Ramblings
Page 3
Idiots with grenades
During this time we ended up with frag grenades and some red smoke. This was not a real problem until somebody had an extra beer one evening and came stumbling down the center isle of the barrack with his hand in his pocket and a pin in his other for all to see. Before anyone could get their crap together he bumped into a locker, causing him release the lever, POP, after everybody came out of cover, there the idiot was with a serious amount of red smoke pouring from his cargo pocket. Well it quickly got too hot to pull out so he held it off his leg as we pushed him out the door. Early the next morning he went to AF sick call with some minor burns and some red discolored skin. The medic treated him and when starting the paperwork said to him "do I need to ask?". So later in the day word came down to Willie and I have a locker inspection and police up all grenades. Which we did. BUT, after we turned them in, another showed up that evening. Well it was too late to turn it in and I didn't want it to go to waste. We were sometimes treated shabbily by the AF dudes in the next-door barrack. So I scrounge up a piece of wire. Sometime after midnight I slip over next-door to their latrine and hang the languishing canister on the toilet paper holder, straighten the pin and attach the wire, then to the stall door. Mission accomplished, went home and to bed. Really wished I could have been there, next morning there was red stains on outside of the louvered siding. I don't know what was on the floor. I guess young guys live through events like that. Was that to happen at our present age it could have been serious.
Quan Loi - 1st ground attack June 1967
I was just looking at a page on John Wavra's website and found Juan Maldonado's account of this event. (7th one down) We had very similar experiences. On arrival when we were being shown around, we walked past an overgrown, with weeds, hole in the ground with a piece of PSP and a few sandbags on it. If we'd been recycling beer cans we may have had a buck or two in there. Didn't look for snakes or such vermin. This was the closest bunker to our tent, which did have maybe 2 1/2 ft of sandbags around it. One bag higher than a cot on pallets. About 2 weeks later the first mortar round hit about 12-15 ft from the tent. Had to run around cots on the pallets in to get to the hole, tricky in the dark. There were 4 or 5 of us in there, everything was cool until the small arms fire started - inside the wire. We looked a each other, nobody had a weapon, a bunker full of dumb asses. So 2 at a time we returned to the tent to grab rifles and ammo. Sometime after things quieted down I talked to a guy that went into a sandbagged conex bunker with a "T" shaped entrance and discovered one rifle between 5 or so of them. While deciding what to do an enemy soldier stepped into the entrance a couple times and reloaded and went back to work. Lucky Day.
