THE DI AN DIARY--MEMOIRS FROM THE VIETNAM WAR/PART SIX: DOWNTIME AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN A FORWARD BASE CAMP

 


Somewhere between 0900 and 1000 hours I was walking into the Headquarters mess hall hooch, and the cooks would feed me whatever and however much of anything I wanted for breakfast...pancakes, eggs any way I wanted them, bacon, sausage, biscuits, toast, and S.O.S (chipped beef and gravy would be the polite translation).  I began to gain some weight back to my emaciated frame.

Decompressing with some hoops. 1969.
I usually would let a little time pass to decompress, often de-stressing on the makeshift basketball court, before lifting the mosquito netting and crawling into my bunk in my room at the back of the barracks. With my work now from 2300 hrs to 0900 hrs, more if required for debriefing completing sitreps, ect., daytime sleep was an adjustment, and I was always restless from the stresses of the previous night, drenched with sweat and on edge. My brain could never let go of the sounds, the voices, the urgencies of the night before.

My nest. 1968-1969.

Nam, our hooch “Momma-san” always performed her chores and cleaning with consideration of my needs for sleep.  Her work was always impeccably performed, and as quietly  as a church mouse. When I awoke in the afternoons we would converse for awhile as she continued her work.  She was petite and demure, but knew how to stand up for herself and took no guff or liberties from any of the guys in the headquarters hooch. I cannot think of my time in Vietnam without thinking about Nam and her kindly manner and always ready smile.

Nam.  Fondly remembered.

I slept, such as it was, through lunch into the early evening.  I showered, and headed to the mess hooch for a light meal, still stuffed from breakfast.  This time I ate whatever the cooks had prepared for the Headquarters Company compound, usually a good variety. 
 
 The rest of the Headquarters personnel assigned to the “Dagger” hooch were daytime employees of the military machine, and in the  evenings before I had to report and they, conversely, were decompressing from their day shifts, we would hang out and tell stories, share news from home as well as goodies from the care packages recently received.  Work was never discussed.

Many cans of sterno evaporated, heating through the contents of cans of beanie-weenies and Vienna sausages.  We played cards, threw knives at targets drawn on wooden walls, and during reflective moments, talked about our girls and families.  About the time most of the guys either turned into their bunks or headed to the enlisted hooch for a couple of beers, I slung the M-16 over my shoulder, and crossed the road to work in the T.O.C., hoping for a relative quiet night for our men on ambush.  They were few and far between.  

It is important to note ,that, other than when performing duty,  there was down time in base camp. As all men in all wars, we found time to laugh and play and occupy ourselves with more pleasant matters than engaging “Charlie.” We wrote lots and lots of letters home. Guys in support mode in the base camp wrote every day. Guys coming in from the field wrote during their “stand-down” time between missions. We posed for pictures, usually shaving and showering to impress our loved ones back home. Certainly there was no other time in which we could pose for pictures or do our writing, other than these “off-duty” moments.


Christmas Eve 1968.  A letter to Mother and Dad.

While there was no way, room, or equipment to play anything as elaborate as baseball we did tack up an improvised wooden backboard with an actual hoop and net, and played basketball my participation was in the mornings solo, but by evening accompanied by a half dozen or more of the guys just getting off their day shift. We made a makeshift NCO and enlisted club out of an empty hooch and the C.O. provisioned us somehow with beer and liquor. A shot of Jack Daniels, as I recall, whether straight or with cola, was fifty cents, as was a beer. We played cards. We made any one receiving a care package from home our best buddy of the day. There is no way to say in words what those goodies did for our morale. Sandy and Mother and Dad, and once from my sister-in-law Sharon always seemed to get one to me at just the right time.


We seemed to always have plenty of dogs around that we were always playing with. Puppies really. The Mama-Sans that had security clearance to clean the hooches brought them in. They knew the American G.I’s would fatten them up quickly. As soon as they were of a suitable size, they would just disappear on some days when the trucks took the women back to their villages. The stew pots stayed full thanks to our unintentional efforts to keep the pups well fed. No matter how hard we tried to keep a dog we had become attached to, protected, one day it would just be nowhere to be found.


The author, Headquarters Tactical Operations SGT Keith Ragan getting some puppy love, 1969.


The local Vietnamese were opportunistic diners. This wasn't Saigon. These were people from the rural countryside and they had adopted a diet of subsistence and necessity. They ate a lot of different kinds of insects, and were particularly fond of rice beetles, which they dispatched upon meeting in the rice fields. Every small village market had rats, wild and some almost as big as our domestic cats, hung or spread out for sale or barter. They enjoyed pork and many of the rural farmers around all the hamlets kept and raised pigs for the family table. It was used as a condiment usually, very sparingly, with various rice dishes. Rice was at the center of every meal, as were soups with various greens and spices. Eels and fish were not as commonly available near the base camp, but were very sparingly used both fresh and fermented into sauces when obtained.

At a rural market.  Credit to the unknown owner.


Headquarters enlisted hooch/barracks 1969.  I was in a separate room on the camera side of this photo








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