Sent in by Ronnie Darel Rash: A New Arrival in Vietnam with the 196th Infantry Brigade

Just a couple of weeks off the 12,000-mile ocean voyage from Boston Harbor to Vung Tau, Vietnam, we’re still shaking off the salt and getting our bearings. I came over with the 196th Infantry Brigade, a unit stitched together from every corner of the States, and now we’re here—thousands of miles from home, sweat rolling off us in the weighty Vietnamese heat. The reality that we’re on the other side of the world hits hard when you wake up in the red dirt, the sound of distant helicopters somewhere over the horizon, the air thick with a thousand new smells—diesel, wet earth, woodsmoke, sweat, and worry.

For now, we’ve spent almost all of our time building up our bunkers and making the base camp feel like more than a patch of naked earth. Armed with shovels and sandbags instead of rifles, our days blur into a routine of digging, hauling, and hammering: laying down planks, stacking sandbags chest high, stringing wire, and worse, digging trenches in the muggy, unforgiving ground. Every man knows why we’re doing this—out there, past the perimeter, the world gets real dangerous, real quick.

When we first landed, stevedores unloaded us and our gear in Vung Tau in a flurry that almost seemed more organized than the Army itself. SEA bees and support units pointed us to lines of trucks for the bone-rattling drive inland. The journey passed through lush green paddies, a world away from the brick and winter chill of Boston. The civilians here watch us pass with wary, unreadable faces, and kids pause their play to wave or shout out for chocolate.

It’s hard to believe that just a couple weeks ago, we were packed onto the ship—sleeping stacked like cordwood or standing on the deck staring at endless water, wondering what waited on the far side of the Pacific. The voyage forged us together. We played endless games of poker, swapped stories from home, and tried to prepare ourselves for the unknown. The older guys—some with the haunted look that says they’ve seen war before, maybe in Korea—don’t speak much about what’s to come, but their silence says plenty.

Now, the daily rhythm of building takes some edge off the waiting. We joke about becoming engineers instead of infantry, but nobody complains—getting the right fortifications up is the difference between fortune and fate. Mail from home is slow to catch up. Some days there’s nothing; other days, the chaplain or the mail clerk brings a handful of letters that pass from hand to hand, read and reread until the edges get soft, the ink smudges.

There’s talk about patrols starting soon, missions in the hills, and rumors of what’s happening north and west. For now, though, we’re getting established—eating what we can, sleeping where we can, and learning to live, work, and fight together as the 196th. Most of us are too busy or too worn out by dusk to do much but rack out on the bunkers we built ourselves—but we know it won’t be long before our training is put to the test.

If nothing else, these first weeks remind me what it means to be part of something bigger—maybe not always by choice, but driven by necessity, and by the bond that grows among men with shovels in their hands and a common purpose: to be ready for whatever comes next, thousands of miles from home.

– Ronnie Darel Rash, 196th Infantry Brigade