Into Cambodia - Keith Nolan [211]
Lieutenant Camp, who had spent his first six months as a platoon leader with Alpha Company and Echo Recon, had spent the last five months dealing with the REMFs at battalion rear. He had come to view them with caution. Once, he told a cook in the mess tent to roll down his sleeves in accordance with battalion policy to prevent malaria from mosquito bites. The cook, who did his job in a marijuana haze, had not complied when Camp came back through the tent. Camp returned again, and finally told the cook he was giving him an Article 15, a small punishment for a small offense. The kid exited the tent with mumbled curses. Camp was continuing up the company road toward the TOC when the cook stormed back from his hootch with his Ml6. He stopped on the road behind Camp and chambered a round. Camp turned his head just as the first sergeant wrenched away the cook's M16.
As Lieutenant Camp and every other combat infantryman knew, those in the bush were a breed apart from those in the rear, not only because those in the rear usually had too much time on their hands–time they filled with marijuana, opium, and frustrated disobedience–but because the rear was a dumping ground for those who could not or would not function in the bush.
By then, The Revolution had also come to The Nam. There was an undercurrent of militancy in the battalion for which a young trooper named Michaels acted as a lightning rod.1 Michaels drove the Mechanical Mules that the battalion used in moving supplies and back-hauling the supply caches. He was also a natural-born leader, and wore Black Power bracelets on both wrists and wore, instead of a fatigue shirt, a slit green towel over his head like a poncho. One day at the battalion firebase, he went too far. Only Michaels knows what was in his head at that moment, but when a sergeant came to put him on a work detail, Michaels came to the door of his hootch and leveled the stub barrel of an M79 grenade launcher at him.
Lieutenant Colonel Ianni, who happened to be walking past, drew his .45 at thirty paces and shouted, “Drop the goddamn thing, Michaels !” Michaels turned the M79 on Ianni and shouted that the colonel didn't have the guts to kill him, to which Ianni shouted back, “I'm not going to kill you, Michaels, I'm going to blow your balls off. Drop it, Mi-chaels!”
Michaels lowered the grenade launcher and was shipped down to Long Binh for court-martial. Ianni, however, was not dealing with an individual, he was facing The Revolution. Someone pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade, wrapped a rubber band around it to hold the safety spoon in place, then placed it in a can of gasoline. This booby trap was slipped into the officers' latrine, but the battalion sergeant major discovered it before the gasoline dissolved the rubber band and allowed the grenade to explode.
Such incidents at the company and battalion level could be seen as the acts of only a handful of thugs and malcontents, and it wasn't until one stepped even farther away from the jungle that the racial situation exploded. At brigade and division rear, there were all-white hootches with Confederate flags and all-black hootches where the uniform of the day included black gloves and pistol belts over the shoulder and .45s tucked under the armpit. The smell of marijuana hung heavy over these hootches, and empty heroin vials could be seen under the pallets laid along the company streets. Any intruder, officer or enlisted, had to walk a gauntlet of silent, stony faces glowering from each hootch door. These were places to be avoided after dark. During the first eight months of his tour, Ianni had served in assignments at Quan Loi and Bien Hoa. One night one of his lieutenants made the mistake of taking a shortcut down a forested path between the Replacement Center and the Enlisted Mens' Club. He was bushwhacked and beaten so badly that he lost an eye. Enraged, Ianni walked