The "baby sons", or young girls in particular, spent much of the time sitting at the front door of their hooch combing each others hair. After observing carefully, I could see that this was not just to comb the hair. What they were doing was getting the ticks out of their hair. One would carefully comb the others while looking at the scalp. When she saw a tick she would pick it out with her fingers, put it in her teeth and bite its hard shell to kill it.
Little boy baby sons would make pets out of bugs. One pet was a rather large beetle that a little boy had attached to a string. The string was about three feet long. The boy was amused while he watched this beetle fly around on the end of his string. My immediate thought was, why hadn't I thought of this when I was a kid? The young boys also plowed rice paddy fields with water buffaloes. They rode on the backs of the buffalo as if they were riding on the back of an elephant, prodding it occasionally with a small stick. We moved across the countryside so much that I couldn't help but wonder what I might see next.
There was always the smell of burning cloth or a musty smell accompanying the villages. I couldn't quite pinpoint the smell. Later I realized that they were burning bamboo to cook with. I think this was what I had been smelling. The momma sons would light the ends of pieces of bamboo under their old looking, wrought iron cooking pots and keep shoving these pieces of bamboo into the fire as they burned up.
As far as going to the bathroom over there, the men just rolled up one of their black pajama legs, while the women simply pulled their pajamas down and squatted. People just went to the bathroom on the side of the road, or in their front yard, or where ever they happened to be. Back home people were taken to jail for doing these things out in the open. This was another world. People didn't think anything of just squatting in their yard. Which country was being unrealistic? This was something that had a great impact on my understanding of practicality. Needless to say, this was an abrupt awakening to the world outside of the protected veil of American culture.
The smells of these villages were always hard for me to get used to. Meanwhile, we didn't know if they were the enemy or friendly civilians. The language barriers between us complicated things even more. We usually had a Vietnamese interpreter with us, but some of the time they couldn't understand a different dialect twenty or thirty miles away.
Culture shock was an issue, not only with respect to our entry into Viet Nam, but in our re-entry back to the states. We'd been shown another world for an extended period of time. In other words, we had experienced a different set of living standards as well as values. There was a very small percentage of what our two cultures seemed to have in common, but the Vietnamese had great love for family and spouse and wept for loss of loved ones just like Americans do. When Vietnam veterans return to the homeland, it's with a whole new perspective on life. It was hard getting used to fitting back into the tight mould of a highly restrictive society once again. Changing my bad language was one of the first things I had to do. I was used to carrying a gun and getting shot at all the time. Now, when I drive a car, I have to worry about getting fined if I'm not wearing a seat belt. I wasn't twenty one when I got home and couldn't even legally buy a beer, but I could go and get shot at in Vietnam for my country with no problem at all. The majority of us who've spent a significant amount of time in combat with the infantry don't really worry about whether something is socially acceptable or not any more. The main thing now is to just get the job done, what ever it takes!...
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