Letter to Terrie, 28 September 1970 — 'I'm at Cam Ranh Bay at a convalescence center to fully recover from my bout with Malaria'

What the letter is

28 September 1970. Seven days after the 21 September hospital admission letter, Charlie has been transferred to the U.S. military convalescence center at Cam Ranh Bay. He writes on the same American National Red Cross stationery, with the same logo across the top of the cream sheet. The voice is steadier than the hospital letter — he is no longer freshly admitted and depressed; he is stretched out on a recovery cot at a base with a beach.

Where Cam Ranh Bay was

Cam Ranh Bay was the principal U.S. logistics base on the south-central Vietnamese coast, occupying a deep natural harbor about 180 miles northeast of Saigon. It hosted the 6th Convalescent Center, opened in 1966 specifically to take stabilised wounded and sick soldiers off the high-acuity evacuation hospitals so they could recover without occupying a hospital bed needed for new admissions. By 1970 the 6th Convalescent Center was a 1,500-bed facility on the beach side of the base, with beach access, recreation, and a movie program. Malaria patients with the “vivax” diagnosis Charlie names in his hospital letter were a common population at the center — the convalescent period for vivax was typically two to four weeks of bed rest, fluid, and antimalarial completion.

This is the second of Charlie’s two Vietnam coastal-rear locations in the surviving letter corpus: the Saigon stand-down referenced in the 29 May 1971 letter and now Cam Ranh Bay in late September. Both were rear-area Vietnam coastal bases far from the I Corps field operations that occupied the rest of his tour.

Transcription

Sept 28

Dear Terrie,

You may be interested in knowing what I’m doing now. I’m at Cam Ranh Bay at a convalescence center to fully recover from my bout with Malaria. I feel pretty good now but the longer I spend here the less time I’ll have to spend in the field. There is a beach and a movie every night. It isn’t raining steadily here yet but I guess it is where my company is. I have no idea how long I’ll stay here but I’m prepared to stay as long as possible. All I do here is sit around. I guess they forward my mail as I got one from home today. Their phone is out of order so I can’t even call home let alone call you. I just lay here adding days to my stay in the wretched land and count the days till I go home.

[page 2:] I guess I’m in good enough health, at least I’m starting out right.

I’m going to have to get ready to move now so till next resupply.

Love Charles

What the letter records

The stretch. “The longer I spend here the less time I’ll have to spend in the field.” Charlie is consciously stretching the convalescence. The medical service had a strong incentive to return recovered men to their units; the recovering man had an equally strong incentive to recover slowly. The letter is one of the most direct surviving lines in the corpus about that quiet negotiation.

The beach and the movie. The two amenities Charlie names — a beach and a nightly movie — are the convalescent center’s specific signature. The 6th Convalescent Center sat on the beach side of the Cam Ranh Bay base; the movie program was one of the explicit recreational therapies for the patient population. The contrast with the I Corps field environment (rain, mountains, patrol) is the structural point of the entire stay.

The weather and the company. “It isn’t raining steadily here yet but I guess it is where my company is.” The southwest monsoon was waning along the central coast at the end of September but the northeast monsoon would soon take over in I Corps where his unit was. He is tracking the weather his unit is in while he himself is dry on a beach four hundred miles south.

The mail and the phone. Mail forwarded from his unit to Cam Ranh Bay; the local convalescent-center phone out of service; no way to call Marietta let alone Maryland. The letter is one of the few that mentions the phone as a category at all — long-distance calling from Vietnam to the United States in 1970 ran through MARS (Military Affiliate Radio System) operators and was tedious, expensive, and often unavailable.

“I just lay here adding days to my stay in the wretched land and count the days till I go home.” The convalescent center is the safest he has been in months, and the only thing on his mind is the count to the end of his tour.

“I’m going to have to get ready to move now.” The second page is three lines and a signature — the stretch is over. “Starting out right” reads as his own assessment that he’s recovered cleanly; “get ready to move” means back toward the company and the field. He returned to the field after this stay; the 4 February 1971 Da Nang letter and Peggy’s 10 February 1971 letter frame the late-tour transition.