Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:43 | Following personal leave to attend his father's funeral, Tom Pemberton returned to Vietnam with a new assignment, auditing stevedore contracts at the Saigon port. When his time was up, he returned to the Army Reserve Advisory Group in Jacksonville. It was a good post, but there was one difficulty. It fell on this unit to notify families in Florida of a soldiers death.
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His father was career Navy and Tom Pemberton was in the Naval Reserve, planning to follow in his footsteps. But he was derailed due to poor eyesight, so he wound up in the Army, which cost him five bucks every year on the Army-Navy game.
Transportation officer Tom Pemberton's first job in Vietnam was at Tan Son Nhut Air Base taking care of cargo. Later, the Army inherited responsibility for the Saigon port from the Navy and he moved to that location. During the offloading of tanks from a ship, a crew member forgot some basic safety, with expensive results.
Tom Pemberton was in charge of an area at the Saigon port and he recalls the sad story of a Vietnamese stevedore who wandered behind a stack of pallets for some reason.
Landing at Tan Son Nhut air base to begin his second tour, Tom Pemberton could see flashes on the ground. It was VC fire aimed at his plane. The transportation officer had a staff job monitoring motorpools and cargo operations. Then he had a highway traffic control job in which he tried to keep convoys from running into each other.
Six weeks after he got married, Tom Pemberton left for Cold War duty in Korea. The transportation officer had the title of Police and Sanitation officer on the troop ship, which was more desirable than it sounds.
Inchon did not have a deep water port. Ocean going ships had to drop anchor outside the tidal basin and offload the cargo and personnel to smaller vessels. Transportation officer Tom Pemberton expected to be sent up country, but he was given a job at the port.
At the Army port in Inchon, it was a 24 hour workday, with loading or offloading going around the clock until completed. Tom Pemberton started out as a stevedore officer, supervising the work on board. He later switched to the on shore job, coordinating the outflow of men and materials.
Tom Pemberton was serving in Korea when his tour was reduced from fourteen to twelve months. His next post was Fort Campbell, where his wife joined him for the first time. He next had a tour in Germany, but Vietnam was beginning to heat up the Cold War.
After two Vietnam tours, Tom Pemberton had an assignment at the Army Infantry Training Center at Fort Polk. The career transportation officer no longer had to worry about rocket attacks, he had to worry about dozens of buses and the occasional crazy recruit.
Tom Pemberton spent the last of his twenty years in the Army in Europe. The transportation officer put his experience to use in one last arena before retiring.
