BTW Thats about 4 minutes of full auto for the M60 “The Pig”. Which is why everyone except the Platoon Leader, his RTO and the Medic carried ammo for this beast. Grumpy (Don’t ask me on how I know about this)
Category: Real men
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On this day in U.S. Army SF history………06 August 1967, eight Green Berets held off 4,000 North Vietnamese Army soldiers in a hamlet and box canyon known as Tong Le Chong near the Cambodian/Vietnamese border, with help from air support.
This battle occurred over two days, responding to the urgent call for help, the pilot, Kenneth P. Miles, responded by flying his F-100 into that box canyon in the dark of night, below 500 feet, firing at the North Vietnamese Army soldiers. When he ran out of bombs and bullets, he returned to his base in Thailand, reloaded and returned for a second time. The NVA finally retreated, leaving behind 2,000 dead and/or injured. At the time, this was the largest battle in South Vietnam.
The US administration did not want the public to know that there were Green Berets working with South Vietnamese villagers in this area, so the incident was never fully reported. Three Bronze Stars were awarded to the Green Beret soldiers on the ground, and a Silver Star to Pilot Commander Kenneth P. Miles, who attained the rank of Major General later in his service career.
—Mud
P.S. The photo is a representation of the team.
This is my friend Adolf, the VW Golf that recently took me and my wife all over the UK. Our relationship (with Adolf, not my wife) was strained.
I spent eight years on active duty as an Army officer, which involved a great deal of travel. Truth be known, all that time away from home was the biggest reason Uncle Sam and I amicably parted company. I realized I could either be an Army helicopter pilot or I could be a husband and father, but I couldn’t be both. I don’t regret the decision.
Most of those trips were to unpleasant places. Once there, the transportation I used typically sported rotors, tracks, and/or belt-fed automatic weapons. However, some of that was actually to places where normal people live, which often involved rental cars.
Rental Car Dogma
Something I learned as a young soldier was that rental cars are always the fastest cars on the highway, and they will go anywhere. If the Army rents it for you and it’s not in your name, then parking tickets are not real, either. The government trusted us with $30-million combat aircraft. Surely, we could be responsible with a low-mileage Ford Fungus. Um, nope …
In my defense, we never actually lost or destroyed one of them. I have pulled up to a hotel in a rental car with the trunk packed full of machine guns, but typically, no one was the wiser. If those parking tickets actually accrue interest over time, then I’ll blame it on those horrible Warrant Officers. They always were a bad influence.
The European Connection
I’ve been to the UK a few times, technically for work. What you’re currently reading is part of that. At least, that’s what I’m telling the IRS. Thanks for that, by the way.
Several years ago, I rented a nifty little Vauxhall. Vauxhall is a British car company headquartered in Chilton, Bedfordshire. My little Vauxhall was the tiniest car they made. It had a standard transmission and a most remarkable personality.
Modern automobiles talk to you. I once read that a new-production car contains between 2,500 and 3,500 microchips. For an American driving in the UK on the wrong side of the road with weird street signs and ubiquitous sheep cluttering up the motorways, audible navigation aids are a lifesaver.
All the major machines in the Dabbs family get their own names, and that extends to rental cars. We named our little Vauxhall Victoria.
Victoria was the perfect woman. She was smart, patient, forgiving, and more than a wee bit sultry. She sounded like a Bond girl. Had I not been traveling with my wife, I might have developed an undue attachment to Victoria. That’s just as well. There’s no way she would have fit in my carry-on bag for the trip back home.
During this most recent trip, the rental car company issued us a spanking new VW Golf. Unlike Victoria, this Golf and I did not get along well. I named him Adolf.
This really is a typical two-way road in the UK. They all seemed to have been made by the Romans and just weren’t built to accommodate automobiles.
Adolf’s God Complex
Adolf took his job way too seriously. He was a beautiful little four-door blue car with all the bells and whistles, and I mean all of them. When I picked him up, the radio was on. Fifteen minutes of frustration later, I Googled, “How do I turn off the radio on a 2024 VW Golf?” The first hit that came up was titled, “How do I turn this freaking radio off!?!” Pro tip: You swipe left over the power button, like that was somehow obvious. It was an ignominious start to our subsequently rocky relationship.
Adolf was inexplicably designed to help me drive. He would make helpful little control inputs into the steering wheel if he didn’t like the way I was doing it. He would chime and tell me to “Drive in the center of the road” if he felt I was not doing so. One time, no kidding, he flashed a warning across the dash that said, “Take your foot off of the accelerator!” Really?
I am not the kind of guy who shouts at traffic. Such a lack of emotional control always seemed like a reflection of poor character. However, this is a transcript of an actual conversation between Adolf and me early on in our relationship: “Adolf, dude, seriously? One of us needs to be the car, and the other needs to be the driver. You get to pick which one you want to be, but you’ll need to stick with it, brother. If you keep screwing with me while I’m driving, we’re both going to get hurt.”
It’s Not Entirely Adolf’s Fault
England is a lovely place. Outside of London, the place is spotlessly clean, and the people are diagnosably polite. That’s a good thing. Otherwise, the ghastly roads would kill them all.
The whole country is cursed with 3,000 years worth of history. That means all the roads, and I do mean all of them, were designed for horses. They are now ridiculously narrow and irrevocably encompassed in tall stone hedges. No kidding, lots of two-way roads in the UK are narrow enough for me to reach out and touch both sides with my outstretched arms.
If you meet an oncoming car, one of you has to stop and back up until you reach a lay-by where you can pull aside. If we Americans suddenly all found ourselves driving in England, half of us would be immolated in fiery car crashes in a week. The other half would succumb to unfettered road rage.
Ruminations
Don’t get me started on parking. There are rumored to be about three free parking spaces in the entire country, but I never could find them. Everything else has a handy electronic machine where you touch a credit card, get a little printout, and post it on your dashboard. They call it “Pay and Display.”
However, pay little heed to any of those complaints. The UK is one of the coolest places I have ever been. The history runs unimaginably deep, and my wife loves it there. Perhaps the next time we can go back, I’ll even find hot little Miss Victoria waiting for us in the car park.
Have you ever been casually pickin’ through random stuff at a junkyard, a garage sale or somethin’, and run across a busted axe handle or maybe an old cracked ’03-A3 stock? And you picked it up, gave it a couple of swings, thumped it into your palm and sorta semi-consciously thought, “Huh. Good club. Cut off here, couple passes with a draw knife there. Club. Good.” Have you? That could be a clue.
If you went ahead and bought it, kinda self-consciously, having no rational need for such a thing, and after a few licks to smooth it out, it wound up sittin’ in a strategic spot for extemporaneous thumpin’s—despite all your locks, alarms and guns which make for a more “civilized” defense—that’s a solid clue.
If you’ve ever stepped out on the back porch and sucked in a snootful of Somebody’s-Burnin’-BEEF! on the breeze and your brain did an instant data-dump, leaving you head-swiveling, salivating, snuffling deeply, your only sentient thought being “Meat. Meat! Burnt meat! Meat good!”
If you’ve been out in public with your mate and offspring, and other critters, two-legged or four, came around ’em, and for no discernible reason your brow furrowed, your shoulders tightened, your nostrils flared and your fists bunched up as you tensed to beat whomever-whatever into the deck like a pier piling if they made any wrong move—even one you couldn’t see, but you’d sense—that’s another clue.
If exposed to anything or anyone “sophisticated” or “progressive,” your lip curls reflexively and a rumbling snarl surprises you when you realize it’s coming from you, that too is a clue. It’s called “showing your gorilla-face.” You may already do it, unconsciously. Just ask your mate.
Ever chip a fingernail at the workbench and without even thinkin’ about it, grabbed a flat bastard file, dressed your talons, and before you knew it your boots were off and you were deeply engrossed in callous removal when your mate stepped in and did an open-mouthed double-take?
If most of your smiling and laughing is internal, done with a calm, placid face, but when you laugh out loud, you show every tooth in your head, frighten the timid, and set off car alarms? ’Nother clue.
If you firmly believe that Big Evils only exist in the world because nobody grabbed ’em by the ankles when they were Little Evils and swung ’em repeatedly against a tree trunk, well then…
Yeah, you could be a member of the Brotherhood of Shaved Apes and not even know it.
The Brotherhood
“Shaved Ape” sounds like a pejorative, but it ain’t. And to be clear, we’re not talking about chimps, but gorillas. Think about it. Gorillas may appear more primitive and brutish than chimpanzees, but aside from their sheer size, consider their behaviors. Their loyalties are solid, treatment of their young is firm but gentle, their desires simple: Don’t mess with them, their homes or their families and they’ll probably leave you alone. Push them beyond their considerable patience, and they’ll treat you to a RUD—a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly—and then calmly go back about their business.
Gorillas are commonly thought to be less intelligent than chimps, mainly because they refuse to play pointless games with pushy, silly humans. I won’t either. Ringin’ any bells for you?
Chimps are highly social and viciously political. They form temporary alliances, betray and backstab, rob, rape and murder. You’ll see chimps ridin’ bikes wearing clown suits, bellboy costumes, even French maid outfits, to get attention and bananas. Ever seen a full-grown, silverback gorilla in a clown suit beggin’ for bananas? No. Know why? Because gorillas won’t put up with it. They have dignity. And they prefer to get their own bananas.
There are no hard criteria for membership in the brotherhood. If you nodded your lumpy head and rumbled assent at any of the lines above, you’re probably qualified.
Useful Assets
Shaved apes need family members like Uncle John. If there’s a “there,” he’s been there, prob’ly packin’ a rifle. Steeped in pain, he laughs; stiff with scars like Egyptian hieroglyphics, there’s a story for every one of ’em, and he tells them with a smile. He’s the one who taught me that pain and injuries are only, “The price of an interesting life.”
“You didn’t have to get crippled just ’cause you idolize me, dummy,” he says. “And you’ll never be as handsome as me.” He’s ugly. He loves me.
After the move to our new place, he had to get a new primary care physician. I dropped him off, ran an errand and pulled up just as he came out. He stopped and commenced seriously shaking. I thought he might be having a seizure, but he was laughing his butt off.
“My new doc,” he chuckled, “Kid’s about 15 and looks like Doogie Howser, M.D. I told him, and he asked, Who’s that?” More laughter.
“Then he says I hafta give up tobacco, coffee, bourbon, beer, red meat, bacon and…” Another fit of shakin’ and whoopin’. I asked “Anything else?”
“I don’t know!” he roared, “I was laughin’ so hard I couldn’t hear him! Oh, it was so cute! He got all frowny and said You’d live longer. I told him no, it would only seem longer, or, like dying and goin’ to hell, but like Hell Lite.” He lit his pipe and asked, “Got time for a dark beer and a buffalo-burger?”
Neo-gorillas need friends like Pete C. On a recent Friday I found a great 1-day deal on lumber and joist plates we needed for our new site. It was 150 miles north and across the border into New Mexico. Pete was closer, on the road coming south.
But he had to scoot straight over, get there before 1800, seal the deal with this guy Michaels and snatch the keys to the 5-ton truck the load was on for two, rent-free days. We were both driving, both on cell phones, and the signal was terrible. We kept yelling “Say again?” to each other, but when Pete finally shouted Roger that, I thought we were clear. We weren’t.
I pulled up at the new site about 1800 and there was Pete, standing by his personal truck, rigged for combat. I sat there in slack-jawed bewilderment as he loaded his ruck, two carbines and the case containing his .50 BMG rifle into the crew cab. He hopped in, grinning.
“Didn’t know if we’d need Long Tom too, so I just brought him. Ready to rock, pal.” Never mind what I’d said. What he heard was like this:
“We’re gonna cross the border into Mexico, roll about five clicks in, snatch this SEAL named Michael and somebody named Joyce. Probably lots of shooting. Be here by 1800.” I explained. He just sighed, spit out the window and shook his head. “Got that wrong, huh?”
“Did you really think we were gonna do that?” I asked.
He cocked an eyebrow, punched my shoulder and said, “Look at me, Connor. Like, we never pulled a snatch job together before? We never rolled in hard, shot up some dump and rolled out, takin’ rounds and laughin’ like maniacs before, huh?” Yeah. I remembered. Got a little choked up. I think he read the question in my eyes. He punched me again, lightly.
“I roll with you, bro,” he said. “Anytime.”
I had a buncha big oranges and some beer in the cooler. We sat on the tailgate, ripped open the oranges and bit into ’em, juice running down our arms; flingin’ drops out into the dust. Time passed. We watched the sickle moon rise in paling light, not sayin’ much and remembering all. A songdog howled and we howled back. Just a coupla shaved apes.
Connor OUT
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