Blog 3629 – 10.10.2025

A Very Lucky Guy

The tenth of a month has for the last fifty-five years of this almost seventy-five year journey in space and time been a memorable day for me. Fifty-five years ago on this date I had completed eight months of my twelve month tour in South Vietnam. Counting the days and months of that assignment was a big deal and the tenth of the month was an important milestone reached each month.

I had arrived “in-country” on January 10, 1970 and therefore my DEROS (or departure) date was supposed to be January 10, 1970. I was expecting to spend my first Christmas in the Army on the other side of the earth from my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I joined the Army on my eighteenth birthday in 1968. In a rare move, right in the middle of eight weeks of Basic Training, the Army gave our whole training brigade a two week leave for Christmas home with our families. I suppose they expected most of us would spend our next Christmas in Vietnam.

I had a six-month teletype repair course after Basic at Fort Gordon, Georgia and graduated in the middle of August 1969. Upon graduation we learned that our entire class had been levied into the Army Security Agency which meant that we were held over in our training company while they ran Top Secret security clearances on us. Several of my classmates and I were assigned duty as company clerks for the duration. In late November we were told that since our security clearances were not in yet we had orders to report to ASA Headquarters in Arlington Hall, Virginia where we would await the completion of our clearance pulling whatever duties that the ASA could find for us. A few days later the Army changed it’s mind again and told us our clearances were in (they were not) and gave us two weeks leave to spend Christmas with our families before reporting to Oakland Army Depot for processing to Vietnam in early January of 1970. So again I got to spend Christmas at home.

In an attempt to appear that he was indeed keeping his campaign promise to end the Vietnam War President Nixon announced yet another hundred thousand troops would be coming home a month early that year. I was one of those fortunate individuals. My new DEROS date was December 10, 1970. I even dodged another bullet. At first my orders said that I was to report to an ASA station in Asmara, Ethiopia immediately from Nam, but since another “hardship” assignment required that I have a year remaining on my enlisted and I was shy of that a few weeks they sent me home on leave for Christmas yet again and changed my orders to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I waited out the last ten months of my enlistment. I actually applied for and received a three month “drop” to attend college and so ended up serving only two years and nine months on active duty.

Happy tenth of the month from this very lucky guy.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White