Letter to Terrie, 16 December 1970 — 'The picture you got was taken in the enlisted men's club here on post'

What the letter is

16 December 1970. Charlie writes Terrie a letter that opens with mail-routing complaints, explains a photo of him she had received, and closes with the 60-day-early-drop rumor he was trying not to count on. The interior of the letter is one of the small sociological notes the corpus carries: a description of the enlisted men’s club at Charlie’s post, the Vietnamese women who worked there, and his honest read of who in country could be trusted.

Transcription

Dec 16

Dear Terrie,

It seems the mail is messing up again as I’ve not lately written and mailed two letters in one day so if you get one one day there will be a day when you don’t get any. It is easy to write while on guard as there is nothing else to do. Oh well.

The picture you got was taken in the enlisted men’s club here on post. The beers weren’t all mine and they serve all kinds of drinks and beer, mostly Kool now. They have Vietnamese girls who bring the drinks etc. Some of the girls are 22 yrs old, married and have children but at times they act like 12 yr olds. Basically they are very nice and its strictly hands off. They are some of the only honest Vietnamese I’ve come in contact with. Most will try to cheat you out of your money if not outright steal from you.

Still no definite word but everyone is talking about a 60 day drop. I wish they would say something for sure. I’ve been disappointed too many times to really get my hopes too high but I’m still hoping.

Love, Charles

What the letter records

The enlisted men’s club photo. The photo Terrie had just received was a candid taken in the EM club at Camp Eagle — Charlie’s I Corps base at the time — with a row of beer bottles in front of him. The opening “The beers weren’t all mine” is a small piece of light defensive comedy at the photo’s expense; a 23-year-old soldier writing to his girlfriend with a row of beers in a photo could reasonably expect to be teased about it, and Charlie was getting ahead of it.

The Vietnamese hostesses. “They have Vietnamese girls who bring the drinks etc. Some of the girls are 22 yrs old, married and have children but at times they act like 12 yr olds. Basically they are very nice and its strictly hands off.” The Vietnamese-civilian employment system around American bases included drink-service positions at EM clubs, NCO clubs, and officers’ clubs — staffed by local women, often married, who took the work because it paid in piastres or scrip backed by GI cash. The system was bureaucratically tightly regulated (the “strictly hands off” note is Charlie’s recognition of the off-limits rule) and was, in practice, one of the more honest economic interactions between American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians during the war. Charlie’s read — “some of the only honest Vietnamese I’ve come in contact with” — is, by itself, a small piece of testimony about how thin the trust layer was between the GIs and the local civilian population in 1970.

The line “at times they act like 12 yr olds” is the small culturally-incomplete observation a 23-year-old American from rural Ohio would have made about young married Vietnamese women whose behavioral registers differed from what he had grown up with. The same letter that registers them as “nice” and “honest” registers them as childlike-in-affect; Charlie was working with the cultural frames he had.

The theft-and-cheating layer outside the EM club. “Most will try to cheat you out of your money if not outright steal from you.” The sentence is the matter-of-fact frame Charlie carried about the broader civilian-soldier economic interface in country. American GIs in 1970-71 Vietnam were targets for marketplace overcharging, short-changing, pickpocket networks running near base towns, and outright theft at the wire perimeters — the same economic substrate that the late-1970 marijuana letter describes in the cigarettes-and-drugs context. The EM club hostesses sat outside that economic frame: their pay was on the base payroll, their behavior was monitored, and the trust relation was correspondingly more honest.

The 60-day drop rumor. “Still no definite word but everyone is talking about a 60 day drop. I wish they would say something for sure. I’ve been disappointed too many times to really get my hopes too high but I’m still hoping.” The Army’s “drop” system was the procedure by which soldiers’ ETS dates could be moved up if the Army was over-strength and needed to clear bodies off the payroll. Through 1970-71 the Vietnam-tour drop rumors ran in 30-, 60-, and 90-day cycles, and most of them did not materialize. The 60-day drop Charlie was hearing about in December 1970 would have been a major piece of luck — pulling his ETS from March 1971 forward to January 1971, before any decision about Lam Son 719 or the Da Nang extension had to be made. “I’ve been disappointed too many times to really get my hopes too high” is the careful soldier-register of a man who had learned not to bank on the Army’s rumored generosity. The drop did not happen.

Sequence with surrounding letters

The December 16 letter sits in the slow Camp Eagle period between the late-1970 field rotations and the January 1971 strategic-decision period. The 60-day drop did not come; the January 19 ETS-extension was the alternative path Charlie chose when the drop didn’t happen.

Source: grandmaE1.pdf page 115 (gitignored locally; transcribed content surfaced here).