I talked about some of this in an early article so I won't go over old ground. But some other things happened that morning and one of them has stuck with me ever since.

The blast came at about 0400. After counting noses upstairs and finding the dead guy downstairs, the next thing that popped into our minds was getting armed. We had a new Arms Room (the place they keep the guns). It had only been completed a couple of weeks before this. Before we had an arms room, we kept our weapons in racks in our rooms but some brainiac decided it was safer to keep them centrally controlled in a secure room just like the Army in places that aren't in a shooting war.

The dead sergeant's roommate was not around. We headed out the door and turned left to get to the Arms Room. I stopped as soon as we turned. There was a long line of GIs in various stages of dress, or undress, waiting in line for their weapons to be issued to them. All I could say to John as I grabbed him was, "Secondary!" The VC employed a tactic of setting off bombs then waiting until a crowd developed and setting off a secondary charge, ususally a bigger one with more shrapnel in it. He immediately saw my point and we both sat inside the door until the crowd died down and we could get in and out of the Arms room quickly. Fortunately, there was no secondary, but better safe than...BOOM!

Our compound had been attacked a time or two; not since I had arrived though, so I wasn't really sure where I was supposed to go. But John was my buddy and he had been there forever so I followed him. I didn't know at that time, but learned that morning, that John was one of those guys who knew a lot about being a soldier, had a lot of soldier skills and talents, and liked to be in the middle of stuff. So the next thing I knew, we were outside the compound. John passed a group of GIs from our compound and approached a group of MPs from down the street. (I call it a street...it was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other...more like an alley). Intersecting our street was an alley (not wide enough for anything bigger than a bicycle). It was dark. Four-thirty-in-the-morning-just-after-you-been-bombed dark. Some light from our compound bled through in slashes, which just served to make the dark places seem darker. In my heart and in my soldier mind, I knew we should go down that alley and clear it. My knees just weren't in that info loop...they just stood there shaking. The more I stared into that alley the more frightened I became. Thinking about stuff you are afraid of just gives you time to imagine more stuff to be afraid of...like thirdary or fourthary bombs...ambushes...all the stuff the bushbeaters do for a living. I also knew that once John got done talking to the MPs, he would glance over at the alley and say, "Come on, Daddy, we should check this out" or something along those lines. I tore my attention away from the alley and paid attention to John's conversation. The MPs were telling him that there was no way they were going down that alley. My little chicken-heart silently cheered the wisdom of that position. But not John. He turned to me and started in my direction, but to my surprise and relief, instead of pulling me into the alley from Hell, he said, "Daddy, cover me from the mouth of the alley while I go check it out". I was immediately relieved and guilty and shamed at the same time. And hurt that John didn't want me to go with him. But I took up a secured position and aimed down the alley and covered his advance. We were a good team; I picked a spot where I could engage the most likely parts of the alley and he stayed out of my line of fire. No one was there. Took five minutes to determine that and soon after that the sergeants came out of hiding in our compound and started directing activity. I wound up on a detail carrying debris out of the blasted building, and even got my face on some TV network news. Showed the TV viewers a combat boot with a six inch splinter of wood driven through it.

There were plenty of opportunities in that year to learn to do things I was scared to do. More dark places, scary nights and days, and not all of them turned out to be empty. I learned a lot about being afraid that year, and I learned that being afraid wasn't a reason for not doing something. Being afraid is smart...makes you cautious. But I have always felt like I failed that first test. I didn't want to go down that alley; no person in his right mind would want to go down that alley...even the MPs didn't want to go down that alley. But I was smart enough to know that the alley needed to be cleared. And sometimes you just have to do things that scare the crap out of you