Evil Lighters in the Jungle; Viet Nam, 1969

Yeah, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil; for I am the evilest  son-of-a-bitch in the Valley.

There was a time in my life when men I knew bought Zippo lighters specifically to have those words engraved on it.

That was a very long time ago.

I haven't actually known many truly evil men.  A few, not many.  they had no need for engravings; what they did defined them, and that was enough for them.

Those with engraved cigarette lighters were usually frightened men, whistling in the graveyard, seeking to create their courage by assuming the trappings of "toughness".  In their essential innocence, they thought that being "tough" somehow equated to being 'strong".

These are not both physical attributes.  Strong is muscular; tough is -- mental.  Emotional, attitudinal.  Strong can be beaten;  Tough can only be killed.

("Cool Hand Luke:" was tough.  He did not win, but he was never beaten.  "Beat Up" .. yes.)


I liked those lighters.  They held a lot of lighter fluid, and they would burn forever.

 But they would leak in your pocket, and the fluid would burn the skin on your thigh, leaving a tender red patch which the rough cotton of your utility trousers would abrade as you crept through the jungle.  Life was shitty enough in those days, without wounding yourself.

"Get a good wound", they would say;   "Nothing crippling for life .. just enough for a ticket home."

Zippo Burn didn't qualify.  It was just a pain in the ass.  *(Well, no .. we didn't carry our lighters in our hip pockets.)*\


A lighter-fluid burn wasn't enough for a ticket home.  Neither was "Bamboo Poisoning", which I did get. It was merely inconvenient and uncomfortable -- unless you left it untreated so long that it became necrotic.    (Is that the term?  It's like Gangrene; infection sets in, and if left untreated the tissue literally rots in place.)  It took seven years AFTER I returned from Viet Nam for the lesions to completely heal and disappear.


Whatever the word is for "they  cut off your leg to save your life", that's the word.  I never did lose a limb, but I DID spend a couple of weeks, back in the Division Base Camp, being treated.     The medics back there in the Rear with the Gear scrubbed the dead tissue out of the lesions on my hands, arms, legs and feet with a rough, no-nonsense, efficient energy.   It took about an hour after the company Executive Officer spotted  me with my pant-legs rolled up at Pay call in the NDP ("Night Defensive Position" ... call it a Base Camp) for him to send me back to First Infantry Division Headquarters in Dian, where I immediately reported to the First Aid Depot.  They were using Hexaclorophene ... you know, that stuff that the workers in the early pizza parlors used to keep their hands clean, until the Surgeon General declared that it caused cancer?  Well, it cleaned me up pretty good, and it didn't kill me.  So I guess short-term usage was okay.

I had to scrub the dead flesh out of my sores three times a day for the period of my "Profile", which is like "doctor says the Sergeant  must keep his pants legs rolled up and wear shower shoes until further notice, and stay out of 'the field', so he can heal".  I didn't like the scrubbing ... hurts like a sonofabitch .. but I did like walking around a military base in a combat zone wearing shorts and sandals.  Field-grade officers quail at the sight of a Profile!  It's a God-like effect; you probably had to be there to appreciate the power it gave to a lowly Staff Sgt.

And there I was, in the Division Base Camp.  I wasn't allowed to keep a weapon.  But I was being guarded by a perimeter of armed soldiers too incompetent to be trusted with loaded weapons in the field, and/or too doped up on grass and narcotics (usually supplied at low prices by Vietnamese 'friendlies') to know when their shift was over.   They just slept in their bunkers and pooped in their pants.

Who says I missed out on the Sixties?

Division Base Camp, in Dian, Vietnam.  First Infantry Division.  The "Big Red One".  I loved that division.  I still have a couple of shoulder patches, a pin, and a coffee mug.

Call "Dian" (pronounced "ziahn") a village on the outskirts of Saigon.  Or call it what it was, an ulcer on the face of the earth.  Every semi-permanent Military Encampment deserves that description.  Did you know that when you had to piss, they had a military solution?  They called it a "Pissoir", after the french word for "pisser".  What it was, was .. they dug a hole in the ground, put a 4-foot long section of 6" sewer pipe in it, and then filled both the hole and the pipe with pea-gravel.  You stand in front of it, pulled out your Johnson, and pissed in the pipe.  Hence the name.

The really classy bases preserved your dignity; they hid your nether regions by putting a semi-circle of the corrugated sheet-metal around one side of the pissoir.  It kept the vietnamese civilian employees ("Bunker Babes") from being exposed to your exposure.  Big deal, they were almost all men, trollops, or old women ... with significant leakage between the three definitions.  Enough to say, they had all seen enough of American Pricks that one more was not cause for concern.  And yes, they had seen a lot of American Penises, too.

Most of the bases didn't bother with the crotch-screening measures.  And when  we showered, the civilian women workers were always present.  We decided to consider this a gift from God for them.

The alternative choice was to never pee.  That didn't last very long, individually or institutionally.

_______________________________________________________

But I digress.

Back to the Cigarette lighter.  And the necrotic flesh/bamboo poisoning:



Self abrading my tortured flesh three times a day, with a terry-cloth towel to scrub out the dead flesh?  That hurt a LOT more than those leaky Zippo Lighters did.  But I still carried a lighter.\

I admit, I did buy one of those lighters and I did have it etched with some pithy saying (darned if I remember what it said, but it was irreverent even though it didn't mention no stinking "Valley of Death"), but I didn't have it for long.


Someone stole it.

Over a period of time, someone stole everything I owned.

I'll get back to that in a few minutes.
No, I won't.   Suffice it to say that the REMFs  (Rear Echelong Mother F*ckers" were predators, and would steal anything  that we left in their keeping.  Their thought was that we were going to die anyway, so why not steal from us BEFORE we understood that we were dead?

You cannot fault their logic, but it pissed me off at the time.
Come to think of it, it still pisses me off!
I understand it, but I don't have any respect for the opportunistic MF's!

___________________

While I didn't  have a Zippo after the first one, I used a tiny little lighter the size of my thumbnails, which didn't hold much fluid but what it held, it did not leak.

I took that lighter off the body of an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) soldier who suddenly had no further use for it.  He wasn't going to be lighting any more cigarettes; he was living .. okay, not living ... proof that Lung cancer isn't the only thing that will kill you;  your political persuasion will do just fine, thank you, if you pursue it to the logical conclusion of fighting for your beliefs.  He was, instead, a testimonial to the motto that "Artillery Lends Dignity To What Would Otherwise Be An Unseemly Brawl".

[Actually, the Third Field Artillery Regiment motto is "Celeritis Et Accuratio" (Speed and Accuracy .. sound familiar?)  But we all really know what those red-striped trouser-legs REALLY think, don't we?  Eh?  Those Inglorious Bastards!  They kept firing on MY position for all the time I was in the field.  But that is a topic for a future post, so I'll let it be for now.]

Back to the body of the NVA private who had this cute little lighter on a string ... I kid you not.

I stole from him shamelessly.  He didn't need his web-belt with the red-star buckle or his "Ho Chi Minh" Sandals (made from the tread of a truck tire, and straps made from its inner-tube).  I left him his pith helmet .. his face was pretty much all f*cked up, and he looked better with his helmet over his face than off.  Besides, it was gruesome; I had enough nightmares to keep me awake for decades.

And I was in a hurry.  Clueless people were still shooting.  My men were bunkered up, but The Bad Guys didn't know that, and someone had forgotten to declare a "Cease Fire, You Guys Lost!"
 moment.

 Oh, and we were still receiving  Friendly Fire from our own artillery ...  a fist-sized chunk of shrapnel hit [SPLAT!!!] in the mud six inches from my right boot heel ... enough cutting-edges in that flash-frozen hunk of metal to flay a thousand fish, and its impact sort of distracted me for a day or a week or a lifetime.  It was scald-your-hand hot when I picked up, and I thought for a while about keeping it as a souvenir, but it was too heavy to pack around when the alternative was to dump water, ammo, or "shrapnel'.

"Shrapnel" lost,  as a candidate for a "souvenir"; as it always does .. and should.

["Shrapnel" is a technical term, not referring to the shell casing of Artillary, but purpose-built devices, which include the current and latest American Hand Grenades.  But that's the subject of a future article.]

Getting back to the original point ....

I took the lighter off a dead NVA Soldier ... to the Victor go the spoils.  Remember that .. I'll come back to it.

I was never evil, and I was never tough.  LUCKY, perhaps ... nothing said "God Loves You, My Son" as convincingly as being shot at .. repeatedly .. and always missed.  Thank you Jesus, for putting crappy sights on an AK and scared boys behind them!

Unfortunately,, U. S. Artillarymen are much better shots than NVA or VC  grunts.  Even after all these years, I've not been able to count the number of times I've been pelted with "Shrapnel" from American Artillery.  (Or bombs .. ask me some time about the 2000 pound bombs from "Arc Lightning" ... B52 .. bombing strikes! Or don't, thank you.)

Ahhh .. I could tell you stories about close calls, and perhaps later I will.  it takes me longer than it use to, to get into the "story telling" mode.  usually it was "Pre-Emptive Bombing" or "Supportive Artillery" that ended up with shrapnel in our web gear, or our backpacks (or smashing into the ground all around us) with no greater effect than scaring the ever-loving CRAP out of us!


(One more page of the memoirs, and then I'll have it all out of my system.  Please bear with me tonite.)

"Usually we caught shrapnel (not the correct name) when we were operating as a "small unit", detached, at night.  That would be one or two squads .. less than a full platoon, call it 20 men ... going where they sent us because "RADAR REPORTED POSSIBLE ENEMY MOVEMENT IN THIS AREA!







A word about Ground Radar: 
                                   Faulty.







We often received radio warnings about "unidentified/ potentially enemy images in your immediate area, moving toward your position".

We were there, we never saw them, but "Higher Authority" invariably decided to "defend (our) tactical position" by calling in Artillery Strikes on our position.  We caught hell, and a lot of Heavy Metal ... and we never were able to convince them to NOT shell us.

Perhaps it's significant that none of my troops, in the dozen or so instances when we received Heavy Metal from Artillery or Bombings ... were hurt ... implies something about the efficacy of Artillary?

Or maybe they were just hitting far away from us to save us?

Interesting, if so, because at least twice we later determined that they were reading OUR position  (our people) as the target .. they thought we were VC. Oh gee, that policy of using black instead of brass insignia isn't working for us?  [snide alert]

Getting Down To The Wire

Frankly, as far as Artillery Barrages and Bomb Runs were concerned?
I would just as soon have declined the honor.

The attention was  flattering, but the consequences were painful, and upsetting.  That American Military Command apparently considered us to be a threat  (they shelled us much more frequently than they ever shelled true-identified units of the VC)  was much more than the Viet Cong had done;  they  (VC) found us laughable, and apparently decided that their best response was to let us alone (with occasional sniper-shots to keep us on edge). We were no threat to them; they were no threat to us.  We all , however, feared American Artillery (and with good reason!)

SUMMARY:
We in The Field always figured it (artillery) was inevitable when unexpected, and unavailable when needed.  They (American Artillery, lending dignity to this unruly squabble) were busy blowing the everlasting crap out of some OTHER unspecting (American Infantry squad) target in the Area of Operations (AO).

Which is to say .. it simply wasn't OUR turn in the barrel.

Maybe tomorrow night, maybe not

Good night, sleep well, and if perchance to dream of small pieces of iron raining down on your night defensive position ...

....  Oops!  Sorry 'bout that!