A Taste Of Home, From Ireland

Christmas 1969, Vinh Long

        I was trying to put together an artificial Christmas Tree that a friend of my mother's sent me for Christmas-1969 in the Mekong Delta.  It got to Vinh Long on time, but it had been smashed flat by the able stevedores of the MATC and APO personnel.  I also received a huge box of christmas foodstuffs from my old maid aunts back in Wisconsin.  I guess they didn't consider that the box would probably sit on a barge in a harbor in Guam or The Philippines for days and weeks. The summer sausage and cheese they sent me from "America's Dairyland" had become enormous fuzzy globs of mold -- the size of basketballs.  The canned stuff made it, and it was a welcome respite from the liver or something they claimed was roast beef that we had been served on an almost continuous basis for a month.  Speaking of food, we did get an excellent Christmas meal -- turkey, cornbread, dressing, etc. 
 
         After that, not much different went on.  Some of the Vietnamese (the ones that had become Catholic, probably from the French) celebrated Christmas also.  Being from Northern Wisconsin, it was my first warm and green christmas.  Dusty, too,  if I remember correctly.
 
         There was one other really nice thing that happened on Christmas, and has stuck with me all these years.  One of my aunts sent me a huge tin of cookies from Ireland.  Another MP, a guy named Hayden (also of Irish-American heritage),  took them over to the Irish nuns at the orphanage near the airfield.  I was really mad at him initially, because he had no right to take my stuff and give it away.  Any anger or semblance of being upset dissolved in a hurry when I saw the reaction of the orphans.  The nuns (all of whom should be canonized) gave the Christmas cookies to the orphans rather that keep them for themselves.  A taste of home, from Ireland, and they gave them to the kids.  Kids that had nothing -- no homes, no parents--zilch.  It was really touching. 
 
         I think that was about the extent of Christmas in IV Corps.  My sister sent me a Jimi Hendrix poster, which the 1st Sergeant ripped down in disgust.  I guess there was a "values gap" there. I mean, Jimi had been in the 101st Airborne. He earned a place in our compound. And the poster looked so righteous, mounted above the 105mm shells we used for ashtrays, and the ubiquitous "No Smoking in Bed" stencils. 
 
         We did manage to get the tree up, but it looked like it was dead.  We finally got rid of it because it seemed to lower morale.  Kind of like the Skipper's potted palm tree in the movie "Mr. Roberts."

SP/4 Charles M. Phelan, 188th MP Company & B Company, 720th MP Battalion, 89th MP Group, 18th MP Brigade, July 1969 to September 1970.