Recreation for Americans in Vietnam

Some stuff that probably wasn’t mentioned at yesterday’s Arlington Cemetery monument dedication ceremony…

Guts ‘N Gunships: What it was Really Like to Fly Combat Helicopters in Vietnam is mostly about flying and fighting, but it contains some description of recreation.

Next to the officer’s club was a large steel cage that housed two adolescent sun bears. These sun bears, indigenous to Southeast Asia, are black with a fawnish face, and weigh more than one hundred pounds. The Camp Holloway bears were captured and rescued as cubs, when the Pathfinders were clearing a trail somewhere in No Man’s Land. They accidently got between them and their mother and they had to shoot Mamasan Bear when she attacked them. They decided not to leave the cubs in the jungle to die, so they brought them back to the cage, and had fed and raised them since. Often, when we were walking by the cage on the way to the club, there would be a couple of exceedingly inebriated Pathfinders, wrestling with them in the cage. Admittedly, the bears were not completely grown when I first observed these encounters, but throughout the year, they quickly became fine adult specimens. I guessed their weight at the time to be in excess of one hundred pounds each. And this was more than one hundred pounds of bear, for God’s sake. They had claws, seemingly as long as my fingers, and a set of teeth that any grizzly would have been proud of. In other words, the Pathfinders were regularly getting their asses kicked. The Pathfinders found a way around this, however. They just got the Bears drunker than they (the wrestlers) were before they entered the cage.

Through the bars, they would hand a beer to the bears, who would take it with their front paws, sit on their asses, and down the chute it would go. They would then beg for another, and another, until they were soused. With the playing field now more level, the Pathfinders would still get their asses kicked by the drunken bears, but it took the bears longer to pin them to the mat. To my knowledge, the bears never injured a Pathfinder, and were always careful to pull their punches. A lot of soldiers going past the cage would give the cherished bears food and beer. When the bears were drunk, they were hilarious, and, by the way, they were usually drunk. They would stumble around the large cage, falling and rolling into one another, making strange, gurgling sounds as they went. When they eventually stumbled into one another, a world class wrestling match would ensue. Seemingly, they would merge into a single large ball of fur, and would roll around on the floor of the cage like a huge, hairy, black and brown basketball. Then, when both of them thought the other had had enough, they would sit and face one another, and lick each other’s faces with a tongue that looked like it was a foot long. After recuperation they would again approach the bars of the cage, stand on their back legs, reach through the bars, and beg for beer and morsels of food. More often than not, they would get it.

There was also wrestling among humans…

I asked, “Aren’t you guys afraid of VD?” “Hell no, all you have to do is go to the flight surgeon and get a shot of penicillin. You ain’t getting out of this, Garrison. You might as well just stop whining around about it and enjoy yourself. Now come on, get out of the jeep and come with us.

The author ends up falling asleep with his new ladyfriend and missing his ride back to the base. So he ends up spending the night in a town where half of the people at VC sympathizers.

Things go a little more smoothly on leave:

In the summer of 1969, I became eligible to fly to someplace in Southeast Asia for about a week, to lick my wounds and convalesce from nine months of combat flying. There were several destinations that one could choose as long as they happened to be available. Places such as Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, and others. Most of all the married guys went to Hawaii to meet up with their wives. A majority of us wound up in rather more exotic places around the globe. I wound up in Taipei, Taiwan.

When I first arrived in Taipei, I was escorted by military vehicle to a place called the Kings Hotel. As soon as I situated myself in my room, I went down to have a drink at the hotel’s bar, and was almost immediately approached by a Chinese gentleman who asked me if I would be interested in a female companion for the evening. I asked what he had in mind and he told me to turn around and take a look. Against the wall behind me was a whole line of women, who had one thing in common. They were all beautiful. Adopting the old adage of, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” I took my pick. Prostitution was technically illegal in Taiwan at the time, so you were asked to sign a contract stating that you were to entertain the young lady for the evening by dinner and dancing and other rather benign activities. These contracts lasted for twenty four hours.

The author describes prodigious consumption of alcohol purchased at the military-run shop on the base, but no use of opiates or even marijuana.

What was it like to come home?

As soon as the aircraft took off and departed Vietnamese airspace, I told myself that I would never complain about anything again. I felt extremely lucky to have been on the flight home. I thought about all the close calls I had had flying missions, and knew that I could well have been killed in combat.

Of course, I’m human, and I have failed miserably about the “not complaining” promise that I made to myself. But when things have gotten tough in life, I remember how things were then, and it helps to put things in perspective.

Then I was to report to good old Fort Wolters for instructor pilot training. This time I would be an instructor. I planned to be every bit as tough as Toth was with me, to give my students every chance of making it home alive, as I had done. I entered the Seattle Tacoma Terminal along with the other soldiers, and we were met by a rather large group of war protesters, carrying placards that said things like, “MOTHERFUCKING BABY KILLERS, WAR CRIMINALS and FASCIST PIGS.” Then their spit hit my face.

As it happened, the author was not a supporter of the war per se. He thought that the U.S. should either go into North Vietnam with a full-scale invasion to try to win or go home. He describes the other pilots as similarly disillusioned with the general idea of the U.S. Vietnam effort. Their motivation for fighting was to save the lives of American ground troops, not a belief that the politicians back in Washington or the generals in Vietnam had sensible ideas.

More: Read Guts ‘N Gunships: What it was Really Like to Fly Combat Helicopters in Vietnam.