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Watching the War
July 3, 2011 |
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So, there I was in Vietnam. After eleven years in
the service, I had finally wound up in a war zone. I
arrived fresh from radar installations in northern
Montana – Cut Bank and Lewistown, to be precise –
not fully knowing what to expect. My presence in War
Zone C had almost as much to do with boredom as it
did with patriotism. Cut Bank Air Force Station, for
example, was forty-four miles from the city of Cut
Bank, a bustling metropolis of some two thousand
citizens and one stoplight. It was a great place for
a city boy like me to be stationed. All my hunting
and fishing had been done in concrete canyons.
Prior to leaving the States for ‘Nam, the Air
Force gave me a two-week course in California on the
M-16, hand grenade throwing, and some other stuff
that I don't remember now. Then they sent me on my
merry way to the Land of the Ao Dai. Combat trainin'?
What combat trainin'? I was a radar repairman; I
didn't need no stinkin' combat trainin'! And I
didn't get much, either. The Special Forces guys had
to take me in hand once I showed up in their camp.
After all, I wasn't supposed to be doing any
serious grunt-type fighting; that's what the Army
and Marines were for. I was a technician. The SF
troops did a better job of teaching us, anyway. We
learned how to use all the weapons in camp, from
mortars and the BAR to the venerable .45 automatic
handgun. Oscilloscopes and multimeters make
piss-poor weapons when somebody is intent on killing
you.
Initially, I found myself in an
interesting situation on Trang-Sup; I was in
Vietnam, but the war was on the periphery of my
existence; it was something happening off somewhere
else to somebody else. Except for obvious things
like sand-bagged walls, barbed wire, mortar
emplacements, and mine fields, I could almost have
been back on one of those remote Montana radar
sites. I got up each morning, greeted Nui Ba Dinh
brooding in the near distance, and went to work on
the radar. In the evenings, I hung out in the little
club or around the barracks.
Oh, and the
heat; don't forget that – or the smothering
humidity. Northern Montana never even dreamed of
heat like that. I was told that the camp itself was
an old French fort left over from the days of French
Indo-China. The towers at the corners of the camp,
plus the one in the center, also served as grim
reminders of where I was and what I could look
forward to in the future.
The most dangerous
thing I'd had to worry about in Montana was
accidentally electrocuting myself, or maybe
surprising a grumpy bear on an evening garbage can
raid. The dangerous creatures here also usually
waited for the dark of night to begin their
activities, only they were far more deadly than the
bears. Not to mention better armed. Besides, the
foraging bears weren't deliberately hunting people
with malice in their hearts. I wasn't in much danger
from them unless I was careless enough to get
between a mother and her cubs.
For the first
few weeks, life went along uneventfully as I became
accustomed to the camp routine. Sergeant of the
Guard was occasionally diverting. The Vietnamese
counterpart would appear on the hour to accompany
the American on his inspection trip around the
perimeter. The night was livened up when we found
somebody asleep, which was often enough. The little
Vietnamese NCO would sometimes proceed to do a tap
dance on the offending troop. After the first time,
I pretended not to notice anything unusual about an
NCO routinely kicking the shit out of a subordinate.
The perimeter guards were usually dressed in
black. I had thought only Charlie was supposed to
wear those black pajama type outfits, but here, even
the Americans sometimes wore them. The GIs usually
wore the black PJs more for comfort while in camp
than for anything else.
As I said, those
first weeks at Trang-Sup passed almost without
incident. At night, we sometimes sat on a sandbagged
wall and “watched the war” off in the distance. The
far away rumble of detonating ordinance pointed up
the flashes from explosions and tracer fire. The
tracers looked like distant fireflies dancing about
in the darkness as aircraft pressed the attack.
Flares washed the tracers from the night, and then
slowly sank below the horizon like a descending
stage curtain while the lights went down and the
scene faded to black as the attack ended.
Two
West Virginians – an Airman named White and an Army
Special Forces guy named Larry Moore – sometimes
brought their guitars out and we would sing along as
they played. Being an indifferent pianist, I had to
admire their skillful musicianship. Once, when I had
trouble singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone,'
because I didn't know the words, a helpful
lieutenant obligingly fed me each line. He jokingly
said that I sang much better than he did anyway. It
was all rather surreal. There I was, perched on
sandbags in Vietnam and singing protest songs, the
lyrics of which were being supplied to me by an
officer. Fantastic.
Then, one night, I awoke
in the humid darkness to the chunk of mortars
exploding outside and the insistent sound of the
alarms. A rather sickly siren and a loud, strident
ringing like an angry, uninterrupted, old-fashioned
telephone bell were announcing that the war was no
longer just beyond the horizon; the vacation was
over. I had, instantly and permanently, switched
from interested observer to active participant. As I
ran to my machine gun, I heard odd buzzing sounds,
which, I realized with a shock, meant that bullets
were passing unnervingly close to me.
Once
inside the pitch-black machine gun bunker, I
strained to see out the gun port. My companion
muttered, “I wonder if there are any snakes in
here.” I considered throttling him; I hate snakes
and I had not been in the bunker at night before.
The war, without warning, had suddenly moved up
close and personal. It was now crouching just on the
other side of the sandbags, watching me. And the
song it was singing was not about protest; it was
about Death. |
 By
Thurman P. Woodfork
Copyright 2002
About
Author...
Thurman P. Woodfork (Woody) spent his
Air Force career as a radar repairman in places as disparate as
Biloxi, Mississippi; Cut Bank, Montana; Tin City, Alaska; Rosas,
Spain and Tay Ninh, Vietnam. In Vietnam, he was assigned to
Detachment 7 of the 619th Tactical Control Squadron, a Forward Air
Command Post located on Trai Trang Sup. Trang Sup was an Army
Special Forces camp situated about fifty miles northwest of Saigon
in Tay Ninh province, close to the Cambodian border.
After Vietnam, Woody remained in the Air Force for nine more years.
Visit
Thurman P. Woodfork's site for more information |
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