Letter home, October 1967, transcript
notes: "--" indicates unintelligible words in a sentence.
"-" indicates a short pause.
statements inside [] indicates editor's note. [?] indicates a guess on my part.
statements inside () refer to what's happening on the audio.
=====================================
[Ernie]
Hello everyone, here I am again, uh, going to have to excuse all these guys, extra sounds and stuff you get because I'm sitting up here on top of the tower and the wind is blowing kind hard and its gonna mess up the mic.
I thought my tape recorder was broken. I was all set to send it home and stuff, but, uh, I finally took it apart and checked it out and find out there was only one contact that had gotten dirty with dust and junk so I cleaned it off and it's working fine now.
There's an awful lot happening here since, uh, the last letter I wrote. Right now things are going really hot, I mean as far as traffic goes, we have a traffic count now about, uh, 12 hundred aircraft a day, even more than that, when before, all we were, well it would be a good day when we had two or three hundred aircraft, and we'd be, we'd have to pad out our traffic count to get more than that.
Ah, things have been picking up here, We has, uh, place has gotten a lot bigger, we have a lot more troops in, uh, the force is here, the 173rd that they were here before, and now even the, uh, first cav has moved in. They, they put in a, uh, a one oh five [105] artillery battery just north of the tower here, just north of where we stay, and they're firing every day, waking us up all night long and everything else, and we have a heck of a lot more helicopters coming in because we have gigantic operation out here to the west of us and they're going out back and forth all day resupplying 'em and taking men out and stuff, and we have C130s comin' in all the time, bringing in supplies, so it gets really hectic here some times. I, uh, just finished a tape, uh, taping myself while I was on the mic, for two hours here around lunch time because one of the guys here is from Qui Nihon and he wants to take it back, show them just how easy they have it at Qui Nihon, so I think I'll give you a little bit of it, put some on the other side, just let you know what we do up here.
It's gotten kinda bad, it's gotten to where, uh, we only have three A controllers, three good controllers for the tower, and we have to work something like a twelve hour shift, even more than that, most of the time when we have night operations, so have to, uh, heh, hope you can hear me over the sound, we got us a big earth mover out here working on the road. He's fixing up the road to the north of us. He's making too much noise, I'll talk to you in a second, soon as he passes.
They're fixing up this road that's just to the north of the tower. This old one that the 173rd messed up. The 4th, uh, division is gonna really make a decent road out of it. They're diggin' it way down to get down to, to some, uh, hard earth and they're gonna fill it in and - I hope that once they fix that one up they're not going to use this other one in front of the tower too much because that thing is nothing but dust, it's not so much dust when a truck comes across it as when a, uh, helicopter comes across to park in the revetment. He just raises a cloud of dust that hides the entire runway.
Anyway, what was I sayin'? Oh, yeah, no, well I was saying that we were, we're all busy and stuff like that, here we've got twelve hundred runs a day and stuff. I'll let you hear, to hear me on the other side of this tape. Uh, we've been getting a little more action than we've been, uh, bargaining for. We've been mortared twice already. About five days ago we got mortared from these hills just to the north of us, they're about, uh, uh, half a mile away, a little more than that. About three quarters of a mile from here, just to the north of us, we got mortared from there.
[another voice]
the only way to do it
[Ernie continues]
And, that wasn't really, uh, too much. They hit us with about 12 mortars and didn't do anything. They all landed close out here, right to the north of our tents and stuff.
We had some, uh, twin 40 millimeter, uh, track-mounted cannon out here and they opened up, and we had rockets firing out there and artillery and stuff, but there was a real nice show, you know, we'd sit here and watch those tracers go over here and they pretty well blackened those hills out there and, and then that night they went and, uh, airlifted all sorts of men out there to comb the hills, see if they could find anybody.
So, that was it for that time. Then three days later, we got hit again, and this time we couldn't find out where they were. We thought they were to the south of us, but, uh, it ended up we didn't, we didn't really find out where they were, and we got, uh, something like 30, 35 mortars and some of them got pretty darn close to where people were stayin' or people were standin'. I picked up a couple of shell fragments from it. They were, uh, throwing some pretty big mortars, and they were trying to hit our north POL, and the funny thing was that being as good shots as they are, you know, from what I saw that first time we got mortared, the first day we moved out here, they weren't, they didn't really hit anything at all. They never, uh, managed to put one mortar where it did a lot of damage. They all landed out here in this open field and didn't do much of anything. Some of them landed on the, uh, end of the runway out here at the unused portion, but I must admit it certainly did scare the aircraft in the area. They all just 'made it'. [departed] They were having pretty busy traffic up til then and everybody just took off and went back to Kontum or someplace. They figured we were getting a bit too hot.
As a matter of fact, I heard a couple days ago that this is, uh, just about the hottest place in Vietnam right now. Yeah, I heard this is just about the hottest place as far as action goes and it must be, the way they're building it up. Take a look at any of those pictures you see, that corner off to the southeast, where we used to have the artillery, well that corner is just nothing but tents now. That whole place is filled up and this other corner out here on the other side of the, uh, runway is filled up, and we have artillery all the way around the field, firing, we have something like five or six fire support bases sittin' in the hills all around us, and they're all within reaching distance of us if we ever get attacked. And then we're, uh, moving men out every day, out to the west, and of course we're filling up with KIAs and WIAs, you know, people wounded and killed in action. Fact today we just had a Charlie Seven Alpha, a cargo plane land and fill up with 'em. Every day[?] we've had these, uh, Chinooks fill up with wounded and take 'em back. It's gotten pretty darn busy, I must admit.
Uh, couple times we've had all-night operations, you know, when we had, uh, fighters and bombers, and artillery and stuff hit these hills, and we had, uh, flares going up and everything like that, and this is right in these hills right to the south of us, and it's the first time that we've been going all night long, we had the tower open all night to control traffic, so, uh, if nothing else it's good to know that your, your kid, you know, is right here in the middle of it all, right in, right where it's happenin', even though I don't really see too much.
We had an emergency today where an aircraft came in with his hydraulics out, you know, he had to make an emergency landing. And we've had some of that just about every day now. But all in all its just the same as always. It's drying out and we have a lot of dust. Luckily they're keeping the road watered down but still, there's dust everywhere and now we have a wind blowing for some reason. I hope it doesn't last too long. Uh, about a 10, 15 mile an hour wind blowing all the time, that's just enough to, so that if you look into the wind you get your eyeballs just full of sand and grit.
I hope you're all doing all right at home. I'm in the best of health here, I have been ever since I've been back. Uh, this place isn't really too bad. It's really nice and pretty when the sun comes out, as it does every day now. And I've been just lazing around. Well 'course we've gone on a binge here of cleaning the place up and kinda fixing up. We've been sandbagging the tower, we're going to sandbag the GCA, our radar set, and the hooch that I'm going to be living in, the second hooch is, uh, we have the walls up and if we get some more lumber we'll get it finished, put a roof on it if we get some tar paper. And at last I'll be living in a real hooch instead of a dinky tent, and I'll be able to build stuff and keep everything out of the dust, I hope. As it is now, most every night I have to, uh, shake out my bed and my blankets and everything else just to get the dust out before I can crawl under and sleep. So, around here you don't really have to, uh, to smoke to get your lungs full of crap. All you gotta do is breathe this dust-filled air. But it's really worth it, I suppose. I'd rather be in this spot of Vietnam than most any other place right now. The weather here is nice even though the wind isn't too good, as far as dust goes. It keeps you cool, and there's something to do here now. You know, I guess most of the other, uh, traffic controllers in the 125th are kinda envious of us because we are the busiest, I think, anyway we are the busiest airfield here now, and, uh, at least we put our training to some use here and it'll do me some good later.
"-" indicates a short pause.
statements inside [] indicates editor's note. [?] indicates a guess on my part.
statements inside () refer to what's happening on the audio.
=====================================
[Ernie]
Hello everyone, here I am again, uh, going to have to excuse all these guys, extra sounds and stuff you get because I'm sitting up here on top of the tower and the wind is blowing kind hard and its gonna mess up the mic.
I thought my tape recorder was broken. I was all set to send it home and stuff, but, uh, I finally took it apart and checked it out and find out there was only one contact that had gotten dirty with dust and junk so I cleaned it off and it's working fine now.
There's an awful lot happening here since, uh, the last letter I wrote. Right now things are going really hot, I mean as far as traffic goes, we have a traffic count now about, uh, 12 hundred aircraft a day, even more than that, when before, all we were, well it would be a good day when we had two or three hundred aircraft, and we'd be, we'd have to pad out our traffic count to get more than that.
Ah, things have been picking up here, We has, uh, place has gotten a lot bigger, we have a lot more troops in, uh, the force is here, the 173rd that they were here before, and now even the, uh, first cav has moved in. They, they put in a, uh, a one oh five [105] artillery battery just north of the tower here, just north of where we stay, and they're firing every day, waking us up all night long and everything else, and we have a heck of a lot more helicopters coming in because we have gigantic operation out here to the west of us and they're going out back and forth all day resupplying 'em and taking men out and stuff, and we have C130s comin' in all the time, bringing in supplies, so it gets really hectic here some times. I, uh, just finished a tape, uh, taping myself while I was on the mic, for two hours here around lunch time because one of the guys here is from Qui Nihon and he wants to take it back, show them just how easy they have it at Qui Nihon, so I think I'll give you a little bit of it, put some on the other side, just let you know what we do up here.
It's gotten kinda bad, it's gotten to where, uh, we only have three A controllers, three good controllers for the tower, and we have to work something like a twelve hour shift, even more than that, most of the time when we have night operations, so have to, uh, heh, hope you can hear me over the sound, we got us a big earth mover out here working on the road. He's fixing up the road to the north of us. He's making too much noise, I'll talk to you in a second, soon as he passes.
They're fixing up this road that's just to the north of the tower. This old one that the 173rd messed up. The 4th, uh, division is gonna really make a decent road out of it. They're diggin' it way down to get down to, to some, uh, hard earth and they're gonna fill it in and - I hope that once they fix that one up they're not going to use this other one in front of the tower too much because that thing is nothing but dust, it's not so much dust when a truck comes across it as when a, uh, helicopter comes across to park in the revetment. He just raises a cloud of dust that hides the entire runway.
Anyway, what was I sayin'? Oh, yeah, no, well I was saying that we were, we're all busy and stuff like that, here we've got twelve hundred runs a day and stuff. I'll let you hear, to hear me on the other side of this tape. Uh, we've been getting a little more action than we've been, uh, bargaining for. We've been mortared twice already. About five days ago we got mortared from these hills just to the north of us, they're about, uh, uh, half a mile away, a little more than that. About three quarters of a mile from here, just to the north of us, we got mortared from there.
[another voice]
the only way to do it
[Ernie continues]
And, that wasn't really, uh, too much. They hit us with about 12 mortars and didn't do anything. They all landed close out here, right to the north of our tents and stuff.
We had some, uh, twin 40 millimeter, uh, track-mounted cannon out here and they opened up, and we had rockets firing out there and artillery and stuff, but there was a real nice show, you know, we'd sit here and watch those tracers go over here and they pretty well blackened those hills out there and, and then that night they went and, uh, airlifted all sorts of men out there to comb the hills, see if they could find anybody.
So, that was it for that time. Then three days later, we got hit again, and this time we couldn't find out where they were. We thought they were to the south of us, but, uh, it ended up we didn't, we didn't really find out where they were, and we got, uh, something like 30, 35 mortars and some of them got pretty darn close to where people were stayin' or people were standin'. I picked up a couple of shell fragments from it. They were, uh, throwing some pretty big mortars, and they were trying to hit our north POL, and the funny thing was that being as good shots as they are, you know, from what I saw that first time we got mortared, the first day we moved out here, they weren't, they didn't really hit anything at all. They never, uh, managed to put one mortar where it did a lot of damage. They all landed out here in this open field and didn't do much of anything. Some of them landed on the, uh, end of the runway out here at the unused portion, but I must admit it certainly did scare the aircraft in the area. They all just 'made it'. [departed] They were having pretty busy traffic up til then and everybody just took off and went back to Kontum or someplace. They figured we were getting a bit too hot.
As a matter of fact, I heard a couple days ago that this is, uh, just about the hottest place in Vietnam right now. Yeah, I heard this is just about the hottest place as far as action goes and it must be, the way they're building it up. Take a look at any of those pictures you see, that corner off to the southeast, where we used to have the artillery, well that corner is just nothing but tents now. That whole place is filled up and this other corner out here on the other side of the, uh, runway is filled up, and we have artillery all the way around the field, firing, we have something like five or six fire support bases sittin' in the hills all around us, and they're all within reaching distance of us if we ever get attacked. And then we're, uh, moving men out every day, out to the west, and of course we're filling up with KIAs and WIAs, you know, people wounded and killed in action. Fact today we just had a Charlie Seven Alpha, a cargo plane land and fill up with 'em. Every day[?] we've had these, uh, Chinooks fill up with wounded and take 'em back. It's gotten pretty darn busy, I must admit.
Uh, couple times we've had all-night operations, you know, when we had, uh, fighters and bombers, and artillery and stuff hit these hills, and we had, uh, flares going up and everything like that, and this is right in these hills right to the south of us, and it's the first time that we've been going all night long, we had the tower open all night to control traffic, so, uh, if nothing else it's good to know that your, your kid, you know, is right here in the middle of it all, right in, right where it's happenin', even though I don't really see too much.
We had an emergency today where an aircraft came in with his hydraulics out, you know, he had to make an emergency landing. And we've had some of that just about every day now. But all in all its just the same as always. It's drying out and we have a lot of dust. Luckily they're keeping the road watered down but still, there's dust everywhere and now we have a wind blowing for some reason. I hope it doesn't last too long. Uh, about a 10, 15 mile an hour wind blowing all the time, that's just enough to, so that if you look into the wind you get your eyeballs just full of sand and grit.
I hope you're all doing all right at home. I'm in the best of health here, I have been ever since I've been back. Uh, this place isn't really too bad. It's really nice and pretty when the sun comes out, as it does every day now. And I've been just lazing around. Well 'course we've gone on a binge here of cleaning the place up and kinda fixing up. We've been sandbagging the tower, we're going to sandbag the GCA, our radar set, and the hooch that I'm going to be living in, the second hooch is, uh, we have the walls up and if we get some more lumber we'll get it finished, put a roof on it if we get some tar paper. And at last I'll be living in a real hooch instead of a dinky tent, and I'll be able to build stuff and keep everything out of the dust, I hope. As it is now, most every night I have to, uh, shake out my bed and my blankets and everything else just to get the dust out before I can crawl under and sleep. So, around here you don't really have to, uh, to smoke to get your lungs full of crap. All you gotta do is breathe this dust-filled air. But it's really worth it, I suppose. I'd rather be in this spot of Vietnam than most any other place right now. The weather here is nice even though the wind isn't too good, as far as dust goes. It keeps you cool, and there's something to do here now. You know, I guess most of the other, uh, traffic controllers in the 125th are kinda envious of us because we are the busiest, I think, anyway we are the busiest airfield here now, and, uh, at least we put our training to some use here and it'll do me some good later.