Another SNAFU -Chu Lai, Vietnam

False reports of friendly casualties sent a medic into an area that was to be bombed by F4 Phantom jets.

  The humidity and heat seem to suck the breath out of me due to the hot sun and blue sky late in 1969, causing me to escape to my RMK-BRJ Construction company dispensary in Chu Lai, Vietnam. That familiar primal survival feeling in my gut tells me this again is going to be another "Situation Normal All Fucked Up "day.  

A heavyset Black man dressed in civilian clothes, who reminded me of a professional football defensive player, entered the dispensary and excitedly tells me that he has gonorrhea, and worse, he is going back to the United States in three days to his wife. Is he one of the company employees, or is he in the military and is fearful of going to a US military clinic because most likely he would be written up and punished by a military court marshal? 

The US Military issued regulations ordering their medical staff to report to the commanding officer the names of personnel who were unfortunate to acquire venereal disease more than once. If that happened, they were subject to disciplinary measures. Of course, this policy, which was meant to reign in the incidences of STD, created other more severe problems. As a result, some soldiers suffered from incorrect self-treatment or the use of contaminated or diluted antibiotics purchased from the Vietnamese black market. It made no difference to me if he was military or not; the poor guy needed help.

Before I could respond, he pleaded in desperation with a panic-stricken look on his face; he stunned me by saying, "I need help! Look, I will buy you a car or write you a check; I can"t go back to my wife like this!" I responded by telling him it's my job to take care of him and not to worry. The examination determined he had a good case of gonorrhea with classical signs and symptoms, which I treated with an injection of fast-acting penicillin and two injections of long-acting penicillin, which should be therapeutic for at least two weeks. Thanking me profusely, he left, and I never saw or heard from him again. I am positive that I saved his marriage or perhaps his life. And as I expected, there wasn't a brand new car or check waiting for me. 

Being in Vietnam for almost three years, I learned not to rely on Allied or US Military intelligence. I depended more on the information given by friendly Vietnamese civilians who I had given medical care to them or their families and villagers in their hamlets. Many times the villagers gave warnings to me and my interpreter to avoid certain areas or avoid going off base because of possible VC/Northern Vietnamese ground attack. The CIA and US Military intelligence agencies were corrupted with misinformation. One day Quang, my Vietnamese Interpreter, laughingly told me that the Vietnamese civilians collected reward money for information given to a CIA officer located at Quang Ngai city. The Vietnamese would exaggerate the number of Viet Cong troops in an area because they knew the more important or more valuable the information they gave, the larger the money award they collected. In my mind, this partly played a roll in the massacre at a hamlet named My Lai about three miles south of Chu Lai.  The Americal Division had received reports of a large enemy force of Viet Cong troops and found none in the My Lai hamlet complex. Being frustrated by months of deaths and injuries and with poor company command leadership, they slaughtered over 300 civilians in the My Lai hamlet.

 I received warnings from friendly civilian South Vietnamese villagers that the Americal Division Intelligence group was compromised by A South Vietnamese Army soldier who was attached to the Intelligence Department. He was providing the Viet Cong, and Northern Vietnamese Army plans of military operations by the US military and its allies. Was this rumor true? I didn't know, but I sure was not about to test it by showing my face at the Americal Division Intelligence headquarters!

 When going off base for medical rescue calls and not having complete information, I would do an "eyes on"  hazard assessment. Sometimes the lack of knowledge or misinformation placed my interpreter and me in danger.     

Later in the day, an American supervisor burst threw the dispensary door yelling the Viet Cong was attacking the rock quarry and that there were dead and injured. My interpreter Nhan and I jumped into the white Chevrolet F-10 ambulance with large red crosses on the side and sped through the Main gate and turned left on to highway one and then took a right at the pond toward the quarry. Driving up the hill, we noted grey smoke arising from a two-story military wood building perched on the hillside off to the right. Coming nearly abreast of the building and grey smoke, we heard loud explosions with popping sounds followed by cracking sounds as bullets snapped by our ambulance. I yelled, "small arms ammunition dump going off!"  I spun the steering wheel and drove the ambulance to the left, bouncing into the rock quarry. I stopped, and both us jumped out and ran to a ditch for cover. Then hunched over and darting around the quarry like a giant rat, I searched for the reported injured or the dead and found none. 

A startling loud "BOOM"  caused me to look across the quarry where a column of smoke arose from in a dip in the hills the army troopers named the "South Rocket Pocket," from which the Viet Cong fired the 122mm rockets down to our base.   I looked up and saw a Phantom F-4  Jet at controlled airspeed diving down toward us, which released its bomb and then, in a powered climbing turn, gained altitude and came around again for another bombing run. I watched as the pinpoint bomb seems to tumble, then stabilize and grow larger and larger to the size of a football. It passed over our heads with a whistling noise and plunged into the hill exploding with rising smoke followed by a "Boom" in front of Nhan and myself. We seemed to shrink ourselves into the shallow hole in case the next bomb fell short onto our position. Rolling over onto our backs we watched the subsequent jet bombing runs on the enemy positions, tracking each falling bomb as it whistled overhead, passing over our dugout position and exploding in the hill in front of us.  I managed to put my head up to take a quick picture with my 35mm Canon camera during the bombing runs as one of the bombs exploded on enemy positions. After the Phantom F-4 fighter jet released all of its weapons, they departed for the nearby Chu Lai runways.  The ammunition dump explosion had used up all of its small arms ammo and had subsided. With the danger gone,  Nhan and I re-searched the quarry for any injured persons. Finding none, we drove back to our Chu Lai base dispensary, both of us safe and in one piece.