Donut Dolly: An American Red Cross Girl's War in Vietnam

Chapter 9 Ambush in the Delta

227 ✚ Chapter 9 ✚ Ambush in the Delta Sometimes the places we thought were the safest were the opposite. One day I received an audiocassette tape from my parents. They talked about what was going on, and told me they had just added a new room, with a fireplace, to the farm house. On the tape, they had recorded sounds of my father stoking the fire. I played the tape on the equipment at the center, available for anyone to use. Guys came in every once in a while to play tapes from home. I felt bad for one man. He told me, “My wife is mad at me. She’s not speaking to me, so she sent me a 90-minute tape that turned out to be blank, nothing on it.” Telling me about it seemed to make him feel better. I thought my buddies, the pilots, would enjoy hearing my dad stoke the fireplace. I took the tape to supper the next day, and sure enough, the pilots were eager to hear it. One man volunteered that he had a tape player in his room. The dozen pilots pushed back their chairs. The scraping sounds echoed through the empty mess hall. We all trooped the 50 feet to the man’s room.1 He was proud to show it off, one of a dozen cozy, two-man rooms that opened onto a central courtyard deck, in a new building. One of the pilots had planted a banana tree in an opening in the center of the deck. We squeezed into the room, some sat on the cots and some on the floor. They all insisted that I have the one 228 Donut Dolly chair at the desk. When we played the tape, everyone groaned at the part where Dad stoked the fireplace. We could hardly listen to it on that evening in January. The sweat ran down our faces, even though we sat still. When the tape finished, I asked, “I love to hear your stories. Will you tell one on the tape recorder for my parents?” They responded with an enthusiastic chorus of, “Yeah. Great idea.” Some shifted their positions as they settled in for another good story. The man with the tape recorder turned it on, and Dusty, from Texas, asked, “Remember the time everybody tried to shoot the same VC?” They all looked at him, ready for the story. “Yes,” they chorused. Dusty continued, “He was out in the open, running as fast as he could. Running across a field of dry rice paddies. How many of us shot rockets at him?” He looked around the crowded room at all the pilots, who laughed and nodded. “It was everybody. The whole rice paddy exploded.” He waved his hands in the air to simulate clouds of dust that billowed up. “Dirt and smoke flew everywhere. You couldn’t see a thing.” He squinted as if he tried to see through the smoke. The chorus laughed with him. “Then, there he was. He came running out the other side of the cloud of smoke.” Dusty’s eyes opened wide and he pretended to startle in surprise. “It was unbelievable. Everybody missed him. He just came running out of that cloud of smoke.” Some pilots repeated, “He came running out of that cloud of smoke.” Some shook their heads, “Right out the other side.” Eager took up the tale where Dusty had left off. “We all shot at him again, including my gunner. The next rice paddy exploded.” He threw up his hands to emphasize the explosion. “Smoke was everywhere. This time, when the smoke cleared, he was dead. I really think it was my gunner who finally got him.” Captain Hoza nodded and finished the story. “The Air Force verified the kill later.” Ambush in the Delta 229 Eager added, “You know, that gunner is terrific. He can hit anything . I can tell him to give me a burst of five, and he can do it.” Another pilot added, “I’d hate to count up how many thousands of dollars in rockets and ammunition it cost Uncle Sam to kill that one VC.” I sent the tape to my folks. My mom wrote back and observed that the pilots had learned to de-humanize the VC so their minds could justify killing a human. I had no more information about the story. I’m sure it...