We had live entertainment form time to time for the sake of the troops’ morale. Nothing like Bob Hope or the big USO shows. Those were confined to Saigon or Vung Tau or the larger posts where security could be provided. This wasn’t World War II where battle lines were drawn and everybody knew where they were. There were no battle lines here. Your own hooch maid could be the enemy. What we had instead were Korean rock ‘n’ rollers who sang with funny, outrageous loss of their Ls—love became ruv—and go-go dancers. Mighty Morris complained that the Korean dancers had mosquito bites for tits. Nonetheless, there was always lots of jeering and encouragement for the girls to “take it all off.”
A couple of times Playboy Playmates came out to hand out pictures, sign autographs, and then get the hell out of there and away from all those drooling horny GIs before it got dark again.
Red Cross blood donor days were events as well attended as the Playmate visits. Guys were always hungry to see round female eyes. Besides, the Red Cross Dollies, surely selected as much for their looks as for their abilities, gave you orange juice and donuts and actually held your hand, even while sticking a needle into your arm to draw blood.
RHIP—rank has its privilege. As platoon leader, I flew the Dollies to the top of Black Virgin Mountain to draw blood from the radio relay detachment. Miles quipped that he bet there still weren’t any virgins on the mountain. Landing on top of the mountain was a trick. The helipad was about the size of a basketball court, with just enough room to one side for the relay station. The mountain dropped off precipitously from there on all sides.
When I took off again, I eased off the mountain in a hover and then let the bottom fall out as on a roller coaster, showing off and giving the girls a thrill ride. They screamed with excitement.
“One of them wore a short dress,” Shaky exclaimed, “and I almost saw her panties.”
“Know what I’d do if I were an ugly girl?” baby-faced Stockton asked rhetorically. “I’d go to war and hang around army posts. You’d get your ass screwed off every night, no matter how ugly you were. GIs ain’t particular.”
Any event gave cause for much excitement and preparation, a welcome respite from routine. Sometimes we had to make a trip into Tay Ninh the city for supplies that could only be purchased there. The club refrigerators never made enough ice for an occasion when everybody showed up to hoot and holler at the girls.
Farmer Farmer, Mighty Morris, Shaky, and I piled into Sergeant Major Rogers’s quarter-ton jeep one morning for an ice run. All such visits had to be made in the daytime. Standing orders. No GIs were allowed in town after nightfall when the VC started venturing out.
Shaky drove. Mighty Morris only half-jokingly said he had rather stay on base if the Farmer took the wheel, considering the way he flew helicopters. I took the front passenger’s seat and let my boot hang outside the Jeep.
“You’re not going to leave your foot out like that, are you, sir?” Morris asked.
“Why not?”
“I’ve heard stories about kraits attacking jeeps and trying to bite through the tires. Imagine what a really big snake could do to a boot.”
“Bullshit,” I scoffed, but I retracted my foot.
The base camp’s main gate opened onto a long track that led through the wire to the highway to Tay Ninh. The highway was a fairly decent road of patched tarmac lined with palms and rice paddies and hooches. Even from five miles away, when the wind was right and sometimes when it wasn’t, you picked up the stench of the brown river and the city on the other side of the river. The odor was a peculiar mixture of stagnant water, cook fires, water buffalo dung, human shit, garbage, and air pollution.
Open souvenir stands outside the wire on the road clustered in ambush of emerging GIs. Coke stands and cribs for the “Three P” girls. Ragged kids, whores, and crones with red betel nut juice staining deeply the crevices in their chins. They waited like crows around a roadkill to mob every vehicle that left base camp. Butchered English raised a cacophony of crow sounds.
“Coke-Cola, GI?”
“You souvenir me, GI?”
“Want have good time, GI? Me good time girl. Me do all you like, GI. Chop-chop, doggie . . .”
I had heard stories about how VC deliberately infected whores with an incurable strain of black syphilis or about how VC whores concealed razor blades in their twats. I never knew if the stories were true or not; they were enough to deter me even if I had been so inclined to experiment. Everybody teased Shaky about his testing to find out. As far as we knew, he still had his dick.
“It was my Texas duty,” Shaky drawled good-naturedly. “I couldn’t let the poor troops loose on these girls without making sure they were all right. Strictly altruistic, you understand? Nothing is too good for the troops—and nothing is generally what they get.”
Farmer Farmer took out a handful of C-rat chocolates and tossed them into the ditch gutter. When the kids and whores scrambled for the candy, Shaky goosed the jeep and squealed out onto the tarmac toward town.
Nearer the city, shops appeared vending everything from tire tread Ho Chi Minh sandals and patched bicycle tires to fish head sauce, rice, Cokes, and souvenirs. Old men wearing black pajama bottoms squatted alongside the highway, looking as wizened and wise as temple monkeys. Women tended cook fires. Whores looking young and pathetically brazen in miniskirts and bright makeup waved and wriggled their butts. Ragged kids ran everywhere, shouting and playing. Women washing clothes lined the river while their children swam. Some guy might be taking a leak in the stream while a few yards downriver a woman filled her clay jar with drinking and cooking water.
Unlike the ground-pounding grunts who spent a lot of time among the Vietnamese and developed a near-contempt and disgust for their way of life, we pilots associated with the natives sparingly. We therefore regarded them with curiosity, interest, and, of course, suspicion.
It was common knowledge that VC and VC sympathizers infected most towns and cities in Vietnam. VC were everywhere, but you could seldom tell them from anyone else. It wasn’t like they wore uniforms or signs on their backs. Only Americans did that.
Surprisingly enough, however, we encountered very little trouble in Tay Ninh. Charlie liked to come to town as much as we did to have a few cool ones and chase pussy. Neither side wanted to upset the status quo. Both sides appreciated the benefit of a neutral ground.
Shaky slowed to thirty-five mph as we approached the river, traveling between the hooches alongside the road. You wouldn’t want to hit one of the kids and cause a big incident. Ahead of us, a group of four or five urchins, the oldest of which appeared to be about twelve, was playing the Vietnamese equivalent of stickball in the road. The kids parted to let us through.
As the jeep eased past, I suddenly heard the distinctive Spang! of a grenade handle being released. I was an old 82d Airborne trooper and I knew what a grenade sounded like when you pulled the pin. I caught my breath sharply.
Mesmerized, I watched a grenade sail out of the huddle of kids. It arced high into the air, twisting slowly in the sunlight, seemingly in slow motion, and dropped toward the open jeep. The kids broke running for the nearest hooch.
The grenade bounced off the jeep’s hood and landed inside on the floorboard between my feet.
“Oh, shit!”
A frag grenade has a fuse of about five seconds. I knew beyond all hope that I was a goner, charmed or not. The charm had all run out.
No one ever knew how he would react when staring at his own death. I simply acted instinctively out of self-survival. There was no time to think about it.
Shaky’s first impulse was the same as mine—to either get rid of the grenade or get away from it. Irrationally, he goosed gas to the jeep and it lurched forward. At the same moment, I scraped the little bomb off the floorboard and flung it out as hard as I could. I didn’t care where it landed; I only wanted to get rid of it before it detonated.
The kids who threw it ducked through the open door of a hut next to the road. By some freak coincidence, the grenade went in right behind them, as if it was a yo-yo attached to a string.
It exploded immediately with an ear-cracking Crump! We ducked as debris and shrapnel whistled past the jeep.
Shaky kept going, speeding until he reached the bridge. None of us looked back. We bounced over the bridge and got lost in the city among all the other jeeps and GIs. Shaky pulled to the side of the street. His hands shook on the wheel. Mighty Morris emitted a quivering sigh. I was still stunned.
“I’ll be a corn-shucking redneck hillbilly!” Farmer Farmer declared finally. “Did you see that? It blew them up.”
They all stared at me. “You meant to do that?” Mighty Morris accused, looking amazed.
“I didn’t. I swear. It just happened.”
“Goddamn!” Shaky said. “That was poetic justice.”
We got our ice and went back to base, not even looking at the destroyed hooch as we drove back by. People were all around and there were some white mice—Vietnamese policemen—investigating. They waved as though to stop us, but we kept going. A GI couldn’t win in a deal like this. We dared not report what happened. It meant a long, involved investigation by CID resulting in the town likely being placed off-limits to all GIs. That would make us exceedingly popular.
We felt like criminals on the lam for a few days, expecting to be apprehended. But none of us said anything about it to anyone outside our group and that was the last we heard about it. I don’t know if the kids were killed or not. Probably they were. The stats never went up on our Vulture Board.
“You saved our butts,” Shaky said. “I’m a short-timer. I’m gonna stick to you like glue, sir, until I get my Texas ass out of this goofy shitpot country.”