By John Dorschner
My best friend in
college, Bill Ingalls, has just published an astonishing book about
his year in Vietnam. It is insightful, harrowing, occasionally funny
and utterly frank – an account of a onetime Soldier of the Month
getting by with pot, booze, a defiant attitude – and a bit of luck.
He operated a
road grader – sitting six feet above the ground, a perfect target
for any sniper – especially during a nerve-jangling stretch near
the Cambodian border when he helped construct a Special Forces
camp. In between, his Army life often consisted of “backbiting, threats,
bribery and blackmail” – while wheeling-dealing, trading
Philippine army guys diesel fuel in return for pot.
The self-published book
is Snakes, Rain and the Tet Offensive: War Stories with Photos,
based on 50
letters he wrote to his
then-wife Faith Rogers, with
some later-day commentary added, and
274 photos he took with a
used East German 35 mm he
bought for
$15.
His
letters pull the reader
directly back to the moment, as
his discussion of family finances: “You
should get about $210 or so this month,” after
he takes $40 in cash for his expenses. He writes he could get another
$40 a month if he's promoted to SP-4, but “I
refuse to kiss ass for it.”
No
glorifying the war for him. As he put it in the introduction: “It
was an ugly war without a real reason for being beyond the political
hysteria of the time. I hated it then, and I hate it now. When I
visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, I cried. It
could have been me with my name on that wall.”
Some 58,000 American soldiers died
protecting South Vietnam – a country that ceased to exist after
the United States finally
conceded defeat. To put that in perspective, 4,500 Americans have
died in Iraq and 2,400 in Afghanistan in the decade-plus we've been
mired in those two countries.
We
were roommates at the
University of Colorado. He was a bright guy who didn't march to
anyone else's drummer – the kind of student who doesn't
automatically parrot back what instructors wanted to hear. He might
read Thomas Wolfe for the fun of it, but blow off a lit class because
he considered the prof pretentious. After several years, he had a grade point of something
like 1.95, and the university informed him that since he didn't have
the required 2.0 he'd have to sit out a semester or so.
In the mid-1960s that
meant one thing: Vietnam.
Rather than become a
canon-fodder draftee, he decided to enlist for three years, so he
could choose a specialty that would (in theory) keep him out of
harm's way. He ended up driving a road grader for the 362nd
Engineering Company. In August 1967, he was sent to Tay Ninh Base, 50
miles northwest of Saigon.
 |
| Ingalls Today |
When he arrived, his
assigned machine was inoperable. He figured out how to fix it
himself. “I was getting paid to operate a road grader, and I did
the very best I could at all times. I had a job to do and I did it.
Being totally against the war, and shirking work, are two different
topics for me.”
Not that the work always
made sense. Once an ornery sergeant ordered him to cut a drainage
ditch right across a road used by Vietnamese workers. The workers
were puzzled/angry about having to walk around the swampy ditch. When
the sergeant left, Ingalls filled the ditch back in. “I also fixed
drainage problems for the local farmers when they needed help, which
I think went a long way toward keeping me alive.”
But he also learned not
to carry tools on the grader – because kids stole them from the tool box.
In October 1967 – just
his third month – he was named Soldier of the Month for his
company, but his relationships with superiors quickly deteriorated.
“I just wasn't able to keep my mouth shut,” about the war or
stupid orders. He turned down a chance to go to officer candidate
school.
More alluring was “dopers' corner – strange music
late into the night. Odd smells and an anarchistic ambiance.” He
passed guard duty sometimes by reading Wolfe
and Somerset Maugham.
He quickly learned the
art of being a dealer, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22,
occasionally draining his fuel tank to get pot, a “high quality
rain suit” or a tubeless tire patch kit, particularly important
because he was getting a flat at least once a week. “My high point
came when I negotiated steak and ice cream for roughly for three
months of Sunday dinners in exchange for fixing the drainage on a …
(food) storage yard.”
In December, his group
was assigned to help construct a Special Forces base near the
Cambodian border – close to the trails that North Vietnamese
soldiers used to infiltrate the south.
 |
| A Man and His Machine 1967 |
Attempts to clear the
jungle led immediately to enemy barrages. The first night, the
nervous engineers fired their M-14s into the darkness at the
perceived enemy locations, not thinking of the Special Forces set up
on the perimeters. The next morning, a pissed Special Forces officer
said some of the M-14 rounds had hit his men and if happened again,
his guys would turn around and fire at the engineers.
“The fighting was so
continuous that I didn't take my boots off for two weeks,” he
writes.
Everybody was jumpy. A soldier on the back of a truck
extended his rifle so his buddy could grab it and leap up on the
truck. Without thinking, the soldier kept his finger on the trigger
and when his buddy grabbed the barrel, his finger squeezed, killing
his buddy with a shot to the chest.
Ingalls heard bullets
whiz past him – like the sound of buzzing bees – but road graders
operated in areas that had already been cleared of vegetation. Much
more exposed were the operators of the Rome plows, assigned to
knocking down the jungle to make a clearing, with the enemy often
lurking a few feet away.
“A plow is the most
hazardous duty in Vietnam for the engineers … they're easy to
ambush and because of the noise made by the plow, the operator can't
hear anything.” The Rome operators tended to misfits, “people who
don't get along in the army at all. Ex-Hell's Angels, guys who get in
fights all the time.”
 |
| Near the Cambodian border, the road grader was parked in a trench to protect it from enemy fire. |
In late January, the area
quieted down. Ingalls didn't know it at the time, but the enemy
troops were done moving south and were now attacking South Vietnamese
cities across a broad front during the Tet Offensive.
The lull didn't last
long. One day a convoy was ambushed about a mile from camp. A young
sergeant rounded up 11 guys to rescue the wounded. “He told me to
climb aboard as well, but I refused, citing the first commandment of
all heavy equipment operators – never abandon your equipment when
attacked. He was pissed, but I sensed that what he was doing was
seriously wrong. All the guys on the truck looked frightened. They
had no idea what to do.”
The truck stormed
straight into the ambush. All were killed. “They never even got a
chance to get off the back of the truck. Stupid waste of life.”
Americans were dying all
the time, of course. Only one incident Ingalls witnessed became a
news story. It concerned a Rome plow operator named Thomas Van Putten. At
the time of the ambush, he had only a week left in country, and a
buddy offered to take his plow assignment. Van Putten ended up in the convoy as a gunner on a scraper. The Viet Cong
captured him. A year later, an emaciated Van Putten appeared: He'd escaped after being a prisoner for a year, serving as a VC mule.
By that time, Ingalls was
back in Boulder, where he graduated with a degree in history. The
marriage didn't last. “I can't say that the Army destroyed my
marriage, but something did, that's for sure,” he writes in a
postscript. “By the time I got out of the army I knew it wasn't
going to last, and we called it quits within three or four years.”
 |
| Ingalls in 2014: He's still a car buff. This 1929 Model A was handed down to him by his father. He recently gave it to his daughter Ursula. |
He became a small
businessman, specializing with considerable success in niche corners
of the auto industry. He's now retired, living in California. Deb,
his wife of 37 years and a professional typesetter, helped design the book. (I was among a bunch of people who gave him him
advice on the first draft, and he rewarded me with a free copy.)
The first edition is a
mere 150 copies. The price is a hefty $90 – because of the huge
expense of printing color photos. It's available at
www.warofwords.co – with
free shipping.
If that sells out, he may
think of a larger, cheaper hard-copy edition, or an electronic color
edition. Electronic would lower the price to $9.99, he says, but
because of the size of the pages and photos, it likely would need to
be read on a desktop.
I was fascinated by his
accounts of the absurdity of the war, but the book could attract a
completely different readership with the photos and accounts of all
the heavy construction equipment. Though they sometimes broke down under brutal conditions, the machines were pretty damn tough. (An enemy shell
once knocked an inch-and-a-half hole through an engine block and the
damn thing kept going.)
He hasn't lost any of his
old individualism. In this age of Youtube and videos everywhere, he's
built a full-fledged sound studio in his garage, producing (among
other things) movie-length radio dramas and much shorter book reviews that
he's marketing to radio stations.
