Introduction: Why I Went Back

Geoffrey S. Poor   |   geoffpoor@gmail.com

From May of 1968 to May of 1969 I was a Specialist 4th Class in C company of the US Army’s 70th Combat Engineer Battalion, stationed at two bases outside of Buon Ma Thuot in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, about 20 miles from Cambodia. I operated a pick and shovel and provided other manual labor. I drove jeeps, 2½ ton cargo trucks and five ton dump trucks, and pulled two kinds of guard duty – staring out over our base’s perimeter from trenches and bunkers at night, and wandering in the bush around our job sites in the field. We built concrete pads for 155 mm howitzers, worked on roads and bridges, revetments to protect machinery, helicopters and ammunition from mortar and rocket attacks, and constructed an underground medical clinic – one room with several feet of heavy corrugated steel plating, sandbags and dirt for a roof. In an odd departure, we built the foundation for a church’s classroom, a project that allowed me to escape the heavy work for a while so I could use my high school French and translate between our lieutenant and the French Catholic priests. 

We slept, variously, in canvas tents with wooden A frame supports and metal cots that held a dozen or so people; in covered and uncovered trenches dug into the ground; and in dirt and sandbag bunkers in perimeter berms. Sometimes we had electricity and mosquito nets, and we always, always had our weapons nearby – each of us had either an M14 rifle or a combination of a .45 caliber pistol and a 40 mm grenade launcher, and we traveled with M60 machine guns on tripod mounts on our trucks when away from our base. We ate lots of very bad cooked food, and lots of C rations.

There is great variety in the experiences of soldiers. Mine was better than some and worse than others. There was intense manual labor that left me exhausted and encased in dust or mud, often with the days running into each other with such numbing momentum and repetition that their beginnings and endings were barely noted. There were intermittent scenes of consuming horror. There were endless games of blackjack played on cots and boxes, and discussions where I learned about the lives of people from every imaginable background and how to talk to them (these were the days of the draft, and every squad contained representatives from disparate groups of American life). In the dry season we baked in the constant sun. In the rainy season we could not remember what it was like to feel dry; boots rotted and the mud felt sinister and was sometimes deep enough to capture tanks. Complaining, jokes, and crazy, unbelievable stories were common currency. There were quiet evenings on guard duty, after the C ration cigarettes and desserts had been traded, with pipes full of marijuana passed around as we watched the sky change and fade, when the world almost seemed to make sense again.

I’ve long since given up trying to understand why the deaths, agony and maiming I witnessed happened to other people but not to me, just as I accept that I’ll never understand why Vietnam had to go through its centuries of occupation by other countries, or why I let my own foolish and misguided sense of adventure lead me to become one of those occupiers (for I was not drafted, but enlisted at 17). But in the decades after I returned, I noticed a growing discomfort whenever that part of my life emerged in a conversation, and I realized that the unease was partly a result of guilt. I had been a contributing member of a shameful mistake spurred by my country's arrogance and blind righteousness. My youthful ignorance mitigated this but did not absolve me.

And so, for purely selfish reasons, I decided to go back and try to establish a better sense of balance in myself regarding this chapter. I hoped that experiencing a revived Vietnam would help, as my memories of Vietnam from the war are of an exhausted country. As a soldier, my limited interactions with Vietnamese people gave me the impression that they were stuck in survival mode. Their lowered and suspicious eyes, their life under yet another military occupation, with all its dangerous uncertainties, made them seem in a constant state of withdrawal and cover. 38 years later, my two weeks as a tourist, even though I spent some welcome dollars and, I hope, added to the growing good will between the two countries, was primarily for my benefit. I was asking Vietnam to help me feel better.

There were two specific places I wanted to see, both of them in the Central Highlands. One was the spot where I was first stationed when I arrived in Vietnam, just outside the town of Buon Ma Thuot. This was a base that held our Combat Engineer company, a US Army helicopter company, and a group of Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers. My adjustment to that life, and finding a way to deal with some of the events that steamrolled over me there, changed me in many ways, some lucid and some forever darkly incomprehensible. I had no idea what would be occupying that physical space 38 years later. But in some twisted sense of pilgrimage, I felt the need to see it, even though I knew it would dredge up feelings that would be hard to handle. The other place was the church where we had built the addition. I wanted to see if the classroom, or even the church itself, was still there. There were surprises in my searches for these places, and at times it seemed as if Vietnam was reaching through the decades to usher me along in my little journey of reclamation. Indeed, the trip itself began to feel like a gift from Vietnam.