One Vietnam Vet Who’s Glad He Went

It took me less than an hour to decide I was going to hate Vietnam. A year later I was sad to leave, because I’d come to love it so.

From the serenity of the central valley rice fields, the majesty of the mountains at Hai Van Pass, to the elegance of the sea at China Beach, Vietnam as a land was breathtaking. But the deeper impressions came from the Vietnamese people who touched my life, friends who knew their own futures were fraught with uncertainty.

It was 1971, and in less than four years would come the fall. Those friends’ lives would be changed immeasurably.

We all know this week marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of what we called South Vietnam. Vietnamese immigrants here in Orange County will commemorate that terrifying time with both public and private events. So will other Americans who recall how our own country strained at the tension brought on by a war we barely pretended to understand.

But we former military types who called Vietnam home for at least a year will remember that war in our own separate ways.

Most Vietnam vets rarely talk about that time now; it’s too far removed from the lives we’ve come to lead. But the mind works its own stubborn pathways. And just knowing this is the anniversary week, the images come flooding forth, even if uninvited.

So for readers, and editors, used to seeing this space devoted to Orange County’s criminal justice system, please pardon a few self-indulgent moments of reflection. . . .

You don’t get to choose which memories rush to the forefront first. They just show up in haphazard fashion. The first for me was a helicopter ride.

I was assigned as a one-man newspaper for the U.S. Army’s 37th Signal Battalion out of Da Nang. Our company commander had ordered me to join a chopper pilot headed to one of our coastal sites, so I could gather news from our unit there. En route I asked the pilot, who’d become a friend, if we were anywhere near My Lai. Scores of innocent Vietnamese, you all know, had been massacred there just three years before, by confused and misguided American soldiers.

The ‘Chocolate Milk Brigade’

“I’ll show you,” he said, nodding his understanding at my interest. He’d taken this detour before.

In less than 30 minutes we were hovering above a peaceful plain of fertile fields. The green of its beauty made the hideousness of that earlier tragedy seem even more surreal.

It wasn’t my best friends who came to mind first, but the hooch maids at our compound. The “Chocolate Milk Brigade,” declared one of them with the best English.

For just a few dollars per month, they kept the hooches we soldiers lived in clean, our clothes washed and our boots spit-shined. One day when the Air Force food wagon made its daily visit, I bought some chocolate milk, and casually asked my hooch maid, shining boots on a rattan mat nearby, if she’d like a carton too. She accepted with such gratitude that the next day I went ahead and bought two. Before long, I was buying chocolate milk for several hooch maids, all of them delighted.

But they never drank it, which seemed strange to me. Later, one of them confided to me: “We don’t drink your milk. We take it home to our children.”

It was a chilling lesson in the realities of life in war.

Dong Thi Buu, a waitress at our compound’s club, became my best friend. She had four sons and a husband off to war she hadn’t seen in more than a year. One day I asked her what her sons wanted to be when they grew up. She looked at me as if she’d never heard such a naive question.

“They’ll be soldiers,” she said point-blank.

Buu’s parents had never known anything but war, nor had she. She had no expectations that her sons would either.

Duc Vinh Binh, my other best friend, was our liaison with the Vietnamese army. He had a laugh that would brighten anyone’s day, and great, great pride in his country. He made my most difficult days less so. And in this sea of memories, Sgt. Binh’s smile is the most endearing image.

Our compound’s official translator/librarian, young Minh Nguyen, wasn’t popular with the soldiers. Her demeanor could be difficult; she acted as if she found most of us contemptible. But she and I became friends because I think I understood her.

It wasn’t the soldiers she resented, it was the war. She yearned for a career in the arts, to travel the world. It left a sadness about her, that she seemed to know the life she wanted was never going to happen.

When I wonder about the friends I left behind, and how they fared, it’s Minh Nguyen I worry about the most.

That first hour of Vietnam I mentioned? I’d just arrived at the air base at Da Nang on a troop transport, and we were stunned to see a huge crater smack middle of one of the runways. A Viet Cong rocket attack, we were told at check-in--launched early that morning. A sudden, dull thought hit me: This wasn’t how I wanted to spend the next 12 months.

But we discovered such attacks were few in number. By my second day, our group was amid the maze of fishing boats off China Beach in a visually stunning scene right out of Pearl S. Buck. That day spawned months and months of enriching experiences that far outweighed any negatives of my military assignment there.

It was a costly war for Americans--58,000 deaths. And other former soldiers undoubtedly could share with you stories more riveting, more enlightening, certainly more violent. My fragmented splotches of memory are special only to me, I know.

But whether you were born and raised in Vietnam, or just made it your temporary residence for a year, as I did, this is the week in which that part of your past won’t be content to remain in the recesses of your brain.

During this anniversary week, Vietnam vets certainly will dredge up memories tucked away for decades. For many, the reliving won’t be pleasant. Some will talk only about the horrors of their experience. But many others, I’m convinced, will share my own thoughts.

For all it taught me, for how it enriched me, for the people I met, I was glad I was there.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers can reach Hicks by calling (714) 966-7789 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com