Page 109 - Been There… Done That!

Been There... Done That!
But the thing was, once I got into Vietnam I wasn’t overly impressed, especially with Saigon. When I got around the country and actually saw these people were 3,000 years behind our civilization, I thought to myself, why are we fighting for this country? I’m sure the communist government was not that concerned about “mama-san” and “papa-san” living in their little hut and working in the rice fields and fishing for a living, so why should we have been concerned about it?
On the other hand, I felt the need to entertain the troops, but after getting shot at a few times and seeing a helicopter shot down, I started asking why I was here. The final straw for me was when the soldiers caught a Viet Cong and one of the guys from the production company pulled me aside and said, “Gary, I like you guys and I want to tell you that the son of a bitch had your itinerary.” I gathered the band up and said we are getting out of here and I wasn’t taking no for an answer.
In those days we could buy an around-the-world ticket for around $1,000 and that was what we had, marked “destination unknown.” So we found a flight and tried to leave it all behind. We had been there only about four months, but with everything that had happened to us and around us, we felt like we had been in Vietnam for 10 years.
We couldn’t drink the water, we couldn’t eat the food and we never knew how hard it would rain. And the night would light up with all the firing and tracers flying back and forth. I even saw action four or five times and in combat mode, it is not a question of what
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