Bill Patterson - Singing "DIXIE" in Vietnam!
"Look away down yonder in the land of cotton,
Ole times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away Dixieland!
Oh, I wish I was in Dixie away, away,
In Dixieland I'll take my stand
To live and die in Dixie.
Away. Away. Away down south in Dixie!"
As strange as it may seem, I heard the familiar sound of Dixie many times in Vietnam. Our 319th Transportation Company was mostly comprised of very young men. Some of them, when they felt they were being treated poorly, would start singing the song. Nearly all of us had been raised in the South. I suppose singing of home made us feel better about the nightmare we were facing soon after arriving in the country. We had heard the song all our lives. To this day I still enjoy hearing it performed.
Of course it did not go over well with the other companies' men in our battalion. I remember a few fights breaking out between some of us. After a few such incidents, the singing went away. I believe its demise was due mostly to fatigue more than anything else. We averaged about 4 hours sleep per night the first few weeks we were there.
Hearing "Dixie" always seemed surreal to me: We were in the United States Army; we were not serving only the South; we were in Asia, not the American Civil War; many soldiers we served with were from the Northern states and I could see in their eyes they did not want to hear the song.
The singing was part of our adjusting to our strange experience of being called from civilian life (we were activated reservists), being sent to a country and war most of us did not understand, being very homesick and fearing the unknown dangers ahead.
But we adjusted. The singing went away and we went to work. We adjusted as best we could. We got the job done and did it very well. Despite the chaos and confusion, we got it done and came home.....