Worth the time…
For those who’ve never been in, kids throughout the world have always known American servicemen are suckers, and always have candy…
Even today, downrange Americans are still giving candy away to the kids… We’ve sent a LOT of 2 lb bags of Starbright Mints with every care package that went downrange…
h/t JP
Whenever I go walkabout in the third world, I always bring bags of candy to hand out to poor kids. I’m a sucker. I admit it. One time I handed out twenty pounds of candy in a poor village in (very) rural China. Some of these kids had never tasted it.
Another hero I had never heard of in my life. Thanks for sharing. Damn allergies are killing me now, need to blow my nose.
I swear, a terrible amount of dust started up around here and got into my eyes when I played that.
LL- Yep, I can imagine, and you’re not the only sucker out there…
Danny- You’re welcome.
Jeffro- Yep…
+1 Dannytheman
What a great story! Our guys are amazing, and they still do this. The Corpsman grandson always asks for extra candy in his care packages from home, as he gives it to children.
When we were working with the Vietnamese refugees right after Saigon fell, we were swarmed with kid with money. They would use their Vietnamese money to buy cigarettes for their parents. We didn’t care that the money was worthless, we were having fun with the kids.
One day, I had a pocket full of this useless money. Our MTO was a old Mustang LT. He saw the money and helped me sort it into two piles. He pointed at the first pile, South Vietnamese money and informed me that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. The second stack was North Vietnamese money. He told me good luck spending that.
Mostly I collected it for my Mother. She had a pretty good collection of foreign money, including from pre-WWII Germany and Japan. I don’t know what ever happened to all of it after she Died.
Dealing with those little entrepreneur/bandits was usually the high point of the day. One little bandit came running up and shoved a handful of NV money at me, grabbed a whole pack of smokes and was gone like a shot. Show me a Marine and I’ll show you a sucker for a little kid. And we never grow out of it. I did pass out a good share of candy that I bought at the exchange.