Page 110 - Been There… Done That!

Gary Graham
am I going to do, but instead what am I going to do to survive? I tried to keep most of the bad stuff from the band. I figured one person worrying about it was enough.
Hell yes, I returned fire. We were on a river barge one night and a firefight broke out. We had red tracers and the Viet Cong had white tracers and we had the lights off on the boat so they couldn’t see us. A marine told me to aim where the white tracers were coming from and just pour it on them. So I unloaded, shooting as vigorously as I could, as was everyone else. Pretty soon there were no more white tracers. I don’t know who we got, but they got it good.
Sometimes we had no choice but to get involved. One night I found myself throwing concussion grenades, but the Vietnamese had been fighting for so long with so little that they had become creative bastards, using punji pits with sharpened bamboo spikes covered with buffalo shit. When those got someone, they would end up dead.
They also liked to grind up glass and put into Coke bottles and send little kids out offering free drinks to soldiers. Someone would take a drink, take three steps and fall down. We learned not to trust anybody because anybody could take us out. Many times when something bad happened it would be one of those little kids, who were mean little son-of-a-bitches that could kill someone in a heartbeat. The mama san who had worked her ass off for a year keeping the barracks clean might one day come in with a sack full of charges and blow the whole damn place apart. We just never knew.
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