Bao Loc memories

Our First Nights…

From the pictures on the website, Bao Loc turned out to be a pretty decent place.  Tents with wooden floors, sandbagged bunkers, showers and latrines.  All the requirements of a place on the way to “numba 1.”  But, it didn’t start out that way.

The runway at Bao Loc was actually built way before our time.  The wreckage of the C-130 was already scattered off the west end of the field by the time we sent the first aircraft up to the location.  Where the Company forward area eventually settled was just an open area and Monkey Mountain hadn’t gotten its name yet.

We were sent up to Bao Loc airfield with two gunships and a slick.  This was in preparation for the 173rd Airborne moving into the area and beginning operations.  We had a GP-medium tent and some radio gear to establish communications back to Dong Ba Thin.  We didn’t even have fuel.  We had to go to Dalat to get gas, rockets and bullets, so every mission had to be planned with a fuel stop somewhere before we got back to the airfield.  Food was in the form of C-Rats heated on an open fire or over an old C-Rat can with a chopped-up rocket motor in it.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  This is like your parents telling you how bad it was when they went to school.  But hey, this ain’t no shit!

We didn’t have any security so we all got to pull guard duty for ourselves.  Bob Jorgensen was on the slick crew and this may be where he caught his nickname, the White Rabbit.  We were all pretty jumpy about being out there all alone but being “macho” kinda guys, nobody would let on that they were scared, except Jorgensen.  When he lay down on his cot at night he was in full battle gear, including his M-16 lying across his chest.  My second biggest fear was that he might hear something and come up shooting.  My first biggest fear was that he wouldn’t.

A captain from the commo section had been sent along to run the radio.  His job really sucked because we at least go to leave during the day.  He didn’t.  We had a generator to power the radio gear but we didn’t run it at night.  No sense advertising our exact position.  When we shut it down it got reeeeeal quiet.  Spooky type quiet.  The kind of quiet that makes your mind begin to hear things that might not be there.  Or – they might be!  It got so bad that somebody finally pulled out a little Coleman stove that we could light and keep a pot of coffee hot.  The noise the flame made was just enough to let a guy get some sleep.

We set up the tent next to a large hole that had been dug for some previous reason we weren’t aware of.  It looked like it was supposed to be a big garbage pit, but never got used.  If you open “Photos 1967” and look at “Random Photos”, you can still see the pit in the picture of Bao Loc.  It’s the one with the water in it.  That’s where we were all going to go if we got mortared or if Chuck decided to try a ground attack.  Whoever was on guard duty usually stayed pretty close to the hole, or in it, so as not to provide a moving silhouette for anyone looking for an easy target.

We had been there a couple of days and I was pulling my rotation on guard.  It was about 1:00 in the morning on one of those creepy dark nights we got at Bao Loc.  I was crouched down on one knee at the lip of the hole, carefully scanning toward the runway to see if anything was moving, when all of a sudden, the sky lit up and a huge explosion shattered the silence.  It caused me to leap about 10 feet into the air, but even as I was on my way up, I knew I was hearing an out-going round.  In Vietnam, we heard explosions a lot, but you learned that the important sound was the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound of the round that went along with it.  If it went whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, BOOM, it was incoming.  If it went BOOM, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, it was outgoing.  That’s what this one did so I knew it was not coming our way.

Unfortunately, the commo Captain wasn’t as finely attuned to the sounds of Vietnam as the rest of us were.  He came out of the tent at a very high rate of speed, feet just a blur, leaned over in about a 45-degree right bank.  He cut a perfect arc from the tent flap to the hole.  It was a beautiful thing to see.  Such symmetry.  He must have played baseball in a previous life because he laid down a perfect slide from about 10 feet out that carried him right into the bottom of the pit.  I almost felt sorry that we weren’t being attacked, it was that impressive.

We came to learn that while we were out, the 173rd had moved in just south of our location.  During the night they had received a fire mission for their huge 175mm guns sending rounds bigger than footballs, miles and miles away into the jungle.  They were noisy neighbors, but it was sure a lot easier to sleep out there after that.

Fred Harms

Sidekick 3

Nov67 - Oct68