Copyright reserved. No part(s) of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, stored in a retrieval system, or translated into any language in any form by any means without the written permission of the author. Robert Flynn's VIETNAM NOTES Part Four "Ouch! Damn it!" I cussed, as the truck hit another deep pothole. Years of removing VC mines and filling the holes of the ones that worked had made the dirt roads bumpy beyond belief. My back and arms are killing me and the choking dust has caked around the goggles on my face, and feels gritty and pasty in my mouth. I feel that I can't take one more bounce (but of course I'll take that and more, because there's no way out). The roar and rattle and banging of my truck, has long since numbed my ears to the outlandish racket around me. Driving long enough puts me into a kind of nightmarish trance. Common sense tells me to keep an eye on my surroundings and watch for patches of dirt, which could be mines, but it's getting harder to do anything but hang on to the wheel and keep the damn truck on the road. The sides of the road are usually steep dirt walls, dropping off into rice paddies and cane fields. Losing it for a second or two can spell real disaster, especially when the roads are slick with mud, or a convoy coming the other way forces us over to the edge of the dropoff. Pulling over doesn't exist, and you don't "stop" in the middle of a fast moving convoy with trucks in front and rear and potential ambushes always possible. My God, how many more months will I be here? Will it ever end? I guess I'd better watch what I wish for.   "LET'S MOVE 'EM OUT!" was loudly relayed down the long line of trucks and tanks, ready to begin the convoy from our base at LZ Baldy to firebase Ross: a little south of Da Nang. It was during the Tet offensive in February 1968 a very bad time for everyone in Vietnam.The communist forces launched the biggest offensive of the war and the whole country fell into total chaos for about a month. The effect on my unit was mainly mortar and rocket attacks many times a night, very hazardous convoy duty, to supply a tiny firebase nearby, and the most ominous event to us, the halting of mail delivery for several weeks. The lack of mail in itself was a hardship, but for circumstances to be bad enough to halt something with as high a priority as mail, we knew that something horribly bad had to be happening everywhere. I'm certain that the folks back in "The World", as we called home, had a much better picture of the situation through the news, than we who were actually there did. In movies and books, soldiers always seem to have a handle on the situation. In real life, I remember not knowing what was happening from day to day, and waking up totally disoriented, in pitch blackness, to the screaming of "INCOMING!" while trying to figure out where I was and where to go, as I grabbed for my rifle and bandoliers of ammo. Many times we slept with our boots on for several days, as to keep trying to find them and put them on, every time a mortar attack came in, was just too time consuming and exhausting. I got to the point where I'd just roll off my cot and huddle in the sandbagged corner of my tent, rather than run across an open area with mortar rounds exploding here and there, to find "safety" in a bunker that didn't seem so safe to me. Not to mention the terrible feeling of claustrophobia I felt, when packed into a tiny sandbagged space in pitch darkness, with a bunch of guys between me and the door who would pack in tighter and tighter each time the VC walked the rounds in close. Anyway, as the convoy moved out, the tension increased, and once again I'd find myself thinking of how long it would be before I'd see home again, if I ever did at all. *** The fifteen-mile or so round trip to Ross took from early morning to late afternoon. Out front of the convoy was a jeep, and in front of the jeep were guys on foot with sharp eyes and metal detectors. By the time we got to Ross they would have blown quite a few mines in place, and filled part of the bed of a truck with mines that they'd dug up. The landscape we drove through looked like the moon in places, with the hundreds of huge bomb craters saturating the area. Gunships constantly flew low and fast over us, startling, but reassuring us with their roaring presence. As my truck was mostly filled with high-explosive mortar ammunition, grenades, and rifle and machine gun ammo, I knew that if I hit a mine, there was a good chance it wouldn't hurt! Nothing would ever hurt again. It was actually kind of comforting in a weird way. Once they found a mine out front of a little house next to the road. Why anyone would be living in that nightmare place I couldn't imagine, but there they were, right next to my truck, a family of several women and children, with one old man in their midst. A few of our guys were questioning them about the mine, and apparently they didn't like what they heard. They knocked the old man down and began beating him with rifle butts and kicking him, while the women and children screamed and screamed with fear and anger, wanting to stop them, but knowing they couldn't. It was very vicious and thorough, and he looked dead, or close to it, by the time they finally stopped. Then they lit the house on fire and walked away. As we moved out I looked back in the mirror: the family was just huddled by the old man's body, crying as they watched their home go up in flames. All that was left on our return trip was a small blackened and charred area, with nobody there at all. *** I walked up and sat down beside him like I'd known him for years. I felt sure he wouldn't mind. We looked at each other for a while and then sort of struck up a conversation. The reason I'd singled him out was because he scared me. For the past few days whenever I had to go down to the bunker line at night, passing by him was a bit unnerving. Maybe, if we got to know each other a little better, the fear would go away. I hoped so, because I'd always been afraid of people like him, even though the fear seemed unfounded. Getting over those feelings would be well worth the effort. There were too many of his kind around to let my fear and prejudice rule me. As we spent a little time together, I began to feel empathy with him. I knew that before my tour in Vietnam was over, we might have a lot more in common than we did now but I hoped not. His life was a story like my own: he'd known happiness and sadness, love and anger, fear and strength. He'd held a girl's hand at night and watched the moon and stars reflecting off the water, thinking of how beautiful life was going to be from now on. Felt all the things we all feel. He'd marveled at a beautiful sunset, and laughed at a silly joke. We were from different countries, but he'd felt a lot like me in many ways. As I sat there, his appearance began to be a bit of a burden. The wispy hair, and whiteness of his face; he hollows where his eyes had been, and bits of leather still stuck to the bone. The time he'd spent in a muddy mass-grave, before one of my buddies tripped over his slightly protruding skull and unearthed his rotted face, hadn't done much for him. Still, I was glad I'd taken the time to have an imaginary conversation with him. He wasn't so scary any more: he was a person now. Just another guy like me, who wanted to live his life the best he could. That was over for him now, but not for me. It made me want to do a little better; be a little nicer, maybe smile a little more. After all, things could always be worse. *** Continue