Charlie Rangers by Don Ericson

Author:Don Ericson [John, L. Rotundo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76040-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

It seemed that only three Rangers in the history of the Vietnam war were ever awarded the Medal of Honor. While small Special Forces teams that ran similar missions had many Congressional Medal of Honor winners, the Rangers had that one medal withheld from them because the men were enlisted volunteers and no officers ran with the teams. This could not be accepted by the superior officers in the rear area, or apparently by the US government. In addition, all medals had to be approved by rear-echelon types of the 173rd ABN Brigade, to whom Charlie Rangers were attached on temporary duty at the date of the mission. Those officers had little use for the small teams of Rangers that gathered their intelligence and ran other types of missions that are still highly classified, because Charlie Rangers was officially a part of and under the “First Field Force.”

In Third Platoon we had Sharkey. He was a Canadian citizen who elected to come south and join the US Army, a twist from all those pussies who fled the United States to avoid military service. Sharkey was medium height and quite muscular. In the rear, he only occasionally had a beer or a cigar. Sharkey had a Kit Carson scout on his team named Hai. A Kit Carson scout was a former VC or NVA who had “rallied” to the side of the South Vietnamese government. The Kit Carsons knew the areas and how to read trails better than any GI could ever hope to. Every platoon had Kit Carsons, and those teams that used them had more contacts than the others. Sharkey and Hai had a special bond between them and it showed in the field as well as in the rear. It seems every time Sharkey took a team out he came back with kills.

The stand-down had begun and I was rapping with Norton and an old friend from the Herd, O’Dougheraty (like O’Donnell, we called him “O.D.”), the guy who jumped into the stream after I had fallen in and rescued my helmet.

Norton was a part-time juicer, and having grown up in blue-collar Detroit, O.D. really liked his beer.

We just sat around the barracks rapping when the hardcore juicers began getting loud and somewhat belligerent. Of course O.D. had to put his two cents in and argue with them. Things sounded like they were getting out of hand, so Norton and I left the Third Platoon’s barracks and sat on a bunker just outside as he lit up a joint. He took the first drag and inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and just smiled. “Nice,” was all Norton said. He was a man of few words; he let his actions speak. He opened his eyes and passed the joint to me. It had been quite a while since my first and last experience with grass, and I was still a bit apprehensive about it, but I took the joint from him and inhaled it deeply myself.

We passed it around till it was almost gone, myself waiting for a bust at any second but doing it anyway.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.