"If you go to Japan within 30 days of rotating back to the States, put a copy of your reassignment orders in the shipping box of anything you buy and it will go home Duty-free!" This was great advice from someone at Pleiku who knew that the orders made it count as household goods! Of course, I have "fast-forwarded" from the shorter Hong Kong "good deal trip" with limited purchasing to an official 7-day leave at a U.S. Army base near Tokyo which had MANY retail sales concessionaires with shops in a PX complex! Great! I bought myself the exact stereo receiver of which I had to buy a slightly different model for a "buddy" while in Hong Kong; he had shown a truly thankless self-centeredness over it -- I should have bought my ivory chess set instead and brought him nothing!
But, at Zama, I also purchased (and shipped to my Aunt Blanche's home near my next base in Sacramento) a set of the best speakers Pioneer made, and a full 12-place setting of good Noritake china. Also, the latest Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder/player. The Japanese electronic industry kept changing so rapidly that I found, a year later, my "latest" equipment was obsolescent. Many acquaintances returning from the war zone after me brought home equipment with ever greater improvements and features than I had been able to find. The Vietnam War did MUCH to stimulate a rapidly-developing, vibrant Japanese electronic industry! Anything I bought overseas was less than HALF its retail price in the U.S.! We have a high standard of living in the U.S. -- we can get anything from all over the world. BUT WE PAY FOR IT! Each "middleman" entrepreneur has to take "his cut" of the ultimate sales price, of course; and each cut raises the retail price by that amount. I sometimes toy with the idea of getting into the import-export sales business!
I must remember to mention Seiko wristwatches, another growth industry due to the Vietnam War! They were very good watches and available in every little military exchange in Vietnam -- the first watches I ever knew that were self-winding and didn't need batteries! (Handy for a grunt in the field far from BX/PX/Navy Exchanges.) I'd really rather have a self-winder now than deal with trying to replace a watch battery. The Seiko's were great -- we marked the weeks by them, not just days. One day seemed just as routine as the next, so every Sunday we would say, "Well, damned if it isn't another Seiko red-letter day!" Our Seiko watches showed a red "SUN" in the day-window on Sundays when all the other days were labeled in black. So, it was a way of greeting each other or exclaiming that another week had passed and we were getting "shorter" (having less time before we would rotate home).
The most shocking thing I ever heard in-country was a particular response with the grisly sense of humor we developed in the combat zone. We WERE in AF sidefiring gunships, AC-47's, remember. We shot gatling guns every night and killed bad guys as they tried to kill us with AK-47 or .50 cal rounds. (Sometimes they had more -- "quad-50 cal's".) Occasionally, every base was rocketed by the bad guys on the ground from off-base at night. One guy in my flight crew was SO happy to be finished after landing, he yelled out, "SHORT! I'm so short I can crawl under the door to my Hootch. I'm going home in a week!" To which, one of our younger pilots immediately replied just as loudly, "Yeah. In a BAG!" (Meaning, a body bag for dead guys.) --Cold, man!
posted by Richard A @ 5:52 AM
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