Viet Vets in trouble again
Aussie Vietnam Vets have hit the news big time. The final volume of the official history of the Australians in the Vietnam War is about to be released and the entire volume must be about Vietnam Vets and their drinking problem.
Google answered vietnam war history+alcohol abuse with 18 million hits. I had to click forward to page 12 before I found someone else other than Aussies having a drinking problem. Our alcohol abuse has been spread across the world and everyone’s talking about it.
I’m actually reasonably confident that the final volume mentions matters other than alcohol abuse but someone has obviously seen fit to underline the problem so that the people who abused us then, and still do, can add alcoholism to our sins. It fits seamlessly with shooting and killing the good guys, being US puppets, killing babies, raping women, and all the other communist propaganda inventions. Having these ‘sins’ thrown at us by Aussie uni students during breaks from collecting money for the Viet Cong ammo fund, goes partway to understanding the horrific PTSD roll from the war
Doesn’t matter – we’re used to the abuse, or at least we have learned not to take it to heart.
Considering most times I got back off patrol the first night in the boozer was effectively a wake I actually don’t care what non-vets think. Five or six cans is binge drinking? Come on…give me a break princess. Five or six cans goes nowhere near putting the black dog back in his kennel.
I definitely remember one patrol that lasted a month so there is 30 days of beer I never got. If I came back dirty,stressed and in mourning and consequently had too much to drink and someone from the 142nd Blog Comments Platoon, safe in their clean, neat, safe house finds that is cause to denigrate my service then get out of the debate.
I’m not listening anymore.
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All I can say is…..who got my share of this elusive stuff? I wouldn’t mind taking the kicks if I had earned them, but riflemen didn’t get anywhere near that ration of liquor, considering the time in the boonies on the dry and the minimum time at the Dat or in Vungas, to be be able to drink the accumulated ration. Hard drinking for a couple of evenings, perhaps three or four evenings was a maximum, and then extended time in the bush or on FSBs without liquor was the order of the day for most Infantry Batallion members. Generally with the time on the dry the amount of liquor required to become intoxicated was lessened also.
I sometimes wonder just how much trading was going on in the rear areas. Maybe someone made a lot of money.
Kev
Amazing – we agree on something. See post on Sunday – 1735099.blogspot/com/2012/03/pandering-to-cliche.html
There obviously was a thriving black market in Australian grog. It was of much better quality than the possum’s piss provided for theYanks, and I’d assume some of it ended up in American boozers.
I had my eyes opened to the extent of routine corruption when I spent a week in Saigon on a guard detachment in October.
Dear Kev,
considering the amount I’ve seen put away by uni students and graduates over the years (a good part of it in the immeadiate post-Vietnam period) it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black (are we still allowed to use that exppression?).
As a sideline, an ex-US combat engineer once told me about hiding a truck load of beer from visiting brass. You see they had all these bulldozers so just dug a hole and buried the truck.
Peter