Remembering the Locals

          My year in Vietnam was filled with numerous enlightening lessons concerning the blessings of America. Until my service in Vietnam, I had taken most of my middle-class upbringing for granted. I believe that my awareness of the contrasts between life in the States and the plight of the locals in the "Nam" seemed to grow as my year evolved. Eventually, I came to realize that the place lacked a sense of community and citizenship. In other words, that the populace lacked any real sense of responsibility associated with neighborhood, community and nation. Like other young American soldiers, I was struck by the depth of poverty for the local population. In the War zone there were none of the "community" services and few of the conveniences that we grow up taking for granted here in the States. Most of the people of Vietnam were small and thin. I soon learned that frequent sickness and internal parasites were simply part of their lives. In most of the places where we worked, the villages had no plumbing or running water.

          I remember one of my first introductions to all of this came within the first week of being assigned to serve as a rifleman for Delta 4/12 199th Light Infantry Brigade. The memory involved my squad moving out the gates of F. S. B. Elvira in the early evening, on our way to "bush" (patrol to an night ambush site.) Anyway there was a very small village called My Yen that was on the way out of the base. I remember walking along with the road side on my left and on the right was a row of hooches (huts, usually constructed of grass, straw, mud, sticks, discarded cardboard and occasional sheets of rusty, probably stolen, corrugated metal roofing tin). In the squad one had to walk alone, keeping a substantial distance from the man in front and in back of you. This was required infantry movement to avoid too many casualties at any one time if the enemy opened up with automatic weapons' fire. All of a sudden there was a big commotion in the darkness of the hooch to my right and then a half-dressed woman came running right out in front of me holding a baby at arms length. The noise in the hooch continued as an old gray-haired wretch in black pajamas came to the open doorway. I eventually realized that the screeching and squawking was the old hag laughing. The child had the runs, squirting a stream all the way from inside the hooch, right past me and into the edge of the road. I backed up just in time. The bare breasted woman stood there for a while, angry and messed over, holding the baby at arms length until the child's runny bowels were finished. Water was hard for these people to get and keep for things like washing. Diapers would have needed washing. It would be an understatement, to say that Pampers were not in this picture.

          The edge of the road was the sewer system for most of the country. Then, with a hard rain, much of the defecation could wash right back up to the hooch, or, if the conditions were good, the stuff would wash on down to the neighbors hooch. Those who lived higher on the hill had a definite advantage. No doubt this had been the norm for centuries of babies’ bowels, angry mothers, and cackling grandmothers.

           Eventually, I dropped my guard, gathered my composure, and quickened my pace to close the gap in the squad that had developed by my being taken back by the strange goings-on.

           I remember a big refuse dump located along one of the sides of the perimeters at F. S. B. Claudette where some of the local population would glean the garbage. Their treasures could be anything they could eat or take out for use or barter. Some of the locals doing this appeared to be ill and others were crippled. Some were very young children. To this day I hold the image of a young girl. She could not have been older then five. She was a mess, faded, pinkish, tattered rags for cloths and an un-kept matted mop of black hair that hung in a wild nest out around her dirty face. She had no shoes on her feet as she worked her way along the piles of rotting refuse, rusty tin and broken glass.

            I remember another of the locals who seemed to frequent the area outside Delta's section of bunkers along the perimeter of one of the fire support bases. This was an old lady who habitually came past in front of the area we guarded. Out from the bunkers, as with most of the bases, there were at least two wide wire barriers consisting of several layers of concertina wire piled up, wired together and then laced with trip wires which would pop and then illuminate if the wire was pulled or jerked. In our section, this old gray-haired skeleton in black pajamas would walk out along between the last ring of concertina and the garbage dump. Nearly every day, at about the same time in the afternoon, she would stop out there, squat as she dropped the bottom part of her black outfit and there she would take her dump. This sort of thing was quite normal if your were a local in Vietnam, but it was hard to get used to if you were a young GI from the US. Anyway, we often joked about this old creature. There was a standing discussion as to whether she did her business out there as a statement of contempt for us or if she was secretly sizing us up, looking for the weakest part of our defense and planning for the next night attack for her satchel charge carrying comrades.

            Later in the year, after moving from the Infantry to the 554th  Engineers, I was driving a jeep in a convoy of assorted supply and equipment transport trucks. We were working our way back down QL13 from An Loc toward or base at Lai Khe. Several of the villages along the rout were involved in the process of making charcoal for transport and sale down the highway to customers in the Saigon area. In one of the villages the charcoal kilns and village hooches were scattered in patchwork fashion up the side of a long hill below the road we were on. As our convoy moved along above the village, we could see that the lower hooches were on fire. I can still see the flames licking high in the air below a wide line of billowing smoke rising, as the fire consumed the bamboo, thatch and meager possessions of the unfortunate townspeople who lived along the bottom portion of the hill.

           Of course, the American way to deal with their crisis was to stop the convoy, collect tools to fight the fire, and then run down the hill to help put the fire out. We did just that. It took us about thirty minutes to get the burn under control. In the process, I noticed that the locals seemed to be unconcerned about the plight of their neighbors unless the fire moved over and began to threaten their own homes. Only then did they seem to get involved in our struggle with the flames.

           Although their behavior seemed selfish and strange, things were about to become even more disturbing for us.

           When the fire was out, I joined the line of other sweaty, tired and smoky soldiers returning up the hill to the vehicles parked along the edge of the road. After we got to our vehicles in the convoy we were surprised to discover that every unsecured gas can, wrench, spare tire, ammo box, article of clothing, box of C-rations, everything that was not bolted down, had been removed from our trucks and equipment.