“Greetings, number two son again reporting to you from the Rice capital of t he w world.” This is how I began my Christmas Eve letter home. I asked them to send my camera (with which the picture on the homepage was taken) and some film. It was a slow day at the Phuoc Vinh forward operating base. We spent the morning putting a cover over our bunker. As it was Christmas Eve we got the day off. On the previous day we had provided road security for a convoy. We set up in three man positions about 100 yards from the road and then waited all day for the convoy to come through. I spent the day writing letters, drinking coke and relaxing. As I mentioned earlier I was told that this was a secure area so we didn’t take security as seriously as we should have. Upon return to our base, I had to wait in line for the latrine. “….a box over a hole in the ground with a hole in the box. Some clown just walked by me and took a picture of the guy on the pot. Nice, huh!” I wrote that it was getting dark and the “gooks” were pulling up stakes and were returning to their “hootches”. In the Army’s attempt to dehumanize the enemy, it pretty much turned us into racists. Some Vietnamese vendors would come to our base during the day to sell us cokes, candy, trinkets, etc. “Any gook out after dark is considered dangerous and is fair game.” In hindsight, I don’t think that was true since we were not in a free fire zone.
The next part of the letter was mostly house keeping stuff. Did my money start coming home? What about my driver’s license? I had some debt, were the bill collectors coming after me? Then I asked them about a girl I thought was my girlfriend. Met her on the Cape when I was working at a state park in Sandwich. At this point I hadn’t received any mail. “I want mail!! Damn this army anyway. It shouldn’t take them this long to locate me, the sorry bastards.” Colorful wasn’t I?
I then proceed to tell them that I’m up for promotion in two months to Spec 4, followed by a brief notation that the 1st Cavalry was the first regular army unit in Viet Nam, preceded, of course by the Marines. I end the letter this way: “Well, it’s time to sign off. We have to put out trip flares and claymores (mines) for our night defense. Take care, Love Dave.”
The letters are usually too long to include in their entirety, so I quote where I can and basically try to give you the feeling of the letter and an idea of who I was.