My First Day in Nam
By Guy Jones
What was my first day like in Nam? It was a day that had total fear for me. The plane I was on, landed in Cam Rah Bay with about 200 of new replacements. I was looking out the window to see if the base was under attack like all the stories I heard back in the states, of how the Viet Cong like to shell the runways as planes come into land with new replacements.
As we came off the plane we where hit by the heat. After we got our grip, we boarded military buses with our bags in our laps. That is when I saw that all the windows had 12-gauge chicken wire over them - so I could not get out that way. As the buses began to roll, I could hear small arms fire near us. I have never before been shot at and only time I heard this much shooting was on the range back at good old Fort Knox. Was there someone really out there trying to shoot me before I even could get off this bus? This made all of us wonder: what the hell do we do now?
With our grip in our laps and piled up in the aisle of the bus we just couldn’t get away if we wanted too. We where like sheep off to the slaughterhouse. The buses dropped us off at the holding area until they could ship us off to our units.
After our in-country processing and with bedding issued, we were assigned a bunk until we shipped out. To my way of thinking, this was just all too much. We were in an area where people were trying to shoot us; in a strange land with small little people who talked in a pigeon English; and the country was as hot as hell.
The area just stunk to high heaven. I found out why; it was because the people would just lift their leg and do their thing right there in the street or on the walkway.
At night, you still heard shooting going on and I was told it’s just the new guys on guard duty taking shoots at everything and anything. This went on all night or until they ran out of bullets. I was so scared from all that was going on, and this was the farthest I had even been from home in my life. I was also remembering all the war stories my father told me when I was a kid, and that didn’t help me one bit.
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