At the gate of our civilian compound, I honked and drove in for the second time. I had taken a grease gun (an M3, .45-caliber submachine gun) and two clips. Carrying these, I sat at the bar, the gun cradled in my lap, the clips in a side pocket of my pants. Providing booze to armed and frightened males is an invitation to serious trouble. The bartender, a local who knew that opportunities were not to be lost, took pains to collect quickly for all drinks. Some of the money even went into the till.

Every male there probably longed for a protective maternal hug. I did. In the bar, the plug had been pulled on the jukebox lest one of the drunks play it.

I climbed a tree. I wanted to know what was going on and to see whether VC and the small NVA group were moving north through the city. There was no movement to be seen. It was a hot, bright, tropical day, and even the birds were silent. From the lower branches of the tree, I could step onto the roof of the club, and, since houses and other buildings almost abutted one another, it was possible to walk across the corrugated rooftops to the southerly end of the block.

At the third roof, the corrugated steel crumpled, and I fell through onto the dirt floor of what passed for a very poor family’s living room. There was a potbelly stove with no fire and a family who looked blank-faced at me, save for a little girl who clearly was very frightened by this armed, sweaty, smelly, dirty, unshaven Yankee. I walked out their front door, with apologies for the damage, and took to the street, back to the compound–where the director now insisted that all of us stay off the roof and the trees in the compound, and that the drinking stop. There were muttered threats, but the order was obeyed.

Later, several of us crouched by the gate (paneled in aluminum sheeting from temporary landing strips, like the G2 gate) and peered at the street through holes in the sheeting. Collectively, we held our breath as an NVA patrol trotted past, headed east–we assumed that the pith helmets and fatigues were of a sort identified as NVA. There was little firing in the middle of the city, and none of us cared to advertise our presence. Children were hushed or nursed, whatever price the silence.

Late in the afternoon, with dusk approaching, we heard the buzz of an aircraft and someone said that ‘Puff’ was up. At home, Peter, Paul and Mary were singing about Puff the Magic Dragon, and Puff was the sobriquet for AC-47 gunships with the door and adjacent window removed, from which protruded ‘gatling guns.’ It was the first time that I had seen Puff, which circled slowly, left wing tilted down. Red streams, like neon, poured from the rearward door and window, accompanied by a flat brrrrp sound.

Someone told me about the firing rate, which seemed unbelievably high, and that tracer rounds were spaced in the feed so that the accuracy of firing could be determined. ‘They fire in short bursts so the equipment doesn’t get too hot,’ my informant said. From a distance it looked benign. Puff broke the attack on Pleiku.

The next day I drove around town and took pictures of some of the buildings. They were Swiss cheese, and it was clear that any living thing larger than a mid-sized dog could not have survived Puff’s fury. That innocent neon stream and brrrrp killed the attacking VC and NVA, but already the bodies had been removed by parties unknown to me. I wasn’t curious about who spirited them away.

There were some interesting local sequels to the attack on Pleiku, which apparently was milder than many of the others but no less frightening. I was told that the colonel at the MACV compound was gone within a day or two, but I had no personal knowledge of that. We civilians now looked on one another quite differently; the Filipinos, Koreans and Vietnamese were, like us, survivors, and we did not merely know them by name but now identified with them, which is quite different. None of the Orientals, by the way, drank during the attack. Their survival instincts were better honed than ours.

My work was in quelling bubonic plague among the civilian population, and it was clear that the interruption of civilian services as a result of combat would result in renewed outbreaks due to disruptions in the rat population. Sporadic fighting persisted in some areas, but my crews and I were unharmed as we went about our work in Pleiku, Kontum, Dak To and outlying areas. One round was fired at us immediately south of the Kontum landing strip. I was told that an inept and elderly VC was posted there, and because he never hit anything, he was left alone. That may have been true, but it might have been a joke. One’s sense of humor is heavy-handed in such circumstances.

One of the GIs from the G2 compound down the street asked me over one evening in April. The G2 commanding officer (CO) quietly presented me with a flamboyantly colored ‘Certificate of Achievement’ for the period February 3 through February 10, 1968, which presumably related to the plague abatement work. The others at this urban outpost sat or stood around, watching us. The CO said to me, ‘You’d get a medal if you were in uniform.’ I was flattered.

The measure had been, presumably, that I did my job and a bit more when inaction would have been understood. I had put myself in harm’s way to benefit a couple of our countrymen. In point of fact, the G2 CO had been correct at the time of the hospital run; if I had chosen to stay in my room, my fate might have been equally tenuous. The certificate was just his nice way to say thank you.

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This article was written by Dr. Wayne P. Olson and originally published in the February 1998 issue of Vietnam Magazine. During the 1968 Tet Offensive Wayne P. Olson was chief entomologist for Pacific Architects and Engineers, a civilian firm under contract to the 1st Logistical Command in Vietnam.

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