Computer Handyman

From Firebase Barbara we went back near Dong Ha, to Charlie-1, one of the bases along the DMZ. It was in theory the safest of these bases because it was the southern-most and eastern-most of this line. Those closest to the DMZ were labeled A, as in A-1, A-2, etc. The next line were B bases, and the third and last line were the C bases. The numbering started from the east, near the coast with 1, and went up as you went west. Presumably Khe Sanh would have been the western anchor of this line of bases. At Charlie-1 we did more shooting during the daytime. Often an Air Force forward air controller would fly up and down the DMZ in a small plane like a Cessna. If he found something big, he would call in an air strike, but if he found something small he would call us. Often he would call a fire mission on “footprints in the sand.” We would start shooting where he said the footprints disappeared, and usually someone would emerge running back toward North Vietnam because they knew that we were...

From LZ Sharon, we moved to Firebase Barbara on a mountaintop west of Quang Tri, close enough to Laos that we could shell the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran along the border. At Barbara we had two eight-inch howitzers and two 175-mm guns. The eight-inchers could fire about ten miles, and the 175s about twenty miles, but less accurately. They gave us pretty long coverage up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. We also did more close support of American troops than we had done since we had parted from the 101st division. I never knew who we were shooting for, but they sounded like Special Forces, if only because they were so calm in combat. We would be adjusting fire for them, walking the rounds in closer, and t hey would very calmly say something like, “They are in the wire, too close for you to shoot at now; you’ll have to wait awhile.” I only learned from a Time magazine subscription I had that an American Special Forces base at Mai Loc had been overrun. I recognized the name because it was m...

After a few months, we parted ways with the 101st and went off on our own to an old Marine fire base called LZ Sharon. The Vietnamization of the war was starting, so instead of American infantry protecting us we had Vietnamese troops and American air defense artillery. At LZ Sharon, the Vietnamese troops were draft dodgers who had been caught, but the Vietnamese Army would not give them guns; so they had clubs and knives. Our air defense artillery was a quad-50 machine gun, four 50-caliber machine guns mounted together on the back of a five-ton truck. Because it was closer, when it fired the tracers made almost as good a fireworks show as the platoons of infantry back at LZ Sally. For some reason, probably because as chief computer I was pretty good at calculating how to aim artillery, I had my own eighty-one mm mortar. However, I only had illumination rounds to support the quad-50; I did not have any high explosive rounds. Most of our battery’s shooting was done at night. Usually aro...

We arrived from the US at Cam Ranh Bay, where we waited for a plane to Dong Ha. I remember looking at a map there, where the dot for Dong Ha would not fit entirely in South Vietnam, but jutted across the DMZ into North Vietnam. This was what the Army called northern I Corps. From Cam Ranh Bay we flew to Da Nang, where I was amazed at the busiest airport I had ever seen, with fighter jets and transports tailgating each other down the runway. In the terminal, however, things looked pretty normal. Everybody was pretty clean and relaxed looking. One soldier, though, looked like someone out of the old Willie and Joe cartoons from World War II. He was dirty, his uniform was ragged, and he had a glazed, far-away look in his eye, the only one like that of the hundreds in the airport. My friend asked him where he was from. It turned out that he was from the DMZ. When my friend told him we were going to Dong Ha, he said something like, “I just came from there. I heard the A-2 base was overrun th...

From AIT, I moved to artillery officer candidate school at Ft. Sill. I was serious, but I was influenced by the general anti-war feeling in the country, so that I was not inclined to put up with a lot of foolishness, and it seemed like there was a lot of foolishness at OCS. I was pretty constantly in trouble, and the main penalty for being in trouble was being forced to run something they called the JARK . It consisted of running 4.2 miles up what they said was the highest mountain in Oklahoma (a medium sized hill) with a full pack, combat boots, etc. However, I did it so often that I could pretty much do it with my eyes closed, and it probably meant that I was in the best physical shape of my life. In addition, I could knock off twenty-five or fifty fairly decent pushups several times a day. About half way through OCS, there was a big celebration of the first Air Force “Ace” who had shot down the requisite number of enemy planes. It turned out that he had a mustache, which until then ...