it. I kept hoping that the other guys would run into those dudes.

So we take the elevator down to the next floor. When we went into the second room, I moved left, the other brother was on the right, and poor Brute came down the middle. Then we heard some scuffling over in the back corner. Everybody got quiet. Real quiet.

I threw a grenade over in the corner. And then we just started shooting in that area.

When we got through shooting, there was no more noise. So now the question becomes, Who’s going to go over there and see what we have shot? Brute decides to be the hero.

He went from behind one desk to another until he found this one guy. He was wasted. He had been hiding more or less. He had an AK-47 with one banana clip. If he gets off a burst for five seconds, he’s out of ammo. He had on black pajamas and those rubber-tire sandals. He looked to be maybe in his middle twenties.

Now it’s for real. Until you come face to face with the VC, it doesn’t seem so real. This is real. And who knows when you open this next door, there may be five or six guys there waiting. Or somebody not dumb like this one guy fumbling around behind a desk.

As we cleared the rest of the floor and the next floor, we heard gunshots from the other team. By the time we got down to the lobby, the five they killed were all stretched out in a row, lined up like ducks. We didn’t bring our guy down. Left him up there for the medic folks. We shoot ’em, you drag ’em.

So we got six VC out of the Chancery. They never saw any classified material. They were just lookin’ for a place to hide.

They had told Ambassador Bunker to stay away until the fighting was over. The rankingest guy that I saw there was a three-button Army general, Frederick Weyand,
commander of the United States forces in the area, and this guy, Barry Zorthian, who spoke for the Embassy.

It would have been impossible to totally prevent what happened to the Embassy. But we did a lot of dumb-shit things over there. The wall around the Embassy was a barrier to honest folks. Just like a lock on your front door. But if a burglar wants to break in, he will. So who was watching the wall where the VC blew the hole. We needed more Marines than two on guard. And better equipped. This was a war zone.

And the VC would watch you all the time. They knew your pattern. And we would, most of us, do the same thing at the same time every day.

In Tuy Hoa they would set the claymore mines out in the daytime. The VC would be watching in the bush. They know exactly where they are so they can sneak up at night and turn them around against you. We would broadcast over an open airway. The Vietnamese would learn some English. So we’re telling them when we were coming and what time and how many of us are coming. They’d sit back and wait. We would even bomb the same area the same time day in and day out. So the enemy would sit in their caves till the bombing is over. Then they would come back out and have a picnic. We won’t be back until tomorrow. Same time. Creatures of habit.

I got so I enjoyed the city of Saigon. The real difficulties came mostly after curfew, when the Vietnamese police, the MPs, and our group were the only ones allowed on the city streets.

The guys in our outfit went to a club on Tu Do Street—“the street of flowers.” We called it our club. Being favorite customers, we were accustomed to getting more than normal favors from the proprietor, which meant girls.

Not too far from the main gate of Tan Son Nhut was Soul Alley, where you could find Cambodian girls in bars who could readily pass for black females. And in the Soul Kitchen, which was run by this brother in the Air Force, you could buy soul food that tasted like back home. Chitlins, ham hocks, cornbread—the works.

If you could drive around Saigon in the daytime, you could drive in any city in the world. Saigon prepared me for driving in West Germany. Saigon had no speed limit.

The big thing during rush hour was to burn rubber from traffic light to traffic light. Especially guys who were driving jeeps and cars that had some pickup. What really aggravated you was waiting at this red light when, invariably, a Vietnamese guy would pull in front of you on a pedal bicycle, loaded with bricks.

One day, coming from the Embassy, I was drag racing this Vietnamese up the strip to the Saigon River. I was in a jeep. He was on this Honda. From red light to red light, he would win one, I would win the other.

When we got to the last traffic light before the bridge, I knew the one who got there first wouldn’t have to give up the lane closest to the center. The four lanes would become two after the light.

When the light turned green, he zoomed off in the lane that would merge with mine. There was no blockade. The road just quit. At the bridge. He had to turn into my lane or go into the river. And that river was so thick with pollution it looked like syrup.

I don’t think he realized what was happening until too late. The last I saw of that young fellow and his Honda, they were both airborne. And he was screaming “Ahhhhhh.”

A lot of Army MPs who would go around checking on their people would go through a narrow alley or street and never come out. There’s no way to turn around. And it’s very easy to drop a grenade in the back seat of an open jeep. And that’s how the MPs usually drove. Which I thought was ludicrous.

One time I was out checking cars in my closed jeep, and I had a grenade thrown at me. It bounced off the side. It was a dud.

Another time I was following an MP jeep, and for some reason, I stopped to talk to another guy who was on the road. The MP jeep went on. About three or four minutes later, we heard this tremendous explosion. Naturally, we responded. When we were about to run into this alley, this guy said, “Don’t go up there. Let’s get out and go on foot.” We found the jeep blown up by a grenade or several grenades. The two Army guys, obviously dead.

Snipers were the biggest danger in the city, however. Especially at night. And sometimes a guy would ride up
on a Honda next to a GI on a cycle or in a pedicab and just shot him right there on the spot. You learned to duck at any sound, watch the movement of anyone.

It got to the point where we were told to always be armed, even in daytime. And if a Vietnamese, be it man, woman, or child, refused to
di di mau
or tried to get away, the authorization was to go ’head and shoot ’em. We were told not to hesitate.

One guy in our contingency was traveling in the Cholon district. A girl on a Honda bike stopped beside him. He told her three times,
“Di di mau.”
She didn’t. Maybe it was difficult for her to get away through the traffic. Maybe she didn’t understand the Vietnamese he was speaking. Well, he shot her. The white mice showed up, and just took the body away. She was not armed. There was no report. It was just one of those things.