Chin Nguyen was our squad’s Kit Carson Scout. Kit Carson Scouts were repatriated ARVN soldiers who had once fought on the side of the Vietcong. In Chin’s case, he had spent much of his youth believing that Ho Chi Minh’s Nationalist/Communist approach to his country’s many problems would someday free him and his large family from a life of endless agricultural drudgery and poverty. But in early 1969, at the age of 20, Chin reluctantly came to the conclusion that he had been wrong, and his entire family disowned him. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
“All my relatives call me traitor,” he once told me. “My brother shoot me dead if I go home.”
When Chin was first assigned to our squad, he spoke very little English, but he spent most of his down hours pestering everyone in our hootch to teach him new words, and it was amazing how quickly he learned. It wasn’t long before he sounded like he had spent most of his life in Los Angeles, California, instead of Can Tho, Vietnam.
Chin’s private life took a turn for the better, too. He met a pretty young Vietnamese girl named Pham who worked in the base mess hall, and it wasn’t long before they were making plans to be married. Hand in hand, they would often stroll through the compound, oblivious to everyone else they passed and obviously very much in love.
Anything and everything about America excited Chin. Our language, our clothes, our music, and especially old TV reruns and movies from the 1950’s. He was convinced that Gilligan’s Island was a part of Hawaii and that Doris Day was the most beautiful woman on earth. His favorite exclamation, always delivered with a contagious smile, was “America numbah one!”
One evening, while waiting for someone to fix the base movie projector, which always broke down at least once during the viewing of any film, Chin looked over at me, his expression much more serious than usual.
“You very lucky GI!” he exclaimed.
“Chin,” I said, “I’m sitting on a rock-hard bench thousands of miles away from home watching one of the worse movies ever made, and you think I’m lucky?”
“But when time up,” he explained, “you get to go home to most wonderful country in the whole world.” I nodded that I understood and the smile which hardly ever left Chin’s face returned. “We trade, okay?” he suggested.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Too bad,” he said with conviction. “I make numbah one American!”
In the field, Chin was invaluable. He was only a few inches over five-feet- tall and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty-five pounds, but he was courageous to a fault and had an uncanny knack for being able to identify enemy ambushes before the actual shooting began. His ability to warn others of impending danger saved many lives and it wasn’t long before he was completely accepted by the entire platoon.
On the day I was wounded in Vietnam, so was Chin. He was placed on the stretcher above mine in a crowded medevac helicopter which immediately lifted off and began racing towards a nearby aid station in a place called Lai Khe.
I could tell by the way Chin’s arm hung limply from his side that he was badly hurt. I called his name a couple of times, but he never answered.
Once in Lai Khe, I was whisked off the medevac, placed on an even faster helicopter and flown all by myself to a large American hospital in Long Binh, where I quickly received the very best modern medical care.
Chin, however, was unceremoniously trucked to a faraway, overcrowded Vietnamese hospital for ARVN soldiers where he apparently received almost no care at all. He died of his wounds a week after he arrived.
A month or so after that, when I returned to my unit to finish my tour of duty, one of the first people I looked up was Pham. She refused to talk to me, or to any other American, for that matter. A friend of hers though, through an interpreter, explained to me that while Chin’s life had hung in the balance, Pham had begged just about every officer on our base to please have Chin transferred to a good American hospital. They all refused, explaining with regret that regulations permitted only American soldiers and their dependents to be admitted to American hospitals.
“America numbah ten!” were the last words Pham ever screamed me.