In truth, I was one of the luckier guys who had the misfortune to end up in this God-forsaken place at the age of nineteen.... (18 would have been worse.) I was with the Army Security Agency...though, at the time that was a SECRET...as a matter of fact everything about my unit was a SECRET. Our very existence was a SECRET...we couldn't even use our real name, they called us a Radio Research Field Station...like, who's going to believe a unit of soldiers would go to VietNam to do research on radios??? We could have done that back home at our local libraries, I should think.

(Ya'know, when I stop to think about it, our mission was exactly that. Radio Research. It was our job to pin-point (RESEARCH) the location of VC and NVA Units, each would ofcourse have it's (RADIOS) out in the "Boonies" and triangulate the co-ordinates with a another bunch of Radio Researchers in Thailand to fix their position...then send B-52's over from Clark AFB in the Phillipines to bomb them into vapor. We were quite sucessfull at this. I have Presidential Unit citations and Bronze Stars and all sorts of medals to prove it. This is where ...when I think of myself as a non-Grunt..I wonder who actually killed more people??? Us Techno-soldiers or the foot soldiers??? Its a non-valor, heavy guilt thing...I wonder about it alot. I think Desert Storm brings this point to light after all this time.)

I was lucky becuase I was with that crack unit of radio researchers and never had to go out and "beat the bush"...as they used to say. I was allowed (read:forced) to stay inside the cozy confines of a very large Combat Base about 40 miles south of the DMZ. EXCEPT...