The Luckiest Guy in Vietnam

In May 1966, I was a U.S. Army sergeant stationed at Camp Drake, in Saitama Prefecture, Japan, on the western outskirts of Tokyo. Life was good. One dollar would buy 400 yen; by contrast, fifty years later a dollar yielded only 110 yen. A large bottle of Kirin beer on the economy cost 100 yen or 25 cents. This was important to a soldier earning $300 a month.

I lived in a two-storey duplex on Fuji View Avenue in military housing on a former Imperial Japanese Air Force base. Two months after my arrival the clouds cleared and there, framed at the end of the street, was a breathtaking view of Mount Fuji.

The overseas military club system was flourishing with low prices for food, drinks and the live B- or C-level floor shows which we thought were first-class.

It seemed to me then that this pleasant lifestyle would continue into some vague and undefined point in the future.

In the Army, a sergeant is known as a Non-commissioned Officer or NCO. However, no one in the Army ever thought of a sergeant as an officer without a commission. The first four ranks of enlisted people were: Recruit, Private, Private First Class and Specialist Fourth Class. I’m sure that some thoughtful system produced these names. The fifth level of enlisted rank was “Sergeant”… period. The levels above “Sergeant” were Staff Sergeant, Sergeant First Class, Master Sergeant (or First Sergeant, depending on position), and Sergeant Major, which was at the ninth level of rank. All persons at each NCO level could be addressed as “Sergeant” except those in the rank of First Sergeant and Sergeant Major. If anyone ever addressed a Sergeant Major as anything but “Sergeant Major,” they would immediately understand their error. A Sergeant Major was sometimes affectionately referred to as “S’madge,” but never to his or her face.

To the military purist, there was an NCO rank called “Corporal,” which was one level below “Sergeant.” In 20 years of military service I have never met or seen a corporal.

Like all enlisted people, and officers as well, I was a member of an Army branch which managed the careers of soldiers according to their jobs in related specialties. I was in the Signal Corps branch and my military occupational specialty was Communications Center Specialist. In the communications center, or comcenter, where I worked in Japan, we received and printed messages from the military network and made them available for the U.S. units in the Tokyo area. We also took their outgoing messages, converted them into teletype format and sent them into the same worldwide network.

As a sergeant, I was assigned as a shift supervisor, usually called a trick chief, in the comcenter with two men under me. It was a 24-hour operation. In order to provide a fairly normal schedule for the comcenter soldiers, three regular shifts were scheduled: days (8am-4pm), eves (4pm-12am) and mids (12am-8am) for five nonconsecutive days each week. A fourth or swing shift covered the irregular gaps that occurred every week.

Serving as a trick chief in the comcenter would be my only practical, day-to-day leadership experience before eventually arriving in Vietnam.

This was post-post-World War II--more than 20 years after the surrender--and Japan was still in a constant state of building: cement trucks were on the roads around the clock. There was still no sign of the prosperity that would emerge in later years. The Japanese seemed to be hardworking and friendly and many were curious about Americans despite the long period of occupation.

Most of the enlisted soldiers working in the comcenter were ardent, frequent and welcome customers of the corner bar near the camp, which was named the Corner Bar for obvious reasons. Sometimes I would accompany them and was treated especially well as the boss of the bar’s best patrons.

The Vietnam war was not a major issue in my professional military life then. I knew that if I was to be transferred to Vietnam, as a comcenter specialist I would live in a well-guarded area and work in an air-conditioned building. This was due to the classified nature of the messages we handled and the need to prevent our teletype and cryptographic equipment from overheating. In many ways I envisioned a potential tour in Vietnam as being much like Japan.

Although I had been in the Army for over four years and a sergeant for two, this was my first assignment in which I supervised other soldiers. So I was learning how to lead in a low-pressure, slow-moving environment. It was in this setting that I learned indirectly about the realities of Vietnam.

The comcenter was in a building that included some units to which we provided service. One unit we supported was on the other side of the post: the 249th General Hospital, which treated many of the serious casualties evacuated from Vietnam. We would receive message after message of six pages in length, the maximum possible in the system, listing the wounded soldiers who were being sent to the 249th. These messages included name, rank, unit, service number and nature of wound. The most commonly listed wound was “GSW” or Gun Shot Wound. Nevertheless, Vietnam and its toll still seemed disconnected from us in the comcenter despite the explicit daily reminders that we handled.

The comcenter had one locked entry door and a delivery window beside it, which was shrouded by curtains inside to maintain security of the interior. A buzzer would summon us to unlock the door for fellow comcenter workers or to deliver messages to our customers through the window. Inside were copies of current and filed classified messages, cryptographic devices and sometimes top secret transmissions. A .45 caliber pistol was on hand in case USSR agents would attempt a daring penetration. In charge of the center was a long-time civilian employee with an Army staff sergeant as his deputy. Another civilian, a washed-up alcoholic, performed some services that we didn’t understand.

Since our building had other units also operating on a 24-hour basis and Japanese labor was cheap, the snack bar down the hall was always open. Often on an evening or midnight shift, only two of us would be on duty. If one was typing a long message onto paper teletype tape for transmission, the other would go to the snack bar for coffee and return with his hands full carrying a tray.

Despite the seemingly impenetrable physical security features of the comcenter, a soldier, returning from the snack bar laden with a tray of coffee and unwilling to disturb his occupied coworker, could open the door from the outside with a well-placed kick. Naturally, this security flaw was outrageous and therefore kept in strict secrecy from the management by us shift workers.

Unexpectedly but inevitably, on one weekend the alcoholic civilian came in to do some work that had not been completed on time. Then to his amazement the door of the inviolate fortress banged open to reveal a soldier returning from a coffee run. The shocked civilian fled in confusion and the lock was quickly changed by the stunned and incredulous civilian manager.

This security upgrade lead to another situation that taxed my still underdeveloped leadership skills. On a major holiday in 1966, I was assigned to the midnight shift with only one other soldier, Jon, because it would be a slow night. Jon was a very devoted customer of the Corner Bar and that night he had clearly exceeded his limit. He was smashed. I had several options at that time, most of which would be harsh for Jon, but I decided to keep the incident to myself and assign him an unofficial punishment.

In the meantime, I went to the snack bar to get us both much-needed coffee. Since the door lock had been fixed, I had to ring the buzzer when I returned. No response. I rang again. Nothing. I knocked on the door and yelled for Jon. I couldn’t be too loud and attract attention from other around-the-clock offices on our floor. I would look really stupid standing in the hall, locked out of my own comcenter.

So I went to the delivery window which was barred and had a sliding wooden shade for security in addition to the interior curtain. I was able to wedge a spoon under the shade and raise it—another security issue that would have to be addressed. I could see into the comcenter because the security curtain had been pulled aside—yet another issue.

Lying on a table, 20 feet away, was Jon, dead to the world and snoring away. Mindful of too much noise, again I called to him but with no success. It would be about 30 minutes before one of our regular customers would arrive for a scheduled pickup of messages, but sometimes the officer-courier would appear earlier or later. If discovered, this situation would be very bad for Jon and not pleasant for me.

Desperate, I cast about for a solution before the courier arrived. Even worse would have been for a high precedence teletype message to arrive and not be processed.

I thought of throwing something at Jon but the bars were too narrow. Finally, I saw a hand-pump water fire extinguisher mounted in the hallway. I brought it over to the small shelf of the delivery window, aimed the nozzle through the bars and pumped. The water streamed out about 10 feet and died away. Another more vigorous pumping action shot the water more than 15 feet, three-quarters...