My Men Had Served a Year in Hell. I Was Getting Them Home, Come Humid Hell or High Water.

[douglas9]

General Becker shook my hand, said nice things about me, administered an oath in which I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, then pinned a gold bar on my right collar while Major Phillips, my boss, pinned crossed infantry rifles on the left.

Ten days later, I got orders reassigning me to Fort Benning, Georgia. My combat tour in Vietnam was over.

I said my goodbyes and hopped a Huey to Camp Holloway, Pleiku. In the morning I reported for shipment and learned that I would be among 150 men returning. It was due in an hour. As the only officer in this group, I was handed a packet of orders and put in charge of getting every man in the group through the Military Airlift Command system. My first command!

The mere presence of a second lieutenant returning to the States raised questions. Wartime demands on the officer ranks had accelerated promotion cycles. Unless they were killed or court-martialed, second lieutenants became first lieutenants after one year. And they never deployed to Vietnam without at least six months of active duty.

A year later, when they rotated home, all were first lieutenants.

https://thewarhorse.org/soldier-overcomes-obstacles-to-get-troops-home-from-vietnam/

[Aristus]

1. I have no doubt everyone who ever served in the military has a story about travel roadblocks.

Mine is much simpler than this guy's. And I didn't have the stress of command. I was a lowly enlisted man. When my tank unit was deployed to the Gulf from Germany, we were on a chartered Pan Am 747 flight (not long before the airline went bust), and that dreamlike flight is a story all on its own.

We landed at King Fahd International just as the sun was coming up. The final leg of the journey was going to be a C-130 flight to King Khalid Military City. But it took all of our first day in-country for the plane to arrive and do a maintenance and refueling turnaround. We had to hang out at the airport. There was no food, but there was a bottomless supply of bottled water, as you can imagine. We hunkered down under plywood sun-shelters, and drank water all day. We were trying to get used to the idea of frequent re-hydration. Since we weren't working out under the hot sun, we didn't sweat away the water, so instead, it was frequent trips to the plywood latrines.

I whiled away the time inspecting the Arabic-language labels on the water bottles. Somehow, it was a commercial product label entirely in Arabic that made the whole thing real for me. Until then, it just seemed like a rather unorthodox training exercise.

[GP6971]

2. I "loved" the 12 hour port calls prior

to boarding. They kept us busy going through Customs and Ag inspections and then the often FOD walks of the runway especially on redeployment from Osan. After all that, we still had to wait about 5 hours for departure.

They were building King Khalid City when I was in Dammam in 79 on business. Of course, no one knew what they were building at the time. It was all hush hush.