Night in the field wasn't all bad. At least down in the Delta when the paddies were dry. Weasel always carried a small transistor radio with him. Come Saturday night it was Golden Oldies out of the military station in Saigon. I'd pull first watch, he'd forego a little over an hours sleep and we'd listen in.
Back then, what constituted a song bein' an oldie was it comin' from the years between '55 and '65. When most of us layin' in the rice paddy were growin' up. Guess that was the golden part. Didn't seem possible that less than a year earlier, most of us in were toolin' around on a Saturday night with nothing better to do than listen to the tunes on the car radio. Smoke cigarettes, no particular place to go. Listenin' to the oldies with Weasel brought back memories of life before the Army and, most of all, before Vietnam.
But those days were behind us no matter how much we wished they weren't. But we were never gonna be the same and we knew it. Our cherries were popped and there was no turnin' back.
But that's not what this memory is about. Except for the night part. The night where movement out beyond our perimeter could be anything. Or nothing at all.
No matter what the man on watch had to call in a situation report every fifteen minutes we had to let command know what was goin' on. Negative was good, positive bad. Also this let them know you were awake. Or at least sleepin' with your ear on the receiver. Bein' it was my watch I came to eves drop on the following sit-rep positive. Went something like this:
There's something out there I tell you. No doubt about it. Get me the starlight scope.
Believe we had one of the scopes per field company back in the grunt age of 1969. I used one now and then. Can't say they made anything a lot more visible. What it did do was make the world look a lot greener. Lord knows what one cost. Triple the civilian price to get what the government paid.
Something's moving, that's for sure. Best get on the horn and get every one up and at 'em.
So there we were, noses over dikes, rifles with safeties off just in case this was the real deal. In the process of wakin' men up and all the bitchin' that goes with early mornin' hours, we no doubt made enough noise to rouse the neighbors. Our luck the clatter would have gotten someone to call the cops. For sure we'd have been ticketed for disturbing the peace. Or maybe arrested and all eighty of us would've ended up spending the night in the hoosegow.
The discussion on the radio droned on for maybe five minutes while we lost sleep and sweated it out. Finally the pig wandered close enough to be identified. One trigger happy rookie could've easily done the beast in and turned it into pork sausage. First round goes off and all the rest of the company would no doubt open up. Except me. I was of the 'wait and see' school. Pullin' the trigger meant more work cleanin' the gun. Not my kinda fun.
Figure this be a good time to bring up water buffaloes. They were the John Deeres of the Delta. Did most everything a tractor did back in the States. You'd see one off in the distance, a kid on their back and a man would think they were almost cuddly, in an ugly kind of way.
But you get 'em without the kid or any Vietnamese around them and they turned into half ton pit bulls. Come chargin' at us with certain death in their eyes. Visions of grunts impaled on their horns dancin' in their heads. Nasty-assed beasts.
And there was no way us imperiled GIs could shoot the bastards. An M-16 woulda just pissed 'em off and made them nastier. And we were under orders not to shoot them in the first place. Most of us could understand that seein' as how a water buffalo was an important part of a farmstead's livelihood.
Smoke grenades, on the other hand, were another story. No harm to man nor beast but pop one and the buffalo would turn tail with the horizon in its eyes. Not sure why that worked but it sure did, slicker than snail shit.
Then there was the time on bunker guard when Lundsford got spooked. Now this wasn't the same time that Tom Smith and Iron Mike got wasted on Carling Black Label and did the Cobra Dance of Too Much to Drink on top of their bunker while a rocket attack was goin' on. That sure was something to behold but not the point of this here memory.
That was the time one of our men got the heebie-jeebies while on bunker guard. Seems he was seein' something off near the tree line that was movin' around. Exactly what it was doin' he couldn't exactly say. But there was no doubt it was something evil and not evil in the sense of wiping out a Fire Support Base by stickin' pins in a voodoo doll or sacrificing a chicken or maybe chokin' one. Even if he was wrong it was a minor miracle that one of us was paying enough attention to see anything at all.
Eventually he got worked up enough for an officer or two to come calm the man down. And, just maybe, see if there actually was something out there. The look-see evolved into a heated discussion with the officers sayin' the bunker grunt was hallucinatin' and our hero stickin' to his guns.
The only way to settle the argument was to fire up an artillery flare. Under anything but the worst of circumstances doin' that was a major no-no. A flare lit up everything in an ugly way. Like the designers didn't give any thought at all to how it made our moles and pores stand out. Not becoming at all. And it exposed us as much as them. So you never fired a flare at night unless there was some form of infiltration goin' on.
As it turned out, maybe Lundsford was right. Maybe the gravestone out there had been movin' around. Weirder things have happened in a combat zone. Then again, maybe not.
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