A memoir of a Vietnam veteran
Gannon took a healthy gulp from his can motioned to Koh Hiep for another round, ran his long fingers through his short hair, took a deep breath and then looked straight at me.
"You ever pull tower duty?"
"You mean as guard duty?"
"Yeah."
"No. We've got a sector from the laundry down to the old French fort. I've never had to pull guard anywhere else."
"Well it's the last week in December and our section has a lot of married guys off in Hawaii screwin' their brains out and I get told I'm gonna pull tower duty." He pulls a smoke from his Marlboro pack, places it carefully between his thin lips and automatically produces his Zippo from the bar's counter top. The rasp of the flint leads to a broad orange flame as he talks and lights the bouncing cigarette at the same time.
"So I climb up and Captain Gray walks me through the set up. I've got a field phone, a prick 25 (PRC - 25, a standard army radio set) and a hot-line to the OD (Officer of the Day, always a field grade at the division's forward headquarters.)" He puffs and aims a luxuriant cloud of white smoke toward the stack of bottles and the mirror behind the bar. "You guys get a set of instructions telling you what all the pyrotechnics mean?" he asks.
He was referring to a list we received when we took command of the perimeter guard. It went through flare colors, usually red, green and white. These would be used by guards and out posts in front of the perimeter to let us know what was going on should other communications not work. White might mean, "I got contact in front of me." Green, "Position over run." Red, "Start praying." They were supposed to change meaning regularly but I suspected that the changes were driven more by real action on the part of Charlie than out of respect for the SOP.
"Yeah, white means this, green means that..." I answered.
"You got it. Well I get handed this sheet and Gray explains how important it is and then adds that I need to fix the sector where the flare is fired, send a warning order to the chief of smoke (The fire direction center for the base's artillery support) and call the OD pronto."
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