Month: February 2023

If you lived in Neely Addition in Muncie Indiana, in the early 1960s, summer break from school was an amazing time.  After breakfast the back door of the house opened onto a day with numerous opportunities. As it was with many 12-year-olds, my bicycle was the transportation to many of these opportunities. It was also important to have a sidekick to share the discoveries of the day with. On our favorite TV shows, The Cisco Kid had Pancho, Roy Rogers had Pat Brady and of course The Lone Ranger never went anywhere without Tonto. My sidekick for those long lazy days of summer was Kurt. He lived over two streets and just up the alley on Rex Street. I was usually at his back door by 9:00 in the morning and we were off to explore the world. Our domain at this time was bordered roughly by New York Ave on the west. Beyond that lay the ever-increasing campus of Ball State Teachers College. In my parents mind I, at the ripe old age of 12, had no business mixing with the academic crowd just a few blocks away. Fortunately , between us and the institution of higher learning lay a foreboding territory known as Shick’s Woods.

Today Kurt and I decided to go off the grid. The pond in the middle of the woods was our destination. We had actually snuck into this area before to explore and had decided that Shick’s pond was destined to be conquered. Today we were going to build a raft to float across the pond.

We came equipped with a saw, a hand axe, a hammer, some rope and a few nails.  We both had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and were flush with the excitement of accomplishing the same sort of feat. Never mind the “No Trespassing ” signs, we were on a mission. In our youthful exuberance it did not occur to us that the trees that we were going to chop down didn’t belong to us and we certainly did not have permission to be in the woods, let alone on the pond.

After the first 45 minutes, the first tree was felled and the realization that this was a bigger project than we had planned had begun to creep into our minds. We needed to discuss our plan in greater detail. When in these types of situations in the past, a trip to Muphy’s Super Market on Wheeling Avenue to acquire a couple of bottles of RC Cola seemed to help rejuvenate our thinking process. Off we pedaled to our destination. Upon purchasing our Colas, our customary habit was to find some shade at the back of the store near the loading dock. In this location we had solved some of the most difficult problems that faced the world in which we lived. Today was no different. As soon as we sat down, we both saw the solution to our delima. Right there in front of us was a pile of wooden shipping pallets. The wood was already cut in the approximate size we needed and in the matter of just a few minutes we could remove the nails and fashion our raft without the laborious task of cutting down a bunch of trees. The first problem was that our hammer was back at Shick’s Woods. Back we pedaled to retrieve our tools, and on the way, we discussed our revised plan. We would use our hank of rope to measure the length of our newly designed watercraft, but we were still going to need a couple of logs to make it float. We also soon realized that those wooden pallets would probably not be in that location long. We spent most of the rest of the day acquiring the necessary makings for our raft.

After creating the proper inventory of wood, we now had to solve the transportation issue. Kurt and I were both experienced newspaper delivery boys and accustomed to balancing several hundred newspapers on our bikes while making deliveries. So up on the handle bars the wood was balanced and off to the pond we headed. After a couple of minor mishaps with a few slats slipping off, we arrived at the entrance to the woods. Also arriving at approximately the same time was my suppertime. Supper was served at 5:30 on the dot at my house and being late was not an option. I had to head home. Kurt had no such curfew but was ready to call it a day as well. We stacked the disassembled pallets at the edge of the water confident that we would be sailing around the pond by noon the next day.

Armed with another hammer and a lot more nails, we arrived back at Shick’s Woods the next morning. Excitement was in the air. I have always done my best thinking at night, while sleeping, and had come up with the idea that we needed a pole to maneuver our raft once we were seaworthy.  So, in the interest of expediency I had disassembled our leaf rake and brought the handle along. We felled another tree and laid out our design for the new raft on the ground. This was going to be easier than I thought.  We would be able to have our lunch aboard our raft while floating around the pond. We always came equipped with a couple of sandwiches and a package of Hostess Twinkies or Cupcakes for our mid-day nourishment.

With the logs positioned properly to ensure the correct buoyance and with the pallet slats nailed on to create the floor, we were ready to see if she would float. Into the water it went. So far so good, it stayed on top of the water. It was decided that we would both jump onboard at the same time and simultaneously push off from the bank to get a good launch. On the count of three we grabbed our sandwich bags and pushed off. Our momentum was enough to get us about four feet out from shore. Immediately we began to sink and in short order we were up to our waists in about three feet of water. I don’t know which disappointment was greater our imitation of the demise of the Titanic or our sandwich’s floating away.  In any case, we waded back to dry land and accessed our circumstance. We were wet, tired and hungry and to make matters worse, slats of wood were occasionally popping to the top of the pond. Without much discussion we picked up our tools mounted our bikes and set out in opposite directions for home. We had sworn each other to secrecy about this escapade and had hoped that no one had recognized us as we were coming or going.

When I returned home, I put on dry clothes and hid my wet ones in the bottom of the cloths hamper. I spent the rest of the day in my bedroom that I shared with LB1 (little brother one). He popped in and out inquiring if I was sick. Soon it was time for Supper, and nothing was out of the ordinary. Just when I thought I had escaped with nothing but a bad memory, my Dad asked “by the way does anyone know what happened to the rake handle?

 

By the end of the sixties, just after my 20th birthday, I arrived in Vietnam in December of 1969. I was assigned to an infantry unit in the First Cav Division operating in Three Corps area near the Cambodian border. I was soon transferred to Echo Recon 1/5th. It was our job to walk jungle trails and report enemy activity and troop strength moving into our area. Theoretically we were to report and not engage. I guess on paper that plan looks plausible. In fact, we engaged the enemy much more often than we planned.

In the spring of 1970, we were part of the invading force into Cambodia. President Richard Nixon announced on national television in late April that the invasion had begun. He and his advisors had come up with the term “Incursion”, to make it sound less like an armed invasion of a neutral country. For those of us involved, it was a full-fledged invasion and the NVA fought back with great tenacity.

The following account is the description of my final week in the jungle and subsequent medivac to the hospital in Osaka, Japan. Ultimately, I ended up at Ft Gordon, Georgia US Army hospital where I convalesced for the next month.

It was late in the day, around 4:30 on June 11, 1970, and we had just been delivered ice cream by helicopter. Echo Recon had been pulled back to the LZ to pull security for the engineers. It was to be their task to blow up a huge arms cache that we had found, and they were busy wiring it for explosives. Our task, in pulling security, spread us out in 10-to-15-yard intervals along a path, up a slight incline that led to the cache. Within a few minutes hundreds of enemy rounds and ammunition that were collected in a 20 x 20 pit would be blown and the final wires were being checked. A re-supply chopper had just left, dropping the usual supplies of, food, ammo, water, and beer. But today was special, we were rewarded with ice cream for a job well done. One of my jobs was to pass out supplies, and today I was moving up the trail, from buddy to buddy with small buckets of ice cream and spoons. As each guy received his ice cream, he leaned his weapon against a tree to eat the rapidly melting treat.