Occasionally our platoon would pull bridge duty on a heavily used gravel road called Highway One, which ran most of the way north and south through South Vietnam. The bridges were wooden and quite small, built over small streams of water. Each end of the bridge had two sand bag bunkers with about four men per bunker.We had to check identification papers of every one crossing them. Due to various kinds of ID and print that was hard to read, it was hard to determine the authenticity of their papers. Anyone fourteen or older was supposed to be in the South Vietnamese army, therefore, anyone walking around or crossing the bridge who looked to be around that age was suspected to be Viet Cong.
Little kids riding bicycles would occasionally come up to us and ask if we'd like to buy some "bookoo number one dinky dow," which means very good marijuana. Some of the soldiers bought some right away. Apparently they'd already smoked it back in the states. I wasn't familiar with it, so I refrained from it, at least temporarily anyway. After participating in some fire fights and being next to some of our men who were killed, my perception of reality changed. I became less afraid of the unknown and willing to try just about anything whenever I had the opportunity, that would take me away from the war I was in.
As a rule, when ever we were afraid of being reprimanded by our superiors for doing something we weren't supposed to be doing, the famous phrase was, "What can they do to us, send us to Vietnam......?" So, one day when I felt the need to escape the harsh realities war, I bought ten rolled joints of local weed, not having the slightest notion of what I was supposed to experience. I couldn't feel anything different after the first few joints, so I smoked all ten of them. Shortly thereafter, .....it was my turn to go check ID's on the bridge.....
Well, the road was three or four feet above the bunker that I'd been smoking in. I slung my M16 over my shoulder and proceeded to walk to my post. When I began my incline up the side of the road, I noticed that I was taking about three steps forward and four steps backward. This was odd I thought. I struggled up the small incline until I made it to the road. I'll never forget the sensation of watching a large deuce and a half army truck coming toward the bridge at a high rate of speed. It was kicking up a huge cloud of dust around it. The front of the truck looked like the face of some kind of science fiction monster, or something that I couldn't quite make out. What ever it was, it was really coming fast and I definitely needed to get it together! Everything about it was unusually exaggerated. It came like a hurricane flying by me, leaving me in the dust like I wasn't even there. What a trip!, I thought. It was a strange experience that kind of left me puzzled for the moment, but it certainly took me temporarily away from the usual worries. It didn't really matter much to me, when their was a good chance that very few of us, if any, were gonna make it out of Vietnam alive anyway....
Then there were the "number one boom boom" ladies, or prostitutes. Three of them usually rode up on a single Honda 50'. That was a pretty good task to achieve, I thought.. Once again, the eminent thought of dying soon on the battle field was a very real possibility, so a couple of times I gave in. These experiences were not at all fulfilling, to say the least. There was no love, no sense of togetherness, just the physical act itself. Hopefully, there would be something much better down the road once I was back in "the world."
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