In between our busy times in Southeast Asia revoking dinks’ subscriptions to Life, occasional macabre humor and happy hour camaraderie surfaced. Being up country brought out some interesting stories you rarely got to hear about from some of its colorful participants. Up at Long Tieng (LS 20A or simply Alternate), we had a constant parade of SOGs, SEALs and Green Berets coming and going (who always referred to themselves as Special Forces or simply SFs). 

The military began revamping in the early sixties to prepare to do battle with a new threat- one that was developing on the Indochinese peninsula. With the French’ loss of Laos and Viet Nam in 1954  over at Dien Bien Phu, it became evident we were going to get involved. What the hey? We had all manner of new toys to field test like F 4s, M 16s, Pigs and Thumpers. It was as inevitable as the eternal thirst for combat medals.

As I said, duty up country was full of excitement. It was a mini-Viet Nam complete with its own mini-Ho Chi Minh trail (Route 7 and 71). The Army Attaché had his hands full with three different flavors of operators. I think they had the added job of Point of Contact for the SEALs, too.  The Air Attaché just had to deal with Air America/USAF conflicts and all of us with fake USAID IDs. Both of their offices were in downtown Vientiane near the Embassy and might as well have been in another country. Being REMFs, they rarely made an appearance upcountry-if ever. It would mean having to leave their uniforms behind along with their Geneva Conventions Cards.

I think, in retrospect, we were considered to be alcoholics, ex-smoke jumpers and  generally uncivilized, uneducated bumpkins who were willing to do most anything for work if it paid well. The Air Force crossovers were the exception. We ‘volunteered’ after a fashion. But that’s another story and this is devoted to Thanksgiving.

A month after I got there we’d just exfiltrated a SOG team of six in a Porter who’d been doing some wild and crazy shit along the trail for a couple of weeks. To be truthful, I can’t remember their names and chances are they weren’t using their real ones anyway.  Remember, I flew with guys named Jack Smith and Ben(jamin) Franklin. Nobody thought it weird, either. So, we were sitting outside the barracks up at Alternate one evening drinking adult beverages and one of the gentleman started talking about their upcoming Thanksgiving plans- still several months off. Then he proceeded to share what he thought of as one of the funniest thanksgivings he’d had in years. Not scary or serious to him but funny. Seems he was on his second or third tour and thoroughly enjoyed this work.

Let’s call him Jim. Jim says he was working up in I Corps the day before Thanksgiving a year or so earlier and they were being extracted out of a recent surveillance mission which had turned into a milk run. They arrived back at the LZ for extraction, popped smoke and called in the birds. The  troops boarded Jim’s ship without incident and grabbed their D rings. Crew chief signaled clear right and Mr. Peter Pilot dittoed the left.  Since the gooks weren’t in active contact with the “extractees”, the PIC let Mr. Peter Pilot in the left seat get some experience doing a power takeoff and exiting the LZ with great celerity. Warrant Officer Last Class John Doe pulled a wee bit too much collective and tipped forward far more than he intended to. As any rotary wing pilot can tell you, when you trim 18 inches off your prop, it complicates getting airborne-especially with a full compliment of passengers.

Jim explained they hadn’t actually gained very much altitude when it became obvious this aerial adventure was going to be short-lived. Ahead of them was a rice paddy with a single farmer out there plowing along with his fairly young water buffalo. Contrary to popular belief, in order to truly autorotate a chopper down without too much loss of life, it’s essential to have sufficient altitude before beginning the procedure. Lacking anything less than 100 feet pretty much ensures a controlled crash landing at best. Jim says the A/C commander immediately grabbed for the cyclic and did a pretty decent job of flaring it before they pancaked…hard.

“A pretty decent job” consisted of all aboard surviving with some extremely sore buttocks muscles. The rice paddy was dry so it was a ‘hard’ landing. Jim described it as “the skids were splayed out flat to the ground like a football cheerleader doing the splits.”

A second later the rotary wing decapitated the water buffalo. The farmer had seen it coming and had the sense to beat feet outside the range of what passes for “wings” on a chopper. Knowing Thanksgiving dinner was going to consist of  vintage 1955 c rations of Turkey with fruit cocktail at best, or ham and beans with concrete crackers at worst, they quickly began to haggle with the farmer for a sizable chunk of the water buffalo for a barbeque.

Allow me to explain the significance of young-versus-old in water buffalo parlance. Most  folks worked their buffalo for 13 to 14 years until the critter was on his last legs. They’d drive it to market and sell it to the local butcher. Tough and chewy doesn’t begin to do justice to the subject. Imagine the texture of Oberto™ Beef jerky and then imagine that 14 year-old aged buffalo meat but still in its pre-cooked state. On the other hand, a young buffalo was probably fairly tender. I wouldn’t know. Nobody I knew had ever seen a young one slaughtered for its meat. The unwritten rule was it had to be ten years older than God before being ready to cook.

Apparently,  Jim says that between them, they scraped together enough Kip, Dong, Piasters or MPC to satisfy the farmer and they had the better part of a hind quarter skinned, cut and ready for egress when the Shithook arrived.  Back at camp, they managed to scare up a can or two of Donald Duck® Orange juice concentrate and some catsup and made a passable Jack Daniels-flavored BBQ sauce. A good time was had by all and there wasn’t so much as a buffalo drumstick left over.

Since my fifty year Form 10 NDA has expired and, I can now freely admit  I belong to the Togetherweneverserved™ Club, I have no reason to believe Jim was funning me. He did confide that several of their missions were to plant cases of 7.62X39 ammo up and down the Northerly portions of the HCM Trail salted with Semtex in some of the rounds to demoralize the Zipperheads. They also jerry-rigged the NVA’s remanufactured pineapple grenades with bamboo add-ons and new prussic acid fuses to go off when they pulled the ‘cork’ on top. Must have been a bummer on the ol’ esprit de corps gig.

And that’s all she wrote on that Thanksgiving story. No turkeys that year except for the peter pilot. I remember our 1971 T Day up at Tango 11. Momasan found a really big chicken to cook and serve us. She came in waving it around and showing it off. The only problem I saw (other than the fact that it wasn’t a turkey) was it was plucked and still very much alive. Given there weren’t any refrigerators thereabouts, the only way to keep meat fresh and prepared for serving was to prep it just shy of terminating it.  Prior to that, I didn’t have any semantic point of reference for the old phrase of “a chicken running around with its head cut off.” Boy howdy I sure do now.

SFs hamming it up for the camera.

As for giving thanks this year, I have 4 healthy grandchildren, none of my kids are in jail or have Fentanyl habits and none of us are dying of cancer or the like. America is healing slowly from her recent experiment in Democracy and some of us are praying for the return of cheap gas, low mortgage rates and affordable food prices. I wish to thank all of you who have entrusted me with your legal problems and look forward to their successful conclusions in the near future. I can’t believe my good luck in even being allowed to do Veterans Claims. It’s tantamount to the Blues Brothers movie where Elwood says to Jake “We’re on a Mission from God.”

May your hand grenades always go off after one thousand four and your turkeys always turn out tender. Amen.