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.