Month: October 2013
BOY – DID I GET A WRONG NUMBER
Viet Nam was low tech compared with the present. Old fashioned, crank-’em-up, hard-wired field phones were used on base perimeter guard to communicate with Tactical Operations Command.
Each bunker went through a ritual in setting up for the night. That ritual included setting out and wiring up the triggers for Claymore mines, setting up machine guns and, for some, putting some Claymores mines on foo gas* drums. There was as well plugging in the com phones and doing communications checks.
One night, some cherry troops managed to cross-wire their com phone to a foo gas trap and, when they cranked up the phone to do a com check, the foo gas exploded in a mushroom of fire when they cranked it.
Seeing the dramatic explosion, other troops opened fire in the general direction of the blast. Other bunkers near by, seeing the explosion and tracer rounds from M-60 machine guns, opened up with rifles as well.
The sounds of “cease fire — cease fire” filled the night air and it took a while to get things settled back down. Tactical Operations Command was not pleased (massive understatement).
* “Foo gas” is napalm. The traps were 55-gallon drums of it with explosives attached. A powder was mixed with gasoline in the barrels, which made it into a gel-like substance. Sometimes called “nape”, it was a terrifying weapon often used in bombs. The burning, gel-like mix would stick to the skin of any poor soul that happened to be too close to a shower of it, and it would continue to burn until the fuel was exhausted.
HAVING A BLAST
I left another post about explosives being used in an effort to clear trash outside of the base perimeter. This time it was a deep puddle of water in a defensive bunker that needed to be gone..
Portions of the base perimeter were protected by a long mound of earth, called a berm, into which there were built bunkers. There was a unit of engineers on the Bien Hoa base that got clever (or so they thought) when a small squad drew berm guard duty and found their bunker flooded from recent monsoon rains.
After quite some time trying to bail it out using cans, they decided they could (having the requisite access to explosives) simply blow the water out with an explosive charge. The result was a 15-foot breach in the berm — with the water still standing in the bottom of the original bunker position.*
To say that Tactical Operations Command was not pleased would be a massive understatement. The troops were made to complete their night-long guard duty sitting in the puddle of water in the middle of that breach without the protection of the bunker (to ensure there could be no infiltration). I suppose it sounded like a good idea at the time.
* One would think that some effort would have been made to scrounge up a hose. After all, they were engineers — and siphoning off the water may well have worked.
MORE HUMOR
THE HERO OF THE 20th
The Bien Hoa base in Vietnam was sprawling, with compounds that could be widely spread. As such, it was especially prudent to have a guard patrolling at night in your own compound.
I was on interior guard one night, carrying an old M2 carbine with one magazine as I patrolled. It belonged to the first shirt and was traditionally carried on interior guard duty. Why we didn’t carry an M14 I do not know, other than that the old M2 was a great deal lighter.
It was a Sunday night and troops had been partying hard to end the weekend so it was just me under arms.
All of a sudden all hell broke loose. I could see flares going up from other compounds in the distance, tracer rounds going out from the base perimeter, and heard explosions. I started to run full speed to the concertina wire perimeter of the compound that faced the base perimeter a couple of hundred yards away. As I jumped over a drunk soldier, he yelled “Ellenson … what’s up?” I didn’t take the time to answer.
I reached the compound perimeter and crouched in the weeds by the wire, looking out toward the base perimeter and thinking I couldn’t do much with 20 rounds but it looked like it might have to be me.
Then it hit me: It was New Year’s Eve.
Postscript: I suspect some troops were denied a trip out of country that night. I watched a Freedom Bird making an approach to the air strip, only to pull up and leave due to all of the tracer rounds and flares in the area — perhaps not so funny.
WAR HUMOR
In spite of whatever else makes being in a war something less than pleasant, troops all had their moments of playfulness and humor.
The vector control lab of the 20th decided to see if there was an optimal mix of food types and amounts of rat poison to attract and kill rats. After several weeks of experimentation they announced their findings:
Rats defecate in direct proportion to the amount of food they eat. Well — DUH!
OBSESSED
Okay … I’m becoming obsessed with finding Gordon Hansen. Maybe it’s because he was from my home state of Minnesota, maybe because I have a brother named Gordon, probably because he was a 20th PMU brother … or all three. If you are a 20th vet and happen upon this blog, please ask any other vets you know. I’m counting on six degrees of separation to work out here. I’ve fried Google’s servers and those hosting Minnesota newspapers.
Gordon Hansen, where are you?
20th PMU, VIETNAM 