Anyone who has spent more than a few weeks at Fort Bragg or the neighboring towns has heard of the Sanford Brick Company. Many of the brick buildings and homes in Fayetteville, and quite a number of the buildings on Fort Bragg were constructed using Sanford bricks. This name is just a coincidence, by the way. I may be related to the brick people, but if so, it is very distantly.
Dak Pek was a pretty isolated place. In early 1966, the nearest friendly place was the Special Forces camp at Dak To, 30 or so miles to the south. Dak To was at the Northern end of the portion of highway 14 that was still open, at least it was open occasionally. The only way into or out of Dak Pek was by air or by foot, and I can’t recall anyone ever attempting to make the trip by foot.
The camp took its name from the Dak Pek River. The camp was staffed with a U. S. Special Forces A team consisting of two officers and 10 NCOs. The Vietnamese Special Forces also had a dozen or so VNSF troops in camp. There were five CIDG companies and a reconnaissance platoon for a total complement of about 750 troops. A few of the troops were Vietnamese who had been recruited from more populated areas, but most were ‘Yards recruited from the local population. Outside the camp, and snuggled up as close to the camp as they could comfortably get, were several fortified villages with a population of perhaps a couple of thousand ‘Yards.
The CIDG troops in the camp had it relatively good compared to the local populace. They were fed after a fashion, clothed, armed, trained, and paid what to them was a generous sum. They were able to spend their pay on extra food or for the black market goods that predictably found its way into the camp in various duffel bags or crates. Or what was stolen from the supply room, as is noted in another chapter.
The local people subsisted on what they could grow, hunt, or gather from the jungle. We could, and did, provide medical care of sorts, mostly treating tropical ulcers and the like. But the local people basically lived in an Iron Age culture. The local people were of the Jeh tribe, who had no written language, and who practiced a primitive religion, where earth, water, fire and other natural elements had their individual Gods. One practice that we were unable to stop was smearing buffalo dung on the scalps of infants. I was never able to find out why they did that. Maybe it was to keep the fleas off--I know if I was a flea, I’d certainly leave an area so treated.
Regardless of the harsh and primitive conditions, the ‘Yards were happy, friendly, hardworking, vigorous and intelligent. A bright smile was the norm. We especially were drawn to the children, for whom we were deeply concerned. One of the NCOs had written to the newspaper in his hometown about the children, and the paper had organized a drive to collect toys for the children of Dak Pek. Several boxes of toys arrived in time for Christmas, 1965. On Christmas day, we collected the children from the camp and from the surrounding villages and distributed the toys. I have a picture of one girl about six or seven years old who is holding a child’s tea set. It was plain to see that she had no idea what it was or what she was to do with it.
I tried to think of things that might give the children some productive outlet for their boundless energy. Our team’s cooks used charcoal buckets to cook our in-camp meals. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if we had an oven so we could have fresh baked bread? The problem was that we had no suitable materials to make an oven, and we couldn’t have bricks flown in. The solution was to make our own bricks. The enterprise was dubbed, predictably, the Other Sanford Brick Company.
We collected a group of children up to about 10 or 11 years of age, and took them to a clay deposit on the riverbank adjacent to the camp. The kids dug up chunks of clay which we hauled on a truck to the vicinity of the team house. They spread the clay to sun dry, then pulverized it and sifted the dust through screen wire. They then added water and molded it into bricks.
After the bricks were sun dried, they were fired in a makeshift kiln heated with a weed burner using jet fuel. After a day of firing and a day of cooling, the bricks were as good as any other brick, though not quite so uniform. The kids chatted and laughed as they worked, and generally had great fun. We paid them 50 piasters a day, which their parents were doubtless glad to get to supplement their meager food supply.
We used the bricks, using mud for mortar, to make a fine oven in the kitchen. The head cook, who had been trained years before by the French, made wonderful French bread for the team. It did loads for our morale, as our usual food consisted of canned vegetables and meat. The cook’s usual procedure in preparing our meals was to open a case of canned vegetables, green beans for example. We would eat green beans for lunch and dinner until the case was exhausted, then maybe a case of creamed corn would follow for the next week. So you can understand how fresh baked French bread was welcomed by the team.
I often wonder if that brick oven is still in use.
(Note: In March 2008, I got a call out of the blue. It was a person who had served in Dak Pek quite some time after I was there. He said the oven was still operating when he was there. He had found my name in an on line database of those who had served there.)
Copyright 1999
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