by Si Robertson
You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I heard! One guy showed up and stayed in my hotel room for three weeks. We became pretty good friends, and he told me about how the Vietcong attacked their camp one night. He said three of their guys were badly hurt during the attack, and the medic immediately started treating their wounds. The medic attended to one guy, leaned him up against a tree, and then started patching up the next guy.
Well, after the medic patched up the second guy’s shoulder, he moved on to the third guy, who was shot in the leg. All of a sudden, they heard the second guy screaming. A tiger had attacked him and was dragging him back into the jungle! The medic and the other two guys started shooting at the tiger and scared it back into the bush. It was one of the most frightening stories I heard in Vietnam.
Fortunately for me, I avoided most of the dangerous missions in Vietnam. But one day, my colonel came to me and closed my hotel room door.
“This conversation never took place,” he said.
Uh-oh, I thought to myself. I’m in trouble now.
The colonel reached into his pocket and handed me three thousand piastres, which was Vietnamese money.
“Go get me a Jeep engine,” he said.
“Say what?” I asked. “Why did you come to me? What do you expect me to do?”
“You have the money,” he said. “Go find me a Jeep engine.”
Hey, I didn’t know what to do. I went and found one of the guys staying in my room. He’d been in Vietnam for more than three years and was always downtown. He spoke good Vietnamese, so I figured he knew a bunch of the locals and where to find a Jeep engine.
“Hey, Kelly,” I said. “Look, I need to go get a Jeep engine. Can you help me?”
“Sure, I know where to go,” Kelly said. “No problem. When do you need it?”
“Now,” I said.
“What are we going to drive?” Kelly asked.
“Hey, I guess we’ll take the deuce and a half,” I said. “We’re going to need somewhere to put the engine.”
“Meet me in the lobby in an hour,” Kelly said.
An hour later, I met Kelly in the lobby and we loaded up in the deuce and a half. We drove downtown, and he told me to pull the truck into a narrow alley.
“Hey, this truck won’t fit into the alley,” I said.
“Sure it will,” he said. “Pull the truck all the way to the end.”
Sure enough, the truck fit into the alley with only a couple of feet to spare on each side. When we reached the end, Kelly jumped out and disappeared for a few minutes. He came back with a short Vietnamese man.
“Get out,” Kelly told me.
I jumped out of the truck. The Vietnamese man proceeded to blindfold Kelly and me.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You don’t need to know,” the Vietnamese man said.
Over the next several minutes, we walked through a maze of alleys and doorways, and then they loaded us into a car. We drove around Can Tho for about thirty minutes. I knew I was going to die when we stopped!
When we finally stopped, I heard a door open. We walked into a building, and then someone took our blindfolds off. When I opened my eyes, the only thing I could see was hundreds of large green containers. “Property of the U.S. Army” was stamped on the side of every container! There were engines for Jeeps, helicopters, and trucks lined up against the wall for nearly three hundred yards. It was like an auto parts store. They had whatever the army needed because they’d stolen it from us.
“We need a Jeep engine,” Kelly said. “Give them the money, Robertson.”
“Hey, this ain’t the deal,” I said. “I want to see the Jeep engine on our truck. You sure are a trusting soul. We don’t even know where we are.”
“Just give them the money,” he said. “The engine will be on the back of the truck when we get back. I’ve done this before.”
Against my better judgment, I handed the Vietnamese man the money, knowing I’d never see it or him again. And I knew there wouldn’t be an engine on our truck, either.
Well, they blindfolded us again and drove us back to our truck. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t believe it when I saw a Jeep engine in the back of it.
The Vietnamese man shook my hand and said, “Nice doing business with you!”
Hey, now I buy everything through the black market: designer jeans, boots, high-definition TVs, toasters, kidneys, livers, and Swatch watches. It’s the only way to do business!
I’ll never forget the time a Bravo Company soldier stayed in my room for a couple of weeks shortly before I was sent home. The only things the guy carried with him were an M16 rifle, ammunition, and a small rucksack that had pineapple grenades hanging from it. I was beginning to wonder how crazy the guy actually was. One night, the guys staying next to us—our rooms were only separated by thin partitions—got drunk and started getting rowdy. They were throwing beer cans and boots at us. The guy staying with me started to get really upset. He’d been chasing Charlie for nearly a year, while trying to stay alive, and the last thing he wanted to deal with was a few drunks! Well, when a boot hit the mosquito net over the guy’s bed, he nearly lost it. He went next door and told them to settle down.
A few seconds later, the guys threw another boot at him.
The guy staying with me reached under his bed, grabbed a pineapple grenade, and popped the pin. Then he threw it over the partition into the next room! Hey, I was lying against the wall to the other room. I grabbed my thin mattress and wrapped my body in it. I was expecting the grenade to explode and blow me into the next room! When the grenade landed in the next room, it sounded like something out of a cartoon. The three guys over there started scurrying for cover. I thought they were all going to die!
Well, the guy in my room was standing in our door, laughing his butt off. I thought he was slap insane! He walked into the next room, grabbed the grenade, came back, and threw it at me.
“Hey, it’s a dud!” he said. “They reacted the same way Charlie does when I throw one into their bunker. There’s one big difference, though. The Vietcong doesn’t get to run. When I throw it into their bunker, I mow them down as they scurry out!”
I looked at him and said, “Man, you’re about half a bubble off. You’re not right.”
I’m telling you: Vietnam did something to your mind if you were over there too long. Another guy who stayed in my room had been in Vietnam since the war started. He was on his sixth tour of duty. He was going home for leave and coming back for a seventh tour!
“Hey, man,” I told him. “You’ve done your part for your country. You’ve done your share and five other guys’ shares. You have a wife and two beautiful daughters. Go home and stay there! Good grief.”
“Hey, I’m going home for thirty days to enjoy my family,” he said. “Then I’m coming back here and kill some more Vietcong.”
“Man, you’re not right,” I said.
“If my mind was a computer chip, I guess there might be a few blips on it,” he said.
Hey, I guess I’m lucky my brain was faulty before I even went to Vietnam.
“As someone who travels with a gallon of tea, I’ve got to make a lot of pit stops.”
Iced Tea Glass
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, we actually had pretty good food in the army. There was one cook in Vietnam who baked some of the best cinnamon rolls you could ever want to put in your mouth. He loved to bake, and his cinnamon rolls were humongous. He didn’t spare any of Uncle Sam’s sugar or cinnamon, either. His cinnamon rolls would melt in your mouth, and we actually cried when he went home.
I worked in the kitchen for a few weeks during basic training at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. I had a crazy buddy I met on the train from Shreveport, Louisiana, and he told me he had the answer to all of our worries about being in the army.
“Hey, we volunteer for everything,” he said.
“Look,” I said. “Everybody I’ve talked to told me not to volunteer for nothing. People have warned me
about doing something stupid like volunteering.”
During our first week of basic training, one of the sergeants walked up to my platoon and said, “I need two volunteers for KP.”
I knew KP was kitchen patrol, and I didn’t want any part of it. But before I could even move, my buddy had not only his arm up but also mine.
“You idiot,” I told him. “This better work out.”
Hey, it might have been worse. When I was in Vietnam, one of the sergeants asked my platoon if any of us had experience in radio communications. I nearly raised my hand because I thought I might finally get to see some serious action, but then I thought better of it. Some sucker from Indiana, who was an amateur radio operator, raised his hand instead.
“Good,” the sergeant said. “You can dig the hole for the new telephone pole.”
For two weeks during boot camp, I helped in the kitchen, mostly peeling potatoes and washing pots and pans. I received a behind-the-scenes look at how the food was prepared and cooked. Hey, it wasn’t pretty. Surprisingly, we actually had good meat come into the kitchen. The steaks we were fed were some of the best-looking beef I’d ever seen—at least until the cooks got their hands on them! What the army cooks did to the meat was criminal. Hey, you haven’t chewed on a two-dollar steak until you’ve eaten a New York strip in the army! But the rest of the chow they cooked in the mess hall didn’t taste that bad for the most part.
After I was finished with KP, I made the mistake of offering our company cook some advice.
“Hey, if you put a lid on the pan there will be less dust and dirt in your soup,” I said.
“You mind your business,” he told me. “Your job is to defend South Vietnam.”
“That’s right,” I told him. “My duty is to defend South Vietnam—not eat it!”
Even some of the combat rations the army fed us were pretty edible. Our rations were actually called Meal, Combat, Individual (MCI), but everybody called them C-rations, which was what the army had been feeding its troops since the end of World War II. The MCI was introduced in 1958 and came to us in a cardboard carton, which contained one small flat can, one large can, and two even smaller cans. The cans were stacked on top of each other, so they were easy to carry in your pack.
The M-unit can was a meat-based entrée, which might have been something like beefsteak with potatoes and gravy, beans and wieners, chicken and noodles, chopped ham and eggs, ham and lima beans, or spaghetti with meatballs. The spaghetti was probably my favorite. Crackers, chocolate, hardtack biscuits (everybody called them “John Wayne cookies”), processed cheese, peanut butter, or jam was usually in the B-unit can, and the D-unit can was a dessert, typically something like apricots, peaches, pears, fruit cocktail, pound cake, or applesauce. If you were really unlucky, the D-unit can only contained a couple of pieces of white bread. That was a bad day, Jack!
The army also gave us an accessory pack with each meal, which included a spoon, salt, pepper, sugar, instant coffee, a couple of pieces of chewing gum, and toilet paper, as well as a four-pack of cigarettes and book of twenty matches. I started smoking cigarettes in high school (I have since quit, but I’ll tell you more about that later), so I was happy to find them in my accessory pack. Eventually, the U.S. military figured out smoking wasn’t healthy for its troops, so the army took cigarettes out of MCIs in 1975. I’ll be honest: I was not a happy camper at the time.
Hey, army food wasn’t exactly Miss Kay’s cooking or fine dining, but you could survive on it and it was better than going hungry.
Of course, I never would have survived twelve months in Vietnam without Momma sending me care packages from home. In one of the first boxes, she mailed me a pair of work boots. There was a Tupperware iced tea cup and a couple of cans of jalapeño peppers in one boot, and a couple of cans of Spam and beans and wieners in the other boot.
I had a small electric cooktop in my hotel room in downtown Can Tho, so I cooked myself late-night meals whenever I was hungry. Shortly after Momma sent me the jalapeño peppers, one of my buddies came into my room. Of course, he’d been drinking whiskey all night and was three sheets to the wind.
“Oh, man!” he said. “Whatcha cookin’, Robertson?”
“Hey, get you some of the pork and beans and Spam,” I told him. “But you don’t want any of these peppers.”
“I love hot peppers,” he said. “Give me a couple of ’em.”
“You don’t want any of these,” I said. “These are from Louisiana. They get jalapeño in your business!”
He grabbed a couple of peppers anyway. A few seconds later, he ran out of my room looking for water.
Somehow, Momma’s iced tea cup stayed with me all the way through Vietnam, and I’ve carried it with me in my back pocket ever since. I guess if it can make it through the napalm, mustard gas, and rice wine of Vietnam, I’ll probably take it to my grave. Everywhere I go, I carry a gallon of iced tea and my light blue Tupperware cup. Now my cup even has its own Facebook page and Twitter account. Some people might even say my cup has a better personality than my nephew Jase.
Now, there are plenty of duplicates of my blue Tupperware cup, but there’s only one original. It never leaves my sight. One time, a guy handed me a blank check and wanted to buy my iced tea cup.
“Fill in the amount,” he said. “Whatever it takes—I want that Tupperware cup.”
“It’s not for sale,” I told him.
I told the guy to go buy his own Tupperware cup, but he insisted he wanted mine. I told him A&E TV wouldn’t let me part with it.
During our first season of Duck Dynasty, I walked into the Duck Commander warehouse, and one of the workers told me there was a big box for me in the back.
“Are you sure it’s for me?” I asked him.
“Oh, yeah, it says Si Robertson on it,” he said.
“Hey, put it on the back of the truck,” I said.
I took the box home and opened it up. Inside, there was a stainless steel saucepan with a lid, a big boiling pot, and a really nice set of steak knives. I looked at the bottom of the box and there were twelve Tupperware cups.
There was also a letter to me from the chairman and CEO of the Tupperware Brands Corporation in Orlando, Florida.
Apparently, Tupperware cups are making a comeback.
And they have the lovely Merritt Robertson to thank.
“Today, with computers, if you’re dating some little ol’ girl online, you can’t even smell her. Girls smell nice.”
Christine and I pose in front of one of our first houses. I probably asked her to marry me two hundred times before she finally said yes!
The Woman of My Dreams
AFTER I LEFT VIETNAM on October 17, 1969, the army transferred me to Fort Devens in Shirley, Massachusetts, which is about fifty-five miles northwest of Boston. I was stationed at Fort Devens for about two years and worked in medical supply. Hey, you want to talk about living in a foreign land. I grew up in the South, and it took me a long time to get used to living in the cold, harsh winters of the Northeast. I’d rarely seen snow in my life, and it seemed like it snowed at Fort Devens eight months out of the year.
Hey, have you ever listened to someone from Boston talk? It sounds like their elementary school teachers went straight from Q to S when teaching them the alphabet. They don’t know how to use the letter R! During a weekend pass, I visited Boston with a buddy of mine who was from there. He didn’t have a car, so I drove mine. After we visited his parents, he took me to nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the home of Harvard University. He wanted me to go bar hopping with him to find some college girls. Hey, I figured the Ivy League and I went together like shrimp and grits. I dropped him off outside a bar and he told me, “Pahk the cah at Havad Yad.” Of course I had no idea what he said, so I drove around in circles for hours. And some people think I talk funny!
People from Boston also used words I’d never heard before. Hey, they refer to shorts as clam diggers and headaches as bangers! They even refer to rubber bands a
s elastics. Do they use rubber bands to keep up their trousers? I walked into the barbershop on base, and the barber told me he was going to give me a whiffle.
“Are we playing baseball?” I asked him.
The first time I walked into my barrack, I asked a sergeant where I could find some water to drink.
“The bubbler is down the hall,” he said.
“The what?” I asked him.
It took me a few minutes to realize he was talking about a water fountain!
Living in the Northeast was definitely a change in scenery for me, but I believe God has a purpose for everything. It didn’t take me long to realize he’d sent me to Fort Devens to meet the woman who would become my wife. I met the former Christine Raney for the first time when I was hitchhiking to an off-base nightclub in November 1969. Christine was riding in the car with two of her friends, one of whom I already knew, and they saw me walking down the road. They couldn’t have missed me. I was wearing a black leather jacket with a big dragon on the back of it. The dragon practically glowed in the dark. I’d picked the jacket up in Vietnam. If Christine’s friend hadn’t recognized me, they probably would have thought I was some rock star.
From the start, Christine didn’t like me very much. She thought I was arrogant and full of myself. She even told me, “You think you’re the rooster of the walk!”
Christine had been married once before; her husband left her because they didn’t think she could bear children. They’d tried to have a baby for a couple of years, but she couldn’t get pregnant. Doctors told her she couldn’t have children because of an underlying medical condition. Her husband wanted a family, so he left her. When Christine met me, she was still pretty leery about dating men. My buddy had been trying to set her up with some of his friends for months, but she had a long list of demands she wanted in her next boyfriend.
“Well, describe to me the kind of man you want,” my buddy told her.
“Okay, here you go,” she said. “He has to be six feet to six feet three inches tall with a slender frame. He has to have blue or green eyes and a beautiful smile with dimples. Most importantly, he also has to be smart and have a keen sense of humor and a warm heart.”
