MEMORY IN VIETNAM PART 1
Professor Berg: And uh, I remember dreams that I had then. And it was vivid… I was in Vietnam in 1968, which is I think before you guys were born. And I still remember dreams that I had there. And as vivid as if I had them yesterday although certain memories are getting really ragged at certain ends but…
Us: Was that about the war in your dreams?
Professor Berg: No actually, the ones that I remember were about coming back. I actually don’t remember dreaming about the war while I was at the war. I remember about dreaming about the war when I got back and for a long period of time I used to have a nightmare that was… I had been called… even though long after the war was over… there was a civilian and I had been called up to go back to the war and it was just awful. And it was odd because it was not so much about going back to Vietnam because these are two different things. It wasn’t as if I was dreaming to go back to Vietnam.
It was dreaming to go back to the war. So it’s here that I started to dream about it. I don’t remember dreaming about it there. Now, some of the things that I remember I think about it because – your professor had told me about this – that I’ve been thinking about the things that I’ve told people before about the war. But things stay. It’s not just about the war stories and… those are there, I can tell you… but there are also other things.
Because I was – let’s not dramatize this too much – I was in a place called Marble Mountain which was about five miles south of Danang, maybe eight miles south of Danang. And it’s on a beach so … you’re talking about a guy who never saw a jungle… if you were to say “Vietnam had jungle” I would say “no, Vietnam had beaches”. And it’s not like it’s a resort area. From what I’ve heard it’s not a resort area.
So I was at this beach and we were at a relatively more or less safe area compared to what other guys had done over there, what happened to me was like 10 in the afternoon walking here at USC. So it was an odd place where I was at. So I remember… I remember stealing… it’s a bad thing because it’s a cliché from a movie.
I wrote a story once about how a friend… how two of us… two friends of mine and I went to up to the division headquarters and conned them out of four surfboards, drove them back to where we were at, built a lifeguard tower and set up surfing it Vietnam. And we had it in the back at one of the three-quarter PCs which I used to drive. So when you used to go to Vietnam… in Vietnam everyone used to hitch rides… hitch-hike on the road or you flew in helicopters. So coming into the Nang, you got all these guys coming out there.
You have the surfboards at the back of the truck so they were like… and it was these guys coming up from up out of the field are looking at these trucks full of surfboards going that way and they’re just lined up and it’s like pandemonium as we drove by because it was like the most bizarre thing that they had ever seen. So yeah, I remember getting those surfboards. I remember this too, there were Vietnamese working on the base and Chieu Hoi, you know Chieu Hoi? No? I was just wondering if he had mentioned these things. Chieu Hoi program was that the Americans would drop things and they would invite the Vietcong, which was mostly those who were fighting. And they would invite the Vietcong to come to our side. So the Chieu Hoi program right… they would come to our side and they would end up in different battalions as guys who would go out on patrols with us.
And I remember working with them, three of these Chieu Hoi. So we had… it’s odd the amount of respect we had for the Vietcong. It an odd and unusual kind of myth but we had these three guys working with us. And I remember going out on patrol with two of them one night and I had been there six, seven months. And I was aware it was a night patrol – we know what the hell we’re doing. And we know we’re not in a dangerous area but we’re not safe either. So we set up in this field, this ambush in the field and we don’t want to do anything. And gave one of the Chieu Hoi some gum. “You want some?” “Yeah.” And he’s over in a hole over there and we’re all quiet. And you can hear him chewing this gum.
And we’re like, “What in the hell? Man! Quiet! VC!” “No VC!” And you know, it’s like there weren’t any there, and there weren’t any there and he’s just out there doing this thing. It’s odd moments like that that come to mind. Or there was a man that was acting as a translator for the battalion. And he worked with what was the intelligence.
And I remember we used to hang around and talk to him, he’s this schoolteacher, he was older. He’s this schoolteacher we used to talk about the war. He was just a nice, wonderful, kind man who was in this thing.
And you could get the sense that he didn’t really want to be in this thing. You know, we were talking about getting drafted. “Oh you we’re drafted” I said, “Yeah”, “how long?”, I said, “couple years”. He kind of laughed and said he got drafted to and I said, “How long”, and he said “nine years”. And I mention this as being kind of unusual because marines were allowed to go into the cities.
The army and air force could go into the cities. They could go into Saigon, they could go into Denang. But it was illegal for marines to do that. Even the villages that were outside of our base camp, the only time we could go through there legally was through patrol. So we had an odd and distant relationship to a lot of the Vietnamese. We couldn’t… I used to driving around to Denang, when I could I would stop and wander around because I needed rest.
So there was always this thing that marines, or at least enlisted marines that were of my rank were always at a distance. So those are the kind of stories that I talk about these guys that keep coming to mind these days. But yeah, didn’t know the other ones. There are all the combat stories, right? There are all of those which are always bizarre.
Us: How many combats were you involved in?
Professor Berg: Not as many as many other people but often enough. Maybe a half dozen times. Maybe when people were really shooting in my direction. So, so… and mostly small arms fire. I mean we never got mortared. The biggest thing was the battalion base camp, which was about 6 to 800 people, it go overrun. So that means if you’ve seen these movies that… it got overrun at night so they blew holes in the wires at four different places and something like 21 guys died that night and maybe a considerable bit more were wounded and it was a… I remember it as a long three-day thing because… I can even tell you the date it was over because I celebrate it every year. It was on the morning of May 5th, myself and four or five of us we’re sitting on the beach leaning up against the building that had been blown up.
We had been fight for… that night we had been fighting for at least eight hours and we had been at other things for two days so we were all sitting and it looked like a bad WWII movie because we were up against something we had helmets.
Over there, right over there are three dead VC soldiers and we’re watching the sun come up over the South China Sea. And it’s like that moment at which you know “okay, I’ve gotten through this one”. And there’s that exhilaration that you’re alive and you’re sitting on a beach and it’s warm and it’s May and most of the guys you know are alive and that’s what happens when you fuck up because you going to be dead. And you know, this is a birthday, this is a birth…