Getting a hair cut

[39mto39g]

While stroling through Dok To in my nasty jungle cloths and filthy boots this 2 nd LT. walks by me , I say howdy and keep walking, He stops and said HAY , Don't they salute officers in your outfit. I turned aroud and told him, NO they don't. Well he demanded a salute and then looked me over and said "Get a hair cut"
It was all I could do not to Laugh. So I said, Ah, Yes Sir?
I got back to my platoon and told my Lt what had hapened and he said well, Get a hair cut. So then I had to go look for a hair cut place. I was right next to the tent hospital. Got me a genuine military hair cut. I went looking for that 2nd LT, and couldn't find him, Probably aready died somewhere.


Ron

[DMZ-LT]

When I first got to the 3/5th Cav . I saluted the LTC , he told me to never do that again. I wore no rank and tied down the extra antenna on my track.

[splummer]

When I first got to my company a 1st Lt walked into the HQ room. The 3 of us replacements snaped to attention and saluted. He told us not to ever do that again. I never saluted another officer in Nam not even a general at Bastone. [It was hard a year later at Fort Bragg to remember to salute.]

[Chas H]

I can't remember saluting, Hell some ossifers and I addressed each other by first name.
I got my hair cut by a local barber that set up a chair right outside our perimeter. And a neck cracking too. The poor barber almost got shot the first time he did it; it must be a VN thing.

[39mto39g]

Most officers in a base camp wanted to be saluted, Most officers in a fire base or an LZ didn't want to be saluted. Offisers in the field would fight with you if you saluted them.
When I left VN I sent 3 days in Pleiku and Cam Rhan, They had starched shirts and pants spit shined shoes and everyone saluted officers.
The LT I was talking about had his gold bars on his shirt and his hat, A dead giveaway that he was a FNG.
This , of corse is just my opinon, for the unit I was in and the time I was there,.
I would imagin it was different in other Army units and definitly different in AirForce units, Marines, and Navy.

Ron

[DMZ-LT]

Rule #15 , Try to look unimportant .......... they may be low on ammo.

[MontanaKid]

And another rule:

Try not to look important. It draws fire.
Try not to draw fire. It annoys those around you.

[Andy]

In the fall of ?67 I needed a hair cut but it was near the end of the month and I needed all my money for beer. We left Cu Chi for a 10 day operation into the Hobo Woods. 56 days later we returned to Cu Chi. The guys who were in Georgia last April can tell you that if I don?t get a hair cut often, it turns to, well, sort of wool.

When I went to the barber shop in Cu Chi the barber offered me $.50 to go somewhere else to get my hair cut. He didn?t want to mess up his shears. I made him cut my hair and really enjoyed listening to him swear in three languages. Course that was the dry season and we didn?t get any showers in the Hobo?s, he probably would have appreciated it if I?d showered before the haircut.

Stay healthy,
Andy

What I would really like to know is how our troops these days shave. I mean today's steel pots are no longer steel or pots. What the heck do they use to hold the water for shavin ?

[MontanaKid]

Hey, these are the days of little tiny pocket electric razors. But it would be a good question if they are in a war where they had to operate as we did. They also have creature comforts we could only dream of in Vietnam. Remember our pocket transitors with a tiny mono earphones that looked like a hearing aid? They, of course have their CDs, and stereo earphones, can watch DVDs on their laptops, etc.

But they still heat their MREs with similar chem tabs to what we had in 'nam for our Cs. And they didn't get as much hot chow. We had hot chow on our firebase. And on resupply days, hot As were usually flown to us in the field in mermite cans. But the army has now all but done away with military cooks. They go to civilian contractors. Intead of smaller mess tents per company or battalion, there are only one large facility in large, brigade sized base camps. My son said it was often too much hassle to go all the way to the mess hall, so he ate a lot of MREs and the stuff we sent him in care packages.

But for the most part, except for special operations, they are vehicle mounted and do wide ranging day and night patrols, with nearly daily returns to the base camps where they have latrines, et. al. My son was a squadleader and Bradley TC with the 1st AD at Baghdad Airport and then up in Taji, from April 03 to April 04.