by Si Robertson
While espionage sounded enticing, so did the possibility of being a mechanic or engineer. My brothers and I were always building and fixing things when we were growing up. If our bicycles or boat motors broke, we had to fix them because we sure weren’t getting new ones. We built forts, bridges, duck blinds, and dams when we were young. How much different could Vietnam really be from Louisiana?
I even thought about going into the military police or becoming a cook. Hey, I’d rather eat my cooking than what I ate in Vietnam. I am the MacGyver of cooking. If you bring me a piece of bread, cabbage, coconut, mustard greens, pig’s feet, pinecones, and a woodpecker, I’ll make a great chicken pot pie. One time I cooked a big pot of soup. The label on the packaging said to empty the entire contents into the broth. Well, Miss Kay got a twenty-cent coupon in her bowl of soup. At least she saved some money on her next trip to the grocery store!
There were so many career choices in the army, and it was difficult to pick only one.
At first, the army sent me to sniper school after I graduated from Advanced Infantry Training. I guess they figured if I could shoot squirrels and ducks, I could hold my own on the battlefield and shoot Charlie. But I was only in sniper school for about a week. After a few days, I asked one of the instructors, “Hey, when are we going to shoot?” He told me we had three more weeks of classes before we would get our rifles. Well, you know how I am about attending classes.
“Uh-uh,” I told him. “Send me to a unit.”
Now, just because the army gives you a test doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to put you in a job that best utilizes your skills. The army tried to put people in areas where they could help it the most, but they weren’t always good at doing it. If the army had a truck driver and a computer engineer, you would think the former would drive a truck and the latter would work with computers. Uh-uh, not in the army. No, let’s switch it. The truck driver worked on computers and the computer engineer drove the truck. The army liked to break a man down and mold him into what it wanted. It didn’t make any sense, but that’s how they did it.
I was assigned to be a readiness noncommissioned officer (NCO) in the areas of materials supply and accounting. My job was supervising supply requests, receipt, and storage, and maintaining an account of individual and organizational equipment. I was like the equipment manager of the army. If a soldier wanted something in Vietnam, he had to come see me. Need a new pair of socks? I’m the man to see. Need ammunition for your M16? I’m the guy. Most days, it was a pretty smooth process when soldiers came to see me. But if I was having a bad day, hey, all bets were off. Grab a Snickers bar, because you’re not going anywhere for a while, Jack!
I was also involved in the day-to-day operations of transporting soldiers, mobilization planning, maintenance, pay, and guard duty. I was basically the commander’s right-hand man. I did whatever he told me to do. Now, I did not wear hard stripes. There were hard-striped soldiers in Vietnam and there were specialists. A hard-striped soldier specialized in combat and war; a specialist was someone like the military police or a medic. We were specialists in something other than actual fighting. Everybody in the army was trained to fight, but some of us were put in areas of support off the battlefield.
After I graduated from Advanced Infantry Training, they sent the notice of deployments to our barrack. Obviously, everyone was hoping to avoid Vietnam, but I always knew that was where I was going to be deployed. I didn’t know why, but I knew in the bottom of my heart that’s where I was going. Well, guys with last names that started with A to R were sent to Germany. Somehow the list of last names beginning with R ended before Robertson. Then I and every guy with a last name after mine were sent to Vietnam. I was the only soldier from my company who was immediately deployed to Vietnam. Later, I found out the guys who went to Germany were only there for a couple of weeks of training and then were sent to Vietnam.
A couple of weeks before I was scheduled to leave for Vietnam, a few of my buddies and I went to see a movie during a weekend pass. John Wayne had just finished making a war movie about Vietnam. It was called The Green Berets. It was about an army colonel who picked two teams of Green Berets to complete a dangerous mission in South Vietnam. We went to see the movie at a theater, and it scared every one of us. Even though the movie was fictional, the images looked real to me. It was the first time I’d seen war. I knew Vietnam was where I was fixing to go, and it didn’t look like a very nice place. In fact, it scared me to death.
“Hey, I gotta work with what I’ve got. It’s called improv-isavation.”
Good Morning, Vietnam!
MY FEET HIT THE ground in South Vietnam on October 19, 1968. Several guys told me their stories about flying into Vietnam, and a lot of them were pretty wild and scary. They told me about being bombarded with rockets and missiles as their jets landed. My arrival was pretty uneventful. We flew into the Can Tho airfield and climbed off the plane. It was eerily quiet until somebody said, “Welcome to Nam.”
Perhaps the thing I remember most about arriving in Vietnam is being overwhelmed by the smell of fish. Now, I grew up on the river, and my brothers and I were always fishing or cleaning fish, but this was different. I smelled fish everywhere I went. The South Vietnamese ate a lot of fish, and commercial fishing was one of their major sources of income. It wasn’t necessarily a bad smell, but it was the only thing you could smell! Hey, how do you stop a fish from smelling? You cut off its nose, Jack! I was ready to cut my nose off after only a couple of weeks in Vietnam. When I returned home after my twelve-month enlistment, I couldn’t stand the smell of fish. I couldn’t even stomach the smell when I went to Phil’s house on the Ouachita River years later. It’s one of the reasons Phil gave up fishing altogether after he quit working as a commercial fisherman. Phil was around fish so much as a commercial fisherman that he didn’t want to be near them after he quit. I’m the same way when it comes to fish, even more than forty years after I left Vietnam.
Can Tho is the largest city in the Mekong Delta and is about seventy-five miles southwest of Ho Chi Minh City (which was called Saigon when I was in Vietnam). It sits near the Mekong River and is the delta’s commercial hub. Today, Can Tho produces about half the country’s rice. Rice paddies, low-lying marshes, and mangrove swamps surround the city, as does a vast system of natural and man-made canals. There were floating markets where you could buy fish, fruits, and vegetables. I’m sure it’s a beautiful city now, but it wasn’t very picturesque when I was there, at least not to me.
While I was deployed to Vietnam, I lived in a three-story hotel in downtown Can Tho. The army base in Can Tho wasn’t big enough to have barracks to house all of the troops, so a bunch of soldiers stayed in hotels with names like the Pink Palace, Cheap Charlie’s, and the Mekong Hotel. From what I remember, the hotel I stayed in was far from a palace, and I’m sure the rent was pretty cheap for Uncle Sam.
Fortunately for me, I arrived in Can Tho about nine months after the Tet Offensive. On January 31, 1968, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese launched a series of surprise attacks against South Vietnam, American forces, and our allies during what was supposed to be a two-day cease-fire during the Tet lunar new year celebration. More than seventy thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops attacked more than one hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam, including the Can Tho airfield, which is where I primarily worked.
It took American forces about three days to clear Can Tho of Vietcong troops. Although U.S. and South Vietnamese forces fought back most of the attacks, the Tet Offensive was a major turning point in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong put the U.S. on notice that they were more organized and stronger than we suspected.
In a civil war like was happening in Vietnam, it’s hard to figure out who’s fighting for what side. What most people don’t understand about the military is that if you go to a foreign country, sometimes they don’t speak your language and don’t want you there. In other words, most of the people there don’t like you. Hey, I
wasn’t trying to make friends in Vietnam. My only goal was to complete my twelve months and get back to Louisiana as quickly as possible.
Although I was there for only one year, it was a really difficult time in my life. It was the first time I’d been away from my parents, brothers, and sisters, and I was thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean from home. I wasn’t quite sure why we were fighting in a land so far from home, but I was bound and determined not to get myself killed while I was there.
One of the things I remember most about being in Vietnam is watching movies on the roof of the hotel where I was living. We had a movie projector set up and we sat and watched movies nearly every night. When I first got to Vietnam, I sat on the roof and watched guys going out. They’d leave sober, but then they’d come staggering back drunk a few hours later. I always thought, That’s not going to be me. But a few months later, guys sat on the same roof and watched me come back stumbling drunk.
Believe me, it was easy to find a drink in Can Tho if you wanted one. Of course, you had to be careful where you went because the Vietcong also used Can Tho as an R & R spot. Charlie would dress like a Vietnamese peasant and walk right into town for some rest and relaxation. Most of the watering holes were filled with bar girls, some of whom made so much money from American troops that they bought estates in the countryside! You could find a drink and a girl whenever you wanted for the right price.
It was the only time in my life when I drank heavily. Now, I partied during my short stay at Louisiana Tech, but it was different in Vietnam. I was largely drinking to forget where I was. When you’re in a place like Vietnam, you get to a point where you don’t care anymore. You’re in a place that’s foreign to you, and you know for a fact that many people there hate you and will kill you if they get the chance. It really does something to your mind to know that many of the people living around you don’t like you and want you to die.
Believe it or not, I came close to killing two people in Vietnam. Shortly after I arrived there, I was on guard duty in a tower at the airfield. I had an M14 rifle and a slingshot. Guess what Vietnamese children liked to do for fun? They liked to throw rocks at the American guards in the watchtowers. I kept a handful of rocks in one of my ammunition pouches just in case I became a target. One day while I was on guard duty, a rock nailed me on the side of my head. I touched my hair and my hand was covered in blood. I thought I’d been shot! I looked down and saw a Vietnamese boy laughing and pointing at me. I clicked my gun and started to aim to shoot him. Thankfully, I came to my senses and didn’t do it. The next time I was hit by a rock, I returned fire with my slingshot. Before too long, I was having regular slingshot wars with the Vietnamese children around our airfield. It didn’t take them long to figure out that I was a better shot than them!
The other time I nearly took a life, I was waiting for a truck to pick me up and felt a tap on my kidney. I turned around and saw a huge snake staring right at me. A Vietnamese woman—we called them momma-sans—had a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck. It was big enough to eat her if it wanted. “You want to buy the snake?” she asked me. I grabbed my gun and was fixing to shoot her and the snake! I’m not sure if I could have ever shot Charlie if I had to, but I was ready to shoot her!
Here’s how bad it got for me during my twelve months in Vietnam: A buddy and me came up with the brilliant idea of us volunteering to be door gunners in helicopters. At the time, the life expectancy of a door gunner in Vietnam was about three days. When one was killed, the army put another soldier in his place. It was about the most dangerous job in the war, and my buddy and I were getting ready to volunteer for it! Fortunately, I came to my senses before we signed up. I must have been insane to even be thinking about it!
I drank so much beer and whiskey in Vietnam that I decided I would quit drinking alcohol altogether once I returned home. I saw what alcohol was doing to me in Vietnam and realized I needed to stop for good.
But I had to make it home alive for that to happen.
“I don’t like uniforms. Hey, right now I want to kick my own butt!”
Deuce and a Half
SHORTLY AFTER I ARRIVED in Vietnam, some of the soldiers who had been there for a while gave me a few tips on how to survive. One of the most important things they told me was to make sure all of my personal belongings were locked down at all times because the Vietnamese loved to steal from Americans. Now, Momma and Daddy had taught me that stealing was a sin—“Thou shalt not steal” is one of the Ten Commandments—so I found it hard to believe that the nice Vietnamese people would steal from the very people who were sent there to protect them.
“What are you talking about?” I asked one of the soldiers.
“These people will steal anything and everything,” he said.
“Hey, I don’t believe you,” I said. “Give me an example.”
“These people will steal your radio and leave the music,” he said.
“Now, that’s a thief!” I told him.
It didn’t take me long to figure out he was telling the truth. One of my daily duties in Vietnam was to drive troops from our hotel to the Can Tho airfield in the morning and then back to the hotel at the end of the workday. I transported the troops in a two-and-a-half-ton cargo truck—we called it a deuce and a half—and it didn’t have a canvas over the bed or rails on its sides. The army started using the M35 family of trucks in 1949 and utilized them all the way through Operation Iraqi Freedom. Obviously, they were good, dependable trucks. The truck had a ten-tire configuration, so it could carry as much as twenty thousand pounds of cargo on the road. It was a very versatile truck in a war zone.
One day, before I made the drive back to the hotel, which was only about one mile, I walked around my truck and gave it a thorough inspection. I was required to inspect the truck every time I climbed behind the steering wheel to make sure it was working properly and hadn’t been booby-trapped by the Vietcong. I saw that each of the ten tires was there and was inflated properly and didn’t notice anything else suspicious. After I gave a thumbs-up, the troops loaded up in the bed of the truck, and I pulled out to drive back to the hotel. But on this particular day, for whatever reason, there was a lot of traffic in downtown Can Tho, so the drive took a little longer than usual. Even though the traffic was crazy, I never had to completely stop and probably didn’t drive less than ten miles per hour.
I arrived at the hotel and the troops started to unload. I locked up the steering wheel, locked the doors, and then started to walk to the hotel.
“Hey, Robertson,” one of the soldiers yelled to me. “You’re missing a tire.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“No, seriously, you’re missing a tire off the back,” he said.
“Good grief,” I said, knowing the soldier was probably trying to play a trick on me.
I walked back to the truck and saw a lug nut sticking out of where one of the dual back tires used to be. Someone stole a tire while I was driving back to the hotel!
“Y’all didn’t see anything?” I asked a few of the soldiers, who had gathered around the truck.
“Nah,” one of them said. “We didn’t see anything.”
“Hey, look, all of the tires were on this truck when we left the airfield,” I said. “I never stopped. Y’all were sitting in the back. You didn’t see anything?”
“Nope,” one of them said.
“Something’s not right with this picture,” I said. “You’re sitting above the tires, you idiots. You had to have seen or heard something!”
“Nah, we didn’t hear or see anything,” one of them said.
I sat there looking at the lug nut while scratching my head and trying to figure out what had just happened.
“The lug nuts must have been loose,” one of them said. “The tire must have fallen off.”
We didn’t have loose lug nuts on a deuce and a half. When we put tires and lug nuts on a deuce and a half, we had to stand on the tire iron to make sure they were tight. There wasn�
��t any way the lug nuts were loose.
The only plausible explanation was that a Vietnamese person stole a tire while I was driving down the road! NASCAR pit crews don’t work that fast, Jack! I know it might be hard to believe, but it’s exactly what happened!
Now, I’ve never had much patience for thieves. A thief is someone who is too lazy to work for what he wants, so he’ll steal from someone else. I’ve read about smart thieves and not-so-smart thieves. In the Czech Republic last year, a band of thieves stole a ten-ton bridge! They arrived at a depot and informed the workers they’d been hired to disassemble the bridge to make way for a new one. The thieves walked away with millions of dollars in scrap metal before anyone figured out the bridge wasn’t supposed to come down! Now, that’s a thief, Jack!
Last year, a man snatched a woman’s purse while she walked through a park in Georgia. When police located a man matching the suspect’s description, they put him into a police cruiser and returned to the scene of the crime. Police told him to exit the vehicle and face the victim for an ID. He looked and her and said, “Yeah, that’s the woman I robbed.” Hey, at least he was honest!
The Lord tells us we’re supposed to love everyone, so I don’t hate thieves. I guess there’s even a place in heaven for them. At least I can respect their ingenuity, and they’re still more likable than most of the attorneys I’ve met.
One day, a teacher, a petty thief, and a lawyer died and went to heaven. St. Peter met them at the gates and said, “Sorry, heaven’s about filled up, so you’ll have to answer a question correctly to come in.”
