I Choked On My Cherrios

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I Choked on My Cheerios

I was breakfasting in the dining room of the Dante Hotel in Lugano,


Switzerland around 1985, maybe 1986, watching the new CNN international
satellite TV station, the brainstorm of the husband of Jane Fonda. I was
thrilled by this idea that news could be doled out all over the world at the
same time, to all peoples. The newscaster, starlet at that time was Bettina
Lüscher who always smiled but was genuinely modest.

As she rambled on with newsworthy tidbits, out of the blue, she quoted a
statistic about the Vietnam “War” that startled me, made me choke on my
Cheerios: “Of the 56,000 dead American soldiers and more than 100,000
wounded in Vietnam, the casualties of that aborted mission, 70% of them
were wounded or killed by mines. And 90% of the mines were defective
United States’ military ordnance.” Fake news? Fallacious news? Jane Fonda
propaganda? I was stunned.

I began to reflect on my own experiences in Vietnam where I had been


assigned as an artillery officer (Military Occupational Specialty: 1193;
forward observer). It was SOP (Standard Operational Procedure) that an
artillery officer would serve half his tour in the field with an infantry
company, and the other six months in various staff positions off the battle
field. (The New York Times: “15% of the troops in Vietnam served on the
battlefield, while the other 85% served as “base camp warriors.”)
A division BC was a mini city of about 20000-25000 soldiers serving as
mechanics, cooks, doctors, chaplains, and whatever else was necessary to
keep the war machine running. Being sent to the field was the fear of most
base camp warriors. Rebellious Afro-Americans were often punished by
being sent to the dreaded field, and a company could have been composed
of 25-30% Afro-Americans. I never once witnessed an incidence of racism
because on the battlefield we were fixed like glue together to get out alive
and back to the States. Whites made friends with blacks; blacks made
friends with whites. They even talked about getting together after the “war.”

When I finished my Officer Basic Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma’s United


States Artillery & Missile School, I was assigned to a missile and rocket
training battalion and lost all my skills at “bracketing” artillery projectiles
that had been fired on an enormous practice range filled with broken-down
cars and trucks. “Bracketing” is a skill that must be practiced, and before
serving with missiles and rockets, I had had practice distinguishing
distances in meters which is essential for a forward observer. So when I
received a telegram on 8 May 1967 ordering me to Vietnam, I at once asked
myself if there might be nuclear warheads in Vietnam. In an interview with
Colonel Anderson, the Fourth Division’s Artillery Commander in Pleiku, I
pointed this fact out to him trying to escape going to the battlefield. He
said: “Lieutenant you will be assigned as a forward observer.” “But,
colonel….” “Lieutenant, yours is not to question why, yours is but to do and
maybe die.” “Yes, sir!” Within an hour, I was helicoptered to a mountain top
near the Laotian-Cambodian borders, near the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where I
saw my unit digging foxholes in preparation for a night’s attack.
There was a big problem with duds, artillery projectiles that did not explode
on impact, and were later made into booby traps by the enemy. If I
remember correctly, the projectiles that I had ordered fired from the Fire
Direction Centers and the data then passed to the howitzers, never had
more than 10-15% duds. But, because we were “privileged” with being one
of the 15% in the field, care was taken to give us the best of the lot. But one
of the real problems was the fact that the projectiles were being mass-
produced both for the war effort and to make the Trumps and Buckleys
richer. There was an economic recession in 1962, and what better way can
you think of than war to get a nation out of an economic calamity. Even
hippies later would become yuppies when the lucre from the Vietnam
“War” was counted! And if you have read Marx’s Das Kapital you will have
come across his assertion that the faster a product is produced, the more
there is a chance that at least some of the products will be defective. The
more the merrier was the mantra in Vietnam. More ammunition
expenditures, more stock profit. Shoot, shoot, shoot!

Another problem for artillery rounds was still another complexity. The
weather. In the Central Highlands, one of the most infested mosquito areas
in the world—we had to take two salt tablets to keep from fainting in the
45°C heat—the muggy conditions, along with defective maps, threw off
target the projectiles making them land where they should not have without
exploding. At times 30-40% of the projectiles just did not detonate. More
booby traps for the enemy. More profit for Wall Street, no? Am I wrong?

After my field duty I was transferred to the Americal Division’s 11 th Infantry


Brigade two months after the My Lai massacre had taken place. At first, I
was the Artillery Battalion Liaison Officer for Lieutenant Colonel Albert L
Russell, Jr, Fourth Battalion, Third Infantry. Colonel Russell was a “brown
shoe,” old school soldier and a very friendly and kind man. I would fly with
him in the morning in his C&C ship in order to survey the area of
operations under his command. He was the kind of officer who would order
his helicopter pilots to fly below, against division SOP, to pick up a
wounded grunt and rush him to the nearest field hospital for first aid care.
The 11th Infantry Brigade’s AO was notoriously, heavily mined. When we
arrived at the field hospital facility, the medic, who had been caring for the
wounded soldier’s black and blue or maybe torn off leg, Colonel Russell,
and I exited the helicopter and let maintenance crews hose down the floor
of the helicopter clearing away the blood and gook from the wounded
grunt’s injury. Then back we went for more. Unfortunately, after a short time
under Lieutenant Colonel Russell’s command, I was promoted to Artillery
Brigade Liaison Officer for Colonel Oran K Henderson, one of the
protagonists of the My Lai massacre exposed by The New York Times’ valiant
investigating journalist Seymour Hersh.

* * *

Suppose you are a grunt assigned to the 11 th Infantry Brigade to search out
and destroy the enemy of the United States of America. You and your friend
from high school had decided to join the Army because you couldn’t find a
job near your own community. The Army recruiting sergeant told you your
chances of going to Vietnam were almost nil, and that you could be
stationed in Hawaii or Europe after your basic training. You call your friend,
your “buddy.” Your buddy and you are joined together such as Siamese
twins are. You are never separated from each other except for the five
meters soldiers in single file maneuvers are expected to do. You sleep
together in the same “hootch,” a tent made out of the two ponchos you
carry during the day.

All of a sudden, one of you steps on a mine. It blows at the leg of your
friend wounding him terribly. You scream for a medic. He comes, he injects
your buddy with morphine. He calls for a Medivac helicopter. ASAP! This is
an emergency! Over and out! There are not always Lieutenant Russell’s
available to beat the Medivac to the aid station.

Now what do your comrades and you think about this event that has already
taken place many times before? Do you, with your IQ in the low 80s
(Genetic Engineering), you who are basically amoral, think a My Lai reprisal
might convince the Vietnamese to stop planting mines forever? Vietnamese
people who are at the mercy of the Americans by day, and America’s enemy
by night?

Authored by Anthony St. John


29 August MMXXIII
Calenzano, Italy
www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior
anthony.st.john1944@gmail.com

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