BJ Littlefield loved Squoshi...everybody loved her...but she loved BJ. Squoshi means little in Japanese. She was small and pretty and I loved her, too. BJ was a huge North Carolina football player who wound up in the Navy and working for the Chief aboard the Mighty Etai (etai means "ouch" in Japanese...our nickname for the Etlah, AN-79, a worn out old net tender that had been home ported in Yokosuka since the end of the war). A net tender is a pretty small ship with two huge "horns" stick...
If you wander long enough and meet enough people along the way, you may begin to get jaded and believe that there are just so many types of people. You change the hair color or the eyebrow shape or weight or height but basically there are a limited number of "types" in the world. You know you've met people and said to yourself, "he's just like______" , fill in the blank. Well, I know that there are some people in the world that there is just one of. World couldn't handle any more than one...
After the Metropole Hotel was blown up late in '65, then the Victoria in April of '66, the MP Brigade Commander was hard pressed to come up with a defense against suicide car bombers. The MPs who were killed in both of those BOQ bombings were armed with M16s and they were useless in stopping a car. The solution came to him, or more probably to one of his staffers who used to be a "Rat Patrol" fan (early 60s television, sorry). MPs have jeeps...they have machine guns...they have shooters w...
I drove my First Sergeant to an out of the way place near a tree line on the edge of a series of rice paddies to meet some other people. We had followed the Sergeant Major and now both jeeps sat on the muddy, dusty, almosta road (yeah...muddy and dusty at the same time...what a place). We sat for what seemed to be a long time when the Sergeant Major told his driver to inspect an old ammo box that was laying near by. I was just an old ammo box...no booby or any other kind of trap...so the S...
Southern Arizona Desert...summer 1967...Ahhhhhhh.
I saw a story on the news this weekend that said that organizers all across the country are having a difficult time getting traditional Memorial Day Parades going because the WWII vets are dying off and the Korean and Vietnam vets...well they implied they were a little bitter about the way they were treated and parading now seems hypocritical somehow. The organizers are turning to Gulf 1 and 2 vets but find they are too busy being...well...busy. VFW and American Legion posts are not doing w...
When Karmagirl asked about the perfect car, I answered with a discription of my "welcome home from Vietnam" present to my self. The story of how I...a staunch Chevy guy from birth... came to buy that car...is a little lengthy, but here goes. My trip from Germany to my home town, "the box", is another article in the making...but it was November of 1965 and after the ordeal of that trip I concentrated on enjoying the 30 day leave I had before me. It was the very beginning of the muscle car...
Sometime in the early 80's, the accident statistics in USAREUR (US Army Europe) involving fuel truck drivers got to the point where the 4 star in Heidelberg wrote to the 4star in TRADOC (Training and Doctrine) and said in effect, "It is your problem...train it out". TRADOC contacted the Transportation Corps in Ft Eustis in Virginia asking if they could train fuel handlers to be truck drivers after they finished fuel school. Not a problem, says TC school...here are the prerequisites...send 'em...
Mannie and I worked together at two places...EUCOM in Stuttgart and FT Lost in the Woods, MO. We were in a group of VIP drivers at EUCOM that had to go to a series of special driving courses set up by the Air Force and one by the German Police. It was kind of like a "Dukes of Hazard" course for sedan drivers...and we got PAID for that stuff. A tough as nails New Yorker complete with accent and strutt...one of my favorites. He was a good NCO and a solid soldier...but just a tad too ent...
Two or three times a week I had to go into Di An, the base camp for the Big Red One...1st Infantry Division. There were two ways to get into Di An, both of them were scary. The old Hwy 1 ran north out of Saigon into Bien Hoa, it was in poor repair and crowded and had little military traffic on it. Hwy 1A was newer, better repaired, more traffic, more military traffic, and fewer VC incidents...but it ran parallel to Hwy 1two to three miles east of the old Hwy and didn't go past Di An. Th...
The challenge for Ronnie was to use the things he learned from the wonderful karate instructors he visited. He really didn't want to hurt anyone but he was always dying to try things out. At a drive-in movie snack bar he instigated a confrontation with three rowdy types so he could subdue them using only his feet. He walked into the tv room where several fellas were watching something, changed the channel and sat in the middle of them....some "chicken claw" thing or other he felt would g...
Ronnie was about six foot tall and nearly 220 lbs. He was surfer good looking, casual, loose, and as free a spirit as I ever met. He came to Huachuca like the rest of us. If you got back from Nam with less than six months left, they discharged you and sent you home...if you had more than six months to go, they sent you somewhere to finish up. Most of the posts in the States were overflowing with shorttimers that no one knew what to do with. I was "lucky"...I got sent to a place where the...
In the same house as the long staircase that took out Mama's tailbone. Two or three in the morning...Chief wakes us to a sensation of intense heat...the bed is on fire. The Chief and Betty Lou always slept in the raw and had a bad habit of smoking in bed...mix that with the usual Saturday night intake and it is not good. This night it caught up with them. Jumping from the bed and pulling Betty Lou out of harms way, the Chief rolled the mattress up and charged through the house onto the fr...
Sometimes the Chief used to get hiccups when he drank...just sometimes....but they weren't the cute cartoon drunk hiccups, these were relentless, painful, and unstoppable. We went through every imaginable cure that anyone could think of...breathing into a bag...teaspoon of sugar...drink from the other side of the glass (that had to be someone's idea of a joke 'cause if you try it, the drink goes down your shirt!)...jumping jacks...and on and on. We tried scaring him, too...not a good idea w...
The fellows on the VTR, (Vehicle, Track, Recovery), the M-88 were working feverishly on the center guides of their tracks. The VTR is like a tank...it travels on tracks that go the whole length of the vehicle and are about four feet wide.. The weight of the vehicle, about 60 tons, is distributed on the track through a series of wheels called road wheels. The road wheels are split and ride over the center guides to keep the track on the wheels. The center guides are like a two pronged spik...