Fifty years ago today, I wrote my Sainted Mother a quick letter.
She had called me a liar in her gentle way, and I felt the need to respond.
“I know you are not telling me the truth,” she had written. “I
know you want me to think you are safe when you really ain’t.”
Late in the day, after returning from a patrol around the
perimeter of our base, I answered. As best as I remember, I said, “You wanted
to know the truth, well here is the truth. All hell has broken loose.”
And it had. The general chaos that came to be known as “The
Tet Offensive,” had started. There is an enduring myth that our military had
been totally surprised. Not true. We received warnings for days that the “gooks”
might try something on this day. Even the villagers across the makeshift
military roads from our base had been acting strangely. Normally, the young ones
came out just after daybreak, took a crap, and then stood across from our towers
or bunkers. They would “give us the finger,” beg for cigarettes, or both. They formed
part of a society with an accommodating mindset, forever flexible.
That day they didn’t appear. Neither did the four or five
barbers that worked for the Americans on our base. In fact, they never came back,
their bodies perhaps ending up in the piles of Viet Cong corpses stacked like woodpiles
and left at major intersections as a warning.
Yes, all hell had broken loose. Turns out that it wasn't that we weren't warned, but that the "Brass" had just ignored the warnings. Now, there was no information
available and no order to the chaos. A mortar barrage might start walking
towards our base from out toward Marble Mountain, cease, and then be picked up
from far away in the opposite directions, bouncing codas back and forth like
instruments battling for the theme of an orchestral work.
A short 80 km (50 miles) away, a small and immortal band of Marines and an ARVN unit were catching the Devil’s own fury at Hue. More about that in
a future posting.
Between duty assignments that day, we met a group of shipmates that
had just returned to base. They were scheduled to go home, having cut
the last links from their “short-timer chains” and processed out with their two
new medals that would gain them everlasting enmity from the general population and
a fair share of their own fellow servicemen. Again, that’s material for a
future piece.
Anyhow, these lads had been seated in an aircraft that had taxied
the runway, pivoted, and was gunning its engines when the Viet Cong began shelling
the runway at the massive air base outside Da Nang.
Yeah, the one General Westmoreland had been assuring the
folks back home was secure.
They left country some 27 days later, those lads. During
that time, they re-joined us. We still had no idea what was going on. We stood watch
for six hours on and six hours off on the towers and bunkers. During the six
hours off we slept, went on patrols, strengthened the base security, cleaned
our weapons, and cursed those who had gotten us into this mess.
We had it luckier than most. Our area was protected by a
mountain to the east, a bay and deep-water harbor to the north, a river to the
west, and who knew how many bases and compounds to the south? There was still the
threat, taken quite seriously, that some band of zealots might decide to test
things at any given second. It was a country of people who had been seeking
freedom for over 300 years, so there were many bands of zealots.
We stood guard, watched, rested when we could, and waited.
Sainted Mother knew I carried a weapon, that sailors weren’t
supposed to, that the news on TV and in the papers was ghastly, and that it was
quite like me to spare her details of what was happening where I was. They say
that she would flinch every time the phone rang during that time.
Want to know how that felt? Just keep electing people who
think war is cool and profitable.
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