It was always a relief when daylight finally arrived.  I soon learned the wisdom in the popular saying “We own the day, but Charlie rules the night.”  During the day, we went looking for them, but couldn’t find them.  At night, they came looking for us and they knew exactly where to find us. 

 

At sun up, our daily assignment at Quang Tri Airbase was to provide extra infantry support for Engineers as they swept the 12 miles of Highway One between Quang Tri and Dong Ha for mines. It took about two hours and was usually pretty routine.  We did get involved in a few small firefights but otherwise nothing much happened.  The most excitement was finding the clues left behind from the previous night’s battles: burned out trucks, huts still smoldering, the awful sight of blown up water buffalo that had stepped on mines and on a few occasions, a dead body. 

 

This was my buddy waiting for the sweep to start.  The first time we met, he introduced himself to me as Lance Corporal Jewel and told me he wanted to become a “lifer” (a career Marine).  Nobody wanted to be a “lifer”—or at least would never admit it—so I was all but certain he was kidding but he said it with such a straight face that I didn’t know what to make of it.  It was some time before I was sure he was just having a little fun at my expense. 

 

Jewel was a joker and a fitness freak.  He did push-ups, sit-ups and countless other exercises anytime he got the chance.  He showed me an abdominal isometric exercise that is done simply by exhaling completely and tightening stomach muscles as much as possible for a count of ten.  I still continue to use this exercise today—when I am stuck in traffic, for example­--and it has served me well. Thanks Jewel, wherever you are.  I would like to think that of all the times I showed someone how to take pictures over there, there are a few whose lives I have enriched a little as well.

 

Everywhere we went, the kids came up to us and begged for cigarettes or "chop, chop," slang meaning food.  Most of the time we ate “C” rations: fruit cocktail, pound cake, spaghetti, or our least favorite, ham and lima beans—more commonly referred to as “ham and motherfuckers”—that came in little green cans left over from the Korean War and were as old as we were. The strangest item was the cheese that listed plastic filler in its ingredients.  When no one was looking, a favorite joke with this stuff was to throw a can of it into the small fires we often used to heat our “Cs,” and wait for it to explode.  Moments later, a very loud “bam” was heard that was sure to rattle the nerves of a fellow Marine whose nerves were already a little rattled.  Also included in our box of "C" rations were cigarettes that were so old that nobody ever smoked them unless they were really desperate so we threw them to the kids.

 

The little boy in this photo couldn’t have been over seven or eight yet he smoked his cigarette with worldly sophistication. He would come visit us most every morning often with other kids about the same age.  Many people have asked me why we gave kids this young cigarettes.  With all the danger these kids faced daily, the health hazards of smoking seemed like the least of their problems.  All the Vietnamese smoked heavily, kids as well as adults. I have never seen a culture where smoking was so pervasive.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to see dogs smoking. 

 

Shortly after this photo was taken, a patrol came in that had been out in “Indian Country” (enemy occupied territory) for almost a week.  Their faces were painted with camouflage cream and their eyes spoke volumes about the terror they had experienced. They were frightening and I had never seen anything like it before.  As the group was congregating at the perimeter wire, a sniper round was fired from a nearby “ville” and it hit one of them in his canteen.  It was the older metal type and the round just made a loud noise and glanced off, causing no more damage than a large dent. The guy appeared to take the near-death episode in stride, casually saying something about how close he came “to getting it.”  The rest of us were trying to decide whether to go after the sniper or determine if we were being suckered into a trap.  But the guy who got hit just kept going on and on about how close he came to “getting it” and how he didn’t know how much longer his luck could hold out.  At first we didn’t pay much attention to him but the guy just kept talking more irrationally.  His eyes alternated between darting back and forth and staring off into space as if he saw something none of the rest of us did.  It soon became obvious to everyone that he had snapped.  The hospital corpsman with us recognized the problem too and the next thing I knew, the guy was in a Jeep heading back to base.  I never saw him again.  I always wondered what they did with a guy in that condition.  Did they try to rehabilitate him or did they just give him an early out and cut him loose into civilian society?

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