Bravo Co. became my new home. Every day I would try to figure out what my new duties were and how to perform them. There were the regular duties of course; keeping track of supplies and issuing what equipment we had when people needed something. There was also learning the art of scrounging and trading. The Army has a procedure and a form for everything, but if you wanted it bad enough or needed it yesterday, maybe a deal could be worked out with another outfit who accidentally had been issued say 40 extra pair of size 10 regular jungle boots. Sometimes things just fell off a truck. Our job was to give our guys what ever we could. Often that meant having trading materials on hand in case a deal came up. Get what you can, where you can, when you can, someday somebody will want it and you can make a deal.
New privates also get assorted other duties, such as guard duty, KP, and my all time favorite, shit burner. The toilets were nothing more than an outhouse. Holes cut in a sheet of plywood with half a fifty-five gallon drum underneath. The job of the shit burner was to pull out those drums, mix in some diesel fuel, set it on fire, and stir it to make sure everything burned. In addition, the shit burner made sure there was plenty of toilet paper on hand. Twelve hours of burning crap, what a treat. At the end of the day I simply took off my uniform and threw it into the pot to burn as well. Every once in a while some extra guard duties came along. Shortly after I arrived one of those popped up. Somebody higher up wanted x number of men to guard a bridge for the night. Lucky me, I got picked to be one of them. They drove us out there and deployed us at both ends of the bridge and in bunkers along the riverbank. They said it was a free fire zone and if we thought we saw something moving shoot it! The darker it got the more scared we were. Somebody somewhere shot at something and were off to the races. For the rest of the night, small arms fire and illumination flares everywhere. No sleep and much fear, that was the story of one very long night. To this day I dont know if there were any VC out there or if we were just comforted by the noise of our firing. At any rate, it gave me a taste of what the guys who were in the field on a daily basis must have felt. Most days and nights were routine, same o, same o, as we used to say. The routine itself becomes a comfort zone. For the most part, when the routine was broken something bad happened. Reminds me of the time. One night three or four weeks after I arrived in camp we heard small arms fire during the night. It wasnt coming from our perimeter but off in the distance a bit. In the morning the word was out, there were VC in the village just outside the wire. As I mentioned earlier, there was a unit of ARVN across the road at LZ English. They had patrols out and some of their people in the vil. They claimed to have found VC in that village and captured four of them. What they did next may sound shocking, but war is hell. They beheaded three of them, tied the heads to a pole and made the fourth walk up and down the village streets all night carrying his three friends heads. This was done in an effort to extract whatever information they could get from him. In the morning they shot him too. Of course we newer guys had to check it out. Small groups, three or four at a time, wandered out past the guard post on the backside of camp, and sure enough there were the three heads tied to a pole. Several guys, including me, had cameras and took pictures. Some even held up the heads like hunting trophies and had other guys take their picture. We went back to camp and ate a hearty breakfast. Welcome to the Nam.
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