I did put my best foot, conservatively, forward.......and somebody stepped on it immediately.
Service in Vietnam - 71-72
Locations - fire base Bearcat, Bien Hoa Army/air base
Commanding Officer - Captain Peter Denker ......best friend last name Guthrie.......You don't get anymore until I know you better.
Officially diagnosed with PTSD .......As a matter of fact the shrink said I was the worst case he had ever seen, (great distinction), before handing me a bottle of 1000 ten miligram Valiums, with the instructions to take ten a day .......yeah, right, zombie land and/or death.
Disability compensation - 100%
Other details that a veteran would know......really. How much do you know about the operations of the 75th Infantry in Vietnam? You may very well suspect/accuse me of lying.
Our mission was long range reconnaissance patrols. We operated in six man teams.......point man....point man's slack man......two radio carriers in the middle........rear scout's slack man........rear scout. We set up claymore ambushes on likely trails. Once we blew the ambush, we would strip the bodies of everything, keeping what we wanted in the way of gear and money etc. and turned the rest over to S2....intelligence. We would insert a wooden nickle between the teeth of each of the dead.....said wooden nickle had a depiction of death on one side and our unit designation on the other......you figure out why we did that......maybe you're a fake. Any wounded were shot.....yeah a war crime by the standards of today, but that was our SOP in the Nam. We operated for five days maximum, or until we made contact with the enemy. If contact was made, we were pulled as soon as it was over, for we were then compromised. Five days was the maximum because one simply could not carry enough water for any longer period of time (we did run out with two days to go once, but that is another story). If your team made a kill, you got three days off before another mission, if you did not get a kill, you could go out again the day after returning from a mission. In the time period 71-72, we were getting over fifty percent of the entire 1st Cav's kills, with a rare maximum of six teams out at a time. I also ran a radio relay with another guy, situated on a mountain called, something like nue chal chin ( a spelling butchery), above a firebase called Mace, at the foot of the mountain. The mountain was laced with amazing natural caves that the gooks liked to hide in. I went into one of them to verify this. Some engineers blew up a bunch of them with (they said) twenty seven thousand pounds of ordinance. It shook the entire mountain......real cool, but one of our M-14s with ART scope fell off the wall, breaking the crosshairs.....real bummer.
There were whores, sucky f*cky, five dolla short time ten dolla all night.....LOL. There was reefer (grocery bag of bud for $20.00), there was heroin (plastic vials of two sizes, about $3.00-$5.00 each), there was killing.......what the hell else do you want to know?
How about you JennyMac?
Thread 'What do you think about the phrase 'trauma doesn't define you"?'
