Posted on 09/29/2021 11:07:37 AM PDT by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Hahahahahah...such as “Tell them they can go **** themselves!”
Such a great story.
USN 1951 sub service here. One of the guys told me that during WWII they used the 200 proof alcohol reserved for torpedo fuel to lace grapefruit juice. Tied on some marvelous benders.
Said he swore off it after waking up one morning and couldn't move a muscle for about an hour. Scared the Hell out of him.
The stuff killed or blinded many, so the military added a foul-tasting pink dye to make it undrinkable. Still, "pink Lady" made a great deodorant before hitting the beach though.
I had heard stories about "Torpedo Juice" but I never heard anything first hand before.
I was actually pretty lucky to be deprived of alcohol during most of my tour, since in those days I was pretty easily drunk.
I drew R&R in Taipei on my eighth month in country and on the evening before my flight from Danang I joined three other Marines and we all decided to visit the Air Force side of the base to see what was there. As always, that was a bad idea.
We found the NCO Club and it was raining heavily, so we were soaked - and a large bouncer told us that we couldn't come inside. We kept asking to come in and some of the Air Force guys inside urged him to go ahead and let us in. Reluctantly, he let us come in and we found a table and started drinking. I don't remember the exact sequence of things, but I remember some airman telling me war stories (!) when one of my companions hit the young waitress accross he bottom with his wet hat as she bent over to hear another table's order. She tottered into that other guy's lap - and then all hell broke loose. The bouncer got knocked out almost immediately and it was about evenly divided between "non-Marines" and "adopted Marines" and the place was pretty torn up, fast. We heard vehicles arriving with urgency, so we picked that time to leave through a broken window and vanish into the rain.
I heard that after that, Marines were banned from that side of the base and they're probably still looking for us - the Air Force never forgives or forgets.
It does make be sigh to think of all that wasted Pineapple Upsidedown Cake!
My book is in final review before printing - so it'll be ready soon.
My son has proven to be a prodigy with precision shooting, so I bought him a Hammerli AR20 match air rifle and I set up a 10 meter range in the back yard. Dang thing is amazing! Postage-stamp size groups at that range.
Hope you are doing well! "Charlie Mike" - I like it!
Heh, that’s a great story-The Air Force never forgives or forgets”!
Yes, in those days, I was susceptible to drink as well, no doubt. I don’t drink much at all anymore, probably better for me, but I did spend a few days offshore fishing in Maine with my buddy who went into the USN with me back in the Seventies...and I did knock back a few.
It didn’t take much, but I sure did have a good time. I forgot how much fun it is-I just don’t have the energy to drink anymore, it really takes the starch out of me hte next day!
I admit, though...we had a damn good time, laughing our butts off having drinks and dinner at a restaurant after...:)
That was what popped into my head as I was driving home-I was wondering how that was going with your book! Glad to hear your progress-
The weight loss thing is kind of fun, since I am not really working at it, it is new meds and just not moving around as much. I guess it is muscle mass going away, but...I do enjoy fitting into clothes.
I have less, er...butt now though, which makes me have to cinch my belt down tighter, and I had a funny experience earlier in the summer. We were having rabbits out the kazoo, and they were destroying my wife’s garden, so I told her I would trap the rabbits and get rid of them. (I am in a neighborhood, so I don’t have the option of picking them off)
I get the trap set, and one night, as I am sleeping with my windows open, I am having dreams of skunks. I woke to my wife whispering “Wake up! I think there’s a skunk in the trap!”
Sure enough, in my groggy state, I peered out the window at the trap and could see black and white in it. It was about 5 AM and just barely light, and I thought if I could release it quickly, I might be able to sleep another hour before I had to get up for work. So I grabbed a pair of pants, pulled them on commando-style if you get my drift, put on a t-shirt and shoes, and still completely befuddled by sleep, shuffled out to the backyard to release the skunk.
Now, this was a first for me. Never had to release a skunk, but I had talked with my boss about it and he said it was safe as long as you held a sheet or beach towel in front of you as you walked calmly and slowly towards the skunk, then you could gently cover the cage with it and release it.
This all sounded reasonable when you were in an office with fluorescent lights discussing it before lunch, but at 5 AM with a real, smelly skunk in your trap...well, I was a little nervous. But he had sounded confident, so I thought it should be just as he said. I walked slowly towards the skunk, which stopped moving as I approached. I knew this, because the tinkling sound of rustling inside the cage trap suddenly stopped, and the silence seemed...well...ominous to me! But on I went.
I reached the trap, and bending over, very gently laid the towel over the top. So far so good.
Unfortunately, as I bent and opened the other end of the trap to allow the skunk to run out, my pants started to slip down. I had grabbed a baggy pair of pants that really didn’t fit, and didn’t take the time to put on a belt. So just as the skunk exited the trap, my pants started to go, and it was a full moon starting to rise. I desperately cinched my elbow to my side, and looked up to see my wife’s grinning face in the window looking out at me.
I suddenly had this instantaneous vision of me, getting my fifteen minutes of Internet Fame from a viral YouTube video posting by my wife from her phone.
In this video, here I am with my pants falling completely to the ground as the skunk exits the trap. It stops, and gives me a spray right in my face before waddling off. Me, with my naked chalk-white butt completely exposed, blinded by skunk spray, groping around and gasping before tripping over the empty trap and falling to the ground.
All this went through my mind in a flash, and to my relief, my pants didn’t go down, the skunk didn’t pause, and my wife didn’t have a phone recording the whole thing! But she was grinning as she saw me struggling to keep my pants up!
I am a touch nervous about my book - it is meant to be an inside view of being a Marine in the '60s/what Vietnam was like for us and combat and being in the "river of wounded". It will likely not make me popular with the "Vietnam was an illegal, immoral war" crowd or the "poor me" crowd either.
I suspect that it won't elevate my status in the Officer's Clubs either, since this view of enlisted life is considered to be beneath my former rank - but what the heck, right? It's meant to be a marker in that time in history and maybe an antidote to the false histories that populate our books and movies about our war.
Anyway, it should be a fun read.
I would consider that unpopularity to be "a feature not a bug"...
At a fundamental level, IMO, we were not in Vietnam to save the South Vietnamese from the Communists, though that may or may not have been a good side effect if we had been able to accomplish that.
We were in South Vietnam to fight Communism, which up until that point (and for at least five more years after South Vietnam finally fell) before the tide of Communist advancement around the world began to recede instead of advance, and that is because someone like Ronald Reagan set the tone for dealing with communism, which was "Don't accept and live with Communists, defeat them".
Anyone who has been in the military knows that, as in every walk of life, there are good officers and bad officers, just like there are good surgeons and bad surgeons. The good officers will understand the criticism even if it stings. The bad ones will react with defensive anger, as we would expect them to. But they know themselves, who they are.
I re-watched a movie recently ("Dunkirk") which had a part that really stuck out for me on the second viewing that applies here. (I had somehow missed its significance the first time I saw the movie)
After the civilian pleasure boat carrying all the soldiers and one Spitfire pilot (who had been shot down in the channel and had to be rescued by the boat) docked, they all disembarked, and as the pilot in his RAF uniform joined the crowd of soldiers streaming from the boats, a soldier walking by spotted him and snapped furiously at him "Where the hell were you?"
The pilot just stood there kind of dumbfounded, and the Captain of the small pleasure boat came up behind him and, putting his hand on the pilot's shoulder, gestures towards the rescued soldiers still filing off of his own boat that had carried him back to England and said gently but with conviction: "They know where you were."
And it applies here, IMO. And that is all that will count.
The only bar fight I witnessed was in a Cuban dive. Brits were there also, and one of ‘em asked a swabbie what the two stars on the back flap of his uniform meant.
Swabbie said, “That’s for the two times we beat Hell out of England and there’s room for plenty more!” When the first chair flew, I got outta Dodge.
Thank You for posting this story. It’s a keeper.
Odd. They are working for me.
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