CUE: I Started a Joke, THE BEE GEES
I suppose in every profession there is a certain mindset that outsiders simply don't understand. So it is with every generation of combat infantrymen. No matter what the war, there grows a sense of humor that is singular to the combat soldier and completely misunderstood by the rest of the army in particular, and the world in general. It comes with the territory, like the suntan from endless days under the blaze of the Asian sky and the thousand-yard stare from endless nights in the darkness. Things that would not have seemed funny in a world filled with more sanity took on a sarcastic humor that bordered on absolute cruelty when viewed through the prism of death and destruction. The infantry sense of humor was dark by necessity for it was a release from daily pressures that had to escape or cause permanent damage to the emotional stability of the combatants. We were trapped for a year in a world without mercy or forgiveness, and so we learned to laugh. We laughed at strange things, but we laughed. At times this dark mirth may have been our salvation.
Pain and suffering was our business, so it was often those very things that triggered our outrageous sense of humor. Even pain inflicted on our own numbers sometimes became the object of laughter. It was simply a matter of how it happened and what was going on at the time.
We had been sent to the edge of the Renegade Woods to guard a company of combat engineers who were cutting down the forest. It was kind of a vacation. We were out of the area where most of the preinvasion stuff was going on before the Cambodian incursion. All we had to do was watch to see that the engineers didn't get shot, and drink sodas. It was really easy duty.
One afternoon, Thomas “Lurch” Glubka took the Two Four track into the laager site to pick up the mail. He was by himself because he was only going about five hundred yards from us. This gave Lurch the chance to hot rod his track a bit. If Lurch was anything, he was a frustrated drag racer. On this very hot day, Lurch ran at top speed for the circle of tracks and shot over the berm of earth that surrounded them. This caused a huge dust cloud and a lot of complaints from those who were close by. As he pulled up to the place where the Chinook helicopter was discharging its cargo, he was greeted with good-natured jeers, a mailbag for the 2nd Platoon, and a brand new replacement who was on his first trip out into the bush. The first sergeant brought the boy to the Two Four track and assigned him to the 2nd Platoon. Lurch opened the top hatch on the APC and threw the mailbag down inside. He told the new guy to get onboard and went off to trade for some C rations with fruit in them.
By the time Lurch got back, the new guy was sitting on top of the track, behind the gunner's hatch. Lurch realized that the boy was not in a very stable position and decided to shake him up a bit on his first track ride. Lurch climbed into the driver's seat, turned up the volume on the old red radio that was tied on the gunner's hatch, and goosed the engine. The Two Four track spun around in the loose dirt and raced for the earthen berm. As the APC shot over the mound of earth and became airborne, Lurch must have been in hot rodder's heaven. He was in his element, and the new guy was scrambling and looking for something to hold onto. What he found was the edge of the cargo hatch on top of the track, which Lurch had forgotten to fasten after tossing the mail into the belly of the beast. When the Two Four track became airborne, the hatch came open and raised up under the knees of the new arrival. The kid grabbed onto the edge of the rising hatch, the track hit the ground with a huge impact, and the hatch slammed shut with the new kid's fingers wrapped around it.
It must have really hurt. The kid must have yelled like crazy, but with the engine revving at full speed, the radio blasting in his ears, and Lurch singing at the top of his lungs, no one knew the kid was trapped like that until Lurch brought the track to a halt and turned to introduce the new guy to us all.
Of course, all his fingers were broken. In fact, we all wondered how he managed not to lose a finger or two in the process. It took four strong men and an ax handle to get the hatch open and free the ashen-faced new guy. The medics came out and immediately took him back to the laager site. He was flown back to the rear on the same Chinook helicopter on which he had come out. We all marveled at this. Here was the perfect tour in Vietnam. A guy comes out for his first day in a combat unit, breaks his fingers, earns a Purple Heart, and goes back in on the same helicopter in which he had arrived. He spends twenty minutes in the line and gets to go home a decorated veteran. We laughed about this for months. I suspect there was a bit of envy in each chuckle.
Some of the humor took the form of running jokes that went on for months. It was so in the case of Larry McCoster, who managed to shoot himself in the head with his own machine gun. It was a lucky quirk of fate that McCoster was not killed in this odd incident.
We were stopped on the edge of a small patch of woods north of the base camp of Cu Chi. There had been some trouble with one of the M-60 machine guns jamming, so several shade-tree gunsmiths had collaborated to get the thing working again. When McCoster tried test firing the gun, a one-in–a-million freak occurrence happened. One of the rounds fired from the gun hit something in the tree line and came straight back at the gunner. The bullet tore a hole in his right ear and glanced off the mastoid bone, doing no real damage but knocking McCoster cold.
Everyone ran to see what had happened. We were all relieved when the medics told us the wound was not serious and all McCoster would suffer from was a few hours of disorientation and a pretty weird-looking hole in his ear. The beauty of it all was that he would get to spend a day or two in the evac hospital. He would stay there until he knew his name and was clearheaded enough to return to combat duty. That is where the joke comes in. Poor Larry McCoster remained out to lunch for close to a week. The medics told us that the doctors in the rear were thinking seriously of sending him back to the States for observation. He was going to get out of the line and go home. It was at this point that Larry McCoster opened his mouth and said the worst thing he could possibly say.
“Oh. Now I remember!”
Needless to say, they sent him back to us. He lost the perfect chance to get out of the field and go back to the world by simply failing to keep his mouth shut.
As the months went by, the McCoster saga became the source of many a laugh on a long dark night. When things seemed particularly bad or when we were all disgusted and exhausted, someone would pipe up and say, “Oh. Now I remember!” and the night would become filled with smothered laughter. If McCoster was within earshot on such nights, the muffled giggles were usually followed by the standard retort, “F—you!”
Not all the twisted humor was reserved for American mishaps. The Viet Cong provided us with moments of cruel humor as well. The fact that they spent most of their time trying to do us bodily harm made it that much easier to see them as the objects of sadistic humor.
During a rainy night ambush, somewhere near Xuan Loc, we began to hear a strange sound coming from the wet darkness of the forest. It was an odd sound that none of us could identify. We thought the sounds of the falling rain might be distorting the noise, but still we could not make any kind of identification, so we all stayed awake and on alert status the whole night. Hours passed and the noise became more and more intermittent, but it seemed louder with each passing hour. We waited for dawn with trepidation. There was no telling what new device of the enemy awaited us, and we were understandably nervous about it.
When the sun came up and painted gray light across the forest floor, we spread out in a line and began to move through the woods in the direction of the menacing sound. Each man was alert and ready to fire on any threat that might present itself. None of us were ready for what we actually found.
During the night, there had been the sounds of mortar rounds bursting to the west of us. This was not unusual, and because we had been advised by radio that it was an American fire mission, we attached no importance to it. But it was of paramount importance to one of the local enemy soldiers.
As we began to close in on the stark sound, it began to change pitch and come to us in shorter spurts of scratchy noises. It began to sound somewhat familiar to me, but I was too nervous and alert for any danger to concentrate on it. Then we rounded a small group of trees and there it was. At first we stood at the ready, looking about for any sign of danger, and then, slowly, we were overcome with relief marked by ragged waves of laughter.
Seated on the ground and leaning back against a tree was the body of a Viet Cong soldier. There was a bleeding wound in his head from which protruded the ragged edge of a piece of mortar shrapnel. He had evidently been hit by the mortar attack of the previous night and made it this far before he gave up the ghost. It was not his grisly death that provoked our laughter but the fact that he was sitting there with a live duck under his arm. The poor bird was locked in the grip of the dead man, held fast against the trunk of the tree and unable to work himself free. He had evidently been trapped like that for most of the night, and it was his frustrated quacking we had heard through the rain-soaked darkness. It was simply too ironic for words, so we laughed, freed the duck, and made our way back to the tracks. We would never again give much credence to the thought of new and strange-sounding weapons.
The vein of hard humor ran deep and seemed to give us a peculiar sense of the ironic that many who were outside the brotherhood of combat could not seem to comprehend. Often, what seemed funny in one instance became chilling and deadly serious in another. The difference between them was a matter of what was happening at the time and how close the situation was to your own mindset. I can think of two incidents that stand out as examples.
On one moonlit night, our ambush patrol was set up on the edge of an active rice field. About midnight, two enemy soldiers came walking along the rice dikes. They were talking and simply strolling along together, no threat to anyone but themselves, when the older of the two suddenly stopped. He was unaware that nine men were staring at him with their fingers on the triggers of their weapons. He began pointing at one of our Claymore mines, which was badly hidden and showed up in the bright moonlight. The soldier handed his rifle to his colleague and reached down to pluck the Claymore from its hiding place. We all stopped breathing, frozen in anticipation of what was to come, while the two Vietnamese stood calmly talking in the moonlight, the older one holding the active mine in his hands. It was like watching a foreign movie without subtitles. We could not understand a word the older man was saying, but it was perfectly clear what he meant. He was telling his younger partner how careless and foolish the Americans were to leave such good stuff lying around all over the place. He began walking toward us, happily winding the detonation wire around the body of the live mine. We bit our lips and ducked low behind the rice dike while one of our number squeezed the clacker and spread the enemy soldier all over the rice field. It was grim, but it was a lot like watching a macabre Buster Keaton silent movie. On another night, a similar situation produced markedly different reactions, at least for me.
It had been a long night, one of many in the unending string of ambush patrols for the 2nd Platoon. It was dark of the moon, and consequently the night was inky, making every sound and breeze a source of nervous anticipation. In the early morning hours, probably about 3:00 a.m. or so, a dark, undulating line of shadows came into our view. It became evident that it was a group of Vietnamese creeping through the darkness, running parallel to our position. As they drew near to us, we realized they were going to pass between us and the Claymore mines that were stretched out in front of us for about twenty-five yards or so. Those who were awake and on guard held their breath as the shadowy figures moved along, only yards away. Suddenly the whole line came to a halt. The dark figure leading the group had stopped and was bending over. He had tangled himself up in one of the detonation wires that led to the Claymores. He swore silently under his breath and yanked at the stubborn wire, then froze in his tracks. He stayed that way for a moment or two, then slowly turned his head in our direction. He knew what he had in his hand. He knew it was attached to a Claymore mine, and he knew one of us was on the other end. In that dark moment in time, he knew he was going to die.
I have thought of this man many times in the years since I left the war zone. I have pictured him and tried to imagine what he must have felt at that moment. Although the situation was not unlike some of the others that had provoked mirth, I have never been able to feel anything but sympathy for him in those last moments of his life. I suppose it's like the standard explanation given when a joke bombs at a party.
“I guess you had to be there.”