I want to tell you about Rufus Hoffer, a friend of mine from the Gentlemen’s Coffee Club, a group of veterans that meets at Starbucks in Spokane, Washington. Rufus served as an Army captain in the 2nd Surgical Hospital at Chu Lai, Vietnam, in 1967-1968, and his service reminds me of my own experience in Afghanistan.
Today, when it appears that American forces will withdraw from Afghanistan and surrender the country to the Taliban, I feel a greater kinship with Vietnam veterans, whose mission also ended prematurely. This surrender is an emotionally challenging concept for me, which may be one of the reasons why it has taken me so long to write a Vietnam story.
Maybe Rufus sensed my difficulty. Maybe that’s why he chose to tell me a lighter tale as his first in my little column. Or maybe his anecdote was simply the first one he remembered.
Rufus had received his officer’s commission in 1962 through the ROTC at the University of Wyoming and eventually moved to the medical branch. The commander of his hospital in Chu Lai was a major who had enlisted as an Army combat engineer but who was later commissioned through West Point. He did well there and proceeded to medical school. According to Rufus, “he was an outstanding man” who made sure his hospital provided the best care.
Yet there was some tension in the hospital between medical officers who had volunteered, such as Rufus and the commander, and those who had been drafted. The commander was a stickler for discipline. He insisted that the officers “were soldiers and then they were doctors.” Their uniforms and haircuts should therefore meet the military spit-polish standard. The drafted surgeons, by contrast, were “damned good doctors” but felt that “being good soldiers wasn’t really that important.”
One night, some drafted surgeons drove a jeep to the officers’ club. Later that night, a military policeman called the commander and asked him to send someone to collect them. Their jeep, overloaded with 12 doctors, had been stopped while swerving down the road. Instead of taking official disciplinary action, the commander punished the doctors by confiscating their jeep for two weeks. This was a big penalty, and the draftees secretly vowed to get revenge.
The commander lived alone in a 35-foot trailer, luxurious by Vietnam standards. He had modified the trailer by converting a salvaged aircraft fuel tank to store water on the roof. On sunny days, the sun would heat the tank’s water, allowing the commander to take hot showers. He would often enter the mess hall in the mornings bragging about his refreshing hot shower, whereas everyone else was lucky to get a cold shower. The draftees saw their opportunity.
Although Rufus never knew who did it, he got word that some of the draftees had climbed up onto the roof of the commander’s trailer and urinated in his water tank while he was away. It became a running joke among the drafted captains in the mess hall.
“How was your shower, sir?” one might ask the captain with a knowing grin.
“You should try brushing your teeth in the shower, sir,” another would say.
Rufus didn’t think the commander’s confiscation of the jeep merited revenge. “I thought it was a wise decision,” he said. “It’s something you would do to your kids if they were driving the car improperly.” But he never told the commander about the urine in his shower, either. He figured “no harm, no foul.”
By way of explanation, he stressed that “there was a big difference between regular army and … drafted.”
Yet Rufus’s pride in his old unit came through in everything he told me about it. Although the draftees “had trouble following this young commander who was spit-polish,” they “did what they had to do. If they had to work for 36 hours straight, they did it.”
Most importantly, he said, they “did a hell of a job saving lives.”
