It’s been a very quiet Sunday evening. Nina has been out with one of her counselors visiting former inmates and I’ve been holding down the homefront while she’s out. Bradica (the dog) has been pacing back and forth through the house looking for Nina. Some nights Bradica will probably walk a couple of miles as she goes back and forth through the house when Nina’s gone.

Yesterday was yard work day. I started by cleaning out the area beside the front door. I cut back the plants so they could start doing their thing for this year and cleaned out all the garbage. The area is a magnet for anything blowing by in the wind which kind of swirls around in that area dumping whatever the wind is carrying. There’s a large window well there which also accumulates a lot of rubbish.

I decided I wanted a window well cover. I checked online at both Home Depot and Lowes to see what they might have available. I couldn’t find what I wanted at the Home Depot online store, but Lowes indicated that they had window well covers and that they were in stock.

I finished up the yard work I wanted to do and headed downtown. That was the start of a frustrating afternoon! I got to the credit union about ten minutes too late to drop off the weblog backup. I got to Lowes to find that the window well covers they usually carried would not be large enough and the only one they had in stock (even though it was too small), was broken. I also wanted a couple of bolts for my motorcycle gas tank cover, but couldn’t find anything that would fit. I went over the motorcycle shop to find that the parts department closed at noon on Saturdays and service wasn’t open at all, so I couldn’t make an appointment to have the oil changed and do the spring cleaning on the bike. Ace Hardware didn’t have the bolts I needed, either. Both Home Depot and Lowes were sold out of the fertilizer I need to put on the yard (“come back on Tuesday,” they both said). There was one bag available at the garden shop, but that wasn’t enough to do even the front yard. The only thing I did get done on my errands was to drop off shirts at the laundry and pick up clean ones. I’m at least set for shirts for the week.

I’m already tired of the presidential nomination campaigns. The first primary is still nine months away and by the time we can actually vote on something, I think most of us are going to be completely turned off by the whole mess. This needs to change. Plenty of people are going to spend far too much money far too soon. When I went through weapon training in the Air Force before my first trip to Vietnam, a very important part of the training was patience … don’t shoot up your ammo until you actually have something in range to shoot at.

A while later I was in Danang, Vietnam, for the first time. We were flying reconnaissance missions out of Bangkok, Thailand … ten hours orbiting in the Gulf of Tonkin keeping track of the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans. We would land in Danang and drop off the package of tapes recorded during the mission along with one person who would stay the night to provide any assistance in processing the tapes and then would catch the airplane the next evening back to Bangkok. We were on a standard rotation schedule … 21 days in Thailand, 14 days back in Japan, and repeat. Of the ten people on the flight crew, six were on rotation for the stay in Danang, meaning that on a rotation to Bangkok, I would stay three nights in Danang.

My first night turned out to be more exciting than planned. I was dropped off along with the mission “take” about 7:30 p.m. and sat alongside the runway for about a half hour waiting to be picked up. I was “armed” with a .45 and five bullets, which were not in the gun — the clip had to be out of the gun while we were on the airplane. My ride finally arrived and we headed to the security compound where the tapes would be processed. That processing consisted of listening to the tapes and transcribing them onto six-ply paper. Analysts would then go through the collected information and write up activity summaries which were sent by teletype to several different places. Usually it would take eight hours or more to process the information and then head for bed. That was a very long day for me which had started at 1 a.m. Danang time to board the bus out to the airplane.

As I arrived at the compound, the Duty Airman (quite disdainfully, by the way) gave me a 2-minute tour, part of which consisted of pointing out the rack of M-16 guns by the door, the locker where the ammunition and helmets were stored, and the instructions to “follow that guy and do whatever he tells you if we have an alert.” The guy I was to follow (and I cannot remember his name) was a Vietnamese linguist, married with three kids in the states, on his second tour to Vietnam, and had been there ten months on this tour with three months left. He was a very likable guy.

We did have an alert. About midnight the sirens went off. I followed my mentor, was issued an M-16 with two clips of ammo (I still had my trusty .45 with five bullets), a helmet, and out the door we went to a sandbag emplacement on the perimeter of the security fence. The sirens were blaring, search lights were shining out into the darkness, and there were a couple of helicopters up tossing out parachute flares for illumination. In spite of all that, it seemed to be pitch black looking out through the security compound fence towards the fence that went around the base.

Within seconds we started hearing shots being fired … kind of like firecrackers … off to the left and getting louder. My emplacement companion was getting pretty anxious — bobbing up and down, swearing, and voicing threats about what he was going to do if the commies got any closer. Well, the firefight was definitely moving closer! A few minutes later he was up and began shooting. I had no idea what he was shooting at! There wasn’t anything out there to see. For all I knew, he could be shooting at our own Marines who might be backing up towards our compound. But there he was, shooting his gun and hollering for me to cover him.

Two clips of ammunition isn’t much. It didn’t take very long for him to empty both clips and then he wanted my ammo because I hadn’t taken a shot, yet. I didn’t give him my ammo, even though he was pretty insistent. Meanwhile, the firefight was once again moving away from us. We were there another two hours — him with a rifle and no ammo, me with a rifle and two clips of ammo and a .45 with five bullets, still not in the gun. When the all-clear finally sounded (but not before several big explosions in the direction of the flight line where Viet Cong sappers managed to blow up several airplanes), we went back into the building. We stripped and cleaned the rifles and turned them in. He took quite a ribbing for having shot up all his ammo on ghosts. I was quite happy, however, that the firefight had gone somewhere else because the 22 bullets for my M-16 and the 5 bullets for the .45 that I had left would not have been much protection.

So, the politicos are out there shooting up all their ammo at each other, but unlike my emplacement companion that night some 41 years ago, they aren’t shooting at ghosts. It’s too soon for that kind of blood letting to be going on in this campaign.