Trees, Shells and Baked Fish

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by Don Gourley

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Larry recently mentioned that there were some strange flora and fauna in Viet Nam and that reminded me of something that happened at Tam Ky.

We got some replacements in my platoon and I decided to teach them how to blow down a tree. I was sort of playing the role but anyway...with an audience of cherries watching, I went over to this tree about a foot in diameter at the edge of the perimeter, fixed a normal charge of C4 and fired it. The tree stood there quivering but was hardly damaged--couldn't believe it. No idea what kind of tree that was but you can imagine my embarrassment

I then went at it like Yosemite Sam, "&#@* sassafrass tree!" Piled it high with C4 and blew it to kingdom come. Class dismissed.

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Speaking of demo...John MacFarland and I were looking at a unit roster and he asked me if a certain attachment from the Arty was "The Demo Nut" who loved to blow things up. I said I thought that was the guy and then Mac recounted the story of when this "idiot" blew the 16 inch shells from the New Jersey that we found in the paddies up north around mid-March.

The first was a dud but the second was definitely not. The company was about 300m away when it went off with an enormous bang. Shell fragments tore through the tree tops/branches were falling down all around. Then the secondary stuff started falling. I was next to CPT Gibson and we heard it coming down; made kind of a whooping sound. Nowhere to run or hide so we just stood in place and this foot long, red hot piece of razor sharp steel went Ka-CHUNK into the ground 12" from Gibson's boot.

I had to tell Mac, "No, actually I was that idiot." I did it with the help of an E5 from the mortar FO section. One of the shells had somehow broken apart and was in water; it blew with a very small and disappointing bang. The other shell was intact, the fuse had been removed and a bit of Comp B had been scooped out. We packed the nose with C4 and I actually thought about blowing it with a Claymore wire from behind a nearby rice dike. I think they weighed in at 2100 pounds, 75% of it HE and fortunately I saw the light, used time fuze instead.

We walked back to the company and CPT Gibson had just asked me if we were we far enough away/I said yes, when off it went. He was pretty cool--just said something like, "2-6, the next #&%@* time you do this, make *$%&#@ sure we're farther away." I went back and looked at the crater it left in the paddy; you could have dropped a house into it. Fun, games and dumb-ass/lucky L-Ts.

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CPT Gibson was a Ranger (Enlisted Honor Graduate/many years on the Ranger Committee at Ft Benning) and proud of it. He often talked about Ranger School with Dan O and me and was always trying to convince us to go after we DEROSed. One day he asked us if we had ever eaten delicious "Baked Fish-Ranger Style" and when we said no he decided this was just the thing to get us to sign up.

Next morning bright and early we humped to a river(the spot where SGT Kelsen took the sunset photo of Charlie Co/2nd platoon guys going over the bridge which MO uses on the LZS photo page) and 6 started collecting all the demo in the company. Bad news, we had very little so he called back to Sally for an emergency resupply of 1lb TNT blocks, blasting caps and time fuze.

With that he had us all start throwing blocks of HE into the river and dead fish began to surface immediately. The problem was they were all tiny little things-minnows of some sort. The locals were overjoyed; the men jumped in boats, started dipping them up by the hat full. The women and kids were sitting along the banks grabbing the fish, squeezing them to force the insides out the back end and filling every pot they had--a year's supply of Nuoc Mam in the works.

Meanwhile, 6 was getting desparate; not a decent sized fish had come up yet. We used the whole case and finally up came this sorry, nasty looking thing, about a foot long. He wrapped it in a banana leaf and we all humped back to our original location. There he took a big wad of mud from a swamp and wrapped it all around this critter, built a fire and put the whole thing in the coals.

An hour or so later he took this hard-baked block of mud out and broke it open. Inside was a nasty gray mess; you could barely tell the fish from the mud--"Baked Fish--Ranger Style." I didn't have any and I don't think Dan O did either, although I believe 6 convinced Tex and a few others to try it. He swore it was fine stuff but I noticed we didn't go on any more fishing trips.

End



Don Gourley
2-6, C/1/501