377th
Combat Support Group, USAF, 1967-1968
Sitting Duck
- I'll never forget the night I saw Charlie. Not the VC Charlie,
just a guy named Charlie. Though time has blurred the names
of most the troops I lived and worked with at Tan Son Nhut,
I'll never forget his name because every time the word Charlie
used it always referred to "the commies", or "the VC", you
know---the ENEMY! Now there, standing before me, was
a real person named Charlie! Rusted tight in my mind for eternity.
Midnight had come and gone
and I had walked to the mail room to blow the cobwebs out
of my box. The lights were off outside the building as usual
and as I approached I noticed an airman leaning against the
wall, reading a letter by the flickering yellow pall of descending
flares.
"How's it goin'?" I nodded
to him as I walked by. He jerked his head toward me, startled.
I felt as though I had intruded upon his quiet solitude and
muttered an apology.
"Oh, No problem, just lost
in thought." He replied.
Box empty, I turned to leave.
He called me over and we made small talk about some of the
action that had been keeping us awake every night since Tet.
I couldn't help get the feeling this guy wanted to relieve
a terrible weight on his shoulders. I looked questioningly
at the handwritten letter open and limp in his hand, and he
told me it was from his twelve-year-old sister. I asked him
if she was OK. He choked, said "Sure", then quietly added
that the previous night he had killed a girl the same age
as his sister.
Then he started to cry.
When the big offensive hit
Tan Son Nhut that memorable night of January 31st, 1968, Charlie
had been one of two guards manning a remote guard post on
the outskirts of the base. He'd never pulled guard duty before
but the 377th Security Police Squadron
needed
reinforcements for Base Security, and he had volunteered as
an augmentee.
Everything went wrong that
could go wrong that Tet-night! Not just for Charlie, or even
the Viet Cong, but for all of us. No, this wasn't exactly
the Battle for Khe Sahn or the Siege of Hamburger
Hill, but it was the wanton onslaught of enemy forces
stabbing everything at once into the vital organs of South
Vietnam and though we were not caught completely off guard,
we were not well prepared.
The story that Charlie revealed
to me was a tragedy consisting of valor, duty and guilt. It
forced me to re-evaluate my role and purpose in the war, but
what about Charlie? What destruction would that awesome feeling
of guilt, however undeserved, wreak upon his character and
moral fiber? Would it fester and devour him to spit him out
at the end of life a withered and empty old man? Funny thing
about life: Though it always fulfills completion, it leaves
a lot unfulfilled.
Around 2300 hours Charlie had
just checked in on his radio and his eyes were straining into
the blackness surrounding his sandbagged guardpost. His sentry
partner had snuck out the back to water the grass when Charlie
thought he heard a movement near the sandbags directly beneath
the protruding barrel of his weapon. The one he'd learned
to operate the preceding day. He froze. The cold finger of
fear ran its jagged nail into the small of his back. Desperately
focusing on the sound, he scanned the darkness but the thumping
of his heart confused him.
Then he saw a human figure scrambling away and he screamed
"Đồng Lai - Đồng Lai!" (Halt! Halt!) This made the figure
pick up its pace so he leaped to the gun, charged the bolt
and held the trigger down. The M60 barked and shook in his
hands as the rounds leaped out at the target, Charlie's target.
He was blinded by the flaming muzzle blast.
Charlie huddled there in the
dark for a long while. The crack of small arms fire from other
battles being fought here and there around the sprawling base
seemed hushed and far. A Security Police gun jeep finally
drove up to investigate and an officer with a flashlight crept
out to the small figure lying discarded in the trampled grass.
With a motion of his hand he signaled Charlie and the others
to approach, which they did, slowly, as if wary of the dead.
In the circle cast by the hand-held light lay the remains
of a black-clad adolescent Vietnamese girl.
The girl had already penetrated
the perimeter, unseen, placed an armed satchel-charge explosive,
and was leaving the way she came in. For some unknown reason
the satchel charge she placed against the side of Charlie's
guard-post had not detonated. Was this child forced by the
VC to attempt to kill the two American sentries? The news
media back home would have us think so.
Months later, I thought of
Charlie as my flight landed stateside. Like so many of my
veteran brothers, I changed out of the uniform worn so proudly,
into civilian clothes as soon as I could. I feared what I
would do if a college student or hippy spat on me and called
me a baby-killer, like the stories we had all heard. Was it
coincidence that these home-grown atrocities soon halted when
the draft boards shut down?
I prayed that Charlie would
eventually see that little girl for what she really was, the
enemy. She was... Charlie.
From SITTING
DUCK, Tales of a Saigon Warrior by
Nik Boldrini
E4, USAF, 377th Combat Support Group
Tan Son Nhut AB, South Vietnam 1967-1968
