Place of duty--2

Place of duty—2

        The afternoon of the first day the platoon was at Angelique, the troop supply truck made runs to the PX tent. Three large CONEX containers filled with cases of beer sat inside an area fenced off by concertina wire near the PX tent. The beer was Pabst Blue Ribbon, Hamm’s, Carling Black Label and Miller High Life. Two other CONEXes held cases of soda -- Fresca and Tab mostly -- and a few cases of Coke if you got there early enough. Every soldier had a ration card and could buy two cases of beer a week. That first day, Hunter and Wizard volunteered to buy beer. Billy D, Kincaid and I bought sausages, beef jerky, crackers and cookies. Bull and Snooze would buy beer and things next day. After settling in the squad tent and cleaning weapons and scraping mud from jungle fatigues and exchanging worn clothing for new sets, we waited for dark. Sergeant Reid and the LT wouldn’t let us drink during the day.

        After supper, Bull and Snooze went off to the NCO club, a large tent with a plywood floor and a bar, a dozen or so tables with chairs, and a stereo system. The other five of us in Second Squad went to the bunker beside the tent. Wizard went inside the bunker and passed up a poncho buttoned together and the neck hole and bottom string tied and the poncho filled with beer and ice. Kincaid and I had scrounged the ice from the mess tent. Outside the wire, there were beer stands, small businesses run by Vietnamese civilians. Those places sold ice in long blocks made at ice houses in the nearest big town and brought to the stands in Lambretta cycle buses or trucks. The blocks of ice the Vietnamese sold were packed in rice husks for insulation and always had bits of rice husk stuck to them, even though the Vietnamese washed off the ice before selling it. Nobody put ice bought at the stands in a canteen cup, but ice from mess halls was declared clean for our use. That night, we didn’t intend to put ice in our canteen cups, but it was good to have clean ice and not the Vietnamese kind made with water from who knew where.

        Billy D took the poncho from Wizard and lay it on top of the bunker. He untied the string at the neck of the poncho and passed out cans of cold beer. Hunter always had the church key, and he passed it around. Everybody took that first sip of beer, the best sip, and lit cigarettes, except Kincaid. He didn’t smoke. “Bad for your health,” he said when somebody offered him a cigarette his first day with the company. Hunter laughed when Kincaid said cigarettes were bad for your health. “Sheeit,” Hunter said. “You see anything around here ain’t bad for your health?” Kincaid had smiled and said, “No sense pushing the odds.”

        We sat on the bunker in a kind of half circle, facing out, and Hunter sitting on the middle top of the bunker beside the poncho. The beer was good, and the cigarette I smoked didn’t have that funky taste of out in the bush when the day was too hot and I’d already smoked too many cigarettes. In the bush, the only good cigarette was the first one of the morning, when I drank C-ration coffee from my canteen cup, or coffee cooked at the mess tent and brought out in a mermite can with the rest of breakfast when we got a hot meal.

        Nobody said anything for a while. The heat of the day was mostly gone. Night wasn’t yet dark enough for people on the perimeter to get spooky and start firing at VC who weren’t there or pop hand-held flares to try and see the VC who weren’t there. The night was too early, too, for VC sappers who were there somewhere to sneak through the wire. VC sappers were good at that, usually waiting until after midnight, when people in the perimeter bunkers were sleepy. Sappers got through wire maybe fifty percent of the time. The really serious sappers stripped naked and eased between concertina and underneath tanglefoot, dragging satchel charges. When past the bunkers, good sappers would throw satchel charges into command bunkers if they found any. Ammunition dumps made good targets, too. Anything behind the perimeter bunkers was a good target, even if what blew up was a squad tent full of sleeping soldiers. Sappers hadn’t tried the wire at Angelique for a month or so.