Then it was Vietnam - part 1

1967 and just about a year left of Airmening, with visions of civilian life bubbling in my head, I was called into the first sergeant's office .  Not a very surprising event as we had become close. I had come to believe that my creative soldiering had impressed him. This was so obvious, why else would he invite me to have conversations about my soldiering and the extra duty most of these conversations generated.  Some referred to this extra duty as disciplinary action but I know the real reason was that he just liked having me around, along with being enlightened by my opinions on the military.

For example he was always interested in how I organized my bunk area with so little effort, then there was my ongoing need of a haircut even after a hair cut, along with my personal dress style - always with my cap stylishly hanging out my back pocket.   Though, this time his manner from the get go was different, something new was going on and that turned out to be my orders to Vietnam.

At the time I wasn't sure of my feelings about all this, romanticized thoughts of war and movie guys in action like John Wayne flashed through my head, only to be dashed by the reality of being an Inventory Management Specialist poking around a warehouse or wondering the flight line. However, thinking back of how my mother so loved the movie "South Pacific", beaches, palm trees aren't all that bad either. So with a new vision of swaying palm trees, balmy weather, I'm thinking, this could be easy duty and with combat pay on top of that. Anyway, nothing ever happens to to a aircraft maintenance supply sergeant.  So going to Nam seemed like an OK deal, maybe not patriotic but my military experience so far could be mostly explained as a silent, covert string of battles fought between me and the Air Force so I was more than ready to start pitting those energies in a more productive way and using them against Charlie.  However, I liked being out on the desert where the base I was now located and Alamogordo the closest city, had begun to feel like home.  Then there was my girlfriend Sue Ellen whose father after a year was trying very hard to like me and I could tell he was getting closer.  I had it figured that by my discharge he would at least be at the point of tolerating me and now all that effort on my part would be to no end, it saddened me.

Then there were the core group of friends Marley, Becom, Big Rice, Bolea and that the group had grown into a sort of a family, So it was going to be tough with out them but this sort of thing is a fact of life in the military. Actually my best friend Becom and I ended up together in Nam at Phu Cat Air Base and we hooked up when we got back in the states after both of us were discharged.

Having to park my MGA with it's recent Mexico paint job was also going to hurt.  As it turned out while it was parked at my mom's one of my sisters boyfriends laid a few wrenches on it and it never ran again. Welcome home Doug..

A few days after a three week leave I boarded a civilian contract flight from San Francisco with a stop in Alaska and on to Tan Son Nhat Air Base in Saigon.  

At Tan Son Nhat our original base ops building survived the war and the communist take over and on my return in 1999 I found that it had been reinvented as the international terminal serving south Vietnam. A few years later a new modern terminal opened but even  with all it's newness it still had the vibes of the old days.  Maybe this was helped along by unnerving event of taxiing up to the terminal past the revetments used by us during the war. As our plane pulled up to what was the old base ops building seeing only Vietnamese civilians and military, grabbing my bags from the same basic area I did in 1967 was really unnerving .
 (Then it was Vietnam - part 2)