While I'm off in the woods with the Cub Scouts this weekend, let's get the readers (and the staff) involved:
Pop in the comments below, and give us one good, short (2-3 paragraph) war story about some interesting event that happened to you. It can be funny, terrifying, illuminating, or poignant - we don't care. Just give us a short little narrative and share a good story. Pretend we're all having a beer together. Heck, drink a beer yourself while you're writing it out...
We've had story time with Guardian already. Matt Purvis talked about hanging out on the Af-Pak border. Murnau's got some field time under him, as does Steve. Heck, even Shelldrake got his boots dirty at some time.
So tell us a story. Take over the site for the weekend and make it your own. I'll be off wrangling 7-year-olds and wishing I was living out some of those war stories
By: Brant
Heard this story from a friend, Larry Tuohey, who was an engineer in Nam and lived in Wash.,DC.
ReplyDeleteAround 1970, he was finished with work for the day when one of the unit's drivers was tapped to take out supplies to an allied unit. The guy knew the way from doing the run before. Larry was bored so asked if he could go along for a ride out of DaNang.
They were traveling fine, and Larry was enjoying the scenery and drive, when he realised they were going way out in the boonies. The kid said it was fine, never had any trouble, which was somewhat reassuring. They finally pulled up to an old French colonial mansion on a rubber plantation that was right near the border.
The first thing Larry saw was four strapping young guys drinking Foster's on the porch. Turned out that was the supplies they were transporting, a pallet load of Foster's.
Who are these guys? Turned out they were Australian SAS, who were out there ambushing supply columns on the Ho Chi Minh trail at night. One of their mother's sent them a pallet of Foster's every week.
Larry appreciated all this, but, "Is it really safe out here?"
One of these brawny six-footers began to titter like a little girl. "They used to bother us, but now they leave us alone."
So I know at least one guy that used to tell a story about faking a mortar attack on the Berlin Wall using a mailing tube that was painted dark green, and a makeshift bi-pod. Apparently everyone thought he was full of shit until he'd pull a picture out of his wallet of a couple of East German tower guards jumping out of their tower in fear. And this was back in the 80s, beofer everyone and their Iranian news agency was using photoshop.
ReplyDeleteI watched a guy hop out of a Huey at Ft Bragg back in the early 90s. He turned around to help his platoon leader out of the bird (she was hauling a PRC-77 w/ her after her RTO twisted an ankle. The Huey was in a low hover, about 4 feet of the ground. As he's helping her out, the whip antenna whacks him in the head, and he pivots away from it, holding his jaw, and just then the Huey starts to lift up, and the skid is somehow caught on his ruck and started to pick him up with it. I've never seen/heard a grown man squeal like that before, but he got the attention of the pilots to get him back down before he'd gotten more than 10-12 feet or so in the air. Good times.
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