Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond by Robert F. Curtis Read Free Book Online Page A

occupied the southern half of the eastern-most shack. It had been built two years before when Playtex moved into the compound. The walls were varnished plywood, an attempt to make it seem more like some of the real world Officer’s Clubs the older pilots had seen in their travels. The floor was covered with those one-foot squares of linoleum that everyone that ever served in the Army spent so many hours pushing a buffer over. The northern half of the Club building contained two rooms, the one next door was a single room occupied by the company XO and the one on the far end was home to two of the company warrant officers.
    In front of the wall of the Club that adjoined the XO’s room was the bar. The builders had done a good job on the woodwork, very professional looking carpentry amid the squatter’s-camp look of the rest of the company area. The mirror behind the bar reflected bottles of liquors, mostly unfamiliar to the pilots since nearly all were too young to drink stateside. Displayed over the top of the mirror was a bra and various bits of female underwear, souvenirs of R&R exploits. Under the counter, were the cabinets where the hard liquor was supposed to be locked up, but these shelves stayed empty because the Club never closed and no one ever bothered to lock the booze up. To the right of the mirror was a door that led to the storeroom where the extra beer and soft drinks were kept.
    To the right of the storeroom door were the two refrigerators that held the beer and soft drinks ready for consumption. The freezer compartments of both held long stainless steel trays from the mess hall that were used to make ice. An ice pick was usually handy on top of the refrigerator so that the pilot who wanted ice could break some off. The water used to make the ice was potable but only just. When frozen, the water had swirls of dirt, like marbling in praline ice cream. The pilots just broke the ice around the swirls and left most of the grit in the tray until someone got disgusted enough to throw it out and start over again.
    Because the Club was an “unofficial” one, it received no support from the official system of alcohol distribution. To buy the hard liquor, the pilots pooled their ration cards and gave them to the Club Officer. This system ensured plentiful booze because each officer was authorized two quarts of hard liquor each month and the non-drinker’s cards provided for the heavy drinkers. The Club Officer would check out a helicopter and take the ration cards to the Class 6 (liquor store in military language) store in Da Nang once a month or so and buy the booze. The beer and soft drinks mostly came from the small post exchange (PX) over by the runway at Phu Bai, a mile or so away. Both soft drinks and beer were in steel, not aluminum, cans and were often flat from the long shipment from the states and the months in storage.
    On the wall near the ceiling, to the right of the two bar refrigerators, was an exhaust fan with bend blades and a motor that made a labored sound as it turned. The wall around the fan was scared and stained from being a target. Once a month or so, the company would order and receive a shipment of bar glasses and just as regularly break them all that night. The game was to see who could get a glass, or at least most of the glass, through the fan without stopping it. If there were no glasses, beer cans were tried, but since they were steel cans, the fan usually stopped when the first one made it into the blades.
    Below and to the right of the fan, among the stained and drooping Playboy Playmates of the month, hung two rocket propelled grenade (RPG) launchers, one a Russian RPG-7 and the other a Chinese RPG-2. Scrounged from the grunts, they were operational weapons, but only served as decorations since no one could get any of the grenades to fire from them. The Chinese one was more like a piece of pipe with a crude trigger hanging on the bottom than a weapon. The Russian version was more