The Nam

People come up to us all the time and say, "Unremitting Failure, what was it like fighting in Vietnam?"  We don't say shit.  We let the teardrop rolling down our cheek speak for us.  What was it like?  Like a teardrop, motherfucker.  Nam was Hell, the hardest damn privilege we were ever granted by this great nation. 

People always want to hear about the atrocities.  There were no atrocities.  What you had in Nam were accidents.  Like one time we were on this Search and Destroy mission and this crazy fuck Shelby said "Look, a little old lady!" and shot her.  Like we say, an accident.  Nobody was too broken up about it until we found out she was from Sioux City, Iowa.  She told us herself as she was dying.  She was just this dear old black lady who'd been taking a blueberry pie to her church and gotten lost.  Had the blueberry pie and everything.  She could have been our sainted granny.  Ain't nobody was very happy about that.  Except maybe Shelby, who got her ears.  

If you want to know fear, spend some time on the perimeter.  It's dark and you hear all kinds of spooky shit.  It makes you jumpy.  Like this one night we were watching the wire when suddenly we heard this "Willllburrrr!"  Just like Mr.  Ed, the talking horse from TV.  Got the whinny right and everything.  Every five minutes we'd hear it again.  It got to us.  It was like the VC had taken psyops and perfected them.  Finally somebody snapped and opened up and we all joined in.  The darkness went apeshit with tracers.  When we finally stopped we heard somebody groaning.  It went on for an hour or two then it stopped.  Come morning we crept out to take a look-see and what do we find?  A dead horse.  A beautiful palomino saddlebred, just like Mr. Ed.  Even had a brand on him reading Property of CBS.  That fucked us all up.  We spent the day getting wasted.  Nobody said nothing.  Finally this grunt Speck says, "What's the use?  Even Mr. Ed's a goddamn gook." 

You saw some amazing shit in-country.  One time we were spread out across this field and Charlie was in the treeline and we kept shouting, "Come on, you chickenshits!" Just to be friendly you know.  Suddenly this giant Viet Cong comes running out of the trees.  Now your vietnamese are a petite people.  You can put six of them in a sardine can and still have room for a rec room.  This guy must have weighed six hundred pounds, easy.  He was either a genetic mutant or a biological warfare experiment run amok.  Fast too.  He came flying across that field.  And he had like ten VC behind him using him as cover, not to mention a couple hanging on his back and shooting around him like he was a rock.  We fired everything we had at him.  There is no fucking way this guy keeps running.  But he did so finally we jumped out of our foxholes and parted like the Red Sea to let that giant fucker pass.  He could have stopped and wiped us out but he didn't.  He just kept running.  Later that night we heard he wiped out a convoy about a mile in our rear.  The next day we heard he singlehandedly shot up a base about twenty miles behind us.  For all we know he made it the whole way to the China Sea.  Right now he could be swimming across the Pacific Ocean on his way to destroy San Francisco.

Comments

[kfc]

My boyfriend keeps asking me how in the hell you could know so much about Port Arthur - have you ever been there? I think it's freaking him out a little, the accuracy of the earlier story. Fortunately, he wasn't in Nam, so he won't be bothering me about this one.

[UF MIke]

It's a mystery to us too. We've never been there or read anything about it although we've heard it's the home town of Janis Joplin. Either we're psychic or every midsize town in America is like Harrisburg, Pa.

[kfc]

UF - Yes, Janis was a hometown girl, and Mary Karr, authoress of one of my favorite books, The Liar's Club. Additionally, I hace learned from The Cajun or Coonass, as they are called in parts Southern, that Babe Zacharias also hailed from that refinery town. That's not a bad roster, though oddly lacking in significant men.