Hooch

My last month in Vietnam, I no longer had to go on search & destroy missions in the jungle.  The reason was I was "short".  Being short was when you had very little time left on your one-year tour.  It was a time when your thoughts were on getting the hell out of Vietnam and not on the job at hand.  It was a time when you were paranoid that you would be wounded or killed after making it this far.  So Army brass assigned short people to a temporary rear job until their time was up.

I was assigned to a firebase where I was given the job of unloading and delivering supplies from helicopters.  It was heaven.  I had my own "hooch" to sleep in at night.  The snapshot you see is my hooch.

I can't tell where the name hooch came from but I can tell you what it consisted of.  A hooch in a structural sense was made from a piece of half-round steel culvert about eight feet long and six feet wide.  A layer of sand bags covered the steel for protection at night from mortar rounds.  The green material you see at the entrance is mosquito netting that I would drape down at night.  Just behind the netting is a poncho liner that was draped over the netting if it was raining outside.  Inside was a canvas cot that kept me above the rats and insects that wondered in at night.  Living in a hooch was similar I would imagine to living in a cave.

In the lower left corner of the entrance, you can see a black, plastic, jerrycan.  It held five gallons of water.  I would fill the can with water every morning after breakfast so the sun would heat it during the day.  In the evening, I used the hot water to fill a canvas shower bucket and take my shower.  Wow, it was great.  The wooden skid was my front porch.  I could sit on the edge of the cot, rest my feet on the skid and read a book or roll a joint.  Just inside the door was the rucksack I had used when I was heading out to the jungle.  Now it was sitting there almost empty and unused.  I still kept ammunition for my M16 rifle and a few frag grenades in it but that was about it.

You cannot imagine what a relief and a pleasure it was to get out of the jungle and have my own private hooch to live in.