Memories

It seems like yesterday, although it’s been 39 years since we served together in a land far away. I can still remember:

Being on board ship, stacked like cordwood below deck while a typhoon raged above. As the ship slammed down into the bottom of each wave like a giant roller coaster going up and down hills, you knew your kidneys were on their way out of your back via your butt hole.

A cold beer, when we could get one, wet and almost alive with taste, sometimes burning your throat because it was so cold.

Going through a chow line and actually eating off a metal tray and being happy about it.

The cookies or brownies from home, stale, broken into little pieces, but as good as Mom or that special someone ever made.

Grateful for that packet of presweetened Cherry Kool-Aid, which came with that long awaited letter from home.

Sleeping on a cot, in a tent and not in a bug infested hole in the ground with the rain pouring in on you. Life was good!

Shivering at night because you were soaked with sweat from the day and it had cooled to a mere 95 degrees at night.

Ever wonder why we were sent to Japan before Vietnam?

Playing football in a monsoon.

Trying to catch a wild pig for dinner.

Crazed Water Buffalos.

Hot Sauce for your C-Rats.

Turning the C-Rat cases upside down, empting the individual cartons of C-Rats with the labels down so it was the luck of the draw..let the trading begin!

And the smell of that letter you finally got from home. It actually smelled like home, not like war and death.

Looking, watching, scouting, trying to find out where that shot came from as you lay in the rice patty and the water explodes around you or the dirt flies in your face.

The call for “Corpsman up”. The wait sometimes seemed forever to see who got hit and how bad. You walk by, there is blood, and you feel nothing except for being numb all over. You wonder if he will make it. You think about families and friends back in the “world” who don’t know yet.

The sound made when a 155 fires close by and the ground shakes with thunder as you try to sleep. The dust spraying into your face as you lay on the ground, your teeth feeling as if they are going to be shaken from your month.

The sound of a 155 as it approaches way off in the distance, getting louder as it gets closer and finally, when it passes overhead on the way to its target, it’s like standing next to the railroad tracks when the midnight special comes through at 100 miles per hour.

Your M-14, the bolt slamming home after you tapped a new magazine on your helmet and slammed it place.

That sound of an AK47, so different, so special, so very deadly, a sound that you never forget.

An F-4 as it makes a run, so close to the tree tops you swear the pilot can reach out an pick a leaf as he roars by, the trail of black smoke turning and twisting as it pours from the engine exhaust.

Riding on a tank, it’s great not walking, even for a short time, especially in sand.

Being knee deep in mud and what seemed like thousands of mosquitoes.

Drinking water with those nasty iodine-tasting tablets in it.

Eating Ham and Slams for breakfast, hot if you could get it, otherwise cold with that ever-present film of cold, hard grease on top.

The smell and intense heat of burning C-4 while trying to heat your C-Rats.

Heating pound cake from your C-Rat’s by cutting a few small holes in the top with your John Wayne, adding a little water and heating the whole thing over a small C-4 fire. Life was good!

Getting menthol cigarettes in your C-Rat pack. Life was not so good!

Lucky Strikes or Pall Mal life was good!

Beech Nut chewing tobacco, don’t swallow it!

Listening for that ever familiar “take cover” or “incoming or outgoing”

Watching the skies and listening for the Medvac choppers, telling our brothers to hold on, you’re going to be OK.

The “thump” of a mortar round as it leaves the tube.

Digging your “cat hole” in the middle of nowhere and hoping that no one would take a pot shot at you.

Waiting, listening and watching while on a night ambush, trying not to move, to not slap the mosquito that is chewing on your face, buzzing in your ear. The first shot of the ambush. Now were in deep shit and in a fight for our very lives!

Remember the smell and taste of your adrenaline?

The sound of a fire mission at night, close by, as the rounds pass overhead to their target and explode, always hoping the cannon cockers have the correct fire mission and the correct grid.

The sound and smell of rain as it moves closer, ever closer through the jungle at night.

Watching tracers as they “dance” through the night sky like shooting stars, but as deadly as the bullets they are part of.

The darker than dark jungle nights, those nights you could not see your fingers 1 inch in front of your nose and how those dark nights would light up like day when illumination rounds arrived overhead, slowly and ever so gently falling to the ground with parachutes, looking as if they were dancing angels with wings.

Experiencing the long boredom of an operation mixed with the seconds and sometimes hours of sheer terror when the “enemy” opens fire and keeps firing.

Standing and staring at the water in the streambed as it flows by your feet, thinking how beautiful and peaceful this place is except for the sounds of the flowing water. It could be home. Forgetting, if even for a brief moment, the terror, horror, heartache, pain, destruction and death that it held only a few minutes before.

The cries for help we tried to answer, but could not.

Listening as the mortar rounds fall through the leaves on the trees. You know you can hear each leaf parting as the round descends to earth exploding death and destruction in every direction.

Listening and watching from a hilltop as our brothers are lifted into the blue morning sky, the baskets they lay in turning in the wind from the chopper blades as they leave us, some for the last time.

Author/Tom Gainer