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The mountainous battle tank, its main gun resembling a short telephone
pole and threatening machineguns pointing in three directions, rumbled
across the front of my position.
“I want that big boy right here beside me,” I spoke to myself.
Using hand signals learned in a stateside training class, I directed
the armor-plated monster to maneuver itself beside my just-completed
foxhole.
“Helloooooo beautiful,” I said out loud to the tank. Then I
gave one of its dust-encrusted treads an affectionate pat before
sliding into my foxhole with visions of upgraded safety and security
dancing in my steel-pot covered head.
That was the platform for why yet today I get a little uneasy in a dentist’s chair.
Our force of about 200 riflemen had bumped into a large enemy unit at
the edge of a massive thicket in the late 1960s during the war in South
Vietnam.
We took some casualties before ordered to withdraw by battalion headquarters.
The strategy was to helicopter in three more infantry companies
supported by tanks and heavy mortar tube sections. Once
surrounded, the thicket would be battered non-stop by artillery,
airstrikes and helicopter gunship fire until the North Vietnamese (NVA)
determined it would be in their best interests to evacuate.
Then our close-range firepower would have its way with them in a nighttime shooting gallery. A sensible military plan.
The NVA knew they would be sitting ducks in the open and that the
primary contributor to their potential onslaught would be a tank like
the one up close and personal with my post.
About 10:30 p.m. hundreds of the bad guys surged from the thicket, most
of them toward my platoon’s perimeter area of responsibility. And
almost every bit of firepower they had at their disposal was directed
at “my” tank.
Line after line of green tracer rounds spit from their AK47
rifles and the whoosh of rocket propelled grenades added to the
eardrum-splitting din.
Subjected to ceaseless incoming ordnance, within minutes the tank
was knocked out and set ablaze. Its gun loader inside was
in a dangerously inconvenient spot within arm’s length of dozens of
high explosive shells, and he wisely elected to abandon tank.
Scrambling to become a co-inhabitant of the nearest foxhole--mine--he took a leap of faith onto my back.
In the course of a military collision entwined with hand-to-hand
combat, the gun loader’s unexpected actions only compounded a horrible
fright night.
Pummeled by the noise, extreme physical exertion and having the
bejabbers scared from me by the tank gun loader’s surprise foxhole
occupancy, I must have gone through a lifetime high adrenaline
spike. All my mettle jumped the tracks and switched into
overload.
Nerve endings were a medium-rare out of control; my jaw, arms and legs
began uncontrollable trembling which was not to subside for way, way
too long.
The vibrations were so severe in their intensity they jarred loose a filling from one of my upper back teeth. Honestly.
With wartime duties to carry out in the coming months, the new tooth crater went unattended.
Shortly following my army discharge, I unsealed a letter from the
Veterans Administration with notification that I was eligible for free
dental services anytime in the next two years. Aware of the
missing filling and that my war zone tooth care had been inadequate, I
decided to take advantage of the proposition.
After a thorough looksee the VA dentist diagnosed that the filling-less
tooth had reached the end of its useful life and required extraction.
He worked diligently for a long time with his tooth-removal pliers, but
the rock-hard molar wouldn’t budge. Escalating frustration
marched across his face.
He turned away and from a chairside cabinet brought out a mallet and
chisel. They soon were to conjure up painfully similar reminders
when I watched Saturday morning TV cartoons as a kid.
The animated dentist had positioned the chisel in Mickey Mouse’s mouth
and was pounding on it with the mallet. It was a comical sequence
generating light amusement from me at Mickey’s suffering
predicament.
Surely, that was cartoon-only material, not real life dentistry.
Think again, rodent breath.
Many, many mallet-to-chisel strikes knocked the back of my skull into
the chair’s headrest, all without a sedative. Finally, the tooth was
adequately chipped away to where it could be wrestled from my
gums. All that was missing from the cartoon scenario was
the dentist climbing onto my chest for more leverage in wielding the
pliers.
“I’ll write you a prescription for some Darvon,” the dentist
advised. I didn’t know what Darvon was...maybe a teenie step up
from Bayer?
The ensuing morning the left side of my face appeared to have a
baseball-sized abnormality. The pain was unimaginable, and
even Darvon wouldn’t make it tolerable. I was unable to
work or sleep for three days.
Months later, I had an appointment with my regular dentist. As the assistant began her tasks, she detected my tension.
“You’re really scared, aren’t you?” she posed before I told her my tale of the dental hammering.
“I served my intership with the VA dentists, they’re butchers,” she said.
Within the past year, the VA decided to revisit my disability
percentage from war wounds and other service-connected afflictions.
When asked what benefits a potential percentage increase would
entail, the examining doctor’s answer was “free dental care.”
Now, you just gotta understand that when the VA subsequently denied
awarding me an extra 10 percent, I flashed a grin...a
toothy grin.
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