Is there a statute of limitations on courts martial?  

I wanna hear the drug and sex stories!

We did too!

I had a buddy that did 1 tour in nam, and he was telling me about some kinda real cheap beer that you could only get at the "local beer joint"that had formaldehyde or some such chemical that you had to pour off the top of the beer before you drank it. Was he just blowing smoke up my exit or is anything about it true? WALI...................

We'd go to the PX and they would have Blatz and Blue Ribbon.....go into town (HUE) and they had Bud, Miller, Crown Royal, you name it.....look at the bottom of the bottle and there would be a very small hole drilled in it and sealed with wax. Just like coke they had "cut it." Now they did have something if I recall that was hell on wheels and would knock your socks off.....Baht I think. JohnT

The beer we normally got was "33," a French brand that was made locally.  The Vietnamese (and everyone else) called it "BahMeeBah," from the VN word for the number "33," which was "ba muoi ba."  It was reasonably awful stuff but it was cheap.  I don't think they bothered diluting it.  I've had it since, in France, and it wasn't much better there, so I doubt the VN did anything to it.  I can't really recall drinking any other kind of beer, though no doubt there were other American brands around.

We all had ration cards that allowed us to buy a certain amount of liquor and cigarettes per month.  The allowance wasn't much, but one of the things on the ration card was a bottle of "brandy."  Nobody I ever met there--no American, that is--drank brandy, but they always bought it.  It was more or less tantamount to cash.  The PX in Cholon sold a very good grade of the stuff (I think Remy Martin or Martell, very pricey) that wasn't very expensive in dollars but cost the earth in Vietnamese currency.  You could swap a bottle of it for almost anything on the black market.  It ended up going to the "name" hotels in Saigon (the Caravelle, and one or two others) where the newspaper reporters hung out, and bought it at a huge markup as they wrote their "field reports."

.....that was it.... Mad-dawg 33......JohnT

Once in awhile my brother and I will go to a Vietnamese restaurant near his office for lunch and wash down the nuoc nam with a couple of bottles of "33".  It's not the worst beer I've ever had.  That dubious "honor" goes to Crown, a Korean beer.  It's rumored that somebody sent some off to have it analyzed and the report came back that his water buffalo had a kidney problem.  It's no wonder those ROK Marines were so mean.  If that's all I had for beer, I'd be mean, too.   

I stopped at a VN restaurant in the States some years ago. Properly made Nuoc Mam can be very good! (The poorly made variety can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.)

How do you properly make fermented fish in a barrel?