You can't just ask for a new trailer, it wasn't destroyed by the
enemy, so we had to go through the proper channels as the military
called it. We waited for three days without water. Every day we
would ask and every day we were told no water today. On the fourth
day we asked and was told "YES" we were getting water today. Someone,
somewhere, had found us a water blivot. For those of you that have
not had the pleasure of dealing with one I'll try to describe it
for you. It is made out of elephant hide and looks like the front
wheel on a steam roller used to flatten out blacktop on a road.
It held about 500 gallons of water and probably weighed 3500 to
4000 pounds.
What a releif though we were getting water. Everything seemed to
be going great. the chopper was on approach, someone popped a smoke
gernade and there it was our very own water blivot. Only one problem,
this pilot wasn't any better than the other. He had it about 2 feet
off the ground when he released it. Well it seemed to bounce a couple
of times, just a little then it started too roll. Yes it rolled
and rolled and rolled. It rolled right off the hill and into the
jungle. The hill was to steep to try and hump the water back up
so they decided to just destroy the blivot which created another
problem. 45 and m-16's would just bounce off because the hide would
give enough. I don't remember how they destroyed it maybe JD could
throw some light on it. I just know it looked like Old Faithful
when it did go.
Two days later we got another water trailer and everything got back
to normal. I learned one valuable lesson every time that water trailer
was leaving I filled anything I could find to hold water, and never
just took it for granted again !!!!!
Ralph Calhoun Jr.
