Deviation Actions
SPIDER IN A CAVE 8/18/2017
In 'Nam troops like the 11th Cavalry were not allowed into "civilized" areas because they were afraid of our reactions to any threat. In other words, we might shoot first and ask questions later. True; they had good reason to think that, but that's another story.
We saw a lot of combat so we had to have a place to blow off steam, someplace to relax. So they would assign us to security at a mountain called, Xa Gia Ray which was not far from Vung Tau. The Brass used to send us there to guard the place and protect the water from saboteurs. Gia Ray was a big rock that stuck out of the otherwise flat plain. Later I came to know that it was an extinct volcano. Falling from this mountain was a waterfall, into a damned up pool that was the water supply for Vung Tau and much of our core.
I do not know where the waterfall came from, but every time I went there I would be real curious about the source of all that water. There wasn’t always enough rain to create a waterfall. I wondered, unless there was a lake up there of some kind — how could it be? I learned from people that would come there to sell us stuff. They had a Buddhists’ {Puck or fuck} religion and to them the mountain was sacred; they had a temple on top of this mountain. That is where the water came from.
Gia Ray was a really beautiful tropical place with lush foliage growing on the mountain. We set up a water filtration plant at a French built dam there. At the dam we could swim in a small pond-like lake that was created by the dam and the dam would also make a waterfall we could shower in. It made a great place to bathe. The girls would come there and take their donations to God from the GI's. I had never seen any combat there. It was a very relaxed kind of place. We would still set up to defend ourselves, of course, but we didn't have much of a problem. We had this guy from New York. We used to call him "Copski" because he said he was a New York cop and was drafted. He was a fuck-up. I don't know if he was ever telling the truth but I do know cops were exempt from the draft. So if he were a cop he really had to do something wrong so that he would be drafted and then wind up in Viet Nam. He was always doing something stupid. However he could hustle girls anyplace he was.
One day all that tranquillity was broken when a sniper started shooting at us. Copski's first reaction was to grab the girl and hold her in front of him as a human shield so that she would take the round before he would get hit. The Vietnamese girl was very upset about being a human shield. My first reaction was to grab a weapon and kill the gook. So as he was cowering behind the girl... He was always afraid of everything. He was either brutalizing somebody, hassling somebody weaker or hiding behind somebody because he was afraid. There didn't seem to be anything in between for this guy. I ran in front of them and spotted the muzzle flash from the sniper in the trees and started returning fire, other guys started returning fire and it wasn't long before we had a dead sniper. It was only one sniper in an isolated incident. We never got shot at there again.
After the fight was over, I walked by Copski and she was really pissed. She cracked me up; not a easy thing to do after a fight like that, she was truly trying to beat the shit out of him. If she weren't so little she would have kicked his big ass. He decided he would punch her out cause he didn't want to deal with her objections to his behavior. So he was getting ready to swing on her and I told him he better not. He looked at me and I had just come back from a fire-fight and he knew that I wasn't in any mood to screw with him. So he let her go; he turned and walked away.
I walked back by the river and took off my clothes and jumped in and swam. I had really worked up a sweat in that little brief fire-fight. The gook had a superior position on us so we really had to move in close. Take really lethal fire before we could take him out of the tree. He had himself strapped in there, a very difficult target to hit. If he hadn't strapped himself up there he would have probably been able to get away.
So I'm sitting in the stream and the girl comes up by the stream and takes her clothes off. Vietnamese people, men, women, children, young and old, would freely bathe in public but they left on their underpants. None of us had any underwear, we used them as gun cleaning rags. So this girl came up to the edge of the stream and left on her bright red American underpants and jumped in, started swimming alongside of me. She wanted to talk to me. I had spoken some Vietnamese by then. So we started talking and swimming in that little pond, and she had decided that I saved her life. She was grateful and she wanted to repay me which she did in many, happy ways.
We were there for a few days and now; she was spending as much time with me as she used to spend with Copski. She spoke English well and started telling me about her religion. I was very curious. I was very curious about the mountain with the waterfall. She told me she had been up to the top of the mountain many times and at the top of the mountain is a temple for her church.
Most of my Vietnamese was guttural i.e. dirty words, she was a very highly educated woman. I couldn't understand the ideas she had about her religion. We each wanted to understand the other but language was the problem. So she offered to take me up there so I could experience it myself. I thought way cool there is no better way to learn her way of life, then to experience it myself. We agreed I could climb this mountain to see this holy temple which was magical by her descriptions and she agreed to lead the way. She was proud of her religion and wanted to share it with me. So, not trusting Vietnamese people entirely, although I liked her a lot I did not want to go alone. I got a few guys together, about half a dozen, eight guys, I think. We decided to climb the mountain and see what was at the top of the mountain. I put it together as if we were going on patrol so that we would not be missed. Leaving camp just for the fun of it or to brake the tedium, was not a thing the brass would like. We were going with each other to protect each other's back for obvious reasons.
We packed our gear as if we were going on a light patrol; plenty of ammo water and explosives. The only thing different this time was, I took with me a super eight movie camera I had bought at the PX.
We set out the next morning early and started climbing this mountain with a couple of the girls leading us. The mountain was a really arduous climb. It was really hot! 'Nam was always hot. We started off when it was cool, but we worked up a lot of body heat. The mountain didn't have any dirt on it. It was just really huge boulders. Boulders that were too big for large numbers of men to move. Everything small enough for even two or three guys put together to carry away, had been carried away.
So, that explained the really solid building of the village at the bottom of the hill by the rice patties. That village was stones from that mountain, carried down, cemented together, and smoothed over with concrete. The walls were very thick. The buildings were very cool inside and now I knew where they got their rocks from.
My guess is the rocks they had around, had come from this mountain for thousands of years with baskets. They had taken all the dirt down off the mountain, filled in the whole valley so it was all leveled by the water, making one huge flat plain for the growing of their rice, with a tiny creek running through it.
The creek must have once been a river. At the time I was there it was about ten feet across and the water was only a few inches deep, like the headwaters of the Wisconsin River here in Land O' Lakes. The bottom of the river was very muddy so we didn't go in it very much, but they had taken large rocks and they situated them in the river so they could cross it and stay dry. The kids made this a play — ground the stones that is. The children would jump from one rock to another,,, barefoot children jumping from one rock to another and the game was to not fall in the water. A group of us tried to play with them once and all of us wound up in the water. No, American could jump as blithely as those children we — just didn't have the coordination to do that.
As we climbed the mountainside it got hotter and hotter. It was really a difficult climb because we were just scrambling from one rock to another. There was no actual walking. The vines helped a lot. The rocks were slippery so that made it difficult to climb and we had gone up with gear for a light patrol, so we were all armed. 'Nam was not a place for Americans to be going around on casual strolls. An extra fifty pounds of ammo was difficult to maneuver as we climbed. We climbed all the way to the top of the pass, a little bit below the summit and here was this beautiful temple up there. We had come up the easiest way. Anybody that went up and down that mountain had to be really in good shape, because there was no easy way up or down. Here was this totally out of place, brightly painted, oriental temple with smooth stucco walls like you'd find in the southern USA.
Climbing that mountain impressed me with the idea that for eons Vietnamese people had come up here with straw baskets and carried away handfuls of dirt over time to create the levies that were now the rice patties that were below us.
Now we are looking at this unusual, beautiful temple. They must have carried all that stuff up that mountain to build the place, probably took generations. The houses around the temple were much simpler. There were on top of posts driven into the earth with hootches built on them so they could have a flat floor. With the really rocky surface up there that was the only way to have a flat floor. There was some dirt so that there could be pathways, but their raised platforms gave them homes. The sides of the platforms were like venetian blinds, draw curtains of reeds, that they could pull up entirely. The platform was like a big kids tree fort with inspiring views of the land below.
pg1