It was just moments later, after the apc's had dropped us off, when we began receiving heavy 50 caliber machine gun fire coming from the direction of the road, about a quarter of a mile away. ' Fortunately', we'd already dug our fox holes. The fifty caliber has an extremely large bullet. When it passes over your head, it sounds like a large fire cracker going off. After getting shot at for a few minutes which seemed like eternity, we discovered that it was our own apc's shooting at us, our own buddies.....
On this occasion, one of our men who was on his second tour of duty after being wounded during his first tour in Vietnam, stuck his arm up out of his fox hole, extending his index finger. Later he said he wanted another purple heart... He said he re-uped because he was bored back in the States. In other words he signed back up to serve another six years in the army after he was shot through a lung and was discharged from the army. Eventually, weeks later, he was shot in the head and died in combat.
I can still remember sitting there on the edge of my fox hole that day. I was reading a letter from home that I had just received by Huey chopper mail call. It was saying that my step father had been beating up on my mother, and my younger brother had to fight him off. That's about how far I was through the letter when the shooting began. I dove into my fox hole, realizing that I had just narrowly escaped the loudest and heaviest barrage of fire power in my life, and the bullets were still coming. Between thoughts of what was happening back home and the loud noise from the machine guns, for some reason, it was as if I could hear a little violin, or some kind of comforting music in the distant back ground. There was nothing I could do about either of these two situations. But between the two of them, something, or someone was telling me that some where there really was something peaceful and good, even though I couldn't comprehend where it could possibly be...
One day while spending a day or two at another perimeter, in the boonies some where, I remember we had a fresh lieutenant from the states. He was new because the last two platoon leaders, or lieutenants, had recently been killed in action. This one said he would, in a sense, back me up in case I was questioned by anyone, on my shooting up some rusty ammo at the edge of the perimeter. We were only gonna to be at this LZ for one or two days, if that.
Anyway, I figured I could get away with gettin' rid of this rusty ammo, so I carried about six bandoleers plus some other rusty ammo from my ammo pouches down to the perimeter. I laid them in a pile in front of me. I thought, "Well what do I have to shoot at?" About 300 meters out, I could make out some hand flares that were attached to rolls of concertina fence. These flares had horizontal trip wires attached to the pull pin on them. If someone tried to sneak through the fence, hopefully they would trip over one of these and illuminate the area. I knew my M16 was zeroed in pretty good, but I didn't know if I'd bumped the sights while chopping trail through the jungle, so I thought I would see if it still shot straight. I was picking them off at 300 yards, and they were going off one after another. What accuracy I thought! Sometimes I would flick my selector switch to fully automatic, shooting bursts of 8 to 10 rounds at a time. Anyway, I was getting rid of my rusty ammo....
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