Our Next Trip

  Patti and I are just a few weeks from our next Viking trip, this time to Vietnam and Cambodia. We depart on March 5th from SFO and fly to Hanoi via Hong Kong. For me it will be a return to Vietnam and for Patti it will be her first trip to Asia. It was 56 years ago that I was stationed in Vietnam. When our Viking trip ends I have arranged a tour with a Vietnamese tour company of the area where I was stationed from late July 1970 until late May 1971. I look forward to returning to Vietnam, if for no other reason than to see how things have changed from the time I was there as a US Army enlisted man. Living conditions for the people in the area where I was stationed can best be described as third world. The people were peasants who were primarily rice farmers and fishermen. It was not uncommon to see people herding ducks and pigs as we drove through villages. Water buffalo were the work animals that were utilized in the rice paddies. There was no machinery and electricity was available only to people who could afford a generator and gasoline; and that was a very small minority of the populace where I was stationed. People would often be seen carrying two heavy bags of rice or baskets of produce on opposite ends of long bamboo poles that were balanced on either of their shoulders. Tuks tuks with many people crammed on board were ubiquitous.  During rice harvesting season, the rice husks were dried on the only paved road in the area, QL 1, which made driving on the road a challenge since it was only two lanes and the drying rice typically took up one lane of the highway. All of the villages and hamlets I visited were quite primitive by American standards. The houses in which the people lived were quite small and had mud walls and thatch roofs. There was no indoor plumbing. Water came from common wells. It was definitely subsistence living, and the longer I was stationed there, the more I came to understand that for them, their main concern was survival. The area where I was stationed was not secure from the Viet Cong, aka Charlie. It was not unheard of to learn that Viet Cong tax collectors would go into villages and hamlets at nighttime to collect taxes, usually rice. If a village chief was uncooperative, he might be killed and his house might be burned. Since survival was key for the people, cooperation with the tax collector was the more typical response. In the morning, before any of us embarked on our daily routines away from the compound in which we lived, we needed to wait to be informed that the roads were clear of booby traps (now referred to as improvised explosive devices). The Viet Cong were well known for burying mines or unexploded artillery rounds along and below the surface of the roads, all of which were unpaved, that branched off QL 1 and lead to the hamlets and villages that were located in Mo Duc District. The all clear reports were not always reliable. When we were out and about, we needed to be back to the compound by dusk since the VC essentially ran the countryside once it was night and it was not considered safe.

  I was attached to and lived with an American advisory team at the district headquarters of Mo Duc District in Quang Ngai Province. When I got to Vietnam I was assigned to the 29th Civil Affairs Company whose headquarters was in Da Nang. My primary duty was to coordinate the distribution of tin roofing material to families that were moving back to their hamlets they had been forced to evacuate due to Viet Cong attacks and destruction. It was not an every day activity, so I performed other duties as assigned such as going to Quang Ngai to pick up mail, riding shotgun (literally, except not with a shotgun but with an M 16) with one of our NCOs who was very good at scrounging for food from nearby American bases (since we did not live on an American base, each one of us received separate rations pay and by scrounging for food were able to keep the separate rations pay rather than spending it on food for us), taking my 3/4 ton pickup to a base to get gasoline for our generator that provided our compound with electricity, or using my truck to pick up a potable water trailer and after getting it filled with potable water, returning the full trailer with water for our team members who spent time in the field living on outposts, and doing radio watch at night either from 8pm-12am, 12am-4am, or 4am to 8 am. My Military Occupational Specialty was Vietnamese Translator Interpreter for the South Vietnamese dialect. Since I had studied Latin, Greek, and Spanish during my 5 1/2 years in the seminary and had done well, I had a knack for foreign languages. Since I had been drafted into the Army, it was up to the Army to determine which MOS was a fit for me. We took some tests early in basic training, one of which was the Army Language Aptitude Test. I did well on the ALAT and as a consequence was assigned to the Defense Language Institute at Ft. Bliss, Texas where I found myself in South Vietnamese Language class 2-36-70, a 36 week language course.

  My classmates at language school were all draftees and college graduates. There were three who were married, and one of those three was a dad. At least three had served in the Peace Corps. It is likely, since we were college graduates, that a good number of us, if not all of us were qualified for Officer Candidate School, but we were all doing our two years via the enlisted man route. We bonded pretty quickly and while we were not all best friends with each other, we all got along fine. The night before I reported to the Oakland Army Base for transport to Vietnam, my family hosted four of my classmates for dinner and an overnight stay. I still maintain contact with those four and other language classmates. The Vietnamese language course soon became monotous and routine. We had class five days a week for six hours per day. It did not take long for us to figure out that we had really soft duty and that it was pretty close to impossible to flunk out of the course. As a result, there were those of us, myself included, who did not put in our best effort to master Vietnamese. We managed and we passed the proficiency test at the end of our course. Suffice it to say that is a very good thing that the course of the war was not dependent on my ability to be understood and to understand Vietnamese. Actually, I did not need to use my Vietnamese all that much once I was in country. We had three native Vietnamese interpreters who spoke both Vietnamese and English very well and did the bulk of the interpreting. That said, prior to returning to Vietnam, I have been a daily student on Duolingo trying to brush up on my Vietnamese for the past five months, and to my surprise, am learning that, in spite of the years and my lack of enthusiasm 56 years ago, the Vietnamese started to come back. Of course, I still need to work on the tones and the diacritical marks over the vowels that dictate how the vowels are pronounced, but I feel I will have some basic skills when I get back there. (I also have Google Translate on my phone).

   Looking back on my return from Vietnam with the benefit of hindsight, I believe we should have had more time to decompress before returning to civilian life, although if I had been asked back then if I wanted some decompression time before ending my leave of absence and resuming life as a civilian again, I'd probably have answered in the negative accompanied by a four letter expletive. I suppose it is true that wisdom increases with age. Many of us on our flight home were finished with our Army commitment and we were going to be separated from the service upon our return. The separation began just about as soon as we got off the plane. About twenty-four hours after we landed, we were separated from the service. In the space of two days we went from being soldiers in an active combat zone to being civilians, and that was fine but also a bit strange. We had not been discharged, we were separated, meaning we were inactive (I think that is the correct term) reserves for 4 more years when we received our formal discharge from the Army. It was good to be back home, but for many Vietnam veterans, especially those who participated in combat, their time in Vietnam left invisible but indelible scars that caused a multitude of problems for them and still do for many.

   My purpose for this blog post is to give some background on my prior experience in Vietnam as I feel it would be neither appropriate nor necessary to include any of that in the travel blog. This time around, I will be a tourist and will have a chance to see more of the country than I saw 56 years ago. As I said, am looking forward to this trip, and Patti is too. It will be different this time around, and it will be good.