Nam Sense by Jr. Arthur Wiknik Read Free Book Online Page A

a woman who appeared to have something concealed under her blouse near her chest. We questioned her but she didn’t understand us until one of my men pulled his shirt over his head, mimicking what we wanted her to do. She finally got the message.
    The woman started to jabber then lifted her blouse exposing her breasts. We almost shit. She had one normal small breast but the other was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Our jaws dropped and we stood motionless, afraid that the affliction might be contagious. Not wanting to find out, we waved at her to quickly pick up her stuff and go away.
    The woman noticed our repulsion and laughed. Then she held the swollen breast with both hands, pointing it at us like a weapon. As we slowly backed off, she squeezed hard and let loose a stream of pus. I ducked from the spray so she took aim at Howard Siner, hitting him in the arm. We ran around like a bunch of kids while she chased us trying to squirt anyone in her range. Even the villagers were laughing at us. When the woman finally ran out of ammunition she calmly collected her pickings and waved good-bye. We saw no reason to check anyone else. How could we? An American patrol had just gassed itself and been defeated by an infected tit. After that, the Army sent a bulldozer out every afternoon to crush and bury the garbage.

    Our AO extended only two or three miles from the edge of the village. Although it wasn’t far out, I noticed something eerily quiet about the region. There were no songbirds. It was as if they knew there was a war on and the only safe place for them was close to the village. Their absence created a sad environment, increasing my feeling of remoteness from the outside world. Vietnam was far away from America and we were even farther. Grunts were so detached from everything that it felt as if we were on a planet in outer space while everyone forgot where we were. Our common bond was that we endured the same frustrating, unforgiving conditions that had control of us. We saw the infantry as more than just an experience; it was a culture of depending on each other for sanity and survival.
    The misery of being in the field didn’t start new with each day; it just never ended from the day before. To cope, GIs conceived a favorite saying, “Fuck it. Don’t mean nothin.’” No matter how bad things got—the weather, the enemy, or the morale, we focused on a hardened “Fuck it. Don’t mean nothin.’” Our only consolation was that the passage of time brought each man closer to his ticket home.
    The misery also came at us from the upper ranks of the Army. Colonel Ajax was being replaced by a Lieutenant Colonel who called himself Condor (they must sit up all night thinking of those code names). Ajax wanted to turn over a clean AO, so his last directive was for us to go back to all of our daytime positions to bag any discarded litter and carry the trash to a point where a truck could pick it up. I suggested burying it in a deep hole, but Bruckner said we wouldn’t be following orders if we did that. So we carried the garbage, sometimes as far as a half-mile. There is nothing like having a tidy war.
    In keeping with Army tradition, it seemed that no matter what we did, someone else didn’t like the way it was done or that it was done at all. Such was the case with the cleanup operation. Colonel Condor couldn’t care less how spotless the AO was because his philosophy wasn’t to have a clean war. He wanted destruction. He ordered us to burn anything that would ignite, except of course, the village. We set fire to bamboo thickets, hedgerows, grassy areas, everything. The burning turned out to be a good idea because after the flames subsided we found booby-trapped artillery rounds that were previously hidden. We burned for several weeks with some of the fires continuing through the night. We loved it.
    About every third day we returned to the same bamboo thicket to set up our DDP because it could easily be