EARLY BOOT CAMP 1955
My childhood taught me how to survive Vietnam. Other kids played basketball, baseball. I played soldier — urban warfare, four or five friends against an invisible enemy.
Games ran four hours. Rain or shine. A “major offensive” meant bunkers, trenches, every day after school until it was done. New tactics. Reach the objective. Don’t get killed. Weapons: cap guns, cap pistols. Harmless.
Off the battlefield, we built weapons that weren’t. Homemade gunpowder — saltpeter from the drugstore, charcoal from the hardware store, sulfur from wherever. Then bombs. Then a 60mm mortar, welded from steel tubing. No live projectiles. Timed fuses so we could run. We never stood closer than fifty feet. Accidents happened anyway.
By our late teens, bigger bombs, bigger craters. Loud enough that the police started fielding earthquake calls.
We quit the day a teammate lost two fingers and took shrapnel to the chest. Static electricity, one pipe bomb. The blast blew the garage door off its tracks and took every window with it. After that: tactics, fortifications, nothing that exploded. Five years of homemade weapons and we never once talked about hurting anyone. We were warriors chasing adventure — training, we told ourselves, to defend our country.
Bad weather sharpened the games. Winter Saturdays, soaked or frozen, finding out what real soldiers endured. One rule: frostbite ended the game. No arguments.
Our bunkers were railroad ties, facing the Atlantic, 120-degree fields of fire, dune grass on top for cover.
Our masterpiece: a thirty-foot Z-shaped trench, hidden so well we sometimes lost our own entrance. I lit a small fire to clear the weeds around it. The wind turned. Inferno.
We were surrounded. Fought the fire, lost, dove into our own trench for shelter. Thirty-foot flames in minutes. A neighbor called it in. Three fire companies, over an hour to kill it.
While the lot still smoldered, police and firefighters lined up hunting for bodies. Ours. We almost made it. Then my best friend’s little brother started crying, and the trap door came open.
All I thought about was what my father would do to me. We’d burned a lot to the ground and nearly took two houses with it.
The fort survived. We shouldn’t have. Firefighters swore the fire would have sucked every molecule of oxygen out of that tunnel. Wrong. Tight roof, deep dirt, and we never gasped for air once. Five more minutes and I’m not writing this.
I never rushed an unknown threat again.
Nui Ba Den, years later. One man, a flank around the helicopter pad. All the gunfire was coming from bunkers 6 and 7. The direct route across the pad was faster. It was also suicide — the Viet Cong were waiting for it.
Low and slow. Flares froze us in place. Darkness got us moving again. The firefight roared, bullets ricocheted off rock, and every echo lied about where the enemy was.
Ten to fifteen feet a minute. Watching. Listening. Waiting for the ambush — the same patience I learned on a beach, fifteen years and a war away.
We flanked the sappers. Killed at least three. Drove the rest outside the wire. Sealed the breach. Nui Ba Den was secure again.
I was ten years old, training for a war I didn’t know was coming.