Good to be King
By King Harris
Every year about this time, I occasionally think back to the Vietnam War. It was July of 1969 that I went over there, and I’d be there for a year until I could come back to “The World.”
Despite my status as a deferred college student and a Navy reservist, in 1968 I graduated with an English degree, and that’s what got me boots on the ground. With Vietnamization now part of a new policy, with Americans handing over equipment and supplies to the South Vietnamese, who also needed to learn how to speak English, so we could train them for the transition.
So, since I had a B.S. in English, the Pentagon thought I would make an excellent language instructor. When I heard I was being ordered to Saigon, I gave the Navy my opinion of the idea, telling them this was the dumbest concepts I ever heard of.
You don’t go off to a war zone to teach kids another language; it won’t work, I told them. All my Navy and Air Force pals at the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, felt the same way.
Not that our complaints made any difference. But I felt compelled to show the brass for example that the Vietnamese would never be able to pronounce the word “Thanks,” one of the first terms listed in the Army manual.
They can’t enunciate “TH-AN-KS.” Having got “no thanks” for my observations, after six weeks we arrived at Ton Sa Nute. I got there ahead of my language pals and went directly to a Navy office to find out where I’d be billeted.
I was immediately ordered to put on this rank flak jacket and dirty helmet, grab an M-14 rifle, and make myself useful on guard duty.
“Guard what?” I asked. (The building had been bombed five days before I got there). Although Tet the year before had depleted the Viet Cong to a large degree, the war was still raging, which prompted me as soon as I got to my permanent quarters to ask a Marine, “Hey, you’ve been here a while. How safe is it here being a blonde-haired, blue-eyed U.S. Navy seaman wearing jungle green sporting an M-16?” “Safer than New York City,” he quickly shot back.
Well, THAT made me feel better. After having protested America’s role in Vietnam over four years of college, it quickly became apparent that I was right in concluding that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt.
Take the black market, for example. It’s all around you as soon as you get there. If you can’t find American goods at the local PX (a military style Costco of its day) you could find anything you need on the streets.
And if you did find something at the PX, like Cognac, you’d simply leave it in the cab taking you back to your barracks and the cabbie would pay you four times what it was worth. Currency exchange was a joke, and on a larger scale, any much needed supplies meant for the field went to corrupt commanders who literally stole entire ships.
All this of course wasn’t the only assault to your senses. It was hot and humid, malodorous, noisy, and downright dangerous.
I was not even there for a month when the Air Force language school was blown up by a suicide car bomber. It never occurred to me that English teachers could be such a threat, but we were, apparently, and would be for the entire tour.
The most worrisome fear was that you didn’t know who might be the enemy; you couldn’t trust anyone. If for example you were out at night and stopped by the “white mice” (Saigon Police) they would threaten you with jail time, unless you paid them whatever you had in your wallet.
So new recruits in country spent the nighttime on the rooftops, smoking pot and listening to “Suite: Judy Blue-eyes” being delivered over Armed Forces radio.
The lifers, meanwhile, invaded the bar scene and tore up the joints, getting in fights or receiving wicked diseases from way too many prostitutes. Guess who went to LBJ (Long Binh Jail) for such behavior? The potheads, of course.
It was going to be a long year.
