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Fraggin'

By Bill Shunas

Did you see "Platoon?" I suppose most of you did. One old memory that came back to me was stimulated by the scene early in the movie when the FNG makes his new friends while on the shit-burning detail.

My First two or three days in Vietnam were spent in a Replacement Company in Cam Ranh Bay. I landed one afternoon, and the next morning there were over a hundred of us assembled under this shelter on the company grounds. We weren't getting any travel orders that day, so they were using us on work details. Every few minutes an E-6 would come over and ask for eight or ten or fifteen volunteers and off they'd go to fill sandbags or cut the general's grass or whatever the hell they were doing.

Now here's the picture. Back home in Chicago it was early spring. The temperatures were 45 or 50 degrees. Then I go to Seattle to fly out of McCord AFB. Same-same weather. Now I'm in Cam Ranh Bay. It's 90 degrees in the shade. If I blink I start to sweat. I've just spend 30 or 40 days on leave, eating, drinking and growing fat calls. The day before, I had spent nineteen hours folded into a seat in a 707 flying across the pond.

Did I want to volunteer to work and sweat for the U.S. Army? Not me. I didn't want to be there. Besides, it was against my principles to volunteer for anything. So I sat there and they came and took away one group after another. Then there were only five of us. And they stopped coming after volunteers. We sat there and waited. An hour passed, and I was becoming satisfied and smug. I'd outsmarted the Army again.

After all that time, this guy comes up to the five of us. He's wearing Spec5 patch and looks like he just got out of bed. Whereas the other honchos were all bossy and authoritarian sounding, this guy is meek and timid.At first I didn't even realize he had come for us. But he had, and he puts us in a truck, and off we go with him. He didn't even say what we were going to do, and even after we stopped by this latrine I still wasn't sure what it was that we were supposed to be do.

I started getting the idea when the Spec5 handed each one of us a pair of dirty, stinky, gloves. We all kind of stood around looking at each other with a sinking feeling in our hearts. "C'mon," said the Spec5. "You just pull 'em out and I'll burn it."

I realize that during the entire history of mankind before flush toilets, in poor countries today and in armies throughout history, this problem had to be dealt with. But that doesn't make it OK when it happens to you. We all sort of looked at each other and then looked at our feet. This is what it really means to be shit on. Finally someone started to move and we all sheepishly went around to the back of the latrine and started to do our duty.

What we had to do was pull out these pots which were about one third of a 55-gallon drum placed strategically under all the toilet seats. I supposed that since THE VETERAN is a newspaper with taste I need not go into detail about exactly how the contents of the pots looked and smelled. Suffice it to say, my stomach felt the same way it does the morning after drinking nine or ten cans of cheap beer.

When our job was done, we sat on a nearby log and gloomily watched the Spec5 pour gasoline into the pots and light them. Now a new smell reached our noses and gave our stomaches another turn. We sat there until the fires were out. When the pots had cooled and we had put them back in place and we were done and felt slightly human, I asked the Spec5 how often he had to do this.

"Every day."

Thinking that maybe this was just temporary, I asked how long he had been doing this.

He gave me his own version of the thousand-yard stare and softly said, "Eight months."

The Spec 5's short-time calendar had 117 days left—117 days of burning shit. He said he was used to it. I guess he was. I supposed he's somewhere in the World now with a wife and kids. What does he say when his kids get to be twelve or thirteen and find out about Vietnam and ask, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" Well, I guess we all did our part for freedom and democracy.

I know you've heard about TV preacher Oral Roberts announcing that God told him time was running out on his life unless his followers coughed up $8 million by March 31st. I think he needed the money for scholarships at his medical school or something.

Anyway, this got me to thinking. The VVAW National Office is always crying about shortage of money. Sometimes it's tough to make ends meet. And they always have to beg the chapters to send in their dues and donations. So I had a little talk with God, and She agreed. Something drastic needs to be done, and we liked what good ol' Oral was doing.

So if all of you don't pay your dues by September 1st, something drastic is going to happen to someone. I thought I'd volunteer. I think I'll vote Barry Romo—well after all, it should be a National Officer. If you all don't pay your dues by 1 September, God will call Barry to the Great Beer Hall in the Sky. If this seems like too drastic a measure for everyone, maybe I could ask for a lighter sacrifice. Maybe god could strike Bill Davis with anorexia instead.

Okay, Kids, time for your civics quiz for this month. This will be a two-part quiz. The first question is multiple choice.

Ronald Reagan is:

1. A Donald Regan puppet.
2. Senile
3. An Ed Meese puppet.
4. Not senile, just plain dumb.
5. A CIA puppet.
6. The original model for "smile" buttons.
7. Nancy's puppet.
8. A General Electric life-size wind-up doll.
9. A NSC puppet.
10. Dead—that's really an alien in the White House.
11. A Howard Baker puppet.
12. All of the above.

Part 2. Essay. Answer this question: When and why didn't I know what they told me when they shouldn't have told me but didn't tell me because I'm not supposed to really know because I don't understand this stuff in reality I had my fingers crossed behind my back so it doesn't count and I'm not really a security risk because they never told me in the first place and I can't leak it to the press because they knew I never knew what Ollie told me?

Life must be so hard for those in the White House. Ask former chief of staff Donald Regan. A While back, referring to Ronnie Reagan's many foul-ups, he confessed, "Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follows a parade down Main Street cleaning up." Hey, I think I met this guy before. Back in Cam Ranh Bay. He said he only had 117 days left, but really, he's still on duty.

What else do the U.S. and Iran have in common besides dealing arms? One thing is that have a similar attitude towards women, at least some powerful men in the respective governments do. Former White House Chief of Staff and chief powerbroker Donald Regan has put his shovel down long enough to put his foot in his mouth a couple of times.

During the arms talks Regan said that women would be more interested in things like what Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev were wearing rather than caring if their husbands were going to destroy the world. Then, another time he said that we couldn't impose sanctions against South Africa because it is a source of diamonds and American women would never give up their diamonds.

He sounds like more sophisticated version of Iranian Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, the guy on the other end of the arms deal. Rafsanjani recently declared that Iran should be using force to make sure women are covered from head to toe. His reason was that this was due to women having smaller brains, which meant that they had to play a different role in society. What this had to do with intellectual capacity and why their role meant that they should be covered up wasn't exactly clear. But then, nothing much coming out of Iran seems to be clear. Sometimes it's money for contra aid and then sometimes it's work for Don Regan's shovel.

Rafsanjani also made the comment that Western countries were in a mess because they had given more and more liberty to women. Maybe here he was referring to Nancy Reagan because she seems to have played a role in ousting his fellow bullshitter, Donald Regan. But he does have a point: Nancy Reagan would be more pleasant if she were covered head to toe.

GRENADE OF THE MONTH

As long as we're talking about religious nuts like Oral Roberts and Rafsanjani, why don't we give the Grenade of the Month to the Reverend Jerry Falwell for a sermon he gave about the unemployed last July 4th. Falwell said, "we feed them and encourage their laziness and their worthlessness, and you can't give them a job because they can make more money on unemployment."

He hasn't got his facts right since, thanks to his buddy Nancy's husband, most unemployed don't even get compensation or welfare. Anyway, Jerry later compared the unemployed to his dogs, saying: "One of the members of the church, a wealth business man gave me two Irish Setters. He told me what kind of meat they needed and where I could buy it and so on. When he left I went to the store and got me a 50-pound bag of Purina and I put it out for them and sure enough, they would not eat it. But four days later, they did. And if we get these bums hungry enough, they'll work."

I guess his religion and his God are against feeding the poor. I suppose that's not as noble as standing in front of a TV camera and begging for more money like Falwell or threatening to die like Oral Roberts. But then again, most of us are not among the chosen few like Jerry Falwell.