Dog Soldier

I don’t like to talk about it, but I was in ‘Nam. Tough times when I was over there, no doubt about it. One time I was in the shit and bullets were flying everywhere and all I remember is reciting the lyrics to “Hot Child in the City” over and over again in my head and trying to crawl inside my water canteen for protection. Not too logical, but neither is combat.



It looked bigger with the fear of death in my veins








You could say I got to ‘Nam pretty late. As part of “Cleanup Crew ’82” you could also say that technically I missed the war by at least seven years. Well guess what? The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now didn’t come out until the late ‘70s, and if they were the only reasons I went to ‘Nam, how the heck was I supposed to go somewhere based on stuff I saw in the movies if those movies hadn’t been released yet? Now who’s stupid?

During basic training, they asked us questions as to how we would handle various situations. The first question was, “If you are attempting to prevent someone from escaping by automobile, how do you most effectively do so?” I immediately put up my hand and said, “You blow up every gas station in the area.” My drill sergeant looked at me funny, then asked Earl, the guy sitting next to me, what he thought. Earl said, “You remove the keys from the ignition and hide them.” The drill sergeant agreed, but you have to remember he was asking this a couple months before Rambo: First Blood hit theaters. I bet he changed his tune after seeing how John Rambo conducts business.



That's okay honey, there's a Shell station just down the road




Once in ‘Nam, I got very confused. I remember I’d been pretty drunk watching The Deer Hunter years earlier, and as a result for years I believed that Vietnam was a nation of deer. I wasn’t clear on whether they were half human, half deer, or if they had deer bodies with human brains, or they were deer with deer brains, but man did Vietnam sound cool. Just a bunch of Americans fighting commie stags and bucks halfway around the world. Frankly, I didn’t understand how the war wasn’t won in under a month. You can’t hold or fire a gun with a pair of hoofs, so where’s the challenge? In particular, I remember briefly coming to during a part where Robert De Niro tries to take down a Vietcong deer in the alpine forests of Vietnam with “one shot.” After slurring “aweeeeesome,” I passed back out. Anyways, by the time I was sober and walking through the theater lobby I saw Americans and deer on the poster and the title “The Deer Hunter,” and that sealed what I believed to be true while drunk.



Me love you long time









Long story short, the Vietnamese are not a race of deer people. They are very much human. And they have guns. And they know how to shoot them. And they hate Americans. And I know all the words to “Hot Child in the City.” And it’s all my own fault, because there were no deer in Apocalypse Now, which should have clued me in. I just figured Coppola was a cheap skate and would rather pay Chinese-American actors to play Vietnamese deer than pay actual deer at full price. To complicate matters, I’m no racist, but I can’t tell the difference between Far-East Asians and wildlife. One time I was visiting Nova Scotia and I thought a moose standing on the side of the road was my good pal Patrick from Honolulu. I stopped the car and yelled at him, then Patrick the Moose rammed the shit out of the SUV I’d rented. I didn’t talk to Patrick for two years after getting back to Hawaii, and when I explained how I thought he was a Nova Scotia moose and I thought it was weird he was eating grass in a ditch near Peggy’s Cove, but I was ready to forgive him for ramming my rental he never talked to me again. Some people are so sensitive about race.



Aim for their antlers