TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

A Year in the Provinces
attempts to crack our lines in attempting to destroy us. By
this time in Vietnam I had been involved in a lot of
combat, large and small, but this night combined all I had
previously experienced into the space of six, seven, or
eight hours: actually, I thought then that that experience
would continue forever and that forever would most likely
become eternal.
In writing how does one describe the chaos and the
cacophony of combat in this modern age – scientifically
enhanced high explosives combined with the eardrumsplitting
quality of ounce‐weight pieces of metal breaking
the sound barrier at the rate of 600 times per minute?
What is the effect of an explosion of three pounds of
modern high explosive encased in a friable steel case when
those pounds are detonated on a granite boulder; when
they are detonated on a hard packed clay surface; when
they are detonated, perhaps, even on a steel helmet? How
does one convey the sound or the disorientation that the
sound effects on the much too slow mental‐comprehension
system of a human? That sound, as partially emblematic
of the totality of the combat experience, is more easily
remembered than described.
At least,if someone were jammed in the middle of a
steel dumpster into which fourteen tons of mixed
boulders, scrap metal and glass fragments suddenly was
dumped and then was shaken around again and again for
six straight hours, the din and bone‐rattling, ear‐numbing
and brain‐scrambling effect would have been a carbon
copy that night. And that didn’t even including the
screams, moans and lamentations of the wounded.
Sometime during that terrible night I prayed more
sincerely than ever I had in my previous 23 years of
habitual churchgoing. I prayed to God to get me through
that ordeal, and I even had the temerity to make a
deal with Him: if God would get me through that ordeal I
never again would use His name to curse. Mine was no
slight offer because up to that moment I had put myself in
the heavyweight arena of cursing, having been known to
shock even the most hardened gunnery sergeants with the
imaginative combinations of an unrivaled fund of coarse
invective. (I never could brook being second in anything
and cursing was no exception.)
I have both mostly kept and even expanded on my
promise for the past 48 years. Perfect? Hardly, but in my
regressions I never forget that I am breaking a promise and
I suffer for it.
I notice that Carl Fulford isn’t much given to
swearing, either.
***
(Bob Kirkpatrick
Charlottesville, Va.)
Serious digging didn’t tail­off till November of ‘67. The
nasty, brutish fighting that marked the Que­Son campaigns
finally paused, the 2 nd NVA Division was slow to answer the
bell. Hanoi sent them to a corner for a standing ten­count,
thinking they could regain their footing by Tet. They
couldn’t. They came out wobbling, tried to take a swing at
the Marines at DaNang and got mauled. They lost another
thousand men before staggering back to the mountains,
A‐31