C Company, Danang


There were a number of English speaking Vietnamese on the plane from Nha Trang, and I got them to give me some more Vietnamese language lessons on the flight north to Da Nang. I found that I had to learn to make sounds with my vocal apparatus that I’d never made before.
I landed in Da Nang pretty much alone and was somewhat bewildered when there was no one there to give me further directions. I sat in the terminal wondering what to do for quite some time before an NCO came in and picked me up. I rode to the C Company area in the back of a deuce-and-a-half and reported in to the Orderly Room to sign in. A guy named Tom Perry whom I knew from Training Group back at Ft. Bragg happened to be there in the office at the time. 
He had been in the class ahead of me when I first started medical training; we were nodding acquaintances, had exchanged a few pleasantries and maybe had a few brief conversations. When he learned that I was just then reporting in he invited me to come and move into his two-man room with him with the specification that he had dibs on the top bunk. That was fine with me and we became roommates and soon afterwards got to be good friends also.
The C Company or C-team compound was just north of the port city of Da Nang on the shore of the South China Sea. On the seaward or beach side of the compound was a row of concertina wire, sandbagged fighting positions and bunkers. Several guard towers were situated around the perimeter and two or three of these dotted the wire along the beach. The C-team perimeter and the perimeter of the B-team compound next door, just down the hill, was guarded by a company or two of Nungs, an ethnic group of Vietnamese citizens of Chinese origin.
Beyond the wire was the most gorgeous of beaches; the sand had the look of granulated sugar, the water blue-green. There I first tasted sea water. 
Just down the beach to the south the C-team area was the B-16, Mobile Strike Force or Mike Force compound and then the firing range for both teams. Then further south was the C&C compound, then Marble Mountain, a huge, apartment building sized rock sitting on the beach, perhaps six or eight stories high at its peak. It was reported to hold several Buddhist shrines and was pretty much off limits to U.S. forces. It was honeycombed with caves and supposedly full of enemy North Vietnamese Regulars (NVA). To the south, then, of Marble Mountain was a US Marine compound.
Our next door neighbor to the north was the Marble Mountain Marine Air Facility (MMAF), a helicopter base with a runway perhaps long enough for very light STOLs (Short Take Off and Landing aircraft) to use. The enemy liked to lob rockets into their compound late at night from somewhere to the south down the beach beyond Marble Mountain and the Marine compound. The rockets could be seen shedding sparks as their propellants pushed them directly over the C-team. When the rocketing would begin we medics had to rush to the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) hospital in the compound and evacuate all the patients and staff to safer bunkers built all around the hospital. CIDGs were Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese and Montagnard troops recruited, trained, equipped and led by U.S. Special Forces. These troops included those of the Mike Force and those of all the A-teams scattered about the countryside which were within the C Company area of responsibility.
One night Tom and I awoke to muffled explosions over at MMAF and the wail of the C-team’s “incoming” sirens. In my haste I grabbed my issue M-1 carbine, threw on my boots and sprinted toward the hospital. About halfway there I tripped on my bootlaces and fell, jamming the triangular bolt of the carbine up into the palm of my left hand. Wrapping my hand quickly, I assisted the hospital patients into the bunkers where we all stayed until the bombardment was well over and the all clear signal sounded.
Tom cleaned and dressed my wound and insisted on putting me in for a Purple Heart. I told him, “You gotta be shitting me”! On any other part of the body I’d have put in a few stitches, but Dr. Hunter decided to the contrary.
The next morning, because of fumbling with my boot laces I was a few seconds late getting to the formation. The Sgt. Major threatened to give me punishment for being late to formation, but Tom took up for me, explaining my wound of the previous evening and the Sgt. Major let me skate.
A senior NCO lived alone in the room next to us and he liked country music. One night this guy was playing his ugly music so loudly that Tom and I couldn’t sleep. We were complaining to each other about the annoyance when he suddenly said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea”, and jumped to the floor. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he seemed to be doing something down on the wall near the electrical outlet. I heard a loud “pop”, and the music stopped. Tom had shorted out the electrical outlet and blew a fuse. We lay awake for a long time giggling like school girls!

Tom and I worked every day in the hospital and several kinds of recreation was available; the beach, a handball court, a combination basketball and volley ball court and movies about every night on the patio of the mess hall/club with the beach and South China Sea in the background. But mostly we got together and listened to music after duty hours until lights out. And if we got some daylight free time we usually spent that on the beach.
Duty was good except when we had to pull Charge of Quarters (CQ) or do PT. CQ meant staying awake all night in the orderly room signing in people who were reporting in, listening to radio traffic, taking care of the after hours office duties, cleaning the office and just being generally in charge of things. It sucked but it was followed by at least 24 hours off all duty.
And PT was a form of harassment. After working eight to twelve hours a day 
people didn’t want to do PT in the sweltering heat and high humidity. But the Sgt. Major ordered that everybody would do PT every day after work. This was the 
same guy who ordered all enlisted men to keep their hair cut in high, white 
sidewalls. Everybody hated and feared him. But, in hind sight I must say, the harassment was clearly designed to drive people out of the garrison and into the Mike Force, C&C, or out to one of the A-camps.
At the hospital, I worked with Sgt. Nick Fragos who survived the battle of Lang Vei which happened during the Tet offensive just before I got to VN. (See Night of the Silver Stars, by William R. Phillips, Naval Institute Press). He had endured quite an ordeal at Lang Vei.
I started writing my journal on the first day of March, 1968 and the following day was assigned the job of running the hospital laboratory. SFC Wilburn was the lab tech from whom I’d be taking over and who was about to end his tour and go back to the States. He trained me to microscopically differentiate the malaria parasites Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax. This was important both in the treatment of the infection by the respective species and the potential intelligence 
value in the differential diagnosis. P. falciparum was more endemic to northernmost South Viet Nam and to North Viet Nam. Infection by that species
meant a patient’s past whereabouts might be determined.
I also did blood work such as complete blood counts (CBCs), hemoglobin levels, hematocrits and white blood cell counts (WBCs) and differential WBCs. I had a small, hand-cranked centrifuge to do the hemoglobins. I did throat smears for TB, Strep and even Diphtheria, stool for ova and parasites and diagnosed Gonorrhea. Dr. Hunter and I even did a viral culture on a patient who died of some febrile disease before we could discover the cause of his illness.
I hadn’t been there very long before I saw the first of many corpses. They brought in a bunch of bodies from an ambush out at one of the A-camps. It was probably Mike Force strikers, including a Vietnamese interpreter. One of the bodies was a “crispy critter”- it was burned up in a deuce-and-a half truck. Quite nauseating! 
On another day a Msgt. Lowe and I went across the road from the C-team compound to the Navy hospital and unloaded from a chopper the body of an SFC shot in the back in an ambush out at the Thuong Duc SF A-camp. Msgt. Lowe was the senior NCO in charge of our hospital. He and the Sgt. major had flown out to the site of the ambush. Their chopper was fired on and Lowe got nicked in the wrist. The Sgt. Major was lightly wounded in the ass. 
On March 16th I got a heads up that I was going out on my first mission the following Monday: I was to drive a deuce-and-a-half in a combat convoy to Thuong Duc. No friendly vehicles had used that road in months because of intense enemy activity, mostly in the form of ambushes. (Shortly after this mission I volunteered for the Mike Force.)

Thanks to Sgt Jack Matheney, B-16, Mobile Strike Force (Mike Force), Danang, Feb,'68 - '69, 
From Mike Force Medic, copyright 2000