Vietnam Follies

VETERANS DAY 2020, Something to salivate on

The flame rose and fell, the skinny smoke hanging until the fat chin-mounted guns and rockets found their targets……..and the light came through the sky.

To HELL AND BACK TO NAM

Yesterday, I awoke to the anniversary of my hospitalization at a New Jersey hospital upon my return as a combat controller in Vietnam.

The alarm clock sounded off like an afterthought. No wonder, when I walked out the door I stepped right into South Vietnam in the morning paper.

So, back in Nam for the third time.The first occasion forced me, a draftee, to visit the old French disconnection. It was as a guest of the South Vietnamese themselves. I wasn’t alone. I had joined 200,000 American soldiers in hopes of getting the job done and coming home alive.

The second time, I’d just begun my vacation in Bangkok, and was seduced into thinking that I needed to get a visa in Saigon to enter Thailand.

Saigon almost kicked me out, just before a CIA officer in civvies arrived at the hotel in the nick of time. He shouted to three Vietnamese soldiers to drop their weapons. As hotel guards, they, along with the hotel, had pulled the old black market trick on me and, had the CIA officer not bellowed at them, my plan was way ahead of his. I was ready to waste…