Hello, Wigwam

By L. John Lawrence

Creating a most unlikely hero, the army assigned Albert Costas, the youngest and lowest-ranking soldier in the Vietnam War, to run errands and do other menial tasks for the headquarters staff in Saigon. The transition to the real world, coming of age - difficult for any young man - becomes for Albert the unreal world of Army life in a combat zone. He sees the parade of bizarre and irrational behavior of men under stress and struggles to maintain his own grasp on reality.

Unknown decision makers hiding behind the code name Wigwam, add to the confusion, where all is upsidedown, inside out, and backwards. Sacrifice and achievement become twisted with tragic results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vivian Zabel
• Release date: Jun 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386818915

Book preview

Book One

The Absurdities of War

Chapter One

Send us a picture of you in your Army costume.

— In a letter from my mother

The Crew Chief threw his shoulder violently against the door. Three, four, five times. It wouldn’t budge. I said ‘door,’ but I guess they call it a ‘hatch.’ The extreme heat softened the rubber seal on the door — the hatch — making it tacky and fused shut.

That was trouble. Big time. That hatch was the only way out of the airplane. About 60 of us were trapped inside the Air Force C-130 that had delivered us to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon, in August 1970.

As the Crew Chief hammered away, I wondered, What if we can’t get out? Wouldn’t it be funny if we’re trapped forever inside this stinking cocoon, never to help protect South Vietnam from the creeping tyranny of Communism.

But soon, I heard it start to give and finally open with a sucking sound, like pulling a boot out of the mud. He seemed to have opened the door to hell. A shaft of brilliant, blinding sunlight shot through the opening and ricocheted back and forth off the bare metal walls. The intolerable heat rushed out to exchange places with the much worse heat that rushed in. The air brought with it the smell of war acrid smoke, exhaust fumes, jet fuel, and spent gunpowder. And the racket of war — aircraft engines, trucks, generators, and men shouting to be heard over the din. The heat, stench, noise, confusion it was hell all right. Even more than I knew. Fear and anxiety washed over me like an avalanche. Who would think they’d send me to Vietnam? What use could a brand-new high school graduate be?

Weeks ago, in boot camp,  a  rumor  circulated  saying  we shouldn’t do well at the rifle range. If we scored well, gossip had it, we went right to Vietnam. Our drill sergeant laughed it off.

That’s a G.I.’s rumor that’s gone around since Christ was a corporal, he said. Just do your best. It’s got nothing to do with your assignment. So, I scored really well. Now, here I was. Army humor.

I never before heard of MAC-V — the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. I first heard the word as I checked in at the Tan Son Nhut Orderly Room. A clerk looked through my personnel folder. Private Albert Costas? he asked and looked at me for confirmation. I nodded. Not much here, he said, leafing through the skinny sheaf of papers. New to the Army, eh? And assigned to MAC-V Headquarters, no less. Beginner’s luck. He assigned me to a hootch, which he said was what they called the barracks. Drop off your duffle bag and gear at your hootch, he said, and then report to the MAC-V compound.

What’s a MAC-V? I asked.

The clerk smirked and shook his head. He turned to holler to  a guy at the other end of the room. Hey, Lou! This kid wants to know what’s a MAC-V. Lou, the clerk, and several others in the room enjoyed a good laugh. A Master Sergeant in a small adjoining room got up from his desk and looked in through the doorway to see whom they  talked about.

Just go to the compound, the clerk said. It’s at the southeast corner of the base. They’ll tell you what a MAC-V is.

I decided not to ask him which way was southeast.

Next, I enjoyed another nugget of Army humor. When someone saw a new guy carrying a duffle bag, it was considered high comedy to give him bad directions. By the time I zeroed in on my hootch, I walked through most of Tan Son Nhut. My duffle bag seemed redoubled in size and weight. Some of my own body weight turned into sweat, which soaked my clothes and did not evaporate because of the humidity.

The hootch was a wood frame with a roof. If someone threw together the quickest, cheapest possible structure to give marginal protection from insects, partial cover from rain, little relief from heat, and no thought to privacy, he had himself a hootch. Window screen covered the frame to keep out bugs. The lower half had slats angled out to shed rain and spaced for ventilation. A two-by- four propped open a hinged steel shutter. Remove the prop and  the shutter closed against rain, which sometimes moved sideways. The floor of the hootch stood about four feet above the ground to keep us dry during monsoon-season flooding and to keep snakes, centipedes, and scorpions from getting in.

These hootch design goals provided more good Army jokes. As regards ventilation, air at Tan Son Nhut did not move. The air inside and the air outside were, as the Vietnamese said, same- same. Monsoon floods routinely reached five feet. I often saw snakes, centipedes, and scorpions inside hootches, and I never saw them outside. Centipedes and scorpions simply climbed the stilts that supported the buildings. Snakes performed more heroic feats driven by their appetite for the rats and field mice that hid in storage areas above the ceiling. Cake and cookie crumbs that fell out of packages from home drew the rats and field mice.

My hootch was empty except for one guy asleep under a blanket. Why would anyone want a blanket in this heat? What seemed to be hammocks hung over the eight bunks, but they turned out to be mosquito nets. At night, we draped the netting down and around our bunks and tucked it under the mattress. Holes in this Korean War-era netting let the smarter mosquitoes find their way in to bite us and maybe give us malaria. But, they couldn’t find their way back out, so they were trapped inside to dine on us until we set them free in the morning.

Four metal bunks on each side of the room formed an aisle down the center. At the foot of each bunk sat a wooden box, appropriately called a footlocker. The bunk with a bare mattress and empty footlocker was obviously for me. I put my duffle bag on the bunk and pried my fingers from the grip. A crisscross pattern from the canvass strap embossed my hand for several hours afterward. I then set out to find out what a MAC-V was.

I liked the sound of the title Assistance Command. I imagined it meant the organization helped the South Vietnamese in some way like building roads and schools. I soon learned our assistance had to do only with killing enemy soldiers, because MAC-V was the in-country tactical headquarters for combat operations.

As I wandered around looking for the southeast corner of Tan Son Nhut, I flashed on a poster I saw in my recruiter’s office. It showed an erect, square-jawed soldier in a crisp uniform. From across the street, a pretty girl looked him over. The Eiffel Tower could be seen in the background.

Chapter Two

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War is mainly a catalog of blunders.

— Winston Churchill

Large, elaborate teak nameplates, hand-carved by local craftsmen, adorned the desks of most officers at MAC-V. One read, OSCAR D. BOSTWICK, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army and in smaller letters, Chief, Office of Information. Above the name, a three-dimensional rendering depicted two elephants trying to make a baby.

Colonel Bostwick’s bald head glistened like it had been waxed. His scalp, like all flesh in Southeast Asia, was covered by a thin layer of perspiration. The office smelled of yesterday’s cigars, and the stink improved just a little as he blew fresh smoke into the air. He shifted his squat, pudgy body in a squeaky chair as he flipped through my personnel folder. Tell me about your experience as a journalist, he said.

He might as well have asked about my experience as an astronaut.

Sir? was all I could think to say.

Your background in journalism. What have you done? Where did you work?

Sir, I’ve never worked as a journalist.

He took another look at my orders. Look. Right here. Your MOS. Your Military Occupational Specialty says you’re a 46Q. You’re assigned to me as an Army journalist. You must have something in your background that qualifies you. Have you done any writing?

Book reports, I guess, Sir. I just graduated from high school ten weeks ago.

He looked at my orders again and said, Good lord, you’re just out of boot camp? You must be the lowest-ranking man in Southeast Asia. And age seventeen? Probably the youngest, too. There must be something in your aptitude that made them send you here. Or maybe not, if I know the Army.

I also met Lieutenant Jerry Fovelle and Private Gary Purdy. Lieutenant Fovelle’s fair complexion and delicate features perfectly suited his effeminate nature. His thinning blond hair signaled the inevitability of baldness. He had a slight build, fair complexion, and a soft-spoken manner. He didn’t try to make his voice deep or authoritative the way many officers did. In fact, I think he worked at his gentle demeanor.

At first, meeting Purdy, an administrative clerk about my age, excited me. I thought he’d be somebody I could buddy-up with, but he turned out to be something of a cave man. He even looked like one. Slightly stooped with large, hairy ears, one long, bushy eyebrow, and a huge jaw. His Adam’s apple was more like an Adam’s grapefruit, and his arms were an inch, maybe an inch-and-a-half, too long for his body. The Army couldn’t even find a uniform to fit him, so his bony wrists hung well below his shirt cuffs.

A later situation characterized both Lieutenant Fovelle and Private Purdy. Purdy adopted the Vietnamese custom of letting the pinky fingernail on his left hand grow very long, and he used it to pick his teeth. Seeing this mortified Fovelle. That young person, he told Colonel Bostwick, is completely devoid of delicate sensibilities.

More paperwork ate up the rest of the day, and by the time I got back to the hootch, I was completely spent. I didn’t sleep much on the C-130, plus the effects of the new time zone and the climate combined to wipe me out.

All the hootch residents were there. Corky Hicks, a chaplain’s assistant, wanted to be friendly. My eyes ached for sleep, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to make a friend. He pointed out the others and described their jobs: three munitions specialists who loaded bombs onto fighter jets, a clerk from the Military Personnel Office, and a mechanic who repaired flight line fire trucks. As highest-ranking man, Sergeant Mercer, the mechanic, was barracks chief. The guy asleep when I came in earlier still lay in bed under his blanket. I said so to Hicks.

Hicks instantly became strangely somber. He stood slowly and said, Oh, oh. He took a few steps, then stopped, and turned to the barracks chief. Hey, Mercer. Costas, here, says Cooper’s been in that bed all day. His tried to make his voice conversational but couldn’t cover a faint note of tension.

I don’t know about all day, I said. Since about one o’clock that I know of.

Mercer looked toward the guy and barked, Cooper! Wake up, boy! Get up! Cooper didn’t move. He walked to Cooper’s bunk and kicked the metal bed frame a couple times. No response. Oh, boy, Mercer said solemnly. The hootch became heavy with quiet. Mercer pulled back the blanket and exposed a sheet that was shiny red with wet blood. You could see Cooper’s face now, so pale white it was almost blue. Mercer didn’t check for signs of life. Didn’t have to. I’d never seen a dead man before, and even I could tell he was dead.

After a moment, Hicks broke the silence saying gravely, Can you believe this? The damn Dead Bed again.

Son of a bitch, Mercer growled. He turned to the personnel clerk and said, Tuttle, Go to the Chow Hall. Use their telephone and call Security and get them over here. Now! To the rest of us he said, Any you guys got any idea about this? Who’s seen Cooper today?

Everyone made some form of a shrug. Mercer turned to me. Was he dead when you saw him earlier?

I don’t know, Sergeant. I didn’t want to disturb him. I thought he was asleep.

Didn’t you think it strange he was covered with a blanket in 110 degree heat? He said the word, strange, with ironic emphasis, like any idiot should know it was a lot more than just strange.

Well, yes. But ... My voice trailed off. Mercer gave me a contemptuous look and turned away. Geez, they’d all seen him covered with a blanket, and none of them said anything about it.

Damn Dead Bed, Hicks said again.

Stop with that, Mercer said softly as he pulled the blanket over the body.

This is number three, said Tuttle as he laced his boots. Three right in a row, said Hicks.

Remember, this was my first dead person. I had never been to a funeral or anything. As I looked at Cooper, the room began to move in a circle. Several internal organs sprouted wings and commenced flight. I hadn’t eaten lately; else I’m sure I would have thrown up. The air took on a sickening, metallic smell. I didn’t know it then, but it was the smell of human blood — a smell that would become all too familiar. Hicks saw me stagger and grabbed my arm.

Com’on, Costas. He steered me to my bunk. You’re looking kind of green, boy.

I nodded and gulped.

This your first stiff? Hicks asked. Well, welcome to the stinkin’ war, buddy. You’ll get used to this. Or, maybe you won’t. Either way, it’s going to be there.

I nodded and gulped again.

Hell of a way to get welcomed to the country though, Hicks said. Well, listen. Forget about Cooper for a minute and listen to this. Do you know about the Dead Bed? Anybody tell you about it yet?

I managed the word, No.

Hicks stood and walked toward the dead man. He tapped the bed frame with the toe of his boot. This here’s the Dead Bed, he said. "Two guys — that is two other guys, now it’s three guys total — who got this bunk are dead now. We started calling it the Dead Bed a couple weeks ago as a joke. Hell, now I don’t know what to think.

"First guy was a munitions specialist like those guys — like Pincus, Ledbedder, and Todd. He was in his late thirties, a fat little guy. What the hell was his name? He’d been here a couple days, and one hot afternoon, while he was on the flight line loading bombs, his heart gave out. Plop! He went down like a tree. They say he was probably dead before he hit the ground.

Second guy was a new troop, like you. He stood in the wrong place in Saigon when one of them bicycle bombs went off. The only thing they found of him was his dog tag embedded in the back of another dead guy about twenty feet away. Now Cooper, here, he’s the third. Three in a row in less than what, about six weeks, Mercer? Yeah, that’s about right. Mercer lifted the front of his t-shirt and used it to wipe sweat from his face. His creamy-white potbelly almost glowed in stark contrast to the dark tan of his arms and face. Cooper got here not even a month ago. We told him the bed had a jinx on it. But it was a joke.

Yeah. How about that, said Hicks. A haunted bed. Some joke.

Tuttle returned saying, "Security’s on the way, and they’re bringing a medic. I told them don’t bother about the medic, but