by W. H. Payne
Danny
O'Connor sat on an upholstered barstool in the cool dimness and stirred his
third seven and seven of the evening. The air conditioner droned and Johnny
Cash was telling how he had fallen into a ring of fire and how it burned,
burned, burned.
On
the wall behind the bar hung crossed AK-47 assault rifles and beneath them a
red and blue Viet Cong flag with a yellow star in the middle. Beneath that was
mounted the long, black, wicked-looking barrel of a Soviet-built recoilless
rifle.
Souvenirs
of the never-ending war, thought Danny.
He
fired up another Lucky and looked around at the other sergeants talking quietly
in small groups at the tables scattered across the floor of the little Quonset
hut. He thought of how much he liked the Sergeants Club.
In
this, his second tour in Viet Nam, he had become well
acquainted with the NCO clubs in the Da Nang area. On his first tour,
as a grunt with the 1st Marine Division, he had rarely seen the inside of a
club. Now that he was assigned to the Air Wing, swinging with the Wing, he had
become a connoisseur.
He
liked the Sergeants Club because it was cool. Not just the air-conditioning,
all the clubs had that, but because it was quiet and calm. It was for E-5
Sergeants only, not for corporals and sergeants like the 4-5 clubs, which were
big and noisy, or the 1-2-3 clubs for the lowest three enlisted ranks;
privates, PFCs and lance corporals, which featured 18 year-olds puking into big
plastic garbage cans and slipping on spilled beer. He wasn't a staff NCO, so he
didn't get to go to the clubs for the senior sergeants and didn't want to
anyway as they were filled with old guys in their thirties and forties.
No,
he thought; give me the Sergeants Club every time. The best club in the 1st
Marine Air Wing compound, except for the music. Danny preferred The Beatles,
The Stones, Hendrix, Janis, The Doors, and The Temptations, not necessarily in
that order. The Sergeants Club musical selections ran more often to country and
western. But Johnny Cash was okay.
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