Letter to Terrie, 18 July 1970 — 'I get mail from 5 different people yesterday but none from you. I am angry.'

What the letter is

18 July 1970. Charlie writes Terrie a short, angry letter from somewhere in the I Corps field, mid-tour. He has just been resupplied by helicopter for another seven days in the bush; mail caught up with the resupply and he had letters from five different people but nothing from her; the captain has decided the unit is not coming in. The letter is short, blunt, and has a register Charlie does not often let himself write in. It is one of the small honest moments in the corpus.

What was happening in the Ripcord AO on 18 July 1970

A clarification (also on the 22 June and 8 July sidebars): Charlie’s battalion (1-506) operated in adjacent terrain east and south of Firebase Ripcord; the firebase itself was garrisoned by 2-506. The famous Ripcord events — the firebase defense, the Hill 902 and Hill 1000 attacks — are 2-506 events. Charlie was in the area, patrolling, on 18 July.

The catastrophic-loss day. 18 July is the single day that, more than any other, forced the evacuation decision. From the MACV Command History: “On 18 July a CH-47C from the 159th Assault Helicopter Battalion was shot down by PAVN small arms fire. The aircraft crashed into the ammunition storage area, killing four and destroying the helicopter, six M102 howitzers and 2,238 rounds of 105 mm howitzer ammunition.” The After-Action Report adds that the crash “burst into flames. The resulting fire and exploding artillery ammunition destroyed 5 105mm howitzers, 2 106mm recoilless rifles, one mechanical mule, and several other items of equipment.” The remaining howitzer was damaged. Tom Marshall’s Price of Exit describes the result: “The helicopter crashed on top of its sling load of ammunition, caught fire, and triggered the entire cache in a spectacular series of thunderous blasts, fuel-air fireballs, and smoke trails. The mayhem lasted for eight hours.” Per Nolan, LTC Lucas had diverted the CH-47 to the artillery ASP — the loss was eventually written off as a combat loss after 1LT Joe Caballero of the pathfinder teams demanded an Article 32 investigation rather than let his men be blamed.

So while Charlie was writing his angry-no-mail letter from his patrol line, the firebase eight or ten kilometers from him was burning for eight straight hours, with secondary explosions from its own cluster bombs, white phosphorus, grenades, and gas. He could have seen the smoke from where he wrote.

Within five days. Brigade commander Col. Ben Harrison would order the evacuation on the evening of 21 July (after the wiretap discovery that an entire PAVN division had massed against the base). On 23 July 1970 — five days from this letter — the firebase would be abandoned under fire; LTC Andre Lucas would be killed in the withdrawal (Medal of Honor); 75 US KIA over the 23-day siege, the last major US ground engagement of the Vietnam War.

For Charlie 1-506. D/1-506 (CPT Donald Workman, detached to 2-506 OPCON as the most-experienced company commander in 1-506) was the most active 1-506 element this week. Two days after this letter, on 20 July, D/1-506 sustained mortar fire on a search operation, killing one. On 21 July at 07:10 D/1-506 was hit by 80 rounds of 82mm mortar plus small arms — the contact ran until 16:15. D/1-506 lost one KIA on 21 July and Pfc. Ronald J. Kuntz was MIA. For C/1-506 specifically on 18 July, the published record gives no named event. The “gung-ho captain won’t let us go in” line and the “7 more days of drudgery” fit the battalion picture: 1-506 companies patrolling the high-speed-trail country east and south of Ripcord while the firebase they could see was burning, helicopter resupply runs the only way to keep them in rations and ammunition. The “7 more days” would have run nearly to the 23 July evacuation date itself.

Sources: After-Action Report (AVDG-CS 23 Jul 1970, Wikisource); MACV Command History 1970 Vol. III; Keith W. Nolan, Ripcord: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, Vietnam 1970 (Presidio, 2000), Ch. 21 (Caballero / CH-47 detail) and Ch. 23 (D/1-506 / Workman); Tom Marshall, The Price of Exit (Ballantine, 1998); HistoryNet: Chinook Delivery to FSB Ripcord; Wikipedia: Battle of Fire Support Base Ripcord.

Transcription

18 July

Dear Terrie,

Just a short sad note. I got mail from 5 different people yesterday but none from you. I trust nothing is wrong. I have received more mail from you than anyone else with my parents a close second. I really want your letters although I realize there may be all sort of complications.

It seems that our gung-ho captain won’t let us go in. We get resupplied for 7 more days of this drudgery out here. From the look of things I guess you will have to wait about [a week or two for] next mail. From what I can gather I have several packages in there I can’t get to. I am angry.

By the way, you may as well send your letters with 6 cent stamps than airmail and save yourself 4 cents. Screw the gov’t anyway you can.

What the letter records

The five letters, none from Terrie. “I got mail from 5 different people yesterday but none from you.” The opening line is one of the more emotionally exposed in the corpus. Charlie’s whole structural relationship with mail had been that Terrie was the most-frequent sender, with his parents Will and Peggy a close second. A helicopter resupply that brought letters from five other people but nothing from Terrie was a small piece of personal-mail bad news. “I trust nothing is wrong” — he hedges, but the line “I really want your letters” is the more honest one. Charlie is in the bush, and Terrie’s letters are the structural reason he can keep going. The 18 July 1970 break in her mail flow was felt.

The gung-ho captain. “It seems that our gung-ho captain won’t let us go in. We get resupplied for 7 more days of this drudgery out here.” The captain-level dynamic that runs through the field rotations of Charlie’s corpus — some captains rotated their units back to the firebase on the normal cycle; others were the “gung-ho” type who pushed for extended bush time to build the unit’s combat record. Charlie’s anger here is the small unfiltered note: he was a draftee, he didn’t want extra time in the field, and the captain’s career-incentive decision was being absorbed by the soldiers under him. “From the look of things I guess you will have to wait about a week or two for next mail.” The seven more days of drudgery would mean another seven days of no letters back home, which compounded the personal-mail problem with the gung-ho problem.

‘Screw the gov’t anyway you can.’ “By the way, you may as well send your letters with 6 cent stamps than airmail and save yourself 4 cents. Screw the gov’t anyway you can.” The line is one of the most populist register-notes in the corpus. Domestic First Class postage in July 1970 was 6 cents per ounce (after the March 1968 rate increase); airmail to APO addresses overseas ran 10 cents. The 4-cent savings was trivial economically, but Charlie’s read of the gesture is what makes the line: he was a drafted soldier writing to his girlfriend from a Vietnam field rotation suggesting she stiff the federal mail service for four cents on every letter to him, because the same federal government compelling his presence in the field was also profiting from the postage premium for getting her letters to him. “Screw the gov’t anyway you can” is the philosophy in compressed form. It is the closest the corpus comes to the broader anti-war / anti-government register of late-1960s and early-1970s draftee culture in Charlie’s own voice, applied to the mundane question of stamp rates.

The packages he can’t reach. “From what I can gather I have several packages in there I can’t get to.” Mail to a deployed soldier ran through the rear-area APO; packages from family stacked up at the rear waiting for the soldier to rotate back. Charlie knew, from secondary chatter on the helicopter resupply line, that he had multiple packages waiting for him — possibly from his mother Peggy’s care-package routine, possibly from Terrie, possibly from Dorothy Hauser and the Mothers for Peace women — and he couldn’t reach them because the captain wouldn’t let the unit come in. The packages, like the mail-flow break with Terrie, were one more layer of the underlying frustration of the 18 July day.

Sequence with surrounding letters

Date	Letter	What it records
22 Jun 1970	22 June letter	”Your father’s attitude is better” — relationship dynamics improving
18 Jul 1970	This letter	No mail from Terrie, gung-ho captain, screw-the-gov’t postage line
21 Sep 1970	Sept 21 1970 malaria-hospital letter	Hospitalized for malaria
28 Sep 1970	Cam Ranh Bay convalescence	Recovering at the 6th Convalescent Center

The 18 July letter sits at the start of the long mid-tour summer field rotation that would eventually culminate in his September malaria episode. The frustration of the field-time, the no-mail-from-Terrie register, the drudgery and the captain’s call all read as the slow accumulation of stress that would catch up with him physically two months later.

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 335 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here).

What the letter is

Transcription

What the letter records

Sequence with surrounding letters

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