It was a week or so after the Morning of the Rude Awakening. After the attack we were inundated with "experts" advising us on how to make our compound more secure. Fortunately our First Sergeant was a sensible guy and didn't try to implement all the suggestions. So all the lower ranks were assigned to work on security upgrades whenever they weren't doing their regular jobs. That meant that after a twelve- to fourteen-hour day, you would be expected to put in another two or three hours work on security.
One afternoon a sergeant from one of the repair teams showed up with a bunch of 55-gallon drums. He started welding them end to end and told us to hurry and get them in place quickly. One of the other sergeants asked what the hurry was and the repair guy smiled and said that if they were welded and in place it was less likely that the owners would try to take them back.
They used the drums for the pillars to support a platform for guards to sit on. A wall of interlocking sandbags was built to about four feet tall all around the platform. Carpenters framed supports for a ceiling and mounted floodlights on the roof. The guard towers were actually pretty impressive. One clever sergeant looked them over when all four corners of our compound had one and opined that we should put chain-link fencing from drum to drum...to keep grenades out...clever boy.
Shortly after the towers were completed, my First Sergeant took me off my route and told me to hook up a jeep trailer to my jeep. He grabbed a couple other E-4s to go with me, threw a couple of bundles of sandbags and three shovels into the trailer and sent us to a local construction site to fill up the bags from a stockpile of sand that was there. I asked him who to see there for permission and he giggled then said that he hoped I wouldn't see anyone there...then added I should just tell them it is their contribution to the war effort. We didn't see anyone, thankfully, but we did understand that our construction materials were not coming from normal Army channels.
We got back to the compound and started unloading the bags. They were being used to reinforce the walls of the guardhouse at front gate. So I parked the jeep in the middle of the road; well, calling it a road is too generous...alley? Probably closer to the truth. Anyway, we started off-loading the bags and stacking them around the guardhouse. After the first couple of layers of bags, I got into the trailer and started handing them out to the others. After a few minutes, I stood tall to stretch my aching back. The bags probably weighed close to fifty pounds apiece so it was tiring work. It was hot, too. We were working without hats or shirts, sweating up a storm, taking breaks more and more often. One of the guards turned his radio up and we were making a party of it; a little singing along, a lot of laughing, just being young GIs.
I threw the last bag off the trailer and stood up straight to stretch again. The sniper's bullet must have passed within an inch of the top of my head, I felt a sensation like someone had blown a hard puff of air into my hair. I didn't hear the shot; it may have been covered up by the normal street sounds. Gia Dinh was not a quiet place; the shooter may have been deep inside a room shooting through an open window. I don't know what other reasons there might have been...but I didn't hear it.
A week or so before, the building I lived in had been blown up...with me and a half-dozen others inside. I was intimately familiar with the sound of 25 pounds of plastic exploding; the smell of smoke and powdered concrete; wood and wires burning; blood and damaged flesh. But this was the first time I had been shot at. I watched the others diving for cover and somehow realized that posing on top of the little trailer was not the best move at that time. There was no second shot. By the time any reaction could be mounted, the shooter was probably a mile or more away sucking down a beer and smoking American cigarettes; knowing the compound would be scurrying around on alert for hours.
After a traumatic event, you try to come down off the adrenaline surge. You are shaky and your knees get wobbly; your heart races. The bosses have to ask a zillion questions to fill out their After-Action Reports; you try to reconstruct the events and sometimes your mind adds or loses details. So I am left with impressions that may or may not be accurate. But it was a significant event in my life and there are some things that seem to stick plainer than others. I seem to recall that the "puff of air" sensation was accompanied by a bee-buzzing in stereo, right- ear-to-left-ear...but that may be a memory planted later as a result of more experiences in that arena. As clearly as I remember the event and the questions for the report later, I have absolutely no recollection of what happened after I jumped out of the trailer.
It was probably early February 1966...or maybe very late January. I had just turned nineteen years old. The average age for GIs in "the Nam". Lots of those nineteen-year-olds got to have their first experience a lot sooner and a lot more often than me. But this was my first.