Nam Sense Read Free

from the waist down. Anyone walking past could easily see who was sitting on the throne. The building sat on a cement slab. Inside was a long wooden bench with a row of ten toilet seats and no privacy partitions. Underneath each seat was a 25-gallon barrel shit-tub in which sloshed about varying amounts of human waste.
    I was selected to supervise a five-man team tasked with exchanging the full barrels with empty ones. Tubs with only a small amount were dumped into full ones and then replaced under the seats for use while the cleaning was going on. As we played musical chairs with the barrels, a GI came in and defecated on the floor.
    “Hey!” I yelled at him. “Can’t you see that there’s no tub underneath you? You just shit on the floor!”
    He casually looked at me saying, “I never check to see where my turd is going to land. Do you?”
    Who would argue with that logic? After he finished, one of my helpers shoveled up the mess and tossed it into a tub we had already pulled out.
    The next step was to place the full barrels in a row and saturate them with diesel fuel. Then we lit them on fire, stirring each one until all the contents were consumed. The stench was unbelievable. Carrying tubs of shit was bad enough, but burning it was nearly too much.
    If anyone had to urinate, they could not use the latrine. Only solids were allowed there. The urine made the tubs too heavy to pick up, and there was always the chance of getting splashed. Besides, piss doesn’t burn very well. The only place to urinate was in a piss-tube, an exposed six-inch diameter pipe stuck in the ground at an angle. The tubes are never cleaned or moved to a new location, so before long the surrounding soil becomes saturated and the tubes overflowed. When that happened, most guys just pissed on the ground next to it. The accumulation of urine became so rancid that piss-tubes could be easily found in the dark.
    Early the next day, many of us finished processing and were cleared to attend a full week of training at SERTS (Screaming Eagle Replacement Training School) in Bien Hoa, the giant US air base 200 miles west of Cam Ranh Bay. We flew to Bien Hoa in a C-130 Hercules transport, a four-engine turbo-prop aircraft used for airfreight or long distance troop deployment. The plane held forty of us, and we sat or spread out on the bare metal floor because there were no seats. There were no windows either, only two rows of six-inch glass portholes too dirty to see out of. The walls had no cover or insulation. Wires, pipes and framework were exposed. The four engines made such a racket that the only method of communication was by shouting or hand signals. It was like a flying garbage truck. The noise and vibration helped to keep me from thinking about what lay ahead. My immediate concern was whether the plane would get shot down or simply fall out of the sky. We landed without incident.
    The SERTS training was to prepare us for permanent assignment into the 101st Airborne Division. Our instruction included classes on the Vietnamese people and their culture, the war and the enemy, and weapons familiarization. At night, we pulled bunker line guard duty. During the day, we performed light physical activities to help get us accustomed to the climate. However, just like all my other stops, I still had to go through the paperwork routine. As I did, the clerk specialist reviewing my file asked a few questions.
    “Is there anything in your records you think should be removed?”
    “Sure,” I answered eagerly. “I’ve got an Article 15 for being AWOL (Absent Without Leave) from Fort Benning for two days. I was on a three-day pass, but I traveled too far and didn’t get back in time.”
    He flipped through the pages searching for the document.
    “Here it is,” he said, as he tore it out and crumpled it into a ball. “Is there anything else you don’t want in there?”
    “How can you do that?” I asked, somewhat surprised.
    “We like to give new guys a