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The Second Lieutenant

Around the cleared moonscape that enclosed Firebase Delta, the jungle dozed silently while the sentries relaxed. Their flak jackets reeked of sweat and chaffed at their skin, but they believed in them. They had less faith in the hedged of concertina wire that coiled like huge snakes around the camp, and they had reason. If they loved anything, they loved the full moon that was falling down the sky. They’d be sorry to see it duck behind the vine-choked trees in the distance. Then they wouldn’t be so relaxed. It was when the dark rose up out of the jungle that men died.

[NOTE: Published in full for all over on The New American Digest  —  The Second Lieutenant — to signal more stories ( real and should have been real) to come. Republished here at this time to preserve the comments from readers below.]

Second lieutenant Gary Murphy, halfway through his tour and twenty-three, lay on his bunk in his half-buried sandbagged hootch reading, for the fourth time, a letter from Sally Goines, who swore she was still in love and couldn’t wait until he came flying home for their wedding. “…After the game, the gang went over to Shakey’s for some pizza in Jean’s car. It was great until these longhairs (you don’t have them in Vietnam, do you?) came in and started acting funny. Not funny ha-ha, ” Sally wrote in the rounded script that irritated Gary,” but drugs or something worse. They tried to order from Fred and kept asking for pizza with everything and kept laughing as they added ingredients like penguin dust, I think one said. And this other one tried to play the jukebox but didn’t put any money in it an, big surprise, it didn’t work. So I politely, and I mean it, told him that he had to put money in it. He took out a twenty dollar bill and began to tear little pieces of it off and stuff them in the coin slot! Can you imagine? That took the cake and Fred came out from behind the counter with the baseball bat he kept ….” Gary felt the ground under him shake gently.

Folding the letter and slipping it into his shirt pocket he got up and, after dousing the light, drew back the blanket that covered the entrance to his hootch.

The ground continued to shudder. Far off to the west, Murphy could see explosions of light like a host of gigantic flashbulbs popping on the landscape. “Arclight,” he thought, “Arclight.” Arclight was a new tactic to crush the Cong. It was a high-altitude air strike featuring B-52s and hundreds of one-ton bombs; an attack that came from planes so high up you couldn’t see them or hear them. Upon arrival, there was a  dense pattern of bombs that probed the earth like a Titan’s fingers searching for crouched packets of flesh they could transform in an instant into fountains of blood and bouquets of bones.

From over nine miles up, B-52s plowed death into rice fields where a navigator’s coordinates crossed on a map. Those coordinates were given by some man examining abstract photographs in a windowless room near Saigon; by someone who had seen a tendril of smoke where there should be no smoke, a rock that cast a suspicious shadow, the pale oval of a face turned up against the darker foliage. Something. Anything that might indicate that Charlie was at those coordinates when the photograph was taken and might still be there. Whatever the sign was it was enough to send the bombers and the bombs to obliterate that point on the map. The Americans in charge of the Vietnam war thought if they did it all the time they would, sooner or later, kill the Cong, kill the VC, kill Charlie and then… then everyone could just go home.

But Charlie, Gary Murphy knew, was never at those coordinates when the bombers came.

Charlie didn’t dawdle around in the bush waiting for some slick American jet jockey to bomb his ass. Charlie had better things to do. Charlie had a tight schedule. Charlie kept his ass in gear, traveled light, and killed young Americans.

Killing Americans was Charlie’s job and he was good at it. Charlie was a pro. And Charlie also had patience. In Vietnam, the Americans owned the day and the cities, but Charlie owned the night and the villages and time. Charlie used all three to kill Americans. Five Americans were killed today, three slaughtered tomorrow, seven more dead or one more dead during the next week. It didn’t matter how many or when. Charlie would just keep killing Americans until Americans got tired of being killed and left. It was that or be killed until they were all just slightly greener patches of the jungle with plants growing where the eyes had been.

To pass the time while waiting to be killed, Americans amused themselves by playing with high technology and bombing the jungle. And so every evening Gary was entertained by a distant Arclight strike; a high-tech, high-explosive light show with no dead Charlies to show for it.

“Stupid assholes,” he muttered up at the sky towards where he thought the planes should be by now,” like using a pitchfork to kill flies.” He yawned and lay down on his cot to get some sleep. He watched the lizards and roaches roam on the ceilings and walls of his hutch and thought of the feeling of Sally’s breasts in her sweater. The memory dissolved and he turned over on his stomach on the cot and felt the sticky damp pull at his skin, then the tightness in his temples and stomach that never left him when he was doing time in the bush. Instead of his girlfriend, he saw the village that he would lead his squad into the next morning.

“Better duty than leading night ambushes, these morning raids,” he thought. “Oh yeah, better. Better if Charlie doesn’t pay us another visit tonight, crawl under the wire and slit our throats, then we’ll get a chance to check out the village in the morning. And that’s when the dinks will cut our throats. Cut our throats and…”

Which was always when the fear lumbered out of the shadows of his hootch and, as he turned over, crouched on his chest, lapping his face with its cold, bronze tongue. He turned his head and stared into the lamp waiting for the fear to leave, and after a time it did.

Nearby he heard a tape playing. The words were far away, a world away in the night,

“Bang a gong,
get it on,
get it on…”,

interrupted by the crackle of the radios as the perimeter guards checked in at the quarter hour. Then the night faded into sleep and sleep into a fitful dream and he saw the village in the clearing again.

It was a village of no importance set in a clearing of no significance ringed by a jungle that existed outside of time. The village was officially considered harmless but worth watching. Politically unreliable inhabitants had been “relocated”; sometimes to camps in the south, sometimes out of the doors of helicopters at three thousand feet. The village was marked off as “pacified”. And that thought, that status, woke him.

“Pacified, my ass,” he thought. “Why not call it what it is, dead? Only trouble is it’s not really dead. Not dead at all.

Recon photos examined in Saigon had shown a wooden bowl near a hut that had moved overnight. That and the absence of any footprints, including animal footprints, gave the men in Saigon a yen to have another look, to send in a squad to get a report that satisfied their endless curiosity. To find out what those foolish little things meant.

Gary sat up and ran his fingers through the burr of his cropped brown hair. He rubbed his eyes, giving up on the idea of sleep, and began to twist the ends of his mustache, and hum the tune of “These Foolish Things” in a soft lilting voice, changing the lyrics to “These foolish things remind me of Charlie.”

And the fear pounced. He tried to push it away by thinking of the time he had spent with Sally in the cut-rate motel off the freeway in Sacramento the night before he had been sent to this shitty country. Only when he looked at her body laid out upon the sheets and he closed his eyes and when he went to draw the curtains, Charlie was in the window and Charlie was laughing at him.

Charlie was right. It was funny. The joke was on him. He laughed out loud in the hut, his voice hollow and strained.

“I’m sure glad one of us is happy, loo-tenant,” said a voice from the other side of the blanket that covered the entrance to the hootch. “But I am sure sorry it ain’t me.”

Gary spun towards the door and saw the black face of Private Jason Gibbs glaring at him. Gary’s anger flashed in his face. Gibbs had not only discovered him laughing at nothing, Gibbs had also approached the hut without calling out; an unappreciated and dangerous bit of behavior at Firebase Delta, especially at night.

“Aren’t you a little out of line, Private?”

Gibbs sneered, “Maybe so, but aren’t you a bit of a white honky motherfucker, sir?”

Gary went rigid, feeling rage surge through him. Then he checked himself and sat down on his cot looking closely at Gibbs’ face. His eyes were shot through with red ringing dilated pupils. Doped to the gills. Where do they get it?

He spoke softly and deliberately. “Gibbs, you are stoned-out, pin-sized pain in my ass this evening. If you weren’t the finest fucking dink-killer in my squad, I’d have you up on report for that little remark, and you’d be doing brig time before you could say ‘watermelon’.”

Gibbs’ head bobbed slowly and he shifted his stance until his huge frame filled the doorway. “Dink-killer? That what you think of me?”

“You’re a genocide genius, Gibbs. That is hardly classified information. And speaking of which, I got a reaming from the colonel yesterday which I have been meaning to take up with you. It seems that it has come to his attention that someone in the squad is slicing the ears off of dead slopes for their private collection. The colonel politely requests that this hobby cease. He needs all the body parts he can get. Puffs up the count, you know.”

“No shit, sir.”

“No shit, Gibbs. So why don’t you meditate on that back in your own hootch? You’ll wish you had twice the sleep you’ll get when we hit that village in the morning.”

“Been thinking on that, loo-tenant, and I ain’t going.”

“What do you mean you ain’t going? We are all going.”

“Not Jason Gibbs here.”

Gary raised his eyes to the ceiling, exasperated. “Gibbs, he said, measuring his words, ” you are a member of my squad, right?”

“I am that, sir.”

“In fact, you are the fucking scout for the squad. Correct?”

“Volunteered, sir. Yes. Did that. Just a dumb nigger.”

“Well, then, you and I and the rest of Zulu have orders from division to take an all-expense paid tour of that village in the morning and I am pleased to inform you that you have the honor of walking point.”

“Village is crawling with gooks.”

“I know that, Gibbs.”

“Then why we going there to find out?”

“Because Saigon doesn’t know it,” said Gary in a bored tone.

“And after we get blown away, my black ass first, what the fuck will Saigon know?”

“Gibbs, this is Vietnam. We are not playing stickball in the Bronx.”

“You telling me?”

“I am trying to explain to you, Private Gibbs, that we are, like it or not, in the United States Army. We are going to take a walk and seek out Charlie. If we are sharp, we can take a peek and split before they know we’re around and invite us to snack on their fishheads and rice.”

“Not fucking likely. They know when we fart in Japan.”

“I know it’s not fucking likely, Gibbs, but it’s tough titty. Those are my orders and I am going to follow them and you are going to follow mine, Private!” He fixed a stare on Gibbs and tried to wish him away.

Gibbs didn’t move. Silence filled the hut for a moment.

“Begging the loo-tenant’s pardon, Sir, but no way. I don’t mind wasting the slopes. Sort of like it. But I do mind getting my sweet black ass blown away because some chickenshit Saigon spook thinks it’s a swift idea. I’m going back to the world but dressed sharp, not in some rubber bag and a tin box. Gibbs is resigning the fucking Army.”

Murphy’s temper snapped. He stood up and stepped up until he and Gibbs were nose to nose in the doorway. “You’ll take orders like I take orders, asshole! Clear?”

“Fuck your orders,” Gibbs whispered.

“What? What? You black son-of-a-bitch! What’s that again?.” He stared at Gibbs who stood as still as a stone.

The silence thickened in the hootch. Radios crackled in the night. Gary thought he could hear the scuttle of the roaches on the ceiling.

Jason Gibbs’ hands clenched into fists in the shadows, then relaxed. A vacant look came into his eyes and then he smile a slow, stoned smile. He stepped back from the doorway, holding the blanket back until his face was absorbed in the shadows. “I guess I said ‘Orders is orders’, loo-tenant, sir,” he drawled in a dreamlike monotone.

Gary breathed out slowly. An infinite weariness came over him. He walked back to his cot and sat down heavily, rubbing his jaw. “Okay, Gibbs. Okay. We’ll forget this little disagreement. You’re a good man, you should just lay off the dope.”

“I agree with that, sir,” came the voice.

“You’ll be fine tomorrow. Don’t sweat it. Get some rack time.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll forget it, sir. Gibbs will be all right, sir.” His footsteps crunched away into silence.

Gary lay down on his cot and gazed towards the door and at Sally’s letter lying on the floor. He was still staring at it five minutes later when he slipped into a dreamless sleep.

“Sir…sir? Loo-tenant, sir?”

Gary awoke groggily. “Wha…who’s there?”

The moon had gone down and his camp lantern flickered giving the hut only a faint copper glow. A shadow shifted in the doorway.

“Just Gibbs, sir. Private Gibbs, Zulu Squad.”

Gary groaned and focused on the shadow through sleep-sodden eyes. “What is it now, Gibbs?”

“I been thinking and I wanted to know if the loo- tenant could play baseball.”

Christ, thought Gary, maybe this spade is ripe for a Section Eight. I’ll never get back to sleep now.

“Why yes, Private, the loo-tenant knows how to play baseball. So what?”

There was a sharp grating sound of metal being drawn through metal. Gary became bolt awake in one cold instant.

“So catch, motherfucker, sir.”

A hand moved in the dim light and Gibbs was gone. A sputtering object about the size of a baseball struck the sandbag wall by Gary’s head and rolled hissing under his cot. Gary was on his feet and leaping towards the door, towards all the rest of his life when an impossible whiteness filled the hootch and he knew that he would never, never, never.

* * * * * *

After Major Timothy A. Scott, U.S. Army Recruiting and Public Relations office for Sacramento, California, said goodbye to Mr. & Mrs. Murphy, he drove straight to the Town and Country Shopping Mall where he ate a cheeseburger with everything at the Chuck Wagon Coffee Shoppe and then walked next door to the Chuck Wagon Cocktail Lounge where he had two Old Fashioneds.

“Rotten war,” he told himself between his first and second drink. “Nice kid gets it in a mortar attack. Still, better than being taken prisoner, or brainwashed, or having your legs or balls shot off.

“Parents took it well. I hate this duty. Have to admit that. At least no tears. A few more American families with that kind of sand and we could finish the job in Vietnam and bring all those boys back from that hellhole.”

He tossed back his second drink, tipped the waitress, wondered how long it had been since she had had it, and drove his gray station wagon from the motor pool back to his office halfway between the State House and the Greyhound Bus Depot. It was the last week in May and he was still ten recruits short of his monthly quota. It worried him until he remembered that the high school graduations were coming up in June and he was sure to get some extras then. Maybe he’d just backdate a few forms. No problem.

Mr. Alan Murphy was an orthodontist who maintained a suite of offices in the Arden Professional Building near his home. After Major Scott had left their home, he called in and told his secretary to cancel all his appointments until after the funeral. In a few days, Gary’s body in its metal box was flown into the airbase nearby. He was buried with full honors in the Arden Presbyterian Cemetery. A squad of students from Sacramento State’s ROTC came and fired rifles over the grave. Major Scott gave a folded flag to Mrs. Murphy.

When the coffin was lowered, Mrs. Murphy became hysterical until the rifle shots seemed to stun her into silence. She accepted the folded flag with a numb expression and carried it away with her like a platter on which there was some invisible offering that only she could see.

Before he went back to work, Mr. Murphy asked his secretary to remove Gary’s high-school graduation picture from his office wall and put it in his desk drawer. When he got there he stared at the light patch on the wall for over an hour. Then he took the photograph from his desk drawer and hung it back in its place on the wall. After all, there was really nothing else he could do.

About a year later, the Murphys sold their large house in the suburb of Arden and moved into a two-bedroom apartment about five miles away that had a view of the American River. The apartment complex was for mature couples and boasted a swimming pool, two tennis courts, restrictions against children, a security guard, and a communal sauna that was never used. Both Mr. and Mrs. Murphy agreed that it was a much more sensible way to live under the circumstances.

On the day that they moved, most of Gary’s things were given to the Goodwill. The rest were stored in sealed cartons that were kept in the basement of the apartment complex. Mrs. Murphy kept the folded flag in the top drawer of her dresser and touched it every morning after she had her coffee and before she went shopping. After all, there was really nothing else she could do.

Sally Goines called a lot of Gary’s old friends with the news and went to the funeral and cried for most of the rest of that day. Then she felt bad for a long time. One day when she was feeling really depressed about Gary, she went down to Shakey’s Pizza at the Town and Country Shopping Center to eat. Eating was something she had been doing a lot since the funeral. A boy with slightly long hair came in alone and asked to sit with her. After a while, they drove off together and parked on a dirt road that ran in back of a hop farm down by the river. The boy lit a joint and offered her some saying that she was just too uptight and that it would make her feel better. Because she just didn’t care anymore, Sally smoked a lot of it. It did make her feel better. Making love to the boy in the reeds by the river made her feel better too.

Sally saw the boy every day after school for more than two months. Then with a brief defiant note to her parents, she moved to Oregon with him. A year or so later the boy moved on to Alaska where they were paying outrageous money for work on the pipeline. He promised to send for Sally and their love child, Kala. But the boy never wrote or came back and Sally was left to fend for herself.

After a while, she met Peter who believe in getting high on Tijuana Gold and staying high by eating macrobiotic foods. Sally and Peter and Kala moved to Yreka, California, and opened a small natural-food shop in the town. One autumn afternoon, they were married by a whispy bearded Indian guru in a meadow high up on Mount Shasta, which was, everyone knew, one of the most spiritual places in the world.

Every so often in the years that followed, Sally and her family — expanded now to include another little girl Zoe — would drive down to Sacramento to spend a few days with Sally’s parents, even though Peter didn’t approve of their diet. During one of these trips, Mrs. Goines mentioned to Sally that Mrs. Murphy had died recently and been buried next to Gary. It was said that Mr. Murphy planned to marry his secretary of ten years. Sally’s mother hoped that he’d allow a decent interval to pass before he did though nothing would surprise her these days.

Sally absently agreed with her mother as she tried to remember Gary Murphy. She remembered the last letter she had written to him putting down longhairs and shook her head. “Could I ever have been that straight?” she wondered. Then when she tried to remember Gary she was a little ashamed to realize that she could not picture his face. She went and found her old high school yearbook and was opening it when Zoe and Kala started screaming at each other in the backyard. Looking out she saw they were struggling over the possession of a brightly colored ball. Putting the book back on the shelf, she went out into the yard.

“Come on, ” she admonished. “That ball’s no good to either of you unless you play together and share. How many times do I have to tell you that fighting’s uncool?”

* * * * * *

When the grenade exploded in Gary’s hootch, the other soldiers at Firebase Delta assumed they were under attack and lacerated the jungle with small arms fire and mortars for twenty minutes. They brought death to a large number of birds, monkeys, and other animals, as well as waking up a detachment of Viet Cong who were minding their own business and taking a rest in the village six klicks to the south.

During the confusion of the firefight, Private Jason Gibbs graded three other locations in the camp and then shot off the little toe on his left foot. He became, along with Gary Murphy, the only other casualty of the raid that never was.

In the morning, Zulu squad, minus Gary and Gibbs, was sent into the village and, finding the Viet Cong resting there in strength, was wiped out to a man. Twenty minutes after they called in contact and fifteen after the last man in Zulu squad died, a napalm strike obliterated the village. Helicopters came in next to hose down the ashes with rockets and machine guns. The napalm and machine guns also failed to kill any Viet Cong since they had left the area at speed right after finishing off the American patrol. When the news of Zulu squad’s fate reached him in his hospital room in Saigon, Gibbs smiled, hobbled out onto the balcony, and rolled a fat joint to celebrate his salvation.

After being released from the hospital with a Purple Heart and a slight limp, the now Corporal Gibbs got himself assigned to the Quartermaster Corps in Saigon. Here, as in the jungle, he excelled. He rapidly adapted to his environment and learned how to fake cargo manifests, how to redirect shipments of PX luxuries to local merchants and the black market, and how to offer and accept bribes. He soon graduated to smuggling dope out of Vietnam and money back in.

When his hitch was up, Gibbs was given an honorable discharge and flew back to the states. He wound up back in New York City and used the money he’d made in Saigon to buy six luxury apartments in midtown and furnish them with expensive women that he rented out by the night. Rejecting drug dealing as a scam that attracted too much heat for a man with his eye on a career and not a job, he prospered and accepted his inevitable title of Superpimp with quiet pride.

Gibbs lived well. He was lavish with his money but avoided the vulgar displays of street pimps. Italian suits and a plain black Rolls-Royce with a young, white driver suited his personal vision. He learned French and Italian and was passable in both. Because of this and his quiet style, he soon found himself serving a select circle of clients centered on the United Nations. And because he had a reputation for discretion and taste, as well as highly talented women, he was, if not invited to formal U.N. functions, depended on and patronized, which was to his mind much the same thing. Jason Gibbs had it together and intended to keep it that way.

To remind the world as well as himself that he had arrived, Gibbs lived in an apartment with a sweeping view of the U.N. and the East River. He kept a white French woman who had never been a prostitute as a companion and decoration. One evening, when they were spending a quiet night at the apartment, sipping champagne and looking at the lights far down the river, Gibbs asked his companion to get some cocaine from the safe in the closet.

When she came back she was carrying the gold vial of cocaine and a large blue-leather jewel case that she had found.

She opened it while Gibbs carefully prepared the cocaine on the top of the glass coffee table. Inside the case, on dark red velvet were some twenty-seven human ears threaded on a shiny leather thong. She gazed at them fascinated for a moment as soft music sounded through the concealed speakers in the room and the tapping chop of the razor blade powdered the crystals on the table.

“What in the world are these, mon cher?,” she asked. “They’re not ears, are they?”

Jason took a line of coke into his nose through a silver straw sold by Tiffany’s. “They are. I took them off of some dead Viet Cong when I was in Vietnam.”

The woman took the straw from Jason and took a hit, relishing the rush. The man had taste, she had to admit.

Then she fondled each ear. “Little bits of history,” she said. “And all of them from men you killed?”

“That’s right. One from each gook.”

She touched one at the end of the thong that was larger and paler than the rest.

“This one too?” she asked.

Gibbs laughed quietly. “That one? I remember that one. Some sorry son-of-a-bitch that couldn’t catch.”

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Front toward enemy September 20, 2017, 4:33 AM

    You hit me like a mortar round with this one Gerard.

  • Nori September 20, 2017, 7:00 AM

    This grenade should be lobbed into the office of mockumentary-maker Ken Burns. Might blow that absurd Beatle haircut right off his tiny head.

  • jwm September 20, 2017, 7:51 AM

    Book Title:
    VanderLeun: Collected Works- Stories & Poems
    (or maybe something catchy)
    I’d buy it hard bound, and give it as gifts.
    Someday?

    JWM

  • Casey Klahn September 20, 2017, 8:09 AM

    Did I tell you about the time I was range officer for M-16 qualifications? Second Lieutenant: me. Vietnam vet: Staff sergeant in the firing position (foxhole). Me: visually checking for clear and safety on each M-16. VV: that look on his face, points his muzzle straight at me and fixes my eyes. Me: notes the bolt is forward, the weapon is on “fire,” and the magazine is in. Extra note: trigger finger is on the trigger. VV: looking a thousand yards past me but on a ballistics course through my brain. Me: “Sergeant, put your weapon on safe.” Does it. “Get up from the foxhole and walk off this range.” Does that, too. Yes, there was a round in the chamber.
    I shit you not. I didn’t serve in Vietnam, because I joined in 1975. Every swinging richard I served with, it seemed, was a combat vet , re: Vietnam. Nightmares. Confrontations in the airport. Trouble at work. Disaffected is a good word for it.

  • Uncle Mikey September 20, 2017, 11:37 AM

    Fantastic

  • indyjonesouthere September 20, 2017, 12:07 PM

    It was written by someone that wasn’t there and heard a lot of stories by many who were there but never in the bush.

  • Vanderleun September 20, 2017, 5:23 PM

    Revelations: Written by someone that wasn’t there and heard a lot of stories by many who thought they would be there but though called were not chosen.

    • gwbnyc September 3, 2021, 8:47 AM

      same.

      particulars:

      1-A from 18th birthday until end of draft. not even a physical. 2nd draft lottery, #320 IIRC.

      had I volunteered I would have been a humiliation to myself, my family, a humiliation to the service and a danger to others, a humiliation to my country.

      I have no pride in it , no explanations nor excuses for it, only a stark recollection and I avoid no judgement.

  • Vanderleun September 20, 2017, 5:24 PM

    Thanks, JWM. One of these days and perhaps soon if I can get my focus back after this recent passage. We’ll see.

  • Snakepit Kansas September 20, 2017, 6:32 PM

    My cousin had two tours of Afghanistan in airborne units. He came home after serious physical injuries due to a Blackhawk crash on 28MAY2014. He has plenty of remaining physical and mental scars from both the crash as well as combat.

  • Bill Jones September 21, 2017, 4:28 PM

    What a stunning fuckup the Pentagon is.

    No wonder the country is $20 trillion in debt.

  • Quent September 21, 2017, 5:12 PM

    I did most of my Vietnam service on a World War II Sumner Class destroyer. They were useful because they were nothing but guns, no helicopter deck, no missiles. On calm nights (which were most of them) you could see and hear Arclight strikes fifty miles at sea. They produced a low rumbling sound and flashes which reflected off the clouds. All of that firepower, all of that screwing around, for no discernible purpose. We sent World War II quality armed forces to Vietnam in 1965. Many of the officers and NCOs were WW II combat vets. Some of the senior officers had commanded significant units in WW II. After seven or eight years of wheel spinning, we dragged a demoralized mess out of Vietnam. Even the Navy was gutted as an institution, thanks to the satanic Elmo Zumwalt. None of the armed forces have ever recovered, and now they are nothing more than play toys for the Social Engineers in Washington.

  • Casey Klahn September 21, 2017, 6:01 PM

    Quent. I like your war story, and my compliments. I want to say the Reagan military, of which I was a member, did much to recover the qualitative losses we suffered during and after Vietnam. In particular, the essential NCO corps was disemboweled by the Vietnam conflict. Company grade officers began to assume many of the roles we let go of when we failed to properly train, promote and retain NCOs, and that was a huge mistake. We reversed that. Training all hours of the day and night, getting zero to maybe 2 hours of sleep a day in the field, we re-equipped and trained up the force that was present when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Gulf War was fought with such an army.

    idk what the condition of the current armed forces is, since I am removed by over a generation of time from the service. I was in the Old Black Boot Army/ pun. They appear to have a strong core of long-serving combat veterans, but I also question the morale of the forces after this long war, and the recent president’s 8 year administration of letting go of as many wins, and as many flag rank officers, as possible. In times like these, the military remembers why legacy traits are core essentials. The sun and the moon change, but the army never does, John Wayne once said.

    Zumwalt must’ve been BB with SecDef McNamara, eh?

    For fuck sakes! I am reading about every component of the military going over to hybrid engines. Goddamned electric MBTs! The guidance of our armed forces has been decidedly and immorally deficient, that’s obvious. TG for Gen Mattis at the helm. TG for Pres. Trump, who just put the world on notice that Americans are back, and will not suffer much from fools going forward.

    OK. That’s all off my chest and I feel better. I’ll buy the next round.

  • Casey Klahn September 21, 2017, 6:03 PM

    I meant to say, above, that there were many, many damn fine NCOs during the Vietnam era, but the institution of the military let them down.

    • TrangBang68 September 3, 2021, 6:59 AM

      In my experience most of the better NCO’s were shake ‘n bakes from the NCO school at Fort Benning, draftees like the rest of us by and large. The lifers were mostly pricks. I remember a song by of all people Bob Segar called “2 plus 2 is on my mind” . It was playing in the summer of 67 while I was getting ready for my call from Uncle Sugar. It had lyrics:
      “there’s a guy I knew in high school
      Just an average friendly guy
      And he had himself a girlfriend
      And they made them say goodbye
      Now he’s buried in the mud
      of a distant jungle land
      And his girl just sits and cries
      she just doesn’t understand”
      As far as the night time went, one of the joys of the nights we weren’t on ambush patrol was smoking some Central Highlands weed and watching the lightshow as “Puff the Magic Dragon”, the gunship lit up the sky with tracers from the mini guns. Once I was chilling at Fire Base Ayers in Hau Ngiah province when some rounds from the battleship “New Jersey ” went over. It sounded like a train.

      • Casey Klahn September 3, 2021, 7:14 AM

        The problem with NCOs developed during Vietnam was because we were filling slots too fast. It was a fast track war, and the development was lacking. I’m just repeating what the older Vets were telling me, however my experience of having all Vietnam combat vets for NCOs was that they were harder than rock and proficient, but as a system many were left to slack and not made to run the army. If NCOs aren’t running the army that is some bad shit.
        The whole fukn army was broken after Vietnam. But, the soldiers soldiered well.
        What about now? It takes years to develop army leaders; systems, standards, character. Just flush one generation and see how shit goes. Biden (cough) is doing exactly that right now.

        • TrangBang68 September 3, 2021, 7:31 PM

          The army was broken as hell by 1970. Once vietnamization was announced by Nixon, there was no rhyme or reason to the war, except surviving and helping your buddy survive. Two things got loose in Vietnam in the base camps, dope and racial strife. I spent my last couple months in the army in a duty company at Ft. Bragg. Good morale was non existent.

  • Howard Nelson September 22, 2017, 10:06 PM

    I just came across — Youtube the band played waltzing Matilda, John McDermott.
    Brave frightened Australian men in war, lives shredded for not even God knows what purpose.
    And we’re sending another inadequate force to the Afghanistan man-grinder. WTF!

  • gwbnyc September 3, 2021, 1:04 AM

    I PDF’d this the first time I saw it a few years ago.

  • Mike-SMO September 3, 2021, 1:38 AM

    Subtle, but a good indication of what you think they are good for…… Could’a’ maybe, talked of alternativs, like a helo “prep” (lessons from experience), or just beat feet. A grenade and an ear (and coke and a bonus), makes your view very clear. Undoubtedly, one of Mackies’ Elite. “Just sayin'”.

    I didn’t. A friend who did, slept in a sandbag “slot” on the floor of his tent or hooch. Mortor rounds, don’t you know. Or somethin’.

    • gwbnyc September 3, 2021, 3:37 PM

      a workmate was stationed there, army, drove a truck. he told the story one could get some leave or some other deal by volunteering for patrol, which he did. sleeping on the ground during the first night he woke up up yelling and thrashing- everyone else jumped on him, wrapped their hands over his face to quiet him. it turned out he had a portion of a candy bar in his pocket, ants got in the pocket after it and were stinging the daylight out of him. nothing further happened.

  • Mike-SMO September 3, 2021, 2:11 AM

    But thanks for the reminder of who isn’t a “friend” down in the City. The “Woke” understand. They are spinning up the “City Gentlemen” so no one will be too upset when Compton (as in California) comes to clear the field for the new “productive” population. It seems so obvious (open borders, “gun control” and defund the Po-Po), but they blunder right into the trap. Uh,……”Incoming!”

  • Dirk September 3, 2021, 8:14 AM

    Not a man or woman out alive, doesn’t revisit the past, to better understand the future.

    VI

  • James ONeil September 3, 2021, 8:49 AM

    University of Florida, late fifties, learned as much, if not more, in the late night, sometimes all night, bull sessions with GI Bill Korean war vets as in the daytime classrooms. Certainly more that shaped and defined my future.

  • Joe Krill September 3, 2021, 11:25 AM

    What memories this story stirred up. Before I got to the New York part I said Gibbs was from either Harlem, Watts or Newark. Dope was a huge problem and fragging happened more than Uncle Sam will ever admit. Add to that friendly fire deaths and injuries and the nightmare changes. We killed a lot of NVA and VC. Shame Murphy didn’t knock Goines up before he shipped out. Twenty seven ears?????? Nahhhhh.

  • MIKE GUENTHER September 3, 2021, 3:07 PM

    The arc light flights… several of the guys I served with, were involved in those. They did Sky Spot, where they laid out the intended track and elevation for the bomb run and using ballistics for the ordinance being dropped, tracked the planes with a narrow band radar and told the bombers when to drop their load to hit the target.

    One of the units was secretly set up on a mountain top in Laos, where they became overrun and no survivors. Of all the Sky Spot units, that was the only one to suffer any casualties.

    I went in in 76 and we did RBS and ECM training for USAFE and NATO air wings.

  • OneGuy November 7, 2022, 1:23 PM

    I didn’t go to Vietnam even though I did my 20 years including the entire Vietnam shitshow. I lucked out and joined the Air Force and lucked out again and was picked for computer repair. Not too many computers in Vietnam. I like to joke I did my Vietnam tour for four years in Germany. But I knew a lot of guys who went to Vietnam. The stories varied back then. Probably today all the stories would be about how bad it was and how it was a useless war. But back then about half the VV’s had good stories and good memories and the other half varied from it being a shitshow to worse.

    I can’t remember all the names. I went to the Vietnam memorial in Washington and I’m looking through the 55,000 names for friends and acquaintances finding a few and realized I couldn’t remember even half the people I knew who went to Vietnam. It was like two different worlds because most of those who went and came back got out and went home. And I was a lifer and I never did go “home” again I stayed out West. I heard a million stories, first hand, second hand etc. Some are probably true and others are probably exaggerated or stolen stories. I knew a lot of fighter pilots and they had some good stories.

    What a waste…