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letter
Letter to Terrie, 18 February 1970 — nine weeks into stateside NCO training, rumors of Vietnam
Charlie's letter to Terrie dated 18 February 1970 — about three months before he would ship to Vietnam. He is nine weeks into stateside Army training, in a barracks room with eight mostly-Connecticut National Guard college grads and students, working through the conflicting rumors that come down the chain of command in any training cycle: the company commander says they are all going to Vietnam; the NCO squad leader says they just want them in NCO school. Charlie's math: he can drop out of NCO school and still take the 150-day Vietnam early-out, which means whichever rumor turns out to be true, he comes out ahead by the same number of days. The pre-deployment letter the corpus had been missing — the gap between the [1969 NCO school letter](/docs/letters/charlie-to-terrie-1969-nco-school/) and the [22 June 1970 first-action letter from Firebase Ripcord](/docs/letters/charlie-to-terrie-1970-06-22/).
What the letter is
18 February 1970. Charlie writes Terrie from stateside Army training — nine weeks into the post he is at, with conflicting deployment rumors swirling and a barracks-room cohort of mostly-Connecticut National Guard college grads. The letter sits in the corpus between his 1969 NCO school letter and his arrival in Vietnam in the late spring. The bureaucratic-rumor texture and the early-out math are the pre-deployment register the rest of the corpus picks up only after he is in country.
Transcription
2/18/1970
Dear Terrie,
It is hard to write anything interesting when I don’t receive letters from you, but I know you have no choice.
Here I am for 9 weeks and rumors are flying fast. From our commander, who tells us we are all going to Viet Nam, to our NCO squad leader who says that they only want you to go to NCO school. The catch is that I can drop out of NCO school too so I can still get my full 150 day early out if I’m sent to Viet Nam.
The room I’m in is fairly good. The youngest is 20 and the oldest 29. 6 out of 8 of them are National Guard from Connecticut and are mostly college grads or students, or at least they are very tolerable. The training promises to be more than tolerable. It is raining and that seems to be the only thing that will make things really bad because the army believes in going out in the rain.
What the letter records
The Vietnam-deployment math. By February 1970 the U.S. Army’s primary incentive structure for getting NCOs to volunteer for Vietnam was the 150-day early-out: a soldier who took a tour in Vietnam would receive 150 days off the remainder of their service obligation. Charlie’s calculation here — “I can drop out of NCO school too so I can still get my full 150 day early out if I’m sent to Viet Nam” — is the standard draftee-NCO calculus of the period: optimize the path that gets you out of the Army fastest, regardless of which branch of the rumor mill turns out to be true. The same accountancy of days that will run through the rest of his Vietnam letters — the 19 January 1971 ETS-extension calculation, the 21 January 1971 “145 days at the most” line — starts here, before he is even in country.
The National Guard barracks-room. The composition of his cohort “6 out of 8 of them are National Guard from Connecticut, mostly college grads or students” is the small-but-revealing sociology of the late-Vietnam-era Army: National Guard units, which generally were not sent to Vietnam, were the favored landing spot for college graduates who wanted to avoid the draft. Charlie was the rare Marietta-College-degree-holding draftee in a room mostly made up of guys who had threaded the National Guard needle. The line “they are very tolerable” is the closest he comes in this letter to commenting on the political and class geometry of the room.
The rain-and-go-out joke. The Army’s commitment to outdoor training in any weather is a recurring grievance across the entire Vietnam letter corpus; this is the earliest instance of it in his own voice, before the monsoons would make the joke a great deal less funny. His later September 1970 Vietnam letter is on its “5th day out” in the actual monsoon and is no longer joking.
Sequence with surrounding letters
| Date | Letter | What it records |
|---|---|---|
| 1969 | NCO school | Earlier stateside training |
| 18 Feb 1970 | This letter | Nine weeks into stateside training, deployment rumors, 150-day early-out math |
| 22 Jun 1970 | Ripcord first-action letter | First action on the firebase; Charlie deployed sometime in May 1970 |
About three to four months separate this letter from Charlie’s first surviving in-country letter (the 22 June 1970 letter from Firebase Ripcord). By the time that summer arrives, the company commander’s rumor has won — Charlie is in Vietnam, in C Co, 1-506, 101st Airborne, on the firebase that would become the last major US ground battle of the war.
Scans
