You know my whole life, I hated to be alone, not fit in and always wondered what was my purpose in life. Might be some things were starting to make sense to me. I was never alone. My brothers and my sister, my father and mother and all my friends were there. No, I was never alone. I always had people around me taking care, comforting me, and loving me. What was wrong with my head? I kept thinking that I did not fit in.

Why should I ever think that? There were the baseball teams and soccer teams hockey teams and people in high school who laughed (with) me, not at me when I sang off key.

Now here I am worried more about the bugs, snakes and lizards instead of the enemy. Yet, wait a minute? Where is my enemy? I can remember staying up many nights not being able to sleep. I was thinking about these things. Was I going crazy? It seemed in my head all the fears that I had introduced were just that – self inflicted!

Eventually, I found out little by little everything that I (not people around me) was supposed to do. I had to become a lot more honest with other people and myself. I had to trust people not just myself. This war in Vietnam was waking me up a lot faster than what I wanted. One of the things that I found out was that I had to listen to people and believe me that was hard. Yet, if I wanted to survive this next 12 months I best listen to what a lot of people told me.

If you don’t mess with the bugs they won’t bother you. If you don’t show aggressiveness to snakes and back off they’ll leave you alone. With the lizards, just throw them some food, then just run.  God were they ugly! I remember once on the beach I had a big beach towel underneath me trying to get a tan and something went in between my legs. I could feel it moving toward my crotch, so I picked up my head looked down. I tried to figure what was going on and Andy who was with me grabbed my towel as I jumped off it. There was nothing!

We looked at each other as if to say what the f***? There were no tracks. Then all of a sudden, where I had been sitting one of those transparent spiders came up through the sand and ran toward the ocean and disappeared.

We watched in amazement what they were doing. They were waiting till crabs would come ashore then kill them. It took me awhile before I could go back to the beach.

The other two were at the trimpad. At the end of our runway there was a rice paddy. Snakes would always come out. Little ones and big ones but again if you weren’t aggressive or tried to get them they would go their own ways.

The lizards were bigger than life. Every now and then we would open the door on the trimpad booth and there they were. We would throw food at them then take off through the backdoor and wait about 10 minutes. They just left.

 In our barracks walking through the front door up to the left was a cage in which lived a chameleon. I will always remember that if he was yellow and green, the barracks was clean.  If he was on the bars trying to pump out the color of gray, it meant something was in our bunks. Spiders, snakes and rats were always around. Under the cage we had brooms, baseball bats ready to stop any intruder who was in our barracks. As time passed these things were so minuscule I did not even think about them. It got my mind off these things and do what I was supposed to do. Fight this so-called war.

Things have really changed today. People in the military have cell phones, Internet connections and tape sent via satellite. In our days, we had what was called a ham radio. I used to hate it. Whenever you finished a sentence you had to say the word, ‘over’. You had to wait on a list so you could call someone. The officers were first, then depending on how much time the ham operator had, depended on if you could make a call or not.

Mostly, I hated Thanksgiving and Christmas. After you were in the country for six months you could take an R&R. A person who worked at the trimpad was getting ready to go on R&R to Hawaii and meet his wife and when he came back he looked very puzzled. I can remember them bringing out a f-100c for final work. The cables on the landing gear were not tight and he told everyone he would fix the cables. When he started the plane up and put it into afterburner and let go of the brakes, the cables snapped in the plane crashed into a reventment wall. When he was removed from the plane he brushed off his arms looked at us. 

They took him away. It seems his wife was doing it with everybody back home. I couldn’t believe it. While I was over there I bought a lot of things, a 8mm camera, a 35mm camera ,dishes, and a smoking jacket. I saved most of my money most of the time.

We worked six days a week. A lot of weeks we worked seven days. It would depend on what was going on. These next parts will most likely be the hardest parts of my life to recall. Some of them I did not mind traveling all out through Vietnam from DA-NANG to Saigon. Some of the experiences I will never forget and some of them I wish I could.