This book is a compilation of stories that are my own and borrowed from friends. I can't swear to the factual content and some of the stories may have become "enlarged" with age. I’m an old guy and this is the way I prefer to remember my service career. I’ve changed all the names and altered the dates a little to protect anyone who may be hurt by this publication. I mean no offense to anyone. Our soldiers are the best in the world and deserve our support. To my Viet Nam Veteran Brothers and Sisters...WELCOME HOME! To the draft dodgers and hippies on the runway that gave me such a memorable welcome home, may you have to burn Hanoi Jane's shit in Hell for all eternity!!!!!!!

The induction center was a real trip. A large brick building in downtown Portland. I had been out partying with a bunch of my friends the night (actually the last 3 nights) before, so I was in pretty poor shape for the biggest event of my young life. I set the remains of a bottle of 151 proof rum on the curb and thus began my military life. A little back history. I was born and raised in a little town in Idaho (about 800 people). The general thought there was that if the country was at war, it was your duty to go fight. The anti-war sentiment hadn't reached very far into the hinter lands at that time, and even if someone would have had anti-Viet Nam sentiments, they would never have dared voice them (those old loggers and farmers would have run them out of town on a rail). It was taken for granted that after high school, the military was the next logical step given the state of affairs at the time. I spent my last year of High School in a small town just outside Portland, but was still a small town Idaho boy at heart. Since I was a volunteer, I got to take my pre induction physical and mental exam right before being sworn in to the military machine. I had played sports in high school so I was accustomed to being around other guys naked, but this was a real shocker. There were about 200 guys in their under wear (even the obligatory guys in women's underwear) going through the tests. Everything was OK until the hemorrhoid exam. Imagine 200 guys in a circle with their backsides inward. Then imagine these same guys dropping their drawers and bending over at the waist while spreading their hinter cheeks. The view between your legs is something that I am incapable of describing. That in itself was bad, but the guy beside me had evidently consumed large quantities of chili at some point and the gas build up must have been tremendous. Anyway, he chose the exact moment the doctor probed him to release the pressure. The doctor was just a little upset. Never submit to a rectal exam from a doctor who has just been the recipient of a sub lethal dose of ass gas. The exam gives a whole new meaning to the word "abrupt." The rest of the tests were pretty much silly. The only exception was my trick knee. My knee would go out from time to time because of a football injury. I had to go to three different doctors before one of them would certify me fit for duty. I'm on the bus headed for Fort Lewis, Washington, July 8, 1968. The bus ride was awfully quiet for a bunch of hormone jockeys. Everyone was speculating about our fate in the military. Ideas ran from a Boy Scout outing to summer camp. The old E-6 in the front of the bus kept chuckling at our comments, but we really didn't pay much attention. BAD MISTAKE! When we pulled through the gates at Ft. Lewis, I thought how cool the MP's looked with their guns and arm bands, and I wondered why they gave us the old single digit salute. I was about to find out. We stopped in front of a huge building, and 3 guys jumped on the bus. I was about to say "Hi" when one of them escorted me off the bus with his boot. I had nearly regained my dignity when I was informed by another guy in a Smokey The Bear hat that my parents were never married, I had questionable sexual preferences, and my diet consisted largely of fecal matter. I had barely time to assimilate these quasi-facts when we were herded (I use the term loosely, in comparison cattle are treated gently at a slaughter house) into a barn-like structure (I later came to the conclusion that military architects are really not satisfied unless the ceiling is at least 30 feet over your head because ALL military buildings resemble barns) and told to strip. Now, I wasn’t self conscious, but it's difficult to disrobe when some guy is telling you that you ARE deficient in every male category before you even get your shoes untied. While naked, we were told to put all our belongings in a box, address same and the would be sent to our "next of kin," The Army likes to use that term a lot, I think they had a list of folks somewhere named "Nextofkin" because every time I addressed something that way, I never saw it again. Somewhere some poor guy is probably still wearing that purple paisley shirt, thinking it came from a grateful relative.

Clothing issue was hysterical. I didn't worry about style too much at the time, but I usually tried to look like I was wearing clothes designed for my same species. The Army has 3 sizes. Small-20 inch waist, medium-30 inch waist and large-40 inch waist. Boot sizes come in two sizes, too tight and too loose. The underwear (I was taught that all real men wore jockey shorts!) was previously used by Polynesian natives as sails for their fishing boats. Boxer shorts! To say I was a little uncomfortable would be like saying death is a little inconvenient. Everything is green. Green has always been a lukewarm color for me, I neither liked nor disliked it, but this particular shade looked like they'd mixed forest green and baby shit. They also give you a big (green) bag to put your new wardrobe in, but nobody had time to get them out of the boxes, so we all just carried a mountain of stuff with us.

Our first march took us to a temporary home where we would stay during our orientation and testing phases. We arrived at about 10:00 PM and we fell into bed after a nourishing supper of a jelly sandwich at 11:00 PM. Really great first impressions of military life were observed by one and all. The next morning, if you can call 3:00 AM morning, we were treated to a delicious bowl of dry Grape Nuts (they're good, but it must have been a ploy by dentists needing practice to give them to us dry) and herded (again) off to what the Army actually had the gall to call testing. The Army's idea of a good way to test your mental facilities is to make you take battery after battery of inane tests while at the same time making sure you're not getting more than two hours sleep, and food that would make a Tasmanian devil gag. Now I understand that it's important to make good judgments in combat when you are not in the best of health, but I do not understand what sensory and creature comfort deprivation had to do with my favorite color and did I like girls. Another test I couldn't understand was the "exploded box" test. They showed a picture of a box that had been unfolded, and you were supposed to choose what the completed box would look like from a set of pictures. The guys who were really good at this one were probably picked to be clerks so they could fold your records into something completely unrecognizable so they could get lost forever. I ended up getting a 147 on the GT (the Army equivalent of IQ) test. This qualified me for officer candidate school, all I had to do was sign up for a bunch of years after my graduation. Well, I only stick my dick in a fan once before I learn that it hurts. Thanks but no thanks. Having a 147 GT score proved to be a bit of a cross to bear also. It seems that commanding officers look at these things and figure that the smart guys are going to be the trouble makers. In my case it was true, but they could have at least given me the benefit of the doubt!!

After the testing was complete, we were assigned to our basic training units. All the comforts of home. A bunk too little for the " hey boss, de plane de plane" guy, four toilets for 40 guys, and a shower that would hold ten people if they were REALLY good friends. At this point I was pretty sure my mother had raised an idiot. They picked out the four biggest guys and made them squad leaders. This is fairly common in the military, your IQ is supposed to get larger with your shirt size. As it turned out, the guy they picked out for our squad couldn't read the names on our shirts (excuse me, fatigue blouses) so they had to pick another guy. This guy turned out to be pretty cool, he could pick his nose without directions. Basic training progressed pretty much at a snails pace for the first few weeks. We'd go to classes, go to sleep in the classes, then do push-ups for falling asleep in the class until we were completely exhausted, then we'd go to more classes. The Army seems to think that the more push-ups you can do, the better soldier you'll be. I figured there must be a better way, and I'll be damned if the Army didn't come up with one. When push-ups failed to properly motivate us, they came up with the "dying cockroach". In this maneuver, you lay on you back in the mud while sticking your arms and legs straight up until they become numb or the Drill Instructor gets bored. Somewhere there must be an AR (Army Regulation) that states that you are not allowed in a combat zone unless you can do this exercise properly.

About two weeks into Basic, we were deemed responsible enough to be allowed to help prepare the delicious meals we never had time to enjoy. Mess hall duty was divided into various job descriptions. They were; DRO (dining room orderly). He's the guy that waited on the lifers and generally kept the food spillage to a level where a guy could walk through it. Pots and Pans. This was the job for the rocket scientist. You had to scrub the pots "to a high military shine." This with pots that had been purchased (probably for several thousand dollars) when MacArthur got back to the Philippines. A study in futility. Kitchen Help. These guys were at the beck and call of the cook. They did important things like run back to the barracks for the cook and get a pack of cigarettes, wash the cook's car and other jobs related to mealtime. Lastly, Outside Man. This guy got to clean the veggies and the grease sump all day long. This was my usual duty station after I asked the mess sergeant how he managed to get fresh eggs to come out that lovely shade of green. The first time I also impressed him with my ability to come up with the correct answer to military questions. He was trying to get me to do things in military order (I couldn't understand why we should fry up 20 dozen eggs an hour before the guys were supposed to come in for breakfast) by asking me "when you're taking a shower, you don't take your wash cloth and wash your ass THEN wash your face do you?" My reply was, "No Sergeant, I don't use a wash cloth at all!" No sense of humor. Straight to the Outside Man job. It was the first time in my life I ever developed a personal hatred for potatoes. Now, I still liked to eat them, I just hated to look at them. The cook told me I was in charge of peeling the potatoes for evening chow. I thought, "How hard could it be?" I didn't know that I was supposed to peel two hundred pounds of the little brown monsters. I Had made quite a dent in about four hours when the cook came back to my station, took a good look, said I'd never finish in time for dinner, dumped both sacks of spuds in a barrel-shaped machine and THE DAMNED THING PEELED THEM IN ABOUT TEN MINUTES!!! I asked the cook why he made me do so much by hand and his answer was "because I could." I would learn that in the military, lots of times the orders given me were just because the other guy outranked me and had the power to give the order. It made me REAL confident in combat leadership.

We had a spinal meningitis scare during our training cycle. None of us even knew what the disease was, we were just told that you could die unless you followed the approved military procedure. The approved military procedure at the time was to open all the windows in the barracks while we slept. Since we all took showers in a small space, used the same toilets and urinals, I figured the germs must not be spread by body contact, rather they must be nocturnal flying beasties, and the wind, rain and sand blowing through our barracks at night must knock them right out of the air. It must have worked, nobody got meningitis, just pneumonia and everyone knows that's good for you!

The good part for me came when we got to go to the rifle range. At last I would get a chance to shoot that 9 pound piece of M 14 hardware I'd been carrying around for weeks. It's my firm belief that the M14 is the finest weapon the military ever devised. It was reliable and accurate. It fired a round that would take an enemy right off his feet and it would function even when a little dirty. Later I would be expected to trade in my trusty 14 for a Matty Matel piece of shit that would misfire when a bug farted within 10 feet of it. Another piece of military genius. We got another speech about how your weapon (NEVER CALL IT A GUN) was your best friend, and how if you didn't qualify properly with it you would surely be killed in Nam (this probably really impressed the guys who had signed up to be cooks and typists). At last we were issued our first live ammo. When we had been thoroughly versed in not killing each other (or more importantly the Drill Instructors) we were allowed to sight in our weapons. I got mine in the black in three rounds, so I got to burn up the remaining 17 rounds trying to shoot the stakes holding the targets up. I did not do this with the approval of my superiors, so I got do demonstrate my cockroach imitation again. Things at last were looking up. I thought, "this isn't going to be that bad after all", (more genetic idiocy showing through). At the end of he session, we were all standing in formation waiting for the trucks to take us home, and the DI's told us to work the actions of our weapons, point them in the air, and pull the trigger. I remember at the time that it would take a real dump truck to have left a live round in their rifle. Yeah, you guessed it. The air was shattered by the blast of an M 14 set on "ultra stupid". Our platoon dummy (there was one in every platoon) had just shot a cloud. To teach this one individual a lesson, we all got to take a 5 mile jog back to the barracks. In the infinite wisdom of the military, when one guy screws up, they punish everyone. I think the strategy is that after everyone gets tired of being dumped on because of one individual, they band together and kill that individual and the Army gets rid of the true idiots in this manner. Just short of killing the offending individual, there is always the honored tradition of the "blanket party". This consists of putting a bar of soap in a sock (sort of a hygienic sap), getting 10 or 12 guys together, pulling a blanket over the person to be partied, then beating the shit out of him with said bar of soap/sock. Although this practice is not openly condoned by the superiors, when the partied party shows up at formation the next morning, the DI will laughingly say, "Hey trainee, you'd better be more careful in the shower from now on" wink, wink snicker. This is meant to infer that nobody is safe so you'd better get some platoon pride or face the consequences. I can say that I never had the opportunity to be on either end of the blanket party ritual. We had a weird platoon. We would pass the barracks inspection with flying colors, but there were only two of us in the entire outfit who knew one end of a rifle from the other. The DI's tried their best to properly motivate the guys to shoot better (they tried everything short of physical death), but nothing worked. Being one of the two guys who could actually hit what they were shooting at, I was the one the DI's bet on at record fire (when you get graded). I was doing great, I hit 75 out of 75 targets. I was feeling pretty cocky, I was even hitting the 25 yard (meter, whatever) targets that had been completely shot out so you had to shoot in front of them and knock them down with gravel. This one particular DI (second cousin of Attila) walked up to me, said "good shooting trainee" and BASHED ME ON THE HELMET LINER with his cute little range sign. I decided that anything he liked, I hated. It was revenge time. I shot just enough targets to get my expert badge, then started shooting the targets of my neighbors who were not doing as well. I rationalized it as teamwork. He saw it as a personal affront. More push-ups, cockroach impressions and a new variation made up just for me consisting of sitting in a fir tree bout 20 feet off the ground screaming "I am a shitbird, I am a shitbird" until I lost my voice. Excellent training technique.

What a great time. Every time a DI says "what's the spirit of the bayonet?" you have to scream "TO KILL!" We learn that there are only two kinds of bayonet fighters, the quick and the dead. We take a quick meeting and decide that our platoon must already be designated as dead. So we go to our first class. The guy up front is explaining that when you stick your bayonet into the enemy, if you've done it correctly, the muscles in his body will grip the blade and it will be difficult to pull out. When this happens, you're supposed to fire a round and blow it out. Wait a minute. Fire a round? If you've got ammunition left, what in the Hell are you doing knife fighting! Army logic. One of the drills you do to learn bayonet fighting is called the Pugil Stick exercise. In this session, you put on a helmet and padded gloves, they give you a six foot stick semi padded on both ends and you commence to beat the Hell out of each other. It starts out as fun, but it soon degenerates into earnest fighting. The DIs help to encourage us by inferring that the losers probably have deviate sexual habits and should have to do some extra duty to lose the inclination. We decide that it's probably better to kill our friends rather than look bad in front of the military establishment. I draw an opponent who has about ten inches of reach on me and I can't seem to land a decent shot. The DI stops the bout and tells the guys that he's going to demonstrate how to do it properly, and since I'm such a pitiful bayonet fighter, I get to take part in his demonstration. The DI gets a helmet and a stick, then starts walking around telling the platoon just how he plans to reduce me to jelly. I think, "there hasn't been anything said about a rear attack being unfair, and there is no such thing as a sneaky bayonet fighter." Armed with this logic, I swung the stick like a baseball bat, taking my opponent (the dead bayonet fighter) in the back of the helmet. I'll be damned, he fell down. I do just as I've been instructed and give him a long thrust into the midsection. Perfect form. Afterwards, I get to demonstrate my perfect push up form. A really lot. The bayonet confidence course is supposed to be the finale' to our bayonet training. It consists of running up to a series of enemy dummies, executing a long thrust to the midsection (filled with straw or strips of tire) and a butt stroke to the head (a leather thing resembling a vertical punching bag). Sounds simple. I head into the course screaming with the rest of the kill crazy demons we've become. I did pretty well for the first dozen or so dummies. I don't know what happened, but I managed to butt stoke one in the midsection and long thrusted to the head, neatly decapitating the enemy dummy. I thought "hey, I guess I neutralized the Hell out of that guy." The DI on the other hand acted like I'd just assaulted his mother. More cockroach imitations. I didn't do the dumbest trick though. In one section we had to run up this pile of logs (about six feet high) and jump off the other side screaming while holding our weapon above our heads. Our platoon idiot did everything correct except for snapping the chin strap on his helmet. When he jumped off, his helmet came off, his rifle smacked him on the top of his head and knocked him out cold. Way cool!

Since we were qualified to kill people with our new weapons skills, we were given the opportunity to pull guard duty on some of Uncle Sam's most valuable possessions. I had the privilege of guarding the railroad depot. It hadn't been used in only about 30 years. I had a 4-hour shift, so I spent the time playing soldier in the buildings. I had real ammo, and I was tempted to do a little bird hunting, but we had been informed that if we fired a round it had better be because the Russians were invading and we were already dead. Well, boredom does strange things to an otherwise intelligent individual. I thought I'd surprise the duty officer when he came around by showing just how alert I was. I hid between two railroad cars and waited. When the lieutenant came walking up, I jumped out and screamed "Halt, who goes there!" I should have judged the distance a little better so the muzzle of the weapon wasn't poking him in the chest, and I should have known that a guy walking through a dark yard would be a little nervous, but there is no way I could have known about the diarrhea. Way lots of push-ups and cockroach imitations. There probably would have been more if the lieutenant wasn't so embarrassed. I decided surprise wasn't necessarily a good thing when the guy is supposedly on your side.

The end of basic training. We get our pictures taken (I still wonder how many guys told their family that their basic training portraits were taken while not wearing pants, just the jacket, shirt and tie). We are told that if we pass out in the graduation ceremony, we'll have to repeat the cycle. I decide the only way I'll fall down is if I die, either way I'm done with basic. I figure I have gained the necessities to make it in this man's Army, I can shoot a weapon well, do push-ups, imitate a cockroach, eat a complete meal in the time it takes to walk through a serving line, tell the difference between an officer and an NCO, salute with the proper hand, march without falling down and masturbate in a three tiered bunk without waking the guys below me. What else could there possibly be! One of the DI's tells us that he'll take us to the airport and feed us all the beer we can drink for $20.00. Not knowing the airport is about 20 minutes away (a $2.00 cab ride), lots of guys take him up on the deal. I'll bet he made $500 that day. I don't have a leave coming after basic, so I took a cab to the airport and got completely bombed (for about $5) to be ready for my next duty station, Ft. Rucker, Alabama.

What can I say, a kid from a small town in Idaho all of a sudden in the deep south. Major culture shock. My plane landed in Dothan, Alabama. I had about 6 hours to kill so I decided to get some breakfast. It was my first lesson that the Confederacy was still punishing the Yankees. I ordered bacon and eggs and they brought the plate out with a mass of partially congealed slime contaminating everything on the plate. When I asked the waitress what it was, she looked at me like I was from Mars and said "Them's grits!" as if that explained everything. I was in the south for eight months and I could never look at grits without my gag reflex doing the mambo. The orientation at Rucker was pretty much standard. An E-6 standing before us making references to our heritage (where does the Army get its information on parents sexual habits?) with the obligatory warning that if we don't take this training seriously we'll all die in Viet Nam. I had signed up for door gunner school. The enlistment NCO had convinced me that after my military stint, there would be a terrific demand for guys who could accurately shoot a machine gun out of a helicopter (actually, it was teenage hormones making life decisions). Anyway, after about two weeks into the training I was granted a reprieve in the form of Army Air Traffic Control School. Another NCO came to a morning formation and said that because of our high GT scores, a few of us qualified to become air traffic controllers. A vision of air-conditioned comfort drifted before my eyes, and I found myself doing something my father warned me against, volunteering.

It was about this time I discovered a particularly noxious little monster that plagues people living in close quarters. The Pubic Louse. It's an eight-legged thing that inhabits the more private areas of your body and creates an itch that makes jock itch seem like a walk in the park. You try not to dig at it but that's not possible. Within a day or so after contracting them, your whole groin is raw. Various remedies run rampant. We had guys shaving themselves, rubbing on all manner of creams and lotions, taking hot and cold showers, anything short of telling the Army you have them (to avoid court martial we're sure). One particularly adventurous guy couldn't take it anymore and put after-shave on his nether region. Well, after his 50-mile sprint all the time wailing the mating cry of a rabid coyote, he said the itch was pretty much gone. I opted for the medics, court martial be damned. They were real helpful, didn't yell at me or anything and gave me a tube of stuff (a pesticide called lindane) that said DO NOT APPLY TO BROKEN SKIN OR IRRITATED AREAS. Figuring it must be a punishment thing, I applied it lavishly. It worked, I was healed and I took great relish in helping to pig shave (all the hair on the body is shaved off, no lather) the low life turd who had brought this little gift to our humble barracks.

Army Air Traffic Control school turned out to be the most boring period of my young life. Hours and hours of the driest study material in the world, punctuated by complete military absurdity. What possible lesson could be learned from being physically ejected from your bunk by a bored sergeant at 3:00 AM?. Understand, we were supposed to be the elite of the enlisted aviation ranks, controlling up to a hundred aircraft at a time, literally holding the lives of countless pilots in our hands, and we're being harassed by a guy with the intellect of dirt just because he can. Go figure. We finally figured out a way to beat the system. We went to the First Sergeant and REQUESTED additional physical training. We asked to have the offending NCO lead us in said PT. We told the First Shirt that between our killer study schedule (we were doing in six months what the Air Force took eight months to do because the Army has to be better) and the nightly harassment we needed a stress relief, and being good little Army troopers, we wanted to do it the Army way. The harassment stopped immediately. The First Sergeant of our training company was one of the finest individuals I had the pleasure of meeting in the service. He was short and Italian, with a very unflattering nickname, but he was fair to a fault. He had never dealt with a bunch of intellectual snobs (we really played the part well) but he did everything he could to make sure we got through our training. The Wop (his nickname) had one philosophy in life; everybody was a faggot. If you performed the act on another guy, you were automatically a faggot. If you ate pussy which undoubtedly wasn't virgin so you were a cocksucker by proxy and therefore a faggot, if you didn't eat pussy, you were a freak and therefore a faggot, my first introduction to the "KISS" method, Keep It Simple Stupid! The company we were assigned to was actually a permanent party company, not a training company. The other guys there already had regular jobs, so we were a real inconvenience, especially since we tried to circumvent military procedure at every opportunity. The First Sergeant took great pleasure in catching us in our little ploys and bringing us back to reality. It's amazing how fast you understand the military ethic after an afternoon of scrubbing urinals with your very own toothbrush. Toward the end of the course, a rumor started floating around that if we failed the course, it was a straight trip to 11-B (infantry) and a quick trip to Viet Nam where we would surely die. Everybody panicked. There was never any need to worry. After the graduation, we found out that the Army was determined to graduate 100% of the class so they could keep the training and not have to give it back to the Air Force. Military Intelligence. One thing I have to give the Army though, not one guy from our class was transferred. They kept us all at Rucker so we could tune our limited skills on Warrant Officer Candidates. They would rather we crashed a few candidates into the ground (everyone knows they are lower than snake shit on the evolutionary scale) than go somewhere and hurt an actual pilot.

Being a real trooper by this time I spent as much time in the beer hall as I could. It was just another barn like building but you could get cold beer for 10 cents a can and that really appealed to me. I was only 18 years old and my alcohol consumption to that point had been what I could talk an older guy into buying for me. Now I could walk up to the NCO in charge and buy it just like it was legal. I even had civilian kids asking ME of I'd buy them some beer. It was all 3.2 % stuff, but it would get you buzzed if you drank enough on an empty stomach!! It was after a particularly vigorous session that I met the First Sergeant on a personal level. I was heading back to the barracks and was carrying the last of a 6 pack of Old Milwaukee beer when top walked by. In my best "buddy" fashion I said "Hey Top, wanna beer?", well, I actually think he thought it was funny, but I ended up with night KP for being drunk in the company area. Who knew that you weren't supposed to be drunk at 10 AM on a Tuesday?? That's how I discovered night KP. The baker at the mess hall was a great little guy from Boston. He had the reputation of being a real hard ass and went through KP's like shit through a goose. The first evening I met him we had a bit of a row (I still have a flat knuckle on one hand) but after that we became buddies. I’d even "buy" night KP from the other guys that got it. I also learned that you never eat anything the night baker cooked. He had a habit of masturbating into the darndest things. He had the reputation of having the fluffiest bread of any mess hall on post. Wonder if the lifers ever guessed what made his bread rise so well. We'd make a huge smoked oyster pizza and site around laughing about how he was "giving it" to the lifers. Different strokes I guess.

I stayed at Rucker for two months after graduation. Rucker was a helicopter training ground for Warrant Officers and Officers learning the basic rules of keeping a helicopter from crashing too hard. We had a real resentment toward the Warrant officer candidates. They had nice barracks and all drove nice cars. In retrospect I guess they deserved it as we didn't know the kind of harassment they were getting. After they graduated it was fun to try and get the first salute. They were supposed to pay you a dollar for the privilege. We used to meet them coming out of graduation and then salute left handed and see if they'd catch it. Only a few did, but they were so happy to be out of the training that they didn't get too mad. Later I was to become friends with a number of these guys that were at Rucker the same time I was. The work was dull and repetitious, but at least the hours were long. Go out in the morning, launch a bunch of white knuckled instructor pilots shepherding a bunch of panicked candidates, make sure none of them dies on YOUR runway, sit like a lump for and hour, and then try to keep from laughing at the controlled crashes these candidates called landings. The language was colorful. The airwaves were supposedly controlled by the Feds and the military, but phrases like "Grab the stick not your dick!", "Don't look at me asshole, the ground is going to kill you!", "If you don't fuck better than you fly you'll never get laid" and (the most common) "Aw shit" were often heard over the air. After a while, we could tell which instructor pilot was which by their voices. I got to know a few of them, and most of them agreed that it was more dangerous to be an instructor than a combat pilot. It was also common to see the instructors get out after a few hours with a particularly dense candidate and kick the bird or just stand there holding their head. I never did envy those guys. It would really be a drag to make it through Viet Nam then get killed because a candidate flew you into a water tower practicing autorotations. Instructor pilots were even easy to spot in civilian clothes, they were the ones with the permanent twitch

Contact with the opposite sex became a priority. The ladies around a military post came in two types, totally unattainable and hookers. The nice girls wanted nothing to do with soldiers and the hookers were only interested in the candidates with great cars and officers with money. The poor EM making $100 a month didn't stand a chance. We had a guy from Atlanta in our platoon, so we decided to drive over there and see what he could scare up. Well, in 1968, on Peachtree St in Atlanta if you didn't have hair down to your waist, you just weren't acceptable. We (with our onion head hair do's) stuck out badly. We couldn't even get the hookers to talk to us there. It turns out that the guy with the supposed contacts in Atlanta was the male equivalent to Typhoid Mary when it came to girls. His only claims to notoriety was acne that cleared up the instant he joined the service and a decided propensity for social disease. Not a real impressive womanizing reputation. It taught me a valuable lesson, only lie about your home life when you are absolutely positive that none of your buddies will ever come within 500 miles of your hometown. One of the guys decided that he just had to get married. In the Army that rates as about a 9 on the difficulty scale. He went through the red tape, flew his sweet heart down and managed a three-day pass for the ceremony. The plan was to get married the first day, then spend the next two days in a motel doing the honeymoon thing. With my sense of humor, a joke on the moonstruck Lothario was a moral imperative. We had the obligatory bachelor party and planned a small reception after the ceremony. I volunteered to make some of my notorious Idaho punch for said reception. I used my usual ingredients (grape juice, 7up and 190 proof grain alcohol) then added the special extras, about four ounces of saltpeter and $40 worth of amphetamine. No, I didn't worry about drug interaction at the time. The reception was great. You wouldn't believe how talkative the guests were. The young couple left for their abbreviated honeymoon and we all went back to the base. When the guy came back a couple days later, he was a mess. It seems that they tried valiantly to consummate the marriage, but all the guy could do was talk about the act. For some reason his equipment had failed him. I was having fun with my little joke until one of the guys decided to tell the guy what I had done. He was afraid the guy might become suicidal. I learned another valuable lesson, NEVER mess with the libido of a former Golden Gloves boxer! Duty became a drag. There were a few exciting times like the Mardi Gras, and hunting water moccasins along the Chattahoochee River (we never caught any) but for the most part, life was boring. I bought a motorcycle (Triumph 650) and started putting around the country. I got rid of the bike when it nearly cost me my sex life. I had replaced the stock seat with a fancy one, and I never really bolted it down. I was riding over a particularly bad section of road, so I stood up on the pegs. At some point, the seat fell off. I didn't realize the seat was gone, so when I hit smooth road, I dropped back down. Right on the tank support and battery. Try standing in formation after you've tried to insert a battery where the sun don't shine. I couldn't even go to the medics. If you hurt yourself off duty, you get an Article 15 (like an Army misdemeanor) for destruction of government property (said property being your body). They really care. The thought of sitting in the south and controlling candidates for my entire military career soon became a black cloud in my life. So rather that remain in relative safety, I proved that my mother took drugs during my fetal period and volunteered for Viet Nam. The guys gave me a great party, and my time in grits hell was over. .

I was granted 30 days leave before reporting for RVN. This was to be a real change in my life. I went back to the town in Oregon that I had moved to from Idaho. The girl I had been writing to met me at the airport with her parents. The fact that her father (who always carried a gun) didn't deter her from molesting me in the back seat. I can still remember thinking that I was going to die in a car in Portland before ever getting a chance to go to Viet Nam. Luckily she was very good in her ministrations and her Dad never even knew. Lucky me. Most of the guys I had gone to school with were either gone or working so I had a lot of time to myself. I was a little apprehensive to say the least and spent a lot of time up in the woods. I drank heavily. I figured that I was going to have a great time one way or the other. The last week before I left we had a party at a buddies house and drank solid for 4 days. I more or less remember all of it. There were 4 of us that had been friends in school. All three of them told me that I was an idiot for joining. Later all three would do time in the service and two would be in Viet Nam. The last night was one of those maudlin things where everyone promised to write, the girls all said they'd send pictures and goodies. The next day I left. I never got one letter from any of the girls at the party except my own girlfriend. Never got one from two of the three buddies either. Going to Viet Nam in 1969 was kind of like falling off the Earth. Some people were actually embarrassed to know someone over there and others didn't want to think about it. That's OK, I was just joining the best Fraternity in the world.

I reported to the overseas depot on a Saturday, full of patriotic vigor and great expectations. Naturally, as soon as I reported in, I began to question my sanity. At the orientation (the Army seems to have a great need to orient their people as many times as possible) we were told that we could not make any phone calls or have any contact with the outside. I took this to mean that my impending arrival in Viet Nam was being kept a secret, but it made me wonder why there was a bank of pay phones in the hall with no guards. I tried one, yep, they worked. We were shown to our temporary quarters, the biggest barn I had ever seen. There must have been thousands of guys in a monster room with no interior walls. I immediately went to the game room. Great planning. Two pool tables and three pinball machines. I figured that mathematically, I could get to play in about two years. We did everything in formation. We went to chow, the classes, everything. In one formation a guy asked me if I'd like to get stoned. Thinking (naive me) that he had a way out of here, I said yes. Instead of anything brilliant, he handed me a small pill. I asked what it was and he said "don't worry, you'll like it!" so I naturally threw it away. Later that day they (the medics) carried him out kicking and screaming. So much for "try it, you'll like it". We were herded out of the barns, loaded on busses, and taken to Travis AFB to board our flight to the mysterious Orient. I should have known what it was going to be like when I saw the Airliner we were to use. Something like "Joe's Airlines, If We Don't Get You There, Oh Well." When they told us that we were going to use civilian transport, I had assumed that we would have a regular pilot and crew. I boarded the plane with all the confidence you would have going under the knife of a Doctor who had graduated from the Bombay School of Medicine and Veterinary Services. I was a little nervous. We took off, flew for about two hours and landed in Alaska. We had two hours to kill, so I got off the plane, drank a $2.00 beer and watched my compatriots buy reindeer shit jewelry. Any way, we left there, made another stop (in Hawaii I think, I slept through it) and before you knew it (only about 24 hours) we were in the traffic pattern for Bien Hoa, Viet Nam. I still wish the pilot would have kept the fact that our approach would be steep to avoid being shot down a secret unto himself.

We landed at Bien Hoa about noon on April 15th, 1969. And some people only hate that day because it's tax day! What an experience. I stepped out of the plane and immediately had an NCO describing my heritage again. We ran to a big hangar like affair where we were supposed to catch a bus for the replacement station. There were guys telling us where to go and what to do if we started receiving incoming fire or a ground attack. Now you have to realize that we have no weapons. I'm starting to get just a little worried. I figured that if things got really hairy, I could knock one of the MPs in the head, and hold off the screaming hordes with his 45. Before I could formulate a decent plan though, we were herded on busses and shipped off to Long Binh and the 90th Replacement. As we boarded the busses, I asked the bored PFC why there was chicken wire over the windows and was rewarded with the comforting information that it was so the VC couldn't throw grenades through the windows. I had confidence oozing out by that time.

Let's see, how to describe the replacement outfit. It was a definite confidence builder. I had been in country for about five hours when I was informed that I would be pulling guard duty. Terrific! Now I would get the chance to start winning the war! Oops! They gave us three rounds of ammunition and strict instructions not to use them. I finally figured out their logic. We were just the warning system. When the powers that be heard our pitiful little three round salvos, they'd send the real soldiers out to walk over our martyred bodies to squash the enemy. No such luck, I lived through my first night with nothing more exciting happening that a bunch of drunks from the EM club coming by our bunker with such words of encouragement as "You're gonna die!", "Poor bastards!" and "You have how many days left?". I discovered it was a tradition for the guys leaving the country to make the new guys feel wanted. Kind of like Pat Garret made Billy the Kid feel Wanted. I soon made the brilliant discovery that everything in the country was hot. The water was hot in the lister bags (a canvas water bag with the little plastic faucets on the bottom so you have to almost lay in the dirt to get a drink), the dirt was hot, the hooches were hot, the air was hot, but odd, in the mess hall, the kool aid was hot but the chow was cold. Greasy cold weenies and white rice. Yumm!! After three days in Long Binh, I finally got my duty assignment. Some place called Tay Ninh. When the guy in the orderly said "Lucky you, rocket city" I should have known that the Luck Trolls were once again shitting on my parade. The helicopter ride out to Tay Ninh was exhilarating. I think maybe we got as far as 50 feet off the ground one or two times. I later discovered that it was another fine military tradition to try and make a new guy puke by flying as low, fast and erratic as the bird would allow. I actually gained some status by not blowing lunch on this flight. Good thing I had shit out everything from my lungs down from the malaria pills for two days before making the flight.

Tay Ninh was supposedly a historic place in that strange country. I was told it was the main area or headquarters for the CaoDai religion. One of those weird eastern religions that was way beyond the comprehension of an 18 year old kid. I did find out later that they get real pissed when you kill a tiger, but that's another story. We landed at Tay Ninh with a flourish and I was pointed toward my unit. I was met by a couple of guys who introduced themselves as Dud and Granny. I soon discovered that very few guys used their real names over there. Whether it was to confuse the Army, the enemy or the FBI I never found out, but to this day I don't know the real names of some of the guys over there. My name became "Spud" when the guys found out I was from Idaho. Real original. Later that evening we were standing around when the air was shattered by a mighty blast. Having military razor reflexes, I hit the dirt face first. When I looked up, the rest of the guys were still standing and grinning. That was outgoing artillery! Later that night another set of explosions ripped through the unit, and not wanting to appear too uncool, I calmly strolled out of the hootch and down to the orderly room. This time everyone else was on their bellies. That was INCOMING! Within a week I could tell the difference and even tell the calibers of outgoing and incoming. In the outgoing mode, 105's really pierced your ears while 155's and 8 inchers just changed the direction your hair pointed. With incoming, the 80MM mortars would make a crashing sound, the 107mm rockets would change your sex and the 122's would stop life cold! I really hated the 122's, as you could get hit from a long way away! The really sucky part was that the gooks would sit in Cambodia and shoot rockets at us with impunity. We couldn’t' shoot at them over there. Never really seemed fair to me. In the spring of 1970 we were to really surprise the Hell out of the NVA in Cambodia though. For the first time, I actually learned something I considered useful.

I managed to get my teeth broken out in the first couple of weeks, and over the air I sounded like somebody trying to talk with a mouthful of something disreputable. Because of this physical disability, I didn't get to work in my designated job of VFR (visual flight rules) Tower Controller. Since I had a temporary respite from actual military duty, I took it upon myself to make friends in a number of useful places. I had noticed immediately that what I considered to be the necessary amenities of life (such as a dry place to shit) were sadly lacking. I had received a pretty good education in the art of horse-trading in my youth, so I started using it to help our unit. It didn't take the lifers (career military) long to notice that us poor enlisted slobs had a better life style than they did. In particular, our latrine (we had two latrines, one for about 20 enlisted men and one for one senior NCO and one officer) always seemed to have toilet paper and the roof was new. That prompted their interest in me. The old man called me in and asked me how I had managed to obtain my merchandise, I simply told him that I had spent a little time in the various clubs around the base and made it known that I could get a guy a ride on a helicopter almost any place in the entire region. That was pretty handy to a guy going on R @ R or leave or such, so some of the guys weren't opposed to coming up with a little surplus supplies for the privilege. The Old Man decided to make my life a little easier and gave me the keys to the palace in the form of unlimited class 6 (the military liquor store) access. All of a sudden we were a rich unit. I would take a bottle of whiskey (for which I paid 95 cents), go out to the navy detachment, trade it for 5 pairs of dungarees size extra small (Navy bell bottom levis) then bring the dungarees into town where the dinks would pay almost any price I asked for them. Oh, I forgot to mention that we would dye the pants first with anything the army didn't seem to be needing at the time and tell the gooks that they were the latest thing from the World (the United States). I found that if you put the pants in a barrel of water that you had put the colored powder from a smoke grenade in, you got pretty (albeit temporary) colors. We had unlimited ice, curtains, fans, and the company of some of he friendliest girls in the province. The only problem with the scheme was you couldn't sell to the same gook store twice. They didn't like the fact that the color came out in the rain (it rained a lot over there). We needed a new plan. We decided to build a club. The lifers were getting rich off the guys at the regular EM clubs, so the idea of a place where a guy could get bombed and pay a fair price seemed like a good idea. We bought beer for one dollar per case and sold it ice cold for ten cents a can. A 140% profit. The only problem was keeping enough of it cold to sell to everyone that wanted it. I made a deal with one of the supply sergeants at the helicopter company to the effect that the next incoming attack (they happened about every night), he would toss a grenade beside one of the empty conexes (a big steel Army storage container with a lockable door), combat loss the thing, then sell it to me for $25. We had the first walk-in ice box in a small unit on the base camp.

One of our real bad ideas was the hooker plan. A lot of the units had commanding officers that actually worried about the VD rate. They wouldn't let the guys bring the girls in or even visit the cat houses, and young men being what they are, it created a ready market for enterprising individuals such as us. The girls charged about $1.50 and we charged $1.00 "bunker rental". It would have worked great if it wouldn't have been for Dud's dog. This dog was the run of the mill variety, bur Dud liked him a lot. For some reason, Dud was away from the base camp for most of the day. The girls had put in a hard morning, and got hungry. You have to understand, gooks looked at dogs like we look at cheeseburgers. Anyway, they had that dog all dressed out and roasting nicely when poor old Dud returned. He about went ballistic. It took two guys to take the fragmentation grenades away from him. He took off across the company area, and we thought we had avoided a catastrophe. WRONG!! He came tearing across the unit in a truck, drove it across the opening to the bunker, then tossed about half a dozen tear gas grenades in with the barbeque crowd. That CS gas took the outer layer of hide off all those girls before we could get them out. They looked like boiled lobsters. You know, we couldn't talk any more girls into coming into our unit for any amount of money, so our venture went out the window.

We were what was known as an orphan unit. We didn't have our own mess hall, supply room or any of the other things a regular unit would have except regulations and lifers. We were "allowed" to eat at the assault helicopter company across the runway, but the food was pretty pitiful and being a helicopter company, there were RLO's (real live officers) and warrants everywhere. Breakfast really wasn't bad, they put the green eggs under red lights (security purposes) so you really couldn't tell what color they were and after a cup of what passed for coffee to numb your taste buds, and the burned bacon on shrapnel hard toast was almost edible. The warrants were pretty good guys when you were away from the company area, but the RLO's were pretty much assholes all the time. The food wasn't worth the hassle. Who wants to get yelled at for a supper of rice (always rice) and some type of amorphous "meat" and a real surplus of stewed tomatoes? About the only vegetable that I saw on a chow line was whipped squash, the same color and consistency of baby shit! So we scrounged our food. We discovered that we were allotted "A" rations. That's the stuff they send the mess hall for the cooks to turn into unrecognizable hash. We took a truck to our rear area in Bien Hoa and found a whole warehouse full of goodies. There was only one catch. Everything came in "company" sized packs. It's pretty hard for 20 guys to use up 100 pounds of powdered eggs and a 5 gallon can of bacon. And that was just the breakfast fare. Aha! It has value, therefore we can sell it. About the only thing we couldn't get rid of was the can of "donkey dick" sandwich meat. It came in a round can about 3" in diameter and the "grain" ran the length of the can. After the first guy hinted as to what the contents might be, it was considered inedible. Believe it or not, we were too patriotic to sell it to the gooks, but some mess cooks weren't. With a minimum of blackmail, we traded most of the stuff to cooks on the base camp so they wouldn't get in trouble for being short on rations. In return, we got field vouchers to draw C-rations and Lurp rations. Between those, what we got from home and the deer meat, we ate pretty good.

I should take this time to explain to the normal citizen what C rations and LURPs are. C rats are food that comes in little green cans inside a cardboard box. There are at least 12 different meals, 90% of which were designed to kill the enemy if they were to be captured. I never found a person that was able to eat the "Ham, eggs, chopped, mixed". It smelled like cheap dog food and looked like it too. Then there was the "Ham and Mother Fuckers". This translates to Ham and Lima Beans. Trouble was there wasn’t any ham. If you stuck a spoon in to that can, you pulled out a can shaped green "sucker". I never really say a lima bean either. There was always a can of fruit in each box. I used to remember all of them but the only good ones were peaches and pineapple. I could never stomach the fruit cocktail, the cherries always tasted a little like gasoline to me. Then there was desert (gulp). Imagine a fruitcake that has been passed around as a white elephant gift for several years, never stored in a good environment and you have a general idea of the fruitcake and the date nut loaf. Then there was pound cake! I honestly think I could get anything for that stuff. It wasn't all that good, it was just the only edible thing in the box!! The candy bars were referred to as "John Wayne" bars because it would take a real hero to eat one. Shaped like a hockey puck and about as tasty! There was also "crackers". If you ever put one in a bowl of water, you knew why you felt full after eating them. They would swell to several times their size. They tasted like the cardboard they came in and the white goop they called "cheese spread" and the brown tar like substance they called "peanut butter" didn't do much to cut the flavor! Finally were the cigarettes. I actually got some with Lucky Strike Green (WWII Victory Luckies) that you had to be careful lighting, as they would really catch on fire! That's a dry cigarette, but they they were over 20 years old by the time we got them. Then there were the Chiclets. If you've ever eaten (chewed) them, you know it takes about half a box to get any gum satisfaction, we got two little pieces per meal, just enough to get stuck in your teeth!! The last thing about C rats was the toilet paper. A little package of sheets about 2 inches by 3 inches and folded over. Made from the dregs of the paper supply, actual chunks of wood still in there, and I still think they used waxed paper. We finally decided that you were supposed to wipe your ass with your fingers, then use the toilet paper to clean off your hand!!! Lurp rations were gourmet fare by comparison. Freeze dried things like chili, spaghetti, chicken and rice and beef stew. Really good grub. All you had to do was add a little hot water, wait a few minutes and you actually had something good to eat. I’ve never been able to figure out why they had to put a thing like a "cornflake bar" in an otherwise good meal. Maybe the Army had a deal with the manufacturer of Corn Flakes to get rid of all the outdated flakes they had. Hard as a rock and completely tasteless!! They had to leave in the toilet paper though, couldn't have anything supplied by the military that didn't have some sort of challenge to it!! I really have to put a mention in here about Sundry Packs. They were supposed to be for forward units only. They contained cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, candy bars (REAL ONES), shaving cream, toothbrushes, stationery, pens etc. A real treasure trove of goodies. Almost as good as a package from home. Trouble was I saw a lot more of them in the lifer hootches than I saw out with the troops. Being in Aviation I got accused of taking out all the good cigarettes (Salem and Winston were worth a fortune to the gooks), and leaving the Pall Malls and the Kents. There were also Kools, but I never saw them make it out. I’m pretty sure the guys at the ration point were making out pretty good with the mamsans because I never took anything from the stuff going out to the grunts!

I guess I should explain the "deer" meat. After a few nights of drunken revelry with some of the warrants (they used to borrow EM shirts to come in our club, they didn't like lifers either) we concocted a scheme to obtain fresh meat. There were lots of deer in area. We just needed some way to get them. Our first effort was to buzz brush patches in a Huey, then shoot the deer with one of the M-60 door guns. The trouble was, there wasn't much left after you hit one of them 8 or 10 times with a machine gun. We finally hit on the perfect method. We'd fly over a brush patch at about 100 feet, throw a CS grenade in, then shoot the deer when they ran out with an M-14 loaded with tracers. We even had one of the guys in maintenance make us a hook so we didn't have to land to pick them up. It would have been hard to explain to the lifers how we lost a $500,000.00 helicopter while hunting the makings for a barbeque. Uncle Sam just wouldn't have understood. As it turned out I was the only one that knew how to dress out a deer. I ad always thought that was something every guy learned. After seeing the first couple of efforts by the Warrants (it looked as if they'd stuck a grenade up it's ass) I said I'd do the honors after that. The deer were pretty small, just about right for a good BBQ, and the meat was really good. Some of the Seals and Beanies said they'd supply meat for one of the get togethers, but not wanting to take a chance on cannibalism and knowing their propensity for practical jokes we politely said we'd provide the meat. A side note to the deer BBQ's was the BBQ sauce. Everyone had their own recipe. All were mostly alcohol (beer) and tomato sauce. Some contained such gourmet things as Lavoris and after shave! I really don't want to know what the all other guys put in theirs, but mine was beer, Army meat sauce (kinda like A1), pepper, tomato sauce, bourbon, garlic and all the hot sauce I could scrounge! I personally think that it was the best sauce in the country!!

Our deer hunting led to one of the more interesting CID investigations I was involved in. One of the Loach (light observation helicopter) pilots was pissed because we wouldn't hunt out of his bird. They're really little, and the hueys carried more firepower in case we actually got into trouble. Anyway, he decided to go out on his own. Being a Scout pilot and therefore certifiably insane, he went hunting by himself with only a 38 revolver for hunting armament. He was just flying around when what did he happen to see but a tiger. He flew back to the base and grabbed one of the guys for a gunner, then went back out. He found the tiger again by throwing frag grenades into the brush piles around where he had first spotted it, and do you think he would let the gunner take him out with the M-60, of course not. He shot the thing with his 38 and somehow broke it's back. According to the gunner, he orbited around that monster for nearly an hour blasting away with that puny pistol. The tiger finally died, probably from frustration or exhaustion, which pleased the warrant to no end. He keyed his mike and said to the gunner "I'll stay just off the ground, you jump out and make sure it's dead!" Being careful to use proper military terminology, the gunner replied "Fuck you,,,,sir." They finally decided it was dead, landed on top of it, lashed it to the skids, and flew back to the base. As I've said before, Tay Ninh is the head of one of the weird religions over there, and one of their beliefs is that if a monk is extra special good in this life, he'll be reincarnated as a tiger. Imagine their indignation when an American helicopter flies RIGHT OVER THE TOP OF THE TEMPLE with a dead tiger lashed to the skid, and bleeding all over the place. Definitely not the way to win the hearts and minds of the people. The warrant didn't get caught though, we (I was in the control tower at the time) cleared him directly to graves registration where the carcass was stashed until we could make arrangements to get it tanned. The lifers stayed away from that particular place with a vengeance. We used that stash spot a lot He shipped it home in about 20 pieces, then had them sewed together by a taxidermist back home. The CID investigation lasted about two weeks. Do you believe they couldn't find one guy that would admit seeing a tiger swinging from a helicopter? Not one guy!

One of the most odious tasks ever handed out to an enlisted man was the shit burning detail. The out houses had the bottom of a 50 gallon drum that had been cut off to catch the waste material as it was deposited. It befell one unlucky individual every day to drag it out with a long rod, mix it with diesel and light it on fire. The greasy black smoke was worse than any chemical or biological weapon the Army could come up with. With my attitude and penchant for opening my mouth at the wrong time, I had the privilege of this perfume on a fairly regular basis. One night I was in better than average form at the club complaining about the plight of the enlisted man in that place when a couple of visiting warrant officers overheard me. They immediately took up the dialogue, telling me how hard they had it. One thing led to another and they agreed on a job switch. One of them had to pull an overnight CQ duty at the ready room (a non flying job, just running radios and generally keeping an eye on things) so we agreed to change details. I would sit in for him and he would burn my shit the next day. The room was easy duty, I mostly slept, the VC being inordinately quiet that week. The following morning, he was over at the hootch bright and early with his compatriot from the evening before. I told them the routine with one small exception, I told them that 115/145 avgas (very high test) would expedite the job. I then headed for the hootch to get the guys to watch the fun. They did everything pretty much as usual except for the 2 or 3 gallons of gas. They even stirred it up extra well. When they lit it, there was a mighty WHOOMP, and shit did raineth upon the earth. I probably laughed harder at some point in my life, but the sight of two officers standing there, hair singed, covered in shit (enlisted shit at that) was a sight I'll remember all my life. Unfortunately, they didn't get quite as much of a kick out of it. For the next two weeks, every time they took off, they flew directly over our hootch. Between the blowing dirt and wind, very little rest was achieved in that period. The standing rule, don't get mad, get even.

There was one particular warrant (we called him Yosarian) who liked to come over and smoke pot in our bunker. He was a great pilot, but his nerves were always raw. He's come over, mooch a bowl of dew (officers NEVER bought their own), get really loaded, then spend the rest of the night worrying that the MP's were going to bust us. He really freaked out one night when a Captain with an MP arm band came into the bunker. I thought he was going to stroke out on us. It took him quite a while to understand that the Captain smoking the pipe across the bunker from him wasn't going to send him to jail. It was really quite commonplace to have a couple warrant and even a few RLOs smoking with us. We were known as the guys who could keep a secret. Actually we were afraid to make any waves. If the lifers on base would have compared notes on us, we'd all still be in jail. Our pot smoking officers led to my first exposure to agent orange. One of the guys decided to play a joke on one of our regulars. He had a 45 cal pistol replica that fired caps, when the captain came walking into our hooch, he jumped up, made some comment about officers in general and the captain in particular, pointed the toy at the guy and pulled the trigger. The caps went off with a loud bang and a stain spread down the captain’s flight suit. He deduced by our rolling on the floor and laughing that he wasn't actually shot and after borrowing a change of attire from one of the guys, spent the rest of the time getting loaded with us. About two weeks later, this same pilot was on a mission between Tay Ninh and Cu Chi and he called me in the tower for a radio check. I asked him what he was doing and he said "killing bushes" which meant he was spraying the small brush piles around the rice paddies to deny the VC a place to hide. I made some comment about that being his speed, seeing as how bushes didn't move and couldn't shoot back. We both laughed and then I forgot about him. About a half an hour later, he radioed in and said " Spud come outside and look at the gas station (slang for the refueling point). Thinking something was amiss, I opened the door and ran around the catwalk. About that time, a fine mist settled over me. It was sticky and smelled awful. I heard from inside the tower "check your bush (slang for the bad moustaches we all wore) I think it's dead!" Payback was a bitch, I smelled like that stuff for almost a week!

One of our favorite pastimes was "rat patrol." The rats were BIG in Viet Nam. If the population could herd them like cattle, there would never be a protein shortage. They were especially prolific outside our perimeter where we dumped our trash. We had standing permission to go out beyond the perimeter and fire our weapons whenever we wanted to do so. The Army figured this would keep us proficient with our individual weapons. It was kind of fun for a while, but even great things like that can get boring after a while. One day we were out there with our rifles when an Engineer truck came by and asked if they could play too. They had neat stuff. After shooting their M-79 and M-60, our M-14s and 16s seemed kind of tame. It was actually a Scout pilot who came up with the master plan. He asked who was responsible for fire inspections at the ammo dump (Tay Ninh had a HUGE ammo dump). I told him that the crash crew over at the runway usually performed that particular service. He asked if we could borrow the truck. I caught on to the scheme. The next day he and I were in the fire truck at the ammo dump doing a "fire inspection." We put goodies in every locker in that truck. LAWs rockets, frags, concussion grenades, claymores and everything else we thought would be fun. The rats in the dump never had a chance. Those gook rats had never seen a three stage claymore ambush before, much less anti tank rockets streaking at their cruddy little selves. Good clean fun.

In my opinion, grunts (infantry) were the cream of Viet Nam. They had the worst job, and they received no frills. Tay Ninh was a rear area for one of the big outfits. They even had a swimming pool. But the lifers couldn't leave them alone even when they were supposed to be resting. They were always welcome in our club, and we would go to extraordinary means to get them rides when they needed to get out. We could even arrange to get them to a different base if they wanted to visit a buddy somewhere else in country. We had some of the best radios in the whole country, so we'd try to find folks for then too. If the lifers would have discovered the uses we had for their fancy toys, they would have shit military bricks. The grunts had one strange game they played. It was called "grenade roulette." They would sit on the top of the berm line (a 10 foot dirt mound), put a baseball frag between their legs, pull the pin and let it roll down the hill. The last one to kick over backwards out of the blast zone "won". I never played that game.

Green Beanies, alias Special Forces were grunts with an attitude. I have no idea what they were like out in the bush, but when they showed up on the base, everyone was supposed to give them a wide berth. I know they had a warped sense of humor. I had been in country about two weeks when a bunch of them were trying to sell me an old Springfield 30/06 (an old rifle). They had a grenade launcher attachment for it and a bunch of parachute flares. Finally one of them said " just shoot it once and you'll be impressed". Not being one to pass up a challenge, I did it. The only problem being, I fired a flare with the rifle up to my shoulder. Well, my shoulder blades hit the ground first!! They had neglected to tell me that the proper way to fire a rifle grenade is with the butt of the rifle against the ground. Common sense should have told me that shooting a two-pound projectile was probably going to result in substantial recoil, but, as I have stated before, my mother raised an idiot. What could I do? There were four of them and only one semi crumpled me. I passed up the urge to fight them ( sudden stroke of genius) and instead laughed and bought the rifle. I figured I was saving some other poor FNG the pain and humiliation I had suffered. I later got to know several of them quite well, And I STILL think they're warped! Navy seals were another group of elite soldiers I became familiar with. In my scrounging forays, I ran into a lot of Remington Raiders who would do just about anything for an authentic souvenir to send home with their war stories. The Seals were an inexhaustible supply of great items. The only trouble with dealing with the Seals was their method of haggling. There was their price or get the Hell out. I willingly paid their price because I knew I could at least double my capital back at the base camp. I had belt buckles, gook web gear, clothing and flags (with authentic blood-I never questioned how authentic) officer boards and lots of other sundry items. There was one dude who was especially fond of bloody rags. He had this dog, a BIG, BIG dog. A Belgian Shepard by the name of Dog. If you saw the dog lying around the hooch, you would swear that he was a big lazy puppy. BUT, when his master said "gook" that dog turned into the best imitation of a werewolf I have ever seen. I'm sure he at least doubled in size and most of that was teeth! All this while not making a sound. The guy claimed the dog ate nothing but dead gook (not more than medium rare). I don't know this to be true, but in the 8 months I knew him, I never saw that dog eat. I don't want to know.

I have no idea who came up with the idea, but we decided to start publishing an underground newspaper. Nothing real controversial, just a little inter-unit gossip and information on which sites were going to be getting "surprise" inspections by the lifer squad. This came about when the lifers surprised us with one of their cute little inspections. We took a lot of incoming in Tay Ninh, so the lifers didn't like to be there any more often than necessary. We hadn't seen them in almost three months. I was in the tower when a chopper called in with a call sign I didn't recognize. I didn't think much about it until they requested clearance to the ramp by the tower. Oh Shit! I have hair down to my shoulders, a great Fu Manchu beard, a Hawaiian flowery shirt, tailored camo pants and cowboy boots on and I'm one of the MOST military appearing guys in the unit. I could see the veins blowing out on the lifer Major's face from clear up in the tower (100 feet up). They decided to replace our commanding officer and give us all Article 15s'. I happened to be the first one in line to sign for the infractions when it came to me. An enlisted man faced with an Article 15 can request a court martial and the court martial CANNOT INCREASE THE PUNISHMENT stated in the Article 15. Hey, a court martial is at least 5 days back at the rear. Flush toilets, hot water, no gooks and real food. What can I lose? When the rest of the guys heard my request, they got with the program and followed suit. You have never seen a more pissed off bunch of lifers in your life. I thought the Major was going to have a stroke. All he could do was yell, and in a combat zone, that's about as bad as a traffic cop waving at you on the freeway. They couldn't court martial all of us or they'd have to shut down the site. We got away with it and our old commanding officer walked to the helicopter laughing (he was retiring with about 40 years in the service anyway). We used the crypto pouches for our newspaper. They went out of Bien Hoa every week. They contained various secret stuff (such as "watch out, the gooks are trying to kill you") radio frequencies and other military trivia. We figured that our little additions would go unnoticed, and we were right. The site chief (usually an E-5) always opened the pouches, and he'd just take out our rag before turning the other stuff over to the CO. Everything went great for several months. The lifers were going crazy because they couldn't catch anyone doing anything wrong. We probably could have ran it forever if it weren't for a site about 50 miles north of us. They were a particularly unruly lot, and when they got the word that the lifers were going to pay them a "surprise" visit, they decided to go all out. I have no idea where they got the class A uniforms to wear in formation for the lifers, but what really set them off was the Vietnamese BAND playing a ruined rendition of "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" as the brass got out of the helicopter. Another investigation. The only evidence they could find pointed at the Brigade Commander, after all, it was on his ditto machine that the papers were printed.

We heard from the Sea Wolf (Navy) chopper pilots that some of the Navy guys were water skiing behind their river patrol boats. It sounded very unmilitary and fun so we decided we had to come up with a plan to enjoy this pastime ourselves. It was one of the lunatic scout pilots who finally came up with the main solution. The Bandido checked out his loach for a routine mission over the mountain. We had arranged to meet him down on the river. One of the gook shops had come up with a reasonable facsimile of skis, so we figured we were set. A rappelling line was tied to one of the skids, the ship hovered over the river, the "lucky" skier jumped into the river, grabbed the rope and the race was on! We hadn't foreseen one important factor. A helicopter goes a really lot faster than a patrol boat. At about 50 MPH the skis were just barely touching the water. At 70 MPH they weren't. The guy was just being dragged over the top of the water, and being a scout gunner (LOTS more balls than brains) he kept hanging on. The "human bait" gator trolling kept up for about a half a mile when the gunner's fingers finally gave out and he crashed into the river. We figured the gunner would be glad to get back with his body basically intact. Wrong. It seems there was a bridge about a mile further up the river and the pilot and gunner had a bet going to see who would chicken out. The gunner bet the pilot wouldn't fly under the bridge and the pilot bet the gunner would let go before they got to the bridge. Since the pilot had managed to knock the gunner off, he (the pilot) claimed to have won the bet. There was nothing to do but run an instant replay. The gunner won, but suffered a poor landing on the riverbank when the pilot jerked up over the bridge. He told me later he really wished he hadn't wrapped that half hitch around his hand on the second try.

We got regular supplies from the distribution center on the base, but booze was rationed pretty closely (even with my ration card connection). We usually had plenty of beer, but every once in a while, supplies ran pretty low. We had been drinking pretty hard one evening when we discovered that we only had about a case of beer left. Everyone had a lot of nonsensical ideas where we could get more, but the voice of reason piped up and said "why don't we just fly down to Saigon and get some more?" We thought that was a great idea. Most of the crew chiefs and some of the gunners on the helicopters could fly nearly as well as the pilots, so we could see no down side in borrowing one of the Army's choppers for such a necessary venture. The question was raised as to which unit could spare a bird for our purposes. We decided the big outfit across the runway was probably the best bet since they had more birds and they wouldn't let anyone from other units in their club (they were in a different Army). We headed out across the runway, five guys just barely capable of unassisted walking, shopping for a helicopter. You have to understand, birds were taking off and landing all the time so one more wouldn't even be noticed. We finally found one in a big enough revetment that we figured we could get it out without killing ourselves and the flight was on. One of the guys staying behind had called a friend of mine at central class 6 and warned him of our impending arrival. We knew that the store was on the waterfront, so we didn't worry about finding it, being qualified navigators and all. We figured finding Saigon would be easy, just get real high (physically, not mentally) and look for a big ass town. It worked. The flight to Saigon usually took about 45 minutes, but we stretched it to an hour. It was kind of fun flying in a bird where the highest ranking man was an E-5 (we were sure to follow proper Army procedure). We found the beer dump, landed on a loading apron, wandered around until we found a palette with a sling on it, picked it up with the helicopter and flew off. The only complication was one of the guys just had to ride the sling back (he had cowboy blood in his background) , so we couldn't go quite as fast back. The guy on the sling kept stabbing beers with his survival knife and letting the wind blast it into his mouth. Between the pendulum action of the sling and the beer mist, he got pretty wasted and kept banging away at stuff on the ground with his 45. I didn't think he had that much ammo, but he managed to hit every figment of his imagination from Saigon to Tay Ninh. We hadn't thought as far as where we were going to put a sling load of beer when we took off, so there was quite a discussion as to the best stash spot. Our usual lifer-proof spot at graves registration was out, those guys drank more than we did. We finally decided to drop it between the hootches by our club so we wouldn't have far to carry it. That's just what we did, the beer and one extremely drunk GI dumped in a heap. It wasn't until we parked the chopper (we actually found the right revetment) that we realized that it wouldn't stay dark forever, and somebody would probably notice about a hundred cases of beer in a great pile. With so much wealth comes responsibility. We had to put it where the lifers would never find it, so we lined our enlisted personnel bunkers (officer bunkers are different, they're not as close to the berm line and they have thicker walls) with beer cases. It was almost fun to get a few incoming rounds for a while, but it got embarrassing when guys would run for a couple hundred yards, passing up several bunkers on the way for the safety of our "special" bunkers. About the helicopter, we had forgotten about the hour gauge, it tells how many hours the bird has flown, somewhat like an odometer. The Army got real mad about the mystery hours, but they couldn't ever prove anything. Another strike for the little guys.

One of my foraging forays resulted in me becoming the owner of an old "grease gun." This is a World War Two weapon made from sheet steel that really resembles its namesake. It fires a 45-caliber pistol bullet and is fully automatic. The problem with this particular gun was that it wouldn't stop firing until the entire magazine was empty! The way we fired it was to drop the magazine out when we wanted to stop. It was a pretty slow firing piece, about 150 to 200 rounds per minute, so dropping the magazine wasn't too difficult. There was a particularly goofy warrant officer who frequented our area (when the RLO's weren't around). He was from North Dakota, had blonde hair that stuck up all the time, was about six feet tall and about 120 pounds and we lovingly called him "Chicken Man" after the inept hero on the AFVN radio network. The guy couldn't do anything without getting in trouble. He took a Loach out one day, started blasting away at sea gulls out the window, got pissed because he couldn't hit them so he mangled a couple with his rotor blades! He made it back to the base, but that poor little chopper looked awful. The gunner was pissed too because there were feathers and bird guts all over the place. Chicken Man saw our grease gun and just had to shoot it. We had a weapons pit in our company area, and he practically begged us to let him crank off a few. Why not! It was a boring day anyway. We didn't think we should have to tell him about the weapon's peculiarity, him being an officer and a gentleman by act of Congress and therefore knowing all there is to know about everything. We just loaded up the thing and handed it to him. He braced himself and pulled the trigger. I don't think I've ever seen a better "panic" expression that when he let go of the trigger and the gun kept firing. I just wish he wouldn't have TURNED AROUND with that thing still stammering to ask "Did I break it?" The Colonel's bunker was behind us. It consisted of a steel conex with 50-gallon water barrels stacked around it. I guess old Chicken Man shot that bunker about twenty times. The gun finally emptied, and there he stood, smoking gun in his hand, all of us laying in the dirt laughing and the Colonel's bunker doing a great imitation of an Italian fountain. He was still standing there when the Colonel came out too. Another really great facial expression. The guy was really an artist at soundless expression. Chicken Man being the good sport he was didn't get even right away. He waited for almost a month. We were sitting in a bunker during a rocket attack. Being good soldiers we were smoking and joking and trying to enjoy the situation. We were all sitting on a bench along one side of the bunker, Chicken Man being at one end. He slowly removed his 38 and during a lull in the conversation, fired a tracer round right down the length of the bench (over our knees). Between the noise, the muzzle blast and the red tracer streaking across our legs, we thought we'd all been killed. He was really calm about the whole thing, rolling on the floor and laughing. He was still laughing when we sent him out to check on the incoming in his skivvies!!

The same scout pilot who gunned down our CO's bunker was always complaining about not being able to shoot back when the gooks shot at his helicopter. Let me explain, the scouts flew about 10 feet off the ground, looking for gooks and basically daring them to shoot at the chopper. There was a pilot flying the bird, and observer in the other pilot seat who carried an M16 or AK and a gunner or "torque" with an M60 in the back, but the pilot only had his pistol. This particular pilot wanted MORE firepower. He tried strapping rocket pods to his skid, but he almost crashed when they all fired at once, so he talked to the guys in ordinance and they somehow wired a mini-gun to the right skid. He had the trigger jury rigged to his stick and took off. I happened to be in the tower that day when one of the gunship pilots came up on our FM frequency laughing like a maniac. When he could finally speak with a normal voice, he told the story. It seems that Chicken Man was working out by the plantation at extremely low level when he began taking fire. He reported the enemy to the gunships, but instead of getting out and letting them blow up the area, he just fired up his makeshift mini-gun and started spinning around. The gunship pilot described the scene as "like looking at the bottom of one big ass lawn mower." The lifers made him take the gun off his bird, but he was a hell of a celebrity amongst the other pilots for quite a while.

The gooks used to fish in the muddy rivers around Tay Ninh. They caught little weird looking things that actually tasted pretty good when prepared by someone well versed in disguising ugly things ( the Phillipinos were great cooks!), but they were really small. While sitting on a bridge one day waiting for the road to be cleared for us to pass through (a common occurrence around there) we got a great idea. One of the guys from North Carolina remembered using Dupont Spinners back home. We guessed that a frag would work the same way. We pitched a couple in the pudding colored water and waited for the boom. Not much happened except the MP jeep in front of us got pretty muddy (no sense of humor those MP's) and about 200 little fish floated to the top. The old papasan by the bridge was overjoyed!! He promptly jumped into the water and began scooping up fish. We just knew that we should be able to capitalize on this procedure. We made a deal with the old papasan and we traded our fishing skills for some of the skills of the younger ladies of the village. I wonder if the Army ever was curious about the fragmentation grenade usage of an Air Traffic Control unit.

We received a box from our rear support area in one of our regular resupply runs marked "one each, fording apparatus, 1/4 ton vehicle." What in the Hell had the Army sent us now! We unwrapped it and found that it consisted of two extending tubes and two floats. After much discussion (the Army never sends directions with anything, you have to order the manual separately) we figured it was for a jeep to cross a river if the river was over the top of the carburetor. This had to be tried. We couldn't have a great and vital piece of equipment like this without putting it to the test. We knew where we were going to try it out (after the water skiing incident, we were intimately acquainted with the river) the only question was who got to be the driver. After a lot of smoking and drinking, the guy was chosen (he could still figure out how to start the Colonel's jeep). We put the snorkels on the carburetor and exhaust, fired a few round into the air and the guy bravely drove into the river. At this point, the river was about 15 feet deep, about 50 yards across and had a nice solid bottom. The snorkels worked great. The jeep went out of sight and the air kept sucking in and the exhaust was blowing out. We only forgot one small item. Air for the driver. I'll say this for PB, he stayed with it for at least a minute longer than I would have. When he blew out of the water, he yelled that he had kicked the jeep into neutral and would one of us dive down and finish the experiment. Having a greater knowledge of the complexities of the problem by that time, we declined. You know, a jeep can idle for several hours before it runs out of gas. It cost us a case of whiskey and a lot of embarrassment to get one of the tank outfits to bring out a tank retriever and drag it out of the river. I don't think the Colonel ever figured out why his jeep was so clean and the seats were so wet.

A couple of the guys really hated the gooks. They were fairly new in country, so I don't really know what their problem was, but the sentiment was there. They came up with one of the more nefarious of our schemes. We had a recoilless rifle mounted in the back of our 3/4 ton truck. We didn't have any rounds for the gun, but it looked awfully mean. The gooks had little tin shacks all along the road where they sold back all the stuff they had stolen from us (along with drugs and hookers) at inflated prices. It used to really make us mad when we had to drink "Wink" or "Bubble Up" or just plain club soda because the Class 6 store was all out of Pepsi and Coke, but the gooks always had plenty. They also always had candy bars and premium beer too. It was a moral imperative to make things right. We would pull up to a stand, order a bunch of stuff and when they brought the stuff out, we'd swivel the gun over, laugh as they tried to run through their ass holes and then take all the stuff. There was a very definite down side though, the name and number of our unit was painted on the front of the truck, and so within a very short period of time, the stands would close like dominoes when we would drive by. We couldn't have bought a soda for any amount of money anywhere between Tay Ninh and Bien Hoa. Oh well, we made our point.

One of my buddies and I put in for a R@R (one week vacation) in Bangkok. We never figured we’d get one, but the trolls running the military must have been asleep, because our orders came down. I only had about $300 so I had to borrow some money from my club fund to go, but we were on a plane within 24 hours of getting the orders. The feeling of going from a combat zone where nearly every waking hour is spent in fear of incoming rockets to a place where your wish is their command (if you have the money) is awesome. The military (being the concerned organization they are) gave us another obligatory orientation. They told us we should be careful about the girls because some of them might have VD. They said we should use judgment in our partying. They said we should stay out of fights. They said we should not change our money on the black market (where we could get about 40% more for it). Then they turned us loose. We went straight to a hotel, bought some civvies, then set out to break all their rules. I can’t describe the feeling of a couple of small town boys had when we discovered that you could “rent” women legally and were in fact encouraged to do so as they (the cathouses) were government controlled. Cheap too as the going rate was very reasonable. They were Asian though, and since my friends name was Rick I can still hear that lady saying over and over “oh Lick, oh Lick”!! I nearly laughed myself silly! We discovered (from a resident Australian) that we should rent a cab for the week so I would have transportation. He told me the guys were honest as long as they had their government sticker, and he was right. The first thing I noticed about the cabs was the fact that they drove on the wrong side of the road. This would have been easier to take if it weren't for the speed limits. There were three of them. 1. Stopped. 2. Fast and 3. HOLY SHIT!! You've never lived until you've raced around a traffic circle at about 60 MPH along with about a thousand other cabs, bicycles and pedicabs until centrifugal force shoots you out a side street. It helps if you're REALLY loaded. Which brings me to the getting loaded part. I explained to the taxi driver that I wanted some con sai (pot) and thought he understood. He took my money and returned with a carton of menthol cigarettes. I objected loudly as I'd paid nearly $5 and smokes were only $1.50 at the PX. He made some weird Thai gestures and I took it to mean that I should light one. I did and to my surprise I had indeed purchased a carton of menthol joints, filtertipped at that!! I darn near quit smoking regular cigarettes on that trip!! My first new acquaintance in Bangkok was a bunch of Australian soldiers from Viet Nam like us. They seemed like a nice bunch of guys, so we decided to meet later for a night on the town. I had never drunk with Australians before. They don't just consume alcohol, they commit temporary suicide. I lasted for about two bars, then the rest of the night went black. The next morning they were pounding on my door at about 8AM, waking me up and setting me to wonder how in the Hell I got back to the Hotel. As we sat around the room, drinking coffee, they explained that they'd had to carry me to the last few bars, but that I seemed like a good sort so they didn't mind. They even took pictures of me passed out in the booths with them so I'd have something to remember them by. That Thai beer was about 15% alcohol and those guys downed it like water. I don't remember a lot of the rest of the week, but I know that we ate and drank everything we could find. The first day I think I remember cheeseburgers, steak, spaghetti and milk shakes. Also a bath tub and all the really hot water (on demand, didn't have to wait for the mud to settle out and the sun to warm it) we wanted!! I don't think there was anything we didn't have that we could have wanted other than a round eyed woman, but believe me, we made do with what we had!!!

Shopping was another experience. When you walked into a shop they served you a glass of 15% beer. The glasses had a round bottom so you could not sit it down so being good little rednecks we just drained them! After about 3 stores we were haggling with the best of them. We cut their prices in half then joked about what a good deal we got on things we would never have purchased sober!!!! Being from the country we weren't exactly used to high class restaurants. In one we sat down, pretty well on the way to being comatose from beer and "cigarettes". The waiter brought out a whole bunch of tiny bowls of various concoctions. Thinking they were hors`d oeuvers we ate them. When the waiter came back we learned that we had eaten the menu!! Not as bad but certainly different we ate a a couple of street carts with our "dates". Later I learned that I ate monkey and octopus. Since then I have tried not to eat anything with arms!!!!

When I got back to the unit, we had a newby. A fresh-faced kid from California we promptly dubbed the California Kid. He was really naive. He actually asked if he could date the local girls. We told him he could do anything he wanted with them for a few bucks. He just couldn't grasp the situation, so we hired three of our favorite hookers, told them he was a " cherry boy" (slang for virgin) and turned them loose on him. When he emerged from that bunker, he was a changed man/boy. He was thoroughly addicted. It cost about 2 bucks to get laid at the time, and I'll bet he was spending $50 a week. If you wanted to find him, he was always in one of the bunkers with one of the hookers. He was the only guy I knew who caught clap 4 times in one month. Even the clap didn't slow him down, and the clap was like pissing red-hot rusty razor blades. He kept this up for two or three months. Until one fateful day. He went in to the village, it was pretty safe during the day, so we didn't think much of it. When he returned, he nearly ran the jeep into the hootch. He was drunk to the max on 33 beer and his entire groin area was soaked with blood. We finally got him to the medics and they got him sedated and ran us off. We were getting ready to pull a CA (combat assault) on the village, thinking one of the hookers had inserted a razor blade and then pulled him in, shredding his manhood. We had just about worked up a good head of steam when one of the medics walked over, laughing his ass off. He told us the real story. It seems the dumb kid had gotten really mangled on 33, then insisted on oral sex from one of the mamma sans. They all chewed betel nut and what teeth they had were broken and sharp. He was so wasted he didn't feel the pain at first, and when he did, it was too late. That gook had chewed his dick something awful. It seems she didn't quite understand what he wanted, just that she was supposed to "eat" his dick. Again, he was a changed man after that.

We did everything at 150% over there. When we fought, it was with everything we had, and when we played, it was with equal gusto. One of our favorite games was a bastardized form of volleyball. We called it gangster ball. Basically there were no rules. It was perfectly acceptable behaviour to punch your opponent in the solar plexus as you went up to spike the ball. The only rule was no firearms or explosives. At one time we had a 125% casualty rate from just playing this game. The most common injuries were sprained and separated shoulders and broken fingers. Nothing to write home about, but enough to attract the interest of the lifer back at Bien Hoa. We were probably the only unit in Viet Nam that received official directive forbidding sports amongst ourselves. It was OK to play other units, but no more practice sessions. Understand, we never actually saw the directive, the old man just said the next injury would be an Article 15 offense. It seems we were our own worst enemies!

Mail was about the most important thing in our world, number two only after staying alive. We would take mail out to the grunts when we couldn't get water to them. The guys needed the contact with home just to keep a semblance of humanity. It was Christmas Eve Day, 1970, and we were told in the morning broadcast that we would have to drive down to Bien Hoa to pick up our mail. There had been a slip up in the channels (WHAT A CONCEPT) and our mail hadn't been put on the supply chopper. No big deal, it was only about a 2 hour drive in one of the deuce and a halfs so three of the guys set out to get it. When they weren't back by 6PM, we became worried. Then the tower called down and said they were getting a weak FM call from our guys. It seems they had broken an axle about 15 miles from the base camp and were stuck. We didn't even think, about 10 of us piled in the back of another truck and started out to get them. We had more armament than a lot of full sized convoys, three M60's, two chunkers and half a dozen M16's, and a LOT of ammo. The highway wasn't a good place to be after dark. The MP's at the main gate gave us some static, but when they saw they were out gunned they just passed it off as lunacy and let us pass. We found our guys UNDER their truck, sure that they would never see the light of day. They were sure glad to hear that diesel motor and see us come flying up the road. We loaded up the stuff from the other truck and left the AO at full speed. Funny thing, we didn’t even get any sniper fire on that run (which was a miracle in itself). When we got back to the company area, I discovered that the biggest package in the truck was mine. My parents had decorated a little fir tree and sent it to me. It was little and the decorations were pretty sparse, but it was the most beautiful thing any of us had seen in a long time. Word spread quickly that we had a for real Christmas tree, and pretty soon there were about 40 or 50 guys standing around our company area. They all wanted to see the tree (the lucky tree, we should never have made it out there and back). Somebody started singing "Silent Night". It was contagious. Pretty soon all those battle-hardened vets were singing. There were grunts, gunners, engineers, artillery and remf's, all feeling like home was a little closer. There was more than one with a clear liquid leaking out of their eyes (real killers don't cry). To this day I can't hear that carol without getting misty myself. That little tree lived for almost a month before that foul place killed it too, but there are quite a few guys with a few of it's needles somewhere, I hope, bringing them luck to this day.

When there are vehicles around and young men, eventually someone will come up with a way to race them. So it was on Tay Ninh base camp. One of the engineer outfits designed and built a drag racer. It was a morphodite affair with 2 1/2 ton truck tires on the back and jeep tires on the front. It had the motor of a 3/4 ton truck with a carburetor from some other vehicle. It looked and sounded mean, but nobody had actually seen it run. One night in the EM club, one of the builders of this contraption made the statement that it would out run anything on base. There were some guys from the cav who had a "mule" ( a flatbed utility vehicle, resembles a large wagon about 4X6 with a motor) hopped up and we had a brand new jeep (belonging to the airfield commander). Everyone was talking at once and arguing about their respective rigs. The only way to decide was to have a race. It being the monsoon season and therefore very light air traffic, we decided the runway was the perfect spot. Lines were figured out and a quarter of a mile was approximated. There were a few helicopters in the area, but we had the cooperation of the guys in the control tower so we felt pretty safe. A flare was fired and the race was on. The engineers’ racer shot fire into the air and roared like a dragon, the mule did a quick wheelie and careened off the runway. The drag racer fared little better ending up in the refuel area (POL) and knocking over several refuel stations. It seems they had never really tried to steer it before. I was the only one who made it the distance in my commanding officers jeep. We hadn't really reckoned on the noise of this project, and when I came driving back up to the starting point, there was the colonel, hands on hips, looking a lot like a father who has just caught his kid with the family car. I don't think he was as mad as he put on. My punishment consisted of the loss of my driver’s license for the duration of my tour. Shit, no more convoy duty!

The first tour over there we had two distinct groups, the juicers and the "pot smoking hippie queers". I Although I didn't really care what substance was altering my conciousness I did have a distinct preference for the latter group as they actually had conversations that had stories that didn't begin with "this is no shit". We had a really unique way of keeping the juicers awake. We would take dirt clods up into the tower and then throw them down on their roof. Since incoming sounds a lot like someone baning on sheet metal this hobby REALLY kept them alert! No sense of humor though, something about suffering from symptoms of sleep deprivation!! We discovered a rather amusing pastime when the action slowed down.

We had almost unlimited access to star cluster flares, an aluminum tube that when the cap was removed and placed over the base and struck sharply, would shoot a cascade of pyrotechnics for quite a distance. There were 3 colors, red, green and white. We lived in tin roofed hootches when we were on the base camp and someone discovered that if you shot one of these flares at the roof, the burning material would hit the sloped surface and scatter in all directions. We must have shot a hundred of these things back and forth, with no more ill effects than some burned grass here and there and a nasty smell in the air. That is until the motor pool sergeant decided to give it a try. To say he was drunk was a severe understatement. He was practically to the point where we could have performed surgery on him and he wouldn't have cared. Anyway, he fired a flare at his own hootch, which also housed 4 or 5 other NCOs, undershot the roof and put the flare right through the screen. Well, as the building blazed merrily and we scrambled mightily to remove the occupants and contents, the motor pool sergeant disappeared. His hootch mates were severely pissed and didn't believe for a minute that one of their own had torched the place. They just knew it was us dastardly peons responsible for this yet another flagrant disregard for authority. That asshole never did confess and we spent the next week building a new hootch for the lifers.

A bunch of us got picked for a good detail once that probably seared the memory of dinky dau (crazy) GI's into the memory of a bunch of Vietnamese nationals. We were supposed to go out and blow down some trees and miscellaneous jungle at a section of the roadway where the gooks had a habit of shooting at passing vehicles. The orders were to "remove the cover" to a distance of about 200 yards. This meant about 4 acres had to be blown down and burned. For the first few hours, we did things by