Woolwine - Part II

     Seems like I just wrote this thing but if I did it was in my dreams.  It's gonna be a triple whammy entry covering three incidents, all of them sharing one thing, Robert Lee Woolwine.  At least that's the way I recall his middle name.  Might just be a yankee prejudice of mine that all southern men have the middle name of Lee if they have the first name of Robert.  And if their middle name is Robert it's shortened to Bob, as in Rufus Bob or Jim Bob. Don't even want to get into Bubba.
     Before I forget, and I almost always forget to describe people, Bobbie was a tad over average height.  Like most of us in the Delta, he was slim, maybe slimmer than most.  Likable, easy going, no glasses, fair of skin, twinkle in the eye, narrow face, a nose longer than it was wide, and a hair color that gets lost in my memory seein' as how it was usually under hat or helmet.  Had a way of talking that slid off the sides of his tongue, rolled down towards the middle dent where it picked up a slightly raspy vibration off his molars and came out crisp and clear, like that makes any sense.  Started out as acquaintances till the Fates drew us together.  Don't remember if he was the first person I met in Bravo Company but for sure he was the last I saw (one year later: oops, the last was Tom Smith).
     Woolwine Loses His Second Point man
     Sunset was my favorite time of day in Vietnam.  By then we'd polished off what could be called with a stretch of imagination, supper. The Army provided us, free of charge, a variety of tasty meals. The cans were olive drab, as were the contents. Real men ate the, cans and all. The rest of us settled for peanut butter and crackers topped off with a can of fruit. As a result most of us grunts slimmed down something fierce over our days in the field.
     However, the best of the best moment came at the end just as the sun settled into the rice paddy muck. Last smoke and coffee. Smokes were usually whatever happened to be in the c-ration box and coffee was a personal concoction that today would be called a latte.  My latte involve dumping most everything from a c-ration box that was coffee related into a canteen cup, adding water, and heating the syrup over a C-4 burner.  Outside of not dying, burning C-4 was the most enjoyable part of being in Vietnam.  Burned with a sky blue flame - or was it green? -  that made me think of eating hamburgers at an outdoor picnic when I was eight years old.  Brought good into bad times.  Had I known back then that the fumes it gave off were poisonous I'd have burned it anyhow.  Poisonous fumes didn't mean shit in the land of agent orange, napalm, four kinds of deadly snakes, eleven varieties of gonorrhea, and a couple of million people who just didn't like you.
     The thing about C-4 was that it wouldn't explode unless you first fired off a blasting cap in it to get the white plastic excited. Or maybe beat on it with the butt of an M-16. Just put a match to it and C-4 burned hot and sweet.  A ball of it the size of a shooter marble was just enough to perk my brew of instant coffee, cocoa, sugar, and powdered creamer.  Marryin' that to the last smoke of the day was enough to almost tickle a smile onto a disgruntled grunt's paddy-smeared face.
     Wasn't as yet monsoon season and the paddy floors were bone dry concrete.  For us that was good.  We slept dry and were able to set up an ideal night position.  Paddies were laid out in a checkerboard pattern.  Chessboard if you were smart enough to not be in be in Vietnam but seeing as how all of us in the field were where we were, I'll go with checkerboard.
     The tactic was bedding the company down for the night in the center square.  There we'd have little mud walls to hide behind and views in all directions.  Hard for anyone to sneak up on us.  One platoon per corner with the command group holding down the fourth. The sun down, tropical dark coming on strong, it was time to hit the bricks, mosey on over to our night position.  Since we moved with the grace and stealth of bossie wearing a ten pound cowbell, how could anyone ever know where we were spending the night?
     Oops.  On that night we were spotted setting up and our Company Commander, we called him by his radio call sign of Bravo Six, threw a hickey fit, told us we had to move, set up in a new position.
     These were back in the pre-GPS days.  Map and compass was our guiding light, even in the dark.  To this day I believe the tree-filled swamp we had to pass through on our traipse to the new, improved night position, was somehow missed by the Army cartographers.  They also seemed to have missed the pond we had to wade.  And they sure as hell forgot the black as the ace of spades night all around us.
     Didn't mean nothin' (We said that a lot. Whenever things turned to shit, it didn't mean nothin'. Just the way it was. We were grunts. The bottom of the bottom). The Word came down, the Word was not good, and the Word came to pass.  We filed out, far enough apart to not trip over each other and close enough to not get lost.  Snaked our way into a mini-forest, mucked down into the swamp, and ended up rifles on shoulders deep in a two acre water hole.  Didn't give a thought to what might call the swamp or the muck hole home.  What lived there, lived there (might even live in me today).  Thinkin' about it just made it worse.
     You'd think there'd be as many exit points from a water hole as there were points on the compass.  Not so in this case.  Our point man saw a single opening in the tree line and bee-lined for it.  But couldn't make it up the steep, shit-slick bank on his own.  Needed a boost from the next man who just happened to be Bobby Woolwine.
     Even back in the middle of the pond I could hear the grenade pop.  Back when I was still new in country the pop of a grenade arming had a menacing sound. Some things, no matter how soft and inconsequential, just sound unfriendly. However, once you heard the pop, and in the Delta it was a familiar sound, you never forgot it.  The following boom came as no surprise.  Two men down.  Not dead, just peppered with holes from the GI grenade in the c-ration can booby trap.  Hell, who knows, maybe the trap had been set about the same time we entered the swamp?
     That set up was par for the course in the Delta.  Most booby traps were elegantly simple.  All a VC needed was a couple of yards of monofilament fishing line, a c-ration can, and a grenade.  American grenades were preferable to Chicoms (from Communist China).  Ours went boom most every time. Yup, we made good grenades. Their's were hit and miss (nowadays that kind of quality fills the shelves at Walmart and comes from the same place.  Call it ironic stupidity).
     The idea was to choose a location along a path American troops would traipse but locals wouldn't.  Tie one end of the line to a fixed point such as a bush and the other to the c-ration can.  Insert a pin-pulled grenade with handle still attached, into the empty can.  Finally, stretch the line tautly across the path and work it though any grass on the path so as to make it nearly invisible.  Tripping the line tipped the can, allowed the grenade handle's spring loaded action to release, and ejected the grenade. Pop!  Five seconds later, boom! They didn't usually kill, just sprayed a body with itty-bitty pieces of wire.
     I was pretty much slack-jawed.  Knew something had to be done but had no idea what.  Glad I wasn't in charge.  First off our medic headed up front. At the same time Bravo Six called in a dustoff.  The intention was keeping the wounded men alive and getting 'em on a chopper so the real doctors could work their magic, pluck the metal and sew up the holes. Most of them anyway. Some would lodge in tender parts, like eyes.
     Bringing in the medivac in the open rice paddies was decided too risky.  So, when it arrived, the chopper lowered straight down toward the waterhole.  Sounded easy enough.  But looking up told even an airhead like me it'd be touch and go.  The opening in the canopy had formed with little regard for someday allowing access by a UH1B helicopter.  Inch by inch the chopper slipped down, flood lamps lighting the area like an operating room, and rotor blades clipping branches on the way.  Had to admit the men in the helicopters were good at what they did.
     Down below we'd formed a line and passed the bodies from man to man, shoulder high.  One of those tasks you don't think about, you just do them.  They're your friends and would do the same for you.  Seeing as how I was the tallest of the group I stood chest deep at the chopper door and passed Woolwine and the point man up to the waiting medics.
       (Did that really happen?  I mean that.   Seems like a lifetime ago and it happened to other people.  I don't recall whether we ever expected to see the two again but suspect we did.  Yes, grenades rarely killed. That was good in an odd kind of way. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam but how many simply tripped grenade booby traps and are hobbling around, both physically and mentally today?)
    Woolwine was gone.  But he'd be back.  And that's another story filled to the eyeballs with irony.  God, I love irony.
     
   

The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mea Maxima Culpa

     I'm not to be trusted.  Simple as that.  I want to be a trustable sort.  Sure do.  But I don't get all that into payin' attention to the littler things in life.  And sometimes have a poor idea of what matters to other people.  Maybe 'cause it doesn't put peanut butter on my bread when I'm hungry.
     Joe should have known better but he didn't.  He was my sister's husband and a veteran of the mess in Korea back in the early '50s.
     On my leave before Vietnam he quietly gave me a Sacred Heart of Jesus card that he'd carried during the Korean Conflict.  He'd received it from his sainted Irish mother - all Irish mothers bein' saints  'cause their husbands tended to test them on a daily basis -  and it might even have been blessed by a priest.  His mom was one hundred percent Irish and the Irish love to make their priests work for a living.  I don't recall what was said when he pressed it into my hand.  But I suppose it had something to do with the card being a talisman that would protect me as it had him.
     What could I say?  Of course I accepted it.  Not that I didn't believe it would protect me.  It was more, or at least should have been more, along the line of,
     What the hell are you thinking?  That's all I need right now.  You're giving me something you've carried in your wallet for 19 years, that bears great meaning for you.  Do you have any idea how much this thing weighs psychologically?  And you're handing it over to me so I can even make it heavier?  Crap!  Nothing like carrying two generations of war on my back when I'm humping the boonies.  If I die with this thing in my wallet, how you gonna feel then, huh?  And how will your mother feel if she finds out?  And what would it say about me that God didn't care enough to save my sorry ass.
     Truth was, my brain said something closer to,
     Okie-dokie.  Thanks a lot.  Hope I don't lose it.
     The 'don't lose it' part was there from the get-go and never went away.  When I left for Vietnam I now had two things to worry me, don't die and don't lose the card.
     So of course I lost it.  Could have lost it pretty much anywhere in the Delta, Dong Tam, Moore, the boonies, or even up at Moc Hoa where we were putting in a week helping build a fire support base near the Cambodian border.  Anyhow, at Moc Hoa I discovered it was gone when I was doing my weekly wallet check for Jesus.
     Moc Hoa was a hoot.  When we weren't stringing concertina wire we were running patrols, burning our bodies top to bum in the swimming hole the Corps of Engineers had carved into a rice paddy, or sitting around at night shooting the shit, hoping we wouldn't be over run 'cause we were out of artillery range.  It was there four of us realized we'd all been drunk in the same hole in the wall bar.  Oddly enough, the bar was called The Pit.  And it sure was one.
     Gotta admit I was bummed out when I realized Jesus had flown the coop.  And that was before I'd even heard the phrase 'bummed out'.  I quickly put it out of my mind knowing I had nine months left in country to make up a good story,
     Yeah, we were in this fire fight, see?  And I was target numero uno for this VC with a machine gun.  Bullets cracked past by me like a hiveful of angry bees with death on their minds.  Finally, he got the range figured out.  Zeroed in and I was a goner for sure.  But then the Sacred Heart you gave me crawled out of my wallet and started deflecting bullets, right, left, and straight back at their godless faces.  Must have knocked away a hundred or so before Charley ran put of rounds and high tailed it out of there.  Next thing I knew, the card turns into a white dove, flies up to the top of a nipa palm, and disappears. Poof!  Yeah, that's what happened.  Must've 'cause there's no way I could make up something like that.
     Don't know if that would have been the story I'd have gone with but it was better than most.
     After our week's vacation at Moc Hoa we flew back to Moore.  A day later, on my way to the bunker me, Weasel, and Papa-san occupied at night, there, right in front of me on the ground, half buried in the dirt, was the Sacred Heart.  Maybe not a miracle, but it got me wondering.
     Of course, a week or two later I lost it again.  No idea where it went.  If you ever take a trip to Vietnam, I know I won't, but if you do, check out the tops of any nipa palms you might pass while cruising through the Delta.  If you spy any white doves, let me know via the comments column for this blog.

     Yes, I did lose the Sacred Heart twice.  And found it once.  Took me a couple of decades to let Joe know.  He laughed it off.

The Plan

     The first time I wrote about my time in Vietnam it was a litany of detail.  Not gonna do that again. Mostly 'cause the pictures in my head aren't all that clear anymore.  So I'll do what I've been doing, write it as it comes to me.  Order be damned.  Mostly it'll be highlights of low moments 'cause what's the fun of going into detail about the palatability of Ham and Lima Beans c-rations?  If you've eaten them, you don't need to be reminded.  If you say you liked them, you're a liar.  If you don't know what they are, nothing I could say would put a spoonful in your mouth.

Why We Did It

     ?
     That was my first thought.  But there was more to it than a don't know.  I figure the buck stops at WWII.  That's when we began the draft that lasted for a little more than thirty years.  And so did a mindset about what was right and what was expected of a young man in relation to the Cold War.  'Cause that's what we were in, a war that wasn't all that hot.  Both in guns and in my opinion.  Don't get me wrong, back then I thought that standing up to the Soviet Union was the right thing to do.  And still do.  But the crux of the matter was the whole thing sucked to high heaven.
     You see, we were at war with the USSR and they were at war with us.  But nary a bullet was fired. Dear Lord, there was no way in hell we could actually duke it out with each other.  The hydrogen bomb said no to that.  A war between the two or us meant world destruction in about the time it took to get in a round of golf.  Couldn't have that.  Coca Cola had to have people around so they could sell some soda pop and make a buck.  Just my way of saying it wouldn't be much of a world to live in if there was no one left to live in it.
     In their own, weird, dictatorial way, neither could the Soviet Union fire up the big one.  Without a world to dominate they'd have no reason to go on.  Someone, could have been Kurt Vonnegut, said that should there be a war after the armageddon, it'd be fought by cock roaches and gonorrhea.  Don't know which side I'd have been on.
     The one thing I know for sure was we made it through those forty-five years without an h-bomb being dropped out of anger anywhere, except in my dreams.  And that happened regularly.
     Instead, the two powers did some shadow boxing, maybe pound on a sparring partner now and then just to keep in shape.  The Reds would stick their noses into other people's affairs, get 'em riled up about revolution and whatnot.  And if we thought they were going too far, we'd send a few hundred thousand young men with short hair over to straighten out those hot to trot third worlders.  Or at least give it a try.
     Did it all work out?  Don't know.  Did us Yankee Doodlers make the right decisions and fight all the right wars?  Probably not.  But whichever war we chose, be it for true liberation or simple meddling, it sure beat fighting the Russians.
     Since we were in that Cold War from the day Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech at Woody Allen's bar mitzvah, we kept the draft going.  We didn't know when those crafty Reds would come storming across Europe so we kept a couple of million men in uniform with the idea of not lettin' them get the jump on us.  And that meant an eternal blizzard of letters that said Greetings from the President of the United States.  
     So, eventually I volunteered for the draft.  Like I said earlier, I'd found my life dead-ended and the draft was my way to clear the slate.
     Also, in the years in which I grew up, most of my friends had pictures on their pianos, mantels, or walls showing young men in uniform.  I went because Mr. Magnuson went, Mr. Kelly went, Mr. Keiser went, Mr. Mayne went, Mr. Johnston went, and Mr. Guanella went ( all dads were called Mr. back then).  Also, of my friends, Dave went, Tim went, Larry went, Darrell went, Rob went, Greg went, and Don went.  Christ, nearly every one of my friends was in some form of uniform before me.
     Most of all, my dad and brother both did their time.  Serving two or more years in the military was just something you did back then.
     So that's why I was in the Army.  That I was in the infantry was another matter.  Let's say I didn't think the whole thing through before before I start yelling, "Take me! Take Me!"
     As to why the United States was in Vietnam, well, I could give a brief history of the area but that wouldn't tell it like it really was.  It was a simple case of getting in a war that was unwinable.  Guess we didn't think the whole thing through before we jumped in to take over after the French were kicked out at Dien Bien Phu.  Steppin' in as we did, we might've had the mindset that the French lost 'cause they were the French.  On the other hand, we were Americans and had not only never lost a war but sure as hell weren't gonna lose one to a bunch of little rice eaters.
     So it looks like both me and The United States had severe cases of cranial-rectal insertion problems concerning the whole affair.  Just one man's opinion.
   

What We Did

     Seemed like our primary function was to walk around with loads of stuff on our backs in hopes of being shot at.  When not doing that we walked around with loads on our backs and went door to door asking people for their IDs, "can cuk?"  From personal experience I can say with absolute certainty that nothing builds self esteem like asking a woman who is suckling her baby, "Papers please?"  Didn't exactly make me feel like I was in the Gestapo but it sure was embarrassing.
     During the time I was an RTO, a typical load for me was helmet liner and helmet, jungle fatigues, socks, boots, M-16, eleven clips of ammo, frame and frame pack, two or three quarts of water d-clipped to the frame, two grenades handle wrapped to the straps up front, twenty-five pound radio with battery, half dozen smoke grenades, fifty rounds of machine gun ammo, pound and a half of C-4 plastic explosive, poncho, paperback book, pen and paper for letters, couple of c-ration meals, bug juice, smokes and matches. Near as I can figure that was pushing seventy pounds.
     During the dry season when I first arrived, the only time we got wet was crossing rivers too wide for foot bridges.  Since we were in a major river delta, we did those crossings on a regular basis.  During the monsoon we got wet when we hit the field and stayed that way till we sloshed our way home.  Along the way we quickly sprouted a micro-garden of plants and animals on and in us.  Also when the rains came down, the paddies filled up and turned into leech heaven.  Bring up some of the 9th Infantry web sites and check out what a bunch of muddy boys we were.
     Didn't take long once I started carrying the PRC-25 before gravity decided I was to always be the last to cross a foot bridge.  You see, a bridge was nothing more than a skinny log dropped across a channel of water, framed in place, with a bamboo railing slapped on for cuteness.  Don't think there were any building codes in rice paddy country.  The first one that collapsed under me was written off by my squad as poor engineering.  The second made it obvious that a structure built for hundred pound people wouldn't stand up under my two hundred, fifty pound load of GI and gear.  So, when we came on a crossing, I quietly stepped aside to let the others pass.  And have a minute to reflect on my upcoming bath.
     One bridge stood out above all others.  And, miracle of miracles, I didn't break it.  A more complex affair than usual, it consisted of a couple of post supports sunk in the muck and ascending vertically to the heavens five feet above, a one by eight plank rose to the first post, a similar bowed plank spanned the posts, and a third descended to the far shore.  Add a thin bamboo railing and I had myself a sure fire disaster.  It was the span above the water I feared most.  And sweated it out as each of my platoon mates safely crossed.  Once on the other side they readied a rope to haul me out of the mire I'd certainly be spread-eagled in.  But somehow, someway, maybe a supporting angel hovered beneath, or the added buoyancy of my held breath, I floated across in the blink of an eye.
     An internet search under FSB Moore and first entry under Blackhawk to ... shows a couple of bridge pictures by clicking on the 3/39th Delta Company's photos at the top.  I believe the plank bridge  in one of the photos is the one I mentioned above.  The log bridge in another photo is typical of the one's I broke.  Most every snapshot brings back memories of what it was like in the Delta.
     Down in the swamps and rice paddies along the Mekong we fought a different kind of war than the troops nearer the DMZ.  No big scale battles with artillery and battalion sized forces for us.  Hell, we only saw who we were fighting on two occasions.  Usually we saw nothing more than the booby traps they set for us to find a pop! and boom!! at a time and their 'Hello GIs' hale of red and green tracers when we walked into an ambush.  The lack of true battles didn't stop us from losing men.  During my first six weeks with Bravo Company we had seven KIA.  A few weeks later we took three more.  Remember, that's out of a field force of about eighty.  Figure in three dozen who were wounded during that period and you can see why we were always short-handed.
     Wading rivers had an appeal we found more seductive than a Vietnamese table top shimmy dancer, sporting a complementary dose of the clap, in downtown Saigon.  The Delta was tide controlled.  Tide in, the streams were full and could usually be forded chest deep.  No more problem than having to dry out over the next few hours.  Tide out was another ball game.  Ten to twenty yards of mud replaced the coffee colored, flowing water.  And I'm not talking about just getting a little goo on your boots either.  Those streams of muck were crotch deep on an average sized man.  Lucky for us we all carried enough weight on our backs to plug us in solidly down to bedrock so that we might enjoy the full effect.
     For me, being a tad over six feet, it was nothing more than striding in till I couldn't lift my legs anymore.  Then, with my arms, hoist one leg up, lay it forward on the mud, and lean forward to replant it. Repeat that maneuver a dozen times and I was across.
     The short guys faced a different problem.  For them it was grabbing a rope slung over to them across the mire and then, a couple of us more or less dragging them from one side to the other.
     A tide out crossing would coat us from the waist down and bespatter most places above.  Top that off with the mud being even parts organic matter - lotta buffalo and human shit - and clay.  That stuff set like stone.  I think there's some still embedded under my toenails.
     Factor in rice paddy, river, and the thickets we sometimes had to machete hack our way through, and it becomes obvious why an infantry company in the Delta rarely covered more than one or two miles in an hour.  Forced road marches at four miles per hour only happened stateside where traveling in the open didn't expose grunts to the constant threat of ambush.

FSB Moore

     No sooner was my gear stashed than Top and I set off in another deuce and a half to Fire Support Base Moore where Bravo Company was flyin' in. The road we honked and weaved our way along, hell bent to crush any scooter or bike in the way, might have at one time been a fine stretch of pavement.  Not so anymore.  She was blemished with potholes every few yards.  Back in Minnesota pot holes like the ones we were now slaloming through, sprouted every Spring due to frost action.  Even as oblivious a man as myself had it figured out this was way too close to the equator for sub-zero temperatures.  Maybe someone was sneaking out at night to steal chunks of asphalt for some ungodly, commie ritual?
     Seemed that out in the Delta, infantry companies worked a different schedule than the rest of the grunts in Vietnam.  I came to learn we did a bit over two days out, two days at Moore, two more out, then a stand-down of two days in Dong Tam.  While at Moore we did details during the day and pulled bunker guard at night.  In Dong Tam we drank beer, played basketball, took showers and watched The Green Berets at night.  The movie was always good for a few laughs.
     Our rotation was dictated by rivers, moats, rice paddies and monsoon.  More to the point, we rarely spent more than two days in the field because of our feet.  Since we were wet most of the time and our feet nearly all of the time, any more than two days out usually meant most of the company ended up with emersion foot and once the boots came off,  our feet would swell like basketballs.  That's not to mention the ordinary, run of the mill, jungle rot, ring worm, and all the other shit that grew on us.  Yup, us candy-ass American boys had a tendency to rot while in the Delta.  Our bodies were free-fire zones for trillions of microbes.  Yeah, those little mama bichos loved to live on and in us.
     At Moore I was assigned to the second squad of the First Platoon.  Seemed that our three field platoons only had two squads each instead of the usual four.  On a typical company sized operation we usually went out with no more than eighty men.  The missing sixty or so troops were either on R and R, wounded, AWOL, or dead.  Seemed the Army couldn't get troops to a field company as fast as the company lost men to one form of attrition or another.  Seems that's the case in all wars.  Down in the Delta it was mostly a case of a whole lot of booby traps and the occasional ambush.
     Second squad took me in like a long last brother.  Might have had something to do with not losing anybody on their last operation and beginning two days of near indolence at Moore.  Access to warm food, cold pop and beer, is a wonderful thing.

     All of this seems so long ago.  Like it happened to someone else.  That I was involved in a war as a ground soldier doesn't seem possible.  The only good that came from it, at least for me, was that I can speak of something I once knew, that did happen.  And how I felt about it as someone who didn't see any good in what I was doing.  It sure as hell was a conflicting thing.  Still is.  Can't say that mine is the right view of what went on over there.  Can't say it isn't.  Can't say I did the right thing by going.  Can't say what I did was wrong.  Can say that I went and it sucked.  Knowing that my life could have easily ended at any moment sure took the fun out of camping out.  And weighed on me a lot more than the sixty pounds on my back.  
     I sure wish I knew myself better and had the answers to the world's woes.  But strike out on both counts.  So I'll just put down words on a page and hope they make some sense.

     No doubt about it, I've gotta quit writing at night.  Get too melodramatic.  More to the point, if you want to know how I feel about my involvement in that war a lot depends on my mood and who you are.  I'm usually very guarded about my feelings, at least in a face-to-face situation.  Put a pen in my hand or a laptop in front of me and it's a different ball game.  Finally, I lack the ability to put on the page, what was going on in my mind and soul during my days in Vietnam.  Saying anymore won't clarify the matter.  Guess I was too personally involved at the time and am now too far away.
     Moore was a circular berm big enough to house a few small buildings, the battalion's artillery, and an infantry company.  In that berm sat a couple of openings with gates.  Built into the berm every fifteen or twenty yards were sandbag covered pill boxes, each manned at night by three grunts.  From this base we occasionally set out on foot, or more often, by helicopter, bushmasters and eagle flights respectively.
     Time spent at Moore was good time, safe time.  We were mortared once in a while but it sure beat the pants out of flying into a hot LZ knowing for certain not everyone was coming back.

May it Ever be so Humble....

     I recall reading on the internet that Dong Tam is a Vietnamese Army base these days. And there's a snake farm nearby.  For all I know the snake farm was already there back in '69 and those insidious commie bastards were raising nothing but poisonous ones. Their intention being to sneak them on planes heading for Hawaii where they'd ruin the tourist business and Japanese newlyweds would have to find a new honeymoon paradise.  Simple case of revenge for Nippon's atrocities in Southeast Asia during WWII.

     As near as I can figure, the sand Dong Tam sat on had originally been at the bottom of the Mekong River.  The Corps of Engineers scooped it up and dumped it on the shore to allow ship passage in the deepened channel.  Ship in the bulldozers to flatten the sand out, a million board feet of lumber, etc. etc., and they had a new base from which to protect the Free World.  Yankee ingenuity at its best.  USA! USA!

     Like I gave a rat's ass about that when I stepped off the plane.  Didn't know where I was, didn't appreciate what I was looking at.  It was all newer than new to an ignorant mind like mine.  I was completely dependent on being told what to do from one step to the next.  Good thing the Army was used to tellin' new arrivals where to go.

     First off I did something stupid.  I mean really stupid.  I was honest.  While I was processing, a Spec. Four clerk asked me if I could type, 'cause they were looking for another clerk.  Truth was I was a two fingered pecker just like I am today.  In a pinch I could type thirty words a minute but was out of practice.  That's exactly what I told him.  I be dumb ass.  Shoulda said, "You betcha!!!  Back in civilian life I worked in an electric typewriter test lab for IBM.  Got the job 'cause I could type a hundred and six words per minute.  I'm a little rusty now but I think I could still crank out at least fifty till I got my speed back.  Also, I've got a hundred bucks a month I don't know what to do with.  Would you be willing to take it off my hands? Pretty please."  The man wished me a good day and a fine life out in the boonies.
     The next few days were spent learning how to be a grunt without actually getting shot at.  The instructors all looked like the Army had cookie cut them from a tall, slim, black, sun-glassed, E-6 mold.  What I recall being taught was that a banana palm did not make good cover.  Wouldn't do more than slime the bullet before it passed through a GI's body.  In my mind the green slime on the round, mixed with my bright red blood, would make me feel all Christmas-like.  Be lookin' for Santa.  When he didn't show, then the real disappointment would set in.  Life's not easy for a soldier with a hole in his body.
     Oh yeah, before I forget, I got one day off from training so I could pull KP.  Made me feel right at home.  Seemed like I was the only one in the kitchen who spoke English.  There was the Vietnamese help and a couple of soldiers from Puerto Rico who seemed to only speak Spanish.  One thing was for sure, they didn't speak pots and pans.  But they did keep saying something that sounded like mama veecho (Looked it up on the internet, guess they were saying mama bicho.  Look it up yourself if you care.), then would point at me and laugh.  I'm not sure what that meant but suspected it wasn't about their mamas.
     My indoctrination done, once again I was deuce and a halfed to a destination.  This time it was the end of the road at Bravo Company, 3rd/39th, a grunt unit that was out in the field at the moment.  Right off I got to meet an old geezer who turned out to be the First Sergeant.  He made me feel right at home. Treated me like an actual soldier, which I wasn't.  Diamond in the rough and a little on edge about what was coming up.  I didn't know shit about anything and I'd have been the first to tell you I didn't, other than I was gonna begin to figure things out over the next eleven months.
     

Never Fight a land war in Asia

     Dear Lord it was hot.  An all encompassing hot that surrounded, hugged and smothered me like a lonely, long lost aunt drenched in two buck cologne who lived with a hundred and seven, one-eyed cats.  Maybe it was the temperature difference between Vietnam and Minnesota that was doing me in, maybe the angle of the sun. Didn't matter. War zone be damned, heat ruled the day.
     My second thought was to find me some water to put out the fire.  The first I came upon was in a lister bag hanging from a rope strung between poles.  Lister bags worked on the cooling effect of evaporating water.  Canvas bag soaked through, breeze evaporated liquid, and cooled down the water inside.  Simple, neat affair.  Would have been nice had there been a breeze.  Would have been nicer had the water I drank been cooler than the sweat soaking through my uniform.  My mind was made up then and there that I'd fight my next war in Hawaii while wearing shorts, t-shirt and a pair of flip-flops.  Maybe with a pina colada in my hand. No doubt about it, I was dressed wrong for the tropics from the genes up.
     A few minutes later I found myself on the way to the 90th Replacement Battalion in the back of a deuce and a half.  And was beginning to feel like a steel ball in one of those Japanese Pachinko machines bouncing down from pin to pin not knowing where I'd end up till I reached bottom.
     No doubt about it, the trip through Saigon was an eye-opener.  To that point I'd dead-brained my way from the time I'd left Minneapolis.  Now, as the truck rolled through wherever the hell in Saigon we were, I started waking up.  Seemed like we were passing through a massive junkyard.  Never ending piles of trash on both sides of the road.
     Don't recall the exact moment but it suddenly dawned on me that one of those piles was a kind of house made from boards, sheet metal, and cardboard.  What in the world was going on here?  Why were people living like that?  I began to get the feeling that there was a lot more misery happenin' in Vietnam than the itty-bitty pissing and moaning in my head.  Not that such a thought actually passed through my head at the time but becoming aware of that first shack began to awaken in me a feeling for the depth of the tragedy that was Vietnam. And that shack was one of hundreds.  Call me slack-jawed.
     The 90th Replacement Battalion was a holding and sorting station for American troops entering the country.  This time no names were called, no formations to stand.  Names were simply posted on a bulletin board along with destination.  Simple enough.  Even a bozo like me could figure it out.  Didn't have a clue as to where any of the destinations were.  But that didn't matter.  I figured I'd end up where they sent me.  Simple solution for the simple minded, thank you.
     I looked her up on the internet one day and found a video of the 90th Replacement with a formation of GIs having their names called out, one at a time.  Might have been that way for some. Not so when I was there.
     My first night in country we took a B-52 strike outside the perimeter.  Like I knew where that was.  The ground rumbled, buildings shook, yup, the earth moved and stuff fell off the walls as the five hundred pound daisy cutters thundered down in clusters.  Everyone except me headed to the sandbagged shelters outside our barracks.  Learned that night it'd take a lot more than a few dozen tons of high explosive ordinance to wake this boy up.  I slept like a baby.
     This was my introduction to night in Vietnam.  Over the next few months, regardless of situation, when it was my turn to hit the sack, even if that sack was a concrete hard rice paddy floor or under a hay pile during a downpour, I slept the untroubled sleep of an infant.  The idea of being stirred awake by a mouse fart of noise only to stare eyeball to eyeball into the muddied face of some guy about to slit my throat and turn me into a geyser of blood just so I could have the chance to crap my pants out of fear before dying, held no appeal.  No sir, not me.  Sleep baby, sleep.
     It was there at the bulletin board that I met Earl.  Seemed he'd been an AWOL also.  But only for two days instead of my three and his day less churned up major consequences. Turned out that was his bad luck.  As I recall he was off to rejoin the troops from our AIT company.  It was good that he'd be among friends.  On the other hand, those friends were off to play in the Au Shau Valley as members of the 101st Airborne.  In my mind that upped his body bag chances a couple of notches.  Bye-bye Earl.  He's not on the Wall so he must have survived.
     I also ran into the another straggler, the Zen Soldier.  On some deeper level the three of us shared a similar bent in our lives.  Cogs that didn't fit well in the machine.  Don't believe I ever knew the man's name.  Also wouldn't mind having a beer with him to talk about his time in Vietnam and the years since.  All I knew of the man was his unique cadence and that he'd been briefly AWOL on his way to a war.  To me that was enough to form a bond.
     Somewhere along the line I turned in my stateside fatigues for a set of the jungle kind just like the set John Wayne wore in a propaganda film we saw in AIT.  You know, the one where he tells us diamonds in the rough that fighting Communism in Vietnam was a great way for him to make a whole lot of money.  Sportin' our new duds, and in formation mind you, we brushed our teeth in unison with a compound normally used to sterilize rats or remove rust from sewer lines.  Actually it tasted pretty good and the glow coming off my pearly whites for the next few months was bright enough to read by at night.
     I recall it being the third day when I saw my name on the bulletin board.  Show on the road time.  Seemed I was heading to the 9th Infantry Division in a place called Dong Tam.  Could have been excited by the news, or I might have been depressed, had I known where the hell Dong Tam was or had ever heard of the 9th Infantry Division.  Turned out they were named The Old Reliables.  Sounded to me like a dog snoozin' under the porch on a hot afternoon.  Figured that beat the hell out of bein' a screamin' eagle.
     Immediately I started asking around.  A true case of the blind asking the blind directions to the nearest Starbuck's in a country in which neither had ever been.  Finally, someone said it might be down south somewhere.  Made me wish Metcalfe was there to fill me in on location, per capita income, and my chances of survival.
     Once again I grabbed my gear and headed off to a point unknown, this time via a two propellor plane lacking any form of civilized seating, movies, and worst of all, no stewardesses.  A fifteen minute bounce and slam the body ride found us landing on an ocean of sand filled with a hundred bare board buildings alongside the Mekong River.

Headin' to Vietnam

     Spending three days in Oakland Army was par for the course.  Didn't know anyone, had no interest in going anywhere while I was there.  San Francisco was just around the corner but it might as well have been in another galaxy.
     That the Army saw fit to keep me busy was okay with me.  Wouldn't have mattered if I didn't have KP or extra duty.  I'd have done nothing different with my spare time than I was already doin', layin' on my bunk reading.
     Twice a day a couple hundred of us stood formation in a big parking lot between the buildings waiting for our names to be called.  The ones whose time had arrived grabbed their gear and headed off to an unseen location.  Maybe a meat grinder to be made into c-rations for the grunts in the Nam for all I knew. The uncalled had time to kill till the next formation.  I headed off to empty ash trays and mop floors or scrub pots and pans.  No complaints, I'd made my choice and was happy with it.  Three days of crap seemed a fair exchange for three extra days at home.  Given the choice I'd probably have chosen a year's extra duty over a year in combat.  Like I said, I was no hero.  Had this been WWII, with a real reason to be in a war, I'd no doubt have felt different.  Scared for sure but with the knowledge it'd be a better world when the war was over.  Not so Vietnam.  Being a year older and on the plane back home, war be damned, would've been just fine.
     Not knowing anyone on the base, and not wanting to know any of them, I withdrew, pulled a shell around me.  It never dawned on me that of all the men I'd been with in AIT, not a one was there.  That they'd already come and gone never entered my little pea brain.  So, during my hours at Oakland Army Base, I didn't much give a rat's ass about anyone beyond myself and the people I loved two thousand miles away.
     Come the third day, Easter Sunday, my name was called.  Sounds all biblical but that's exactly what happened.  Grabbed my gear and headed off to another, as John Prine so aptly called them, warehouse of strangers.  Only a few hundred walking yards away, it sure enough was a warehouse.  Concrete floors and walls.  Glarin' overhead lights.  Made me feel like a rat in a maze.   Dividers like those in an office building demarcated each man's temporary space.  Inside each space was a bunk in case you wanted to be alone with your thoughts.
     On one wall hung a bank of telephones that could be used, toll free, to call anywhere in the country.  Above the phones were clocks showing the four time zones.  Nice to know the time.  A man didn't want to wake up the relatives needlessly to let them know he was on his way.  What the hell, it was a private war, no lines to be drawn on a map for the folks at home, with an end that didn't seem to matter to anyone except the Vietnamese, so why wake anyone up if you didn't have to?  One day you weren't there anymore, then a year later you were back.  "Where you been Homeboy?"
     Called home to my mom.  In the background was the noise of the family over for Easter dinner.  We talked for a few minutes then said our goodbyes.
     Next, I called Lois.  There was nothing to say.  The weight of the moment was too heavy.  What was there to say?  Goodbye, see you in a year?  Yup.
     There's so much that could have been said in those few minutes.  But what would it matter?  Behind all the words would simply lie the fact that this could very well be our last phone call.  Yeah, I know I didn't die.  But back then, on that Easter Sunday in 1969, I didn't know that.  Lois didn't know that.  My mother didn't know that.  But death was a very real possibility and was standing there next to each of us as we spoke, yet none of us brought it up.  Like it was bad luck to admit the old boy existed.  Death is something you talk about when it feels far away, when you're in a philosophical mood with a drink in your hand, not when it could be gettin' on the plane with you in a couple of hours.
     We rode a bus to the San Francisco airport.  Ain't that romantic?  Great city to be in.  Not so great to get on a plane with three hundred men in fatigues.
     My brother-in-law Joe had been in the Korean War.  Oops, that's right, it wasn't a war, it was a conflict. And according to the fat kid in charge of North Korea, it ain't over yet.
     Back in Joe's war, like the early days of Vietnam, American troops were shipped overseas on ships.  Guess that's where they got the term shippin' out.  One thing he vividly recalled was watching the lights of San Francisco fade off into the distance as the troop carrier steamed west toward the Far East.  That image was in my head as our TWA flight ascended, banked, and headed into the night.  I tried like a son-of-a-gun to give my moment of leaving the World behind as much meaning as his.  But I failed. Seems like the meaning of a moment is lost if you try to hard to find it.
     Years go by.  Memories of a specific moment fill up with meaning.  So easy to see the importance of events in the rear view mirror, when you know how the story played out.  But, at the moment, when I sat there on the plane watching a movie or trying to read, I felt no meaning beyond how screwed I was.  Meaning?  Piss on meaning.  We had a saying in Vietnam that fit most every bad situation, "It don't mean nothing."  Just our way of saying things happen and we have no control over how, what or why.  Someone dies, "It don't mean nothing."   
     I recall getting off the 707 in Honolulu.  Joe remembered having a two buck beer at Trader Vic's in Waikiki, so they must have been given shore leave.  As for me there was just enough time to smoke a couple of butts and look at the artificially lit gardens around the airport grounds.  The times they were a-changin'.
     Troops flew to Vietnam in less than a day.  Spent their three hundred, sixty-five days, then win, lose, or draw, nine out of ten grunts went home, most in one piece.  A kind of commuter war.
     None of the soldiers on the flight were known to me.  Most were NCOs, maybe even some officers.  All in all, they seemed a happy group.  Those with some time in the Army were off to spend a year away from the wife and kids.  Among them were troops of high moral fiber who believed in what they were doing, were there 'cause they wanted to be.  And a handful whose object was making a fortune in the black market.  Most were in-between.  Might even have been some misplaced grunts like me.
     Each time we landed on our cross pacific flight the crew of stewardesses - back then they weren't as yet flight attendants - changed.  Each new crew was a little more mature than the last.  The crew accompanying us to Bien Hoa had a touch of gray in their hair.  The lady at the exit door had tears in her eyes as we left.
   

Russ LaFrance

     Russ was from Minneapolis, married, and from what his brother told me years later, very intelligent in a calculus kind of way.  But he had his problems, 'specially when it came to being in the Army.  Could've been a case of depression, a fear of going to Vietnam, against the war and somehow was drafted into the infantry.  Whatever the reason I knew him as a quiet man who had the ability to come up with a beer or two at the EM Club most every night even though he had little or no money.  Gettin' tippled on other people's money seemed one of his talents.  Another asset was his affability, easy to like with nary a bad word for anyone.

     We agreed to get together on leave before heading to Vietnam.  And we did.  That afternoon I came to appreciate the man's tolerance for alcohol.  I showed up at his apartment mid-afternoon with a quart of Southern Comfort to go with the beer in his refrigerator.  Russ never said if he liked what I brought  'cause he was too busy puttin' it down to get a word out more than now and then.  We, I s'pose it wasn't a fifty-fifty kinda we more of seventy-thirty kind of we, polished the bottle off but seein' as how he was still thirsty, Russ suggested we head to a local hangout, a workin' man's bar name of Pearson's, Home of the King-Sized Drink.  While Russ continued with what he seemed to do well, I payed a visit to the men's room.  There my body ejected as much excess alcohol as it could through my mouth and nose; never a pleasant experience even if the floor around the stool had been dry.

     By that time I was ready to head home and sleep for a day or two.  The problem was we'd invited his wife and Lois to meet us after they got off work.  Which they did.  And the three of them had a fine time while I sat in the corner of the booth doing my best to stay awake.

     During our afternoon's drinking and babbling Russ said he wasn't going to Vietnam.  At the time I paid no attention 'cause he was drunk.  Probably would've written it off even if he wasn't.  At one time or another the thought of not going must have passed though most of our heads.  My friend David Magnuson, who'd done a tour in Vietnam with the Marines, told me to head straight for Canada when he heard I was in the infantry.

     Also, during AIT, one of the trainees went on a hunger strike for some reason or other.  I don't know if any of us knew exactly why.  And considering how bad the food was, we figured it was just an excuse to not eat in the mess hall.  More or less he was shunned by the whole company even though some of us quietly agreed with him, each in our own way.  His strike went on for a week, then he was gone.  Poof!

     At one time or another the idea had also passed through my head, so when Russ said he wasn't going, what could I say?  Probably something stupid like, "Me too."

     But, in the end, I went and Russ didn't.  Didn't find that out for twenty years until a cocktail party conversation with his brother Dennis.  Between those two times an article in the paper caught my eye.  On a back page story that would've normally have passed by unseen, I saw Russ' name.  He'd died with his daughter in an apartment fire.  That he was living in an apartment at an age when most of us were homeowners got me wondering where his life had gone.

     His brother filled me in on the missing years.  Russ had remained AWOL for some time.  Whether the Army caught up with him or he turned himself in, I don't recall.  Regardless, Russ refused to serve in Vietnam, was court marshaled and spent six months in the stockade.  Time up, he still refused to go to Vietnam.  Six months more.  At that point the Army offered to change his MOS to Intelligence but still send him to Vietnam.  Again he refused and ended up finishing his two year hitch in the stockade.  The story as I recall it may not be perfectly correct but is close.

     Of the men I served with, Russ returns to my thoughts more often than any other.  No matter which side of the fence you sit on, it's obvious that the circumstances we faced during the Vietnam war caused many tragedies, Russ' among them.  His name is not on the Wall in Washington and never will be.  But, in my mind, Russ was a casualty of the war.

     

Why I Wasn't Busted - it'll take a while to get there

     We were given seventeen days leave after AIT.  Normal was a full month at home before shipping off to Vietnam.  However, we'd already had twenty-one days after Basic Training because Christmas had interrupted the flow of things.  Between then and New Year's Day the stateside Army went into hibernation.
     This tradition became standard among Western armies during the Crusades when the Christians would stop battling Islam on December 25 to celebrate the spirit of love and peace that went with the season.  It was on a Christmas day that Richard the Lion-Hearted gave Saladin a figgy pudding, along with the recipe for Mrs. Saladin.  Saladin, in exchange, gave Richard seventeen concubines, who, in turn gave the English king a dose of the clap which he brought home to share with everyone.
     Seeing as how we were battling the twentieth century version of godless heathens in Vietnam, our stateside Army would cease operations long enough for troops to get stinking drunk and then sober up enough to stomach the mess hall's version of figgy pudding.  That's why my Basic Training cycle was cut to eight weeks and why we were given leave before returning in early January in order to learn how to kill a man nine different ways.  Love and peace baby, they make the world go round.

     Lois picked me up at the airport and we spent most of the leave together.  The plan had been a marriage before I shipped out but that plan ended before I knew it existed.  Something about a talk with her dad, who was a wounded medic in WWII, made her see that being married to a potential body bag didn't make much sense.  The idea of being a potential body bag held no appeal for me either but I understood her dad's logic.
     Looking back on that leave tells me it was one of the best seventeen day stretches in my life.  Each day was savored like a fine meal.  Seemed I was building a cocoon around myself.  Cutting out the unnecessary.  Paring my world down to a few relatives, Lois, and putting the next year behind me.    Focus on the important.  And the important ain't that many things.  As the saying went back then, "They can have my body but not my mind."  
     In truth, I never figured on dying or being maimed.  Doubt any of us who fought in Vietnam went with the idea of never coming back.  I knew it was a real possibility, just like I knew Pluto was the farthest planet from the sun.  But death was no more than a fact out there somewhere, not something a person ever laid their hands on, nothing more than a concept.
     And believe me, I never figured on being a hero.  That was for the John Wayne's of Hollywood fighting on the backlots of California.  Over the years it has grown to be acceptable and proper to be grateful for the sacrifices made by veterans.  Treat us all like we were heroes.
     As far as I'm concerned, all I want is to be left alone about my time in the Army.  I'm somebody who put himself in an intolerable position and saw two years in the Army as the only way out.  That I briefly ended up as a grunt in a war zone was my own fault.  It wasn't so much a sacrifice on my part as it was stupidity.  But that doesn't exonerate the idiots who got us into that mess.
     Said this before, most of the problems in my life were self-caused.  Same goes for society.  Especially one with as many assets as ours.
     Time to get off the box.  Seventeen days turned into twenty.  Guess going to Vietnam held less appeal than staying home.  Hard to believe.  Now I was an AWOL.  But I didn't think of it that way.  In my mind an AWOL was running away never to return and I wasn't.  Instead, I was taking my time, getting used to the water of combat.  No sweat, the Army and the war would still be there even if I was a little tardy.
     On the downside, I figured the Army might see my late arrival differently.  And they did.  At least the Lieutenant in charge of something or other at Oakland Army Base did.  In our one-to-one chat he said if it had been up to him I'd have been given a cigarette, a blindfold, and a place of honor against the wall of shame.  But seeing as how I'd no doubt die in Vietnam from a bullet in the back as I ran away, crying like a baby from my first fire fight, instead he dumped an Article 15 on me.  Extra duty, confined to the area, and forfeiture of a week's pay.  He could have busted me back to Private E-1 but it would have done no good.  Army policy would immediately promote me to PFC as soon as I stepped off the plane in Bien Hoa.  Had I been wearing chevrons I think he'd have busted me just so he could tear them off.  Oh the shame.

Good Times

     Yes, there were good times.  A lot of them.  The sun rose behind us one morning as we sat in bleachers listening to a military lecture that was not heard.  The clouds above the man up front constantly changed colors.  Brilliant pastels constantly changing clothes against the deepest of blue skies.  No one but the instructor made a sound. We sat there staring and slack-jawed.
     Poker on the weekends.  Mostly stud and two card guts.  Nickel games that never got out of hand but still paid a close to the vest gambler like me enough change to live off my earnings.  Of course life was cheap in a trainee outfit.  Didn't go anywhere or buy anything but a burger and a beer at the EM Club across the street.  And, over the course of the nine weeks, a half dozen LPs.
     But the games were fun, a lot of fun.  We were makin' less than a hundred bucks a month, so a three dollar pot carried a lot of weight.  Stimulatin'.  Got my pulse movin' and my mind off what was down the road.
     Six guys sittin' around a bunk, smokin' butts and shootin' the breeze.  Seemed like none of the usuals ever lost much money.  Profits were brought in by outsiders who didn't know what they were doing.  Felt sorry for a man who lost ten bucks in as many minutes, but not sorry enough to return the man's money.  But it was the freedom of a Saturday afternoon with a week's duty in the past and the next week too far away to care.
     Earl's taste for poker was richer than mine.  Usually he'd sit in with us.  Once in a while he'd wander off to find a game with more meaning.  His favorite was blackjack and he had a feel for it.  Mid-cycle he found himself in a high stakes game and walked away with over three hundred dollars.  That walk away took him straight to the post office where he sent home a money order for nearly all of his winnings.  Smart man.  Then bought a tiny stereo set with what remained.  That's why I bought a half dozen albums.
     Chili sauce in the mess hall.  May not sound like much but it was a happy day when those red bottles were put out.  Our cook, like our Drill Sergeants, lacked talent for his job.  Boiled spuds at every meal and a whole lot of hot dogs or burned liver as ugly accompaniments.  The chili sauce covered up a lot of sins.
     Like in Basic Training and Vietnam later, Lois' letters kept me going.  She wrote nearly every day and mail call was always worth waiting for.  Knowing someone was there, back in the real world, waiting for me, made life worth living.
     Then, every evening that I could, I would sit and write in return.  Most of my letters were nothingness, small talk.  But they were one sided conversations with her.  In my mind Lois was always there.
     Small talk.  Constant banter among the men on the second floor of our barracks.  There was always someone to talk with, argue with, solve problems with, two dozen men to be with every step of the way to the crap most of us were facing.  Laughter in the face of ... wellll, all but the Reservists and National Guardsmen knew what that face was.  All we had to do was let our guards down for a moment and we'd be staring at it.  But we were together in our respect for that terrifying face.  The best of bad times.
     Don't know if the Army intended it that way but, for the most part, we were left alone.  That was good.  Our Platoon Sergeant was a shake 'n' bake fresh out of NCO School who'd gone through AIT six weeks earlier, name of Teeter.  He was nothin' like the Drill Sergeants we'd had in Basic Training.  Wasn't in our faces yelling all the time.  Or doling out punishment out of sheer joy.  No, Teeter was laid back and probably as clueless as we were as to what combat was like.
     Our lot in training was learning how to use weapons and how to walk through the woods with loads on our backs.  Boy Scout jamboree with real things that went boom and bang.  Wasn't all that bad except for the not wantin' to be there part.
     Seems like it's possible for people to have a good time anywhere.  Just that in a war time army the good times come and go quickly.  The bad time hangs around a long time.  It's there, off in the background, bidin' its time, even when the good times are dancin' around up front by the fire.  Our hope was that its good buddy Death wasn't there also.
     The best of the times was the last one.  Sittin' in the SEA-TAC airport bar waiting to go home.  There were eight of us buyin' rounds and getting picked off one at a time as flights were called.  Outside of Russ and Earl I was never to see any of them again.  Don't remember a name.  That's how life goes in the Amy.  You see the same group of men twenty-four hours a day for nine weeks, then it's over.  Why I never saw them again is another story.  Probably the next entry.
     That the group of us was havin' a good time just talking is the story of soldiers everywhere.  Where we go, at least back then, there was no entertainment besides ourselves.  No phones, no internet, no video games, no television, no radio to speak of.  Just each other with our stories of the past, thoughts of the day, and hopes for the future.  Talkin', it's what grunts do.

Rememberin' Kurt Vonnegut

     In his own odd way he was a recomin' of Mark Twain.  At least that's how I see him.  Clear sighted and a great sense of humor.  Some of his funniest sentences were one word long, or so it goes and covered a lot of ground.  Once in a while I'll end a paragraph with a single word.  Thanks Mr. Vonnegut.

     But why include Vonnegut in a Vietnam remembrance?  Has to do with the subtitle for Slaughterhouse Five.  The Children's Crusade summed up both WWII and Vietnam, probably all wars.  It ain't the old boys climbin' out of the trenches or trompin' through the jungles.  It's the young who don't know what the hell they're doin' until it's too late.
     Age-wise we weren't children.  But at the same time we were.  Most of us were between nineteen and twenty-two.  And didn't know shit from shinola about life.  Just that we didn't want to lose ours.  A year under our belts out of high school, what did we know?  Where had we gone?  What had we done?
     Vietnam was indeed a children's crusade populated by children who had no idea what they were actually crusading for.  If there's a lesson to be learned from that dirty little war... here I'm stumped and don't know if it's possible for the human race to ever truly learn the lesson from any tragedy in any way other way than retrospect.
     Said it before, I'll say it again, if George W. Bush had been a grunt in Vietnam, we'd have never started a war in Iraq. You can take that to the bank.