PX Manager being my additional duty while with Advisory Team 51, I would take flights to our outlying areas every other week selling PX goods, cigarettes, liquor and whatever other merchandise I could fit into my two footlockers to the smaller advisory teams consisting of some four to six Americans. Specialist Four Morgonsan was a soft-spoken black man from Pennsylvania and our Advisory Team 51’s postal clerk at Bac Lieu. He traveled with me to the outlying teams providing postal money orders and special category mail services to the folks on the smaller advisory teams.
Morgonsan had a degree in Civil Engineering and was working for some railroad company in Pennsylvania when he was drafted. He was not much on Army protocol and felt he had more than ample authority to set aside postal rules and manage postal operations as the requirement dictated and not as some bureaucrat back in Washington had established in the many postal regulations Morgonsan had sworn to follow.
"Those ignorant folks running the US Postal Service just don’t know how to manage the military post offices,” Morgonsan complained to me in one of those many flights we took to the field. “They sit in their fancy offices back in Washington telling me how to run my unit post office several thousand miles removed. By law, I am not allowed to conduct postal operations outside of my team’s mailroom. But the hell with them! I see a need to provide postal services to our smaller advisory teams, and I am going to them. If they want to stop my service, let them come out of their fancy offices and stop me!” They never did.
On a flight to one of the battalion advisory teams, a major and captain joined us with no particular mission in mind other than to see what field life was like. Upon landing at the last of the several battalion advisory teams we visited that day, we were all still sitting in the chopper on the ground waiting for the five advisors to come to our chopper from their base. The pilots had called ahead, and the four or five advisors were on their way. The major asked the captain, “Did you see that black fellow at the last site? That has got to be the darkest black man I’ve ever seen.” I looked at Morgonsan, and he smiled. Just then and with a flushed look on his face, the major focused on Morgonsan. “Oh, I’m sorry,” the major said to Morgonsan sheepishly.
"That's okay, major," Morgonsan kindly replied. However, the major was not done doing damage.
"Well, actually,” the major added addressing Morgonsan “My wife is Mexican-American. I met her while stationed at Fort Bliss. My pet name for her is Wetback, and she gets pissed whenever I call her that.” Morgonsan just smiled and said nothing.
Meanwhile, I was doing a slow burn until I just could not contain myself any longer. My Bad Wolf was edging me on. “Major, I’m Mexican,” I offered. “And nobody in his right mind better call ME a goddamn Wetback!” The major seemed startled and began to utter something unintelligible.
That was the first and only time I’d ever heard Morgonsan laugh out loud. He was stomping his feet on the deck of the chopper and laughing so hard that he had tears in his eyes. One of the pilots turned around to look at me and gave me a thumbs up.
The major quickly jumped out of the chopper and started to say something else but stopped short when the captain, too, jumped off the chopper and said loudly “Here they come. They’re just down the road, folks.” The major’s awkward moment had passed. Once we finished our business there, we packed up everything and headed back to our main team. It was an exceptionally quiet thirty-minute flight back. Morgonsan and I became good friends after that.
On one of my trips to Saigon, I found a nice Seiko watch at the Cholon PX. Some months earlier I had sent a Princess ring to my kid sister in Texas but nothing to my kid brother. I bought the Seiko watch for him hoping I would have sufficient time to mail it from the Tan Son Nhut airbase post office. I first checked in at flight operations and asked if there were any flights going to the Bac Lieu area. I learned there was a C-123 leaving for Can Tho in the next few minutes. I signed up for the flight unable to mail my brother’s Seiko. That next morning I caught an Army Otter to my Advisory Team 51 at Bac Lieu.
My first task was to see Morgonsan at the team’s post office and mail my brother’s Seiko. Morgonsan was a pleasant and talkative person. He asked how I manage to go to Saigon any time I wanted and how he wished he could go with me. “But I’m stuck in this dreadful post office. I don’t nearly have time for lunch sometimes cause all you folks gotta have your darn mail! But I’ll get an assistant someday, and I really wanna go experience Saigon with you!”.
We were talking and talking while he was processing the Seiko for mailing. He asked me how much insurance I wanted. I responded. He kept talking and became somewhat distracted.
Weeks later, my brother still had not received the Seiko. I went back to Morgonsan and provided him my insurance slip to see if he could put a trace on it. He asked me for the certified mail slip. “I didn’t send it certified,” I told him.
“Aw, man, don’t tell me you didn’t send it certified? Something like this just has to go by certified mail; otherwise, some butthole along the way is going to rip if off. I never let anything like this go except as certified mail.”
Morgonsan apologized and blamed himself for not informing me about the requirement to send it certified. “Buddy, I’m darn sorry, but there’s not a heck of a thing we can do about it at this point other than collect on the insurance for it.”
I was only a couple of weeks from leaving Vietnam and never made it back to the Cholon PX which stocked these watches. When I got home to Texas, I gave my kid brother the insurance slip. We both went to my Texas hometown post office in San Benito and collected the insurance for it. It was a Mexican postal clerk who processed my brother’s insurance slip and handed my brother Raul the insurance money for the watch. I distinctly recall my fellow Mexican’s remarks about the stolen watch, “Those Seiko watches are really nice watches. They’re pretty expensive here. I know because I sell Seiko watches on the side.”
I quickly and intuitively surmised that it was the Mexican postal clerk who stole my brother’s watch, and I’ve always wondered where he might have sold it and how much he might have sold it for. My kid brother never got to experience his Seiko watch.
Just before Christmas 2016, and some forty-eight years later, I was reviewing my book for the umpteenth time and came across My Brother’s Watch. It saddened me that I had never replaced the lost Seiko as I had always intended to do. I mentioned to my wife Malina that I had once bought a Seiko watch for Raul, but it had been lost in the mail.
“And you never sent him a replacement?” she asked.
Not wanting to discuss the issue, I printed a copy of My Brother’s Watch for her to read. After reading the story, she approached me announcing, “Okay, we’re going to buy a Seiko for Raul and send it to him for Christmas.” When she was unable to find it locally, she went to SeikoUSA.com and bought an exact Seiko Solar Chronograph which she had given me for my birthday a couple of months earlier.
She sent it to arrive at my brother’s home just before Christmas 2016. Another closed loop in my life thanks to my kind-hearted wife, Malina.
Seiko Solar Chronograph
( My brother’s watch )
.
"During the reporting period from October 2019 through September 2020, OIG special agents conducted 1,221 internal mail theft investigations, resulting in 333 arrests, 1,000 administrative actions, and approximately $588,000 in monetary benefit for the Postal Service.- US Post Office Inspector General
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