Talked to the guy again. Look, I’m not his attorney (nor is this a trial, of course), but I know him to be a man of integrity and, I dare say honor. He’s not the kind of guy who would say he could pop a man’s head off with a twist.
And I also did an hour or two of Google and Google scholar search on “scratch,” of course, and the application of raw (not dried) latex poppy, in the Vietnam War or in other places or time, and came up empty.
So,
About his basic medical first aid skills, last year on the street he stabilized a car accident woman with all her teeth smashed in, skull fracture, and one eyeball hanging out of its socket, which I know is true because later I talked to one of the EMTs who hustled her to the hospital. Anyway, that’s not all that important. Until last month he was still walking around with bullet fragments. Again, I just saw some scars; he’s dying of cancer and is in and out of the VA hospital.
First: I was wrong about his nephew in Afghanistan. The nephew told him he tried the poppy latex thing once on himself only.
Some more answers to the questions I asked directly from this thread. (His entire conversation on this, I might add, was prefaced with something like “let those fuckers come and talk to me. I was there, they weren’t.” Not aggressive, just a little sad.)
Second: he and the other soldiers did not make slashes on their arms. He said they scraped the edge carefully over their forearm (can’t remember top or bottom) till the skin was raw enough.
Each “scratch” was the term for one poppy slashed with four longitudinal cuts equally spaced. He said of course heroin was available everywhere. He did not use it because a) he didn’t want to be a junkie, and b) more importantly, he couldn’t get fucked up for so long and be useless.
Per scratch, fifteen minutes to kick in, half an hour to bliss out and be relatively functional.
[About the heroin, he (and another vet standing with us), mentioned the huge amounts of heroin shipped in body bags for distribution outside country, as well as, presumably, coffins. Never heard that, and worth another thread.]
He also repeated that he would do the scratch thing on his wounded men, regardless of later complications, when the morphine had either run out because of the shitload of wounded, or when it ran out because the syringes had been stolen by soldiers using them to get fucked up.
He said he joined in 1966 and left in 1975, by 1969-70 a gunny in 3rd Recon. I Wiki’ed it and read and showed it to him–either he’s a nutball who memorized the whole thing, or he’s not (eg, he said he was part of a prisoner rescue, and foretold or corroborated almost every other point mentioned); he added to the account that training also took place in Belize, Venezuela, and Columbia; and that the patch he wore early on (he described it first) was as shown in that article for unit’s earlier designation, the 13th, but said when they wore it it had a dagger going through it at an angle.
That’s what I got.