Firebase Football

          I remember another "newbie's" impression from some "down time" at Fire Support Base Claudette. Working out of this Fire Base, our missions seemed to alternate between day operations sweeping rural regions while checking identities and night, bushes (ambushes and listening posts). When we were assigned the " bush", we frequently found some down time in the light of day when we could try to catch up on our sleep, play cards, or fool around a bit. As grunts in the 199th, what we owned was what we could carry. Yet there were other units, other kinds of jobs for soldiers, where men had the luxury of living a more stationary life. The fellows in the artillery had a bit of this luxury, and I remember that some of those gunners had an old, really pathetic looking football. The thing had a slow air leak but it was good for about ten or fifteen minutes at a go before the game would stop and one of the men would get the job of running back over to the gunners' tire pump for another resurrection. Sometimes, the darned thing was as flat as it could be and yet, the game went on.

           Now, you have to try to picture this one. The area where the Redcathers of Delta Company played was just outside one of the entry gates at Claludette. One of the goal lines butted up to a pile of concertina which was usually pulled back into a U-turn by day and then at night the stuff was dragged back around and up over to restrict part of the road. The men in the game usually had their shirts off and so you see these clowns out there with jungle boots and baggy pants. They had no pads, no football helmets, and they threw themselves into the game like there was no tomorrow. For a "newfer" like myself, the whole spectacle was bizarre. I had played a bit of ball in high school but when they got me over there I felt like this was not the same game I had known. The fellows would hit and tackle each other with a furry. If the course of their play yielded a bone cruncher, the participants would simply roll onto their backs in the dust and laugh until the pain lessened. When the game put some of the men down on the ground, trying to recover a real slammer, the others all laughed and sort of danced around as their buddies gyrated, rumbled and moaned in their pain. Along with the play, one of the men was walking around the edge of the area with his hand up to his mouth, acting as if he were a sports announcer on the radio, yelling out the play by play at the top of his voice. They all were crazy!

          I certainly did not understand this ritual until much later. Anyway the image sticks in my mind because a tall blond fellow, an R. T. O, named Dave Kenney, went out for a long pass and the high arching, wobbling, pathetic excuse for a dead pig in the air, took him deeper and deeper toward the razor sharp nest of concertina at the goal. We all expected him to stop.... give up the pass, but he did not. Up he jumped, then in a slow arch his reach caught the wobbling pig. He seemed to hover up there in the air for the longest time and then down he floated, spread out over the tangle of razor sharp concertina wire. Down, slowly down, he ascended, deep into the lap of this tangle. Then his body just sort of hung there slowly easing up and down with the springy wire, settling about two feet off the ground.

          At this point in the game, things all got deadly quite. The men rushed over to the fellow. His face reflected a glimmer of satisfaction, pride at his "All American" moment and then, in an instant, he and the rest of us became very serious. This man was stretched out there, deep in the hive of nasty wire, on his back.... impaled. Every time one of us would try to ease into the tangle to try to help him out, it would pull the razor nest along, tearing deeper into his back.... into his neck and the back of his legs. He would give a heavy "huff' of wind from down in his lungs each time we tried to move in to get him, making the wire pull at him in his frozen, ritual sacrifice, position.

           Eventually, he had endured sufficient pain for several of the men to get deep enough into the rolls of wire to lift him up. I don't know whether we should attach significance to the fact that the gunner's football was the first to be rescued from the nest. Next, they brought the man almost straight up, with the springy wire trying to follow his body as he was raised. I remember grimacing at the sight, empathizing with his pain, as one and then another of the razor barbs popped back from his skin. As they Dave up out of the wire he started to smile. Then he sort of shook all over and he grabbed at the fellow holding the football. Pig skin in hand, he broke out of the huddle of men who had just rescued him. Down the make believe football field he went, skipping and jumping while waving the ball high above his head and yelling out at the top of his voice, over and again, "And the crowd goes wild!." He continued his tirade for a while as men clapped, whooped and laughed their way deep into the moment. Then, someone yelled out to him, "get over here with that you crazy bast_rd!". "The thing still has some air in it.... Lets play!"

             Only later into my tour of duty with these men would I understand all of this. For the grunts, for us, these sorts of times represented a way to loose the nasty reality which was our lot. That Claudette football afternoon was just a pitiful few "All American" moments for some "All American Boys." Some of America's finest! It was a way to make a fleeting bit of "Stateside" come for a visit.

              Unfortunately, like the air in the gunner's pigskin, it would not last long.

PS:         On May 27, 1869, Sgt. Claude Van Andel, one of our firebase football stars was KIA in an NVA ambush. In the same combat, his RTO, Dave Kenney also suffered multiple wounds and died 15 days later in the hospital. Eight other soldiers from Delta Company were wounded that day.