My Men Had Served a Year in Hell. I Was Getting Them Home, Come Humid Hell or High Water.

General Becker shook my hand, said nice things about me, administered an oath in which I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, then pinned a gold bar on my right collar while Major Phillips, my boss, pinned crossed infantry rifles on the left.

Ten days later, I got orders reassigning me to Fort Benning, Georgia. My combat tour in Vietnam was over.

I said my goodbyes and hopped a Huey to Camp Holloway, Pleiku.  In the morning I reported for shipment and learned that I would be among 150 men returning. It was due in an hour.  As the only officer in this group, I was handed a packet of orders and put in charge of getting every man in the group through the Military Airlift Command system. My first command!

The mere presence of a second lieutenant returning to the States raised questions. Wartime demands on the officer ranks had accelerated promotion cycles. Unless they were killed or court-martialed, second lieutenants became first lieutenants after one year. And they never deployed to Vietnam without at least six months of active duty.

A year later, when they rotated home, all were first lieutenants.

My troops included three warrant officers, all pilots. They decided that I must be on emergency leave, then asked “Do you have some kind of family emergency?”

I called everyone together in a semicircle next to the runway and explained that I was newly commissioned, that I had been a buck sergeant and had arrived in Vietnam with the advance party of the First Air Cav in August 1965 as a PFC.

One man said,  “Well, if you got a battlefield commission and you were in the Cav for more than a year, why ain’t you wearing the CIB?”

I replied that the Combat Infantryman Badge is awarded to men with an infantry MOS assigned to an infantry brigade for at least thirty days of combat. That meant that they were paid in that unit, were promoted there—were in every sense a member.  I had spent months in the field with infantry units, but I was never assigned to one. My job was not fire and maneuver but shooting photos and gathering news material.

We sat on our bags in silence, waiting for our ride home.

And waiting. There was no shade; as the sun rose it became uncomfortably warm, I told one of the senior sergeants to find water for everyone, then go lay on some lunch. I told another to find a shady area big enough to protect everyone from the sun.

That guy returned in ten minutes with a place; I told him to take the men there.

Somebody had to be near the runway when our plane landed; I appointed myself; the pilots joined me for reasons of their own.

At noon, we ate bologna sandwiches and drank bottled water.

At 3:00 p.m. an Air Force sergeant told me that our aircraft would land in a few minutes. I sent one of the pilots to get the troops; they returned just as a big C-141 slid onto the runway a mile distant.

We waited while it taxied in. Then 150 newbies stumbled, blinking and sweating, into the nightmarish heat, humidity, and stink of burning human feces that was everyday Vietnam. They got into buses and drove off.

After a few minutes, the pilot, a captain, appeared and headed for the operations building. I stepped into his path.

“Lieutenant Wolf, sir,” I said, self-consciously. “When can I load my men?”

He dodged around me, calling over his shoulder, “We’re not taking you.”

I was probably the junior officer in all four armed forces and the Coast Guard, but I had spent much of the previous year as an even more junior enlisted man, cajoling very senior officers to allow me to do things or go places they had already refused to allow. There was a fine art to knowing how hard to push, when to stop, and who could be pushed.

But I was not afraid of any Air Force captain.

I ran after the pilot.

“What the hell do you mean, you’re not taking us?”

He regarded me warily, as though he feared I might bite him.

“We don’t have enough fuel,” he said, moving off as fast as he could.

Not enough fuel? Literally thousands of 55-gallon drums of jet fuel were stacked along the edge of the runway. “Not enough fuel” was Air Force for “I want to go home before the shooting starts.”

Two minutes later, I vented my spleen to an Air Force lieutenant colonel. More carefully than I would have spoken to his Army counterpart, I explained that my men had served a year in Hell, that they had waited all day to go home and we expected to be on that C-141 when it took off.

“He’s right about the fuel—those drums belong to the Army,” replied the colonel.  “But hold on. Cool down while I talk to the pilot. He’ll take you and your men, I promise.”

Ten minutes and a phone call later it was worked out: our plane would refuel at Cam Ranh Bay before heading back to The World.

As I counted noses, loading my men on the plane, the pilot glared at me.

Flight time to Cam Ranh Bay was 20 minutes. We landed in driving rain and parked in the fueling area. The co-pilot, also a captain, came back to say that refueling would commence as soon as everyone was off the aircraft.

I looked out: The fueling crew was in wet-weather gear, but there was no structure, no trees, no trace of shelter for half a mile. And the sky was falling.

“It’s raining very hard,” I said.

“Air Force regulations,” he said.

“I am not going to get these men soaking wet on their last day in Vietnam,” I replied. “JP4 isn’t that volatile. In the Cav, we refuel Hueys with their engines running—and we’ve never had a fire. And it’s so wet out there that there’s zero chance of an accidental fire!”

I was bluffing: We did refuel Hueys with engines running, but only with the crew chief standing by with a fire extinguisher.

“Air Force regulations,” replied the captain. “Get your men off the plane. They have to be at least a hundred feet away before we can start refueling.”

“Hell, no,” I said. “Excuse me. I apologize. Hell no, Sir.”

The standoff continued for an hour. My men seemed to be enjoying it just a little more than standing out in the rain.

“Be reasonable, Lieutenant. Flight regulations say that a crew can’t be awake more than a limited number of hours, including the time we’re flying.  So, if we don’t leave in the next hour, we can’t go. We’ll have to log sack time here, and they’ll have to find you a new crew.  We may all have to spend the night here.”

“Boo hoo,” I replied. “Nobody’s got a change of uniform. I’m not sending my guys out to get soaked and then make them fly home in wet clothes.”

The co-pilot stormed off. Then one of my pilots came up with a face-saving solution:  Our guys would stand under the C-141’s massive wings, sheltered from the rain, while refueling proceeded.  One helicopter pilot would stay with each group to ensure that nobody lit a cigarette.

I went forward to the cockpit and made my pitch. The pilot’s face lit up—he wouldn’t have to spend the night in a combat zone.

Thirty minutes later, tanks topped, we soared up through thick clouds still heavy with rain and into the sky.

After a while, one of the sergeants came over to say that he’d chatted up the loadmaster and found out what was eating our pilots: The usual route for outbound flights was Travis-Honolulu-Manila-Pleiku, with a crew change in Manila. Manila to Pleiku is only about 1,600 miles round trip, well within a C-141’s range. But outward bound between Honolulu and Manila, the autopilot malfunctioned. Before the pilots knew it, they were a thousand miles off course. Instead of Manila, they landed at Andersen AFB, Guam. That’s three times the distance from Manila to Pleiku, too far to fly roundtrip without refueling.  The crew of our plane was based in Guam, and that’s where the original crew waited.

And, because the pilot had never planned to haul us to Guam, there was no food aboard. The crew had box lunches, but we wouldn’t eat again till Guam.

I couldn’t believe there was no chow available in Cam Ranh Bay.  We would have been OK with C rations. But the pilots didn’t ask; loading food might have caused a delay that would cost them a night in a combat zone.

About an hour out of Guam, I asked the pilot, as nicely as I could, if he’d radio ahead to lay on a mess hall and transportation.

The pilot shooed me out of the cockpit.

Andersen AFB was a B-52 base and boasted some of the world’s longest runways. We landed around midnight and taxied for a long time, then stopped. Through the window, I saw nothing but darkness until a blue pickup truck pulled up. The pilots and crew got off, trotted over to the truck and sped off into the night.

And left us on a pitch-black runway somewhere on an enormous base.

After ten or fifteen minutes, I realized that pilot had taken his revenge on an uppity infantry lieutenant.

I told everyone to take their valuables, leave everything else, and get off. The sergeants put the troops in a column of twos. I grabbed one of the helicopter pilots and told him to bring up the rear and make sure nobody got lost, then moved to the head of the column. We walked the white runway line toward a distant speck of flashing light that I guessed must be the tower.

Half an hour later, I burst into Flight Operations ready to kill. By ancient tradition, “rank among lieutenants is like virtue among ladies of the night.” So, when the duty officer turned out to be an Air Force first lieutenant, I got right in his face.

I told him I wanted buses for my men and a mess hall to serve them. And I wanted them now.

The lieutenant showed no surprise that a wild man was making demands and ranting about chickenshit REMF pilots who’d leave a planeload of hungry and exhausted soldiers just out of the war zone sitting on a runway miles from anywhere in the middle of the night. In five minutes, my guys were boarding buses to a mess hall. I watched as each one pulled out. I was about do Tail End Charlie on the last bus when the Flight Operations lieutenant appeared.

“Let ’em go,” he said. “They’re my responsibility now. Come with me.”

He took me to the Officer’s Club, where I ordered a steak and all the trimmings.  I ate it and ordered another—and he wouldn’t let me pay for either one. Before my plate was empty, half a dozen B-52 pilots had surrounded our table, all trying to buy me drinks. And all anxious to hear about what the receiving end of an Arc Light was like.

Arc Light was a B-52 strike. Here on Guam, flight crews rose at two o’dark, briefed at 0300 and an hour later were at 40,000 feet. They flew 2,500 miles nonstop, refueled in the air, and proceeded to grid coordinates somewhere over Vietnam, to a target they never saw. When their computer said so, each B-52 dropped eighty-four, 500-pound and four 750-pound bombs; together the four planes in a typical Arc Light obliterated an area over a half a mile wide and more than a mile long. Each bomb blasted out a crater fifteen feet deep and fifty wide.

Then they turned and flew another 2,500 miles nonstop back to Guam.

All without ever seeing their target.

Now these B-52 pilots had an actual Air Cav infantry officer in their midst, and they were anxious to find out what effect their bombs had on our targets.

I had twice witnessed Arc Light strikes, both from a Huey three or four miles out and at about 4,000 feet—safe, yet close enough to hear the blasts and see a giant brown zipper opening in the green jungle with concentric shockwaves radiating out from each bomb blast. Here and there were flashes of dark orange. An enormous pall of smoke and dust rose from the impact area.

Once I landed to observe the aftermath of a strike. Hours after the last bomb fell, the air was thick with smoke from a multitude of fires.  Human body parts covered with flies, a moonscape of craters and uprooted trees and great gashes opened in the earth to expose parts of a tunnel complex below.

All this I shared with the B-52 pilots. Then they wanted to know if their bombs were effective, if it was helping our efforts.  I said that nothing we faced in South Vietnam could withstand that kind of bombing and that their accuracy was spectacular—but these strikes were only as effective as our intelligence. I did not say that often our intelligence was mostly guesswork.

Two hours later, reunited with my men, we were airborne, bound for Honolulu.  Everybody soon fell asleep—except me. I was trying to anticipate the next thing that could go wrong. Then I realized that it already had: Guam is American soil. If that jerk-off pilot hadn’t abandoned us, we could have saved the hour that would be required to go through Customs at Travis AFB.

I went up to the cockpit to introduce myself to the pilot, a cheerful, apple-cheeked captain, and asked him how long we would be in Hawaii.

“Depends on how quickly they refuel us,” he said, pleasantly. “Anything over ninety minutes, and you’ll need a fresh aircrew.”

“Say that’s what happens—how long a layover?”

“Four or five hours at least. Maybe more.”

“Then could we at least get Customs out of the way in Honolulu?”

“You didn’t go through Customs at Andersen?”

I shook my head.

“Well, that was stupid,” said the pilot. “Yeah—if they send us to bed, I’ll have base ops call Customs and make that happen.”

I revised my opinion of the Air Force upward. A little.

As I turned to go, the co-pilot, a first lieutenant, piped up.

“You’re on emergency leave, right?”

“No, nothing like that,” I replied and turned to go again.

“But you’re not in any kind of trouble?” he asked.

“No, ” I replied, dreading what I knew was coming.

“Then, how come you’re still a second john?” asked the lieutenant.

“I was commissioned eleven days ago.”

“In Vietnam? Really! How did that happen?”

Before I could catch it, a tiny sigh escaped. “Kind of a long story.”

“It’s quite a way to Honolulu and when the autopilot’s working, we don’t have that much to do up here,” said the captain, smiling, interested.

“My wife made fresh coffee,” added the lieutenant. “By the way—how come you’re not wearing a CIB—you’re infantry, right?”

The cockpit was quieter than the passenger compartment; one could converse in normal voices. Before answering, I looked into the night. A brilliant half-moon hung high against an indigo blanket glowing with more stars than I had believed existed.  Below us, a silent symphony of lightning illuminated an endless sea of clouds. A vast electrical storm, beautiful beyond imagination.

And darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. The words from Genesis popped into my mind. I realized that one part of my life was over; another just beginning. It was scary yet exhilarating. I sat down between the pilots.

“Maybe I will have some coffee,” I said. “About the CIB—it’s a long story.”

“Flying time is eight hours, so you might as well start,” said the co-pilot.

I took a long breath. “A couple of years ago I was working in a camera store, and then my driver’s license got suspended….”

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This War Horse Reflection essay was written by Marvin Wolf edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines.

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