Blue Villa & Other Vietnam Stories

By Ernest Auerbach

Ernest Auerbach served as an Army captain in Vietnam during the build up of the war, 1966-1967. He recounts his adventures there and describes some of the general courts martial cases he tried and defended. This is "Catch 22" in reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 24, 2008
• ISBN: 9781440114038

Ernest Auerbach

Ernest Auerbach was president of Austin Opera from 2011 to 2013 and remains a trustee. He is a retired United States Army colonel whose subsequent assignments in law and management included Xerox, N.L. Industries, CIGNA, Andersen Consulting, New York Life, and AIG. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Austin, Texas.

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Copyright © 2008 by Ernest Auerbach

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-14021 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-14038 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008944040

iUniverse rev. date: 12/19/08

Contents

POINT OF VIEW.

THE EARLY DAYS- FORT BENNING.

VIGNETTES OF LIFE IN COUNTRY

TRIALS

FINI VIETNAM

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

POINT OF VIEW.

With the passage of time, the sharp edges that define people and events smooth out. Some incidents in war, adventures and the characters that populate those incidents and adventures still stand sharply defined as do the details surrounding them, not all. Perhaps that’s the result of selective or could it be fading memory? With that caveat, this is the story of my year in Vietnam (RVN). I was a captain and a member of the Army’s legal corps, the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. We are called JAGs, and according to a contemporary list of officers stationed there, I was the 22d member of the corps assigned to RVN since 1959 when then Lieutenant Colonel Paul Durbin served there. I will write about events leading to my arrival in Saigon; relate anecdotes that are the heart of this telling with their strange relation to reality, and then describe a few cases I prosecuted and defended which show how law and justice adjust to war.

This is not a story of blood and guts, though some of that comes through as I was there during the troop build-up, traveled throughout the country a great deal, saw a lot and sometimes got into tricky situations which were the result of a hot war going on. Death was around us every day, and we were never constipated. But that aspect of the war has been written about many times, and by excellent reporters.

The men who fought on the line day after day were the men for whom we had the greatest respect. During my tour in-country, from March 1966 to February 1967, I worked and lived with a large brotherhood of officers and men, some great people, some not. All family. I salute the men of the Blue Villa, the members of the Staff Judge Advocate Office, 1st Log Command, who served at the same time in Vietnam as I did. We were stationed in a building located across the road from our command head shed, located about 400 meters outside the main gate of Tan Son Nhut Air Base (TSN), Saigon. TSN was then and remains Saigon’s main airport. In early 1966, Saigon was changing from a reasonably attractive French colonial city into a choked, American dominated metropolis quickly outgrowing its capability to provide public services and absorb the growing number of soldiers and civilian refugees who fled the countryside. It was a hot town, a hot town at the center of a hot war, a war which we believed in at that time.

THE EARLY DAYS- FORT BENNING.

As a newly commissioned Army first lieutenant assigned to the Infantry Officer School at Georgia’s Fort Benning in August 1962, I was poor and could only afford to drink beer at the O Club – Officers’ Club - with my buddies, read pocket books and see movies on post. Even if I had had more cash, October in Georgia was bloody hot so there was little incentive to go off-post into nearby Columbus, a town most of us thought had little to offer; or to Phoenix City, Alabama, which was off limits to us because of pawn shops, used car dealers and brothels all which lived off the soldiers. Fort Benning was and continues to be the home of the Infantry. There was great pride at Fort Benning in the Army and in the Infantry when I was stationed there, and a statue was prominently displayed with a group of soldiers led by an officer crying out Follow Me - the call of the Infantry, the spirit of leadership. It was a post with a decidedly Southern flavor. Even though the Army was fully integrated by then, I saw the faded signs White and Colored below adjacent water fountains in some of the older buildings.

On the tantalizing side, should carnal desire have steered me in the direction of ladies of the night, none of whom ever had a problem gaining entry to the O Club’s bar, these young and attractive women were only interested in captains and up, real men with abundant cash. Lieutenants such as me could only look and lust. When I arrived at Fort Benning, I knew nothing about the Army. I had not been in ROTC, nor had I been an enlisted man, nor had I gone to Officers Candidate School. I received a direct commission which put me in the Infantry School without any military background. I didn’t know how to salute, wear a uniform properly or any of the military courtesies; absolutely nothing about military life. I quickly went through an intense period of catching up. Much of our physical training was conducted by Army Rangers. They were the toughest and the best, and lessons they taught us saved my life on at least one occasion. Unlike other troops, they never bent the rules just because we were officers. They made us repeat and repeat exercises until we got them right. The greatest lessons I learned at Fort Benning were those of leadership, the responsibility of senior to junior, the responsibility of command, the loyalty of one soldier to another. To the best of my ability, I carried these lessons through my Army and subsequent civilian life. Having had those lessons drummed into me, it was and continues to be strange to me that among civilians, that sense of loyalty,