WW2 Carbine Late Features

[lemaymiami]

Like many young men I smoked in Vietnam (and the price of a carton of cigarettes was around $1.75 if memory serves). I smoked just about anything with tobacco in it from age 16 to age 24... To this day I can't tell you how I was able to quit cold turkey - but I did at age 24... Best thing I ever did healthwise...

Young men do foolish things (so do old farts - but that's another topic entirely... ).

[browningautorifle]

When I came home from VN I was smoking 4 packs of PallMalls a day.

That would easily have killed you by now.

To this day I can't tell you how I was able to quit cold turkey - but I did at age 24... Best thing I ever did healthwise...

I was drinking more than smoking when I got out of the army and quit that at the demand of my wife. Cigarette consumption went sky high and I decided it might be bad so I quit cold turkey too, never went back to either. Both were started in the army as I was too young to have been doing either before. I'm sure I would be broke or dead if I hadn't.

[DaveHH]

It took me about 3 months to burn through $1400 I'd saved in Vietnam, all on drinking. About a year later I got married and for some reason stopped drinking everything but Diet Pepsi. After two years of that, I brought home a bottle of vodka and a large can of V8 vegetable juice and told my wife that I was craving a bloody mary. Went through it all in one night, then settled down to a regular California lifestyle. We drank a lot of beer and never got fat doing it.

People wonder why Vietnam vets are screwed up. Take your average High school grad, send him to a hot uncomfortable place 9,000 miles from home. Give him access to all of the booze and beer he can drink, all the dope he can smoke (Dope and Opium), plenty of hookers most great looking and diseased, then try to kill him or if he is in a maneuver battalion, teach him how to kill people, maybe shoot him, feed him food totally unsuited to the tropics where he loses 20 lbs and then have Mom see what comes back through the front door a year later.

[Daan Kemp]

Average soldier's age in war is about 18, just after school. Impressionable. Examples set by more senior ones. There is only so much you can do when not actually busy in operations. Then in a base with minimum facilities. It changes your life forever.

Previous wars' hardships were clear in the veterans' attitude and actions in peace time, although not understood then. It gets better as time goes on but never goes away. Treatment helps if you are willing to undergo it.

The South African Army had an excellent destressing programme in our long term low intensity bush war, that those who managed to sidestep or escape, still to this day regret not going through.

[painter777]

Anyone notice in Franks picture that the guy with the Carbine has another pipe stuck in his hat. Appears it may be a Corn Cob pipe.

[frankderrico]

Hadn't noticed that before Charlie. They all seem to be looking at something beyond the trumpeter.