My recent VA experience

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Blinkers make a noise?

In my case, it was 106 mm recoilless rifles that got my hearing. That plus just the general loud noises of combat.

They blew our main ammo dump (1st Cav) at Camp Evans a couple months after Tet when it was all loaded up for our coming assault on Khe Sanh to dig out the Marines. It was kinda loud too, especially when the four 50,000 gallon underground helo fuel tanks blew up, one after the other. Those babies go up with a mushroom cloud that was visible at night from the glow of burning fuel. I had been sitting on a sandbag bunker some distance away, watching the pyrotechnics, and literally thought we had been nuked when the first one of those big tanks went off. "Omigod," I thought as I rolled backward off the bunker. "They had a nuke in there. I been fried!" This panicky speculation was not quite as crazy as it now sounds. There was a tactical nuclear warhead for the 8" gun, and there had always been a Strangelove element of our military who wanted to use nukes in VN.