The Officer with a Jeep
Interviewer: Did they ever explain to you why these specific targets were chosen?
Hoffenblum: Back in the Saigon, alright, when they annotated photographs, remember the photographs would be no more than 24 hours old. Because mainly… well all of a sudden we’d get the target, this was gonna be a Vietnamese air force and I was gonna bomb this stock, just over the border in North Vietnam. All of a sudden I get the target and it’s not there. It’s been bombed before. It’s been destroyed. And I start going through command saying, “Why are you sending bombers there? There’s nothing there, there’s nothing there! My God we’re going into North Vietnam you’re going to be attacked!” And…but they went ahead and sent them anyway. And then I read in the paper, the Stars and Stripes, the military paper, that those planners got awarded the meritorious service for doing such a good job for picking out that target, and the target wasn’t even there. I had no idea. There was a lot of friction by the way, and competition between the Air Force and the Navy: which targets the Navy would hit, and which ones the Air Force would hit. You know this was called “Rolling Thunder”, was the term that was given to the air strikes up in North Vietnam. If you remember I was concentrating on air strikes only in North Vietnam. But I sometimes wondered why they picked this target or that. I didn’t have the foggiest , I didn’t know why the targets were picked. And when I saw they were actually sending people in harm’s way to drop bombs on a target that wasn’t even there, I became somewhat cynical.
Interviewer: How did you interact with you superiors and the pilots to whom you gave information?
Hoffenblum: Interaction with the pilots was paramount. The air force was run by pilots. And you can’t become a four star general unless you were a pilot, unless you were a doctor or lawyer or something like that. To be a general officer, you pretty much had to be a pilot. And in the air force, the pilots only listened to two men: their crewmen of course, but besides your crewmen, the maintenance officer and your intelligence officer, and the interaction between the two was very important because we used to give them information that would save their lives. And I had a very close relationship with the pilots there in the air force. And then of course, because I was the base intelligence officer, I was second to the base commander, who was a full colonel. I was a lieutenant most of the time. I became a captain thirty days before I left. But I had my own Jeep. Because of the position I had, my office was air conditioned and I had my own Jeep, where everybody else did not have air conditioning and they had to take a bus to go from the base to Can Tho. So there was a lot of jealousy among majors and captains and second, first lieutenants, who used to run around with his air conditioned office and his Jeep. But the key thing was that I had to get along with the base commander and the pilots, and that I did very well.
Interviewer: What was your interaction with the Vietnamese like off the battlefield?
Hoffenblum: Well when you were a young man and you were in Saigon…and by the way only those of us that were stationed in Can Tho, and had business in Saigon were allowed to go into Saigon. Most of the GIs you interviewed were in the infantry or artillery were not allowed to go into Saigon. They didn’t want to have a city full of suits. And more often than not we wouldn’t be wearing our uniform inside downtown Saigon. Sometimes we would, but not always. And there used to be these women. You buy what’s called Saigon tea, you go into a bar and they would be there. And there was a place called Cho Lon, which was the Chinese sector of Saigon, it’s where all the Chinese lived, which is no longer there, by the way. And uh, if you went into Saigon and you found a pretty young girl and you bought her some Saigon tea, she was probably Chinese. And when you went to Cho Lon, they were probably Vietnamese. They didn’t want to run into family or something, seeing them. But we visited some restaurants. It was not a stressful…it was not stressful in the city, Can Tho. So we’d go out to eat and do things, and we also had television by that time, and some of the guys would just watch tv, movies and things such as that, but I never really bothered. And also, by the way, it usually was pretty late by the time I got to Can Tho. It would be 8, 9, 10 o’clock by the time we get there. More often than not, we’d just chitchat and go to bed.
Interviewer: What was on everyone’s mind at base?
Hoffenblum: Oh no business. No business. I mean depending on… I mean I remember we had a good time…I remember we used to have entertainment, the USO tours would come through. And they were good by the way. You did not go, well the government did not send you to Vietnam…you didn’t have to be famous, but you had to be good. I remember one time we were at a staff meeting, and we found out that Roy Rogers and Dale Evans was coming. Do you know who Roy Rogers is? Let’s put it this way. He was one of the most famous movie cowboys of his time. Most of us grew up watching Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and his horse Trigger. And everybody laughed about it, but when they arrived on base, my God, I mean everybody came out, cameras were blaring or what have you…But I would say when you get in on base, for the most part it was not stressful, except when the pilots… the pilots went on those 50mm gun and that was stressful-people would shoot at them. But for most of us, we felt very secure, and lived on the economy. So much different from the GIs who were stuck out in the boondocks, and maybe got some R&R in the cities, or I forget what they call them, but there was a few.