Vietnam 67 (1 Viewer)

"Tim," by retired Lieut. Colonel Charles A. Krohn.

Tim approached me soon after our plane landed at the Tokyo airport in early spring 1967. We were both looking forward to a break from the war in Vietnam on our first R&R. We’d never met before.

He was a bit nervous about approaching me, and asked if I'd been in Tokyo before. Several times, I replied, when I was stationed in Korea a few years earlier. He said this was his first visit, and asked if I would mind if he hung out with me.

I outranked him, but we were in civilian clothes and it seemed a bit awkward not to use first names. We didn’t have any big plans, and only a few days to see everything. We got dinner, and hit a few bars. Mostly, we talked, about the war, about our families, about growing up in small Midwestern towns.

Tim had a new camera and wanted to take some pictures to help remember his trip to Japan. The concierge recommended the Chinzan-so Garden. He said all Tokyo residents know the place and we should not miss it. Taxis were cheap and we decided to splurge. While I was waiting to order lunch, Tim strolled around taking pictures. I gather it was the highlight of his trip. It was a reward for me to see him so pleased. Later we visited the Sanno Hotel for a relaxing steam bath, among other things; this was 50 years ago, but it still seems a violation of trust to say more.

As we were leaving the hotel, Tim noticed a display of Honda motorcycles in the lobby. He seemed to know a lot about the machines and talked me into buying a Honda 90 that could be shipped back to Vietnam free.

I had no particular interest in motorcycles, but Tim was so enthusiastic and so insistent, I didn't want to break the bond of trust that had grown between us. The cost was trivial, less than $200, as I recall.
The bike was waiting for me when I returned to Camp Radcliff, home of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, where I was the public affairs officer. With little effort I assembled the several pieces, including a battery that arrived wrapped and fully charged.

Anxious to share the experience, I tried to call Tim on the unreliable telephone system. He was stationed a few miles west, and I wanted to propose we meet in the middle, near Mang Yang Pass, where French Mobile Group 100 had been ambushed in an earlier war. A stone marker commemorated the spot, and I suppose it's still there.

When I finally got through a few days later, I asked if I could speak to Warrant Officer Tim Kearney. That would be impossible, the operator said, because he had been killed in a helicopter crash on May 6, 1967. Later I learned he had been on a classified mission to extract soldiers from the Special Forces group dropped into Cambodia to look for Chinese advisers.​

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Lieut. Colonel Krohn with a South Vietnamese Army interpreter.
 
"Being Black in Vietnam," by George Brummell.

Army in early 1962, after quitting school in the 12th grade (I later got a G.E.D.). I joined the Army because of the lack of jobs in the small town where I lived, because of discrimination and because I didn’t see going to college as an option. My brother had washed out of the Army, and that had something to do with me wanting to succeed there. I was a little nervous, though, about entering an integrated military because I hadn’t associated with whites other than in stores and at the work place. Where I lived, in Federalsburg, Md., on the Eastern Shore, the town and schools were very much segregated.

I soon discovered that living with whites at Fort Jackson, S.C., wasn’t bad. The only difference I saw in whites was their color. Some were more educated than I was, though some were surely less educated. The four years leading up to my Vietnam posting were without incident – though once, in basic training, a white guy thought he could hop in front of me in the chow line; we settled the disagreement right there, by coming to blows.

My best buddy, Ted Belcher, was a white guy from West Virginia and my squad leader. Ted and I were together for a year in Hawaii, where we served with the 25th Infantry Division. Ted, who had short had dark hair and blue eyes, was a handsome, clever soldier who had already served a tour in Vietnam, spending three months as a door gunner on a helicopter.

Eventually I got shipped to the war. Unlike many soldiers who were sent later, who went by plane, we were literally shipped, aboard the Gen. Nelson M. Walker, an enormous troop carrier. It was exciting to be in the salt-filled air under millions of stars planted on what appeared to be a moving ceiling, and experiencing the camaraderie with nearly 5,000 other soldiers.

Base camp was in Chu Chi, just north of Saigon, where my unit – A Company, Second Battalion, 14th Infantry – arrived hot and sweaty. I, a new sergeant at the time, settled into a big hot tent set on a wooden platform, which I shared with other noncommissioned officers of my platoon. I was among three other black NCOs in the platoon of 35; there were no black commissioned officers in the company.

Our job in Vietnam, as I saw it, was to man the defensive position surrounding base camp. We called our camp Ann Margret after the movie star who had visited the defensive positions while they were being built. We also went on patrol, carrying out seek-and-destroy missions to keep the enemy away from camp, often for a week or more at a time.

In the field, whites and blacks operated as brothers. We had one another’s backs, sharing responsibilities without discussion. We laughed together, and cried together over wounds or dead comrades regardless of color of skin. There was one episode I heard about: A white guy for some reason said a black soldier should be tied to a “plow line.” When the company commander heard about the insult he took care of it, and it was not repeated. The bottom line was that we were a unit, and each segment was very important in combat. When there were injuries the white medic treated all of us the same, often risking his life to mend someone else’s.

Back at base camp, though, things were a little different. One day I joined a poker game. I felt less than proficient at the game, but I sat down anyway. That was a mistake. I lost everything, all my monthly pay of $300, and so had nothing to send my wife. I felt miserable so I borrowed $20 from a friend and it didn’t take but a minute to lose it. Leaving the poker tent I encountered my platoon sergeant, someone I didn’t want to see.

“Sergeant Brummell,” he said, “I thought I told you to go down on the bunker line and release Staff Sergeant Krogh."

“You did, Sergeant,” I replied, “and I’m on my way.”

“On the way my ***, that’s been over an hour ago.”

He walked toward me and whispered, “Come over here, Brummell.” I followed him to an isolated spot around a tent.

“Look here, nigger boy,” he said, “I made you sergeant and I don’t have any problem taking it away. You better get your black *** down on the bunker line and relieve him and right now. If this happens again I’ll put your *** on an outpost so far in front of everyone you’ll be a cinch to get killed.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” I replied, and trotted away to the bunker line.

But as I said, we usually left that casual – and not so casual – racism back at base. There was one incident, though, and it came in late 1966, when I was blinded and severely wounded in combat. Immediately after, I heard voices, the worried voices of my white comrades, assessing my condition.

Once I was loaded onto a helicopter, my throat began filling with blood. I heard the white guys on board debate who was going to clear my air passage. Finally, one of the men put his finger in my mouth and scooped out the blood, saving me from choking to death. Helpless, I wondered what shape I was in, and why there was such reluctance to help a dying man breathe.
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George E. Brummell
 
"PTSD Does Not Mean You're Weak,"by Peter Fossel, a decorated Marine combat interpreter who served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967.

Somebody once suggested that veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder can't “handle” war, and are therefore somehow weak.

No, sir, we are not.

I’ve been there, and I “handled” war. I handled a fellow Marine officer being burned alive when his “bird dog” spotter plane crashed in Khe Sanh and we couldn't pull him out while he cried, "Tell my mother I love her!”

I handled holding friends with their faces blown off, or bodies blown nearly in half, who were trying to apologize, hoping they weren’t being any trouble.

I "handled" mortar rounds coming in every night for week after week during the winter monsoons of 1967, tearing apart our ponchos and sand bags and limbs, one after another in a never-ending dirge, mud and leeches all over our bodies. I “handled” killing people I’d never met and didn’t hate. I’d learned the language, and could speak with them, but still had to kill them face to face.

I “handled” facing a North Vietnamese force attacking head-on in human waves by the Ben Hai River in Con Thien on Sept. 6, 1967, when those behind me were dying. Four or five of us drove off the attack, but in the process pushed the N.V.A. to our right, dammit, into our mortar platoon, whose members were mostly unarmed, and most of whom were quickly killed.

The first time I shot a man was during an ambush; standing over him moments later, watching blood pulsing out of his back, I screamed to the universe, “Dear God, can I have this moment back? Can't we start again, please?” But no, that doesn’t happen.

Death is not to be feared; killing is. Killing leaves a hole in your soul.

I “handled” being ordered to march elderly Vietnamese out of their villages, at night in the rain, until they died, one after another. I carried one or two until I couldn”t any longer, and they fell to the wayside.

I “handled” being ordered by our company commander to cut the right ear off dead Vietcong for the sake of a body count, and wouldn’t follow that order and went to the battalion commander, who ended the practice.

I “handled” all of that, and I have PTSD, but I am not weak.

PTSD has nothing to do with weakness; it has to do with a normal human reaction to events so far outside our experience as to defy imagination. Nobody can “handle” it as if nothing happened. Many hide in drugs or alcohol simply to survive. And other veterans, such as my own father – along with untold thousands of recent veterans – find no exit from the suffering except in death by suicide.

One lesson to be gained from this is that war makes you crazy. The Veterans Administration recognized that in 1980, when it added PTSD to the list of war injuries, and the list of walking wounded from that diagnosis would be far longer if it weren’t for the misunderstanding that PTSD somehow indicates weakness. We don’t want to be labeled, disabled or disordered.

War makes you crazy. It simply does. And the true insanity, the true weakness, lies in not understanding that.​

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Peter Fossel on board the Iwo Jima en route to South Vietnam, 1967.
 
"What It Is Like To Get Shot Down,"by James Ritchie, a pilot for the Navy during the Vietnam War, and is now a retired judge in Northern California.

The aircraft carrier Enterprise was certainly one of the grandest naval vessels ever constructed. Fast and substantially longer than three football fields, the carrier weighed almost 95,000 tons when empty of airplanes and people. Thanks to nuclear propulsion, it could remain at sea for months at a time without refueling.

That ability was not necessarily a selling point for us, the pilots and crews who flew from this huge aircraft carrier. But we had to admit that when the "Big E" was launching fighters and bombers from its powerful steam catapults or “catching” those returning aircraft, using four massive, hydraulically spooled steel cables stretched across its rear deck, it was a formidable weapon system.

In 1967 the Enterprise was the newest, fastest and largest of the Navy's aircraft carriers. It was on its second cruise in the South China Sea, sending aircraft to and from Vietnam and its coastal waters. We were flying some of those planes. We were pilots and radar intercept officers, or RIOs, in VF-96, a fighter squadron, and one of 10 squadrons in Air Wing Nine, which was stationed aboard the Enterprise for six to eight months at a time. We flew the F-4B, a two-seat supersonic fighter-bomber that had become a state-of-the-art part of the Navy's war effort.

Among the VF-96 pilots and RIOs, many of us were 23 to 25 years old, recent college (or Naval Academy) graduates who were now "veterans," having completed the Big E's first combat cruise from late 1965 to mid-1966. Now we were back for a return engagement to help "disrupt the flow of men and materials to South Vietnam” – at least, that's what they told us we were doing, and we were still buying it.

We lost a couple of aircraft on that first cruise, though in each case the two-member crews had been safely recovered and we had all returned home relatively unscathed.

Our missions varied: MiG patrol; forays against bridges, power plants, truck parks and the occasional rail yard; and what was called “armed reconnaissance” over North Vietnam. Sometimes we would fly relatively quiet missions along coastal waters to hinder or stop any suspect barges or supply vessels.
But we also flew on multiaircraft missions, what the air wing commander called alpha strikes. For those, the F-4s often went as flak suppression: Since we went in first, often the enemy would lock in on us with its radar and then launch a surface-to-air missile.

SAMs were bad news. We knew they were out there waiting for us, and sometimes we could see them coming -- long, thin objects that looked like flaming telephone poles, lifting off and turning in our direction. Fortunately, we had electro-countermeasures system that could often detect the SAM radar searching and sometimes locking onto our aircraft. When that happened, the countermeasures system set off a loud and somewhat distracting series of cockpit warning lights, warning tones and buzzers that were almost as scary as the missile. We'd get an intermittent tone when the missile's search radar was looking for us and a steady (and I thought louder) warning when the missile had us in its radar lock. The only way to break that radar grasp was through high-speed, high-G turns that made navigation next to impossible.

In 1967, our squadron lost three more aircraft during these missions, and this time their crews did not all escape.

Against this backdrop, my RIO, Frank Schumacher, and I found ourselves on a two-aircraft reconnaissance flight up the North Vietnamese coastline on the morning of April 8, 1967. Bill Dwyer was flying the other F-4 as we headed north in the Gulf of Tonkin toward Haiphong Harbor. We were abeam of each other with Bill flying slightly behind me as we descended, trying to maintain visibility beneath the gathering low coastal clouds.

With the deteriorating weather, we decided to turn back and commenced a rapid 180-degree turn toward south. After we completed our turn, Bill was in front of us, which meant that we were more likely to be hit by antiaircraft batteries first alerted by his plane. Then I looked up and saw a small island had popped up ahead of us.

As I turned hard, trying to avoid the island, I felt a distinct thump, which I thought – I hoped – was Frank stowing the radar. "Frank, don't slam the radar back over land," I told him through the intercom.

Frank's excited voice came back quickly, an octave or two higher than normal, "I didn’t."

Realizing that we'd been hit by anti-aircraft fire, I managed a quick, cryptic transmission to Bill before we lost our electronics and part of our hydraulic pressure. We were still quite low and I was able to regain some altitude before the aircraft pitched further up, out of control. Realizing control was impossible, I jettisoned my cockpit canopy as our prearranged loss-of-communication signal for Frank to get out. He didn't hesitate and ejected quickly.

By that time, the aircraft was headed almost straight up, and running out of airspeed. I pulled the ejection handle, and my seat and I were abruptly blasted out into the airstream. The rocket seat fell away and I found myself floating in a surreal, tropical setting beneath a fully blossomed parachute. I could see Frank descending a thousand feet below me and a now-burning F-4B spiraling down toward the Gulf of Tonkin. Unfortunately, I could also see that same small island and fishing boats heading in our direction.

After landing in the water and bobbing back to the surface, I managed to untangle myself from the parachute. I reeled in the small rubber raft, which had inflated after I released it from my seat pan on the way down. I grabbed the raft and tried to hoist myself into it. Finally realizing that even a small rubber raft might have a bow and stern (pilots never understood boats), I flipped it around and managed to climb in. Peering through the haze toward where I thought the island and its fishing boat armada might be, I began a vigorous backstroke south.

After paddling in the water for less than a half hour (though it seemed longer), I saw a search and rescue helicopter above me. In no time the crew was winching me up and ferrying me back to a nearby destroyer. They picked up Frank too.

We spent a dry and pleasant evening, offering thanks aboard our rescuers' vessel, before being recalled to the Enterprise the next morning. Our commander asked how we were doing. "O.K., I guess," we responded.

"Good,” he said. “You're back on the flight schedule, this afternoon."

A big, fast aircraft carrier and a formidable aircraft could not guarantee success, or absolute safety. Although Frank and I survived our misunderstanding with that small Vietnamese island, some in our squadron had not been so fortunate. If the 1967 "summer of love" was coming, it was a long time before we found out about it.​

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A Navy F-4B Phantom II firing Zuni rockets over South Vietnam
 
"Coming Home......Twice", by Blaise Arena, a retired chemist.

My friend Johnny was made for the Army. The toughness, the discipline, the camaraderie, the patriotism. And his older brother had already joined up. After high school and boot camp he found himself in Vietnam with an infantry unit, right where he wanted to be. This was 1967 and war was raging there, and at home. I don’t know what his experiences were in the war – he didn’t talk much about it. I remember a photo showing him manning a machine gun at some rice paddy outpost, with sand bags surrounding him. Years later, he said the first time he killed someone he vomited. Most guys did.

Maybe he vomited more than once. Johnny was big, and talked tough and was tough – not afraid of any fight. But he was also softhearted and sensitive. Over the many years I knew him he often showed a feeling for the underdog; he easily wore the robe of protector, never the bully.

After his first deployment in Vietnam he returned home for a brief R. & R. His mother, a big, always cheerful woman, organized a coming-home party for Johnny with beer and soft drinks, chips and pizza in their living room. Neighbors and friends came, and most of Johnny’s seven brothers were there. It was fun and all went well, until the end of the evening. After most of the partiers had gone home, I and my three best friends – Eddie, Mike (one of Johnny’s brothers) and Larry –talked with Johnny. The many bottles of beer he enjoyed all evening were having their effects.

The war was a mystical, abstract thing for me and my friends; we were in college and knew it only from television. It was a concept. We could not possibly have imagined what it was really like to be under fire in a Vietnam jungle. I doubt that we ever tried to imagine it. It would have been just too far from our easy lives on campus, or at home on our leafy Chicago street.

Still, the war was a frequent topic of our late-night discussions. As the party wound down we could not resist engaging Johnny in such a discussion. There’s no other way to say it – the four of us ganged up on him. We assaulted him with our Vietnam debate weaponry: “It’s a civil war, we don’t belong there.” “The South Vietnamese government is corrupt.” “The draft is illegitimate.” And so on. Johnny defended what, of course, he saw as his own efforts there. This was about him.

Johnny had never bought into the left’s antiwar arguments, obviously. If he was even aware of them, he did not care. He just wanted to fight for his country, without question. We pummeled him, four on one, until finally after an hour of this and too much alcohol, he couldn’t take any more. Weeping and yelling at us, he stormed out the front door into the night. The party was ruined. Johnny’s mother rushed onto the front porch and called after him, begging him to come back. He disappeared. I remember his mother glaring at us – a very rare thing – and she probably asked if we were happy now. Although I don’t really remember what she said, it was clear she was terribly hurt for her son.

My three friends and I were instantly transformed from intellectually sophisticated, superior college boys to small, foolish kids. We were ashamed. The party ended; we left. As I recall, Johnny returned late the next day. His worried mother was much relieved.

What must he have been thinking during that time? “I have fought for my country, put myself in danger, killed the enemy. Endured hell. I thought I was the returning hero; I was proud. What has happened, what did I do wrong!” Did he hate us?

I think we made apologies to Johnny’s mother and when he returned, to him. But honestly, I’m not sure they took ... maybe it was just forgotten.

About 25 years later Johnny and I suffered through near simultaneous divorces. Both of were forced to leave home and family. In early winter we both returned to the haven of our childhood homes on that same Chicago street to find comfort from family and old friends.

During this miserable time Johnny and I reconnected. I fondly remember freezing nighttime walks to neighborhood taverns to drown our sorrows and talk about our misery. He was hurt; so was I. These dark winter months formed the basis for a renewed and enduring friendship that lasted for 13 years, until he died suddenly at home, and alone, of a heart attack. He was buried among his fellow veterans in the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill.

I hope that I helped Johnny get through some of his misery ... maybe I made up a little for treating him so badly at his homecoming party. I know he helped me.​

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American soldiers on patrol in Vietnam.
 
”A Day in Binh Dinh Province”, by Dick Guthrie who served in the Army in Vietnam and retired in 1991.


That morning, before the heat takes over, my Bravo Company — about 130 strong and mounted aboard 20 armored personnel carriers — rumbles through the firebase’s gate and onto Binh Dinh Province’s Route 1, the “Street Without Joy.” Several miles north, we turn right on a dirt track heading across a vast expanse of paddies toward the South China Sea. Just off the road, on a whitewashed mud wall, I see a sign saying, in English “Do not drive tanks on the people’s rice fields.”

The fellow who painted that must be a farmer, I think, one whose most sophisticated tools might be a shovel and a hoe. Driving my mechanized company across his paddies would destroy thousands of plants, and catastrophically disrupt the irrigation of surrounding plots. I feel for that guy, and I want to win the people’s hearts and minds. But he knows as well as I do that in 1967, the Vietcong are aggressively seeding all of Binh Dinh’s roads with mines, which kill nearly as many Americans as AK-47s do. The farmer’s entreaty spotlights the quandary I’ll face every day I command B Company. I have my soldiers to protect, and odds are fair that the next time we come this way, driving on “the people’s rice fields” is the choice I’ll have to make.

In-country for only a couple of weeks, so far, we’ve operated as airmobile troops, taking helicopters to our objectives. Today is our first opportunity to operate mounted on our armored personnel carriers, the way we’ve trained. Each armored box bristles with three machine guns and carries all the ammo, food and water a rifle squad needs. Operating mechanized, we know we can kick the *** of an entire Vietcong battalion. All we have to do is find one.

In our fight against Communism, the day’s mission is to cordon off the village of Phu Ninh while troops from the South Vietnamese National Police Field Forces search for hidden Vietcong or munitions.

The radio crackles. “Six, this is one-six — at an intersection — we’ve got a gaggle of ‘little people leathernecks’ crossing.” The First Platoon leader is informing me why he’s come to a stop. “Would’ve fired them up, but my one-five spotted their U.S. adviser.”

“Little people leathernecks” is the lieutenant’s attempt to disguise the identity of these friendly forces over the radio. Doing it properly and encrypting the term with the code in our communications operating instructions would have taken 10 minutes. Since nobody’s warned me about a South Vietnamese unit operating near us, I’m annoyed. Responding to my irate call, battalion says that the adviser to the Vietnamese Marines forgot to apply for the usual clearance. I’m to “stand fast until they’ve passed through.” I have my driver take our A.P.C. forward so I can get a better look.

To my surprise, I find a trained and alert force. They file by purposefully, in a disciplined tactical formation. At the same time, an alarming number carry live chickens or pigs that I assume they’ve stolen. I wonder what else these allies of ours might have “liberated” from their compatriots. Roaming the countryside so heavily armed must give them unlimited opportunities to intimidate hapless farmers. It’s rumored that corruption in the South Vietnamese Army often leaves their soldiers near starvation. If true, I realize such looting would be an inevitable result.

We’re stopped in a typical hamlet: simple buildings, made mainly of bamboo stalks and palm fronds. A family’s vital functions — cooking, feeding, sleeping, recreation, procreation, birthing and all the rest — play out in one or two small rooms. Our allies stream past, and our idling engines fill the damp air with diesel stink. Before long, several dozen kids have gathered to scrutinize us. Our men, kids themselves, dig into their rucksacks for goodies they stashed for just such an occasion. Soon, a flock of olive drab cans of food and silver hockey pucks of chocolate arcs from our vehicles. My guys aim for the smaller children at the fringes of the throng, but fast as the little ones race for the prizes, they’re invariably slammed to the ground by older, bigger boys.

From behind me in the cargo hatch, my boyish, sandy-haired radio operator tosses a can of fruitcake to a little one. His blue eyes lose their sparkle when a teenager snags it midair.

Our troops — as idealistic as high school kids anywhere — are outraged.

In this poverty-stricken place, our men’s instinctive caring for underdogs is a distraction. I expect most of us sense how condescending and counterproductive such efforts can be, but the impulse for altruism will endure.

In a flash, my peripheral vision spots movement and reflexively, I crouch, my senses on full alert. My hand slaps the .45 in my shoulder holster. Turning fast, I see that an old woman has materialized alongside my vehicle. My breathing resumes only after I confirm she’s not carrying a basket of grenades. I lean down to look at her. She’s tiny and stooped. I estimate that — even with the cast-iron hoe she totes on one bony shoulder — she can’t weigh 90 pounds. Years of hard work in the sun have left her face dark, deeply creased. She looks up, shakes her fist and shouts. I have no idea what she’s hollering, but obviously, she’s seriously pissed off. She wants us gone from her hamlet, from her district … from her country!​

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Continued from prior post.

As she rails on, tears stream down her creased cheeks and her grimace exposes her few remaining teeth, blackened by betel nut. I wonder if its juice has an intoxicating effect, ramping up her agitation. We’re the good guys, so I nod down to her, and smile.

Her eyes narrow to slits. Planting her feet, she puts her full weight into swinging her hoe at my vehicle’s armored flank. Again and again. The clangs persist until a boy of 6 or 7 comes up to gently take her by the arm. Even after he’s led her out of sight, snatches of her hoarse, rasping outrage echo back to me.

Finally, the last Marine crosses the intersection, and we roll toward Phu Ninh. Before we’ve gone 100 yards, we again slow to a crawl. Eventually, my A.P.C. reaches the obstruction: a pair of rusted tank hulks, battered practically beyond recognition, squatting astride the roadbed where they met their end.

It’s obvious that a decade or more before, this is where their French colonial crews suffered a violent fate. Only a big landmine could have flipped the one that’s on its back.

Over the coming months, we’ll pass this way often. Each time, those shells will bludgeon me with their clear warning: This, white man, is what your hubris can cost you.

Finally reaching our objective, we quickly encircle a hamlet smaller than a football field. I call for the South Vietnamese police, and the orbiting Chinook helicopter lands. Within minutes, they’ve assembled the villagers in a holding area just outside my perimeter. Inside, 20 uniformed police form a straight line.

From my A.P.C., I hear a barked command that sends the policemen to ferret out hidden enemy soldiers, explosives or weaponry. The seasoned cops move cautiously, staying in a line as they go, and they use metal rods to probe every inch.

Then a noise somewhere between a gag and a choke draws my attention to the holding area, where a young woman lies pinned to the ground by three policemen. A fourth has clamped a cloth over her face, and a fifth now empties a canteen over the rag. The victim coughs, gasps, recoils and rears against the three weighing her down. I’ve never seen such an inhumane procedure. Each time the man floods the rag again, her chest heaves, she gags, and her bucking sets all three restrainers to bobbing. Obviously, she feels that she’s drowning.

Outraged, I sprint to the American military police captain attached to the South Vietnamese unit, and get in his face. With condescending calm, he suggests I relax. He says I’m new in-country, that I don’t understand. I tell him to stop violating the Geneva Conventions, or I’ll pull my company out, leaving them stranded. He replies, “No one ever died from one of our ‘drinks of water.’”

Furious, I radio my battalion commander. “I sent you there to put in a cordon,” the colonel snaps. “Make it a good one. Do your job — let them do theirs.”

Speechless and humiliated, I stalk back to my A.P.C. and lurk there, fuming, until time to call the helicopter back for the police.

When the Chinook at last lumbers away, I radio my platoon leaders, ordering our move to the vast beach nearby, where we’ll set up for the night. Just as our diesel engines crank, I hear distant AK-47 shots. The rounds tear through palm fronds just overhead with a tsht-tsht-tsht that confirms someone is shooting at us. Instantly, our First Platoon responds with several bursts, hoping to draw fire so we can find the sniper. He doesn’t shoot back, but we can’t just pretend he isn’t there — next day, he’ll be levying more rice taxes on the villagers, or planting more landmines to disable our A.P.C.s and kill our men.

Several men think they’ve spotted movement in bushes across the paddy, and I order First Platoon to attack. Instantly, one squad vehicle supports by fire with all three machine guns, while a second one races up the hedgerow with guns blazing. The shooting stops, and I wait long minutes for a report. At last, a subdued voice in my headset: “One-six, we’ve completed our sweep. No sign of sniper; no expended brass. We did come across a pair of locals …” His voice trails off.

As I race that way, I see my lieutenant leaning awkwardly over some bushes. Maybe they did catch the sniper. But then, I see it’s a waif of about 11. Cowering on the ground, she cradles a shrieking toddler, little face red and distorted, inconsolable. Accompanied by a Kit Carson Scout – one of the ex-Vietcong soldiers who now work alongside the Americans – I climb out of my A.P.C. and run to them.

Tears stream down the older girl’s face, and between sobs, she gasps responses that are inadequately translated by the Kit Carson: “Mother working, they take eat … coming home, many shooting.”

“Ask her if she saw any VC, any shooting,” I say softly, despair roiling my insides.

“Only see mother,” the Kit Carson says, stone-faced.

There’s no mitigating the unspeakable terror we’ve visited on these two innocents — for the crime of going about their daily routine. Desperate to comfort them, I reach out to pat the older child’s shoulder. Terrified, she cringes away.

The sun is low on the horizon, and the area is teeming with armed troops gunning for us. My priority is to get my company set up to defend for the night. If we don’t move now, we’ll be exposed and vulnerable, stumbling around in the dark. Gagging back my nausea, I give the order: “Mount ’em up, let’s roll!” My cracking voice sounds hollow.

Later, inside our perimeter, my head swims as I try to process what I’ve seen.

After commanding my company for six months, I’m sent to work at battalion headquarter. On duty in the operations bunker one afternoon, I get an urgent report: a 250-pound bomb has just hurled one of our A.P.C.s 30 feet into the air. The driver and two others are killed, and three survivors gravely wounded. Witnesses later report that, in the confused aftermath, an old woman and a boy about 6 were seen hustling away from the spot where we later recover the “clacker,” or firing device, that detonated the buried bomb.

Fifty years have passed since that first day of mechanized operations. I went on to experience other events so horrific that they still cause nightmares. But after that one, no other 24-hour period so effectively laid bare to me all the conundrums of the Vietnam War.​

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Dick Guthrie on the coast of the South China Sea, Binh Dinh Province in 1967 and 1998.
 
“A Bowl of Pasta”, by Dan Sarago, a psychotherapist in San Francisco, who worked for the VA as a readjustment counseling therapist from 2001 to 2014.

In June 1968 I lost my student deferment. I was a 22-year-old English major who commuted to SUNY Buffalo from Lovejoy, a working-class neighborhood on Buffalo's east side, where I lived with my family. I had never been on a plane before, nor away from home.

My deferment was always temporary, just for a year, but I had hoped it would buy me enough time. By then, most men like me already had a good sense of what the war was like, because we could see its terrible effects in our hometowns and neighborhoods.

Early enlistees had gone off to war with ideals, or in a haze of naïveté. I was more clear-eyed. One month before, one of my neighborhood friends, Tony Palumbo, was killed in Vietnam. Our Italian neighborhood was in shock, and mourned the loss of one of our finest sons. I couldn't bring myself to view Tony's body at DiVincenzo's Funeral Home. I was too scared that the same thing would happen to me in a few months. For many years after, I felt guilty for never saying goodbye to Tony.

I left for basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., on June 7. It was two days after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that maybe his death meant I wouldn’t have to go.

In the first month at Fort Dix, I contracted pneumonia. After recovering in an Army hospital, I got “convalescent leave” and went home to my family and my girlfriend. I was 20 pounds lighter, with a shaved head, and I drowned in the khakis the service had given me just a couple of months before. It was sweet to be home, and I pondered heading for Toronto, just two hours away. But while I was against the war, I couldn’t desert, either – I thought of all those guys like Tony who had already gone off to war. Who was I to say no?

I headed back to Fort Dix two weeks later and got "recycled " into another basic training unit. This time I made it through, and waited to learn where I'd go next. I thought my illness, and my college time, would keep me from combat, yet I got assigned to the infantry. Soon I found myself at Fort Polk, La., affectionately known as Tigerland.

I was frightened, but resigned to the fact that my comfortable and safe little life was officially over. During the next eight weeks of jungle training in the bayous of Louisiana, I lost any sense of what I was doing there and just went along with the program, getting swallowed whole by my olive-drab existence, the heat, sweat and sleep deprivation and the war lying ahead.

My fellow grunts were a ragtag bunch: Appalachian farm boys, Puerto Ricans, Southern blacks, Northern blacks, immigrants who were promised citizenship and a few convicted felons who were given the choice of the Army or prison. This was mostly the makeup of the infantry: the uneducated, powerless and poorest young men you could find. I sure wasn't in the bosom of my Italian neighborhood anymore.

In the eighth week of training, we were on a 15-mile march, carrying full packs and M-16s out to the rifle range. Ten miles out, I could feel my feet stinging with every step, but plowed on. By the time we got to the range, I was in intense pain and couldn't feel anything below my ankles. I dropped to the ground and removed my boots. I had six blisters, an inch thick and the size of quarters. A young buck sergeant took out a safety pin to pop them, but then recoiled when he bent over me. "Put him on the mess truck and get him over to the dispensary,” he shouted.

An Army doctor looked at me and said the magic words that surely saved my life: "You can't be in the infantry with those feet," he said calmly, and wrote up a medical profile for "non-infantry duty.”

Just like that, I wasn't going to be a grunt. Just like that. Instead, I ended up in clerical training, alongside mostly white, middle-class, educated enlistees – men who’d signed up for three-year hitches to avoid combat.

I never saw the infantry unit that I trained with again. They all shipped out for Vietnam the week after I was injured. I don't know who lived or died there, since I couldn't remember anyone's last names. Every time I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial I try to figure out which were my training comrades, but to no avail.

I ended up in South Korea, attached to an administration company. After 13 months I was out; I went home to Buffalo, and college on the G.I. Bill. I didn’t cut my hair for three years.

I did make it to Vietnam, though. In 2014 I traveled around the country with a group of combat veterans, from Ho Chi Minh City in the south up to Hanoi. I made a special stop along the way. I found the place where Tony was killed, and left a Lovejoy T-shirt, his framed photo – and a bowl of pasta. It was my way of honoring him, finally.​
 
Thanks for posting the first-hand accounts, Brad. I always prefer them to accounts written by historians why weren't there, usually years after the event.
 
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