-- The incidents contained herein are memories from 30 + years ago and cannot be expected to be exact and are not necessarily in exact order, except where stated -- WWW I first heard of the 8th RRFS from my instructors at Ft. Devens who had been there. From them I knew that there was a swimming pool and tennis courts, so I went prepared to use them. I took my swim suit and tennis racket and a couple of cans of tennis balls. When the truck drove through the gate of the 8th, we could see the pool with no one around and I knew something must be wrong. When we (the new guys) asked, we were told about the pool being closed. Someone told me about the explosion of the ammo dump on August 5, 1967, the very day I had reported to the Oakland Army Overseas Replacement Center to go to Viet Nam. WWW When the ammo dump exploded the seismic wave generated by it tore the vinyl pool liner. When I arrived at the 8th exactly one week later, the pool had been closed. After I had been there about 11 months, we secured a new pool liner and I was one of about 50 guys who worked to get the new liner in. After we got it in, filled the pool and got the filter system running, the pool opened. I left Phu Bai 3 days later headed back to "the world". WWW For a while after I first got to Phu Bai, several times a day there would be explosions. All kinds of munitions that were not detonated in the explosion were scattered all over the Phu Bai area by the blast. These munitions are not returned to the dump, but destroyed in place, if not endangering life or property. To do this, a charge was placed somewhere around the weapon and detonated, which would detonate the weapon, and these explosions could be heard, and felt, for miles. This caused everyone who arrived during this time they were cleaning up these munitions to ask, "How do you know when it's incoming?" The standard answer was always the same. "Don't worry, you'll know!" WWW Upon arrival, I was assigned to a room in D Row of the trailers. Brian Fornier was one of my room mates. He was also the first guys that was friendly. Sometime before I arrived there, Brian had been riding in the back of the maintenance truck and was jumping out, holding on to the overhead bow when his wedding ring caught on a screw. This pulled his left ring finger off from the first knuckle. When I arrived there, he had the finger in a black plastic wide-mouth jar in formaldehyde. He was going home a few months later and didn't want to take it back to the world with him so we, he, I and a couple of other guys went to the bathroom and had a funeral for his finger which he "buried at sea" by flushing it down the commode. WWW One day a Bell Huey helicopter landed on the compound. Several of us, who were off duty during the day, went to where it landed. Someone got out of the Huey and walked off in the direction of headquarters. While he was gone, we walked all around the aircraft and, I believe, talked to the crew chief. It was the first close-up look any of us had ever had of a Huey helicopter. In a few minutes the man who walked off came back and we backed away from the aircraft while the pilot brought the rotor blade up to speed. As we stood off to the left of the chopper watching, the man in the open back door motioned to us to move out of the way, that they were going to take off right where we were standing. We moved about 100 feet toward the back of the craft and he lifted off and quickly took off, passing right through the spot where we had been standing. WWW One nice summery day (almost every day was summery, but not all of them were nice) not long after I arrived, several of us were walking around on our compound when we started smelling an odor that we only slightly remembered from basic training. It was CS or what most people call tear gas. It wasn't very strong at first, just barely detectable, then it started getting stronger and stronger and we had to go some place away from that area to get away from it. WWW One of my assignments one night was to put some ground cables on some encrypted TTY units. We were grounding the cases so they would not radiate any signals that could be intercepted outside the room. We screwed 1/4 inch braided ground strap to the case and ran it down into the trough below the floor. In this trough was a 1 inch twisted copper ground cable, suspended above the bottom of the trough every 8 feet by 8 foot hard copper stakes that went into the ground; hence, grounding all electronics in the building. The only way we had of making good contact between this copper cable and the braided copper ground strap was to solder it. We just tied a knot in the strap around the cable, placed two 100 watt soldering irons on it and went away for about 15 minutes. When we came back, the cable was just starting to get hot enough to melt solder and make a secure connection. We took all night to attach 8 straps in this manner. WWW One late afternoon I was outside watching through my binoculars as two F4 Fantom jets were attacking something off to my southeast. They would fly in a circle, staying on opposite sides of the circle from each other, and dive on the target dropping several bombs that would tumble to the ground. When these bombs would explode, we would count 24 seconds before the sound reached us. That equates to something over two miles. On later passes, they would each drop one bomb that flew straight. When it hit, a blast could be seen even from the great distance. In fact, the blast could be felt when it flapped my pants legs back against my legs. Each jet made several passes dropping these bombs. I would never have thought that one Fantom jet could carry so much ordnance. WWW One night when I was on guard duty on star bunker #3, where our department always had guard duty, the weather was miserable. It was cold, rainy and windy. I heard later that the chill factor was an unheard of 32 degrees that night. When the rain got too heavy, we moved down into the second level of the bunker. This level had a concrete floor and ceiling, at most 4 feet high. We had to sit at or crawl on this level. We crawled in and found a wood hand grenade box inside to sit on, which made it great. We had been there for about an hour of our two-hour duty, when I attempted to move the box I discovered that it was quite heavy. I looked inside and found that there were 24 high explosive hand grenades in it! These things were not suppose to be left sitting around like that. I immediately picked up the field telephone and called the Sgt. of the guard and informed him of my find. The watch officer came out in a jeep and took the grenades back to the armory, where they belong. WWW We got in a new Maintenance officer while I was there. He came there and without looking to see how things ran, decided to change EVERYTHING. He checked and decided that we were above our allowable stock on some items, mostly 7 inch reel-to-reel tapes. Since a tape can be used to record classified data, and they were used tapes, they were considered classified trash. We had to break the reel, cut the tape into a length no more than one loop around the reel and put it into paper "burn bags" to be burned in the new classified trash burners. Burning was only done during the day, so when day shift came in, their job was to burn the very heavy bags. They put the bags of many thousands of feet of acetate recording tape into the burners and lit the fire. The burners were equipped with big blowers to make sure the fire got hot enough to destroy anything that was flammable. Well, we found out that acetate was not flammable! But it sure did melt. Not only that, it completely ruined the new burner, causing the new warrant officer to get in a little trouble with his superiors. WWW Other nights we had to do such things as clean up the supply room and move stock around into what our maintenance officer thought was a more military manner. A joke that us electronic repair types sometimes played on people was to charge up a large capacitor and throw it to someone. When that person catches it, they would usually discharge it, getting a good shock in the process. So, when people were moving things around, sometimes things would be tossed from one person to another. Once, someone picked up this little item and pitched it to someone else, who had recently been the recipient of a charged capacitor, and he just let it fly by. Turns out it was a CRT from a Hewlett Packard Oscilloscope, which smashed when it hit the floor. That was $2500.00 down the drain!
WWW During most of my time in Viet Nam, I worked 3rd shift, which was from 11:00 p.m. until 7:00 am . I remember sitting on the steps on the end of my building (D Row) many nights, about 11:00 p.m., probably Tuesdays, since that was my day off, and talking to people and waiting until time to go to the movie that was showing that week, which started about 2:00 a.m. This particular Tuesday night, January 31, 1968, I happened to be on that step about 2:00 am, watching somebody shoot baskets on the lighted basketball court across the street. Someone else was throwing a bayonet into a piece of plywood he had standing up against the basketball court fence, when we, I don't remember who was standing talking to me, heard a sound that seemed to be a very low, slow flying jet plane. I started looking around and all of a sudden a brilliant pinkish red fountain of sparks exploded about three hundred yards to my right. It was an incoming round of some kind. It turned out to be a 122 mm rocket, fired by the Viet Cong from about 3 miles away. I vaguely remember standing, turning to face down the hall and saying "Incoming!". I didn't yell, I only spoke it. I later was told that when I said "Incoming!" I woke someone up in a room at the other end of D Row, 100 yards away, through a closed door, with a room air conditioner running. A guy who lived in that room told me that he was awakened by the rocket, and when I said "Incoming!" his roommate sat straight up in bed. That's what adrenaline can do for you. WWW I then ran into my room and grabbed my helmet, M-14, and thought how useless it was without ammunition, so I grabbed that and took off for the access trench, which was about 25 yards to the side of the basketball court across the street. When I got there, there was a large crowd of guys trying to get down to single file to fit in, so I cut across the field to the main trench, got down on my knees, leaned back so that I was sitting on my feet and put my head down and covered it with my arms. I remember looking up and thinking that the trench was so wide that a rocket could easily fall into it. I remember thinking during an early practice alert that the exact same place in the trench should be wider to allow people to pass. Shortly after I got down into my cover position, a rocket hit the ground about 30 feet away, outside the trench and dirt was blown all over me and everyone else nearby. Eugene Zadra, a guy about 5'5" tall and rather rotund was going into an entrance to the trench near where I was when the rocket landed. The blast blew him all the way over the trench. Fortunately he was not injured. He immediately scurried up the outside of the trench and got inside. He found his glasses after daylight. They weren't broken. I was really scared. I remember being so scared that I almost threw up! During this attack, about 30 rockets were dropped on the entire Phu Bai area, and about 5 to 10 on our little compound. I think two of them hit A Row, our BOQ, (Bachelor officers quarters), setting it on fire and burning the trailer house units down to the frames. One of these rockets was going directly at the Enlisted Men's Club, when it hit a vertical tree limb about 5 inches in diameter, ricocheted off, cut the power cable to the alert siren and hit the BOQ. I think this was the first of the two that hit it. This attack lasted for about 45 minutes, but that seemed like hours. They would fire 3 rockets, wait about 5 minutes, fire 3 more rockets and so on, for about 10 volleys. After about 2 hours, they let us come out of the trenches, and by then the fire had almost burned itself out. I remember hearing that the only injury that night was someone who was standing up watching the fire, when a rocket landed nearby, exploding, and a piece of shrapnel nicked his face about like a shaving cut. He was given the choice of getting a purple heart and being court marshaled for standing up during an attack, or forget the whole thing. He forgot it! WWW Buckland Churchill, a guy that I had known at Ft. Devens and had only been there for a short time had within the last day or two got his head shaved, (Not cut short; shaved) and was in the shower all lathered up when the attack came. He ran to the trench with lather all over his body wrapped in a wool army blanket. Between the drying lather and the wool blanket, he couldn't stop scratching. WWW That rocket that landed near me made a crater only about 18 inches long, about a foot wide and about 3 inches deep in hard packed sand. The shrapnel that it threw off hit a 12 x 12 timber that was the corner post of the tennis court fence and made it look like Swiss cheese. Another of the fragments was blown about 75 yards, penetrating the side wall of, I think, E row and entered the mattress of someone still sleeping. The mattress "bucked" him to the floor, and I was told he hit the floor running. WWW The alert siren was on top of a 30 foot pole. A few days later the wire to the alert siren was replaced but it seems that a bird had made a nest in the siren, using a piece of wire and when power was turned on to test it, the motor burned out. The siren was taken down and shipped somewhere to get the AC motor rewound. I worked with the antenna crew to put a jeep siren up on that pole to use until the main siren could be repaired. Because it was a DC motor, we ran new wires from the CP Bunker to the siren and tried it. We had two car batteries in the bunker and at the siren we had only 2 volts, not enough to turn a 12 volt motor. We had to mount the batteries just below the pole and run an AC relay to turn it on. That worked. That was the alert siren we heard for the rest of Tet. WWW While I worked nights, I spent some of my daylight time handing out mail at the orderly room and had seen some horror stories of packages. I remember one guy who had gotten a package from his grandmother. It contained homemade chocolate chip cookies and a can of frozen orange juice concentrate. The package had been crushed, WWW making small crumbs of the cookies and breaking open the can of orange juice concentrate. The package had been put in a plastic bag to protect the rest of the mail around it. He took the package and dropped it in a trash can just behind him. Poor guy. My birthday fell about the middle of the two-week Tet Offensive. On my birthday, I received a package in the mail from my parents. The corrugated cardboard box was about 12 inches square by about 8 inches high. When I opened it, I found two cotton knit shirts atop another piece of cardboard. Upon removing that, I was surprised to find a birthday cake! The cake had not one mark on it. Just as perfect as it was when my mother finished icing it! WWW When my mother made the cake, she put it on a piece of aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard cut to perfectly fit into the bottom of the box. She then iced it, with the icing running down onto the foil, "gluing" it down. My dad then cut 4 pieces of cardboard and folded them into triangle-shaped pillars which he put in the corners of the box, then put the piece of cardboard on top with the shirts in this upper compartment. Another odd thing was that he had mailed it only 4 days before! Most letters were taking from 7 to 10 days to get there. WWW I took it out and we, my room mates and I, started eating cake. I went around to other rooms and ask if anyone would like some, and after being told where the cake had come from, several guys would not believe that it could have been mailed from the US and made it there in that condition, and especially during the conditions at that time. WWW Since I helped hand out the mail, Captain Brown my CO (made Major a couple of months later) asked me to help at pay call during the day of January 31st. I agreed and I was placed in charge of getting each man to sign his pay voucher before he reported to Capt. Brown for his pay. Wes Chong, from Honolulu, was the company clerk and he would pull out the packages of MPC wrapped in the copy of the pay voucher that each man got and hand it to Capt. Brown. While this was going on, another rocket attack came. Capt. Brown, Wes and I ran outside the orderly room and hid in a big stack of bundles of empty sand bags. Wes carried the big tray of money under his arm. We stayed there for a while and after the attack was over, we continued pay call. You could set your watch by the rocket attacks. One at 2:00 am, one at 10:00 am and another at 2:00 p.m. WWW Starting before and continuing during the Tet Offensive, a new communications cable was being run along the road directly across the street from my room. They were putting this 300 or so pair cable, about 3 inches in diameter into a small trench about 10 or 12 inches wide and only about a foot deep. Before the cable was in the trench, some rockets fell somewhere in our area, and being the only place I could get below ground level, I dived into this trench, lying on my side, and barely fitting into it. A couple of days later, during another rocket attack of the two week Tet offensive, a rocket hit the cable about 100 feet past a splice, completely severing the cable. That meant the splice that 6 men, working in pairs for 3 shifts a day, for 3 days had just finished, had to be taken apart, there and at the other end, and replaced by a new spool of cable. WWW During the Tet offensive, a Huge helicopter that we called a "Jolly Green Giant" came onto our post carrying what we called a "Conex" slung below it on a cable. A conex is a steel storage/shipping container about 8 feet cube with doors that make up one side of the container. Everyone heard this enormous helicopter come in and by the time we got to where it was landing, he was already down. They disconnected the cable, put it inside the aircraft and took off. Unfortunately, where it had landed was where we were digging up sand for sandbags. When this huge 5 blade rotor bit into the air to lift off, about 100 people standing around watching got sand blasted. The conex turned out to be the liner for a bunker built for our new maintenance officer. WWW Two guys had the privilege of building that bunker. It was made by placing two conex's face to face and putting a large sheet of steel over the top of the space between and down the back side, leaving only about a 4-foot opening in front for a door. At each corner, 12 x 12 inch timbers were placed into the ground that extended as high as the conex. A 12 x 12 inch timber was placed around the top of these, making a complete frame just outside the conex. Heavy plywood was nailed to the outside of this, and this entire area around the sides was filled with 12 inches of sand. Sand was placed on top and then the plywood placed over it and nailed down. All around this, sand bags filled with wet concrete were placed, out about 4 feet at bottom, tapering to about two feet at top, then two layers of these were placed over the top. Out in front of the door, with entry slots on each side, was placed a two foot thick wall of concrete-filled sand bags. WWW Another time our compound was visited by a helicopter was also during Tet. This time, because the ground convoys were not going through, we were not getting any fresh eggs for breakfast, so a load was brought in by Huey. Again I was there to watch it land and unload it's precious cargo of eggs. Three men carefully removed a cardboard box about 3 feet square, full of eggs onto a small wheeled dolly and rolled it away. Then the helicopter brought up his rotor speed, and began to take off. Because of Tet, I was in full uniform, including steel helmet. The blast of the rotor blade blew the helmet off my head and rolled it across the ground like a straw hat in a stiff breeze. WWW One night near the end of the Tet offensive, we had some sort of an attack. I don't remember if it was mortar or 122mm rocket. While we were in the trenches, a helicopter took off from somewhere nearby and flew right through our antenna field. All the tower lights were off and the guy wires that support them had no lights anyway and this pilot flew right through it! He must have known that antenna field well! WWW Another of our maintenance officer's ideas was to put his maintenance guys in the shop on 12 hour duty. That wasn't very good, because we had 3 shifts of people. Day shift would come in at 7:00 am and get off at 7:00 p.m.. Night shift would come in at noon and work until midnight and 3rd shift would work from midnight until noon. That meant that from 7:00 am until 7:00 p.m., you had 2 complete crews of people running over each other WWW Sometime during the summer of '68 a friend and I were walking along the top of the trench on the side of the compound near the antenna field, to take pictures. I had borrowed a 400 mm lens that was about 6 inches in diameter, to use with my camera. We were walking along the top of the trench when we saw a king cobra lying in the bottom of the trench sunning itself. From the head to the tail was about 8 feet, and the snake was not by any means stretched out. I would guess that the snake was a king cobra and was about 12 feet long. We startled it when we came up on it, so it crawled off into the side of the trench, behind the woven bamboo wall. We reported the snake to someone of authority, and I never heard any more of it. He and I were just glad that it wasn't in our part of the trench! WWW On July 4th, 1968, the Maintenance department was going to have a Picnic. By this time I was the driver of the maintenance truck, so I drove Charles (?) Stephens, one of our maintenance supply guys, around to try to find some steaks to barbecue. We started out with 3 bottles of some sort of alcoholic beverage, such as Wild Turkey, or some other thing in that line. We went to mess sergeants all over the Phu Bai area to trade whisky for steak. We came back with three 20-lb boxes of steaks. We had the picnic at the motor pool, in the "drive through". I don't remember what we used for a grill, but it was sufficient to hold 10 to 15 steaks at once, and everyone had 3 or 4 steaks that day. We had 3 trash cans with iced beer and cold drinks in them. All in all that was a pretty good day! WWW Being the maintenance department driver, several times I had to drive to Jai Lai, a couple of miles north on Highway 1, then off to the west on a dirt road a few more miles. This drive was fairly safe during the day, but I don't think anyone but possibly combat troops would have attempted it at night. I know I never did. Jai Lai was a depot maintenance area. They did more extensive repair than we were allowed to in our shop. They would rebuild equipment. On one trip I saw some 155mm gun tubes lying on the back of flat a bed truck. They had a huge cargo parachute suspended in the center from a pole and stretched out in all directions to shorter poles, making an open air chapel. The parachute was jungle camouflage colors. On a few occasions, guys who were off duty that day would ride along with me to Jai Lai. On one of these days, I had about 6 or 7 guys with me, including 5 or 6 riding on troop seats in back, along the sides of the truck. As I said, most of the road was dirt; RED dirt. After riding on the very back for the entire trip, when we got back one guy was completely red from head to foot including his face. He was the funniest looking thing I saw all year over there. He didn't think much of the rest of us laughing at him. WWW I remember going to Jai Lai once shortly after they had a big ground assault on them. Lots of things were torn up. I even talked to one man, who could barely hear at that time. Three satchel charges had been thrown into his tent. Except for his hearing, he was unhurt. WWW At some point, I think in the spring of 1968, another ammo dump exploded. This one was smaller than the first because after that one, they established several small dumps, scattered all over the area instead of having just one big one. The explosion rocked the ground pretty good. I remember being outside watching the ensuing fire (which burned for about 4 hours) when another explosion went off. When the shock wave got to me, it felt as if the ground had moved about a foot away from the blast then immediately back toward the blast, moving very quickly. I remember it knocked me down. WWW One night, sometime not too long before I left, our intelligence people got word that the Phu Bai area was to come under a massive ground attack and could possibly be over run! Since I was the truck driver on days, I was not at work that night. Everyone not on duty was put on alert, which meant we went to the trenches. We heard all kinds of things passed through the trenches. Some true, some rumor, but at that time, we didn't know which was which. One of them was that thermite grenades were sat around on all the secret equipment and all the records, etc. All extra copies of paperwork was taken outside and burned in 55 gallon drums. We could see the glow of this from our position in the trench. This really scared us. We spent the night in the trench and by morning, when nothing happened, the all clear was given and we went back to our rooms. That was one very long scary night! WWW As I have said, one of my last duties was driving the truck for the maintenance department. I was working day shift, at this time, just before I left Phu Bai. One day we were almost out of paper for the "Visicorder", a highly secret instrument (at that time) that recorded radio finger printing of side band radio transmissions. I don't know if the paper was all gone, or if they were very low, but I was sent to the airport to meet every flight coming in to try and get the paper. I went to work at 7:00 in the morning, and after spending all day and all night at the airport, I finally came back to the compound, turned the truck in and went to bed at 7:00 the next morning. I had been asleep for only about 15 minutes when someone came in, woke me up and told me that the Sgt. at the shop wanted to know where I was and why I was not at work. I had to get up, dress and go to the shop and remind him that not only had I been on duty for 24 hours, this was my day to be ROD. That means Relieved Of Duty, which everyone did three days before leaving for home. I had to tell him all this in person, then he let me go back to bed.
Bobby Bates |