Ed Gaydos – Fire Direction Control – Part Two
The Demo
It seemed like some guys, a lot of guys come to think of it, made a kind of hobby out of gonorrhea. It wasn’t that hard to do. On a trip to Phan Thiet I was walking down a side street with a guy from Sherry. Vendors waved us over and mama-sans pulled at our sleeves, “Come see top notch girl.” My companion followed the mama-san, but first took off his wedding ring and said, “I always take the ring off. Then it don’t mean nothin’.”
Five days after convoys to Phan Thiet—I could count them—soldiers lined up outside First Sergeant Stollberg’s hooch begging for a medical pass. They held their crotches while Top yelled at them. Then at formation the next morning he yelled at everybody. His tirades were aimed squarely at an audience of teenagers away from home for the first time, full of empty threats and crude references to male anatomy, which always got their attention. “You come back with the clap, you’ll never see the rear again the rest of your goddamn tour. Tell you what, I’m going to start giving Article 15s for damaging Army property. Your dick belongs to Uncle Sam, you hear me? You can play with it all you want, but you bring it back dripping, I’ll have your ass.”
Top invited the battalion surgeon out to give us a talk on the ravages of venereal disease in Vietnam. The doctor said that one strain had no cure. Top interrupted him with, “In other words, you go to Japan and wait for your dick to rot off.” But the gonorrhea kept on, taking heavy casualties after every convoy.
Formation on this day was next to Gun 2. We fell in at ease while Top stood with his hands behind his back. We knew something important was coming when Top skipped the section chief reports. He got straight to the point. “Every time one of you goes to Phan Thiet you come back with a sore dick. So I give you a pass to get a shot in your ass. In a month you come back holding it in your hand again and crying for another pass. Well I’m sick of it. Goddamn fucking sick of it. So I’m going to help you out.”
Top reached into his pocket with his left hand and pulled out something small and square. “A lot of you have never seen one of these. It’s called a condom. When I was a kid we called ‘em rubbers.” He smiled, but in a wicked sort of way. “And for you momma’s boys who don’t know how to use one, I’m gonna show you right now. Pay attention.”
Top pulled his right hand from behind his back and held up a broom. He held it in the middle of the handle. “This is you.” Guys elbowed each other and pointed to the broom handle. Top thought a moment, “Well maybe this ain’t exactly you.” He slid his hand up to near the end. “Is that more like it?” Everyone looked at somebody else. More elbowing, some laughing, a dangerous thing to do in one of Top’s formations, but he let it go.
Top slipped the broom under his armpit, and went to open the condom. He struggled with it, ignoring the free advice coming from the formation. Finally he bit the corner and got the slippery thing out in the open. He then sent it into battle. He showed the tactical positioning on the tip of the broom handle. He demonstrated the maneuver of unrolling it. When he came to the last step he said, “You can’t pull this thing on like a sock. You got to leave some room at the end.” He snapped the little empty hat at the end of the condom. Everybody laughed and guys started punching each other on the shoulder.
Top ended the formation with a promise. “I got a whole case of these in my hooch. You come in and get a handful before going to the rear. They’re free. No excuses. You come back with the clap, I’m not shittin’ I’ll cut the goddamn thing off.”
…………………………
Not long after this I was at the latrine and could hardly stand for the burning. Oh boy, I thought. I was one of the old men in the battery, twenty-six years old, a section chief, overly serious about everything, and thinking back probably a little pompous. I dreaded what I had to do next.
I went to Top’s hooch and told him I needed to get to the hospital. “I don’t know how this happened, Top. Honest to God I never put my toe in the water.”
He looked at me, “It’s not your toe we’re talking about,” and held out a handful of the little square packets.
I went to the regimental hospital in Phan Rang. The medics took a culture, which in itself was a minor adventure, gave me a bag of pills, and told me to come back in two days. When I returned the technician gave me a thin smile, “You got a whole zoo growing in there.” He said it was nonspecific urethritis from highly unsanitary conditions. I thought: VD without the fun. Vietnam always had new ways to screw you.
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I never tried to tell the First Sergeant about how I really got the clap. It would have felt like trying to explain how a virgin gets pregnant. But I made sure it never happened again. I started washing my hands before going to the latrine.
