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[Then], we were in Bihn Thuy which is in Mekong Delta. I was in the little city Bien Simoa, where I was doing some shopping. I heard that we were getting hit. When there is incoming you know -- bombs are flying and people are running and scrambling. I knew it was going to be a little dangerous to walk right into the firefight. I took refuge in a restaurant. I went through the procedure of coming out of military clothes -- stripping down to my pants. I took my top shirt off and tied it around my waist. I had my T-shirt on. They had black people over there [who were] Cambodian. And I could speak Vietnamese pretty well, so sometimes I could pass. That helped me.

I stayed there until my instincts told me to move. When I came out, I saw a couple of guys that I knew who were Navy SEALs and I went with them. It was like an unspoken procedure, and you just act like it's no big deal.

So, I got back to the base and someone tells me that the bunker has been hit. My guys -- the barracks they were in -- were totally demolished. My entire band had been killed.

I remembered something that one of the guys told me and we laughed about it. He said, "If I ever croak, make sure they don't cremate me because I don't want to burn twice because I know I'm going to hell." I thought about it and started laughing. I laughed. Someone said to me it's not a laughing matter. But that's the only way that I knew how to handle it.

Name: Doris I. "Lucki" Allen
In country: Long Binh, Saigon 1967 to 1970
Job: Intelligence, Army Operations Center
Rank: E7
Age in Vietnam: 40
Current age: "7thank you2"
Current home: Oakland, Calif.

I worked in the operations center. There were 300 men to every one women on the Long Binh post. Run that around in your mind.

I started [doing] intelligence analysis in USRV, the Army Operations Center. Every intelligence report, every information report that had to be written down from all over Vietnam, came across my desk. Usually they would throw them out. [The report] would say Charlie crossed the street last night. Another report, way down, would say Charlie walked down the street and he went into the third house ... I was the one who sat there and said, "Hmm hmmm," and put it together.

The reports would come in saying Allies had five killed and 20 wounded and three enemy killed and 81 wounded. Most of the time we did better than they did, because all you can say is I think I killed them. It got so bad that down in My Toh one of the commanders told his troops, "When you come back here you bring an ear and I will know that he's dead." And that's when they started calling them "apricots" in order to prove that somebody had died.

I got there in October of 1967. Tet Offensive was January 30th of 1968. Thirty days prior to that happening, I turned in a report called "50,000 Chinese." I knew a major offensive was coming from all that I had read. There couldn't have been that many Viet Cong in the world. The report was a page and half. I took it to my supervising officer and he said, "Take it to Saigon." It was that important -- he believed in me. I took it to Saigon. I took it to MACV (Military Assistance Command in Vietnam). I talked to the bigwigs. I was thinking, You better disseminate this. They said, "No. I don't think we can do this."

I asked myself why they weren't listening. I just came up recently with the reason they didn't believe me: They weren't prepared for me. They didn't know how to look beyond the WAC, black woman in military intelligence. I can't blame them. I don't feel bitter. That's just people, baby. When you aren't prepared for something, you just aren't prepared.

I came back to the states with no guilt. I had sadness, I saw those names on the wall, but I kept doing my job.

Next page | It hit me right then that I was helping to kill people