Rick Holt's Adventures in Vietnam
Letters Home from Vietnam, 1971
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Long Thanh
April 10, 1971
Saturday
1 pm
Dear Folks,
The vacation is over now. Monday I go back to that back breaking job in Avionics. I got down here yesterday about 6 pm. The mail clerk refused to open the mail room yesterday evening. We got the first Sergeant and he made him get our mail. They were trying to tell us we were lucky to get any mail at all. That it was illegal to send mail up on those planes. And if they sent it the way it was supposed to be sent, by forwarding it through the 37th Signal APO -- we would have been getting our mail three weeks late. That's a lot of BS if you ask me. There are just a lot of lazy people down here who don't want to do anything for anybody.
I understand it is getting almost like stateside down here with all the harassment and everything. Haircut inspections twice a week and people getting put on detail for all kinds of little things like wearing love beads. They're going to look awful hard to find something wrong with me though. I'm proud of my uniform and I wear it proudly. I can look those lifers right in the eye and they can't say a word. They'll have to get up pretty early to catch me. They'll never have an all volunteer army if they keep it up. They couldn't pay me enough to put up with it. Up at Da Nang we did our job, nobody bothered us. Down here our 'fearless leaders' have a hard time getting anybody to cooperate with them. And they can't understand why. The military is a necessary part of our government and even though it is a little screwed up I guess it doesn't make that much difference, because it's the little guys like me, Paulson and Duff who make our country great and not the lifers. I'm going to cut this letter short. I'll give you the order of the day a little later tonight.
Rick