Billy

Billy was a casualty of war just as surely as the men and women whose names are on The Wall.  He and I met when I first got to Dong Ha, the gritty little Air Force radar site on the Vietnamese DMZ, wedged in between a Navy hospital on the west and a large Marine camp on the east.  Billy and I were the same rank, Airman First Class until October 1967, then Sergeants, but he was far older.  Over the next seven months, I got to know Billy pretty well.  He told me that he'd been a cook, a Master Sergeant, married, and sober, but all of that was gone.  He'd been in Thailand, Vietnam, Thailand again, and then finally, back in Vietnam.  There was a nickname for guys like that - Asia Hands they were called.- old hands at being in Asia.

I also learned that even if he'd spent  a number of years as a cook, he knew our particular radar sets inside out.  If I had trouble finding the cause of a problem, Billy would help, show me what I'd overlooked, and how to start troubleshooting should the same problem ever rise again.  Our radars were older models, brought out of storage for our war and cobbled together from perhaps several systems.

Billy was a little guy, his skin a weather-beaten brown that seemed to hang loosely on his spare frame.  The sinews lining the backs of hands physically showed strength, but with a small screwdriver and a deft touch, he could fine tune the trigger circuits to keep the radar's magnetron singing a smooth tune.  His eyes were those of an extraordinarily heavy drinker, but he could read the worn schematics as well as sober men a decade younger.

On the evening of my first day on the site, Billy showed up with a six-pack of beer and he and I stood outside my Quonset hut hooch drinking while he tried to tell me about life on the DMZ.  I'd been briefed several times that day on the need to hit the deck in the event Charlie took a potshot at us from the DMZ only 5 or 6 miles away.  What the briefers really said was, "If you hear a loud bang or a siren, get your ass as low as you can."  Billy reiterated the same sentiment as we leaned up against the sandbag bunker that surrounded the tin-roof hooch.  I'd been issued a flak jacket and a helmet and advised to wear them both all the time, so I had them on.  Billy had his helmet on, but his flak jacket was tossed over the six pack of beer.  His priorities were a bit different than mine.

Halfway into my second beer it happened.  An enormous boom, so loud and so close that the hooch shook and rattled and I jumped feet first into the bunker, really a ditch dug along side the hooch with a backhoe, then covered with a layer of 6 x 6 timbers, a layer of perforated steel plate, and then piled high with sandbags.  I scrambled away from the entrance to give Billy room and only then noticed that he hadn't followed me.  I turned around and looked out.

Billy was standing outside the entrance lighting a cigarette.  He looked down at me in the hole and without sounding caustic at all, gave me a crooked grin and said, "C'mon up, man.  That's outgoing."

Once I scrambled out of the hole, Billy gave me a lesson in the sounds of artillery.  "If you hear a 'boom swish,' that's outgoing, but if you hear 'swish boom,' get yer ass down.  That's incoming."  It turned out that a Marine artillery unit had a couple of 155 howitzers immediately adjacent to our radar site, right behind the chow hall, and had fired off a round.

Over the next few months, I got to know Billy pretty well.   Our older model radars were in vans with sides that could be opened for ventilation, but the humidity and heat of South Vietnam were tough on the tube circuitry and the red dust that seemed to be everywhere ate up moving parts quickly, so those who'd come before me had built wooden shelters around each van and had installed window air conditioners in each shelter.  The tires were kept inflated and sat on a concrete pad, so beneath each van was a space we'd use as a shelter should Charlie fire off a round or two when we were working on the radar.

On one day in early September, we'd been hit by artillery a number of times and the bomb dump across the runway took several direct hits that caused enormous explosions, so the radar bunker was full.  Someone thought to take a head count and we realized that all were accounted for except Billy.  The job controller remembered that he'd been performing daily inspections on one of the radars, so we figured (hoped) he'd holed up beneath the van.    After we'd been under fire for quite a spell, Billy came crawling in the far entrance, his skin seemed to have lost all color and his hands were shaking.  "I need a drink.  Anybody got something?"

Someone handed him a bottle of Seagram's VO from a box in the corner and Billy took off the cap and upended the bottle, his Adam's apple bobbing has he slugged down enough 80 proof whiskey to make most men wobble.  Finally, he stopped and put the bottle back in the box and began answering questions.  He had indeed been at one of the equipment vans that were housed in plywood shelters, performing daily maintenance routines, when the first rounds went off.  Like we always did, he'd crawled beneath the van to wait out what he assumed would be the normal harassment fire we'd been experiencing for several weeks.  He was all by himself, scary enough under normal incoming, but when a big explosion shook the ground enough to knock out the tech power generator and the sheets of plywood began falling off the walls, being by himself became unbearable.  He told us he'd crawled to the entrance, opened the door, noted black smoke rising over the revetment to the north and because the explosions seemed to be a ways away, he'd dashed to the bunker.  We stayed in that bunker until after two that afternoon because every once in a while, Charley would lob in another round or two in an apparent attempt to keep the fires going.  When it was all over and an 'all clear' had been announced by an airman dispatched from the Command Post, we started cleaning up.  The plywood was nailed back, when tech power came back on, we brought the radars back up.

Billy noted a hole the size of a dollar torn in the waveguide of one of the radars and a larger hole in the vane on the rear of one of the antennas.  "Jaysus," he said, 'that coulda been me."

One night, I was the sole radar tech on duty and was inundated with problems.  First one search radar transmitter would shut down, and while I was bringing it back up, the other would go down.  This kept happening, I was getting nowhere, and ops was griping about losing video.   I finally admitted defeat and clambered over the revetment and went to Billy's hooch.  He grumbled, but promised he'd help, so I went back over the wall.  In a few minutes, he came into the transmitter shelter where I'd been trying to balance the trigger, took out his pocket screwdriver, adjusted the same components that I'd been working on, but with a light touch and a sharp eye.  In just a minute or so, the trigger had smoothed out and the transmitter was humming smoothly.  He gave me that crooked grin, told me he'd already fixed the other transmitter and was going to bed, calling me a rookie or something like that.

In December of 1967, the Air Force powers that be decided that Dong Ha was way too dangerous to keep people there over six months, so Billy and I were told we'd been reassigned to a radar site near Pleiku city, in the central highlands of South Vietnam.  A few days before Christmas, we were taken down to the flightline and put on a C-130 that took us to Danang.  We caught a ride later that same day on a C-7 Caribou to continue our flight south.  We landed at Pleiku right at dark and the NCO of the Day got us a ride up to the barracks, some bedding, and found empty bunks. .

Now I've described Dong Ha as a gritty little place, and that it was.  Laid out with a couple of dirt streets going east-west and two more going north-south, all just bulldozed out of the red clay  Our living quarters were all steel Quonset huts with black patches in the rood, surrounded by sandbag walls that had been built over three or four foot wide ditches.  Near the end my stay a Prime Beef construction team began building living quarters with sand-filled walls and roofs, but I hadn't been assigned to one.

Here in Pleiku, life was obviously a little more civilized.  Our barracks was a two-story building with space inside divided off into cubicles by tall, steel wall lockers and bunks stacked two high, so each cubicle housed two people.  Billy and I took the first empty one we came to, and in deference to his age, I took the upper.  After all, I was only 25 years old and Billy was in his late thirties.  We made our bunks and unloaded our duffel bags into our lockers, met some of our new neighbors, and asked about the chow hall.  We were told it was too late for the chow hall, but the snack bar was open.  Snack bar!  We thought we'd gone to heaven.  We were coming from a little radar site in the boonies where you'd eat in the chow hall or go without unless you could find a C-Ration laying about.  So we set off to find this snack bar.

They had hamburgers!  I hadn't had one since I left the land of the big BX.  They had milk in little cardboard containers, just like back home, totally unlike that large block of white ice they'd put in a big pan in the middle of Dong Ha's chow hall.  Billy wanted a beer, so after we ate we found the Airman's Club. A couple was all I could take so I went back to the barracks early and crashed.  Billy came back sometime later and flopped down on his bunk, fully dressed in fatigues.  In the morning, we went to the chow hall that was but a short way down the paved street, then climbed the hill to the radar site and signed in to the unit, met the folks we'd be working with, and got our assignments.  I'd been selected for promotion to Staff Sergeant on the first of January (a fact that bothered Billy - he'd grumbled that he had to help me and I was the one that got promoted), so I was put on the day shift with a job of getting the antique height radar (an AN/TPS-10D to radar folks) up and running.  Billy was put on a rotating shift.

The next few weeks were pretty calm compared to Dong Ha.  A couple of times mortars hit near the flightline, but each time an AC-47, nicknamed Spooky or Puff the Magic Dragon, showed up and filled the space where the mortar was thought to come from, with long, thin, dancing red lines of tracers.   One night, Billy and I went outside and sat on the sandbag wall around our barracks, watching Spooky lay waste to a hill beyond the runway.  A couple of Billy's warm beers and our own fireworks show is still a strong memory.

Some time in January. Billy was notified that his request for a consecutive overseas assignment to Thailand was denied and the he was being assigned to a radar site back home.  He was upset at first (I think he said he was really pissed off), but then he started talking about going home to his mother's and going fishing.  I thought going back to the States would be good for him, because if he wasn't working, he could be found at the Airman's Club where he'd drink until they closed or they threw him out.  Hopefully he could dry out back in the CONUS.

Sometime in February or early March, Billy got his orders to leave.  He'd have to fly up to Danang to catch the freedom bird, so when the day came, I used the site's truck to take him and his bag to the flightline.  We didn't have the privilege of making reservations, but just had to wait until an aircraft would be going our direction and we'd line up to get on the manifest.  I hung around Base Operations with him for a while, but soon had to get back to work.  Before I left him, I told him I'd see him sometime and to stay out of trouble.   He shook my hand, gave me that crooked grin, and said, "Get the hell out of here, rookie," or something like that.

That night after work, I moved my bedding to the lower bunk and went to bed early.   Sometime in the middle of the night, Billy came stumbling in, drunk as a skunk. found me in what had once been his bunk, tried to climb to the upper bunk, fell cussing, tried to climb again and once more, fell, this time into the steel wall locker, gashing his forehead, cussing even louder.  I woke up to his cussing and then jumped out of bed when he hit the locker.  The noise woke up half the barracks and guys gathered all around him, urging him to go to the clinic for that gash.  He adamantly refused so someone found a first-aid kit and patched him up to stop the bleeding.  It turned out that he'd become tired of waiting for a flight, so he'd left his duffel bag at Base Ops around 3:00 in the afternoon and had walked to the Airman's Club.

I started moving my gear to the upper bunk, but Billy stopped me, saying he'd sleep on another empty bunk.  He'd sobered up substantially, but I suspect he was asleep before anyone else.

In the morning, I dragged him out of the barracks, got him to the chow hall and somehow forced him to eat.  After we'd finished, I walked back to Base Operations with him and stayed with him until he got on a C-123 heading for Danang.  I stayed and watched the aircraft take off and disappear over the horizon before I went up the hill to work.  Billy was finally on his way home after spending three or four years in southeast Asia.

One day, probably in the middle of March, my supervisor came up to me in the maintenance shelter and asked me to come outside with him.  Together we walked down the lane that divided the site when he stopped.  With a look that said he didn't want to say what he had to, he said, "Mac, Billy was killed in an accident back in the States.  Apparently he was walking along a country road at night and a car hit him.  I know you guys were buddies.  I'm sorry."

That was in 1968.  I've thought about Billy from time to time, even had to wipe my eyes a few times.   I know where his grave is in rural east Texas.  My wife and I travel to Texas fairly often and on one of these trips, I'll find that cemetery and his grave.  Perhaps I'll mark it with a sandbag and a couple cans of warm beer.

Not all of the losses in the Vietnam War are named n the wall.  A lot of casualties from Agent Orange are missing.  Billy was a casualty of way too many beers and way too many years 'in country,' but a casualty nonetheless.

Rest in peace, old buddy.  I know you're in Heaven.  You served your time in Hell.