Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
Corps. Mine was II Corps, and so the next day I flew north on a Vietnamese Air Force
aircraft to Pleiku to be assigned to "Coalbin Willy" Wilson.
So, it was a very interesting time. That C47 landed on the airstrip at Pleiku, which later was
to become Camp Holloway, where the Americans came in full force a couple of years later. I
remember well the landing. First of all, the airplane had all kinds of pigs and chickens and
everything else on it. We landed, and there's a big whirr as we rolled over the pierced steel
planking and you could see the ends of the planks flipping up outside the aircraft. We moved
down to the end of the runway, the plane did a quick spin around, and we noticed a little
wood hut off the corner of the runway.
So, I got off, one other soldier got off, and we started walking toward the hut. There was no
sign of any activity and nobody came out to meet the plane. We heard the engines rev and the
plane took off behind us. Then there were only the two of us. We walked in the hut, and it
was absolutely empty, no people, except for one little stool on which was an Army field
telephone.
Now, we were outside the town of Pleiku--Pleiku is a very small town. It must have had a
couple of thousand people, oh, 200 or 300 little shacks at a crossroads in the red laterite soil.
We couldn't even see it. We were on top of a plateau. There was nothing within vision above
the horizon except that hut we were in.
We had no weapons. We began to wonder what was going on here. So, we rang the
telephone, and rang it, and we must have rung that telephone for four or five minutes before
an American voice answered at the other end. We identified ourselves as Americans who had
just landed at an airfield that we thought was Pleiku and said, "We're here." He said, "That's
fine; we'll pick you up in about 25 minutes" because that's how long it took to drive from the
then MAAG [Military Assistance Advisory Group], later MACV [Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam], compound to pick us up. So, we hopped in his jeep and roared off to
our new home, MAAG, Pleiku with the II Corps headquarters.
Q:
You've referred to this, but did you have any orientation or training before you left the States
or when you first arrived?
A:
No, absolutely none. They had some kind of a course people went to at Bragg, which gave an
orientation to the area. Engineers were among the first to go over. I think when Taylor had
come back it was easier to say, "Let's send forty engineers." That gave a cover for why we
were being alerted. We had no orientations, no language training, and didn't come by
Washington, Belvoir, or anywhere.
Q:
From Illinois to the--
A:
Flew from Illinois to San Francisco, where we incidentally had a second honeymoon along
with Ted Bishop and his wife. Ted had been at the University of Illinois with me, and they
were friends. Then the wives flew home and we went to Travis Air Force Base, checked in,
got on the plane, and deployed.
56
Previous Page
