Do we have any Vietnam veterans posting on here?
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Sometimes, but not very often. -
I have the utmost respect for veterans. My PaPaw was 101st Airbore during ww2. My Dad and both his brothers were in Nam. I lost an uncle I never knew over there. The unfair treatment some veterans received returning home was one of the biggest black eyes this Country has ever received. A lot of those that were dishing out the abuse then are the same people today touting Socialism. In my opinion, the 60's began the downfall of this Country.Isaiah 5:20Comment
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There's not very much to tell. I was in the U. S. Air Force, assigned to Bien Hoa Air Base. ​There were some Army folks there, too, and some VNAF (Vietnam Air Force). The USAF folks were restricted to the base and weren't normally allowed to leave. I was off base twice during the year I was there. I went hopping around the country in an old C-47 once, and I got to go to sightsee Saigon once. Saigon was 17 miles from Bien Hoa.
We had a variety of aircraft stationed there. The primary fighter was the F-4. The VNAF had some A-1E Skyraiders stationed there. The USAF also the C-123 Provider. I think it was used to drop the infamous Agent Orange. Agent Orange was used to defoliate the trees so the Viet Cong could be seen from the air. There was a helicopter called the HH43 Huskey that was used for responding to inflight emergencies of other aircraft that were using the airfield. One interesting thing about the Huskey was that it couldn't fly in lightning storms because the blades of the propeller on top were made out of wood. There were a lot of inflight and ground emergencies. I was working one night when some Army guy hijacked a USAF C-141 that had landed there. He ended up shooting one of the crewmembers of that airplane, but the rest of the crew subdued him. A couple of B-52s landed there in a thunderstorm once. That caused a lot of headaches because B-52s weren't supposed to be on the ground anywhere in Viet Nam.
My job was to work with the airplanes coming and going. I filed their flight plans, except for the fighters stationed there. They didn't file flight plans because they didn't have time. They got notified to take off & go somewhere to bomb something, so they hopped in their F-4 & went. I worked primarily with the aircraft that were bringing in new troops from the states and taking those going home back to the U. S. They were called Liberty Birds. They were civilian charter aircraft that had a contract with the government to rotate troops. I was on duty when Bob Hope made his last appearance in the country. He landed there and went to Long Binh. It was an Army base a few miles from Bien Hoa.
A lot of the local Vietnamese people worked on base. They did some clerical work and things such as building maintenance and clean up. One old lady did the laundry for the people who lived in my barracks. There were about 50 of us living in the building. I think we paid her about $1 a month to do our laundry.
We didn't use American money. We had what was known as scrip. That was to prevent American money from working its way into the local economy. Every few months, our scrip would be replaced with a new version. Whatever scrip had made its way into the local black market was made useless.
The food we got at the chow hall wasn't very good, so I basically lived on Dr, Pepper and peanut M & Ms. The chow hall served 4 meals a day--breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight chow. Midnight chow was when we got real eggs. The eggs served at breakfast were powdered.
We were attacked by rockets & mortars 9 times in the year I was there. A siren system tried to give us a little bit of notice so we could make it to a bunker or some other safe place. I believe 1 guy died in 1 of those attacks when he didn't make it to shelter in time.
I didn't receive any kind of bad treatment when I got home. I was stationed in Topeka, Ks. when I returned. Maybe if I'd been stationed somewhere else, things might have been different in that respect.
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Thank you for sharing, and for your service.John 3:3
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That was interesting, samsdad. Thanks for sharing your story with us. Vietnam ended during my senior year in high school and , growing up, scenes from the war seemed to be a part of every evening's news. Guys I went to school with were up next if it hadn't ended then.Comment
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samsdad, thanks. There's nothing like reading a first hand account.
I didn't know we had helicopters with wooden blades there.
Were the Vietnamese pilots considered to be good fliers?
Did the B-52s usually fly in from Guam and Thailand, or other places?
Were the flights that took servicemembers between there and the U.S. on big commercial jetliners on airlines like Braniff? Do you remember where they'd stop in between there and the west coast?
What was Saigon like? Did you enjoy it there? What was most memorable there?
Thanks for posting, and for your service.Comment
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Actually, I was about to say that I didn't remember the VNAF pilots having a lot of problems, but I remembered that 1 pilot managed to forget to lower his landing gear before he landed--not once, but twice. If I remember correctly, his squadron commander shot him in the head while he sat in the ****************pit after the second time.
​I think the B-52s mostly came from Guam, but I'm not sure. That was a long way above my pay grade.
Braniff was one of the carriers. Others that I remember are Delta, Flying Tiger, Continental, Pan Am, & TWA. There were probably others that I've forgotten. I went to Viet Nam on Flying Tigers & came home on Continental. When I went over, I left from McChord AFB, Washington (Seattle). We stopped in Anchorage and
Tokyo. When I came home, we came direct to McChord and continued on to McGuire AFB, NJ. A lot of the flights going over left from Travis AFB, CA. Enroute stops were the Philippines, Japan, and Hawaii. Folks from Viet Nam went to Australia, Hawaii, Singapore, Bangkok, & Hong Kong on R & R. I never went. I was married & couldn't afford it.
Saigon was ok if you kind of forgot that the VC might be around somewhere. The taxicabs were called cyclos. They were motorcycles with a two-person seat on 2 wheels behind it. One thing I remember was having lunch at the Continental Hotel (if I remember the name correctly). I think it had been there since the French days. I had French onion soup. It was delicious.
One other thing about Saigon: The Air Base there was named Tan Son Nhut. It was 17 miles from Bien Hoa. Not long after I got there, a USAF pilot landed his airplane at Bien Hoa when he thought he was landing at Tan Son Nhut.
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I spent 6 months in VN in 1968. I was in the Army, stationed at Fort Bragg, NC. I worked in a supply warehouse for an artillery battalion, AKA battalion S-4. We moved as a battalion in April 68, and I was in what they call the advanced party. An artillery battalion has about 600 guys, and the advance party was about 120 - guys selected to fly over and set up our assigned area. The remainder came on a 22-day ship ride. The flight took 56 hours - on a C-130. 120 guys, mostly sitting on boxes of equipment that we would need to set up.
The reason I only spent 6 months is because when a battalion moves, it moves with everybody who has at least 90 days service remaining. Some guys got over there and soon were processing out to go home.
That area was at Bearcat. http://720mpreunion.org/history/proj...arcat_area.gif It was a fairly large outpost in the middle of the jungle. Another guy, a Georgia boy named SGT Sammy Smith, and I moved into an S-4 warehouse, a building about 20'x80' if I recall, and lived alone there for almost 3 weeks, until the rest of the troops arrived. That was the scariest time - all we had for power was a small generator, but we didn't run it at night because it was noisy and we couldn't hear! The two of us ended up building a room in the corner of the warehouse, and that's where we lived for the duration.
The S-4 job is to keep the battalion supplied. Among a lot of other things, this required a couple of us to drive a "deuce-and-a-half" (2 1/2 ton truck) out into the jungle, wherever our shooters were located.
Rocket and mortar attacks were fairly regular. Smitty and I had about a 100-yard dash to the nearest bunker. (I can't remember why we didn't build our own, or even why we chose not to sleep in an already-bunkered hooch with the other guys. Young and stupid, I guess.)
There was a tower with a rotating red light in the middle of Bearcat. When they knew enemy was in the area, all lights went off on the post including that red light. If I stood up in my cot, I could see it, so I was in the habit of doing that all through the night, just checking. What's funny about that is that I continued to stand up in the bed (half asleep) for about a year after I got home. My wife didn't know what was going on!
I didn't have a lot of negative fall-out after coming home. Except maybe the guy who I considered to be a close friend acting like it was no big deal, because I wasn't infantry and actually shooting at people. Trust me, it was a very big deal for everybody who went, no matter their role.
I also cut all ties to the many good friends I made while there. I really don't know why, other than I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me. I regret it now very much.Comment
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My older brother served just short of two tours in Vietnam. 1968 to 1970... He was Seabee naval combat construction engineer... Got sent state side afterwards getting shot for a second time in early 1970...
He is very active in the retirement get togethers..Comment
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I'm glad I stumbled upon this thread. The Vietnam War is infinitely fascinating to me. For obvious reasons it gets kind of drowned out by WWII, which is unfair to the soldiers who had to be over there. (Though some of them, like Virginia Blue, may have wanted to forget.)
I agree with Blue Heaven that the way veterans were treated was horrendous, but I would disagree that the '60s began the downfall of America. The colossal amount of lies the government told and continued to tell for literally decades stained this country, and I would like to think had I been alive then I would've been able to hold two thoughts in my head about Vietnam: to both appreciate the veterans who served while also trying to bring change to a situation that NEVER should have happened.
That war was so avoidable and it's basically what happens when a government is blighted by paranoia and boredom. The lies that were told about why we were in Vietnam spanned presidents, crossed over party lines, and should be a lesson for anybody in power--but unfortunately it hasn't been.
The Fog of War is the best thing I've ever seen on the war.Comment
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