The Calendar, The Nuts, And A Long-Ago Time In A Far-Away Place.

No political punching today. This year’s terrific NCAA tournament (my bracket was busted in about a minute and a half) has put me in a good frame of mind.

So, let me tell you a story.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a 23-year-old, newly minted, Infantry 2nd Lieutenant Airborne Ranger with my name spent a fair amount of time in a little woebegone country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam.

In Vietnam, I took command of a platoon of about 30 draftee soldiers, none of whom wanted to be there and all of whom never understood why they were. There were no college graduates among that lot, and a few never finished high school. They were America’sflotsam and jetsam, and they all knew it. I would grow to love every one of them.

Month after month, my guys and I patrolled the mountains in the north of South Vietnam, occasionally encountering North Vietnamese Regulars who were doing the same thing. Those were interesting meetings. We didn’t talk much when we met, but we did frequently have a somewhat frank exchange of views.

Our Platoon had some memorable moments in Vietnam, such as The March to the Sea, The Rescue, The Whistling Mortar Round, The Search for the Body That Turned Out to Be a Piece of Wood, and The Flying Flywheel. But those are stories for another day. For right now, for today, we’re telling the story of The Calendar and the Nuts.

Four months before the end of my first Vietnam tour, the Army promoted me to 1st Lieutenant, made me say “goodbye” to my guys, sent a Huey chopper to fly me out of the jungle, and gave me a staff job on Firebase Vegel in northern South Vietnam. A firebase was a temporary army camp built by the Corps of Engineers on top of a mountain. It supplied the troops in its area both logistically and militarily. And by “militarily” I mean weapons, ammunition, and helicopter gunship support and transportation. Firebases were cushier than the jungle, but often more dangerous, because they were stationery targets. That was made apparent to me a number of times in vivid ways.

My job on Vegel was to dream up crazy search and destroy operations for the “grunts” in the jungle, the crazier the better. I did my best to make them crazy enough to satisfy the Commanders, but not crazy enough to get our folks killed. It was not easy.

The Army of North Vietnam and their comrades in the south, the Viet Cong, were a determined foe. They were fighting with biblical devotion for a purpose they believed in — their country. They weren’t going anywhere until the war was over and they had won. We, on the other hand, were the political pawns, the shmucks who were there because we had to be, and none of us liked it all that much. Wasn’t our country. And all of us knew, with a fair degree of certainty, the date we were scheduled to go home — if we could stay alive long enough.

With two months to go in the country with the biggest mosquitos on earth, I began to get a bit anxious. I knew guys who had come to untimely ends with only a few days left, one, a good friend, within three hours of leaving. So, realizing I needed a diversion to take my mind off things, I decided to create one — my very own 60 day, Short-Timer’s Calendar.

I confess while deep in the jungle in the 1960s my admiration for and envy of Hugh Heffner knew no bounds. Consequently, my Short-Timer’s Calendar was the centerfold of the June 1970 Playboymagazine. To build the Calendar, I enlisted the aid of my Battalion Commander Bulldog Carter (that’s right, Bulldog), and Buck Kernan, my partner who went on to become a Lieutenant General, like his father before him. The three of us divided the luscious photo into 60 puzzle-like areas counting down from 60 to one. The trajectory of the progression became increasingly lascivious.

Thereafter, we held a nightly, candle-lit ceremony in the bunker occupied by Buck and me.

But before I describe the ceremony, I have to tell you about the Macadamia nuts.

During Vietnam, soldiers who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in that hellhole were allowed a ten-day R&R (Rest and Relaxation) vacation, usually a little after the mid-point of their tour. Unmarried soldiers usually went either to Bangkok, Thailand, or Australia. We always marveled at how many of the ones who went to Australia never returned.

Most of the time the married folks went to Hawaii to meet their wives. So, when my turn came, I hopped a plane at Da Nang airbase halfway up the coast of the South China Sea and flew off to meet my wife, Marilyn, in Honolulu.

When we first checked into our hotel and got to our room, we discovered the hotel had left a small jar of macadamia nuts for us. Up until then I had never tasted a macadamia nut in my life, but once I tossed the first one down the gullet, I was hooked. I subsequently learned Hawaii is noted for its macadamia nuts. There’s even a Macadamia Nut Visitor Center somewhere on Oahu.

You may forgive me for saying that with the exception of the inside of our hotel room and the balcony outside it on Waikiki Beach, the one with a beautiful view of Diamond Head up the coast, we never did see much of Hawaii for the first four or five days.

But toward the end of the R&R, after we’d come up for air, seen the sights, sampled the beach, and done the obligatory Don Ho nightclub show, we went to the PX (Post Exchange) at Scofield Army Barracks and bought a large jar of Macadamia nuts for me to take back to Vietnam. In Vietnam, little things became luxurious delicacies.

The next day, Marilyn and I boarded our separate planes, she to return to the civilized world of Massachusetts, and me to head back to something completely different.

Back to the ceremony.

The bunker assigned to Buck and me had a single bunk bed. There was only one bed, because Buck and I took 12-hour shifts in the Operations Center, where we prevented the dominos from falling and kept the world safe for democracy. One of us would end his shift, head to the bunker, wave as he passed the other guy, and crash into the bed.

Every night, at 2000 hours — 8 p.m. to you — the three of us, Bulldog, Buck and I, would gather in the bunker. I had scrounged a small table which I had placed against the wall to the side of the bed. I had lovingly pinned Miss June to the wall above the table. At the appointed hour, I would light the two candles I had placed on each side of the table under the pin-up. I would open the jar of Macadamia nuts, which occupied a special spot in the center of the table, and hand each of my comrades one nut, taking one for myself. We would then spend a moment in quiet reflection, meditating on the bounty before us, after which I would, with a red marker purloined from the Ops Center, X-out that day’s descending number on Miss June’s tantalizing body.

We would then eat the nuts.

We did that for 59 consecutive nights. Fifty-nine red Xs covered Miss June. We were down to ONE! On the final night, we held a special ceremony, inviting the Battalion XO, the other six staff officers, the Battalion Sgt. Major, and the Chaplain, Father McBride, into the bunker, which became almost as crowded as the stateroom scene in “Night at the Opera.” We gave everyone a Macadamia nut that night, and, to great applause, I placed the last red X on Miss June. Even Father McBride smiled.

Then, in a service worthy of priestly ordination, I passed the jar of Macadamia nuts to Buck — who, because he still had six weeks to go, later on would replace my centerfold with his centerfold and continue the tradition. We retired my centerfold to a place of prominence on the side wall of the Ops Center, where it looked down on all the guys, and where Bulldog could see it every day, its 60 red Xs pointing the way to his bit of heaven back in the U.S. Six weeks later, Buck’s would hang his beside it.

The next day, I choppered south, boarded a chartered Pan Am plane with about three hundred other happy survivors, and flew home to what we called “the world.”