On Top of San Juan Hill, Republic of South Vietnam, June 1970

You can hear a lot of pros and cons about the Vietnam War. All I can say is what has to be remembered most are the sacrifices of the Americans who fought it because their country said it was the right thing to do. They were good men, and women, too, who fought all the way through that war. They did good things for the people of South Vietnam, too. I was a war correspondent there in 1970, and I saw pagodas Marines constructed near Danang. I visited orphanages that American doctors and nurses visited regularly to help improve the health of children with all sorts of maladies. Some ended up adopting these children and bringing them home to America.
I insert here a photo of me, on the right, interviewing a GI from the Bloomington, Indiana, area. I do not recall his name, but he was a very nice fellow. The bunker behind him was his home, and what I remember most about that was the fan I saw inside the bunker he used to keep the place cool. It had two blades. The other two were missing. This photo is of  San Jaun Hill, up from Fire Support Base Bronco that was up again up from ChuLai, the Americal Division Headquarters.
Most of what I remember of San Juan Hill is how isolated it was. You could only get there by helicopter. I remember the perimeter fence and bunkers all around it. I remember how dusty it was. I remember the "piss tubes," that is tubes sticking up out of the ground the GI's used to urinate in. They were totally in the open, so any kind of privacy was not a concern.
I remember the chow hall being on top of the hill. I remember seeing the movie screen up on top, too. Every fire support base I visited had such a screen, and anyone who was there got to see movies every night. But, funny, the film for the movies had usually been broken into several pieces and badly spliced together. So, as you watched a movie there might be a scene in which there is this very beautiful woman doing something. Then in the blink of an eye, no faster, that scene would vanish and you'd see the good guy shooting the bad guy.
At Fire Support Base Bronco there was as close as you could get to a US Army approved whore house. Yep! Whore House. It was a hut the GIs called a steam and cream house though the official name was "steam bath.". I explain. You go in, pay your money. You strip down, and this comely looking young Vietnamese woman enters.  She puts you in a white steam bath cabinet and closes the door so only your head sticks out of an opening at the top. She turns on the steam---but she turns it on so high that you cannot stand it long because it gets so hot. You yell! She turns it off, even though it may have been only 30 seconds. The next service is the massage, but of course, she has no training in that field at all. She just pounds away at different parts of your back. She tells you to flip over. She pounds away at your chest, and with a sort of "well" question, she grabs your penis. This is where the possibility of the "cream" comes in, of course. The "well" part means do you want her to go on. Now a particularly horny fellow might say go ahead, and I am sure many did. Anyone else said no thanks because there are venereal diseases in Vietnam for which there are no names and certainly no cures
A couple of other stories about my visit to the Americal Division.
I remember seeing one straight strip of black asphalt pavement. It ran, what, maybe 100 yards? That was it. Trucks and jeeps ran back and forth on it continuously.  It was always the place you could find a cap or a hat since as the GI's ran up and down that strip, their hats and caps blew off. Few stopped to pick them up. So if you needed one, you could sort through until you found your size, and it was yours. Fun.
I arrived at Chu Lai one day right after dark.
I'd caught a ride on a helicopter at CamRhan Bay (sp).  The pilots followed the coast on the trip, but mostly they flew out over the South China Sea. I suppose that was to avoid any chance of some Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldier taking a pot shot.
They purposely skirted a peninsula  that was supposed to have been the birth place of Ho ChiMinh.
Not long after sunset and in the dark, the pilots flew so they came into the big Americal base from the north. The pilots left once they had their craft on the ground, but a gunner stayed behind to tie down the ship. Most interesting and curious to me was that as we came in and then after we landed, everyone could see this big firefight going on right off the perimeter of that big Americal Division base. I mean it could not have been more than 200 yards away from where the pilots parked that helicopter. You could see all sorts of colorful explosions, and you could hear those explosions plus the small arms fire that went with it. Thebeauty of death because of all the color?
Yet, all that was happening in that firefight, it might as well have been on another planet as far as the crew of that helicopter was concerned. One or two of them looked that direction, but otherwise made no comment or did anything. For some reason I felt someone ought to go help.
Strangest and craziest of all came when I went to the "hooch" where I was to spend the night. As I entered, I saw a fellow watching television right beside the door from which I'd entered and from which you could clearly see firefight.. Oh, and yes, there was a closed circuit television channel at Chu Lai. As I came in the fellow looked out the door and pointed to where are the fireworks were from that firefight said, "I wish they'd cut it down out there so I could watch my program."
The program was "Bonanza!" Is that nutty or what?

US Air Force coverup? Yep!

FLASH! In 1983 all four aircraft flown by the precision US Air Force Thunderbirds flew into the ground during a training exercise. The crash killed all four pilots and shocked the nation. The Air Force made an exhaustive study and ignoring the most obvious cause, officially blamed the crashes for mechanical failure even though from the start the obvious cause was pilot error.


A final report issue...d by the Air Force attributed the crashes to a small, almost minute piece of debris found in one of the lead aircraft's systems. I learned this to day from a person who served on one of two boards that investigated those crashes. He said that in most cases the Air Force wraps up investigations of such crashes in a month. This one took two months of 12 hour days---because the board concentrated on trying to find a mechanical failure to explain the crashes--even though from the start the obvious cause was pilot error.The lead pilot flew too low to recover and flew into the ground. Other members of the Team, following their leader did the same thing.

A second investigation followed. It was led by a brigadier general directly responsible to a four-star general who had responsibility for the Thunderbirds. This second panel determined the cause mechanical failure. This panel reached that conclusion on very thin evidence while ignorning the most obvious and probable cause, pilot error.

Why cover-up such a finding? To protect the reputations and careers of the four-star general and other senior Air Force officers who commanded the Thunderbirds. Mechanical failure gave these senior officers an out! The real tragedy, like so much of what happens in government, is that once again what the government reported cannot be trusted.