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.