A Small Slice of a Soldier's Life

By David Engel

At this writing, I am sixty years old, and the realization that I'm not getting any younger has prompted me to put some things from my life down on paper. I am writing this for my daughter Gina and son Todd, who one day, may want to know what their father did during his younger years in the military. All of my stories take place from late 1968 to mid-1970. From basic training to AIT, but mostly my lovely tour of Vietnam in Southeast Asia. Some of my stories, I hope you will find funny, and some I know you will find tragic, and others may get me in trouble. I hope there is a statute of limitations on some of the things I have done or seen. As I share my stories with you, I will also be using some slang terms that were used in Vietnam. I've created a glossary in the back of the book for these terms. Please refer to them if needed. I hope I touch the heart of my daughter and son and show you a small slice of my reality of what Vietnam was really like from a soldier's point of view.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645443384

Book preview

Preservice

When I graduated from high school, my intentions were to go to college for four years and study to be a marine biologist. I had four years of biology in high school and loved it. I had always done well in school, pretty much straight As, until my senior year when I discovered girls and partying. When I graduated from high school out in California, all my friends who’d I’d been partying with would all be going to the same college I was. This forced me to rethink my timeline for a higher education. I could see the party moving from high school to college, and I would not do well at all, no how, no way!

I thought, I know what I’ll do. The volunteer draft route for two years, get out, and go to college then. All my friends would have moved on by then, and I would not have had the temptation to undo twelve years of good grades.

As fate would have it, I went to enlist, and they wouldn’t take me. Something about too much albumin in my urine (this indicates a problem with your kidney or bladder and could cause you to become weak on the battlefield). Okay, great.

I moved back to Minnesota, married my childhood sweetheart, and seven months later, got a draft notice. Meanwhile, my wife is seven months pregnant, and I think, No problem, right? Wrong! I go down to the draft board and pass the physical with flying colors. Not a damn thing I could do. Boy, you’re going to Vietnam was the only thing I heard.

I fought the army to let me stay stateside for at least two more months so I could see my daughter born, but they weren’t having any of that. When I left for Vietnam, I had a chip on my shoulder toward the army, the size of Texas, and I still get pissed off if I think about it too long.

Company graduation picture from basic training.

Breakfast in Bed

Ispent my basic training at Fort Lewis in Washington State. It is a huge military base, with a very large contingency of soldiers being trained there. Your 8-week basic training is called a cycle, with three thousand or more soldiers being trained at one time. These soldiers, once they graduated from basic, would then move on to another cycle of training called AIT (Advanced Individual Training)—all done at Fort Lewis. After AIT, you would then be given orders for where you would be posted, such as Germany, Vietnam, or stateside.

As you move out of one cycle, another full group of people move in, and the process starts all over again. Near the middle of your basic training, everyone in your unit has to take a physical efficiency test, consisting of five events. Each event had a maximum score of one hundred, so five hundred was a perfect score. All the rest of the army bases in the United States had the same rating system, and each knew what the other’s scores were. It seems that Fort Lewis had very few soldiers max the physical efficiency test in roughly eight cycles. The word came down from our company commander that anyone maxing the proficiency test would get breakfast in bed served to them by the base commander and the rest of that day off. Most of us thought that even if we did max it, Breakfast in bed? Yeah,