North Dakota can give you a lot of things. Peace of mind. Here you can still sleep at night with the door unlocked.
Nobody steals the Sunday paper off the stoop. In the worst winters, you can keep the car running at the gas station while you go inside. And North Dakota’s sons are legendary.
Hard-working, no-nonsense farm boys. Boys with heart. They’ll come to work with a cold and do twice the work of your average city boy.
Got a tough Job? Hey, you, Dakota Boy. Come here. Yes, North Dakota can give you a lot.
It can also get you walking point your very first day in Vietnam when you’re 20. Where are you from? “You can count on walking point from now on,” Don Davidson’s platoon leader said after hearing the answer. North Dakota boys were just more aware.
You could trust them. ADVERTISEMENT That was the word. Davidson didn’t sleep that night.
But just a few months removed from the Dakota plains, how could you sleep? Certainly not after that frantic, tree-top-skimming helicopter ride at break-neck speed from Duc Pho. And when the chopper landed at the clearing, they pointed you in the right direction and you ran faster than you’d ever run before, half expecting to take a bullet in the next second. And now, in the morning, it would be your job to walk point, your job to detect the mines — to either find the trail around them or to set them off with your own foot.
Point man walked alone. It was your job to sniff out the ambush. The Viet Cong would let the point ma.
