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The Old Lady’s Coffin: a Vietnam Story
Posted on | May 14, 2010 | 2 Comments
by Rick Gauger ©2010
[Author's note: This is the first time I have written about my experiences as an intelligence officer with the First Cavalry Division during the Vietnam War. A warning to sensitive readers: this story contains descriptions that you may find disturbing. Everything in this story is true.]
This is one of the things that happened at LZ Pony. The LZ had been in place four or five days by the time this happened. There were about 30 American soldiers at Pony, including my little interrogating team. Fighting was going on elsewhere, so our helicopter support was sparse. We didn’t have our jeeps, our tents or our other luxuries. We were by ourselves on a bare hilltop surrounded by little hamlets and rice paddies in a valley in the mountains. We lived under our ponchos. For two weeks our luck held out. The weather was good and there was no enemy except for a sniper who used to fire one shot at us from a great distance every evening at 5 PM.
The LZ commander sent out small patrols of seven or eight infantrymen, to explore the hamlets that dotted the big valley and its tributary valleys. I wasn’t supposed to go on these patrols, but I did anyway. I was curious about this exotic place, the infantry needed interpreters, and it’s smart to scout around when you’re in VC country. My Vietnamese Army interpreter, Sgt Xuan, was willing to go too.
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Baby Universe: speculations and shortcomings
Posted on | May 14, 2010 | 1 Comment
A recent conversation with a friend:
R: Okay, I just heard that some of your co-workers are claiming to be able to see evidence of ‘the time before the Big Bang.’ I think you should go see them, and, in your authority as the oldest employee at Goddard, to knock it off. Things are confusing enough as it is.
B: I suspect there are some problems with the definition of “Big Bang” in such statements. If the Big Bang is considered to be the beginning of the Universe, then they or the reporters who are reporting it should indeed Knock It OFF! If, however the Big Bang is the period of Inflation that supposedly happened a split second after the beginning of the Universe, then there is a chance something can be figured out about that time before the Bang, though actually “seeing” it may be a bit of a conceit.
R: Speaking of the Big Bang, and waffling around it, there’s a similar issue emerging in deep-time geology. Lately I’ve been trying to study more about the early history of Earth, the Hadean Eon and all that, and I notice that there is a tendency to start Earth history at the point the moon was created, supposedly by a collision with a big, big planetoid named (By whom? Why wasn’t I consulted?) Theia. What if I want to hear about before that?
It’s like the big bang not really being the Big Bang.
B: It seems likely that anything large enough to generate the moon from an Earth collision probably would fundamentally change the evolution/history path of the Earth. So maybe it will never be possible to do anything but speculate on what the Earth was like as a baby. Either that or it was a pretty dull place before Theia arrived…
There has been a lot of theory and research done on solar system and planet birth, but not much on Plant/Planetoid collision. Sounds like a good place to start or climax a story….
Whose Blog is This?
Posted on | May 13, 2010 | No Comments
I’m Rick Gauger, a writer of Science Fiction, a Cartoonist, and Vietnam Veteran. I wrote the science fiction novel, Charon’s Ark. I was born in 1942. Britt Griswold is my friend, whom I met when he was a teenager in the Annapolis, Maryland, area sometime around 1975. I aged and Britt grew up. When I began to write in 1980, Britt took an interest. When such things became possible, he created this blog for me. Then he urged and urged me to come out of my hole and show off my works on the blog. I finally began doing so in 2009. Britt has stuck with me during my decades of depression, constantly encouraging me. No one ever had a better friend.
