Finding The Base/Mortar Attack

Geoffrey S. Poor   |   geoffpoor@gmail.com       

Setup: After an extraordinary coincidence, I have found someone -- a Honda driver named Lam -- who knows the location of the spot where I was stationed. We are the same age. He remembers where the helicopters were in 1968-1969, which is confirmation of the location. We're traveling on his Honda to a tiny village for an elephant ride, and he's told me he'll show me the spot I'm looking for on the way after I stop off at a bank to get some cash.

I come out with my money and walk up to him, eager to get going. But Lam just smiles gently, points across the side street to a building on the other side, and says quietly, “Geoff, the helicopters were there.”

I look across the street, but whatever my eyes see does not make it to my brain. I look back at Lam, across the street again, back at Lam again. Nothing registers. Everything inside me has come to a halt, as if I need to rediscover my animation from toes to brain. I hear no traffic sounds, feel none of the sun’s rays, and have no idea what my eyes are looking at. I look across the street again, and slowly begin to feel and think and sense again. There are no tears in my eyes, but there is an ache that seeps through me. Staring now across the street, returning to the present, I see the nearest building for the first time. It’s the Café Highland, a large and modern two story building with a circular terrace upstairs and an outside patio downstairs, framed by a white picket fence and shade umbrellas with Trung Nguyen Coffee printed on them.

When I’ve soaked this in, I look back at Lam, who knows enough to simply wait. Words come to me of their own, without thought or plan, and I stupidly mumble something about bad things having happened there.

I stare again across the street. The early morning coffee rush is over and people trickle in around the parked Hondas and a few lush trees. This is where the mortar rounds from the tidy lines of rubber trees had landed, aiming usually for the parked helicopters, or our construction equipment, and where we scrambled out of our tent, a stream of knees and elbows almost diving out into the bunker, until for some reason one night the mortars landed on us before we could run. One landed just outside my tent, six feet from my body and on the other side of a three foot sandbag wall that we had complained about building a week earlier; without it, the mortar would surely have killed me. The noise, and the terror it created in me, consumed the world, and for a time I was aware of nothing other than that sound and terror. More rounds landed around the tent, and I realized I had moved underneath my cot and was on the floor. Then a louder explosion that temporarily ended sound: a round had landed on a 2x4 cross piece supporting the tent’s roof and, by some perverse stroke of good fortune, detonated a few feet over our heads; had it made it to the floor we would all have died. When I was able to hear again, the new sound was the screams of those hit by its shrapnel, and the new smell was the combination of burning gunpowder and blood. Darkness, sound, smell and fear were all my awareness registered. 

Then, gently and smoothly, neither quickly nor slowly, the terror disappeared, the fear itself dissipated. It was replaced by a calm and enveloping acceptance. It started as speculation – I think I’m going to die – and then became sure certainty, with a touch of curiosity – Hmmm…so this is how I die. This is my death, and it’s now. Well, there's one big question answered. And as I was leaving, as I felt my departure, I looked down from my new height of several feet in the air and saw myself lying under my cot, my hands covering my head and my body stiff and tense. I observed this odd scene for a bit, and might have been about to say goodbye, but then I returned. The mortars had stopped. I was back under my cot and heard screams and moans, and the ghastly smell was thick and heavy in the smoke. The few of us who’d not been injured helped the others get to the medics’ tent next to us. They leaned on us or we carried them, our footing made difficult by the blood on the floor. When this was done we counted ourselves by flashlight, and we were one short – PFC Jerome Gothwait from Wisconsin, age 19. We went back and found him under his cot, part of his skull missing and brains spilling out. We carried him to the medics. The next day I went to check on his status. The medic looked in his log and found his name next to the letters “KIA”. He and I had arrived in our outfit at about the same time, and had spent many of our days working near each other.

It took us all of the next day to clean up the blood and flesh from the wood pallet floor as best we could, and replace the ripped tent. Later that day the decision was made that we would sleep in the bunkers inside our perimeter berm from then on. With no breezes and no way to put up mosquito nets, we’d often lie in our slippery sweat and battle mosquitos through the night, but were safer from mortars and hoped that the less accurate rockets, which could penetrate several feet into dirt before their much more powerful explosions, would not find us. But our movements were noticed. One of the Vietnamese women who did our laundry was caught pacing off distances between places in our area of the base. She was fired and escorted off. A few nights later, as we were sleeping in our perimeter bunkers, the dark and echoing sound of mortars being fired started again to reverberate in the rubber plantation. The first rounds landed some distance from us, got progressively louder, and we realized that the detonations were being walked along the berm towards us with precision. Distant became closer, then loud became painful, and then one round landed directly on top of our bunker. Sound disappeared for a few seconds, to be replaced by a buzzing ring which lasted until we could again hear the explosions, now receding down the perimeter to the other end. No one spoke for some time, and it seemed as if no one breathed. The bunker seemed hardly large enough to contain our terror. Just as people started to move, a spindly, tobacco-chewing man from deep in the Appalachian hills nicknamed Tennessee, who told us he’d been mystified in basic training when he’d had to deal with a combination lock for the first time in his life, was the first to speak. “Gawddamn it, Ah think somebody’s tryin’ to keel us.” There was no laughter.

But the comfortable Café Highland patrons did not care about any of that, and the sun began to warm me again. I walked around the fence and took some pictures, and then it was time to move on. As we drove away I looked back once again. If that stylish building were transplanted to Santa Monica or Fort Lauderdale, it would not look one bit out of place. It would, however, serve the best coffee in the neighborhood.