During Christmas week of 1970, I was on TDY at a base right up against Laos. Udorn Royal Thai Air Base was the jumping off point for all the action to the north. Air America occupied a quarter of the base and there were more classified operations than you could count. Airplanes would land with Thai roundels on the side and take off with the Laotion Erawan (three-headed elephant). Six hours later they’d land, refuel and take off with no markings but the tail number never changed. Most of this traffic was on the AirAm  apron code named Waterpump.

Without going into detail, I was employed there that week. We had the run of the warehouse where all the small arms and liquor was and I was on very good terms with the manager. I got him lined out on calls back to the states on the MARS radio system and I got free booze and guns occasionally. I’d spotted a British SMG called a Sten and decided it was my kind of gun. Never mind that it was a 9mm. It had a silencer, looked cool and when you’re 19, that’s what counts.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten

That weekend I stayed with our aircraft crew chief  who had a bungalow off base and we got pretty slippery. The hootch  was right beside a lake about 10 klics from the base called Dalat Nambua. I remember it was off Soy Nam Khang where an ice manufacturing plant was. That’s Ice Water road if you don’t speak Lao. Soy means road or lane. Nam is water and khang is hard. Hard water is Lao for ice. This language was really easy to learn. I took the Sten and several clips with because you didn’t wander around without armament in the boonies. Rich brought the Jim Beam and the Papasan who rented the bungalows brought over the left-handed tobacco. After way too much of everything, we decided to take the Sten down to the lake and try skipping bullets like flat rocks. This idea was not thought out very well at all.  Unbeknownst to us, 4 Klics south on the other side of Dalat Nambua was a Thai military outpost. That’s where the skipped bullets were landing.

Within 30 minutes things got pretty exciting. First, several Hueys came over and rocketed the shoreline and jungle 800 meters to the west of us. 5 minutes later three T-28s rolled in and nuked it with napalm and BLU-26.  http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/submunitions.htm

We tiptoed back to the bungalow, stashed the guns and the booze and came back out acting like tourists. If anyone ever tells you liquor and guns don’t mix, don’t believe them. Trust me on this.

Rich got the poop report from Papasan a week later. A  small contingent of CTs (Communist Terrorists) had tried to infiltrate the Thai compound and were repulsed. The body count was 5 dead and 3 captured. I’m not sure if they were counting monkeys or humans. Papasan forbid us to shoot from his property ever again.

Christmas will somehow never be that exciting again. As for the body count, this explains how we killed everyone in North Vietnam twice and they still had enough to whip the ARVN after we left.