Uncle Sam
Ain’t Released Me Yet
Memoirs of a REMF
Copyright©
2016 by Robert B. Martin, IV
All
Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express
written permission from the copyright owner, except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. I have attempted to recreate
events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them.
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Chapter
42
Another Birthday in The Army
“Aging
can be fun if you lay back and enjoy it.” ..........Clint Eastwood
The monsoons
departed as March arrived, marking the beginning of my eighth month in Vietnam
and the anniversary of my 26th birthday. I was older than most of the troops in
the battalion, many of the officers, and except for the senior ones, most of
the NCOs. I was called an old man and asked dumb questions such as, “Why are
you in Vietnam? Aren’t you too old?”
My mother
sent me a dartboard with real darts for my birthday. We could now get rid of
our hooch’s homemade dartboard and stop using the Atropine syrettes for darts. Atropine
was the antidote for nerve gas, which was never used. A syrette was a cartridge of medicine with a spring-loaded hypodermic
needle. The cap was removed and the cartridge was jabbed against a muscle of
the body (usually the thigh). The hypodermic needle was driven into the muscle
by a spring and the medication was automatically injected. Atropine was one of
the three most common syrettes carried by medics. The other two were morphine
(for pain) and epinephrine (to revive a stopped heart). Atropine syrettes were
issued with our gas masks and since my hooch-mates worked in supply, easy to
obtain. We would activate the syrette by pressing the cartridge against a
board, which released the spring causing the needle to shoot out. We then used
them as darts. It was something to do.
The 5th Marines began to pull out of
Vietnam on March 24, 1970, and we hoped this meant the war was all but over for
the U.S. and we would all be going home soon. We could at least wish.
The
temperatures would soon be back into the high nineties and low triple digits
now that the monsoon season was ending. It was time to reopen our firebases in
the A Shau Valley so the infantry could begin to reclaim the valley from
the NVA once again.
March also
meant that our BC, CPT Rankin, was transferring to another job, and our new BC
would be CPT Tom Austin, another Georgia boy. This made two captains from
Georgia in a row. CPT Austin was a big, friendly red-headed guy with a great
sense of humor. We would soon become friends and be on a first name basis when
no one else was around. He served as our BC for only about four months before being
wounded on FSB Ripcord, resulting in his being evacuated to the hospital ship Hope
and, eventually, back to the World.
Continued in Chapter 43, Unconventional Soldiers.…
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