Truman has more of a reason to write a book than me. He was fighting against a much more powerful enemy in much harder circumstances. And he was on the winning side of that war. But I digress, like I said before. Binh and I entered Truman’s office and gave crisp salutes. Binh followed his with a polite local bow and a “hello sir”. “Teaching some English, I see”, said Truman.
“As you well know, in a war like this, words are more important than bullets”, I replied. Green Berets are as much diplomats as they are soldiers, or rather, they are diplomats first and soldiers second.
“Well said. Well, what have you got for me?”
“I found and searched a VC tunnel complex near my outpost. Binh here has the report and helped me write it.”
Binh stepped forward and handed the report with both hands, as is the custom in most of Asia. When something is important, or you are giving it to someone important, you use both hands to offer it. It’s a custom few Americans over there learned or even noticed. If you ever get a business card from a Japanese person, for example, they will use both hands and do a slight bow when handing it to you.
Truman took the report and slowly flipped through the pages. His face told me I had done good work. The report wasn’t long, and Truman reads fast. Plus, I hadn’t been dismissed yet. Even so, the minutes he took to read it felt like hours.
“Outstanding work, keep it up. Anything you need from me? Your wish is my command.”
This was the part I was waiting for, but also the part I was the most nervous about. I wanted to get my spy camera for myself and weapons and ammo for Binh. I was afraid of asking for too much and getting nothing or something worse.
“I’d like a spy camera for the next time I explore a tunnel complex. We’ll get more intel that way. My memory’s good but a picture lasts longer. I’d also like some M60 machine guns, ammo, and radios for Binh and his men. Say enough for an Army infantry battalion.”
“Binh has that many men?”
“Yes sir. I’ve seen them form up. They’re experienced and disciplined too.”
Binh made the thumbs up gesture and smiled. I had coached him beforehand to do that when he heard the word “disciplined”. I felt a bit guilty about that piece Potemkin Village dishonesty, but it got me what I wanted. Potemkin was a Russian governor during the reign of Catherine the Great. He built fake villages filled with good-looking actors to impress her when she visited his domain.
“Damn! How much English does Binh know?”
“He can’t speak it so well yet, but he can understand a lot and I’ll keep teaching him. He’s been helping me with Vietnamese.”
“OK, you sold me. I’ll give you what you two can carry now and send the rest on another chopper. Dismissed!”
Binh and I loaded the chopper and headed back for the outpost. I’d never seen him more excited and his respect for me grew by leaps and bounds that day. I had just won my first battle of sorts. It was important now not to get cocky. Fatal mistakes are borne of overconfidence far more often than fear.
After we got back to the village, Binh formed up the battalion and called out some names. They were the elite of the battalion: either strong, brave, smart, good marksmen, or just popular in general. Binh explained in Vietnamese to them (for my benefit) that they were the best and so could choose between either a radio or a machine gun and I would train them on how to use them. They made their picks and fell back in formation. Binh explained to guard the US equipment carefully because it took a lot of work to get it. He turned to me as a signal to make some closing remarks.
I stepped forward and shouted in Vietnamese: I look forward to teaching you! I followed that up with a raised fist and a battle cry of SAT CONG! (kill communists!). The men went wild, and I knew Binh appreciated the shout-out to his tattoo. In human relations, there are rarely any unimportant details, and what is apparently trifling often turns out to be crucial. It’s a hard lesson to learn and I was slow to learn it as a child.
I decided to do the gunnery course first since all the men had shooting experience and that skill was easier and more relevant. The tricky part was finding a suitable piece of land nearby. I ended up deciding to use reduced size targets on a shorter range. In jungle warfare, firefights happen at 50 meters or less almost all the time anyway. I decided to use a waterfall as a backstop and also because the roar of the water would mask the sound of the shooting. I decided to let the men do everything themselves. People learn faster that way. Three of Binh’s men came to the waterfall with me, and I told them with words and gestures how to set-up the machine gun we had brought.
It took a bit longer than usual, but the important is they learned it all themselves and would remember it. After they all learned how to load and shoot, I told them they were the instructors now and that every man in the battalion should know how to load and shoot an M60. So for the next few weeks, they took soldiers out there in small groups to do just that. I could tell they took pride in learning how to shoot an advanced American weapon. From what I knew about Soviet weapons, they seemed better and easier to get, but I knew using enemy weapons was frowned upon and best avoided. Besides, the ticky-ticky-pow! of an M60 is music to my ears. Guns are the ultimate percussion instruments.
I was a soldier once.
Now I own a Firsting Flute and couldn’t be happier.
19K, if I remember right. Something with tanks, no?
Also, enjoy this Vietnam War radio chatter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuuDWd8SL7A
I see we are doing euphemisms again.
Every time I hear Vietnamese chatter I know that Mrs F is talking on the phone to one of her friends.
And go hide under a bed?
Time to go fishing, in case the friends showed up for dinner…
One of her friends asked me to catch some bullheads for her but not clean them, what a deal. I told her I should take the gills and guts out but she was adamant on leaving the heads on.
Another time a Thai friend wanted some small perch (not bream) but let her clean them. That’s easy enough, in the winter.
The daughter wants to learn to fish. Happy, I am.
You’ll always know where she is. My kids learned to fish, my grand daughters, as little kids, loved fishing, then they grew up.
Actually one teaches “Outdoor Adventures” in a small Alaskan village, I think she’s learning more than she is teaching.
Daughter had a Vietnamese (ex) boyfriend. I gave him some fish. He threw away all of the parts I would eat and cooked the parts I would throw away. Stunk up the house for a week.
What the hell was that?
Didn’t the new arrivals do a lot of commercial fishing in your area, about 50 years ago?
Yes they did. What they lacked in taste they made up for 10x over in work ethic. Glad to have ’em.
👍
Young HE had the vinyl of Billy Joel’s Nylon Curtain.
I didn’t blast it loud, but. I was in my brother‘s room using his Panasonic system to play it while lying on the floor drawing something or other.
“Goodnight Saigon” played for a good minute or two before I noticed Dad standing in the hallway. The sound of the helicopters at the opening of the song had frozen him in his tracks.
After the song was done, he said the most about the War that he’d ever said up to then and ever since. I wouldn’t say he -liked- the song, but he connected with it.
I was shocked today. A young female employee at the Poduck Dollar store had a name tag on that read Xi. I’m a little (lot) behind on names, gender and pronouns but my goodness, even out in the sticks it’s become contagious.
Like Xi Jiping, or pronoun Xi?
I guess it was her first name, maybe a pronoun. How would I know, I’m old.
If she is Asian, it was very likely her name.
https://mcrawford.substack.com/p/old-cars-and-the-logic-of-dispossession
I am not much of a Neil Gaiman fan, but he was onto something in American Gods.
https://slate.com/culture/2023/12/golf-ball-rollback-callaway-titleist-taylormade-usga.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Last spring, the USGA and R&A proposed what’s often been called a “bifurcation”: Elite competitive players would play with one kind of golf ball, and 15-handicap players drinking beers with their buddies would play with another kind of golf ball…..And that would be bad, because “part of golf’s appeal is this underlying sense of: ‘I can do that, too.’ And using the same equipment as the pros gives us a more accurate feel for how talented these players are.” Companies like TaylorMade wanted to make sure they could keep selling equipment on the grounds that using the same wares as the world’s best players would provide some sort of connection between us and them.
What’s funny is that the USGA/R&A think that their rules have anything to do with anything. What makes sense is two markets for equipment: compliant and not; then folks play whatever they want; suppliers would sell both, so they get to have their cake and eat it too. But folks will cheat! Yeah, they already do: unless the balls and clubs are provided by the tournament, there will always be equipment compliance risk…..just ask Maurice Petty.
Don’t most sports make the contestants use a standard ball even if they can choose to use different brands of, say, tennis rackets or baseball bats that have minimum and maximum specifications? Maybe golf tournaments could require “use these brand balls with such and such compression rates” but you can bring whatever brand conforming clubs you want.
I remember in school, I had to take a class on African American history. It was basically poorly sourced at best and all propaganda. My favorite was them trying to pretend that all Natives were friends of the slaves and how blacks who fled were welcome among them as free men.
Sure…some slaves escaped and lived with Indians and were free. In a few places, at a few times. Then there were a shit ton of Natives who owned slaves. As Razorfist says, the Trail of Tears was followed by a trail of slaves.
My favorite was a paragraph that asserted, with no sources or evidence of any kind in the professor’s own book (that he forced us to buy and he’s not some accepted authority on the sujbect, thing looked like he printed it in his garage) that slaves resisted slavery at every turn with silent protests by breaking tools, doing shitty work in general, and sabotaging their master’s food.
When it comes to DEI history, the standards of the profession go out the window entirely.
From what I hear, that’s pretty wide spread. I will leave it to genuine historians to tell the tales of various ethnicities. They should all get the respect they deserve. Meaning, telling the whole truth, showing nuance, and letting the reader reach their own conclusions.
There’s a big problem with trying to diversify history and it’s that there really aren’t the sources that say what the modern grievance mongers want them to say. There’s a whole lot of silence in many cases because you can’t write history without sources. This shit is more like creative writing or an opinion piece. And there’s no desire to let the reader reach their own conclusions.
I could never make the sort of assertions this professor did in his book in one of my papers.
the
ticky-ticky-pow!click-CLUNK! of an M60Speaking of fiction and Vietnam
https://david-drake.com/
☹️ RiP
Hey from Parkersburg, W. Va.
Nothing but damn chemical plants along the mighty Ohio river.
But they look so pretty at night, especially when you’re upwind.
Barges are great. And that stuff has to go somewhere.
Breaking News:
Apparently Rodney on the ROQ dry-humped a 15yo at his sex/drugs/rock and roll club back in 1974.
Meanwhile, someone actually convicted of raping an underage girl continues to be lauded in Hollywood.
The horror…the horror.
She pretended to be older than she was, and some guy drunkenly tried to get it on with her. How did she ever recover? She never said no or tried to stop him. So he’s guilty of not having affirmative consent – a concept that doesn’t exist anywhere outside academia.
Guy might be a creep, but being a creep isn’t against the law. And allegations from the ’70’s have no place in a court of law.
I mean, it was bad and he shouldn’t have done it, but I’m pretty sure it was the least bad thing that a famous guy ever did to an underage girl at that club.
Rolling Stone has a poor track record covering rape allegations.
‘Morning all.
Yep, this is right in RS’s wheelhouse isn’t it?
1974? Fuck off…
I guess they just couldn’t hold back on this hot, breaking news until its 50th anniversary.
Right?
What a joke. In a way I feel sorry for her, and for him, assuming this happened. Where were her parents? Why didn’t she know better? I’m assuming he may have had no idea her age, some teens look older than they really are, especially if you’re drugged up and in an environment you’re not expecting someone that young. Or he’s a creep. But how could we ever know 50 years later. It’s stupid.
Good morning all!
Say Yes to getting fired up. Maybe become a SpaceX Starship Trooper.
Make it a great day!
Morning.
Good morning, Beau, U, Sean, Stinky, and Suthen!
How goes it?
So far, so good…but I suspect there’ll be frost on my windshield this morning, so I’ll have to allow time for scraping.
How about you?
My windshield was clear, and I didn’t need to zip up my jacket when I went to the store.
Since tuesdays are remote days, I’m back home getting ready to connect to work.
Ooh! Made me think of this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cFD7pimdY5A
The cafeteria has a Space Force flag up on the wall.
Hey, hey, hey! 🌞
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c2CMgGMi_f4
🎶🎶
Acoustic version. I like it.
Was expecting this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r87cIxZXEME
Expecting this /Boomer
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jsaTElBljOE
suh fam
Whats goody
/Hey from West Virginia
Good morning, homey!
Mornin’.
You do get around, don’t you?
You going home through Cambridge or Athens?
Mornin’, reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie! How are you and yours?
Mornin’
Mrs. Patzer is on the mend, gonna let her drive today, methinks. She may be able to take me to surgery Monday. Progress!
Good morning all!
The local NPR had a story about an audacious new plan to ban gunz.
They’ve taken a brain sample from the ME shooter. They’re going to check it for “damage” that caused him to be a mass shooter. The hypothesis that they’re going to “prove” is that the guys’ exposure to concussion from training shooters gave him a TBI.
Second-hand-gunz! It worked to help ban ciggies, why not try it here?
More likely had something to do with the planetary alignment. Someone should work up this guy’s birth chart.
“We’ve found high levels of Powerpoint Poisoning.”
“Don’t publish those results.”
I’m sure they’re going to get the result they pay for.
Pretty soon a desire to own a gun will be recognized by ‘experts’ as a sign of sufficient mental illness to revoke one’s 2A rights.
Because anecdote=SCIENCE!