Monthly Archives: March 2022

Hi blogsters:

I hadn’t thought about my old running buddy, Phil, for a while.  That last blog entry got me chewing on thoughts of him.  I’ll tell you a bit more about him.

Phil went to the Marine Corps as the result of being a 17 year old driving from Temple, Texas, to Austin with a case of beer in the car.  A Williamson County Sheriff Deputy stopped him on a tail light violation, asked for his drivers license and saw the case of beer.  Old Phil, being a clever youth, gave the officer a Texas Drivers License with an altered date of birth, so’s to keep from being arrested as a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.

The deputy wasn’t fooled.  He hauled Phil off to the slammer to reflect on his sins.  He was offered the alternatives of going to prison for presenting a phony ID, or going into the US Marine Corps.

In Vietnam, at least, Phil was old enough to drink.  He became Marine Recon and a sniper.  Phil was in the jungle with a squad of other snipers surrounded by a NVA rocket launching unit when the first rockets were fired into Da Nang AFB, though the squad wisely stayed hidden and didn’t take any shots, they radioed in the location of the rocket unit and brought an airstrike down on top of themselves.

They’d be dropped into an area where the NVA was expected to set up a battalion or division headquarters, sit there a couple of weeks waiting quietly, and try for a head shot at a senior officer.  Once the shots were fired they’d try to sink back into the bushes until things went quiet, then slink out to some place where they could be lifted out.

Phil did two tours over there.  When he came back he had such a chest full of medals they snatched him up for Nixon’s Honor Guard.  Which Phil believed would be easy duty.

Instead, it was riot control.  Wherever Nixon went there were anti war riots, and Phil and his unit busting heads, which he thoroughly hated, since he agreed with the demonstrators.

Phil hated politicians, hated war, hated the men responsible for sending him over there and making him the troubled, rage filled human being he was during the decade and a half I knew him.

But the Vietnamese body counts were a lot higher because of Phil.

When I last saw him half his face was eaten away by Lupus, contracted as a result of Agent Orange in those jungles.  The Veterans Administration was fighting and squirming denying all those guys were ill from Agent Orange, that the problems were Service Connected, so they’d have to offer disability and whatnot.

Phil used to observe that he might have been a lot better off if he’d just let them send him to prison for the beer and phony ID.  Then they couldn’t have even drafted him for that place.

I wonder if that old Agent Orange has killed him yet.  Another victim of friendly fire with a delayed action fuse.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

That thing with Texas voters banning marriage got me thinking about some Texas marriage observations of the past.

I used to know a guy in Texas named Phil.  Good fellow, old Marine Corps shot up vet with a chest full of decorations.  We used to do a lot of drinking, hunting and running around together during the ’70s and 80s.

Phil got himself hitched to a woman named Susan.  Good woman, but perhaps the meanest female human I’ve ever encountered.  A husband doing anything to violate her perception of justice was to be avoided on pain of the painfully unexpected.

Which didn’t keep old Phil from sneaking around occasionally, doing something that would have violated her perception of justice.  Women liked Phil a lot and being one of the highest decorated Marines ever to come out of the Vietnam War didn’t mean Phil had the will power to always refuse.

Nevertheless, Phil and Susan had a happy marriage, more-or-less.  They vented their rages and frustrations, of which both had in plenty, having ping-pong ball gun battles, stalking one another around the house, sometimes lasting hours.

Every July 4th Phil and Susan would have a traditional Sex and Violence Marathon Party lasting a couple of days, or until everyone went home.

A television would play The Sands of Iwo Jima non-stop at one end of the room and another would play porn flicks non-stop at the other end.  Lots of interesting stuff in the IWO JIMA flick.  We’d sit there with the squeeze box backing up that film, looking at a particular scene, looking at it again, again again again, studying the camera footage (US gov footage from the Iwo battle) until we quit, but tended to go back and do the same thing again … two or three scenes in there are serious head-scratchers.

One scene a bunch of guys are on a 3/4 ton truck, a wounded one on the front bumper, when they hear a big round coming in.  They all hop off that truck, grab the wounded guy and rush for a foxhole…  But midway between the truck and the hole they realize there’s no time.  They drop the wounded guy out in the open.  They all dive headfirst into holes just as the round hits and the camera goes flying along with legs and maybe an arm or two.  Amazing footage.

Anyway, I’ve digressed.  I wanted to tell you how Phil and Susan, thanks to his philandering, ended up in a long duration menage a troix situation.  They all thought of it as a marriage for a couple of years.  The third of the three was a woman who looked almost exactly like the woman wossname son of Kirk Douglas played opposite in a movie named Romancing the Stone.

Beautiful woman, but a rattlesnake extraordinaire who eventually gave both Phil and Susan a lot of grief.

But I’ve wandered so far what with pingpong ball gun fights and Sex and Violence parties I suppose I’d better save the menage a troix story for another time.

Jack