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
54
A Letter from Vietnam
“I get
mail. Therefore, I am.”.......Scott Adams
I received a letter from Gary Simon
shortly after returning home. He was still at Camp Eagle but would be leaving
soon. He wrote to tell me about an incident that took place several days after
I left the battalion.
The NCOs had conducted a drug search of
the hooches, which came as no surprise. But one of the sergeants noticed a
loose sandbag on the outside wall of my previous abode. My old personal area
was on the other side of the wall. The sergeant pulled the sandbag away to see
if any drugs were hidden behind it. Instead of drugs, he found a hand grenade
with its pin wired to the sandbag. By pulling on the sandbag, he had also
pulled the pin from the grenade. He saw it in time and flattened himself
against the sandbagged wall. The sandbags on each side of the grenade directed
the explosive force and shrapnel outward and inward (toward my old personal
space). Luckily, the sergeant escaped injury. The grenade was probably put
there before I left. Perhaps at the same time the other two grenades were
hidden in the blast wall behind the hooch. Except this one was rigged to
explode.
After that letter from Gary, I tried to
put it all behind me, and for almost twenty years, I did not think of Vietnam
very much. That is, not until that hot July day in Denton, TX, in 1989 when
Laura Palmer read those twenty-six words.
“Bob Kalsu was running to meet a
chopper that had just landed at Fire Support Base Ripcord, on a desolate jungle
mountaintop, when he was killed.”
Continued in Postscript, The GI Revolt, Bounties, Fragging,
Desertion, and Draft Dodging….
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