Cure or Disease?

A condom serves as a very fine balloon,though a small protrusion is at the top, when filled with helium and attached to a string.  (see side bar re: sex in raincoats)  It was suggested they be worn in tandem for there proper function (military redundancy!) though the twice daily VD sick call testified to either a very high failure rate or improper usage.  The Balloons were quite amusing.

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Malaria pills were offered as a palliative against this disease. The cereal bowl full of them at the end of the chow line  we were told may me taken one per week if we desired to be assured of not contracting the disease. The diarrhea experienced by the end of the third week  was the uninformed certainty that stopped all but the most compulsive pill taker.  I decided they were there for the amusement of the experienced.
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Home again, Home again, Jiggity Jig

Thomas Wolff warns us of the impossibility of  'going home again'. Not that we shouldn't in a nostalgic way but in an idealistic and realistic way. We imagine we  will but it will never be. As we separate from our home path to the experience outside its influence and environs we are becoming something apart from it. We glance back on parting, either in place or in mind and we imagine our return. But we can't recapture our place or ourselves, at least not as it and we once were.
Col Olds' addressed this in his farewell speech, warning us. He knew.

Eats and Drinks

Coming soon to a chow hall near you!  Breaded Prawns!!! YUM O!!  Supply screw up.
Sent more than could be stored long term.   Prawns on the chowline every meal for three weeks!!! I'm 61. I still don't eat Breaded Prawns!!!!
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If it came in a rusty can...(steel can/aluminum top, the weld seam din't hold up in tropical storage and sent streamers of rust cascading through the beer as you poured it into your glass) It  must be Carling Black Label!!!   Good times with a cool one on the Patio (next to the swimming pool with no water in it.  YA. Thought you'd remember.)!!!!
First  one or two Pabst in the aluminum cans...15c?  then on to wasted on the 5c Carling Black Label!!!!!  O YA!!!!!
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Goodbye, Memock!

Memock has posted his last entry to 'Life in Rural Thailand'.  The restaurant has been sold and they have said their farewells to Seerung's  family after their extended vacation through southern Thailand. If you haven't yet, visit his blog. 
He contacted me through this blog curious about life in Ubon during the Vietnam War and what his restaurant was then, being just outside the front gate of UBON RTAFB.
His blog has been a pleasure to follow and a wonderful connection to a place I knew in far different times.  His blog has allowed me to reconnect with several guys I was stationed there with in 1969.  The photos and movies/videos sent to him by former servicemen have been an awesome experience to view.  Through his blog Thailand became less a land far, far away and long, long ago for me.
Thank you, Andrew.

MORE UBON from 'Life in Rural Thailand'

More Ubon photos from 67-68
Check out the prices he writes about!  But then I knew of some guys collecting these on the flight line under the lights and paying their rent with them!!!  The Baht Bug!!!
YUM!!!!

You Gotta See This!! from blog ' Life in rural Thailand'

Old Ubon Ratchathani video and photos. « Life in rural Thailand: 

Taking the King's Shilling

   In the fall of '68 LBJ suspended the college deferments to appease the hue and cry that the wealthy elite sons weren't subject to the draft and possible death by virtue of their college deferments. I wasn't elite nor wealthy but I was in college and draft deferred. Carrying too many hours as an engineering student burned me out and I wasn't able to stay enrolled. Fortunately I was a few months ahead of the curve and was able to possibly escape being drafted as the first letter of my last name was due to be in the draft selection that March. It was Jan. or Early Feb. by then and checking with the draft board confirmed the approaching gamble of fate. Discretion being the better part of valor I hied me off to the Air Force Recruiter whom I had signed up with the spring before but changed my mind and took up scholarship instead. I had, I hoped, my bases covered.
  

Above the Screw

This is  a typical maintenance dispatch board  set up. Only in our shop we had a single board. The shift duty Sgt sat at it and  sent the radar tech crews out to the various planes and locations.

Col. Robin Olds' Farewell

 I recently came across this on Bob Wheatley's  Viet-REMF. That was the first I'd every experienced it. It should have been printed on a hand bill and given to every departing GI in SEA! It may have given us pause to consider what we were about to experience. We were so high for going home we couldn't imagine what we were to face 72 hrs. after departing SEA.  I hope after reading this blog some of you do.

 "'Now, I won't say good-bye to you. You know we have had some time over here together and I am not going to say good-bye because I know I will see you again. But I just want you to think of something. You have changed! You are not the same young guy that walked onto this base. Things have happened to you inside and you will never be the same for the rest of your life. It's going to take you a while to realize this and it's going to be awfully tough on you when you get home because that little wife that waved good-bye to you is not going to recognize you when you walk back through that front door. She is going to sense immediately that you have changed. And she is going to want to know how you have changed because she wants to know where she stands with this stranger that just walked into the house. So I guarantee you, within the first ten days home, you are going to have a fight. Then you are probably going to go to a party or two in your home town, where they are going to sort of half-ass welcome you back and your best friend from high school or college is going to walk up and tell you what a dumb shit you are for having been there fighting that stupid war. Then you are going to fly off the handle at him. Or you are going to want to tell him or someone what it was all about, and you are going to realize that nobody gives a goddamn.'

Colonel Robin Olds, Commander, 8th Tactical Fighter Wing
In His 1967 Farewell Address to 'The Wolf Pack', Ubon, Thailand"

Odds and Ends

 The big 'F' was the most prevalent expletive we used. It covered just about every circumstance with the proper adjunct phrase.

FIGMO- F*** I Got My Orders or F*** you I Got My Orders or F*** it, I Got My Orders-- The beginning of  attitude deterioration, accelerating when 100 dys remain and the attitude of SHORT begins...like; I'm Short ,I give a f***?


FUBAR-- F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition--  Anything defying  conventional wisdom and sense. To us  most things Military.

"SHORT!" --Heard as a bellowed expression of exuberance at any time of day or night, especially under the influence of drink taken.

SHORT was celebrated by an sexually explicit drawing divided into numbered tiles which were colored in daily from 100 to 1. Several versions circulated, which was before xerox. Some admin. guy somewhere must have kept a mimeograph machine busy!!!
This was posted in ones locker and displayed on the open door when the 'lucky' owner was in residence. SHORT! was a 100 day celebration of going Back to the World. And now all these years later most of us privately celebrate this time at Ubon as the most exciting of our lives. But we saw things differently then. Life before us was longer and we had no idea of the value of our experiences.  Now we really are getting 'Short' and hope to extract the sweetness from the past that we were then unaware of. A sort of distillation after the second pressing of the fruit.
A far cry from living in the past , rather a savoring of it!


SHORT was counted on a small wheel counter worn on a chain through the top shirt buttonhole. 99 days and the bag drag!!!!( leaving the country for 'the World')

Don't drink the last bit out of a bottle of  beer or soda in town.  This is where the insect bits and other detritus settled. I don't think their filtration standards were very high.

Don't drink the Thai Whiskey.  Chunky floaters and possible blindness.

Baht bugs swarmed around the flightline lights and felt like getting hit with a tennis serve. 3to4 inches long and were eaten by the nationals. I knew of guys paying there rent in town with beer cases of the things.  1 baht= 5 cents.

A condom can be used as a floating balloon if inflated with helium from the tank in the radar shop.

Bombs Away!

Texas Instruments Paveway I

  I and my partner were sent out to an F4 with this laser designator system attached to the cockpit sill and the GBU slung underneath on the centerline  bomb rack. Though I've forgotten the details we were to do some system integration with our radar and bombing computer system it seems.   It was one of  those non-existent things that didn't really  exist no matter how real they appeared to the untrained eye. After the short briefing we received at the aircraft before we started we were as able to not see it as any one else.

REMF

REMF is an unofficial derisive incestous military acronim for those of us who were not on 'the front lines'.  We were 'in the rear with the gear'. Yes and No. More politely called Rear Echelon Military Forces. It is a tragic military reality that so much goes on away from the contact points that enable those in 'contact combat' to survive and succeed.  This is what we did with these.

"The planes I fixed blew up the truck on the Ho Chi Minh Trail
carrying the bullet with your name on it." Dan Decker, TSgt , USAF,(ret.)

Try doing that with an M-16!


FIGMO    FUBAR

The flavor of freedom

Subject: I REMEMBER YOU. Memorial Day, 1999. AT VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL
Date: Monday, 31 May, 1999 07:55

Not long ago... a lonely American soldier in Vietnam wrote:

" To those who fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know."