THERE WASN'T MUCH time to sit around and mope. Either you were fighting for your life or you were in the rear with the gear, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. What little time you had was spent coloring in the spaces on your short-timer's calendar and counting the hours and days to DEROS (Date of Expected Return from Overseas). But, the holidays were different, especially Christmas. 

As soon as Thanksgiving passed, one of my fellow lieutenants proposed that we make Christmas gift stockings for the children at an orphanage near Ton Son Nuht that we supported. We wrote home for toys and clothing and began stuffing it into stockings together with fruits and candy that we purloined from mess halls and the PX. Of course, it became a competition to see who could stuff the most into a GI wool sock. 

You have no idea how far you can stretch wool, do you? Ours grew to about four feet in height and maybe eighteen inches in diameter. I couldn't imagine how one small child could hold one upright even if it were sitting on the floor.
After the fiasco at Thanksgiving (we ran out of turkey at the 9th Admin Company and I ran around Bearcat looking for scraps from other mess halls to make sure our men got theirs - I didn't) I wasn't going to let my men miss another holiday dinner. 

The parents of one of my men owned a restaurant in Indianapolis and his father shipped several packages of food and decorations including centerpieces, table clothes, silverware, candles, and serving pieces. The son, who had grown up in the restaurant business, took over the set up. My sergeant requisitioned two GP (General Purpose) Medium (sized) tents to create a “banquet hall.” I donated the beer and booze and the main course that I requisitioned from the ration breakdown point in Long Binh.

I signed out a jeep and trailer and took off for Saigon the week before Christmas with a driver. We stopped first at the docks on the Saigon river and picked up several cases of beer and Coke as well as a few bottles of Seagram's Crown Royal and real French Champagne. How did a mere lieutenant afford all this? Easy. The Coke was three dollars per case and a case of beer and liter of champagne were a dollar-fifty each. Go figure.

On the way back we stopped at Long Binh when I saw a refrigerated semi being unloaded at the ration breakdown point. The KP's were off-loading seventy-two pound cases of steaks into a refrigerated warehouse. I had my driver remove his blouse so that he would look like every other KP and he joined the line. He made two trips into the warehouse, but on his third trip, he detoured to the jeep and we sped away before anyone noticed. We had the main course.

Two days later, I stopped at the main mess hall at the division base camp and bartered for the rest. The mess sergeant wanted one of each medal to make a display for the dining room. I called my office and had my sergeant fulfill the request. The sergeant then entertained me in the dining room while his staff loaded my jeep.

When I finally left the mess hall, I could not believe my eyes. The jeep was buried in cases of food. Fresh baked bread. Canned corned beef. Five pound bricks of cheese. Half gallon cans of condiments, including ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, relish, and olives. I can't remember what else.

The laterite roads in the base camp had been recently oiled and we slipped perilously close to falling into a drainage ditch several times as we made our way back to our company area and loaded every available refrigerator.

Our Christmas dinner was an unparalleled success, I think. Some of details are hazy. However, I remember a chugging contest with my division head, Major Rome Smyth. We used champagne. I didn't make it very far before he finished, drinking that is. He spent the rest of the night belching. We didn't waste a single bit of the carbonation.

The left over food (and there was a mountain of it) was shipped off to the orphanage near Ton Son Nuht that we helped support, together with stockings that we had filled with small gifts and treats that our families had provided.

Baby killers, yeah, that was us. 

Oh, I almost forgot. Bob Hope was there. I'm sure you saw it in the news. I'm somewhere in the crowd, playing cards. The view wasn't all that great, nor was the sound. It was rumored that someone was arrested for wandering into Raquel Welch's dressing room by mistake. Yawn.    

WE'RE FAMILIAR WITH famous generals who rose to great office, Grant and Eisenhower being notable in that group. But, did you know that a REMF (a Rear Echelon Mother F***r) also rose to President. William McKinley was a commissary sergeant who delivered coffee and meals to the men on the firing lines at the bloody battle of Antietam?

A MODERN ARMY cannot move, shoot, or communicate without a dizzying array of intelligence, planning, and logistics. Along the way, it creates a mountain of paperwork to document, authorize, and memorialize every aspect of its operations. Every combat soldier has many needs that must be met for him to fight effectively creating a need for at least three or four soldiers to support every one in combat. 

Every recruit takes the same battery of tests to measure vocational aptitudes as well as general knowledge and intelligence. The results are used to place each in a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) to which they are best suited. The MOS list for the Army resembles a telephone directory for a large city. Other branches of the armed services have far smaller MOS listings simply because their missions are not as broad as that of the Army. Of course, errors are made in assigning recruits to an MOS and these are the stuff of legend (and jokes). However, the system works, in most cases, and those who are not tapped for one of the myriad occupations collect in one of three combat arms MOS; infantry (grunts), artillery (canon cockers), and armor (tank crews). To these men, all others who serve in the “rear with the gear” are REMF -- Rear Echelon Mother F****r.

The prejudices of combat soldiers towards REMF resemble those applied to soldiers of African descent in all wars. Despite the fact that African-American soldiers served with distinction in every American war beginning the the Revolution, they have been derided as either too inept or too cowardly to fight. Time and again their actions belied these prejudices. The exploits of black volunteers led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, documented in the motion picture Glory, proved their courage. General John J. Pershing earned his nickname “Black Jack” leading negro soldiers during the Cuban Insurrection where they were eclipsed by Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the press only; they were not eclipsed on the battlefield. The Tuskeegee Airmen memorialized in the motion picture of the same name, won the admiration of even the most diehard bigots during World War II. However, in every instance, they were still blacks who ultimately were treated to the same discrimination when they returned from war.

So too, REMF are considered less than real soldiers and cowardly for being assigned to the rear with the gear. And, like the blacks who served in other wars, these prejudices followed them home where combat veterans continued to deride them. Most REMF hide their service while combat veterans parade with their medals and their memories. Is it envy; REMF won the MOS lottery, and the combat soldier lost? In all honesty, the REMF cannot claim an equal share of the glory of war, but neither are they deserving of the derision they receive.

One of the itinerant combat infantry captains who came to babysit the 9th Admin Company for a while had lost half of his men in a battle with the Viet Cong. Before you judge him too harshly, let me add that the fault was not entirely his; his battalion commander had decided to deploy his entire command on line to reconnoiter an enemy deployment that turned out to be an ambush. “On line” is an attack formation usually reserved until you know your enemy's location and disposition. This captain, like most other combat veterans, had no regard for REMF and treated them with derision.

I was passing his office one day and was attracted inside by the sounds of confusion. A company vehicle had broken down on the road somewhere south of Camp Bearcat in the late afternoon and the men riding it would be in peril if left there overnight. The VC often traveled the roads under the cover of darkness and mined them in anticipation of the next day's travel by American and ARVN forces as well as civilians. Engineers swept the roads clean of mines each morning before they were “opened” to traffic.

The motor pool did not have a vehicle to retrieve our truck before nightfall and it appeared that someone would have to secure it until the next day. The captain was frantically calling for help, but no one seemed available.

He laughed when I suggested that we could do the job ourselves. His scorn was clearly evident as he laughed at the idea of clerks and cooks going out on a combat patrol and he dared me to even try and find volunteers for such a mission.

I sent runners around the company area to find anyone who was willing to go out with me to secure the truck for the night. I told them to meet me at the company HQ and bring their weapons, flak vests, and steel helmets. Within a half hour I had almost every off-duty member of the company lined up, ready to go. Cooks were armed with butcher knives as well as their M-16's. Clerks were cleaning and checking their rifles and grabbing loaded magazines of ammunition from a footlocker to stuff into their pockets. The captain stood transfixed. It was a sight beyond his imagining.

As we prepared to exit the base camp, another unit arrived towing the disabled vehicle we were on our way to defend. They had come across it by accident. There was a general sigh of disappointment from my impromptu command.

Unfortunately, the change in attitude towards the REMF was short-lived as the captain was rotated to another assignment and his replacement arrived with the usual attitude that all had come to expect from combat veterans.

Combat veterans deserve all the glory, and REMF deserve equal respect. Unfortunately, we were equal when we got back home; we were all baby killers... 

GENERALLY, THE ENTERTAINMENT options in the Vietnam war zone were equivalent to those you enjoy at home: radio and TV via the Armed Forces Radio and TV Network, a night at the movies, live stage shows, and clubs featuring drinking and gambling.  
Of course, the news and entertainment broadcast on radio and TV were censored to protect us from the hate waiting for us back home. Hindsight makes me wonder if that wasn't a mistake. Would we have handled it better when we got home had they prepared us for it? 

The North Vietnamese were only too happy to tell us that we were fighting an unpopular war. Trinh Thi Ngo, a popular radio personality in North Vietnam known to GI's as Hanoi Hannah, broadcast news and commentary about the war. I was never able to tune into her broadcasts. I suppose that we were too far south to get a clear signal. 

Armed Forces Radio Network (AFN) played popular rock selections omitting only those that were obviously anti-war. I never saw any official rankings, but “We Gotta Get Outta This Place” by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and performed by the Animals, must have been on top. Troops sang along energetically whenever it was played.

Fundamentally, I left planet Earth for about five years. My first two years in the Army were spent in training and then Vietnam. Neither place offered much opportunity to keep tabs on the world I had known in civilian life. I saw popular shows such as Laugh In and Star Trek in reruns. The next three years were spent in Hawaii where I had little interest in the outside world. Also, satellite TV had not yet been established and everything came to the islands on tape delay. We spent the week avoiding newspapers so that we could watch last week's sporting events without knowing the outcomes.

One of the funnier incidents occurred during my time in Officer Candidate School when I realized that the World Series should be played and I had no idea as to who might be in it. Another candidate told me that he had heard that Baltimore was playing. Baltimore? You've got to be kidding. I grew up in Baltimore with the Orioles and had never seen them win even one game that I had watched on TV, listened to on the radio, or attended at Memorial Stadium. We had a joke in Baltimore: What has nine assholes and lives in the basement? The Orioles. Now, the year I left, they won the World Series!  

I purchased a small, battery powered Panasonic TV at the Post Exchange (PX) in Vietnam and my bunk mate and I watched Combat starring Vic Morrow. This was our favorite. I suppose we enjoyed it because it depicted a much more satisfying war than the one in which we were engaged. We also never missed the weather report featuring Bobbie The Weather Girl.

Feature Films were circulated throughout South Vietnam on 16mm film. The projectors were fitted with special CinemaScope lenses to accommodate the wide screen presentations. By the time these films reached our officer's club at Camp Bearcat, they were pretty well used. Sprocket holes along the film's edges were chewed up and the film frequently broke. We watched the projectionist scan the film looking for a good section before re-threading it into the projector and continuing the presentation. We would complain loudly if we saw him throwing away too much of it and we were convinced that the scenes we missed were probably the best ones in the film. 

One film in particular remains firmly embedded in my memory; A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood. I wandered into the backroom of the officer's club where the projectionist had started the movie without an audience. I guess he was tired of waiting for someone to show up and decided to watch it for his own enjoyment. I watched with the projectionist for a few minutes and before telling him to stop and rewind it while I gathered an audience. I walked back into the bar area and announced the number of shootings I had seen – more than twenty in the first three minutes of the film – and everyone came back with me. 

Besides free feature films and cheap booze, the officer's clubs were meccas of gambling. We had slot machines and card games. You had to buy tokens at the bar for the one-armed bandits since we had no coins (all our money – Military Payment Certificates – was paper). Some of the most popular games of chance played at officer's clubs around the world involved five dice in a leather cup: Engineer's Dice, Liars Dice, Horses, etc. Bartenders would play patrons for drinks – double or nothing (win and you get a free drink; lose and you pay double).

Most people have seen films of the big stage shows that the USO sponsored including the annual Bob Hope Christmas Show. However, most are not aware that smaller, lesser known troupes of entertainers toured the camps regularly. Many came from Australia and some featured Vietnamese bands playing and singing popular songs. It was surprising how well Vietnamese girls could sing American songs even though they could not speak a word of English. Of course, most were dressed in hot pants or mini skirts and we weren't too critical.

Our division had a portable stage that resembled a small camping trailer. A friend who DEROS'd a few months after me related that the stage had been hit by a rocket as it was towed south to Dong Tam where our division headquarters relocated. I hope that the NVA soldier who fired it never learned that he had wasted an opportunity and allowed many more strategic targets to pass unharmed.

Last, but not least, I must not fail to mention the Adjutant General's Special Services office. Never confuse this with Special Forces. Special Services managed movie theaters and craft shops at Army posts all over the world. They installed a large, above-ground swimming pool at Camp Bearcat (unfortunately the water was heavily chlorinated and I stayed away). They also kept a supply of sporting equipment and hosted softball and football tournaments throughout the theater. I learned that their inventory included bows and arrows when we found that someone had stolen and shot them at our guard posts one night while I was the officer on duty. Now, that's entertainment!    

I WAS REASONABLY careful when I first arrived in Vietnam. I slept under mosquito netting and took my antimalarial drug from the dispenser outside the mess hall every week. However, as time wore on and wrestling with the netting over my bed became annoying, I let down my guard and contracted malaria. I ended up in the infectious disease ward of the field hospital for about a week. 

It was not a pleasant stay. The nurses and medical corpsmen were attentive and I was treated well enough. Most of my fellow patients were congenial. The simple truth is that it is not much fun alternately baking and freezing, soaking your bed in cold sweats as the fever rises and then rattling your teeth until your gums are sore when your temperature plunges.

Most of the other beds in the ward were occupied by fellow malaria victims and an even number of those with acute cases of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD). The worst of these latter patients arrived shortly after I was admitted and remained mute for as long as I was there. Like the patient in Joseph Heller's Catch 22, he was hooked up with a catheter and an IV. He laid on his back, spread eagle with an ice pack atop his private parts like the mushroom-shaped cloud hovering over a thermonuclear detonation. 

About two days after he was admitted a Miss America contestant arrived on a USO-sponsored visit. She was accompanied by her escort officer, one of our medical corpsmen, and an enlisted man with a Polaroid camera to take photographs of her with each patient she met. She stopped at each bed, introduced herself, and asked “What happened to you?” She then autographed a photo of her taken with the patient. 

Fortunately for our amusement, her entourage was delayed at the bed of one patient as she moved alone to the man with the ice pack. In response to her question he simply lifted the ice pack to reveal the most massively engorged penis anyone could imagine. It was black and blue and purple. The poor young woman stared agape in horror until her escort officer leaped to pull her away while the patients pulled pillows over their faces to stifle the laughter. I have often wondered if the incident scarred her in anyway.

I was scarred, but not by the sight of the poor man's genitalia. The malaria remains with me to this day, hiding in my liver. It attacks my system if I allow myself to become run down. I spent another week battling it at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii about two years following my tour of duty in Vietnam. I had lesser attacks every few years thereafter. Doctors warn that it will kill me if I am weakened by any other malady. 

Regardless of how long I live with it, I will never forget the misfortune of the young woman who came to help build up our spirits in the field hospital in Vietnam.

My experience also gives me a peculiar empathy with the millions who died from malaria, a disease all but eradicated until the ban on DDT. I can imagine their sufferings better than most.  

SIBERIA IS THE largest land mass in the world where the tempering effects of water are absent. Without a large ocean nearby to ameliorate temperature changes, the thermometer descends well below zero and warm air from the Southern Hemisphere is drawn towards it. This latter air mass is super-saturated with water evaporated from the surface of the Indian Ocean. Massive clouds carrying untold amounts of water migrate northward until they collide with the Himalayan Mountain Range. As they push up the sides of this natural barrier, formed some 8 million years ago when the Indian continent ran into Asia, the air cools, water condenses, and rain begins to fall in torrents, and we stood naked with bars of soap in hand, taking warm showers unless, of course, we were unfortunate enough to be on a combat patrol. 

We built showers in our base camps. They were simple wooden frames with corrugated tin or canvas sides for modesty. Some mounted barrels atop them. We bartered for wingtip fuel tanks from the Air Force, using cases of C-Rations for trade goods, and painted them black to adsorb the sun's warmth during the day. A cooperative family member mailed us some shower heads and we were in business just as soon as the engineers came around with our daily ration of potable water.

We were fortunate in the Mekong Delta. Although the land was built up from deposits of silt carried down from the Himalayan Plateau, wells only twenty-five feet deep provided plenty of sweet, clear water.

When I first arrived in Vietnam, we lived and worked in wabtoks; wood-frames lifted off the ground atop used artillery shell shipping containers, covered in screening and topped by canvas tents. Unfortunately, the canvas had rotted by the time the monsoons arrived and they easily tore open wherever the tents sagged and water pooled. We used to send a man around with a broom to push up from inside to spill the water off. However, one young genius used the handle end of the brook and popped the sagging tent like a water balloon. He got very wet and we had a good laugh.

The first time I experienced a monsoon I was walking towards my hootch (the wabtok where I lived) as a wall of rainwater approached. I was fascinated by the sight and neglected to pick up my pace. Although I was able to reach the screen door before the rain arrived, I stepped inside thoroughly soaked.

The engineers had prepared for the monsoon season by digging a network of deep, wide trenches throughout our base camp and leading away from it. It was a good idea but hardly adequate. They quickly filled with each storm and we found ourselves walking on a thin lake with hidden pitfalls. Using the radio tower as a reference point, we learned to navigate between the mess hall, our workplaces, and our living quarters while avoiding the ditches. Someone had laid down pallets like sidewalks in preparation for the coming of the rains, but these drifted with the winds and the currents and often led over the abysmal depths of the drainage system.

Another pet project of the engineers was digging trenches to be used as "bomb shelters." Covered with metal culvert halves and then topped with sandbags, they looked like a good idea. Unfortunately, they quickly filled with seepage from ground water or rainwater. They made nice little lap pools but little else.

Our roads were compacted laterite, a clay-like material, that became as slick as oil in the rain. All vehicles, especially jeeps, slid across roads as though driving on black ice. One day as we were sliding sideways past a colonel on foot, I saluted, and he stepped into a ditch as we passed. I hope that he survived. We could not stop to help him, and I was still laughing much further down the road.    

EVERY SOLDIER MUST earn the respect of his commanders, his buddies, and the enemy in the crucible of combat. Unfortunately, some may have to work harder than others to prove themselves. Although the military can expunge a soldier's civilian identity simply  by shearing away his hair and dressing him in a uniform, they cannot alter the prejudices that he brings with him from his former life.

Lance Corporal Sel Louis had to prove himself almost every day. Although he had proven himself in Boot Camp, just like every other Marine, he was the target of racial prejudice at every turn. Because he was Asian, he resembled the enemy even though wearing the uniform of the few, the proud. Trust lasted only a few moments after every test in battle.

While my father did everything he could to inculcate me with the prejudices of our kind, Corporal Louis did everything he could to avoid being a victim of bigotry. He is an American Marine of Chinese descent who served in Vietnam approximately the same time I was there – 1967 to 1968. He experienced prejudices from the very moment he donned the uniform and had to prove himself many times. Although such prejudice is no longer welcome in polite society and has no legal standing, it can never be totally excised, even by act of Congress. Unfortunately, prejudice and ignorance are inextricably bound together. 

All men are equal in the foxhole where bullets and bayonets snatch lives indiscriminately and artillery rattles every soul. However, until a man experiences combat, he may cling to the prejudices that he brings to war with him. Even then, bigotry may be so deeply embedded that he cannot free himself of it. 

FOR ME, the 1967 War could just as easily refer to the war in Vietnam or The war in the Middle East. I spent most of that year in the former while I followed the latter in the pages of the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military's news source. 

Ironically, the men I served with seemed more interested in the war in the Middle East even though we were engaged in the one in Vietnam. Everyone I spoke with agreed that we would rather help the Israeli's since they appeared more willing to fight for themselves while the Vietnamese seemed servile, willing to accept almost any tyrant. Also, we fell victim to the typical American predilection to side with the underdog. I remember that the Stars and Stripes published a map of the Middle East listing the sizes of the armed forces of the participants, clearly demonstrating that the Israeli's were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. 

I was among the few who predicted that Israel would win, although I was loathe to put my money where my mouth was. My confidence wasn't that high and my pay grade didn't support a gambling lifestyle. I can only dream about the odds I would have been offered had I been so rash as to predict an Israeli victory in less than a week.

Again, I watch developments in the Middle East from afar and wonder at the changes, not in the Middle East, but rather in the attitudes in my country. Why do we now revile the underdog? Why does our President call for a return to the borders existing before The 1967 Six-Day War? Doesn't he know that there were no recognized borders prior to 1967? There were lines of battle where the Israeli's stopped after driving away the Arabs who had come to annihilate them, but no recognized borders. Doesn't he know that the Arabs have never recognized the state of Israel, let alone any borders? Changing "borders" will only encourage the Arab nations to dream once again of driving the Jews into the sea.

We must excuse our President for his ignorance in these matters. Although he is, by all accounts, an extremely intelligent and well-educated man, he was just a six-year old child when the Six-Day War was fought in 1967, and it is just another dusty page in history, one of the most poorly taught subjects in our schools.

Hopefully, an America that respects its allies (it has damn few of them these days) will re-emerge before Israel is again the target of another attempt to wipe it from the face of the earth. We will need more people like Winston Churchill who understood that peace comes through strength rather than a Harold Wilson-like leader who attempts to appease his enemies. Indeed, it would be nice if our leaders could even recognize an enemy.  

THINK ABOUT IT. How close would you like someone to get to you with a straight razor when they might be a secret insurgent? 

Ever U.S. Army unit in a combat zone, even the REMF (Rear Echelon Mother F***rs), were issued a barber kit containing the bare essentials for maintaining a “bare” head. There were no electric clippers simply because electricity was rarely available in the “boonies.” Hand clippers like those used to groom horses and small animals were used instead. We either gave ourselves haircuts or spent a few Piasters for the thrill of have "Charlie" give us a close shave.

Luckily, we had a lieutenant, Bobby Tillman, who had worked his way through college barbering, and a somewhat reliable source of electricity in our division base camp. He had his wife ship his kit to him and charged us 25¢ for a standard Army haircut; whitewalls on the sides and a fringe on top that created the illusion of a “flattop.” Civilian-style haircuts were a bit more. Most of us went with the “bare” essentials, but one lieutenant kept the highly styled look of JKF. Indeed, he looked like he sprang from the same gene-pool.

When Bobby DEROS'd (returned state-side), we were left with a problem. Our solution was to check out the company barber kit and give ourselves our own haircut. Recognizing the peril of this adventure, we agreed (over numerous beers) that we would take to the chair in a round robin, each taking a turn as a barber. No one was allowed to give a haircut to the person from whom they had received theirs. The result was comical. Flat tops were tipped at a jaunty angle, like a Parisian beret, or the fringe failed to circumnavigate the head. No two sideburns were equal. Mohawks transected skulls at odd angles. Fortunately, no one lost any body parts though some were injured. 

The second solution to follow shortly thereafter was to solicit a Vietnamese barber to set up shop in the officer's club. This worked well until the Tet Offensive of 1968 and no civilian personnel were allowed access to our base camp for several weeks. When he returned, we learned that our barber had lost his home in the fighting. An empty 5-gallon water bottle was placed near his chair and it was soon filled with loose piasters that financed the building of a new one.

On rare occasions, I had the pleasure of slipping into Saigon and took those opportunities to get the full treatment; a facial and a massage as well as a shave and a haircut for the equivalent of $1.25 American. You spent about an hour in the chair and often had trouble walking when they were done. 

Most Saigon barbers were women or, more specifically, girls in their late teens or early twenties, and very attractive. Many provided other “services” right there in the chair (or so I've been told).

I've missed the Saigon barbers since I left Vietnam. I had similar experiences in Okinawa and once in Hawaii. No mainland barber ever came close to providing “full services.”  

THERE IS NOTHING more heart breaking than a soldier receiving a letter from a special girl back home who decided not to wait. It is extremely rare for a soldier to send a Dear Jane because he found someone else to love while serving in a combat zone, but it did happen. I know of at least one case. 

I'm not writing about geographical bachelors -- those who cheat on their wives because they are away from home. That happens all too frequently. Many married officers of my acquaintance openly bragged of conquests while on R&R. Some could not wait for their scheduled week in some exotic locale - Bangkok, Hong Kong, Australia - where their spouses could not join them, and sought the beds of local whores.

No, this tale involves an unmarried enlisted man under my command who was an honest bachelor. He fell in love in Thailand. But, wait. Let me back up a little. He had a girlfriend back home. She seemed inclined to take the relationship to the next level, even sending him a picture she had taken of herself, bare-breasted, in the bathroom, with a Polaroid camera. By the expression on her face, she wasn't too sure of what she was doing, and reaching across to the sink where she had propped up her camera to trip the shutter caused her breasts to sag unflatteringly. Still, her intentions were good, I suppose. He kept the picture on his desk where our division chief, a major spotted it as he wandered through looking for a snack. Picking the photo off his desk, he held it at every angle and proclaimed it to be an interesting study in feminine anatomy.

Still, the young man remained captive to her allure until he visited Bangkok, Thailand on R&R (Rest and Recuperation). There he fell under the spell of a professional. This young lady had one thing that the girl back home had lacked; a night in bed with our hero. It was his first.

I don't remember his name, and that's probably for the best. I can't imagine he would be happy being reminded of the consequences of his experience. 

He returned to the command in Vietnam with dreams of returning to Thailand after completing his enlistment in the Army. He kept up a steady stream of correspondence with his new paramour, and she replied in kind, signing her letters, not with her name, but rather, with her “license number.” I remember overhearing one of his friends kidding him; “3895?” Imagine if you introduce her to your family and your father says, “Ah yes, I know your mother well. 827.”

The ribbing continued for several weeks until another enlisted man in my command took R&R in Bangkok. He carried the prostitutes “number” with him. She had written our hero to have his friends “look her up” and she would see that they enjoyed themselves in Thailand. Well, this friend returned to report having a most excellent time – with her! That broke his heart.

I can't say for sure, but I don't think he ever went back...        

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun...

NOEL COWARD PURPORTEDLY wrote that song while on the road from Hanoi to Saigon while Vietnam was secure in the arms of the French colonial empire. I ran there almost every day in the midday sun while the country was locked in the grips of war. 

Camp Bearcat, where I was stationed with the 9th Infantry Division during my tour of duty in Vietnam, was circled by a road along its perimeter, just inside the berm, and laced with a grid of streets. All were paved in compacted laterite, a reddish clay-like substance that was slicker than ice when wet. The grid was interrupted in the center of the camp by an airfield that stretched the full width encompassed by the perimeter road. I generally ran along the perimeter road, about 4 miles, in the cool of the night. I circled the airfield, about one and a half miles during the noon time break when more sensible people were having lunch and keeping in the shade. I never had a running-mate last more than a day or two.

When asked why I ran so much, I explained that if I ever had to run, I wanted to be able to run, far and fast. I was half-joking, but actually, that was a pretty good reason.

Most people were content simply to sit and shake their heads at my behavior while others made comments out of earshot. Remember, the temperature was well above 100 most of the time and the humidity made the air feel as though I was running through a thoroughly soaked sponge. The guards at the bunkers that I passed on my nightly runs along the perimeter road sometimes challenged me and I would laugh in response. If a lone insurgent had made it inside the camp and was running in a white tee-shirt and U.S. Army issue fatigue pants and combat boots, they had my permission to shoot him on sight.

One night I decided to cut across the camp using the street that delineated one edge of the airfield, and a group of mechanics working on a Huey nearby decided to encourage me on my way by tossing rocks in my direction – at me, actually. I reversed direction without hesitation and ran back to them, all in the spirit of good fellowship, of course, and they scattered. When I found their commanding officer in a hangar nearby, he seemed annoyed that I should disturb his rest with such a petty matter. (He definitely was one who put the “MF” in REMF (Rear Echelon Mother F***r.) So, I waited by the helicopter until the vagrants returned and explained the nature of their transgression. Although I was not wearing any insignia of rank, the .45 caliber on my hip might have given away the fact that I was an officer. Not too many enlisted men had them -- although from what I have seen in the news, almost all Army personnel carry sidearms these days.

I never insisted on my men maintaining any kind of physical training nor did their company commander ever make such an effort. For REMF, duties continued 12 hours or more each day, 7 days each week. There was no break such as combat soldiers might enjoy between patrols. (Note that the use of “enjoy” there is somewhat sarcastic.)There were only church services on Sunday morning for those who chose to attend and then back to work. They would never know the fun they were missing had I not written of it here.