Ground Pounder: A Marine’s Journey through South Vietnam, 1968-1969

Chapter Fourteen: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

295 Chapter Fourteen In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida “The only war I ever approved of was the Trojan War. It was fought over a woman and the men actually knew what they were fighting for.” William L. Phelps (1933) Our new commander was an older colonel named Woodson, who had worked his way up from the ranks. Stoic, distant, and hard as nails, he was a no-nonsense type of officer, but I had no complaints. He was a fair man who just wanted to get the job done and go back home to his ailing wife. The new top sergeant was a master sergeant named Venables. Always the consummate bureaucrat, he eventually gainedmyrespectandadmiration.Asayoungboyofseventeen,hehad joined the Corps in order to go fight the Japanese during World War II.Afterservingwiththe1stMarinesatGuadalcanal,hewaswounded at Bougainville. With a little over twenty-eight years in the Corps, he hadseenitall.Therewasnowayanyonecouldfeedhimalinewithout abigsmileformingacrosshistightlips.Hewouldjuststandthereand nod his head for awhile, until he had heard enough. Then he would 296 Ground Pounder gently put his arm on your shoulder and say, “Son, if you are going to trytobullshitsomebody,youneedtoshowatleastalittlesincerity.For heaven sakes, lad, didn’t your mother teach you anything?” Up to this point, I had always worked in the warehouse, while the other guys either worked in their own air-conditioned shops or went fishing. However, Master Sergeant Venables had a couple of surprises for me. First, he informed me that I had been promoted to the rank of corporal, which wasa pleasantsurprise. Ina spanoffourteen months, Ihadgonefrombeingaprivatetoafull-blownNCO.Thenhetoldme that I would be temporarily assigned to mess duty. The only problem IhadwiththisassignmentwasthatIwouldbeworkingfromsixinthe evening to six in the morning for thirty days straight. This not only meant that I wouldn’t to be able to see Wesley and Gino for awhile, but also, I wasn’t going to be able to show off my new stripes down at the warehouse. If I had known that mess duty was going to be an ordeal unto itself, I would have gone into hiding. To this day, I still get sick to my stomach whenever I smell the sickening aroma of fried bologna and onions. Every evening like clockwork, I would show up to work with an overweight lance corporal named Eddy and we would begin to make three hundred god-forsaken sandwiches for the various units in the area. As one of us would lay out three hundred slices of bread on a huge counter and cover each slice with a glob of greasy butter, the other guy would pull out a twenty-five-pound loaf of frozen bologna from the freezer and begin cutting it with a machine into thick slabs. Once everything was ready, we would place a frozen slab of bologna on each slice of buttered bread and then cover it with a slice of old, green-looking cheese. Then after covering the pile with another piece of bread, we would individually wrap the sandwiches in cellophane and stuff them into a brown paper bag for delivery. On a good night, it could take us anywhere from three to four hours to prepare the sandwiches, depending upon how hung-over we were. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida 297 Immediately after making the sandwiches, the two of us were expected to help prepare the midnight meal (mid-rats), which consisted of one serving of meat and potatoes along with two vegetables and a roll. The idea was to provide a decent meal for the guys in the compound working the night shift. Then afterward, Eddy and I were expected to wash the dishes and clean up the dining area from top to bottom. Normally, we were able to finish this task just in time to help begin to prepare the breakfast. Besides working my butt off for twelve hours straight, I quickly discovered that it was almost impossible to get any sleep during the day. The heat was stifling and the Vietnamese cleaning ladies that worked in the barracks were always keeping me awake with their constant jabbering. It didn’t take long before Eddy and I were walking around completely exhausted. A skinny white sergeant named Willard and an old Hawaiian pastry cook named Tu Tu supervised our shift. Because neither one of themhadmuchofaneducation,itwasdifficulttohaveaconversation with them that didn’t revolve around the art of slopping food onto a metal tray. Both of them were around forty years old and had been in the...