Christmas Brings Melancholy Joys To Dakto Bunkers
Bernard Weinraub, The New York Times, 26 December 1967
DAKTO, South Vietnam — At dawn today mist clung to the scarred mountains around this valley base camp and a chilling wind swept sand through the tinsel and green shrubs that dangled from bunkers.
From a loudspeaker, muffled voices sang “Silent Night."
“Christmas and war,” Specialist 4 Mike Marcks, a 20-year-old medic, said as he stood shivering outside a mess tent. “A contradiction in terms.”
For Specialist Marcks and the soldiers of Company D—as well as most of the field troops from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta—Christmas in Vietnam was a curious blend of melancholy and humor. A one-day allied truce left the war quiescent, giving infantrymen a fleeting and uneasy respite from combat.
During the day, most of the troops in the field sat on bunkers listening to Christmas music on Armed Forces Radio, writing letters, dozing, sipping beer and praying on hills and in valleys with exhausted chaplains who shuttled from unit to unit by helicopter. Finally, most ate a Christmas Day turkey dinner that was often lowered from helicopters in containers.
For the infantrymen of Company D of the Fourth Division, Christmas Day on the northeast tip of Dakto began at 6 A.M. when a red flashlight moved eerily through the darkness of each bunker and someone shouted: “Get up, everybody, it’s Christmas!”
The 26-year-old company commander, Capt Clark F. Rehberg of Ypsilanti, Mich., sat up on his rubber mattress, put a fatigue shirt over his khaki sweater and wrote to his wife, Barbara, who is expecting a child in two weeks.
In a nearby bunker, a tall, blond platoon leader with a drooping mustache. First Lieut. Phillip Lawler, yawned and startled a half dozen sleeping soldiers by loudly singing "O Come All Ye Faithful” in Latin.
“I learned it in parochial school in Madison, Wis.,” the 22-year-old officer said.
“And in a third bunker, Pfc. Mike Luvice of 1008 Simpson street, the Bronx, removed a worn New Testament in Spanish from his pocket. "I always carry it, I always read it,” said the slight, sad-eyed infantryman. "I have been here a couple of weeks and I read St. Matthew every day. God is with me, I think.”
He sat on the floor and tied his boots. "Vietnam is not so bad,” he said quietly. “I cannot express myself so good but Vietnam, for me, is like helping pay something back to the American Government. They have done a lot for my people in Puerto Rico.”
He smiled. “My mother in Puerto Rico sends me papaya and Pineapple for Christmas and my aunt in New Jersey sent me cookies and I give them to the Vietnamese,” he said. For days the men of Company D of the Third Battalion, Twelfth Infantry, have been receiving Christmas gifts—small cans of fruit were the favorite—but the mood of the season has barely apparent in Dakto, which is 280 miles north-northeast of Saigon and has been the scene of some of the bitterest fighting of the war.
On Christmas Eve, however, the men of Company D shuffled into a tent mess hall that had been set up in the morning and decorated with holly and tinsel and two-foot Christmas trees. As they waited for their macaroni and chipped meat, a tape recorder in the kitchen was flipped on and a choir sang, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” An unshaven and redeyed youth, looking no more than 17 years old, turned from the center of the line and walked to a comer of the mess Hall, tears streaming down his face. Three others, biting their lips, left the line and sat down at a table.
"Most of the men try not to think of Christmas,” the Protestant chaplain of the battalion, Capt Bill Ingram of Crane, Tex., said. “They’re homesick. I tried a couple of nights to have Christmas carols and it doesn’t work. Christmas makes them think of home, and it’s hard to think of home in Dakto.”
Last night, sipping beer and playing cards, the men of Company D appeared to relax. Each received a Christmas card from the province chief in Kontum (“Thank you for assisting in making Christmas possible again this year in Vietnam,” it said) and opened gifts from home, many of them immediately tossed away.
“I got lots of brown shoe polish in two packages that were sent from Fair Lawn (N. J.) High School,” Specialist 4 Ted Moench, a heavy-weapons infantryman, said incredulously. “Brown shoe polish! I mean, the Army wears black boots.”
Later, lying in darkness on rubber air mattresses in a bunker, the men spoke for hours of past and future Christmasses.
“I wonder what time it is in San Francisco?”
“I'm gonna miss the big duck dinner my grandmother makes each year. . . .”
“Next Christmas I’ll be in the real world. . . .”
“I was in Dix last year and I went to New York for Christmas and I met a stewardess who gave me the key to her apartment in Greenwich Village.”
This morning, after breakfast, the men sat on their bunkers in the chilly autumn air laughing and singing “Jingle Bells” over the company radio. By 4 P. M„ they were lining up for shrimp cocktail, roast turkey and mince pie. At dusk, shortly before 6 P. M. and the end of the 24-hour allied ceasefire, they cleaned their weapons in silence.
A second lieutenant, Terry D. Parsons, stood near the company command post and gazed at the darkening hills around Dakto. He pointed to a scarred, rust-colored hill two miles away on which grass was just beginning to sprout “I wonder what year, what battle, what occupation that hill was cleared,” said the 20-year-old lieutenant, who is from Tucson, Ariz. “This country has been at war such a damn long time. Will It never end?”
