Once Upon a Time, if you don’t like this beginning for a
short war story, tough Shiskies. The
other day I was at the VA for my annual visit and ran into a Vietnam Veteran
that was even wearing a hat that said Vietnam Veteran and one of those T-Shirts
that says MIA’s are gone but not forgotten.
I kind of expected him to act a little militant but I guess at the VA
one’s attitude about serving isn’t worn on your sleeve. Kind of like a gun fighter in the old west,
there will always be someone that has had a worse experience than yours. Most of us from that war are just starting to
lose track of small things and we no longer worry that people will think we are
“Making Stuff Up.” After all, it is a
war story isn’t it? They are generally
collections of places; faces and events told so many times that fact and
fiction are so blended in to the storyteller’s craft that no one could ever
decipher the reality form the fiction.
The guy I ran in to
and I talked about the tough side of war and somehow the subject of the smell
of Vietnam came up. In addition to
having the war suck, Vietnam stank. If
you went in to any of the markets, the first smell was of a boat dock in the
middle of summer. It was a collection of
minnows, fish guts and water pumped out of bilges that hung in the air. You could see the piles of dried fish there
in the market and people actually would come up and eat one of the dried smelly
things to make sure they were fresh? You
can imagine that with a place that had a monsoon season, the smell of rotting
is just a part of your day. I’m sure
that having about a half a million unwashed US soldiers there didn’t make it
much better.
I told my new buddy that I had sent a roll of film home to
the wife to have her develop. She sent
me one of the pictures back to me and wondered what the smoke was from? It was the smoke of diesel as they burned the
shitters each day. One poor soldier had
the latrine duty and his job was to burn the crap each day. He said that on one trip to the rear area he
somehow got hooked into being the NCOIC of one of those details. He said it was kind of neat to have three or
four guys and to go around to all the latrines on the big base camp. The even gave him a ¾ ton truck to haul the
gas cans. He was free to go anywhere and
he visited no only the PX but the nearby airbase that had an honest to god
drive in with ice cream and hamburgers.
He said that most of the guys in and around the big base camps were on
foot most of the time and having a vehicle was a blessing.
We talked a little about friends we knew that had gone back
to Vietnam in just the past few years.
Many of them find the country changed and the landscape little
different. The people there are pretty
much just trying to make a living and seemed pleased to meet new people much
like the people here in the USA. He did
note that a lot of the old military bases are now just an overgrown area and
the junk pickers didn’t leave much of value after we left. Our buildings were for the most part just 2X4’s
and tin and most of that got scavenged or salvaged and is gone. When we were there, you saw a lot of small
hooches in the villages near military bases with C-Ration boxes as the siding. He said most of that got replaces with the
tin off our old buildings. He said there
were a lot of Military museum but it gave our returning soldiers the willies to
realize that the enemy depicted in the photographs were our guys.
I would someday like to visit more of the world outside the
USA but there are still quite a few places here in America I want to see. Think that
Yellowstone is on our schedule for this summer and there is still the Arches in
Southwest Colorado on my list. Oddly
enough, Death Valley is also on my list but that is a winter trip for
sure. But, back to my war story, it is
way too easy when making this stuff up to distract myself and get off topic.
My VA Buddy and I were in the same area near Pleiku, but with entirely different
units. Pleiku was on the plains but near the mountains of the Central Highlands. I was in an Artillery Group that
provided support to whatever combat units were in the area. He was in the 4th Infantry Division. It was kind of neat to be able to go into a
town and the 4th Division MP’s would just leave us alone. One of the towns I would want to see is Kontum,
along the river and about 50 miles north of Pleiku. Before TET in 68, it had been a very pretty
town and the old buildings were spectacular.
After TET there were many places where the tanks had shot through the
walls and left cancer looking scars. I
wonder if they kept some of the holes as a kind of symbol of what war brought
to their country.
All you have to do is to visit any of the VA’s in any major
city to see the scars left on the faces of our young men and women. I am blessed that I can write about my
wartime experiences without being sucked back into the quicksand of war. One of the young soldiers that I sent to
Desert Storm came home with a blinding flash of the obvious, “Hey Colonel, you
know that war is one damned good place to get your ass killed?” Yep that about sums it up for me and for now
the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment