The Rock Jaw Ladies Club: A Memoir of the Other Vietnam. The Sick, Crazy One!

By E.T. Baysden, Jr.

In 1968, the author was part of a group of US Navy advisors billeted so deep in the Mekong Delta that they could only be reached by boat. The Navy forgot about them, the Army ignored them, and there was no “adult supervision” for long periods of time.

The result was a madcap whirlwind of bizarre misadventures and risqué behavior from Saigon to Sydney and back, as they talked their way onto helicopters, boats, bush planes, (and even a Rickshaw at one point.)

For the author and his colleagues, Vietnam could be described as “98% boredom and 2% wet underwear”. This book is about the 98%, and the insane things that happened when nobody knew – or cared – where they were!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483434179

Book preview

45511.png

The Rock Jaw Ladies Club

( A Memoir Of The OTHER Vietnam. The sick, crazy one ! )

E.T. Baysden, Jr.

Copyright © 2015 E.T. Baysden, Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3418-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3419-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3417-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 07/10/2015

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

Home, However Humble

You’re In The Army Now!

Bon Apetit!

The Welfare Service Center For The Allied Forces

The Rock Jaw Ladies Club

Ralph

Cam Rahn Bay

Welcome Home From Hong Kong

Rat Patrol

The Spook House

Bali Hai

Random Narratives Of Stupifying Surrealism

Air America

Fish And Game

Gia

Nuoc Mam

Australia, 1969

Prokopetz

Titchener

Flynn

Epilogue

Dramatis Personae

Postscript

Acknowledgments

The Rock Jaw Ladies Club

A Memoir of the Other Vietnam

This book is dedicated to the countless thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who endured the real Vietnam: brutal and horrific. I am in awe of their sacrifice. I wish they could have been with me instead.

- E.T.B., Jr.

001_a_lulu.jpg

This book is a memoir, and a pretty loose one, at that. It is a series of recollections, without much of a timeline or plot. You could view these little memories as separate free-standing short stories, though I hope you won’t. Rather, they are all part of a wild adventure that took place in various parts of Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, then what happened afterward, then what happened before. (A curious arrangement, I know.) The episodes are not in any chronological order. They are in the order in which they spilled out of my head, having fermented there for the better part of fifty years. My memories of that time are all jumbled up and disconnected, so it follows that this book is, too. I urge you to abandon any need you may feel for connectedness or order. There was precious little of that in Vietnam, so there’s not much of it here, either. Float free!

Rock Jaw (n.) Colloquial G.I. slang for Rach Gia (Rock Ya), capital of the province of Kien Giang, the southernmost in Vietnam.

Ladies Club (n.) A group that offers social, recreational, cultural and charitable activities for adult females. Also the popular name for the whorehouse on Bien Hong Street in Rock Jaw.

ARVNJunkForce.Gold260914.psd

PREFACE

You probably won’t believe half of this, and I can’t blame you. If this little memoir reads like Catch 22 or M*A*S*H on drugs, it’s because that’s how it seemed when it happened. And it all really happened.

This is a book about Vietnam, but if you’re expecting war stories, you should probably get your money back. Instead, these stories track the misadventures of a small group of U.S. Navy advisors who found themselves hurled into a crazy, surreal backwater of that war; they were billeted in perhaps the most remote corner of the Mekong Delta then promptly forgotten by the Navy and everyone else.

I should first explain that there is not a heroic bone in my body. Rather, I arrived in Vietnam in April of 1968 through a circuitous set of circumstances. Finishing college in 1965 with a frighteningly low draft lottery number, I was in line for a one-way ticket to the Army Infantry – and Vietnam.

So, like thousands of others, I took steps to guard against that: I joined the Navy. And because I had heard that Navy Officers dined on linen tablecloths in their wardrooms, with real china and silver and were served by Filipino stewards – I entered Navy OCS in the fall of 1965.

A little over six months later, I was aboard the U.S.S. Pocono, a nearly obsolete old tub that nevertheless carried an Admiral, a Marine General and their staffs – ostensibly to oversee the type of boat-based amphibious landing not employed since Korea. The brass aboard saw to it that we had a pretty cushy existence: Caribbean in the winter, North Atlantic in the summer – that sort of thing. I even had my own Filipino steward who woke me in the morning, collected my dirty laundry, and even shined my shoes! Life was good.

A year later, I was patting myself on the back so hard for fooling the U.S. Navy that I failed to notice a pattern emerging in my shipboard advancement.

I was first assigned to the ship’s Deck Division, long the domain of the Navy’s biggest fuck-ups: chronic slackers, habitual criminals and psychopaths. (When you get busted in the Navy, Deck Division is what you get busted to.) It was also the place where the ship’s small boats were housed and operated, and it was the typical first assignment for the ship’s newest, greenest Ensign. And in 1966, on the Pocono, that would be me.

After a year with the misfits and troublemakers of Deck Division, I was put in charge of the ship’s Gunnery Division. My onboard education now consisted of experience with boats and guns – a curious tandem that surely must have caught someone’s attention in the Naval Bureau of Personnel.

GREETINGS, said the orders. "PROCEED TO COUNTERINSURGENCY AND VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE SCHOOL, CORONADO, CALIFORNIA, AND THEN TO VIETNAMESE COASTAL GROUP 44, KIEN GIANG PROVINCE, SOUTH VIETNAM.

The craziest year of my life was about to begin.

FOREWORD

I was about to become part of an organization known as MACV, acronym for Military Assistance Command Vietnam. The program actually preceded the presence of U.S. combat troops. Shortly after the French left Vietnam, the Army began sending Advisors to the Vietnamese forces, hoping they could train the locals well enough to defend themselves and trying to preclude the necessity of U.S. troops on the ground. As we now know, 57,286 dead Americans later, that plan was not destined for success.

In the beginning, the Advisory Corps consisted primarily of Green Berets, but eventually it came to include everything from police chiefs to polygraph operators. Advisors had counterparts among the Vietnamese cadre with whom we were supposed to form strong bonds in the process of teaching them the American way of war. Never mind that most of us didn’t know much that would be useful to the Vietnamese military, or anyone else. Many of us had only been in our own Navy for two or three years. There were exceptions to this, but I didn’t see many. Many of their officers were wealthy aristocrats, schooled in Paris and involved in the war only to save the family rubber plantation (or hotel chain or shipping line or Tungsten mine). Or so we thought. Many of them got dissed early on for expecting the U.S. to fight their war, while they essentially hung back and watched.

Some of us advisors thought that this hanging back and watching was sort of a dandy idea, and I was a card-carrying member of that group, but it didn’t always work out so well.

The Vietnamese Navy was kind of a rag-tag outfit in 1968, but it was about to double in size by 1970. The emphasis began to switch to shallow-water craft that could patrol the thousands of miles of rivers and canals that crisscross the country, especially in the Mekong Delta. The Enemy Aggressors as they were officially referred to, were increasingly using this watery network to smuggle in supplies and personnel from the North. To patrol this maze of waterways, our allies created a fleet of several hundred motorized wooden junks in the basic configuration of the fishing boats that had been used for centuries – except these had 50 caliber machine guns mounted fore and aft, and a Honeywell crank-operated belt-fed, M-79 grenade launcher on the bow. We round-eye¹ experts would patrol with the boats and teach their crews how to kill Communists. One advisor was usually with each boat, which carried a crew of five or six. Boats normally patrolled for five days, followed by five days off, and those five days were where the problem lay. Sailors with time on their hands are trouble waiting to happen.

All this must have seemed like a grand idea – from a corner office in the Pentagon in 1968.

ARVNJunkForce.Gold260914.psd

HOME, HOWEVER HUMBLE

To get to the Vietnamese Navy Base at Kien An in the Mekong Delta, you first had to fly to the island of Phu Quoc in the South China Sea. I am told it is a beach resort today. And since there was not a Viet Cong within a radius of at least a hundred miles, it was pretty much like one then.

The U.S. Navy Base on Phu Quoc had the best of everything - good food, cozy quarters, even U.S.O. strippers (well, sort of) every other month or so. I would have loved to stick around