Nicknames & Call Signs – 983 words

Nicknames/Call Signs

Most of us had a nickname in the Army but we all did in the aviation units. We would use them over the air as our call sign but since that was deviating from procedure, the Army frowned on it. All the more reason to use it.

My assigned call sign was Potato Masher 47, pronounced potato masher four seven. The company was the Potato Mashers so that was part of every ones call sign. The number told the listener who he was talking to. Masher 6 was the commanding officer of the company. Every unit commander was called “6”. Masher 5 was the XO, an so on. Mine, 47, just meant I was a peter pilot in the fourth platoon; when I left that number would be given to my replacement.

We all used our nicknames for call signs whenever we figured the brass wasn’t listening. Chooch got his when he first arrived and all the old timers started calling him Choo Choo after the NFL running back called Choo Choo Coleman. Harv got his when he told the same batch of old timers he was from Harrisburg PA. They immediately said, “Oh, are you Harvey from Harrisburg?”. It stuck. My nickname/call sign was Pig, but I didn’t get it when I was a FNG. I earned it.

Like I have said before, we drank more than a little bit. We were all given ration cards to use when we bought booze and cigarettes at the PX. We got 7 bottles of hard stuff and a number (that escapes me) of cartons of cigarettes per month.

When we moved into what became our permanent company area there were nice wooden hooches that had exterior walls with the upper half just window screen and the bottom half wooden louvers. The result was a nice air flow through the building. After filling a zillion sand bags to build revetment walls around each building and bunkers between each building, we started to convert one building into an O club.

We salvaged the styrofoam shipping containers that the aerial flares came in and used them to line the underside of the sheet metal roof and walls. We hung some of the parachutes that were “recovered” from those same flares from the ceiling and walls and built a bar from old ammo crates. Someone got an air conditioner, some refrigerators and a stereo set and we had an O Club.

We sent a bird on a resupply mission every once in a while and gave all our ration cards to the guy doing the buying so he could fill up a Huey with booze. They didn’t care how many cards you showed them, just you had enough to cover the purchase. An imperial quart of Seagrams 7 cost $1.75. I don’t remember what a case of beer was but equally cheap I’m sure. We sold a can of beer for fifteen cents and made a bundle. Pretty soon we had an O club that was making money. The important thing was that we had a place to drink that wasn’t our room in the barracks. I remember many a night playing four handed combat solitaire with the stereo blasting out Woodstock on a endless 8 track. We never got tired of Country Joe and the Fish blasting out, “gimme a F”.

At the time I was moving into the ranks of “old guys” and the routine was putting on the weight. Seems like bouncing up and down at the rate of 300 per minute all day didn’t work off any weight, but it did do a number on your back. Anyway, I was pushing 240 lbs after weighing in at 165 as a grunt.

You may have heard; it was hot there. We would often wear our OD boxers and T shirt when off duty. So it came to pass one evening that I was so attired and extremely drunk while playing solitaire with the guys in the club.

One of our favorite pastimes was to toss particularly obnoxious drunks into the water trough tub that we occasionally used to ice down beer. The last time I got thrown into the tub I had tried to escape. I ran outside and laid down on the PSP pissing bridge (Pierced Steel Plating; used by the engineers for portable and temporary runway) that spanned the 8 foot ditch between the rows of hooches. We would often piss off the PSP section into the ditch, hence the name. I guess I figured that they wouldn’t be able to pry me off of the PSP. When they caught up with me they lifted me up and carried me off to the tub. Problem was I had been clinging to the edges of the PSP section; when they lifted me up I ripped off a fingernail when it caught on a hole in the edge. It took all the fun out of the tradition.

That night, having been particularly obnoxious, I could see where the events were leading. Not wanting to repeat that experience or take a swim in the ice water, I offered to be the club topless Go Go dancer on the bar top. At this point all I was wearing was my OD boxers. Soon after it became apparent that I couldn’t dance the Go Go, someone (I’m pretty sure it was Chooch) shouted out, “what we need is a nude Go Go dancer” while pulling down my shorts. It was during my attempts to not fall off the bar that Chooch announced. “You shall no longer be known as ‘Fat Red’; there are already plenty of ordinary fat guys named Fat Red.” “You are ‘Pig’ the one and only ‘Pig’ “. It stuck. Everyone started calling me Pig so I embraced it and used it for my call sign. 

It seemed cool to call the tower and say, “Phouc Vhin, this is Pig, I’m five south for landing at POL.”