Free 15 Months in SOG by Thom Nicholson Page B

requests that you make a tour of the perimeter and don’t come back to the front gate for thirty minutes.” He looked anxiously down the dark road.
    I thought I could hear the sound of a tracked vehicle approaching the camp. “Now who in hell would be driving a tank down the road in the middle of the night?”
    “Don’t ask, sir. Just make your rounds. Please, sir. Right now.” The young sergeant was fairly hopping up and down in excitement.
    Hestitantly, I nodded. “Okay, Spivy, I’ll make my rounds, but you’d better not be setting me up for an ass-chewing from the XO.” He grinned in relief, and hurried me on my way. I took plenty of time, even going inside the TOC, which was almost soundproof.
    When I returned to the front gate, the Montagnard guards were all smiles at the joke, whatever it was, but they wouldn’t let me in on it. All I could get from them was “O’Connor funny,
Dai Uy.
”
    The rest of the night passed uneventfully, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the sun came up. Whatever O’Connor was up to, it hadn’t happened on my watch. I should have walked the fence again, but decided it was better if I didn’t, in case there was something I shouldn’t see.
    As I ate breakfast, I sensed a mood of jocular anticipation sweeping the men in the mess hall. Clusters of them would whisper together and then dash for the door, giggling like kids with a secret. Spotting O’Connor over at one of the tables, drinking coffee and looking bleary-eyed at his surroundings, I eased up beside him and sat down. “What the hell’s going on, O’Connor?”
    “No so loud,
Dai Uy,
” he moaned in misery. “My head’s ’bout to bust wide open.” He slurped some more of the coffee. Looking up at me with eyes nearly bleeding red, heflashed his big smile and whispered, “Take a look over beside number four guard tower.”
    Following the flow of gazers headed that way, I walked to the southwest corner of the compound, where a twenty-foot-tall tower marked the corner of the defensive perimeter of the camp. There, just outside the wire, half-buried in the sand, was a massive, M-110 self-propelled howitzer, its mighty eight-inch gun pointing like a dark, menacing finger of accusation right at our offending village across the bay.
    Troops were laughing in glee as they came up and inspected the gun, while across the open expanse of water, the cowed village was quiet as a mouse in a bed of sleeping cats. I must have invented a dozen new ways to cuss a man as I hotfooted it back to the mess hall. “O’Connor, you crazy, pea-brained wetback,” I snarled as quietly as my enraged blood would let me. “Where on earth did you get that cannon, and what are we gonna tell the XO when he finds out who put it there, and who let it into the compound?”
    Casually, O’Connor brushed aside my anger. “Relax,
Dai Uy
. How long do you think its been since the XO walked the perimeter of the camp? Nobody will tell him or the CO, and in a week there’ll be no way anyone can prove who did it or when. Relax, man. It’s cool.”
    Damned if he wasn’t right.
    For the next two weeks, countless MPs and a certain Marine artillery unit were looking all over I Corps for their stolen self-propelled gun. It seems whoever took it had swept the road of any tracks, and the twenty-ton monster was not to be found anywhere. I heard the Marines were tearing their hair out at the idea that anyone could steal something so big and noisy right out from under their noses. Of course, to any rational man who knew Marines, there was an easy answer. The army did!
    Some time later, some big-shot Marine was flying his chopper over the camp and spotted the missing gun. Thechopper landed right on the beach, and a very steamed Marine colonel was all over our colonel, wanting to know just how that gun got where it was. Colonel Isler soon had every officer in camp giving statements, but I could honestly say that I didn’t see a thing on my guard shift.