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A "PURPLE" CAN OF HAM & LIMA BEANS
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One way
to "pass the beans"
The C-Ration cans were color OD;
perhaps this one should have been purple
It has been said that typical field duty in Vietnam was “98% boredom and 2% sheer horror”. Well, given that “98%” worth of boredom, you know some goofy things are going to happen while waiting on the other “2%”.
One day I was horsing around with some of
the guys in my battery. Seems we had
come up with a game of taking a huge mallet (for driving tent stakes) and using
it as a baseball bat. One of
the men was tossing up rocks and trying to hit them with that big, cumbersome
mallet. He wasn’t faring very
well, so I picked up a C ration can of ham and lima beans to give him a bigger
target. I tossed
it to him saying, “Here, try and hit this.” He was standing maybe
I arrived at the 67th Med at Qui Nhon. Diagnosis: torn ligaments. Sure enough, I had torn the ligaments in my left ankle but no break. I felt embarrassed lying up in that hospital alongside guys who had been wounded in battle. At one point an officer and his assistant came by, going from bed to bed. They would stop and ask the guy how he got his wounds. If it was combat related, they presented him with Purple Heart right on the spot and took down the info. When they got to me I just said that it was NOT combat related and I wasn’t about to offer ANY explanation whatsoever.
Perhaps I should have asked if they could take the medal, remove the cameo of George Washington, and replace it with a small replica of a C-ration can labeled “Ham & Lima Beans”.
Nah…somebody might have gotten the idea that I got the medal because I was the only soldier in Vietnam who would actually eat those damned things.
Lt Gary "Dean" Springer