From Dick Bowman
Gunner, I think I told you this one before, hell - you were probably there! One night down at B'Sar, south of Bao Loc, a Korean show group came into the compund. A band and a couple of girls. This was something special, the only time we ever had something like that happen while I was in C Co. The messhall was prepared and the band started to play - they weren't too bad. The drummer did an excellent job with the drum sollo in Iron Butterfly's Ina God Divida. Anyway, after the band quit a Korean girl got up on the stage and did a silohuette strip tease, no lights except one back light. Everybody got a charge out of this, but one fellow, Morgan, a 10 ton driver wanted to see more. Morgan slipped out and returned with a a big flashlight. He got back in unnoticed and some how got up high near the rafters. He flipped on the flashlite and the whole place erupted in applause and laughter. The shapely red faced Korean girl gathered up her clothes and vacated pronto. That was the end of the show. I laughed like crazy!
Tactful..... we were escorting a General to Ba'sar,,just 2 jeeps and our guntruck.Our CC was a young LT who was about to go home ,and was very "street wise".We were about half way through the Bao Loc Pass and this General figured he would stop and take some pictures.He pulled out a real nice camera and started clickin away.Our CC got down off the guntruck,mumbled something to the effect of....this SOB is crazy..and walked up to have a talk with the general.
He said somethin to the general.The general looked at his camera,jumped back in his jeep and took off in a hurry.
When the LT. got back on the guntruck we asked him what he had said that got the general movin so fast.He said ,that was easy,I just told him what a nice camera he had,and suggested that if he was going to continue to take pictures he should shoot them from the hip.The general asked him why, and he told him if he kept putting that camera up to his eye there was a very good chance it was going to get a bullet hole in it....I always thought that was tactful........gunner
One funny thing we pulled on shit Willy was to load the crapper with a little gas mixture of about 80 to one. Well we all gathered up for the show ...at a distance. Poor ole Willie was a shitty site when he touched her off, plus he was minus some hair too! Some purty good times for us . Max
From Dick Bowman
Gunner, I think I've told you this one before, and some of the other C Co 815th guys may remember it, but in late '69 Roger Vaughn and I worked the night shift in the C Co motor pool on Engineer Hill at Pleiku, maintaining the trucks after you guys came in from Kontum. One day, the day shift guys had just got off work, and were getting ready for guard duty. I had to go back to the hooch for something and saw Sgt Jim Koller (from Wisconsin), who was always a practical joker casting a look at a guy named Aeck (from Michigan) who was headed for the latrine to drop a load. Koller said something like, "Watch this, I'm gonna get Aeck." He grabbed a CO2 fire extinguisher from somewhere and took off for the latrine. Once Koller found out which hole Aeck was on he went around back and pulled up the door where the shit willies pulled to tubs out and aimed the fire extinguisher for Aeck's bottom end. Koller let go with a long burst of cold CO2, dropped the door and took off. Aeck slammed the latrine door open and was hitching up his pants as Koller ran by, The chase was on and Aeck was hollering, "Koller, I'm gonna kill you!" They ran all over the Hill. That was about the funniest thing I'd seen in a long time and I laughed my butt off! Wish I knew where Koller is now.
Ok.... i am gonna tell you the monkey story. It was in Pleiku, engineer hill. The boys had a monkey, they kept it tied up at the back of the hooch. This monkey had been having personality problems. He got loose one day, and trashed the hooch, tore down all the mosquito nets, pretty much ransacked the place. Wolf was the 1st one home that day, he took one look around, and promptly shot the monkey. We came in off the road later, and found Wolf cleaning up the hooch, and the monkey? dead from a gunshot wound. We were like ,Wolf, why did you shoot the monkey? Wolf looked at us stone faced ( and serious as hell) and said I had to...... he was going for his gun.
gunner
I was loading scrapers with DG at a pit by FB
Blackhawk ..well ..in the morning the waterbuffs would be
laying in the pit... so one morning with the 4in1 bucket
I clammed a good sized bull calf up and loaded him in
the can
I guess he survived well enough to raise a
little hell at the spread...our C.O. Capt Greer ..who had
a stutter problem...was about crazy trying to chew on me....
but couldn't get the words out. Was funny as hell at
the time.... Max
From Dick Bowman
Ah yes, and then there were the juicers, of which Roger Vaughn and I prime examples. Vaughn loved his booze, and he loved women. He didn't much care what they looked like, about the only requiremnets were that they were warm and breathing. Anyway, along about Christmas time, 1969, Roger decided he needed to get laid. I don't remember if he made it down to Pleiku's Whore Alley, or if he sweet talked one of the house girls into it. Whatever happened, Roger got the job done, and he thought everything was fine. A few days later Roger said he was gonna have to go on sick call, there was something wrong. So he went on sick call and found out he had a case of the clap. Roger got the pills and a warning to lay off the booze for a couple of weeks, until the pills were gone. All was fine until New Years Eve when all of us that didn't have duty started celebrating. Roger kind of moped around, not saying whole lot. You could tell he really want to hoist a few with the rest of us. Along about 10 or 11 PM ol' Roger says "To Hell with it. Gimme a beer!" And he proceeds to get shit faced. A couple days later Roger is having great difficulty out at the piss tube. He had a terrible grimace on his face. He said not a lot was coming out and it hurt like hell. I said you better get up to the dispensary. So he did. The medics gave Roger the double whammy - two simultaneous injections of cold penicillin, one in each cheek of his butt. It just about put him on his knees! So Roger was a good boy, he laid off the booze and the antibiotics did their job. Each day, when Roger went to the piss tube, he could urinate a little farther. It went from a dribble to a trickle, and then a full fledged stream. Some days later I was walking by the piss tube, up from the motor pool , while ol' Roger was taking a leak, and he says "Hey, Bowman!" I looked over at him and with a big grin he says, I'm cured!" And he was making a good stream 6 or so feet long. Roger Vaughn is one that I miss
Its goin to take me longer to tell this story then it did for the whole thing to happen. We had left Kontum with a convoy to Dak To,as we were pulling away from the checkpoint a jeep and 4 or 5 cargo trucks fell in behind us.The trucks looked new,and the boys were dressed nice and looked well fed,we could tell right away it wasn't anybody we knew.
About an hour out of Kontum one of the 10 tons got a flat right front tire.We pulled up alongside to cover the guys while they changed the tire,and because we were to only guntruck in the convoy,the CC decided to wait.
The jeep that had been tailing us pulled up and a young LT got out and started raggin on the guys to hurry up.As soon as he open his mouth every one took an instant dislike to him......he talked like an angry gay boy. By this time the guys had the tire on the side of the truck and were about to hand it down when the LT said something to the effect of ....I want that tire down here NOW.....The two guys that had a hold of the tire looked at each other,and I thought to myself....oh boy...here it goes..........Sure enought they turned that tire loose....with a good aim I might add....right at LT bad additude...Now ....if he had been smart he would have kept his eye on the tire and sidesteped it at the last minute.........but he wasn't very smart and he took off runnin...Needless to say it didn't take that tire long to catch up to him,and he went down in a cloud of dust and a bunch of "gay" soundin cuss words.Every body was tryin not to laugh,but we weren't very good at it.Our guys went down after the tire and his guys went down after him,he went back to his jeep with nothin brused worse than his ego and we didn't hear a peep out of him the rest of the convoy.....that may have been the funniest thing I saw the whole time I was in country...gunner
Funny story time..........yeah, have maybe one left. When I got to C Co 815th Engr Bn in July '69, A Co had an A2 5 ton truck chassis outfitted with a redimix concrete mixer, just like the ready mix trucks we saw back ithe World. They used it for big jobs - slabs, floors, footings etc, Probably had been used quite a bit over at Camp Holloway, or Camp Enari before I got over there. I heard that the Colonel was really pround of that mixer. Gunner, maybe you can verify this story.
If an operator was lax about cleaning the mixer out promptly, the stuff set up which meant that someone had to pull the hatch of the mixer and get inside it to chip away at that concrete to clean it out. Then someone came up with the idea of using small chunks of C4 to speed up the process. And it worked well several times. One day a partial load set up - much more concrete than encountered before. It was reasoned a larger chunk of C4 would be needed to break that stuff loose. The C4 was placed and set off. But what was thought to be an adequate charge turned out to be way too much. The explosion opened up that mixer like an M-80 in a tin can. The Colonel was not pleased. Adios, Dick
Dynamite....we used to get volunteered for many strange and unusual duties.When we were living at Dillard there was a rock quarry across from the compound.They drilled during the day,and had a crew that packed dynamite into the holes at nite.They had been geting sniper fire and the brass decided to put a couple of guntrucks in the quarry at nite to put a stop to it.This turned out to be some "interesting" duty ,thats another story.Our first nite out they loaded several cases of dynamite on our guntruck and told us to carry it over to the boys that were doin the packin.We didn't know anything about dynamite and very carefully handling it.We got over to the quarry and handed the first box over the side to a fellow,he put it on his shoulder walked about 20 feet away from the truck picked it up over his head and threw it down on the rock corner first breaking open the box and scattering dynamite all over the place!!........we about died......so much for being careful with dynamite.........gunner
