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 Post subject: In the Rear with the Beer and the Gear
PostPosted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 1:00 am 
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Feldmarschall
Feldmarschall
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Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2007 1:48 am
Posts: 1051
Location: Washington state
(Moved from the old YW site):

________________________________________
It has been said that in Vietnam, there were 7 soldiers in the rear working in support roles for every one soldier "on the line" as it were. In my later years, I can happily say that my time in Vietnam was spent as one of the seven, not the one. No, for a combat patch I cannot wear that big, yellow Cav patch, not even the red strawberry of the 25th Division. Just the USARV shield with the sword sticking up (never did see a sword in Vietnam).

I joined the Army out of boredom at age 18, and didn't realize that soldiers don't just sit around the barracks and play cards like they did on Sgt. Bilko -- there were always rocks around the orderly room to paint, and if nothing else, you might find yourself on police call, picking up cigarette butts.

After a rough start in the Army I got squared away and the Army made me a company clerk. I did a good job of it, but was stationed at Fort Lost in the Woods, Missouri and was getting restless again. After hearing the other permanent party continually "yucking it up" about "the Nam" and about how you got to go over there and blow stuff up for free (they were all engineers), I decided that was the place for me and volunteered.

Well, sometimes even the stupid get lucky by accident. I got a nice rear area job in the headquarters detachment of an ordnance battalion. I was there from July 1970 to February 1972. During that 19 months, units really thinned out due to the withdrawal. My outfit was the place where units going home turned in all their major items of equipment. We were always surrounded by a great wealth of equipment, piles of weapons, armor, cannons, and hundreds of wheeled vehicles, a bounty which we took full advantage of. There were only a few of us in the unit interested in guns; sometimes we would fill a 3/4 ton truck full of ammo and grenades and go out to some deserted place and fire it all off and blow stuff up. At times we pulled guard duty, but then again, the gun nuts kind of looked forward to it as it gave us more opportunities to blast away for free (and drive the Sergeant of the guard nuts). I only had to pull a gun on another person once during my tour and then I re-holstered it without firing a shot. My only shots fired were in recreation.

Looking back, I am glad that I was there when I was instead of 68-69, which is when I could have been if I had joined right out of high school. Mid-70 to 72 was relatively quiet (unless you happen to have been killed or wounded during that time); 68-69 was a time when there was still a lot of killing going on.

We cried and moaned at the time about how long our work days were, and that we had to work 6 and a half days a week. We stood a work formation at 0700, got an hour and a half for lunch from 1200 to 1330, and went back to work until 1800, unless there was some big crisis (like the paper clip inventory was behind schedule or something that seemed really big at the time) when we would work longer. Of course, all of our personal affairs like going to the PX, snack bar, barber shop, tailor, laundry, and so on were done "on the clock" so those hours were not so bad. I suppose we could have really gotten all of our work done in about 2 hours if we had been conscientious and the Mickey-Mouse could have been dispensed with. Back at that particular time at least in the rear areas that I was familiar with, staffing was characterized by having way more people available to do a task than was actually necessary.

I volunteered for an extra 6 month half-tour to avoid having to go back to the world and take up real soldiering again until my ETS. You know, go back to Fort Ord and finish off my time. Back to arranging my foot locker just so, rolling up my socks in little buns and shining my boots. Oh, and having a shaving brush on display that no one in the army had used since 1947. Even being in the rear in Vietnam, I didn't shine my boots for a year and a half and by the time I went home, they looked like suede leather they were so fuzzy and un-died.

While I was in the Army, I trained on the M-14, a wonderful rifle, and later on the M-16. In Vietnam, fired most of the contemporary American small arms and several obsolete types that we "found" like the M2 fully-auto carbine, Thompson submachine gun (never had a butt-stock for it), and others. Wasn't crazy about the machine guns; enjoyed rifles more. Still have my .38 revolver that I stuck in the bottom of my duffel bag and brought home with me.

When it was time for me to leave country, we had to go through an inspection to make sure we had no "contraband items". I decided to leave my .38 right where it was, at the bottom of my duffel bag; I doubted that the MP's wanted to dig through all of my dirty shorts, smelly pair of extra boots, and a mildewed field jacket that I never wore to get to the bottom of my bag, and I was right, they didn't. I thought that place at the bottom of my bag was so clever until I got home and found that after dragging my duffel bag around so much, there was the perfect outline of a revolver plainly seen on the bottom of the bag.

Re: In the Rear with the Beer and the Gear (and the Sgt Major)
________________________________________
When I arrived in Vietnam, it was right after the Cambodian invasion in 1970. The units that came back out of Cambodia brought back a quantity of captured enemy weapons along with our own blown-up and burned-out equipment. They turned this stuff in to my unit; I can still visualize the burned-out and melted down aluminum hulls of the M551 Sheridan tanks that they brought in on "dragon wagons" -- have always been glad I was not one of the "crispy critters" inside one of those things when the RPG's bored on inside and blew up. Anyway, the captured weapons came back to us and they were placed muzzle-first in 55 gal. drums with the tops cut off. Over in our CC&S Company, they had a big, multi-hundred ton press with a "V" shaped cutter on it. They would put fifteen or twenty long guns on the anvil under the cutter and lower it. The weapons would be pinched in half and "de-milled". The weapons were mostly old bolt action rifles, Chinese and Russian Mosin-Nagant types, really beat-piss-on Mausers that the French had captured and brought from Europe after WW2, and a few very crusty what are they, MAS-36's? Re-captured former American weapons like M-16's, M-1 rifles and carbines (many of which had been sold to the VC by RVN soldiers), were reconditioned and given back to the RVN for re-issue. Crew served enemy weapons were hung up on the walls of mess halls and clubs; AK's and pistols were scarfed up and reused by GI's and were practically never turned in. SKS's were kept as souvenirs and taken home by GI's. Saw a really neat "Vietcong 45" once that was taken from around Tay Ninh. It was a very precise, hand-made copy of a 1911 45 auto. I don't know how many Americans know this, but later in the war much of the Vietcong, both main force elements and local units, were armed with our own M16's. These were weapons that they had taken in small measure from battlefield losses of Americans, but mostly from South Vietnamese forces (at various levels) who had sold, traded, or lost them, or had abandoned them in retreat or had them when captured. Why send all the way to China for small arms when you have a source of supply right in front of you? Of course, when South Vietnam folded in 1975 all the remaining weapons that we had lavished upon them for years that hadn't already been lost were captured by the north. Because the NVA already had its own equipment, much of this quantity of M16's was surplus. They then took this cash cow and sold them to trouble-making buyers all over the world. These rifles have turned up all over, Nicaragua, el Salvador, Colombia, Northern Ireland, Angola and other numerous places in Africa, you name it. The CIA has run the serial numbers of many of these weapons and you guessed it; from stocks that the US turned over to South Vietnam prior to 1975. And there are still hundreds of thousands of them out there. Maybe we should get the useless United Nations to see if they can round these all up with their international gun ban.


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