Bien Hoa AB
- 1968 The truth about Security Police Red Horse Augmentees is that
we were the guys who could be spared. It was not so much that we were
a bunch of misfits, though there were elements of that in our selection.
For most of us it was just our jobs. Me, for instance; I was supposed
to spray bugs and trap rats. That is, after all, what MOS 56650 engineering
entomology specialists do. I would do this in accordance with the basic
Red Horse mission which was to carve a base capable of handling a squadron
of heavy fighters from virgin territory in 30 days. If you are trying
to do this in a jungle or swamp or somewhere that diseases are carried
by critters like mosquitoes or ticks then Red Horse was going to need
bug stompers to protect our guys from the nasty critters. And
even if we weren't needed for our main specialty we were cross-trained
into nearby fields.
I occasionally worked
on our water truck and helped SSgt Nonaka haul water from the base plant
up to our elevated tank on Red Horse Hill. I also received some cross
training into air conditioning. I was taught how to carry the compressor
end of a window unit in order to earn my very small end of the take
when we fixed air conditioners and ice makers for other outfits. Of
course we maintained Red Horse equipment for free which meant that the
Red Horse dayroom was always cool and always had ice. We had built our
own barracks with its own little quad and individual cabins for our
senior NCOs. Our Colonel lived in a fine trailer over on the old part
of the base and his air conditioning always worked. I was very distant
from the Colonel, but I liked my working environment.
I was able to take off
to do "termite inspections" for whole mornings. I read and shopped and
dropped into the NCO Club for pre-lunch drinks with some other characters
who somehow had been temporarily cut loose from accountability in the
middle of this strangely peaceful war. And that was the strange thing
about it. Daytime on Bien Hoa AB was, if anything, even livelier
and more colorful than daily life on a stateside base. Because bug sprayers
are charged with chasing varmints in base housing I got to know a little
about some of the strangeness of family life. But the invariable rule
stateside was "that nothing can be seen from the street"--Bien Hoa was
in the heart of the orient, and they didn't have that rule.
The base was a collage
of laundry flying from backyard lines, structures of every sort of function
and design. Vietnamese single-family huts could be seen from some sections
of the perimeter and their version of a townhouse from the section next
to the town itself. On the base we lived in sandbag bunkered hootches
with cloth tops, individual hootches and trailers, large two story 50
man barracks, and an assortment of hangars, butler buildings, Quonset
huts, French bunkers and several institutional buildings done in something
from the French Colonial era. The French stuff looked like a concrete
version of Napoleon's idea of classic Greek architecture. Heavy and
stolid and overlaid with a patina of mold or something that had darkened
and mottled the exterior wall into various shades of greenish tan.
I was knocked out of
my job as a bug bonker by the ranch hands who flew over Bien
Hoa every month or so in their spray bar equipped C-123s and dosed the
bugs-and-us with Malathion. We were moving into two story wooden barracks
when I arrived. The two hootches still in use over by the outdoor theater
didn't want any new guys so we moved right in to these fairly plush
conditions of two story wooden barracks with fully louvered screened
sides. Each two man bunk had a 36" ceiling fan. In the evening this
arrangement was fairly comfortable and permitted us to sleep. I must
have got the habit there because now it is almost impossible for me
to sleep without a fan blowing air over me.
I had the life of
Riley. In the morning we would very visibly run our rat traps in
the cantonment area. Then, having done our duty for all to see we would
separate after agreeing to meet later in the day to perform more "duty."
This was where my free time came in. I was working my way through the
James Michener and Frank Yerby collections down at the paperback trading
library. I would go over to the music library and record stuff to bring
back to the reel to reel in my cubicle. Once I decided to go swimming
at the small pool at the NCO Club. It was like swimming in over chlorinated
piss. Once was enough, but I had to do it once just so I could tell
the tale.
So they had a certain
number of us at loose ends and General Momyer or somebody wanted to
have his "pink ponies" live up to the line in their song "We can build
and we can fight." We had all gone through two weeks of basic infantry
training under the supervision of some very able Sergeants from the
Air Police Academy in San Antonio. These guys treated us with respect
while they taught us to respect our weapons. It was while I was on bivouac
during this training that my M-16 jammed. We were using blanks for realism
during maneuvers which made a jam more likely. It was the damnedest,
most frustrating thing. I am grateful that I was not in a real war at
the time. We were in a field exercise and I had just fired. I heard
the spring in the shoulder stock go "sproing" and the slap of the bolt.
I pulled the trigger for the next round and it didn't move. I had trained
on the M-1 Garand, M-1 carbine, '03 bolt action Springfield. I tried
pulling the charging handle. Nothing happened. I tried to find something
to slap to force the bolt forward. No luck. I remembered that if the
weapon had been fired enough it might have enough heat to cause the
round in the chamber to fire by "cooking off". Even blank rounds can
be dangerous if they go off unexpectedly. I sat down and waited while
the rifle cooled. It seemed like an hour because people were running
around me in the Florida panhandle forest firing off blanks and capturing
each other and being ruled dead by the umpires and I had to hide out
and wait for my M-16 to come to its senses and get to work. I dreaded
having that happen when it was for real.
So there I was running
at large on a big air base--you know it was too good to last. Eventually
somebody in the office figured out that the bug sprayers weren't really
doing anything. Then they put that together with the fact that the SP
squadron needed warm bodies. I also had apparently demonstrated some
sense with firearms. The worst they expected us to do under actual fire
was freeze up. That's bad, but it is redeemable. A kick in the ass is
recommended as initial therapy. And it is not the worst. It is not suddenly
standing up from the hole like John Wayne and bravely facing the enemy
down with your fierce visage as you spray him with .223 lead.
I think that we started
our initial augmentee-assignments just after Christmas 1967. During
this time we were either delivered to the SP squadron at Guardmount
or, more often, parceled out to various SP positions as directed by
one of the shift NCOs. Once I actually wound up in the back of a jeep
watching the real SPs pull on doors in the work and storage area and
answer calls while a can of beenie-weenies was cooking on the manifold.
This was just routine police work. Or a couple of us might wind up assigned
to one of the French forts, or one of us might join an SP in his "foxhole"--that's
what we Red Horse types called them although they were just a little
circle of sandbags laid on the ground. I wondered how effective they
would be against a round from an AK.
The night of January
28th was not quite as routine as my previous assignments. We were informed
that Intelligence had "good information" that something was up and we
might be hit. I was assigned to the end of a ramp (delta?) down by the
POL dump. I think there were one or two other Augmentees and a couple
or three SPs as well. I thought I was very military at the time (Red
Horse could do that to you), so I asked what our assignment was and
where we were to take positions if we were attacked.
"Take positions? Crap!
I'll tell you what to do. Pray!" said the SP three-striper who was evidently
in charge. "You see those POL tanks?" He gestured in the direction of
the massive fuel storage tanks. "That one is full. If it gets hit it'll
burn, but the dike should hold it. Now this one over here is about 2/3,
3/4 full and you pray it might burn too--I don't know. Now this one,"
the POL guys told me about" it's empty. And you better pray like hell
that it don't take a 122. Cause if it does we are all going to be greased."
"Oh," I said, "I never
thought of that."
"But don't worry." He
continued, "Charlie's not really after us. He wants to hit the planes.
We only get fried by accident. Why one time when they killed an Airman
in a rocket attack, Hanoi Hannah apologized and said they were truly
sorry because the brave freedom fighters of the South Vietnamese People's
Army and their brave volunteer comrades from the Army of the Peoples
Republic of Vietnam had only meant to hit the planes." I had no way
of knowing if this was true, but it sure sounded impressive. So the
conversation began. The SPs filled us in on their experiences and we
shared ours.
I got the impression
that SAC bases were pretty rough on SPs. These guys recounted experiences
of going out the barracks window barefoot into the snow with civvies
in hand to avoid having to go and stand next to a B-52 (which was in
no real danger because it was miles from anywhere remotely civilized
guarded by blowing snow and 5 degrees below zero temperatures.) just
because somebody who thought he was the next Curtis LeMay had decided
to call an alert. We talked about our girls and how much time we had
to go in the war.
The area supervisor,
a tech sergeant, came around in his jeep with a coffee urn wired to
the back. He said things were pretty quiet around the base then continued
on his rounds. We smoked, and talked, and walked around, and stared
at the distant horizon looking for trouble. Somewhere between two and
three AM (my time may be a little off) the coffee jeep came back. I
filled my canteen cup from the tank. The area "supe" said if nothing
happened soon they were going to call it a night and send the Augmentees
home. That sounded good to me.
I was standing facing
the flightline, though I couldn't see it because of the buildings in
the way. My back was to the storage tanks. The army "black hats" had
a big chopper parking area to my right. We had seen army sentries and
outfitters over there from time to time. Suddenly there was a loud "bang"
from that direction. I thought and maybe said, "Those army guys really
screwed up this time." I thought they had managed to blow up a chopper
while repairing it.
Then there was another
"bang!" also from the direction of the chopper pad. I had never heard
a 122mm rocket before except from a mile or more away and inside a bunker.
I now think that these were the impacts on the perimeter road which
was hundreds of yard on the other side of the choppers. We began a frantic
scramble for cover. There was only room in the foxhole for two guys.
I ran a couple of paces up the road that ran to the to the ramp and
dropped into the ditch on my left. Now the warning siren started up.
The base seemed to be moaning as if it were a wounded animal. More "BANG",
BANG, BANG. Some of the reports were distant. Some were pretty near.
Then "BANG" one that was real close. I heard something go over my head
with a sort of wavering hiss or tremolo shriek, my nose itched. I brushed
off some of the weeds the shrapnel had cut and dumped on my face. I
tried to get deeper into that ditch. Tried to wriggle my way down. We
had pissed in that ditch earlier. God knew what else was in there. I
didn't care. I wanted to dig back to the world.
There was a bright light
and I looked up toward the repair sheds. An F-100 had been hit and was
burning. At the entrance to the POL dump a fuel truck had been holed
by a piece of shrapnel. For some reason known but to God, it was not
burning. I wouldn't have noticed it except I smelled kerosene. Saw it
flowing down the road into the dump and looked back up the stream to
see this yellow fuel truck with a hole in it and beyond that the burning
F-100. We had to stay down a long time. As the 100 burned it began to
cook off ammo. No real force of course, it wasn't going through a barrel.
We heard a lot of bangs, and every once in a while the sound of a slug
bouncing off the siding of a hangar or skipping down the ramp.
When things cooled off
we hunkered down as close to the Motorola two-way as we could get and
tried to follow the action. The dispatcher was not the usual one. One
of the SPs said the Colonel was on the horn, but how would I know. Sometimes
we could hear the incoming calls, usually a request for confirmation
that we had friendlies "our people" in a certain area. Usually answered
in the affirmative. A few times "No! We don't have anybody there. Shoot
to stop! Shoot to stop!" Then, in response to an unheard transmission,
"Shoot to stop! Shoot to stop!" Occasionally we heard small arms fire
at a greater or lesser distance.
I didn't wear a watch,
but sometime after daylight they picked us up and moved us to positions
right on the flightline. It wasn't exactly clear what we were supposed
to do. All around us the techs and mechs were sending up aircraft. In
our helmets and flak jackets loaded down with ammo and gear we looked
out of place. Sometime in the early afternoon an officer came around
and told us that we could sleep provided we curled up in our holes to
do so. I was never so grateful for permission to stand down. I started
cutting Zs right there in the aircraft parking area while jets were
taxiing by to give the VC a little of their own back.
That was the first
day of Tet '68 for me, as a Red Horse Security Police Augmentee.
