Scope 2006 - SIU School of Medicine

Tibiletti’s Boots
34
Wesley G. Robinson-McNeese, M.D.
Office of the Dean
I don’t remember the exact day Tibiletti got the boots. He ran into the barracks
that day and told a story of a wild send-off given to this Special Forces sergeant.
Tibiletti said the sarge threw the boots from the back of a cargo plane as it lifted off the
runway. The boots were genuine — not the ordinary, puke-green, canvass-tops worn by
most G.I.s in Vietnam, but leather with a zipper up the middle and just a hint of the
former shine. These were flight boots for sure!
“Damn!” Tibiletti, the newest of the new in Vietnam had had a pair of
jump-boots literally fall into his possession from the sky. I was as envious as hell.
Already three months into Vietnam, I had not so much as a shoestring handed down to
me by a vet, and here, Tibiletti had a pair of Special Forces jump-boots. “Damn!”
Seemingly every Vietnam soldier either had in his possession, or was actively
seeking, some special lucky piece. These charms were acquired by design mostly, but
these boots came to Tibiletti by blind luck — so unlike what typically befell him.
Tibiletti, a past, basic training spastic, was as likely to trip over a pair of boots
as to wear them. Nevertheless, he had the boots and for the next weeks would keep
them with him constantly, either on his feet, or under his bunk.
At DaNang it was customary to send off a buddy with an all-night beer bash.
The Bien Hoa-bound C-141s would drone into DaNang around 0500 hours and by that
time we would be a drunken rabble. The whole event served as group anesthesia from
the pain of being left behind. A fire would have been started, and the soldier who was
leaving would have burned nearly everything except the clothes on his back, the contraband
that he intended to slip through customs, and that special piece of gear that would
be left behind for some lucky soldier.
It was an accepted, howbeit asinine ritual that showed more bravado than
brains. If Charlie had chosen that hour to lob a few 125-millimeter shells onto the base,
our fire would have been like a homing beacon guiding the rockets in. But when a
buddy had done his time in Vietnam and was headed back to the States in something
other than a box, his good fortune was a special event, and we celebrated. With a mixture
of relief and suppressed resentment, his barracks-mates ushered him through his
final day in ’Nam in the spirit of teammates carrying a star player on their shoulders. A
bonfire and beer seemed little enough to acknowledge the occasion. And to end the
occasion with a special piece of gear being left behind by a departing vet, that made it
SCOPE 2006
even more worthwhile. The thinking was that if it had been lucky for him, it just might
be lucky for you. Still, guys who were leaving typically passed on their treasures to some
special buddy who had been in Vietnam with them for a while. My God, Tibiletti was
just a newk! He had only been there two weeks.
I had first met Tibiletti in basic training. He was from California, Los
Angeles, I think, but he didn’t look or act like the proverbial, sun worshipping,
Californian. Rotund and loping, he was constantly poking his glasses back atop his nose
as he moved awkwardly through one basic training exercise after another. His full name
was Raymond Charles Tibiletti. His father was some big shot in radio. I’m sure that
somewhere along the line one of the family’s lawyers had goofed and Tibiletti had been
issued induction papers. He quickly became the drill instructor’s whipping boy. Believe
me, he was nobody’s soldier back then, just a slow, uncoordinated, mild-mannered guy
who had gotten drafted. It was because of this, or maybe it was in spite of this, that I
befriended him.
Tibiletti had the uncanny ability to tell which city you came from if you
would give him the call letters of a hometown radio station. I had tried to stump him
with “WESL,” but he shouted back without hesitation, “East St. Louis, Illinois.”
He had come to DaNang two months after I had arrived. He was assigned to
my squad and from that day on we shared a stall in the barracks and just about everything
else, except those newly acquired boots of his. It was on the night that Tibiletti
was teaching me the subtleties of Bob Dylan’s music that sappers got onto the base and
blew up an ammo barge. After we got off the floor, I noticed that Tibiletti was
clutching his boots and stroking them the way you would a talisman.
On that early morning when rockets slammed into the barracks area killing
seven guys, everyone had run for the bunkers with little thought of anything else but
getting there. Tibiletti, on the other hand, stopped long enough to get his boots.
Huddled in the darkness of the bunker, we talked in whispers of the dead outside. No
one had seen them die, but we had heard the unmistakable sounds — the whistle of the
falling shell, the slightly muffled explosion that signaled the splattering of bunks and
flesh. In the darkness Tibiletti did not talk, but just held onto his boots.
“Direct hit,” the first-shirt had said. The first-shirt knew the sound all too
well.
As the days went on, Tibiletti took to spit-shining the boots and calling attention
to them during conversations. “These babies are gonna take me home,” he would
say, “They’re going to take me home!”
Hell, maybe he knew what he was talking about, I thought. After all, he had
begun to act more like a soldier than ever before. On patrols he was as cool as anyone
and his reaction time was getting faster. I had given up believing in charms, but
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