by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
This is a memoir created for my Eng 2080 Creative Nonfiction class.
"You can't be too careful."
I've heard this many times, and said it to myself a few as well.
The place I said it to myself most diligently was when I was a soldier in Vietnam in 1968. I was going to be there for exactly one year, if all went well. Uncle Sam had promised us soldiers that, that was our tour of duty.
"I can't be too careful." was my first thought each morning.
But when this thought became most important was at night. That was when "Charlie" was active. That’s when the rockets got fired that landed on our bases. That’s when we got shot back at.
That didn't happen often, but one night it did.
I was manning a bunker on a cliff over-looking the Song Be river. The place was beautiful -- lush and tropical -- it would have been a great place to film a Tarzan movie. Our base had been a resort in that long-ago, before the war. While I watched that night, a fire-fight broke out between someone in the valley and the ARVN base next to us. The ARVNs were using machine guns with tracers. Great fun to watch. One of them was a .50 caliber. Huge... and fast. Those bullets flew in almost a straight line through the night across the valley.
For a moment, one of the enemy returned fire with tracers -- I suppose he was frustrated. He was shooting some kind of puny .30 cal. The bullets didn't even reach the top of the hillside. But for the next two minutes the guy on the .50 cal never let up. That sure was noisy compared to the burst firing he had been doing previously, and was supposed to be doing. Then it was all over. And, unlike some war movie, there was no explanation or "The End" when it ended. It simply stopped.
In the end, I was careful enough, I survived, my tour of duty ended, and I was sooo happy when I was on that plane headed home.
The second place I was told this often was when I was working as a rocket scientist just north of the Great Salt Lake and west of Brigham City. There I was engineering rocket fuel, the solid propellant type.
"You can't be too careful. This stuff burns hot." I was told, "So hot, it can burn through concrete."
The buildings around me were one proof that the people I was working with believed in this being careful wholeheartedly. The buildings were small, widely spaced, and each one had a deliberately flimsy wall so that if there was an explosion one wall would blow out, not the entire building.
"You can't be too careful." Nothing was done by a single person. One person did the work -- strictly according to written instructions -- and a second watched the first person work -- to make sure the instructions were followed to the letter. Both people marked off their work on a check list.
My job was going to be writing those instructions.
I couldn't be too careful at work, so the excitement on this job was getting to and from work. I lived in Salt Lake, and some days I would take off at dawn in a small flying club plane from Salt Lake City airport, fly across the lake, and land at the VIP airport the company had built on the site so military brass could come in easily when they wanted to inspect. I'd work my day, then fly back home. It was expensive -- cost me half a day's pay -- but it was lots of fun, and I was building up hours to get a commercial pilot's licence.
The highlight of that flying was when I got to watch the very first test-firing of a Space Shuttle Booster while I was flying my plane, circling over the Great Salt Lake.
The booster wasn't going anywhere. It was strapped to the ground, horizontally, and the exhaust was pointed at a hillside. When it fired, the flame bathed the hillside and a huge cloud shot thousands of feet into the sky as the exhaust bounced off the hillside. Now that was a neat, and unique, spectacle. And I was watching from my plane. (here is a video of what I saw)
As I said, my job was going to be writing those instructions.
But, instead, I quit.
I decided this "you can't be too careful"-lifestyle was not the life for me.
I wanted to risk, to experiment, to try doing things in ways no one else had done. Yeah! That's the life for me!
So instead of working on huge rockets, I switched to working on small computers -- the newly invented personal computers and newly invented ways to connect them together, Local Area Networks (LAN).
Something didn't work? Uh oh! Crash! Then, Ah Well... hit the reset button and try, try again. This was work where a steady stream of new-and-world-changing inventions were coming out. Yeah! World Changing! One example being spreadsheets. Yeah, I liked this a lot better.
I was rocking the whole world, and I didn't have to be too careful while I was doing it.
--The End--
ARVN (pronounced are-vin) = Army of the Republic of Vietnam. It was US soldier jargon for South Vietnamese soliders, our allies.
To read more on my Vietnam War experiences go here.