Pizza and Mortars: Ba- Muoi-Ba & Body Bags

By William R. Upton

In 1966 boys went to Vietnam because it was their duty to do so. Some fought, some supported the fighters. All knew danger because there were no front lines in Vietnam. Sleep sometimes was interrupted by incoming mortars. Days were often jarred by grenades tossed into bars or claymore mines planted beneath picnic tables. Bill Upton served as an airplane crew chief flying out of the resort city of Vung Tau. He survived the war and was changed by it. Pizza & Mortars: Ba-muoi-ba & Body Bags is about coming of age in a war zone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 23, 2004
• ISBN: 9781453582961

William R. Upton

In1965 Bill Upton flew to Vietnam in a Caribou, a U.S. Army airplane. For twelve months, he ferried bullets, bombs, and body bags from the Mekong Delta to Quang Tri. His plane was hit thirteen times by enemy fire. Still, he snapped photos, wrote poems, and kept journals to record events that changed his life forever. The result is his coming of age memoir, Pizza & Mortars: Ba-muoi-ba & Body Bags. For his Vietnam service, Bill received an Air Medal, Vietnam Campaign and Service medals, a National Defense Service medal, and a certificate of appreciation from General Westmoreland.

Book preview

Copyright © 2003 by William R. Upton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

18911

CONTENTS

I’m a Hero

Thirty Years Later

My First Two Years

Green Skivvies

Escape and Evasion

Gray Tigers Take the Sky

Aloha Hawaii (Hello)

Aloha Hawaii (Goodbye)

Over the Pacific

Midway, Gooney Birds & Myra Faye

Hitching a Ride

No Hope

Vung Tau, Vietnam

The Company Clown

Pizza and Mortars

R & R

Plei Mrong, Montagnards, and Trash

Flak Jackets and Respect

I Meet Binh and Lao Xi

Gray Tiger ‘86, Charlie Moore, and Binh

Here’s to You, Binh

Lao Xi and French Wine

Lao Xi at Front Beach

I’m a Pilot

A Jeep to Quang Tri

The Major

Back in Time for Combat

Milk Run

I’m Wounded

Like the Movies Back Home

The Widow Maker

Figmo

Home

Afterward

I’M A HERO

Superman or Green Lantern ain’t got a-nothin’ on me.

—Donovan (1966)

At 7 o’clock sharp on January 20, 1966, I arrived at my new Caribou, Gray Tiger ‘99, for my first mission in Vietnam. Behind the airplane a red casket with gold trim rested on the back of a deuce-and-a-half. Fifteen standing, squatting, smoking, jabbering Vietnamese dressed in somber colors milled around the plane’s cargo door.

I walked over to the driver who leaned against the truck’s tailgate. Who’s bein’ buried? I asked.

Some gook’s all I know. His cigarette bobbed up and down as he spoke. Sarge said mayor of Vung Tau or somethin’. He pointed at the milling Vietnamese. Them’s his kinfolk, I guess.

Where we taking him?

The driver looked at his clipboard. Saigon.

I signed for the casket, turned away, and performed my pre-flight checks on the twin-engine cargo plane. Satisfied it was safe to fly, I filled in my flight log, flipped up two port side troop seats to make room for the casket, and fastened a set of rollers to the deck. Minutes later a three-quarter-ton rumbled up and dropped off the pilots, Captain Marshall Bracey and Chief Warrant Officer Jesse Stephens. I knew the two but had never flown with them.

Mornin’ sirs. I saluted with one hand and held out the other. S/P4 Upton. First name’s Bill.

Captain Bracey, about five feet six and slender returned my salute then shook my hand. Good morning, Bill. He adjusted his aviator sunglasses. Marshall Bracey, first name—Captain! He grinned to show he was joking. That’s what Mom calls me, anyway.

The taller Mr. Stephens tipped his cap. G’morning, Bill. I’m Jesse Stephens. Call me anything—but late for cocktails. He patted my shoulder.

Not half bad. I’d lucked out for pilots.

Captain Bracey climbed into the plane, sat down on a troop seat, and thumbed through the logbook. I followed him.

Ready to load, Captain? I asked. We got fifteen passengers and the former mayor of Vung Tau.

He looked up. I saw the casket. Is the plane okay? Captain Bracey snapped the logbook shut, took off his sunglasses and polished them with a green handkerchief.

Lookin’ good, Sir.

Then load ‘em up while Jesse and I do a walk-a-round.

Yes, sir. Fuel samples are on the loading ramp.

Gotcha, he said.

Six members of the funeral party set one end of the casket on the rollers and pushed it toward me. Once the casket was in place I draped a tie-down strap close to each end, figuring that should be enough. The casket looked fragile so I didn’t reef down on the ratchets. Happy with my work, I helped the passengers climb on board, get seated, and buckled in.

In a Caribou, troop seats line both sides of the cabin and passengers sit across from each other. I normally sat next to the forward bulkhead, directly behind the pilot. On this flight, however, I sat next to the casket. For one thing, a mama-san with black teeth sat in my regular spot and I didn’t know how to say ‘find another seat’ in Vietnamese. Another thing, if I sat in back I could snap some photos out the cargo door which I left open on hot days. But mainly I decided to sit back there because the funeral party had collective halitosis. In Korea, they called it kimchi breath. Whatever they called it here, it stunk.

With passengers and casket all set, I hopped down, pulled the gear lock pins, and held the fire extinguisher while Captain Bracey started the engines. Then I boarded the plane and buckled myself in. I clicked the intercom. Ready back here, sir.

Roger that, Mr. Stephens said. Let’s go to Saigon.

I relaxed and mentally patted myself on the back. Nothing to this job. A piece of cake. All was thumbs up while we taxied, but when the plane sped forward for takeoff, the casket lurched once and rolled backward. Toward the open cargo door. The rear tie-down strap had slipped off and lay useless on the floor. The front strap was still in place, but the casket was sliding backward under it. Just before the casket rolled out of reach, I reached out and hooked a brass handle with my fingers.

As the plane lifted off and we began our steep climb, gravity and inertia multiplied the coffin weight. Holding it was like dead lifting a thousand pounds. I clenched my jaws and squeezed my fingers as tight as I could. In my mind, I could see the casket hit the ground, burst open, and a dead papa-san bounce ass over teakettle down the PSP runway. I could also see headlines in my hometown paper—Local Boy Serving in Vietnam Found Guilty of Corpse Abuse. Wouldn’t that make Mother and Dad proud?

But just keeping the former mayor on board and my name out of the papers wasn’t enough. My job, once we took off, was to let the pilots know if the landing gear had retracted, but I couldn’t see the damned things without releasing the casket. Gritting my teeth, I loosened one hand long enough to push the intercom button. Gear up, sir, I said. I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right.

Roger, came Captain Bracey’s voice from the cockpit.

That job done, I resumed my two-handed death grip on the casket until we leveled off at altitude. After the pressure on my arms and hands eased, I let go, collapsed backwards, and rubbed life back into them. When I could straighten my fingers, I flipped open my seat belt and stood up. All at once and as if on cue, the Vietnamese passengers clapped and cheered. I scratched my head, grinned, and took a quick bow before adding three more straps to the casket.

Outside the plane at Saigon, one Ho Chi Minh-looking papa-san walked over to me.

Papa-san see everything. He chuckled as he spoke. You big hero to Vietnamese . . . he said and patted my back, you save dead man. He walked away laughing. He said something to the woman with the black teeth. She laughed, too.

Captain Bracey jumped down from the plane and stood alongside me. What was that all about?

Damned if I know, I said.

Well, let’s get on our way then.

THIRTY YEARS LATER

Young soldiers drink to forget, old soldiers drink to remember.

Bill Uptoe

—Vietnam 1965-66

In the summer of 1996 an old Army buddy stopped by my house in Oregon. We drank beer and swapped lies about the Vietnam war and our duties as airplane crew chiefs. We were both in the 57th Aviation Company and our airplanes carried jungle boots, ammunition, soldiers, body bags, mail, VC, cows, chickens, spare parts, and even a few celebrities from one end of South Vietnam to the other.

Do you remember the time a villager chucked a spear into the side of my Caribou? Jerry asked.

I nodded. You showed me the picture once.

It never happened, he said. I bought the spear from a papa-san in Vung Tau and rigged it to look like a Montagnard did it.

You’re shittin’ me.

I shit you not, he said.

Do you remember during our layover in Hawaii when Lieutenant Carson marched bare-ass naked down the hotel hallway banging on doors with an umbrella? Or the time, in country, when John Wayne Maine took over for me for a day and let Captain Bracey bounce the port wing off a rubber tree at some plantation?

Jerry laughed and said, Yeah, Maine duck-taped it and they flew it back to Vung Tau. I always told him he needed glasses. By the way, I saw Maine a couple of years ago. He’s looking old.

Not like us, huh?

Jerry sucked in his gut. Nope. Not like me, anyway.

You ever hear from Frog Fogarty?

Jerry shook his head. Huh unh. I expect some Tallahassee hooker has killed him by now.

I laughed in agreement. Or he fell off a barstool and broke his scrawny neck.

We talked and drank that night until neither of us could hold our eyes open. Then, over breakfast, we talked some more. Finally, time came for Jerry to leave. We hugged and promised to stay in touch. Take care, Jerry said as he got into his car. He rolled down his window and looked up at me. Why don’t you write a book about that Vietnam stuff? It’d be a kick in the ass.

After he drove off, I rummaged through my bottom dresser drawer, pulled out an old shoe box held together with masking tape and rubber bands, and opened it. On top of everything laid half of a Vietnamese five dong note clipped to half of an American dollar bill. I had kept those torn bills for thirty years because of a name in red ink: Binh. My Vietnamese Marine buddy. He had taken the other halves. We’d planned to find each other after the war, tape them back together, and buy Ba-muoi-ba beer.

Next on the stack were an Air Medal, a Vietnam Campaign Medal, a Good Conduct Medal, Crew Member Wings, and other military awards. Under the medals was a book, Saigon in the Flesh. On the cover an attractive Vietnamese girl in a skimpy black dress posed sexily. I remember glancing around furtively before forking over sixty-five piasters for what I believed to be Vietnamese porno. When I took the book to my tent and started reading, I could hardly keep my eyes open:

South Vietnam has two seasons: rain and sun. To be more accurate, however, one must say there are three seasons in South Vietnam. The rainy season (from May to October) is very wet, while the dry season . . .

Blah, blah, blah!

In a way, it was Vietnamese porn. I’d been screwed out of 65 piasters.

Digging deeper, I found black and white photographs. One of Binh smoking one of those burnt rubber smelling Vietnamese cigarettes. What doing, Uptoe? Binh used to say that all the time. Another snapshot showed Lao Xi, her bikini top about to burst, black hair dripping with sea water. She posed against a rock on Vung Tau’s Back Beach. Next came a group picture of me, Frog Fogarty, Sonny Bass, RC Murray, and three other guys whose names I couldn’t remember. We all had drinks in our hands; a half empty vodka bottle sat on an upside-down washtub.

In the next-to-last photo, my high school sweetheart, Myra Faye Nelson, hugged a stuffed pink poodle I’d won for her by knocking over milk bottles at the Multnomah county fair. We were quite the couple. From day one, our relationship had been like driving the Rockies in a worn out Volkswagen. Smoky and slow chugging up one side, no brakes coming down.

The last photo was of Mother and me standing next to her Rambler Rebelstation wagon—I burned the Firestones off that puppy more than once during high school. I had my arm around her shoulders and we were grinning, tickled over something. I wore starched Army fatigues tucked into spit-shined combat boots; she wore a summer dress and fuzzy house slippers.

At one end of the shoe box, held together by a crackled rubber band, were all my letters to Mother. I had found them in her bedroom closet after she died, surprised she’d kept them. I picked one postmarked Fort Polk, Louisiana.

May 26,1963

Dear Mother and All,

How are you? I’m doing fine. Is everything okay at Granny’s? I hope so. It’s been two weeks now, and I like the Army a lot. They cut off all my hair and gave me a bunch of new clothes—all green, ha! ha! I’m in a barracks with sixty other recruits who all seem like nice guys except my squad leader who I don’t like too much.

My new address is Company H, Second Training Regiment, Fort Polk, Louisiana. Now you have my address, so please write. I will send money for the car payment when I get paid. They’re calling us to chow, so will close for now.

Your Loving Son, Bill

Memories. Lot’s of them. I dropped the letter back in the box and shook my head. Could I possibly have been more naive? I picked up the currency pieces again. What were we thinking of when we signed those bills? There would be no Ba-muoi-ba beer with Binh. That was all gone. But there was a story to tell.

MY FIRST TWO YEARS

Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh, here I am at Camp Grenada.

It is very entertaining and they say that we’ll have fun if it stops raining.

—Allan Sherman (1963)

I decided to join the Army because I was failing 11th grade for the second time. True, I didn’t like high school, but the failures weren’t totally my fault.

The first time I failed because my folks pulled me out school to run the family gas station while Dad had back surgery. The second time was when in February of 1963 Mother packed me, my two brothers, and a couple of changes of dungarees into the Rambler and moved us from Albany, Oregon to Valliant, Oklahoma to be with our dying grandpa. Although I enrolled in school there, I was too far behind to catch up. Failing would mean starting my junior year for the third time. The Army looked great by comparison.

I took the enlistment tests during the third week of March. Two days later, while sprawled out on Granny’s couch reading a Superman comic book and listening to the Four Seasons on my transistor radio, the phone rang. Mother answered it.

Yes, Sergeant Wilson, she said, he’s here. How did he do?

Sergeant Wilson? From the recruiting office? I jumped up, dropped Superman on the floor, and ran to the telephone.

Mother pushed me away, nodding her head and saying, uh-huh and mmh-hmm and oh-my-word.

I shifted from foot to foot and pulled on her arm. "Mother, let me talk to him."

She held me back with one hand and said uh-huh a few more times. Just a minute, Sergeant. He’s right here. Mother put her hand over the mouthpiece. It’s your recruiting sergeant, she whispered, he wants to talk to you.

Moth-er! I snatched the phone from her.

Congratulations, William, the Army recruiter said. You’ve passed the written tests. We’re bussing you to Oklahoma City on Monday for a physical. If you pass that, you’re in the Army.

Thanks, Sergeant Wilson. Thanks a lot! I hung up the phone. I’m in the Army, Mother. I took her hands; we danced in a circle, and hugged each other. How about that?

She smiled at me with one of those I’m not so sure smiles. At least there’s no war going on.

Basic training was tough but survivable if a guy could learn to fit in. At seventeen, I had gone nowhere, done nothing. I hadn’t participated in varsity sports, drama club, or belonged to a street gang, so I didn’t have very much in common with the other recruits. In order to fit in I started drinking. It was like when I smoked my first cigarette in high school. I didn’t do it because I craved the taste of tobacco. I smoked to impress my friends, who smoked to impress me.

My underage friends and I, with the blessings of the U.S. Army, drank all the three-point-two beer we could buy. They must’ve theorized that we couldn’t drink enough of the watered down stuff to get drunk. Little did they know. One didn’t have to be a math major to see that two, three point two beers equaled one, six point four beer. You just had to piss more often.

So every time I went to the PX, my first stop was the beer cooler. Sometimes I drank alone, but most of the time it was with a buddy.

In July of ‘63, on my eighteenth birthday, I drank with my Cajun friend, Arthur Hebert. Here be my birthday present to you, Billy Boy, he’d said. That night, Hebert, a bona fide Louisiana coon-ass nineteen-year-old taught me how to chug-a-lug beer, a skill, I found out later, that had no value whatsoever anywhere for anything. Unless making yourself look stupid was a desired trait.

That night we chug-a-lugged fourteen beers between us, enough to build an impressive but wobbly beer can pyramid. When it finally toppled, we headed back to the barracks. I fell down twice and helped Hebert up three times on the way back.

At the barracks we detoured drunkenly to our respective bunks. I don’t know what Hebert did, but I threw up in, on, and around my bed before flopping down. My six-foot-tall, one-hundred-eighty-pound-non-drinker squad leader ordered me to clean up the mess.

I couldn’t clean it up. Hell fire, I couldn’t even stop my bunk from spinning. And I was so sick that only death could’ve made me feel better. My squad leader didn’t care. He jerked me to my feet and pushed my head into a nearby garbage can with his elbow, breaking my nose somewhere along the way. Several guys pulled him off, threw me into bed, and mopped up my mess for me. I guess I’d finally made some friends along the way.

I don’t remember going to sleep, but I do remember waking up. My head throbbed, my swollen nose was black and blue, and my throat ached from puking. I raced from my bunk and threw up again, this time in the commode. After showering and tweaking my nose back into position, I felt better. By lunchtime I was ready to start all over again.

In the middle of September I graduated from combat engineer school. It was time to report to my first real duty station and sharpen my newly acquired construction and equipment operation skills. Then, I figured, in two-and-a-half years, when my enlistment ran out, snagging a high paying job should be as easy as lacing combat boots.

In late October, twenty-three days after I boarded her, the USS William Mitchell steamed into Inchon Harbor. Two days later, I reported to Headquarters Company, 8th Engineer Battalion near Tongo-Ri, Korea. I spent a year there and guess what? Never served a day as a combat engineer. Never operated a bulldozer or a road grader or any other equipment that would help me in civilian life. They made me a supply specialist. Six days a week I sorted bolts, nuts, washers, screwdrivers, flashlight batteries, and etc. for distribution to line companies. Three screws, three nuts, and three washers to Company A. Three screws, three nuts, and three washers, to Company B, Company C, Company D, ad infinitum.

In August of ‘64, halfway through my one-year tour in Korea, the Navy destroyer, USS Maddox, and the aircraft carrier, Ticonderoga, opened fire on two North Vietnamese patrol boats and sank another in the Gulf of Tonkin. Orders came to go to DEFCON three alert. For the next thirty days we wore full combat field gear, and carried our rifles wherever we went. Like what I imagined real war was like, without the shooting. Since every indication had us going to war, I decided then and there that if I was shipped off to war, it wouldn’t be as a supply specialist. But the Army wouldn’t allow a change of job assignment for no good reason, and my not liking sorting bolts and nuts wasn’t reason enough. They would, however, let me do so if I reenlisted. I agreed to four more years and headed back to the states.

In Army Aviation School at Fort Rucker, Alabama, I studied to become a Caribou airplane mechanic. During training, I learned the short takeoff and landing airplane inside and out, memorizing her 96’ 7½" wingspan, her length, height, weight, top speed, and cruising range. I studied specs on her 1,450 HP Pratt & Whitney R-2000 engines. In short, I fell in love with her grasshopper shape and upswept tail section.

November 13, 1964

Fort Rucker, Alabama

Dear Mother and All,

How is everybody at home? I’m fine. We had our first test at Aviation School last week and I came out 3rd in a class of 40 people. I’m surprised to find out how easy school can be since I realized how much my future depends on it. I’ve got my heart set on completing this course—and doing well.

Mother, you don’t have to worry about me going to Vietnam because I just spent that year in Korea. I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving.

I love you very much, Bill

That was bullshit about not going to Vietnam because of Korea. I didn’t have a clue as to where the Army would assign me after school.

In January, 1965, I graduated Caribou school fifteenth of a hundred and two and was transferred to the 50th Transport Airplane Company at Fort Benning, Georgia. I loved my new assignment and worked hard to be a good Caribou mechanic. Before long I was promoted to assistant crew chief.

GREEN SKIVVIES

Green, green, it’s green they say on the far side of the hill.

Green, green, I’m going away to where the grass is greener still.

—New Christy Minstrels (1963)

Less than a year later the Army transferred me to Fort