Dustoff (eBook)

Chapter 4:
Trying to Figure
It All Out

I reported to my unit in Tuy Hoa, Republic of Vietnam (RVN), in March 1969. Jerry reportedly went to a larger aviation unit in Danang, Vietnam. Only one of us eventually returned to the States.

As the new guy, who received a respectful but cool welcome, there was a lot to take in and try to comprehend. In the ideal world, the unit commander would have assigned a mentor to a newly reporting officer. There is a book called The Officer’s Guide that says this is how it is supposed to work. Perhaps this nicety was dropped because we were in a combat zone. In any case, I had to figure out, on my own, friend from foe and where I stood in the pecking order. No small undertaking. I will try to describe how that went.

The unit to which I was assigned, the 68th Medical Detachment HA was situated in Tuy Hoa, RVN. A few months later, it moved to Chu Lai, RVN, with its large equipment transported down the coastline of the South China Sea in a Korean SST freighter. The move took place under the watchful eye and under the auspicious direction of the unit’s movement Officer. That was me, the unlucky newbie. It was a dreadful job, which is why it was dumped on the lowest-ranking green officer in the unit. No sane or more powerful officer wanted that task.

Before we made that move, I needed to figure out who was who in my seasoned and well-established Medevac helicopter ambulance unit. I wanted to do so in order to begin trying to survive my tenure in both the unit and in the foreign country I would call home for the next eleven-and-a-half months.

Time has sopped up and blotted out some of the observations I thought I would never forget. Human memory is like that. After fifty years, a few details are lost. So, it is clear that some individuals will be left out of this attempt to recollect and describe the personnel and some of the personalities making up my unit’s nicely oiled operational machine. 

Thinking back on the personalities who stood out right away as I reported into the unit, the first one was a very serious, and somewhat daunting, commanding officer (CO). He was a major. It would have been nice if he had opted to appoint another officer, like a sponsor, to show me the ropes, guide me through the earliest weeks, and identify the pitfalls. Perhaps there were no volunteers. Consequently, I was completely on my own.

There were two captains and a first sergeant amongst my earliest introductions. The first sergeant seemed to pretty much run the show. He had a clerk. Probably the wrong title, but he was also a pivotal figure because he typed all of the paperwork that made things happen in the unit.

I need to add what now seems like an astounding and an important note to try and put things in their proper perspective. There were no copy machines, no pagers, no faxes, no cell phones, no computers, and no word processors. Carbon paper was how duplicate copies of any document were made. This was the orderly room in a well-run American Army unit. It was thought to be leading edge at the time—and it was. The point is that everything was done manually and by a live person and rarely by any machine or electronic device. One exception might be telex or telegrams that were used to quickly convey some official communications. So, that sergeant and clerk had enormous power because everything relied on their actions.

The men assigned to that Tuy Hoa, RVN-based Dustoff unit felt the unit showed great valor in the performance of its mission. That unit’s personnel were convinced they were working in an operationally hot area, in terms of enemy activity, and that they had been lucky to fare as well as they had.

The unit had reportedly lost only one of its pilots. Some months before I arrived, he had been in a crash and there had been a fire. He was wearing Nomex from neck to toe. (Nomex was fire-resistant cloth given to aircrews to help get them through a fire-related incident.) He survived the fire with manageable injuries. What went unnoticed was that some of the Nomex had melted into the skin of his ankle. He developed a complication, which was presumably an infection, that led to his sudden and unexpected death. I do not recall his name, in part because he died before I joined the unit, but I hope he is listed on the real and virtual Vietnam Memorial Wall(s). For all I know, I may have actually been his replacement. I think the aviation personnel in our unit started wearing leather boots because of that unfortunate occurrence.

I was quickly introduced to the unit’s supply sergeant because I had immediately been assigned a ground duty of supply officer. To this day, I thank God that the supply sergeant, Alex Boynton, was a genius. It was standard practice to dump unwanted duty assignments on the newbie. The Army had a lot of “ash and trash” (non-combat) duties that it seemingly preferred to assign to a commissioned officer. Presumably, warrant officers were considered to be technical experts, that is, aviation specialists, who were to be spared certain administrative duties. It’s probably only in my head, but I felt I set a record for the number of those duties I took on upon my arrival. While being supply officer was a fairly significant duty, it was clearly a job that someone who outranked me would not have wanted.

Eventually, I became aware of a supply clerk, a quiet, rather nice fellow named Michael Lloyd Morris DeBolt, who I simply called DeBolt. I don’t think he was there when I first arrived, and I had begun to shoulder what I felt was yet another onerous duty. That feeling was probably a reflection of the fact that it, along with damn near everything else active-duty officers did, was foreign to me. This was my first unit assignment. I probably thought all I would have to do was fly a helicopter. What a dreamer! I had four years of ROTC behind me and two months of new-officer orientation at Fort Sam Houston. I was well-schooled in ROTC, but still felt ill-prepared to step into some of the tasks before me.

Though they were not U.S. personnel and not even officially contractors, “hooch maids” were the next category of personnel I met. (Sometimes that word is spelled hootch.) They might as well have been introduced as “soapsuds wizards” or “room-cleaning Dervishes”, since I had no idea that they existed on the planet. I had never heard of a “hooch maid,” and had no idea what they did or how important they were to our daily upkeep and maintenance. I think, unlike the men in my unit, who I prefer not to identify by their full or true names out of respect for their privacy, I can identify my residence’s lead hooch maid by her first name. It was Linda. I thought that was an odd name for a Vietnamese woman. She was smart as a whip, her English was fluent, and, in time, I realized that she had to deftly side-step sexual advances from us lonely Americans. That was probably no small feat, since she was attractive and we all eventually became very, very horny. She eventually told me her real name was Lam, but coining the name Linda kept things simple for her. It also probably enabled her to separate her work life from her home life.

Hooch maids maintained our living quarters (that is a nice way of saying “cleaned up behind us”) and laundered our clothing, which included folding, pressing, and putting them away for us.

I learned an interesting lesson soon after I settled in. I noticed that my full seven sets of underwear had dwindled to just four sets. I asked the junior captain what happened to my clothing. He said that the hooch maids were socialists. They looked in your drawer and those of the other officers that they were assigned to work with, and they evened out the quantities in all of the drawers. Their goal was to make sure that everyone had the same amount of clothing. So, you had to hide some of your stuff because they did not actually go by names on the clothing. They were more interested in evening things out and making sure that everyone had about the same amount of everything. 

Next, I began to be introduced, simultaneously, to the warrant officers, who comprised the majority of the unit’s pilots, and to the enlisted men, who I slowly learned could be broadly grouped into three categories: medics, crew chiefs, and maintenance personnel. In truth, I did not immediately know warrant from enlisted. I could see name tags, but since we did not wear trappings of rank, around the unit (wife-beater tee-shirts were a common outer garment), it took me a little while to figure out exactly who did what. Let the record show that the warrant officers were not particularly friendly. I outranked them, but they knew it would take a while before I knew what I was doing on the ground. They also knew that I had a lot to learn about how to be effective during medevac missions. Until then, the new guy is blissfully ignorant dead weight.

There were, of course, a few other occupational specialties, but I concluded what we didn’t have were cooks or truck drivers. We all ate at an area mess hall. So, no food preparation took place in the unit. It had been staffed, by the book, with exactly what it needed to perform without fat or duplication. It was lean.

As an aside there was a sister unit, the 54th Med. Detachment HA, that was literally right next-door, as in forty yards away. They were the real veterans of the operational area. They were there when we moved from Tuy Hoa, making them the operation-area veterans, and us the...