Want To See Your World Explode?

Special to Pacific Flyer

On a blistering hot day in the jungles of Southeast Asia many years ago, my Navy unit received a message that we should stay away from certain grid coordinates - well away - the next day.

In fact, if we could get to Saigon, it would be better.

“What’s up?” our grizzled old chief asked the LT.

“I think the Air Force is going to create a new LZ (landing zones),” he replied.

“With what?” the chief asked.

“I don’t know, that’s above my pay grade, but we’re five miles or so away so it should be okay.”

“They ain’t using no nukes are they?” the chief persisted as we all listened intently. If the U.S. was going to escalate the war with nuclear weapons, we were going to ask for transfers to Alaska. Or Romania.

You see, officially, we weren’t even there. We were a spook group who wandered around in the jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, putting up sophisticated antennas and establishing portable VORs for the flyboys.

Our only protection was a bunch of crazy Marines who actually seemed to enjoy the humidity, the heat, the possibility of being attacked by the world’s most dangerous snake, the Black Mamba, and shooting at folks they didn’t even know. Marines, we decided, had to take a sanity test to get in one of these long range recon outfits.

If they were even remotely sane, they were over-qualified. Our lads were just the opposite - geeks, nerds, linguists, guys who used to build sophisticated transmitters in their bedrooms and broadcast rude music to cars passing by. We learned that we could get along with the leathernecks as long as we didn’t ever challenge them physically (fat chance) or say anything rude about the United States Freaking Marine Corps.

Well, since we were, technically, an intelligence outfit we got on our backchannel radios and tried to find out exactly what it was the Air Force had come up with to create an instant landing zone. The best we could get out of anybody was that they were going to drop something out of a B-52 and we should get as far away from it as we could.

So we took some lawn chairs, a cooler, a couple of sun umbrellas, six crazy Marines and set up on top of a karst (a rock outcropping) about three miles from the grid coordinates. We knew what time the “event” was to take place but not exactly what was about to happen.

We got there an hour early and after sipping some native nectar and munching on our K-Rats candy bars, we aimed our cameras (bought fresh in Saigon) at the coordinates, which was nothing but dense, thick, overgrown, dangerous jungle full of evil little men in black pajamas.

Of course, a B-52 tended to come over at 40,000 feet so we couldn’t see him, but we had his radio frequency and heard him call control that he was preparing to drop. Let’s see, our brainiacs began figuring, he’s at 40,000 feet, terminal velocity is 132 mph depending on winds and drag, so it should be hitting right about KAPOW/WHOOM/WHAM!!!! The explosion occurred about 1,500 feet in the air and blew us all off the karst, back down the other side and into some thick, green, barbed bushes.

“Holy freaking s...t! What the hell was that! I think I’m deaf, am I deaf? Probably, and your nose is bleeding, ohmigod, ohmigod,” etc. etc. Those of us who were able, including all the Marines, climbed back up to the top of the karst and looked at the grid coordinates and there was a perfect, round, flat circle about a mile in diameter with absolutely nothing, and I mean NO THING within that circle.

Not a tree, not a blade of grass, and for sure no one in black pajamas. We looked around and all our gear was gone, blown into eternity or possibly Cambodia. And that’s was our first exposure to what we later discovered was a fuel-air explosive.

It actually makes the air catch on fire, plus everything the air touches. Most of us had burns on our faces and unprotected arms, nose bleeds, ear bleeds and scorched hair. It was a week before anyone could really hear, even with the headphones turned all the way up.

When we sneaked back to our hootch, the LT was standing in the doorway.

“You boys didn’t go out to the grid site to watch, did you?”

“Us sir? Why would you think that?”

“Possibly because some of you are naked and all of you look like you’ve been laying on the beach for week.”

Even the Marines were awestruck and, according to them, they’d been everywhere and seen everything. Since we weren’t even officially in that country, there was no report filed.

But, sometimes, late at night, when I can’t sleep, I can still see that monster sucking all the air into a gigantic, almost majestic, ball of fire, then exploding outwards. What were we thinking?

And, what do they have now they aren’t telling us about?