by Ed Miller
With gratitude we spent some of our time off on Sunday afternoons delivering dump truck loads of sand to numerous locations throughout Camp Evans. After we dumped the first load of sand, word quickly got around the base, so all we had to do was drive through their gate and soldiers would appear to direct us to delivery points. One afternoon, we had so many dump trucks on their base that it looked like a Seabee camp.
Some of the Army bunkers were quite elaborate, requiring many sandbags. When they depleted the initial supply of sand, the Army soldiers said they would love to trade us for more truckloads. We had the sand they wanted, and they had things we wanted: jungle boots, boonie hats, and poncho liners, so we were happy to make a trade. We learned the barter system well in Southeast Asia. Not only did we barter with the Army guys, but also with Vietnamese people. In exchange for our C rations, they gave us sunglasses and rubber flip-flops made out of old US tires and tubes.
One night during a mortar attack on Camp Evans, we ran from our beds and dove into our bunker located on the side of our hooch. When we noticed one of our guys missing, a friend and I ran back into our hooch to find him. Bob was trying his best to crawl into his clothes locker. We surmised that his action may have been caused by the effect of his evening at the enlisted men’s club, the only bar on our base where enlisted soldiers could drink alcohol. It seemed that Bob had made the most of the establishment and gotten quite inebriated. So inebriated, in fact, that we had to pull him out of his locker and drag him out to the bunker.
The following morning, Bob didn’t believe our account of what happened during the night, and although he did remember having been in the bunker the previous evening, he wasn’t about to admit that he had tried to paw his way into his own locker.
One of the poncho liners acquired in trading turned out to be an especially well-used possession for a friend of mine. During lunch one day, this fellow pulled his dump truck into position alongside a dirt wall, so he would load first after lunch; at which time, a bulldozer would push the dirt over the top of the twenty-foot-high wall, and a front-end loader would then load each dump truck. He then climbed down from his cab and walked a short distance to greet a nice looking eighteen-year-young Vietnamese woman who had come to visit him, and then welcomed her up into the bed of his dump truck. He climbed up after her, holding several beers and his poncho liner, which had been procured by bartering a dump truck load of sand with an Army soldier, and I assume was used as a blanket to lie on.
I suppose our commanding officer enjoyed keeping track of how we were performing our duties, because he drove up in his jeep shortly after the driver began attending to his lady in the dump truck bed. The commanding officer, the CO, asked the missing driver’s whereabouts, and someone told him that he had gone behind some bushes to heed the call of nature. After shooting the breeze with the rest of us for a long few minutes, the CO wished us a good afternoon and drove away.
After lunch, our industrious and elusive driver was grinning from ear to ear. Before we got back to work, the dozer operator hollered down at us from his perch up high to get our attention. He begged us not to call him a Peeping Tom, but confessed to watching the driver with his girl while the CO had been on site. Apparently the dozer’s routine was to sit on his equipment while he ate his C rations, enjoying a panoramic view of all the personnel and trucks below him, and on this day he had gotten quite a show. He also said that the soldier who had told the captain about the missing driver doing his business sure as hell knew what he was talking about. The driver had certainly been giving the business to the girl the entire time the CO was talking to us. The dozer operator said he damned near laughed out loud when the dump truck driver looked up at the dozer operator, grinned at him, and shot him a thumbs-up. We all applauded the dump truck driver for unloading on time. It turned out that this was not just a one-time fling. That same girl came to meet the lucky driver at one work site and then the next. Love—or lust—seems to conquer all obstacles.
When we were away from our camp and not close to a location serving hot food, our standard culinary fare came from boxes containing various kinds of “Meal, Combat, Individual” rations, more commonly referred to as C rations. Each box typically contained one can of meat and vegetables, such as beans and franks, or spam and a vegetable, but one of them—the absolute worst—was cold ham and eggs, although everyone called them H and MFs (ham and motherfuckers). Another can would usually contain fruit, and other cans, or packages, could offer chocolate, crackers, cocoa powder, cigarettes, or a folding, pocket-size can opener, better known as your basic P-38.
C rations typically tasted pretty awful, although their flavors could be made more palatable if they were heated. Most of the guys who drove trucks, or those who operated heavy machinery, learned that the hot exhaust from a motor’s manifold, which funnels the exhaust, functioned like an excellent stove to heat their meals. After puncturing a hole in a can with your P-38, you would then set the can on top of the manifold. Sometimes you might have to leave the motor running so the manifold would stay hot. Other times, it was so hot outside that the engine naturally stayed hot for a long time. Either way, in fifteen to twenty minutes, you were eating a warm meal.
If we weren’t away from Camp Haines, we ate at our US Navy-operated mess hall, our “chow hall.” Food was served all day from about 4:30 in the morning until 9:00 at night, and there were few restrictions. If you were a soldier, you could eat as much, and as often, as you liked. This was wonderful for us since Navy cooks have always had a reputation for serving the bests meals of any of the armed forces, and our cooks reinforced this reputation. Each morning, I looked forward to breakfast because three or four cooks manned separate stoves and every imaginable breakfast fixing surrounded each stove. You could ask for an omelet with any ingredient, or pancakes, waffles, or eggs fixed any way, or steak and eggs, or almost any other breakfast you could dream up. Our chow hall received an award for being the Best Chow Hall in I Corps. It was a hell of an honor since we were pitted against the much larger and better supplied chow halls in Da Nang.
It was my job, and privilege, to haul at least half our food supplies from Da Nang. I had heard that our mess hall’s procurement officer—who was probably a master chef—excelled at the Navy’s art of comshaw a bribe or payoff. It may have been that he was just a damned good barterer, but the foods he secured (by whatever means) allowed us to eat what honest-to-goodness tasted like home-cooked meals. It was light years better to eat in our mess hall than be stuck eating those damned H and MFs.
With so much good food available, and numerous, varied choices, it often happened that we weren’t able to eat everything we piled on our plates. But our uneaten or partially eaten meals did not go to waste. After we placed our trays at one of the kitchen windows, the kitchen crew removed the utensils, napkins, and other inedible items, and the leftovers were scraped into washed out fifty-five-gallon steel drums and left outside. Shortly after each breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and on a daily basis, our closest Vietnamese village’s food envoy could be seen leaving our camp with one, sometimes two, of the drums mounted onto his cart, which had an axle and two passenger car-sized tires.
On my regular Highway 1 drives, I would watch what took place after the envoy arrived at his hamlet with our leftovers, and I was astounded the first time I saw it. A number of villagers would come out to meet the envoy, and then one of the villagers used a large ladle to scoop out food to fill the pots and pans that residents brought with them. It didn’t seem to bother them that different meats, vegetables, breads, and desserts were mixed together. None of us Seabees could have fathomed having to choke down that concoction, and I am sure every one of us would have become violently ill if we ate from these drums. But then, I doubt that any of us have ever been as hungry as they were. The Vietnamese seemed to relish each meal as if it had been freshly prepared, and we never heard of them getting sick from the food.
There was, however, someth
ing that regularly made me sick as all hell. It came in the form of the weekly malaria pill all US soldiers were required to take. They were horse size, close to the size of two quarters stacked together, and they must have worked, since I don’t know anyone who contracted the disease, but the pill’s side effects were not fun: nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, upset stomach, headache, diarrhea, weakness, and loss of appetite. They didn’t make me vomit or lose my appetite, but within hours of swallowing one, the rest of the side effects would start to wage war on one another.
It began with an upset stomach, a bit of nausea, and a slight headache. Soon after came a wave of abdominal pain, the likes of which would damned nearly bend you double. This pain would always be immediately followed by violent diarrhea—a side effect that could be tolerated when in close proximity to a privy—but try driving a truck down Highway 1 when the symptoms take hold. To distract yourself, you think nice thoughts of being back home, or try to sing a popular song. Your body straightens out, stiff as a board, and you squeeze your cheeks very tightly. There were several times that I had to bring my rig to a screeching halt in the middle of the highway, jump out of the cab, and suffer the embarrassment of squatting by the side of the road while nature took its course. I can still remember the calls from the Army dudes driving by my vehicle. Many blew their horns at me. Others even hollered, “Been there, done that.” Oh yes, all truck drivers knew to keep a roll of toilet paper in their trucks.
The last of the side effects, weakness, caused me to slowly pull myself back up in my truck, where I would sit for several minutes while taking long, deep breaths. It was rough, but I know the pill’s side effects were mild compared to the suffering I would have experienced had I contracted malaria. Fifty years later, when the occasional stomach bug comes to visit, or when preparing for those dreaded colonoscopies, I am mentally transported back to the memories of having to take those pills.
By far though, the worst part of my job in Vietnam happened each morning at daylight. I always drove one of the first vehicles on the road following the Army ordinance crews (minesweepers) clearing of Highway 1, which they did before traffic was allowed onto the roadway. On these early morning drives I’d see dead bodies laying in the middle of the road at villages, hamlets, and towns. The South Vietnamese Army soldiers placed the bodies of the Viet Cong, or suspected Viet Cong, and sympathizers killed the previous night in the roads leading into each community. The bodies were supposed to make a statement about what would happen to those who aided the enemy. There might be one body lying alone, or a pile of bodies placed on top of one another.
I remember driving very slowly by the bodies the first time I saw them. I didn’t get sick or anything like that, but it took me several days to get the sight out of my mind. The sight of them was certainly a hell of a way to start each day. They were a reminder that I was in the middle of a war zone. I never got used to seeing them, but I saw them so often that I began to accept the practice as just another one of the many unnecessary things that happened during my time in Southeast Asia. War, as they say, is hell.
After driving trucks for six months, I asked to be taken off the Da Nang runs so I could become more proficient at operating heavy equipment—bulldozers, scrapers, and loaders. After I did this for two weeks, I was asked if I would volunteer to do a special job for the Army. One might think that only a fool volunteers for anything while in military service, but I was quick to volunteer; I thought this offered a chance to get out of camp for a few days to do something unique. It wasn’t more than a couple of days later when I watched as a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane helicopter hooked an International mini-bulldozer to it and then took off and flew westward into the A Shau Valley, west of Huế. I then boarded a Huey helicopter and off we went in search of the Skycrane. The Skycrane flew slower than the Huey and we eventually passed it and landed at an Army firebase on top a mountain.
The sight there was surreal: completely devoid of vegetation. Soldiers had pointed Army artillery downhill and fired shells at all the trees and shrubbery until nothing was left but dirt and rocks for several hundred yards. They’d made it so that the enemy couldn’t sneak up on the firebase since the land was barren and there was nowhere to hide.
Soon after I disembarked from the Huey, the Skycrane set the mini-dozer down on the mountain. Over the next two days, I operated the dozer to dig a ten-foot-wide by fifty-foot-long by ten-foot-deep hole on the mountainside. Within an hour of my finishing the hole, another Skycrane flew in to place a pod into the hole. The pod was eight-feet wide by forty-feet long by eight-feet high, and was complete with all the comforts of home. Its purpose was to house some commanding Army colonel or general, although I never found out who stayed there. I do know that after spending two nights in a mountaintop bunker, ensconced in a sleeping bag beside twenty Army soldiers, I was ready to go back to camp. As I grabbed my boots to get ready to head out, one of the Army guys told me to be sure to shake out the scorpions. Thankfully, my boots didn’t have any of the critters, but I watched the others pour them out onto the ground and smash them with their boots.
When the Skycrane eventually returned to take the mini-dozer back to Camp Haines, I got to experience the static electricity discharged by hooking the mini-dozer to the crane. I had not been forewarned that this might happen, and was knocked down onto the bulldozer’s seat. As I attempted to get up and try again, an Army sergeant jumped up onto the dozer and hooked the cable to the Skycrane. He’d clearly done this before. We both then jumped from the dozer, and away it went back to Camp Haines. When the loud helicopter noise abated, he said, “Don’t let it worry you. Hell, that happens to everyone the first time.” My Huey soon arrived to take me back to camp. I never again volunteered for mini-dozer duty.
A couple of the other guys in the battalion had their own unexpected encounter with a vehicle. It happened with one of the two brand-spanking-new concrete mixers mounted on International truck frames we’d brought with us to Vietnam. The trucks were ugly, but at least they were new, and no construction battalion would have been able to construct much of anything without concrete. Anyway, during one of the daily rainstorms—and it rained every single day for forty days—one of the mixer drivers left our yard with a load of concrete. He drove no more than two hundred yards when his truck slid off the slick dirt road and became stuck in a shallow drainage ditch. He was lucky it didn’t turn over, and he left it running so the concrete would continue mixing while he walked a short distance to our maintenance shop. A friend of his was a mechanic there and the driver asked him to use a bulldozer to pull his mixer out of the ditch. The mechanic wasn’t an experienced dozer operator, but he agreed to help. They secured several heavy chains to the dozer, and the mixer driver bummed a ride by perching on the dozer’s fuel tank as the mechanic drove to them to the concrete mixer.
Surveying the muddy conditions at the site, the mechanic suggested using the dozer’s blade to push the mixer backward, rather than pull it, out of the ditch. The mixer driver also thought this was a better plan since he wouldn’t have to crawl into the mud to hook the chains to the rear of the mixer. But their attempt failed, and not only did the mixer stay put, they inadvertently pushed the mixer’s power takeoff (PTO) shaft through the radiator and into the fan, shutting the motor off, which in turn, stopped the mixer from turning. In the ninety degree heat, the concrete hardened pretty damned quickly.
The accident happened on a busy road, so it didn’t take long before “those in authority” were on the scene. Both the mixer driver and the mechanic were instructed to use the chains—the ones they should have used to begin with—to pull the mixer backward out of the ditch, and then ordered to tow the mixer down to the maintenance shop and park it beside a large, diesel-powered air compressor. They soon learned the air compressor would power the jackhammers they would both be using to break up the concrete.
Over the next week to ten days, those poor fellows spent their days inside the steel mixer drum
. After they removed the cover from the man-sized hole on the outside of the drum, which all mixers have so they can be cleaned, they would lower a jackhammer into the hole and start working at it. They’d rotate shifts, and as the jackhammer worked, cement dust would boil from the manhole. After the “inside man” had worked for a while, he would climb out to clear his eyes and lungs, and they’d switch turns. Each time they crawled out of the manhole, for a break, a cigarette, or a meal, they had to dust themselves off. They looked like dogs shaking themselves after having fallen into a pit of baking flour.
We could gauge their daily progress by watching the pile of concrete chunks grow when they tossed them out of the manhole. When they finally finished the job of jackhammering and removing the hardened concrete from the mixer, the pile looked more like two loads of concrete. Thank God this life lesson—to not use a dozer to try to push a concrete mixer out of the mud—was learned because of someone else’s mistake.
Not far from where the jackhammer operators were working was the location of one of the most preposterous situations I ever witnessed. When our battalion arrived at Camp Haines, we took ownership responsibility of all equipment left by the previous battalion. A road grader, or a motor grader, is a construction machine with a long blade used to create a flat surface during the grading process, and an inventory check showed that our battalion was now in possession of a Galion motor grader, although it had not been included on any previous inventory list. It was so strange that calls were made and lists rechecked, yet no one found any record that the grader ever belonged to any battalion. In fact, no record was found that the motor grader ever existed.
