Apples

I should have written this over 30 years ago, but I didn’t want to, and still don’t really, (I mostly just wanted to forget about it), but I will because my daughter wants me to, although it may not be as exciting as she would like.
My Viet Nam story is not your typical war story.
In a years time we made one trip up river every five to six days, but there were a couple of times that we were broke down, and had to sit and wait for parts, so it is not possible for me to remember every trip. It just seems like we were going up river, or down river constantly, and for the most part we were. What I remember now are mostly just certain incidents.
There were times when we had to move fairly close to one bank of the river, or the other to stay in the deep water, and this one place, there was a small village, and as we passed, there was always small naked children playing, women washing clothes in the river, and a few men standing farther back, but they would always wave to us, and we would wave back.
Where the women washed clothes there was a wide board that extended out into the river about 15ft, propped up by a couple of stakes in the water, but only a few inches above the water. There always seemed to be a woman squatted at the end of this makeshift dock washing clothes.
One day, as I was about take my watch on the port .50, I had an apple in my hand, and I thought to myself, “I’ll bet these people have never even seen an apple, much less eaten one”, so I threw the apple toward the lady on the board. Somehow she saw the apple coming and immediately stuck her fingers in her ears, and ran for the nearest hut. It was a pretty good toss and the apple splashed into the water about 10ft up river from where the lady was, and began to float downriver. One of the naked little boys, noticing that it was floating, and did not explode, jumped in the water, and swam after it, coming up with it, and holding it in the air showing us that he had it. A few of us applauded the boy, but the Craft Master said, “That was stupid, you just wasted a perfectly good apple”.
The next trip by, I think the whole village was down on the bank waving to us, so we threw a few more apples, and this time the bigger boys, and two of the men swam for the apples. After that it became a regular thing as we passed that village.
Then one day we pulled into Saigon, and one of our men finished his tour of duty, and went home. The next morning as we were loading cargo we got a replacement, and let’s just say this guy was a little different. Right away he started talking about how he wanted to start killing “Gooks”.
He was pretty disappointed when he found out that the guy who just left had been there a year, and had never killed anybody. We told him that if killing was what he wanted, he should transfer to one of the PBR’s, but as far as I know, he never put in for it.
That next trip as we passed the village, he decided to throw potatoes, and that would have been okay except that he was trying to hit the people. I said, “What are you doing”? and he said, “So what, they’re nothing but a bunch of gooks, and they will probably be shooting at us next week”, and I said, “Yeah they probably will now”. After that a couple of the other guys joined in the potato throwing, but that day was the last apple I threw.
So much for public relations.

South China Sea

Chapter Four



We left Cat Lo at day break the next morning, heading out into the South China Sea. We would be out of site of land for a time, so the Craft Master charted a course to the mouth of the other river (Mekong Tributary), the mouth of this river was nearly eight miles wide, and in some places less than five feet deep, and the mud underneath the water could have been 30ft deep, who knows.

On that morning the Boss, (Craft Master) said to me, “ Today you are going to learn how to steer by the Compass.” Now this compass was old, built probably in the early forties. Suspended in some kind of thick liquid, and she came around mighty slow, which meant that when the boat came around, you had to wait for the compass to catch up, and it was very easy to over compensate, and for that reason the wheel was on manual steering. About a mile out the seas got a little heavy, and we were not heading straight into the wind, consequently, every time we came up on a swell at an angle, the boat would slide off the swell, thus throwing us off course.

If you have ever tried to steer a car when the power steering goes out, then you have some idea of what it was like, heaving back and forth on that wheel. I was supposed be relieved after one hour, but he made me stay on the wheel all the way to the mouth of the other river, and by this time I was pretty much getting the hang of it, and plenty tired.

When we hit the brown water, I went on lookout, mostly to rest I think.

After about half an hour we came to a string of fish nets, anchored by bamboo stakes that looked to be stretched all the way across the river, but we were headed for a relatively small opening. On the left side of this opening was a straw hut mounted on stilts. There was nothing else for miles in any direction, but when we passed through the opening an extremely skinny old Vietnamese man dressed only in shorts came to the door of the hut, and waved to us, and we all waved back, except the man on the port .50, who had the gun pointed at him the whole time, but as far as I could tell, he was just a harmless old man. We passed him by and headed on up river. Awhile later as the river narrowed somewhat, we began to use landmarks as our bearings to stay in the deep water, and these landmarks had to be memorized for the next trip. Of course the Craft Master, and the guys who had made the trip many times before, already had, but the river was constantly changing, and once in awhile we would slide up over an underwater sandbar that we didn’t know was there. (I have a story about one of those times that happened about six months later while I was on the wheel).

Once in awhile there would be a very small village with the buildings on stilts right on the bank of the river. There would be small naked children running around, and women washing clothes in the river, but we saw very few men, and most of the ones we did see were old. We would sometimes speculate about where the young men were. Some thought that they were “Viet Cong” out somewhere fighting our people, and we watched these people very close, but they always waved to us, and we waved back.

Before dark we reached our next stop. We tied up at the PBR Pier, at the town of My Tho, (Pronounced “Me Toe”). We had our own winch & boom crane, so we unloaded their cargo of food and ammo.

When we were finished, we lit off the Webber Grills, and had New York Strip steaks with all the trimmings, and plenty of beer for supper.

(To be continued)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mekong_River