one from my ongoing series not found in my book: LIGHTER MOMENTS IN THE VIETNAM WAR IT’S A CHIMP, NOT CHARLIE Animal lovers may not appreciate this story, but it happened. On one hot steamy day in the jungle as point man I led our platoon through the thick foliage and came across a group of human-like chimps walking upright and gathered around each other like VC’s doing a map check and that’s what we thought they were at first. We had grown used to dangerous critters like tigers, elephants, and long tail monkeys that took shots at us with tail-end ammunition, and some very big snakes. Not to mention an endless stream of biting insects like mosquitoes, scorpions, lizards, large centipedes, and warrior ants that attack a guy with pinching jaws that felt like a thousand bee stings, just to name a few. But this scene was different. The platoon had been “beating the bush” for days, trekking slowly on after the Vietcong, expecting to run into a gunfight at any moment. Leading on in one column, my sweat towel being drenched with perspiration, we spilled out onto a narrow trail that was overgrown with foliage and barely identifiable, when I saw a group of men in a clearing fifty or sixty meters away gathered together in what appeared to be a map check conference so I dropped for action. And we couldn’t believe our good luck: we caught Charlie in the open bunched up; we thought. My buddies crawled forward to me with all eyes glued on what we thought was an opportunity to wipeout a VC squad in black pajamas, and can’t explain why no one realized they weren’t the enemy after starring at them awhile, because all we saw at the moment was catching Charlie with his coolie hats off. Those gibbons or chimps stood upright like men, not hunched over on all fours like apes. And only after I fired a burst of 5.56 rounds into the group, killing three or four, causing the others to scatter into the tree, did we realize what they were. Now, the humor in this lies in experienced GI’s being made a monkey of by a bunch of guerillas. Sorry about that!
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 21:12:20 +0000
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