When he first came In Country Morgan thought hed entered the outer circle of hell. Walking from the air conditioned comfort of the large passenger jet into the stifling South East Asian heat was like walking into an overheated sauna. He smiled at the plastic smile pasted on the face of the Stewardess and followed the Marine in front of him down the steps to the Cattle Car, green semi buses parked on the tarmac. vehicles that had been stripped of seats and designed for crowding in Marines, like cattle, for transport. The Cattle Cars rumbled across the terrain taking the Marines to a transit area of Da Nang Air Base where theyd been kept busy on work details until they were assigned out fits. Morgan had looked at the Marines sunning themselves atop bunkers along the runway as the plane taxied, and thought that Vietnam couldnt have been THAT dangerous, something he would grow to learn was a premature conclusion, after joining his outfit, the 5th Marines, who were fighting some of the fiercest and costliest battles of the war. Hed long since lost any aversion to the heat, he noticed it, like one notices the hum of an air conditioner, it was there, it had an effect on his comfort, but it had receded from being initially noticed into something more akin to the status quo. In the area where he found himself now, a camp known by the imaginative Marine Corps name of Hill 51, he no longer thought of Vietnam as a mysterious place of palm trees, lush jungles and small foreign people who spoke a strange bird like language, but as a place divided between moments of intense boredom and discomfort and sudden bursts of unholy terror. On this day he was content to be bored, his platoon was in the rear
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 13:21:27 +0000
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