CSotD: Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa
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Today's Rudy Park reminds me of a guy named Bob whom I worked with, back in 1972. You have to realize that, 40 years ago, the veterans had not yet learned not to tell their stories, and both Bob and Dan, a Marine recently returned from Vietnam who was a bartender at the restaurant, would swap memories during breaks.
Bob had only been stationed in Vietnam in a technical sense. That is, he had been a Green Beret in what would have been Cambodia if we'd been in Cambodia which of course we weren't.
What Bob wasn't doing where he wasn't stationed was working with the Montagnards, an indigenous people who disliked the Vietnamese and were eager allies in disrupting traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which most decidedly was, at least partially, in Cambodia.
It was not easy work. Bob expressed great affection for the people he lived among, but much of that was mutual respect among warriors. The Montagnards were a simple people who lived close to the earth, and thus lived close to life and death, and there were some nuances in how you needed to deal with them.
Bob told of a time when they had gone quite a while without having been resupplied. Finally, a chopper arrived with ammunition and other supplies, among which were new batteries for their electrical equipment and a brand-new lieutenant fresh out of the box.
One of the Montagnards was delighted to see new batteries, because he had learned what little English he knew from watching Star Trek on Armed Forces TV. So, when it was time for his favorite show, he hooked up a battery to the portable TV they had and switched it on.
The brand-new lieutenant came over, however, and turned the TV off. "We have to preserve those batteries," he said.
The Montagnard looked up at him and said, "No do again," and turned the TV back on.
The lieutenant then kicked the battery cable from the back of the TV and so the other Americans waited until they'd had a firefight with the North Vietnamese so they could list him as Killed In Action, which would create much less paperwork and overall difficulty, and be better for his family.
This did not strike Bob or Dan as particularly harsh or astonishing, but, rather, just something curious that happened. But it's the kind of story the vets quit telling after seeing enough civilian jaws drop.
Tough duty though it was, Bob got through it all without a scratch, or, at least, he would have if he hadn't gone to Saigon for R&R. He found it ironic that he'd spent all that time in the thick of such nasty business, only to be shot from behind by a nine-year-old cigarette vendor on the streets of what, in any sensible war, would have been the rear echelon.
It's a matter of opinion as to whether there was a "rear echelon" in Vietnam, but there were places that were supposed to be safer than others, and when Bob told of being shot by a cigarette kid in Saigon, he and Dan both chuckled and shook their heads, and Dan told about a company clerk at his firebase who had somewhere obtained a bullwhip and went around cracking it, until the day some weary grunts came in from the field and he cracked the whip in the face of a particularly weary grunt who responded by putting a round through his whip-cracking shoulder.
Apparently, combat can give some people a case of the grumpies. Who knew?
All of which is mere background to the story that I thought of while reading today's "Rudy Park." It's actually a story that has been rattling around my head since the Aurora shootings and the predictable response by all the Walter Mitty types about how swell it would have been if we could have turned that event into a full-fledged gun battle.
When Bob first got out of the service, he and his wife Polly were living in California, and he got a job as a security guard at a bank.
One day, the bank manager came up to him in the lobby, apparently responding to a rumor, and asked to see his gun. Bob took it from the holster and the manager asked, "Is it loaded?"
"No," Bob said.
"Why not?"
"Well," Bob replied, "the way I see it is this: If someone comes to rob the bank and they don't have a gun, then I won't need bullets to stop them. And, if they do have a gun, then I'm not going to draw mine, because I've been shot, and it burns."
So Bob went into the restaurant business, the bank hired Walter Mitty or maybe Barney Fife, and they all lived happily ever after.
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