Tony, Pete and Randy

This shot of Tony (on the left), Pete (in the middle) and Randy from my squad was taken in March 1970.  They are standing in one of those rare open areas in a jungle that was generally choked by bamboo.  It was a sunny day in the dry season.  The company had not had contact with Vietcong soldiers for months.  There was not a lot to be concerned about at the time and you can see that in their faces.

Tony has his M16 rifle in his hands.  You can see the side of a smoke grenade just behind his right shoulder and the neck of a 2-quart canteen just below it.  Pete is wearing a vest-full of grenades for the M72 grenade launcher that he is holding unlatched and open in his right hand.  Randy, with his rifle by his side and his left thumb hooked around a bandoleer of M16 ammunition clips, has a Saint Christopher medal dangling around his neck.

All three are hunched over due to the weight of the pack they carry.  Green towels are wedged under the straps to cushion the weight.  Their beards are the result of our spending more than two weeks in the jungle.  What was camouflage green colored cloth helmet covers on their steel pots are now tinged a reddish-brown.  That reddish-brown color is from Vietnam's signature red dirt.  If you look closely, you can see writing on their helmets.  We all had something scribbled on our helmets.  It might be a Vietnam nickname, a saying of some kind, or maybe the home town and state we hailed from.

I was a new-guy at the time so my helmet cover was new and unmarked.  They were grizzled Veterans who were teaching me the ropes.                

M42 Duster

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I took this snapshot of an M42 Duster on Fire-base Candy in April 1970.  The Army was using them close the Cambodian border.  Our infantry company traveled with number of armored vehicles for a few days and this Duster was one of them.  They were also used on Fire-base Buttons as a defensive weapon on the berm.

Each of those two, 40 mm cannons on the turret fired high explosive rounds at a rate of 120 rounds per minute.  Above the 40 mm barrels you can see that it had an M60 machine gun as well.

In 1952, when GM first started building them, it was designed to be an anti-aircraft gun.  They were retired in the late fifties with the introduction of HAWK SAM missile systems.  Only 3,700 were built.  Duster's were sent to Vietnam for low altitude air defense but North Vietnam never did use aircraft.  So we used them on unarmored enemy forces.  I'm surprised we got away with firing the weapon directly at human beings.  I would have thought the Geneva Convention would have had something to say about it.

I was surprised to learn that it required a crew of six men.  The vehicle weighed 25 tons loaded.  It was about 19 feet long, 10 feet wide and 9 feet high.  A 500 horsepower gasoline engine could get it up to a top speed of 45 MPH.  Finally it had a range of about 100 miles on a tank of gasoline.

I never did get to see one in action.

M67 Recoilless Rifle

In July 1970, I was on a fire-base serving temporarily as a supply sergeant.  One day I decided to walk around the berm and pose with some of the unusual weapons we used for defense.  This particular weapon is a M67 Recoilless Rifle.

The M67 weighed a little over 37 pounds and was 53 inches long.  The bore size was 90 mm.  As you can see, it could be fired by a soldier standing up.  The Army has a 106 mm version that was far heavier and was usually mounted on a jeep.

A soldier can fire this weapon without being knocked backward by recoil because some of the gases produced when fired push to the rear as well as to the front.  That is why they call the weapon recoilless.  Being recoilless, it could be dangerous to stand directly behind the weapon when fired due to the back-blast.

The flechette round that is standing up in front of me weighed about 7 pounds.  It had a maximum range of about 300 meters.  Flechettes are small steel darts with fins.  When fired from the berm at the enemy, the flechettes dispersed forward in a cone angle of about 8 degrees.  Flechettes were designed to stop and wound the enemy, not necessarily kill them.  Wounding the enemy is better than killing them because it takes more people in the rear to serve those that are wounded versus killed.

Something about getting hit with a blast of flechettes does not sound very appealing.

Shitters

This snapshot was taken on a small fire-base in July 1970 during the rainy season.  In the immediate foreground is a 105 mm Howitzer, surrounded by a wall of sandbags.
On the far side of the sandbag wall, you can see four wooden boxes called shitters.

Each shitter is about three foot square at the base and six feet high.  Back home, after a cup of coffee in the morning, you generally go looking for a bathroom.  On a small firebase in Vietnam, after a cup of coffee in the morning, you go looking for a shitter.

Each shitter was open in front so they faced the berm to provide a bit of privacy.  Another benefit of facing the berm was the soldier sitting there could keep an eye out for attacking enemy soldiers.  I never did see any enemy soldiers while sitting on a shitter, by the way, during my tour in Vietnam.

There was a platform to sit on with a hole in the middle that emptied into half of a fifty-five gallon drum.  The drum was accessible from the rear of the shitter via a hinged door so when the drum was reasonably full, it could be easily replaced with an empty one by the shit burner.
The shit burner performed his work in the area behind the shitters.   Morning and evening, he mixed kerosene with the shit and toilet paper mix and then lit it on fire.  When the barrel had burned itself out and cooled, the shit burner tipped it over and drummed out the ash.  During the day, when not burning shit, the shit burner could read, sleep, eat at the mess hall, drink beer and smoke ganja (as long as he avoided getting caught).

After spending a couple of months as an infantry soldier living in the jungle for fifteen days at a time hunting Vietcong soldiers,  I could appreciate why someone would take the job.


     

105 mm Howitzer

This snapshot of a 105 mm Howitzer was taken on Firebase Candy in April 1970.  The gunner posing next to it provides a sense of scale.  The diameter (bore) of the gun's barrel is 105 mm or about 4 inches.

The Howitzer was a model 102.  It was about 17 feet long, 6.5 feet wide, 5 feet high and weighed about 1.5 tons.  It was light enough that it could be towed by a small truck or transported by air with a Chinook helicopter.  Even a Huey helicopter could pick one up and deliver it to a new firebase.

A firebase normally had five or six of these guns.  They were used to protect Infantry soldiers who worked the area around the firebase.  When called upon, they could fire a thirty-three pound high explosive projectile a maximum distance of about seven miles.  Once on an enemy target, it could drop projectiles,  one after another, into a tight circle of approximately thirty meters at that distance.

Infantry companies had to know exactly where they were in the jungle at all times to take advantage of these guns.  Gun crews were good at hitting a spot on a map.  Infantry companies therefore had to be good at knowing the spots where they were and where the enemy was on the map to ensure they didn't accidentally call in high explosive projectiles on top of themselves.

On my tour in Vietnam, there was a time when our platoon was in the unfortunate position of being in the wrong place on the map when 105's started lobbing in shells.  We had a man killed and others severally wounded.  When it happens, they call it taking friendly fire.

I don't know where that term came from but I do know there was nothing friendly about it.

The Mess Hall at Buttons

This is a snapshot of the front face of the Mess Hall at Buttons.  The picture was taken in mid-afternoon so there was no food line forming yet.

The soldiers were likely dropping by for coffee.  One of the Vietnamese women appears to be pealing potatoes.  The other two were posing for the picture.  A large refrigerator is on the right side.

If you look closely, you can see how dirty the area is.  The feed line was coated with red dirt.  Everything in fact is coated with dirt.  In Vietnam, we all had other things to worry about.  No one cared about a little dirt in the food area.

If you had a permanent job on Buttons, this is where you received your three meals a day, every day, for a year.  Doesn't look like much does it?  Well, I would have given my eyeteeth for the privilege of working on Buttons full-time and eating here for a year.  If you had lived and worked in the jungle for two weeks at a time chasing Vietcong soldiers as I had, you would have made the same decision.

The Dump at Firebase Buttons

In May 1970, I was on Buttons to take a flight physical for a door gunner position.  I could not catch a Huey back to Ace High until late in the afternoon.  So with time to kill, I agreed to serve as an armed guard on a truck that carried garbage out to the dump the served Buttons.

The drive was uneventful until we approached the dump and began to slow down.  It was then that Vietnamese kids tried to climb into the back of the truck while it was still moving.  The driver, watching them in his rear view mirror, would speed up then slow down in the same way you would dangle a piece of yarn in front of a kitten.  Before we came to a complete stop, four or five kids were already in the truck picking through the trash.

Look at them.  Many are dressed in old Army shirts that they probably found in the trash.  They skillfully picked through what we dumped there like they had been doing it for most of there lives.  I would guess it was like shopping at the Supermarket for them.  They all had a shopping list in their head of what was good and what was not so good.  I'm sure their families ate what they found and brought home.

In the United States, the homeless do this kind of thing as well.  You hear now and then that someone was caught in a dumpster or you see someone with their head in a trash barrel on the side of a road.  But I don't believe the homeless have to do pick through trash for a meal.  There are enough programs out there where people can always get a meal at a shelter or a soup kitchen.

I made one trip to the dump during my year in Vietnam.  It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. The kids should have been in school, not picking through the trash at the dump for food.  South Vietnamese politicians let them down.