A Pair of Unsavory Retrospectives

By Ken DeHaas

2/1 H&S 70-71

Just a word of caution. If you are not of the Nam Brotherhood please brace yourself for the first staggering, repugnant memories of this, then, green Marine.

Very soon after settling in at Camp Lauer, center of operations for 2^nd Bn, 1^st MarDiv., I had the opportunity to take my first jeep excursion through a local ville. Situated at the base of Marble Mountain, Nui Kim Son was your typical everyday Nam hamlet. Yet was very dilapidated by even the poorest of American standards. Not long after entering Nui’s city limits, the first visual trauma assaulted my pampered senses. There was papa-san unashamedly squatting and doing his business on the side of a muddy, pot holed, pathetic excuse for a road. He looked unabashedly into my incredulous eyes while grunting with pajama bottoms around his ankles. The disgusting surreality of that moment slammed me head first into a primal wall of reality with sledge hammer force.

A little further on down the road saw a fairly large gathering of Hamlet dwellers off to my right. Asked my chauffeur what was up with that? He stopped the jeep and said “Let’s check it out”. In retrospect I realized that I was being set up. What I was about to see he had undoubtly seen more than once. In his own peculiar way he was serving as the f___ing new guy guide. As we slowly made our way across the clearing it became apparent that this congregation was focused on something or someone at their center. The mostly female crowd parted easily as we nudged our way forward. Our presence went as unnoticed as some slightly bothersome mosquitoes or flies, scarcely worth the effort it would require to swat or shoo us away. I stopped at the edge of the inner fringe, my escort a step behind. Didn’t need to go any farther. Just a few feet away a girl, maybe eleven or twelve years old, was calmly seated in a chair as hands darted in and out of her coal black hair. Some lingered briefly, as if searching for an elusive prey. I surmised correctly that this was some sort of grooming ritual. But with a mind numbing twist. Exterminate the lice by making a small meal of them. You know what they say, “waste not, want not”. Yeah right. I had seen more than enough for one day and headed back to the jeep. For the second time in less than an hour my coddled, stateside mentality had been forced to take a grotesque detour. What next?