“We’d take a gas mask and take the filters out and tape over them, and just make a hole in one of the filters. We’d stick a joint in the gas mask and puff like mad, just keep breathing until you either dropped or it burned through. Sometimes you would drop, and sometimes it would burn through.”
– ‘Strange Ground: An Oral History Of Americans In Vietnam, 1945-1975 By Harry Maurer’
Sergeant David Combe, South Vietnam April 19, 1969
“Pot was a funny thing there. Not everybody smoked it. I’ve heard all sorts of reports of the time I was there… 20 percent, 80 percent… I would say in my area, maybe 40 percent of the people were smoking pot, another 40 percent were getting drunk. There were 20 percent who just wrote letters home. And listened to Barbra Streisand. Most people smoked their pot in a pipe, because cigarette papers were alway getting sticky and soggy. You couldn’t keep them dry in the humidity. Finally I came up with an invention. I cut a hole in the bottom of my locker and put a light bulb on an extension cord in there, so the light bulb was on all the time to keep things dry. American ingenuity.
One night the authorities decided to bust us. They knew we were some of the hard-core pot smokers. So they staged a raid. It was the most incredible raid. They came in both ends of the hootch with machine guns and MP’s and CID men and the company commander. There were literally twenty people who burst in on this hootch. Of course in the army, in order to be arrested for illegal possession of anything you had to really possess it. It had to be on your body or in your locked locker. So the rule of the game was: Don’t be holding. If you’re traveling, keep it handy to throw away. And if you’re at home, leave it out, but not on your body. They walked in and comfiscated something in the neighborhood of four pounds of prime marijuana. It was all over the place. They lifted up the pillow of my bed and there were ten neatly rolled joints laid out there. They said, “Whose are those?” I said, “I don’t know.” They said, “Isn’t that your bed?” I said “No, that’s the army’s bed. I just sleep there.” They checked in my locker, and here was this light bulb with all these Zig-Zags. But there was no law against Zig-Zags. They found other stuff that I had brought back from Australia. Some brightly colored silk underwear that I had picked up in Sydney, a skimpy men’s clothes catalogue. And they got the idea that they were really getting involved in more than they could handle. Oooooh-kay. They pushed that back and concentrated on the pot search. Which they couldn’t find on us, so they couldn’t bust us.
Oh, they were mad. They were so mad. My seargeant, Sergeant Walker, who was a lifer clerk – what a combination – he was very disappointed. Very disappointed. He said, “You know, you could be an outstanding soldier. Why don’t you just come down and have a beer with me every night instead of this stuff?” I said, “Why, Sergeant Walker, how can you talk about drinking beer and getting yourself all fucked up in the middle of this hostile place?” So they just threw up their hands. After that we were always warned, because one of the MP’s would come over and smoke with us, and he told us when there was going to be a crackdown.
We were always trying to find new ways to get fucked up. It was so terrible there, so boring. That was the worst part – every day was just like the one before. The only difference was maybe today would be wetter than yesterday. So it was a search for how you could possibly smoke more than you had smoked last night. It was a kind of challenge. We’d take a gas mask and take the filters out and tape over them, and just make a hole in one of the filters. We’d stick a joint in the gas mask and puff like mad, just keep breathing until you either dropped or it burned through. Sometimes you would drop, and sometimes it would burn through.”
– ‘Strange Ground: An Oral History Of Americans In Vietnam, 1945-1975 By Harry Maurer’
‘Tunnel Rat’ Vietnam War