Life During Wartime

That's All Folks!

When the new boat that I was assigned to arrived, I brought my few belongings on board and met the crew. As usual, the crew consisted of myself, the coxswain, and two seamen. The boat was relatively new and the engine room had a recent coat of paint. I was the old-timer, having been in the country for about six months (!).

After a few days, we received our first mission assignment. Guess where we were going? Right back to the exact same place where my first boat had been sunk! This news scared the shit out of me and I was a nervous wreck for the next couple of weeks. I didn't take my flak jacket or my helmet off at any time, including when I was trying to sleep, which the other guys on the boat thought was pretty funny, but what did they know?

Anyway, we survived that mission without incident, and that boat was never assigned to any more infantry support missions while I was in-country. The boat was pretty much-assigned freight freight-hauling duties for the rest of my tour. The stuff we hauled around included gravel, rebar, beer, soda pop, lumber, artillery, and small arms ammunition.

Let's Get High, High As A Georgia Pine

There was plenty of drug and alcohol use in the 1099th Medium Boat Company when I was there. In fact, the company was sort of divided into two distinct groups: the Alkys and the Heads. The Alkys regularly got wasted at the tiny Enlisted Men's (EM) club at Cat Lai, where the beers cost somewhere between $0.10 to $0.25 a can if I recall correctly. Hamms and Colt 45 were usually served there. Soldiers would pile up empty beer cans into a pyramid on a table until someone passed out into the pile, knocking the cans everywhere to the great hoots of fellow revelers. 

Sometimes, drunks would travel out to the pier to sleep it off on their boats. And sometimes, they would not notice that the tide was out and the boats were eight to ten feet lower than they were when they went to the club. The lucky ones fell into the inboard boat and suffered various minor injuries. The unlucky ones fell into the river and their bodies ended up in the locals' fishing nets downstream of the base.

The Heads regularly partook of the pot that was available everywhere in Vietnam. I personally bought pot from pre-teens on the base at Cat Lai, from taxi drivers, from prostitutes, and, in one instance, from South Vietnamese policemen who traded our crew a five-gallon water can full of pot for a case of c-rations. Something called Thai stick was also available, which was an opiated pot that was extremely powerful, as well as regular opium.

My favorite drug of choice was what we were told was a liquid pharmaceutical amphetamine called Maxitone. You could go to any taxi driver in Saigon and tell him that you wanted to buy Maxitone and they would round up as many doses as you wanted for $2.00 a pop. It was supplied in 2cc glass ampules with a breakable nipple at the top. We usually poured one ampule into an RC Cola to kill the taste, but there were several others in the company who were shooting Maxitone up straight out of the bottle.

I tried shooting up Maxitone once, in the engine room of a neighboring boat. The boat's engineer volunteered to do the deed. The rush from the dope was exceedingly fantastic, but the high faded after about 30 minutes. What to do then? Have another shot, of course, but for some reason, it occurred to me that this might not be a wise choice and I never tried it again.

Partaking of Maxitone made all of us brilliant blabbermouths. We would regularly decide that since the war we were participating in was totally wrong, we would march to the HQ in the morning and refuse to participate in the nasty imperialistic, anti-commie business anymore, prison be damned! Of course, once the sun came up, our insanely awful hangovers prevented taking any action besides trying to get some sleep. So much for fighting the Power!

There were usually a couple of newbie Second Lieutenants assigned to ferreting out the dope users in the Company. Whenever our boat was assigned to guarding the ammunition barges temporarily parked mid-river at Cat Lai at night, a couple of these characters would sneak out to our boat on a launch to do an inspection. However, having two or three speed-freaks on the roof of the boat made it impossible for the officers to find anybody that wasn't "asleep" except for the one guy assigned to radio watch that night. Oddly enough, their inspections never turned up anything incriminating.

The first time I took LSD was at Cat Lai. Someone from another boat had gone to San Francisco for their week's R&R and brought back some tabs of LSD with them which they generously shared with the rest of us. I don't recall having any spectacular insights from this trip, but I do recall taking my "pet" python out from his ammo case home and showing him around, which made all of my fellow travelers flee from their boats.

At the end of my tour, the boat dropped me off at a local airbase where I watched a Huey helicopter spiral out of control while taxiing just a few feet off of the ground, then crash into a couple of other parked aircraft, causing murder, mayhem, and chaos. After the base was reopened I hitched a ride back to Cat Lai, where I was given a new set of fatigues (my crew had thoughtfully thrown my other clothes into the river as a going-away present) and my orders to go back to the States. I rode a boat to Saigon where I picked up some Maxitone to go and rode a bus out to the Ben Hoa airbase. I taped the speed to my leg, and after listening to a lecture about smuggling dope out of Vietnam, boarded a Boeing 707 for the flight home.

After boarding the air-conditioned airliner, we were attended to by attractive flight attendants and flew off into the wild blue yonder back to the US. 

And just like that, it was over.