Jim Kustes – Gun Crew – Part Two

Kustes center loading a round on Gun 5

Living Large

I spent thirty years not giving Vietnam a thought. So there are big gaps in my memory. Early on a very close friend, Steve Sherlock, died on a mine sweep. Eight months later at the end of my tour I’m wounded bad when the jeep I am sitting on hits a mine and Paul Dunne is killed. I remember both of those, but not a whole lot in between

I do remember it was not all doom and gloom at Sherry. I had a good time there, one of the best times I ever had. I don’t remember a lot of details, but I remember the big urn of coffee the cooks put out at night outside FDC. That’s where I learned how to drink black coffee without cream. The little cartons of milk were a lot of times soured and you’d hunt for one that was good. In the mess hall I liked to watch the officers who flew in for a day go into the officer’s section with a carton of milk. They’d take a big swig of that milk and spew it out. I’d get a kick out of watching them.

I was friends with the guy who worked in the mess hall, Mike Bessler from Doylestown PA, and I would go down to the chopper pad when they brought the ice in and help unload. I always dropped one and got to keep a chunk. In my hooch I had a cooler and I always had ice cold beer. My hooch mate, Leroy Leggett, had a reel-to-reel tape recorder. We ran a secret wire from the battery generator into my hooch, so we could play music. And we had lights strung up in there. I could get ten people into my hooch with the music and lights and cold beer. The guy in the mess hall would give me ham, and we’d have ham sandwiches too. One day the First Sergeant, it had to be Durant, walked in because he heard the music and the partying. He just stood at the door and said, “Jeez, you guys got it better than I got it.” He just shook his head and turned away and walked out.

Party time in Jim’s hooch – Leggett with pipe, Jim with beer

I made sure I had as many amenities as possible. Our showers were made out of ammo boxes with a 55 gallon drum on top and a ladder going up to fill it. The officer’s shower had a portable water heater in the barrel, and I thought if they had hot water why not us? So I worked on my shower to make sure we had hot water. I can’t remember exactly how I did it. I may have gotten a water heater and heated the water on the ground and then carried it up. Or I may have put the heater in the barrel on top of the shower. I don’t remember. I do know we had hot shower water on my gun.

The M67 Immersion Water Heater ran on diesel, and heated water to clean mess kits, trays, utensils and canteens. The officers shower had one installed in the water barrel perched on top of its rickety frame. The enterprising Kustes somehow secured an M67, no doubt through his special relationship with Mike Bessler.

Cindy, mess hall worker, with M67 water heaters
Two Showers
Original picture by Dave Fitchpatrick

Ants, Scorpions and Snakes

We were being mortared so much in July and August of 1969, every day, that it didn’t bother me anymore. We couldn’t get anyone to patrol the mortar sites for us, so Lt. Parker got all the guys to go out and look for ourselves. There were probably twenty or thirty of us. Parker told us when we hit this mound out in the rice paddies for everyone to open up on the tree line with suppressive fire in case anyone was out there. When we get there we all hit the ground and open up. I had this piece of crap M16 that jammed on me. I am laying on the ground trying to clear my rifle. I am laying on the ground trying to clear my rifle. Red ants start biting the hell out of me, and I realize I am laying on top of their nest. I jump up brushing them off, and I look around and everyone is laying on the ground shooting and here I am standing up jumping around in the middle of it all. I was lucky we were not getting any return fire.

After that day, I thought if I ever have to go anywhere I am taking an M14. One of the medics had an M14 and I borrowed it from him whenever I had to go anywhere. I never used my M16 again. Guys would carry the cleaning rod on the butt of the M16 to poke out the spent shell when it jammed and wouldn’t eject. You had to keep the M16 really clean, but the oil you had to use on it, because things were so sandy, made it worse.

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I remember when I first got in country, people had these scorpions and they’d take a pencil to make them strike it. One day I was taking a sandbag out of the gun parapet and reached in and got stung in the finger by a scorpion. It kind of scared me because being naïve you hear all these stories about you better get aid right away. I went to the medic and he said, “Yeah, you’ll be alright.”

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We also had a cobra in our parapet. It would rear up with its hood. I had a bad fear of snakes at the time. But one of the guys shot it. Later I was working out on the perimeter and this black thing sprung up on me. I almost crapped my pants I thought it was a cobra. It turned out to be a piece of black metal banding that popped up when I stepped on it.