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Almost Home

By Marc Levy

Patrol. Jungle. Ambush. Monsoon. Mortars and rockets, a base overrun. The teeming rain and blistering heat. I'd seen my share as a grunt medic in 1970. A year later, at Tan Son Nhut airport, I waited on the tarmac with dozens of weary grunts in weathered fatigues and boonie hats, clean-cut REMFS in khakis and shined boots, last seen on the flight to Vietnam. Sitting on our duffle bags or standing idly about, we chatted and began to sweat as the sun came up. A local REMF came near. "Snow. Anyone need snow?" He was selling heroin, but I did not know it. After a time, we boarded an enormous commercial jet. We broke into cheers when it finally roared down the runway, nosed upward, and lifted into the air.

In that first hour, men talked excitedly, drank liquor from small glass bottles, ogled the good-looking round-eye stewardesses, and little by little settled into sleep. Hours, or was it years later, the captain's voice over the intercom, the mechanical snap of one hundred seat belts locked into place, the robotic whirr of landing wheels descending. Ears popped. Infinite minutes passed. Finally, the jet touched down, the enormous engines roared in reverse, the aircraft lurched to a halt, and each man stepped down the metal stairway into a cavernous hanger.

I couldn't help but look at the replacements standing off to one side. Clad in new fatigues and new boots, their duffle bags stuffed with new t-shirts, socks, and so forth, they gaped at us, the shocked-out grunts especially. "Will I look like that when I come home?" they must have wondered. I didn't think to ask, "Have I changed that much in a year?" As we marched past the awestruck men, the only sound to be heard was the thudding of our jungle boots on the cold cement floor.

We walked to a far-away exit, which led to a well-lit room, where we sat in chairs and filled out forms. We were glad to hand over our MPC. "You don't need it! You're home! Give it here!" said a smiling clerk. He proffered a plastic bucket as he ambled up and down the seated rows, men willingly emptying their GI pockets of the colorful scrip. How much did he collect? A hundred, two hundred dollars? Decades later, after reading a book by Cornelius Hawkridge (tip of the hat to John Ketwig), I realized the clerks were smuggling the MPC back to Vietnam to be exchanged on the black market for dollars, paying a cut to the marketeers, splitting the profits. Pulling that stunt a few times a day, they made good money.

Paperwork completed, in an airport bathroom I changed into my dress greens. With an Army voucher, I caught a flight to Newark, NJ. A taxi from Newark airport to my parent's house, about eight miles away, cost six bucks. What I remember most, what moved me, what I'll never forget—since my parents, tragic figures who would not send me a survival knife while I was in combat—"You might hurt yourself," they said—was the sight of my dog jumping up and down as I walked in the door. My beloved dog, the one true thing I missed in that bright green, red dust, rainy year away from home, jumping for joy at the sight of me.

Marc Levy served with Delta 1/7 Cav in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1970. His website is Medic in the Green Time. Email: silverspartan@gmail.com.