Vietnamese Hot Fredrick Hudgin   © Copyright 2026 by Fredrick Hudgin

Photo by Khanh Hoang Minh 2 at Pexels.

Let me explain.

It was the summer of 1970. I’d just finished two weeks of pre-Vietnam training at Fort Lewis, Washington, where I’d learned how to clean, load, and shoot an M-16 rifle. That evening, the flight to Vietnam departed from McCord Air Force Base, next to Fort Lewis. Two of the men I’d trained with and I had another guy take our picture while we waited to board the plane. All of us had the same “Oh, crap!” look on our faces.

For the next twenty-four hours, when I wasn’t sleeping or eating the airplane meals, I stared at the seat back in front of me or out the window at the Pacific Ocean. We stopped to refuel in Anchorage, then Tokyo. All I remember from either airport was the huge mountain in sight from the runway where the plane rested while it was being serviced—Mount Whitney from Anchorage, Mount Fuji from Tokyo. No one was allowed off the plane, and armed American soldiers walked around outside it. I still wonder what they thought of their duty—keeping other soldiers onboard the plane so they could go to the meat grinder of our Vietnam War.

We landed at Ton Son Nhut (pronounced Ton Son Nute) Air Base in Vietnam at 6 AM local time. After in-processing, I was put on a noisy C-123 cargo plane to QuiNhon (pronounced Quin Yon), on the coast about 400 miles north of Ton Son Nhut. The company clerk of my assigned unit, the 359^th Transportation Company, picked me up in a jeep and drove us to the company compound, about thirty minutes from the airport. I signed in and met the company commander and First Sergeant. They assigned me to the First Platoon.

My platoon sergeant wasn’t too excited about my arrival. I had never driven a tractor-trailer before, and that’s what the 359^th did. So, I had to prove to him that I could do it safely. At least I knew how to drive a stick shift and use a clutch from driving Grandma’s VW Beetle. He gave me a two-hour course in how to start and drive one of the tractors—an old, worn-out, military version of a six-wheel-drive Mack truck. It had a five-speed manual transmission with a high-low-range gearbox. The shift pattern was different from Grandma’s Beetle, but I got used to it. The window glass on the doors had been removed, replaced by steel plates with a small cutout, allowing the driver to see the rearview mirrors mounted on brackets outside the doors.

My squad leader was a black buck sergeant with a silver front tooth and a smile that never left his face. The two of us went on daily training rides for a week, first without a trailer, then with an empty fuel tanker, finally with a full water tanker. Water is heavier than any of the fuels the company hauled. His thinking was: if I could drive safely with a load of water, then the fuel cargos would be easy.

On our first ride together, the temperature outside had to be over one hundred degrees. After studying the dashboard, I asked him how to turn on the air conditioning. He laughed, as though he’d just heard the funniest thing in his life, then pointed to the windshield. The windshield was on hinges—release the locks and swing the window forward for ventilation—the military version of A-C in Vietnam. The reality of being in a combat zone was just beginning to soak in.

The training was thorough and exhausting. I learned how to drive those trucks safely and do first-level maintenance on them. If I ever meet my squad leader again, I will shake his hand and say thanks.

Once I’d finished my squad leader’s training my, I took and passed my platoon sergeant’s driver’s test. I was assigned a truck and given my driver’s equipment issue by the company’s supply sergeant: an M-16, a bandolier of loaded clips, a flak vest, three boxes of C-rations, a steel helmet with a clothe camouflage wrap on it, two olive-drab bath towels, and a down-filled sleeping bag. As the supply sergeant handed me the sleeping bag, I’d laughed. “Down? Really? It’s a hundred degrees outside. Why the hell would I need a down sleeping bag?”

He just smiled. “Wait until you get to Pleiku (pronounced Play-ku) and spend the night. You’ll be grateful for every one of those feathers.”

The next morning at 5 AM, I drove to the trailer parking area and watched the other drivers hook up and pull their assigned tanker. For my first trip, I would go without a tanker. As the convoy left the staging area, I was fourth in the line of about thirty trucks that made up today’s convoy, resupplying the American troops fighting the war. Our destination today was Pleiku in the Central Highlands. The other drivers had told me it took eight hours to get there.

They called tractors without a trailer a “bob-tail”. I had no idea why, but I found out when my truck hit the first pothole. I was bounced off my seat and bumped my head on the cab’s canvas ceiling. Those truck suspensions were designed to support a loaded trailer weighing over 40,000 pounds. Without a trailer, the bumps in the road went from annoying to “I can’t believe I didn’t go through the roof.” I felt like I was bronc-riding at a rodeo. They did the no-trailer thing for all the newbies on their first ride, so they could get a feel for driving in Vietnam before they had to do it with a trailer. By the end of that ride, my poor beat-up body definitely had a “feel” for that road.

And no one had mentioned “the dust” before we left. I’d never seen dust like I found in Vietnam. The first truck in the convoy threw it into the air. The trucks behind that one added to it, giving each driver a free coating. It was even worse if you had the windshield open to cool off. Being the fourth truck was bad. I couldn’t even imagine what the poor bastards in the last trucks were experiencing. By the end of the day, you could peel the accumulated dust off your face like dried-on paint. And you’d think the dust would only settle on exposed skin and the outside of your uniform. Well, you’d be wrong. That night in the showers, I discovered that it had somehow found its way into all those hidden covered places where you really didn’t want it to be.

Convoy security was provided by gun-trucks. There was one at the beginning, middle, and end of the convoy. I was three trucks back from the front gun-truck. Those gun-truck guys were in five-ton cargo trucks with dual steel walls around the cargo area, packed with sandbags between the walls and on the floor. On the front of the cargo area was a very deadly-looking .50 caliber machine gun. On each rear corner were smaller, but no less deadly M-60 machine guns. Each gun had a soldier in a flak vest and steel helmet sitting next to it.

As I followed the truck in front of me, I started remembering all the war stories I’d heard about Vietnam. Paranoia grabbed me like a big, mean dog. It would be just my luck to get ambushed and shot on my first convoy. I studied the vegetation and bamboo thickets next to the road, expecting a Viet Cong ambush to blossom into a deadly crossfire with me at the center. Luckily, that never happened. By 1970, everyone but me knew we were leaving. I guess the V-C were just biding their time until we did leave. But the driver ahead of me had warned me about a village we would pass through. Every time we convoyed through that village, someone would shoot three rounds over the convoy. The shooter never hit anything, so no one had called in a hit team to take them out. We figured that if we got the shooter removed, the V-C would replace them with someone who would really shoot at us.

Sure enough, as we passed through the village, I heard the pop-pop-pop of the rifle. The guy in front of me waved at the shooter out his little window-hole, then threw a couple of C-ration cans for the kids beside the road who were waving back.

The first big climb from the coastal plain to An Khe (pronounced Ahn Kay) slowed everyone down to a crawl. Those worn-out trucks pulled those heavy 5,000-gallon tankers of gasoline, JP-4, or diesel up the pass at three miles per hour. Since I wasn’t pulling a tanker on this trip, I just stayed a safe distance behind the truck ahead of me.

The An Khe plateau is about fourteen hundred feet above sea level. The air was noticeably cooler than when we started. From the An Khe pass, the road wound west across the plateau, going over ravines where the Army Engineers had built bridges, and up and down the rolling hills, until we reached the second big climb on the road to Pleiku: the Mang Yang pass. I had thought the An Khe pass was bad. The Mang Yang pass was even worse. We crept back and forth up that hill from Hell, passing a bamboo forest that filled the hillside above the road—a forest that could have hidden an entire battalion of V-C, and no one would have known. In the air above the convoy, a Cobra gunship circled. I found out later that, after a particularly deadly ambush, the gunships protected all the convoys to discourage any overzealous V-C commanders from doing just the kind of ambush I was imagining.

The Pleiku plateau was even cooler than the An Khe plateau—another thousand feet in elevation. We drove across it without incident until we reached the outskirts of Pleiku. The lead gun truck pulled off the road into a long, wide spot. I found out later that they did this to let all the slower trucks catch up before we entered the town of Pleiku and the Army base west of town. The truck in front of me followed the others into the wide spot, so I followed it as well. The drivers got out of their trucks and stretched. Alongside the pull-off area were a bunch of little stalls with Vietnamese people offering food, paintings, jewelry—pretty much anything that would sell to a GI. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and that food smelled out of this world. I followed another driver to a stall where an old woman with most of her teeth missing was stirring what looked like chicken Pad Thai.

“You like, GI?” she asked, smiling hopefully.

“How much?” I responded.

“Tree dolla.”

All of my US currency had been changed to MPC (Military Payment Certificates) when I in-processed at Ton Son Nhut.

“MPC OK?”

“MPC good,” she responded, smiling happily.

I handed her three dollars.

“How hot you like?”

My whole life, I had liked hot food. I’d been going to my favorite Thai restaurant in Princeton, NJ, for so long, they didn’t even ask me. They just made it HOT!

“Make it hot,” I instructed.

She smiled and did as I told her, handing me the paper bowl with a plastic spoon when she finished.

It smelled fabulous. Several other drivers had come to her stall and were waiting for me to finish my purchase. I smiled at them and began to walk away, shoving the first spoonful into my mouth. Then something strange happened. It was like I was entering into an alternate universe. The world around me became fuzzy as the waves of spicy heat overwhelmed reality. My mouth was in shock. The realization that this was hotter than anything I had ever imagined, let alone eaten, quickly filled me. I didn’t know what to do—swallow and hope it got better or spit it out. The other drivers started laughing. One of them handed me a canteen. I grabbed it and started chugging the lukewarm water. The laughter spread through all the drivers and stalls nearby.

The driver with the canteen was laughing with the other drivers. “Don’t ever tell ‘em ‘hot’, troop. There’s US hot, and there’s Vietnamese hot. Our glow-in-the-dark hot is their yawn-in-the-dark mild.”

Well, that turned out to be a rite-of-passage event for almost every driver who came to that oasis. And I was right there laughing with the rest of the witnesses when the next poor soul did the same thing I had done.