In one place, next to an underground bunker, a bomb from one of our jets had piled up a large mound of sand. It just missed the bunker by a couple of feet. The pile of sand had one of the enemy's arms protruding from it.. I thought if I pulled hard enough with an NVA belt wrapped around the forearm that I'd be able to pull the body out of the sand. Not so. When I pulled, I pulled the hand completely off of the arm. Apparently it had been there a day or so. It took me by surprise. I didn't have time to work at it with my entrenching tool, so a bull dozier that the Chinooks, sh..hooks (big choppers), had flown in to cover up other bodies moved the dirt. This was another one of these educational experiences that helped me learn not to sweat the small stuff and just keep movin'...
Sometime, just after we had taken the hill, one of our guys was going through what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. His eyes rolled back and he just fell over backwards. His skin was kind of blue colored. He was also probably suffering from exhaustion, and possibly dehydration now that I think about it. He was medi-vaced out. At the same time, one of our four deuce mortar tubes had a mortar round that was jammed in the tube. This was very bad! All it needed for it to explode was a little pressure on the front end of it. The only way to get it out of the tube was to pry this live bomb out with a stick. I didn't want to get blown up with one of our own bombs while they wrenched and tugged at it, so needless to say, I stayed as far away from it as I could get, like on the other side of the perimeter... There was one underground bunker that had two dead NVA soldiers in it who had apparently committed suicide. As I looked into their bunker, I could see both of their brains lying under the board bench that they were sitting on. They were still sitting in an upright in position.
After securing the hill for a few days, we just walked off and left it for Charlie to take back again. On top of the rest of the things we had to endure, this was the kind of thing that really made your head spin. What kind of victory was this? We needed something positive to replace the men we had lost. It wasn't there... Our morale continued to deteriorate. Sensing the need to survive, our men increasingly became less likely to follow orders as long as they could get away with it...
I was tired of burning villages, shooting at people and getting shot at, but I was mentally still hanging in there. I'd somehow maintained my sense of self control and was in the middle of a war that made no sense to me. Even though there weren't many left in my squad, I was still, as a squad leader, obeying orders to the best of my ability. The closer I got to my discharge date, the more I figured it would be my turn to get hit with something. I'd been through too many close calls. My turn had to be drawing nearer. I was one of the few left of the original troops that had come to Vietnam together from Hawaii. The rest had been killed or wounded.
I didn't like the added responsibility of being a squad leader, but I didn't want to have to follow orders from someone I didn't think was gonna take us in the right direction. Anyway, to make it official, they sent me to a leadership school somewhere in Vietnam for ten days after my promotion to sergeant E5. I was schooled once again, as in basic and advanced infantry training for things such as map reading, calling in artillery, and air strikes, etc. On the way back to my unit after this ten day schooling, I had to spend a day at an Air Force base named Phu Cat. The differences between our army bases and this air force base as far as sleeping quarters, mess hall and roads to various buildings was unbelievable. Phu Cat was like an American military base back in the states. They had everything imaginable, even black top roads with little blue school buses to take the men to work during the day...
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