Yesterday's Weapons Forums

On another site, some blow-hard was getting a little shrill about having never smoked dope in the service. Maybe he didn't... I don't actually care.

But I got to thinking about the topic and how it related to Viet Nam. Some folks never tried it, but quite a few did.

Like me. Here I was, 19 years old - 10,000 miles from home - depressed - homesick beyond description... and scared. I confess it; I was often afraid to leave the compound in the morning. I don't think it's a sin to be afraid as long as you actually do the things you are supposed to. So I did. It's not like I was the only person wanting to 'call in sick' but did not do so.

But I was offered the chance to escape reality for a bit one night by way of some native hemp & couldn't think of a reason not to... but one soon became apparent when Uncle Ho's Boyz made a fairly serious attempt to revoke the lease on our little fort.

Which by the Grace of God I survived. I never touched the stuff again and the very smell brings back vivid memories. When I was in college, a girl I knew lit up & I had to break off the date. Odd how that sort of thing sticks in your mind...

Bottom line? I don't think it was actually a sin to try the stuff... just stupid. Very stupid. SW

I have related a number of my Vietnam experiences on this board, but this subject was one I have avoided as to personal involvement. The situation in the rear areas where my experiences took place were different than those that existed on patrol or on a perimeter line. The level of alert was much lower than a line unit. Also, my time in Vietnam was in the later phases of the conflict, and that makes a lot of difference as to the attitudes about and uses of drugs. The use of marijuana was endemic at the time and place where I was in Vietnam.

I don't know if they had these up north, but where I was one of the forms of marijuana were "tailor mades." These were marijuana cigarettes, no filters of course, that were precisely rolled like real cigarettes, packed in packs of 20 and wrapped like tobacco goods, and then further packaged into a carton of 10 packs, again like real tobacco cigarettes. The only difference in the packaging was that the carton had an aluminum foil inner liner to seal out moisture. These tailor made joints even had brand names on the packs and carton. The ones I remember seeing were called "Maple Leaf" and "Park Lane." This was real first class flying for pot heads.

In my unit area, the usual practice was to simply load the green leafy substance into a briar pipe. We had one pot head clerk on one of our line companies who really did smoke a pipe, but he sort of mixed his own "Half and Half" blend of pot and real pipe tobacco. The idea was that the highly fragrant pipe tobacco (Flying Dutchman?) would cover up the odor of the burning pot. He never was challenged that I know of.

The resident pot dealer in my unit would break down his $5MPC bags using government US Army franked envelopes, which even at the time I thought was ironic and amusing. He later got caught smuggling a large quantity onto the post inside a Deuce and a Half tire. He was pending court martial when I left country. They didn't have pot sniffing dogs quite in those days; this guy was given up by an informant.

By far and away the larger danger when I was there was the use of heroin. It was sold retail in small plastic vials for $5MPC and was quite pure, I'm told. I was never tempted to use it (scared straight by seeing the movie, "Man with a Golden Arm" when I was a kid). Soldiers who started down that road crashed rather quickly. When I used to go into Saigon in areas frequented by soldiers, the little plastic vials could be found on the ground almost as commonly as cigarette butts. The word then was that our sneaky enemy, the VC, was selling it to American soldiers to undermine our morale. Many years later, I found out that the distributors were actually a group of high officers in the South Vietnamese armed forces, our nominal allies, and it was all about money and nothing about morale.

i think your last sentance sums it uo perfectly - with drugs its all about money - nothing else