Page 111 - Been There… Done That!

Been There... Done That!
For a while, military personnel couldn’t return fire unless they had requested permission to do so, but I was a civilian and didn’t have to do that. After seeing a son-of-a-bitch coming after me a couple of times, it made all the difference in the world whether I wanted to shoot back or not. One of the sayings in Vietnam was, “We don’t know if they are friendlies or not, so shoot them all and let God sort them out.”
The Vietnamese quickly learned that lives were not the issue, but rather a territory, and they figured us out really quickly because we would lose guys to take a hill and then turn around and just give it back. It was always something. One day B-52 strikes were going on roughly 25 miles away while we were performing and we literally had to reach out and grab the wall to stay on the stage. Of course, the soldiers weren’t fazed, just worried about holding on to their drinks.
By the end of December 1969 the band and I were off to Guam for a six-show gig at Anderson Air Force Base. The night after our first show I was approached by Colonel Hedland who said, “Aren’t you glad to be out of the goddamn Nam?” I told him we were and he asked us to go back out and play some more for the crowd of about 300 people, so I told him, “Get us something to drink and we’ll go back on and jam a little bit.” They brought us some of the best champagne known to man and I’m telling you, I played a non- stop medley for an hour and a half. I had a bottle on each side of me and by the time we got done, we were drunk. We had a rented station wagon and were feeling pretty good, actually a little crazy.
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