Armistice Day follow up

My old friend Trixie posted this on Facebook.  I remember it all very well but had not seen the photo for quite some time.  Thank you Miss D.

I served in the United State Army for 855 days (but who was counting?) from 12 Sep 69 to 14 Jan 72.  From 3 April 1970 to 28 Oct 71 I was stationed at the US Army Depot-Cam Ranh Bay.  This was a huge supply depot located at one of the world's best natural harbors on the coast of what was then known as the Democratic Republic of South Vietnam.  Where I worked was a supply depot, an area much removed from the areas of major hostilities.  I worked in an office.  We had electric typewriters.  The office where I worked was in that quonset hut right behind the jeep.  There was a door there on the end but we mostly used the side entrance.  I don't remember why.

We all lived at something called the "Cantonment Area", a clustering of barracks located maybe a click or so from where we worked.  Vets will know how far a click is.

We were REMFs, real echelon lucky dogs.  REMF areas are heavily laden with senior NCOs (non-commissioned officers, senior sergeants if you will), also known as "lifers".  These were, and almost certainly still are, people making a career out of the military.  Senior NCOs were middle aged in a force overwhelmingly peopled by the young.  But they were middle aged and they had clout and they didn't want to walk half a mile to and from work every day.

So there were lots of jeeps.  I suppose all of these jeeps had a defined military purpose but the truth is the real reason they were there is that they were lifer commuter vehicles.  Each company would have two or three jeeps assigned to the company but mostly signed out to one of the senior NCOs but also sometimes signed out to one of the very junior commissioned officers (second lieutenants, aka second looey, aka LT2, aka butterbars, the very lowest level of commissioned officers, in Vietnam often ROTC graduates).  Every jeep would be parked somewhere in the cantonment area overnight.  In the morning people with the proper connections to the person who was signed out for the jeep would meet and ride to work.  A jeep like the one in the photo is a four seater and there where ALWAYS four people in the vehicle every morning as it traveled from the cantonment area to the work area in the army depot.

I should note that there were also a few three quarter ton trucks and an occasional deuce and a half parked overnight in the cantonment area.  A few newfers might have to walk for the first few days after they arrived in country.  But soon enough most people had made some sort of arrangement and everyone drove to work.

The senior NCOs who were signed for the jeeps were used to having some latitude in their working environment.  Senior NCOs are the connective tissues that enable the organism that is the US Army to function.  They show up for work, the job gets done, and in recognition of their contributions tiny, small considerations are granted to them.  One of the considerations they were granted at the US Army Depot-Cam Ranh Bay was that they were allowed to alter the official as required by Army Regulation markings of their vehicles by including a name on the below the windshield panel of their assigned jeeps.  I do not know positively, but I know that almost always the name below the windshields on those jeeps was the name of some senior NCO's wife.

I worked for a junior lieutenant.  He was about my age, he was an ROTC graduate of if I recall correctly, Drexel University in Philadelphia.  ROTC (reserve officer training corps) meant that part of the cost of his education had been paid by the US government in exchange for he agreeing to enter the military as a commissioned officer after graduation.  He was in the Army, he had an engineering degree, he was a junior lieutenant assigned to an engineer company at a rear echelon supply depot.  For him it was a plum assignment and he knew it.  He could have drawn much worse but with the assignment he had he knew he was going to be able to wait 365 days and then go home to his wife.

He wasn't very hard core.

So anyway he wasn't a guy thinking in terms of perks and his jeep didn't have any name in the "name" spot on the jeep.

I suggested to him that we could paint the name of my most faithful non-family correspondent in that spot.  He knew enough about me to know that I did actually have just such a faithful correspondent.  When I suggested that we paint "Trixie"  on the jeep it appealed to him immediately.

"Trixie" was just vaguely subversive, an aggressively sort of brassy sounding sobriquet entering into an ocean otherwise full of Mary and Ellen and Jane.  My LT wasn't an army lifer either and the vaguely counter-culture note suggested by the outside the mainstream name appealed to him.  He gave the go ahead.  I got a stencil kit and a can of spray paint from the supply sergeant, I stenciled up that spot below the windshield and applied the paint.  And sure enough, almost immediately upon completion of the painting of the name the expected reaction came.  The husbands of Mary and Ellen and Jane were all indignant.

LT2 Jeff  had to explain to them and I actually had to verify that I had a friend who wrote to me on an regular basis whose given name was not but who was known to me as Trixie.

Even all these years later I am amused thinking about it.

Here are two other pictures of me in my green clothes.

The first one is Private Miller, while I was still at Basic Training at Fort Benning, Georgia.  I think probably Larry, but maybe Bob, took that one.  With my camera.

Larry was from a small town in Wisconsin, he slept on the top bunk, I slept on the bottom.  That close proximity meant that he and I had to endure together a lot of the random indignities inflicted on trainees.  There actually was a guy named Bob, he was from Virginia the town in Minnesota, he slept right around on the other side of those lockers and he was the guy who convinced me to buy that camera.

It was a Pentax, the first nice camera I ever had.

This one is Specialist Miller sitting on my bunk in the barracks at Cam Ranh.

You can see a tiny bit of Vietnamese on the No Parking sign below that light on the left.  That was meant to be humor.  That's Harmon Killebrew in the middle pane of a collage I made that I called "Twins".  You can also see that completing the painting of the walls was never deemed to be really important.

I was on a floor with NoDak (a guy from North Dakota), Dutch (John Denver's brother), Sgt. Sandeen, Peets and a bunch of guys mostly from the south who were heavy equipment mechanics and operators for the depot unit I was nominally assigned to.  I was assigned to that unit but I could type and the Army always needs guys who can type so I worked at Depot Headquarters.

Which work I got to every day for a few weeks at least there in the middle of my time in country by riding there in the Trixie jeep.