Chapter 4

This final chapter of this summarized story is highlighted by my final departure from beautiful scenery and bad memories and it is really at the end of the hectic days of frenzied ground fighting in the south and heavy bombing in the north and along the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” which was more of a unpaved “super-highway” under the jungle canopy and not a simple path that wandered about without rhyme or reason. The conflict stretched on for another sixty months but the casualty statistics were a lot more acceptable from a public relations standpoint and a lot fewer families were getting letters of condolences from unit commanders. There is no intention to downplay the combat action of the seventies but a simple statement of a closing scenario.

It was increasingly apparent that the South Vietnamese fighters were well aware of their risky position and no amount of transferred weapons, ammunition and supplies would offset the fact that they were being basically abandoned by their mentor, patron, ally, the good old US of A.

There might have been a few die-hard pockets of “True Believers” that still thought the NVA regulars and their Chinese advisors could be defeated on the field of battle without American direct involvement, but they were the ones that paid the price of sticking it out to the end hoping the American armed forces would come riding to their rescue at the last moment.

The final take-over of government was a “Déjà vu” repeat of the French debacle but, in all honesty, the government in Washington and the people in the country had all moved on with typical anti-military throes of total disengagement.

I had been tasked with using our dispersed units to “shake-down” missing items like codebooks, shoulder fired rockets, and any chemical weapons in the lost or missing category. Strangely, I was able to find stores of the sensitive items in odd places and rewarded the liberators with fresh script from our “slush fund” stockpiles. I knew there would be a change in script notes very shortly and we needed to get rid of it anyway. After a certain date, only officers could exchange the now worthless paper currency for “greenback” dollars and they were honor bound to do it with complete honesty. There were so many loopholes that it was a joke that still brings a smile to my face.

The next time I went into the G-2 shop, I actually met some people who knew who I was and they told me that the common belief was that I was either KIA or MIA up in Quang Tri Province. I found out later that erroneous report had led to the auction of my stored gear on Okinawa including a number of irreplaceable items. It also made it all the way back to Camp Pendleton where my nifty little Mustang was released as “abandoned” by the storage facility. They compensated me with a five hundred dollar chit in both cases since actual value could not be determined. I was so happy to be back in the land of the big PX that I never made a fuss. Besides, I knew it wouldn’t do me any good and might cause me some problems down the line.

My “White Elephant” Nancy was done in by some renegade police types that were probably just looking for her strong box of hidden assets. That was a few years before the final takeover of the Embassy down in Saigon and it was better in the sense that it was a quick exit and not a long lingering painful exercise in revenge and retribution for the supporters of the central government regime.

I knew that most of the most dedicated supporters of the American forces were pretty much caught with their pants down and unable to scoot out of danger like some of the well-heeled civilians down south. There was no point in trying to find out what had happened to people I knew and depended upon to help me get missions accomplished. It was better just to write it all off and start with a clean slate hoping God would look after them better than the American Government had.

Despite the title of this less than epic story, I am happy to state I never came under sniper fire, at least not in that country. The “Sniper in the Tree-line” is a bit of an inside joke because it was used by me on one occasion to get a visiting Hollywood starlet to huddle in a foxhole for a memorable fifteen minutes of pulse-pounding excitement. The “Sniper in the Treeline” nickname added to my own was a lot better than being called “Bugs” by perfect strangers.

Strictly a nickname to denote less than sane or logical response mechanisms in the midst of chaos, “Bugs” was not related to anything sexual in nature despite British usage in erotic passages.

I apologize to using a reference to “Snipers” as the title of this story for fear it might be misinterpreted as a story about snipers.

I did write a fictional account about an effective sniper unit in World War II. It was called “Old Soldiers Never Die” and the sniper was German, not American.

There was a wonderful film called “Enemy at the Gate” about snipers that was detailed accounts of both German and Russian sniper units in the midst of combat.

I worked closely with different snipers and found them to be extremely anti-social and lacking in the ability to communicate verbally. They were more like “Hunters” always searching for their prey with insatiable fixations on boosting their “count” whenever possible. Still, I always felt a little safer with one of them around because it was like having a guardian angel looking over your shoulder to assure you that you were still under the protection of some ill-defined “Witness Protection” program.