Stuck in Viet Nam 1968

Posted by Webmaster on Jun 17, 2011 | Comments Off

“ YOU’LL BE TREATED LIKE A QUEEN”

It was the 60′s and I was two years out of High School. The young men of America were given “travel opportunities” courtesy of Uncle Sam at the time and I did some traveling on my own singing throughout the North East. Saturday nights on the WWVA Jambooree and appearances at Air Force bases from New York to Caribou Maine kept me pretty busy.The year ended with a bang, my first Christmas away from home , entertaining our troops in Thule Greenland! So, when my manager called with “How’d you like to do a 4 month tour of the Orient?”…I jumped at it. After all that cold weather I was eager to go “somewhere warm”. I got my wish!

I’d be going with a group called Jimmy Case and the Cherokees. Jim had done many trips prior to the Orient and Europe, always with a new female singer in tow, and was known to always have great bands. It was going to be “a breeze’. All I had to do was put together some outfits and a song list. Then came the “Queen” promise! (later I would remind myself of what sometimes happens to Queens… poison,shooting, stabbing and other unpleasant things).

Our first stop would be overnight in Tokyo on our way to Korea. As fate would have it, when we woke the next morning , everything had changed. The morning news greeted us with a military emergency in Korea.The capture of our ship the Pueblo was an act that would not only greatly affect the men of the Pueblo, but a Country Music Show from the USA who would be “rerouted”. “It might be dangerous in Korea, so we’ll just send you on down to Saigon, nothing ever happens down there”. And so it goes. A troupe of musicians who go where they’re told, get ready to perform. Oh, also, did I mention this was the 23^rd of January 1968? We arrive in Saigon, get our schedule and do some shows. Then it got interesting. They called it Tet!!

Tet Offensive from our Saigon roof (we thought it was the fastest fireworks ever, silly civilians!)

Here’s a few things I thought might be interesting. If you were there, heard the music or shared some C-Rations with us… would love to hear from you. You might have been in one of the groups who threw one of your homesewn patches at us or gave us a ride on a plane “anywhere North” out of Saigon. We were in such good company!

Lynda K.