Charlie Called Tails.

We'd put in a long, hard day of Winnin' the Hearts and Minds at Long Binh, and now, at dusk, we were lounging around the phone cable spool tables in the Outdoor Cafe section of the NCO Club. We were adjusting our own hearts and minds with cans of Blatz 3.2 beer, at 15c a can.

One of the troops at the table was a guy from Barre, Vermont. A real New Englander, with a Down East drawl, who only said anything about once every two weeks. When he spoke, it was worth listening to. A Newbie once asked him, “Vermont, huh? Lived there all your life?” After a pause our Green Mountain boy drawled out, “Nope. Not yet.”

Before you conclude that were were warring in luxury, let me describe a couple of things. The “club” was a tin roofed pavilion with rusty screen wire walls and a concrete floor. The outdoor section where we sat was across a path from a rank of 55 gallon drums, buried on end to the rim, filled with gravel, and covered with wire mesh, for the purpose of returning used beer to mother earth.

The club did have some slot machines. Which turned out later that year to be totally crooked, and part of the scam of a gang of “senior NCOs”, who went to jail for stealing from the club and the troops.

That Blatz beer was supplied by someone who had obviously paid a lot of money for some Congressman's campaign. It was the only brand we got, and in those days before aluminum pop tops, the tin and steel cans had set in pallets on the Saigon docks for many days in the 105 degree heat. The can tops were rusty. You can only imagine what this jungle pasteurizing did for the brew inside.

Weekend nights, the club would present bands. These were Filipino, Viet, and Korean “cover” bands playing US rock hits—badly and with such bad accents you could never pick out a recognizable lyric. The bands traveled in beat up VW vans with the tiny, crappy amplifiers they used. They always featured two things. One, scantily clad dancer girls—or some were even girl bands—and, two, every band ended every show with what was the GI anthem for Vietnam—The Animals', “We Gotta Get Outa This Place.” Even if they sounded as bad as Roseanne singing the National Anthem, that one brought the house down. Always. The bands were bad. But as the evening wore on, and the beer goggles and beer 'phones began to kick in, they got to looking and sounding better.

We did have it better than the troops in the smaller camps, the fire bases and such. But “better” doesn't always mean “good.”

As we sipped our sundowners, some 100 yards up a jeep was parked at the side of the dirt road in front of a latrine. The jeep was in “tactical configuration.” That meant there was no top, and the windshield was folded flat down on the hood. It looked like an Olive Drab slab on wheels.

Just as the sun got down enough we could barely see the jeep, Charlie, as part of his adrenaline replenishment program, sent us an evening rocket.

This evening's offering happened to come in just right, and hit directly under the gas tank of that jeep. Between the warhead and the gas, there was enough of a bang and whoosh to send the jeep flipping up into the air.

As the rest of us were diving for the ground, the Pride of Vermont calmly takes his beer down from his lips, looks at the tumbling jeep, and says, “Heads.”