The Road Mine
Private First Class Jim Layne had only been in country a little over a week. A tall, skinny eighteen year old kid with sandy brown hair, freckles and lots of curiosity about the world, Layne was amazed at the ingenuity the Vietnamese People displayed in getting things done with very little to work with. In a letter to his mother he said, “If these people only had half the stuff Americans throw away, God only knows what they could do. I hope the North Vietnamese aren’t as resourceful as the people I’ve seen around here. If they are, this war could get nasty before it’s over.”
Sitting in a guard tower early in the morning while waiting to be relieved of duty, he was amazed to watch the small motorcycles, scooters and three-wheeled Lambrettas running up and down the road crammed full of produce, merchandise and people. It was not unusual to see a family of four or five people riding on a small motorcycle. Sometimes they would be hanging on to wicker baskets full of stuff or have poles balanced across the motorcycle with things suspended from the ends.
The three-wheeled Lambrettas made him think of a cross between a motor scooter and a small truck, or maybe a modified golf cart. The Vietnamese could pack more people onto, and hanging off of, one of these oversized go-carts than an American family would have loaded into a full sized station wagon. And then they’d even have the roof covered with tied-down produce and merchandise. Vehicles and fuel were expensive, so the locals couldn’t afford to waste it. Even if he sometimes couldn’t understand the Vietnamese, Private Layne had to admire them for their ingenuity and toughness.
His second week with the unit, Layne volunteered to ride shotgun on a five-ton truck. The convoy was scheduled to leave at first light to make a three-hour run to the Bravo Company camp near a little town called Plei Me. Convoy duty could be dangerous because even though the roads were swept for mines, the enemy just replanted more after the sweepers passed. Occasionally, a convoy would get ambushed and snipers always seemed ready to take shots at the truck drivers, day or night. But even with all the problems involved, a convoy was the most efficient way to re-supply a unit. The big diesel powered trucks could deliver a lot more needed supplies in a short time than helicopters while attracting less enemy attention.
It was just after passing the mouth of the la Drang River Valley, where the Cav had fought such a bloody battle with North Vietnamese Regulars not so long ago, that they found a Lambretta that had triggered a mine. The trucks slowed down and wove from one side of the road to the other to keep from running over pieces of the little three-wheeled vehicle and its cargo of farm products and people on their way from one of the small villages to the market in the nearby province capitol. The mine crater on the right side of the road still gave off a burnt smell from the explosion. Bodies of all sizes, or what was left of them, were scattered on both sides of the road.
The bloated bodies and sickening smell of decaying flesh suggested they might have been dead for a couple of days. It was hard to tell because everything rotted quickly in the hot, steamy jungle. There was nothing that could be done for them, so the convoy moved on, but on the return trip to base that afternoon the men dipped rags in diesel and gasoline and held them close to their noses as they passed the bomb site to try covering up the ripe, smell of death.
Back at the hooch that evening, no one had much to say, and that night Jim Layne took his first drink of whiskey. When he woke the next morning he still had that image of death in his mind, that sickening smell of decay in his nostrils, and after a half hearted attempt at eating breakfast, he had his first drink of the day.
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