-- 2-8--

Comments by Mike Roberts - 2

 Home   Contact  AFVN   Past Contacts   AFVN Roster   POWS: The Honored   Taps: Those Departed   AFVN Organization   AFVN Reunions

AFVN History         AFVN Photos & Stories           AFVN Group Conversations         Audio Archives          Video Archives       AFVN Guest Book

​ Project Jenny        KLIK - 1st Inf Di v       Women in Vietnam        RELATED--  To AFVN    To Saigon   To Vietnam       Further Afield      Index

         An Lac is about one hundred miles west of Nha Trang.  I had been on patrol with US Special Forces advisers and the Montagnard Irregulars they were trying to train and motivate.  It was pretty quiet, no contact and it had been raining hard for over a week keeping the supply plane that was my ticket out of coming in.  At night after the perimeter had been secured there wasn't much to do but play cards, read, drink Ba Mui Ba beer and listen to the radio.  Up in the Central Highlands of Vietnam Radio Hanoi boomed in loud and clear.  Each evening I drank Ba Mu?i Ba with members of the A-Team and listened to Radio Hanoi.  Each morning we all swore not to do it again.  The Ba Mu?i Ba was said to be laced with formaldehyde and produced monster hangovers.  The Radio Hanoi broadcasts, while funny at the time, also tended to stay with you like a Ba Mui Ba headache.

         "You are a long, long way from Fort Riley now and there is no Jersey Coffee in town on Washington Street where you can sit around the counter, eating hamburgers and sipping coffee without having to be afraid a bomb might go off, like it did in that restaurant in Saigon a few weeks back.  Like I said you are new here and really don't know what LBJ and company have let you in for by sending you across the Pacific to invade Vietnam, because the local stooges and the more than sixty thousand American troops who came before you couldn't stop the South Vietnam liberation forces.  But you will learn the hard way.  Ask some of the guys that have been around a while . This isn't Washington Street in Junction City.  You can get killed here. Get out while you are still alive and before it's too late."  (Nguyen Van Tung, 30 June 1965).