Vietnam Notes Part 2 continued.  Garbage detail again. Damn! Oh well, better that than burning shit. Burning shit was much worse. Our latrines were outhouses with the bottom half of an oil drum used in place of a hole in the ground. Disgust and disease prevention demanded that we pull the drums out, pour diesel fuel into the mess inside, light it up and stand there stirring it up occasionally, to make sure it all burned away. Lots of fun and fragrant too! Like I said, garbage beat shit anyday. We would load up four or five large metal trashcans brimming with rotting garbage and trash, and heavy enough to need three men to comfortably lift one high enough to slide into the bed of a truck. Then we'd drive out of the firebase about a mile to the dump area, where a crew of Vietnamese would be kind enough to unload it for us and put the empty cans back in the truck; of course they did get paid. Their pay was that they got to eat that slimy, stinking, rotting garbage - swarming flies and all. This they did, handful over skeletal handful, in a horrible, frantic, disgusting way. These people were starving to death. We'd bring a little food along to help them, but it didn't make much difference. There were just too many of them. As I'd stood there, watching all of this with a sickened fascination, I'd wonder how they could live like that.They were the homeless in a place where "homelessness" was a deadly serious thing. I came to the awareness that the reason I was in the truck, with a full belly and a place to sleep, and they were just feet away actually dying of hunger with no place to go, had nothing to do with deserving anything. It was fate: or God's will: or luck. Whatever you called it, it had little to do with "fairness". There are always those wanting something-for-nothing, or feeling that the world owes them something. I'm not speaking of them, and I certainly don't have all the answers. Years later, when I came close to taking our version of homelessness, as my only option to deal with a life that I'd turned into a nightmare, I felt those feelings of frustration with mankind's selfishness even more. Anyone can end up there but most of us have to end up there ourselves, or come very close to it, in order to see that truth in our hearts. Maybe, someday, we'll evolve far enough to feel the compassion to actually do something about the unnecessary suffering, of a large part of humanity, without having to suffer it ourselves, but that isn't how it is now. Although I have much more faith in our future now than I once did, it just isn't going to change anytime soon. **** I pulled the truck up next to a bunker, out on the perimeter. It was an unusual vehicle; a 3/4 ton truck with armor-plate welded to the front of the bed, rising above the cab. A machine-gun mount was placed in the middle, allowing the gun to fire over the top of the cab. I had been ordered to take the truck to the bunker line, to add the firepower of the machine-gun to the already formidable line of weapons facing the rice paddies and cane fields outside the wire. On hindsight this wasn't a very good idea. While far from impregnable, a bunker is a very hard structure to destroy and can be rebuilt quickly and cheaply. A truck on the other hand is a relatively valuable, easy to destroy, and a very tempting target. I got out and hopped up into the bed, to get things ready for the night. Since I had to pull guard duty anyway, the thought of spending the night in a nice, dry, relatively-clean truck sounded much better than the usual damp, dirty, rat-infested bunker. I loaded a belt of ammunition and settled back to begin another long, tense night. The gun-mount had a spotlight on both sides of the gun, so you could see what you were shooting at, in the dark. This was undoubtedly designed, by someone who had never thought the situation through. I had no intention of ever using them to aim, as doing so would be about the same as drawing a bull's-eye on your nose and shining a light on your face but the lights were good for surveillance. I would duck below the armor-plate, flip on the lights and look through a small hole drilled in the plate, while swinging the gun back and forth to illuminate the landscape. The night was very dark. I had just flipped-on the lights and started moving the gun, when right in front of me, almost to the concertina wire a VC sapper jumped up and started running. I was startled for a second, but yanked the charging handle, swung the gun around on him, and totally forgetting what an easy target I made, started shooting. As the tracers caught up to him, he dove below one of the dikes of a paddy. By this time someone had popped a hand flare, and the landscape was bathed in the eerie Halloween glow of its flame. The only sound was the hissing of the flare drifting down from far above, on its little parachute. Suddenly the man jumped up a short distance from where he had disappeared and began zigzagging away across the landscape. I started firing, following him with tracers, but every time the rounds caught up to him he would dive and disappear again. This went on for quite a few minutes until he finally made it into the cover of a cane field and was gone for good. If I'd hit him, he never showed it. I yelled out at the night "Motherfucker, you DESERVE to get away!" and really meant it. I was laughing with the stress and adrenaline-rush, but was absolutely furious at myself for missing him. I was a pretty good shot and I wanted that bastard DEAD! He had been only seconds away from lobbing a satchel charge or two into my truck, and that could have very easily ended in disaster for me. That, plus the sick and all too common conviction that men are subliminally taught from boyhood, that killing a man would make me more of one, only added to the anger. Very quickly those feelings were tempered with the awareness that I had just witnessed the bravest thing I had ever seen. That guy had single-handedly crept up to a perimeter of barbed wire, claymore mines and trip-flares, backed by bunkers filled with soldiers equipped with quite an array of deadly weapons and all for the purpose of destroying one lousy truck. Or he had possibly not been alone, but had taken the heat on himself to save his friends. Either way it was amazing. I think we were all stunned by the display of courage and skill we had just seen. It had been something totally outside my previous experience. Then as I began to realize how close I had skirted death, the raw reality of our situation set in once again. It was impossible for me to stay aware of how dangerous Vietnam was, on a continuous basis, and still maintain the ability to function but every so often, a reminder would jolt me back into the paralyzing fear, and once again I'd just have to hang on and wait until it slowly drifted away. The anger that I'd felt on failing to kill that man, along with many other terrible memories, ate at me for years. Slowly as time passed, my mind began to heal, and I found my heart opening to a more loving, kind, and spiritual way of life. The anger turned to acceptance, and then one fine day to gratitude. I am so very glad that I don't have the death of another human being on my conscience. He was an enemy soldier fully intending to kill me if he could, and, if I had killed him, I'm sure I could accept it as just another part of my life and a necessary action at the time. On those, nowadays, rare nights when I wake up feeling lost, alone, and afraid, with Vietnam all around me, the relief of not having killed him helps me find my way back to my warm, safe bed a lot sooner than those old feelings used to. Love and kindness are such beautiful, healing things. Vietnam Notes Part 3 All copyrights reserved

Robert Flynn can be contacted at: netcatalog2@aol.com