Living Conditions In Vietnam

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages that I had in Vietnam as a soldier were my living conditions. While we did spend a lot of time in the field with our Vietnamese counterparts most of our time was spent at the district or the province headquarters. As a result, unlike many of my counterparts in the military units, I at least had a bed to come home to. On my first assignment we lived with our Vietnamese counterpart in his house. The house itself was a large building; it had originally been the French counting house or district headquarters during the colonial period. The house was used as a headquarters for the district chief as well as our living quarters.

Team House at Ap Bac

The front of the building was set up as a briefing room and headquarters area for the district chief and his office. It was also used as a formal meeting room with a large table. He would conduct staff meetings there usually once or twice a week. Immediately behind the office area were two large bedrooms. The district chief and his family occupied those living spaces. Immediately to the rear of the building was a large kitchen and dining area. Here the house servants, which consisted of two maids and a cook, would prepare meals for the family. Tucked into a corner of that building there was a bathroom.

Our quarters consisted of one large room that was subdivided by large metal wall lockers. Behind the wall lockers sat our bedroom area. We had three sets of bunk beds set up there with large mosquito nets over each of the beds. Each of us had our own separate wall locker for uniforms and other personal items.

Bunk-bed arrangement in Team house

In the front of the building, we had our office. Our PRC-25 radio was set up there and there were two large desks as well as an area for maps of the district posted on the back of the wall lockers.

Our “office”

At one time there had been a garage, basically just a covered shed next to the building. During our stay there we turned that into a separate room that we used for our briefings, ‘lounge’ and ‘entertainment’ area. We also had a propane gas refrigerator that sat in the room. We purchased a couple of chairs and a couch on the local market to furnish the room. The concrete floor was tiled and there was a doorway that exited from that room to the outside.

The Lounge (former garage)

The bathroom in the house was very primitive. It consisted of what we referred to as a French toilet. It was a porcelain bowl that sat on the floor over a large drain that flushed into a septic tank. You could stand above it and urinate, but to take ‘a dump’ and ‘make a soldier deposit’, you would have to squat over the hole and do your business. When you were finished there was a 55-gallon drum of water that sat in the corner and you would have to take a small bucket of water and pour it down the hole to flush.

When our new district chief moved into the house with his large family, we no longer took our meals in the back with the family as we had with our first counterpart. Our first counterpart had left his family in Saigon and lived in the house with his mistress.

After our new counterpart moved in, he asked if we would take our meals in our own area. Our house maid would help prepare the meals in the kitchen and then bring our food to us in our office area, where we had a small round table.

Compared to how our brothers lived in the field we had wonderful accommodation.

When we went to the field on operations with our counterparts we lived like everyone else hunkered down in foxholes, or laying along canal banks in the mud. But the advantage was when we came back, we had a place to stay, and we did not spend weeks at a time in the field like our brothers did in Vietnam.

After our new counterpart moved his large family in, we built our own bathroom facility. It was outside of the building over its own septic tank. The building itself was made of brick, and it was heavily reinforced so that we could connect a 300-gallon water tank to the top of the roof. The tank was black plastic, and it had a large black cover over the top of it. As a result, we generally had warm water when we took a shower. The bathroom also had a sink where we could shave and a flush toilet. Water from the tank would come down a pipe into the toilet so that you could flush it just like any normal American toilet. We used to laugh that we had the only flush toilet between Saigon and the provincial capital at Moc Hoa.

Our maintenance man, Mr. Hai, would make sure that the tank was filled daily and once a month he would ensure that the septic tank was pumped out. The entire building was built about three feet from the ground so that the septic tank wouldn’t fill with water during the monsoons. Our Sergeant built the facility, and it was an engineering masterpiece.

At the end of that tour, I extended and was moved to the provincial capital, where I lived in the MACV team headquarters compound. By the time that I arrived in late 1970 the compound was well established. As an officer I had my own room although we made some major modifications to that while I was there. Each room was about 12 feet wide by 20 feet long. There was enough room for a bunk bed, a small desk and an overhead electric fan.

We had a working water system in the compound and a large military style latrine that had bathrooms at one end and a shower room at the other. The compound had a large mess hall as well as offices and maintenance areas. Immediately behind the compound was the airfield and the main street, in front of the compound, led to the central city.

The compound had a rectangular wall that was approximately 4 feet high topped with barbed wire surrounding the entire place. In each corner of the compound was a large bunker area that was heavily reinforced and was our haven in the event of an attack. Along each of the outer walls there were also smaller fighting positions, again heavily reinforced, that allowed our soldiers to position themselves to defend the compound if we were ever under direct attack. Each of the main bunkers in the corner had communications contact with the command bunker in the center of the Compound.

I mentioned earlier that I had a different plan for my room. Ultimately, I convinced all the intelligence advisers to consolidate our quarters into one living area. We ended up sharing three rooms in a row and modifying them so that we had one large room for our office area as well as the lounge set up, and then we used the backroom as a bunk room for all of us. That allowed us to do better coordination and sharing of intelligence information. In the office area we had one large map and all intelligence had to be posted on that one map. We had radio contact with all the district teams as well as the headquarters TOC. We had one large metal security container for classified information and a large red thermite grenade on top of the counter. If we were ever attacked and it looked like we would be overrun, we could quickly destroy all our security information.

Our Intelligence Office in Moc Hoa

In 1972 when I was recalled to Vietnam, I was assigned to the headquarters of the 525 Military Intelligence Group in Saigon. We lived in a hotel that had been converted into a bachelor officers’ quarters. Each of us had a large room with a bathroom and a shower. We had a small dining room in the building that was run by a Vietnamese staff and provided us our meals. On the roof of the building, we had a covered area where we could watch movies and there was a small bar set up there as well for drinks. This was truly the ‘Life of Riley”.

Utah BOQ – Saigon

View of Saigon from Utah BOQ Room

Life in Saigon was a luxury assignment compared to even what I had been through at the district and the province level. When I did go to the field, up to the city of Hue and Da Nang, I lived in a compound that was like what I had experienced at the province level. When I did go to the field we lived like every other soldier did. But those trips were infrequent, and I spent most of the time in 1972 and 1973 living in relatively comfortable surroundings.

So, as you can see, living conditions in Vietnam for some members of the Military Assistance Command units as well as the headquarters folks living in the big cities was far different than what we normally see in the movies about Vietnam. Our lifestyles were far different; our accommodations were luxurious compared to living in a foxhole or sleeping in a hammock. Our duty assignments, while stressful, did not compare to any way, shape, or form that the guys in the infantry and combat units were putting up with every day. We were the lucky ones.

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