Listening To Old Warriors
Veterans have lots to tell us if we stop and listen
The old man laboriously made his way past the parked cars towards the restaurant. With his ball cap, knee brace and cane he didn’t stand out from the other retirees in this suburb of Las Vegas save for his greater infirmity and determination.
I almost stopped and asked if he needed assistance but something in his demeanor waved me off. The old and physically challenged are often prideful.
I’d sat down at the counter and ordered my breakfast when the old man came up and asked for the free stool next to me. “Of course,” I said, and he heaved himself onto it with an effort that left him winded.
My order arrived and he flicked a finger at my plate. “What’s that mess?” he said, pointing to my corned-beef hash. “You can have it,” when I told him.
For a moment I feared I’d landed one of those grumpy, opinionated old farts full of bile and bad memories. But past experience held my tongue and sure enough the old man began sharing true gold.
I didn’t have my notebook with me — I’d just gone out for breakfast — and I’m paraphrasing what he said. But the encounter rang in my head for hours.
“Fred”—as I’ll call him — asked me what I did. I told him I write for a living and—judging him to be a veteran—I mentioned my work for War is Boring. I had to explain the name but he knew what blogs are.
Punji Traps, Waveguides & Body Hoists
“You write about military stuff, do you?” he said. “You know what punji traps are? When I was in Vietnam I came up with a way of detecting them.” I sat up and leaned in. Between bites of egg and hash I heard his tale.
American troops in Southeast Asia hated and feared punji traps. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers dug deep pits in the middle of jungle paths and camouflaged them with branches and fronds. The sharp bamboo stakes smeared with feces inflicted terrible infected wounds on troops who fell into the traps.
Because they were often nothing more than dirt holes and organic matter they were difficult to detect. “But I came up with a way to detect them,” said Fred, “even though I’m not very smart.”
“I realized that the sound made by helicopter rotor tips was the same frequency as the sound of an explosion. Now you know they use explosives for seismic work, the sound waves travel through the ground and they map oil and gas deposits that way.
“I figured out that you could use the sound of an approaching helicopter like a seismic boom and pick up the hollowness of a punji pit. The math for that kind of stuff was available as far back as 1937. Anyone trained as a civil engineer could figure it out. I built a detector we used in Vietnam.”
I asked Fred about his career. “I’m just a Nebraska farm boy. I don’t remember so much anymore on account of an injury I got in Vietnam.
“I worked on electronics in World War II. Radar and stuff. Vacuum tubes — triodes and rectifier circuits. When we got a pentode [a five-element vacuum tube] we thought that was hot stuff.”
“You know what a waveguide is?” he asked me. I acknowledged I’d heard the term.
“They’re a long piece of metal with a hollow space running through it. Specially shaped so that radio waves running through it stay inside and don’t lose signal strength.
“I was up on a ships’ radio mast working on a radar unit. Pretty early, 1943 or thereabouts. Dropped a piece of waveguide clear to the deck. Made a hell of a noise. I thought I was going through the wringer but it wasn’t damaged enough to hurt it.”
Years later a Nebraska radio station built a tall tower to catch signals from distant commercial stations. “They weren’t getting enough signal to the ground from the tower. I asked the guy, ‘Do you know what a waveguide is?’ He didn’t so I helped him out with that.”
After the war Fred visited a veterans hospital. He saw how much trouble nurses had getting wounded vets out of bed and into bathrooms.
“You ever seen a butcher’s freezer? How they hang the meat up on these racks of hooks that can move around? I came up with a setup like that for hospitals.” Fred said the nurses could hook up vets in slings from overhead racks and then move them from room to room.
Still Inventing Things
Fred pointed to his knee brace. “”I still invent things. I invented a better knee brace, one that folds backwards and you lock it to support 40–50 pounds. Looking for someone to manufacture it. The wife won’t let me spend the money!”
We chatted some more then Fred slowly got up to go. I wrote out my contact information and asked him to stay in touch. I wanted to hear more of his stories.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I come in here most every morning for breakfast. The girls know me. You can find me here if you want to talk.”
I tried to confirm what Fred told me. I found lots of information about punji traps online but little about detection methods besides manuals and memoirs of careful probing by soldiers and Marines. I couldn’t find information about the hospital lift system Frank said he invented. Or his claimed invention of the smoke alarm.
But in a larger sense that doesn’t matter. Fred may have been yarning for the benefit of a credulous younger man, or maybe getting a bit fuzzy on the details.
But he clearly knew what he was talking about and his tales were new to me. His stories were specific and unusual, neither generic I-was-there accounts of Okinawa or there-I-was boasting about hand-to-hand combat with Viet Cong.
If Fred made them up he was as inventive a storyteller as he was an engineer. And I don’t believe he made them up.
So much of the past has evaded capture in books and records. So many amazing experiences drift within the grey matter under greying heads and behind wrinkled faces.
I’m going to keep trying to verify Fred’s stories. I’ll look out for him at the restaurant and dig through Google. And I’m going to listen to more old folks when they feel like talking, especially veterans. They have a lot to tell us and a lot of it is pure gold.
