I don't know if it was newspaperees or if the higher ups in the 1st Cav actually called them "Mini Cavs", but that's what they were known during the late summer of 1967 when we were doing these chordon and search operations in villages in Binh Dinh Province. Basically what would happen, with very little warning, the whole idea of being too surprised whoever might be in any given village, a company would be airlifted in to a village that was small enough to be surrounded completely by a company of American troops- say 100 to 120 men.

The company would be landed by platoons around the perimeter of the village. Uh, a platoon here, a platoon here, and a platoon here until the village was cut off from outside with the troops then being ordered to keep everyone in and everyone who was already out, out. Um... at that point, once that was accomplished, uh we didn't have anything to do. We'd sit around in the shade and read, and eat our c rations and, and um make faces at the people- threaten them if they came close to our chordon, whatever.

Oh, then the national police field for us- the Vietnamese Field Police would be brought in- usually by a chinook or huey's. And then they would go through the village itself and search and interrogate and look for caches, uh poke around the thatch, and talk to the people and usually rough up the people who seemed suspicious to them and maybe take a few prisoners or VC suspects.

Uh at which time they would depart with whatever or whoever they were departing with, and we would either hike some distance or set up a perimeter for the night or we would be flown elsewhere and set up a night perimeter. They were usually operations that actually lasted three or four hours during the afternoon. Uhm... and it became the going technique uh late, during the late summer of 1967 around Bong Son, Phu My, and that area. It's really all we did, uh, besides the normal patrolling and securing of fire bases for several weeks.

What was the point of the operation?

The idea was that if you moved around a village quickly enough with no warning uh, having achieved surprise, then any VC in the village would be trapped there. They wouldn't be able to get out. You might uh... if you moved into a village and there was a chance that the village could be warned ahead of time, then the VC, they could bury whatever compromising documents they might have around- they could conceal weapons, etc., etc.

The idea was that if you moved in quickly and then ran a quick search, uh the VC might be caught with their pants down. You could, you could pick them up. Supposedly, once or twice in these operations VC, 1 know VC suspects were picked up. Whether they turned out to be actual Viet Cong, I have no idea. Um, the only time in an operation at all like that, where I actually saw Viet Cong captured, was just a sweep through a village uh that we happened to be doing with the national police. But it wasn't this, this "mini cav" type operation. And we did find that Viet Cong who admitted that he was a Viet Cong.

But the idea was that if he could insulate the village, than there couldn't be any escape if he did it fast enough. At one time we went so far as to march down Highway 1, and at a point where the company was... passing directly through a village, the whole company split up and literally ran as hard as we could around the perimeter of the village on one side of the road uh to, to trap anyone who might be running, who might be getting away, uh, pretending to march through on our way to some other objective and then suddenly surrounding the section of the village. Whether it worked or not I have no idea. Uh, it certainly didn't work noticeably. Uh...

What kind of an area was it? Describe the villages and the terrain.

Usually the villages were, oh, it was a very densely populated area. I understand that area was one of the most populous in Vietnam. It was mostly broken up in rice paddies uhm, sweet potato fields, manioc fields, and small villages. The villages I would say would be maybe two to three acres in area, at largest. And I would think probably usually smaller than that. Uh, they were essentially coastal plains, very flat in most places- completely surrounded or hemmed in by mountains rising very abruptly from these plains. The plains themselves were completely occupied by either paddies, fields or villages. There was very little forest cover, or anything like that.

Ah, Route 1 ran directly through this area along with the old Vietnamese railway. And most of our bases, our operational bases, were, were then almost within shouting distance of Route 1. Uh... I mentioned earlier that these operations seemed to be more of a defense tactic for security along Route 1 than an offensive tactic in which we might expand our, our influence. All the villages we did this sort of thing were either on or very close to Route 1. We never really went out into the villages where you'd expect to find Viet Cong or a greater Viet Cong influence.

Did people look prosperous or poor? What did they look like, the women and children, men?

They looked, I guess, as good as any Vietnamese I saw. I didn't notice, I didn't sense a feeling that these were sick people or somehow depraved or anything like that. But I don't know what sort of average I'm working from. No one ever took me to a village and said these are the prosperous Vietnamese who were doing well. So I really got nothing to base that on. They didn't look, you know, diseased or hurt, or anything like that. Uh, at the same time, though, they did scrounge through our garbage at the bases and that kind of thing. So obviously they felt in need of certain items. But, just as a complete neophyte in Vietnam, I would say they were doing fairly well. You didn't see a lot of kids around with ulcerated legs or untreated uh sores or anything like that.

Were these areas considered VC areas or not?

No, that's what I was saying, I guess, indirectly. These weren't the areas where you would think would be insecure. And we didn't consider them insecure. It was quite common around some of the bases, which we were then in one case, a kilometer of a village we cordoned and searched, to go off the base- you know, sometimes you might forget your weapon and not really think much of it.

And you could go down to any one of the villages and get a Coke or a beer or something and not feel that you were risking anything. We were right on the main highway. And in this area, when I was there, the Cav had been in this area pretty much without a break for over a year. And it was considered to be a very quiet sector of operations. Most, at one point, in fact, most of the division was outside the division's area of operations. It was so quiet that the division could loan itself out to other units.

Did you ever wonder why American troops were doing that sort of thing instead of the Vietnamese?

I think we've wondered in that sense why we were doing anything (laughing) instead of the Vietnamese. Um... in that sense and in every other sense, actually in most cases we never saw the Vietnamese actively supporting us, certainly not in the military role. We never noticed that we went into an area and if there was any back up from the ARVN you'd go into an area and deal with it maybe three or four times. And then you'd go back in again because the ARVN had never gone in there.

No one had gone in and tried, tried to retain the security that we had established by- we thought we had established- by sweeping. In fact, the mini Cav operations, the cordons, were probably the only time we ever did see the South Vietnamese go to work. And the national police field force was, as I understand, separate from the South Vietnamese Army. It was not part of that at all. Oh, I think the way we were looking at things, perhaps rather naively, uh, because the national police wore camouflaged uniforms and all that, we considered them some sort of elite group. Oh, but the army of South Vietnam never seemed really, almost really didn't seem to exist in our eyes.

Was uh...

For some reason, whether rightfully or wrongfully an almost uh a legendary air had built up around it. I was only in the Isle once, just for an afternoon, going up to support a reconnaissance unit that had gotten into a fight.

Let's talk about the Cav operations against the three regiments, I guess.

The 3rd NVA Division.

The division that was operating there. Um, describe one of those engagements and how it started.

Well, typically the engagements in 1967 involved... making contact with an enemy unit entrenched in a village in a coastal plain. What would happen uh, it could be a reconnaissance chopper pilot might notice a radio antenna sticking out of a hooch roof ten miles from a nearest road, which would be very unlikely unless it were a military base of some sort. Uh, it might be uh, a chopper pilot might notice a machine gun being carried by someone who was trying to evade and happened to be near a village and was heading for a village, whatever.

Something would arouse suspicions on a brigade commander's part, say. And he would order the reconnaissance unit attached to his brigade to send a platoon called a "blue team" into that area to check it out. Ah, at least two of the three cases that I could think of that were sort of archetypal- that's what started it- blue team would go in. If it drew fire, it would either deal with the problem itself, if it could, or it would call a supporting units. Um, if it could deal with it itself, it usually meant it was a pretty small force of enemy, maybe a squad of Viet Cong or something had, were passing through a village or it, it overslept or whatever it couldn't get into a safe area. Uh, the three instances that took place that strike me as the major battles of that period were a lot larger than that.

A reconnaissance unit would go in and find itself confronted with a whole battalion of North Vietnamese. And within twenty-four hours, at most, you'd go from committing an American platoon to essentially an entire American battalion. Ah, usually as an incremental thing, your platoon would go in and essentially get its ass kicked off when it walked into the battalion. And so you'd send in an American company, and it would get its ass kicked off and then you'd, you'd call in two more American companies and then you might call in a platoon of armor to help out, and of course, all this time you're, you're building up in terms of employing more and more artillery, more and more gun ships, calling for jet strikes, and then heavier jet strikes. Uh, about which time the village was pretty much destroyed.

When you mentioned these unit names, just go back and say how it builds up, but...

Let's say you have a battalion of North Vietnamese in the village. We're talking 3 to 400 enemy soldiers entrenched in anything from just little foxholes to concrete bunkers. The first American unit to actually go in on the ground would usually be of platoon strength, maybe twenty to thirty men with light weapons, and out in the open. Ah, obviously they're not going to make any headway at all against an entrenched enemy battalion.

However, they might not be able to identify it as a force of that size, since the North Vietnamese obviously aren't all going to stand up and be counted. So the reconnaissance unit might report back and say, "Well, a suspected enemy company- maybe 100 or 90 to 100 enemy troops." The American commander of that area might say, "Okay, we'll commit a company instead of a platoon," which would be, in Vietnam, generally about 100 to 130 people would be your average field strength for a company. That company is going to find out when it runs into the village or tries to approach it that there's a lot more than a North Vietnamese company there.

How do they know that?

Because of the extent of the firing. There was a rule of thumb, I remember getting a little note from Intelligence once, telling me how to figure out the enemy strength. And it was something like if you had one machine gun, one light machine gun firing against you, it was probably an enemy platoon. Uh, two machine guns or one heavy machine gun company. If you had a mortar or an 81-millimeter or 61 millimeter mortar (61 or 82, I guess the enemy weapons were), there was probably a company. If you had a 120 millimeter mortar, ah you were up against at least a battalion or regimental size outfit. Anyway, there was a whole sequence of... estimations.

If you had say two heavy machine guns or recoilless rifle firing against you, you could figure out you were up against a battalion. So there was a method by which some estimation of enemy strength could be arrived at by a commander on the scene. Uh, at the point in this case where a company commander goes in against a village and realizes that he's taking, let's say, fire from several heavy machine guns or recoilless rifles, or whatever, realizes he is up against a battalion unit, he's going to call for help. And it's going to be realized at that time that given they were fighting 300 or 400 enemy troops, given that were dug in and entrenched... having established that you're up against 300 or 400 dug in, very well dug in, enemy soldiers, you're not going anywhere, even with an equal number of American soldiers without an awful lot of support going in first.

Uh, generally speaking, I know for a unit in the attack in modern warfare, as I understand it, you generally need odds of three to one in your favor to guarantee breaking into and fighting through an entrenched position, unless you're willing to take an awful lot of severe losses to do it. We weren't. Uh, the whole idea, I think, of the whole American war, was to wage war on the cheap. And it was a lot easier to try to surround the village and blow the enemy to bits with artillery, jets, gun ships, etc., instead of going in and fighting it out. And we had the troops to do that, we usually had the time to do that.

It was very seldom when you couldn't afford, you know, to have two or three companies, or maybe three or four companies spend twenty-four hours sitting, essentially, around the perimeter of a village while you blow the village to bits. And then the next day go through and sweep and pick up the pieces. And if the enemy were still there, fight them for a while- long enough to at least delineate their exact position, and then pull back and go to blowing it up again. That's generally how those battles ended up. Not pitched infantry battles, although for the infantrymen involved, it was pitched enough. But, really just sitting back taking the village to bits, and then going through and finding out what you've accomplished.

Uh... the perfect village battle (chuckling) in terms of this discussion, would be the An Hoa and An Kuang fights- also known as the Dam Trao Lake fights in late June '67. The villages were quite isolated. They were in the context of... lakes, or a large lake on one side- very broad and totally uninhabited sand dunes on the others. So that even on the ground, from a slight distance, it could almost be seen as a diorama. Everything was very distinct. The village was there. It didn't sort of fade into the background or anything. Why the North Vietnamese got stuck in that village is beyond me, unless they made a grievous mistake.

But whatever. When we flew in we didn't know what the operation involved. I think we realized because we were put into the air so suddenly with so little warning that somebody needed help, but what exactly the situation was we didn't know. Now, for all I knew, we were going in to just be on call for somebody. From the air coming in your could see the village, you could see almost every building and every palm. You could see the every paddy right around it. You could see the dunes. Ah, and you could also see at least a company of GI's advancing towards the village across the dunes, obviously just having landed just before we flew in.

Oh, there was a lot of smoke coming up. There were some jets overhead. Uh, I can't, it was obvious the village was being bombarded. And because of the, of that, obviously there was a fight going on. And I think it kind of intrigued a lot of us. Uh, fighting under those circumstances was a lot, pretty easier than bush whacking it out in the jungle, where you couldn't see a damned thing. Uh, from anywhere around that village you could see for, jeez, up to half a mile or two or three miles unobstructed. And so you didn't get the feeling of being closed in.

And for some reason you felt safer in that circumstance than you did elsewhere. You didn't feel that the battle would be quite as deadly because you somehow would be able to see things a little better. And I think part of that was perhaps that you knew the village was where the enemy was. You had some idea of where the enemy's location was. Usually out in the woods, the enemy might be anywhere for 360 degrees around you. But when you approach the village you knew who was in front of you. And it was almost the kind of fighting that if you, if you weren't actually being shot at at the moment, you could almost sit back and enjoy it, which we did. Uh, we moved up to a point on the edge of the dunes facing a village across about 400 yards of open ground. We enjoyed ourselves.

Back up just a bit. How did you feel when you were coming closer to a place where you knew there was a battle going on? You're in the helicopters- it's cold up there- you're coming down and you know it's going to be hot...

Okay, (interrupting) in none of these, in none of these situations...

So what was the sense of anticipation in the choppers?

You never, you never had to anticipate a hot LZ. We went into one once or twice that was technically hot. But we never knew about it. In fact, we generally understood we were going into green LZ's. There was never any anticipation or anxiousness about that. Oh, the only time in this operation or in any other that I remember being nervous. And I remember thinking, "Uh oh, this could be trouble." That was when we approached this village to the point where where there was this corridor of land across to the village from the dunes.

At that point we didn't know what we were going to do and they sent down the orders to go across the corridor and head for the village. And we knew there was fighting going on in the village- we could hear it, we could see tracers at the north end of the village ricocheting up into the air both green and red knowing enemy and American. They told us to head across the corridor of land and enter the village. And at that time I got very nervous because I knew perfectly well that somewhere along the way the North Vietnamese were going to do something to stop me from entering their village.

Oh, however, I didn't really have time to worry about it, because within fifty feet of starting to cross this open land we were told to stop and come back. Oh, at which point it became a spectator sport. You sat up in the dunes all afternoon all that, all the, all that evening and night and all the next morning and just watch the village being blown up. It was fun, if that's you're idea of fun. Uh we would catch occasional sniper rounds overhead, and we'd sit there and write about it and take pictures of each other, technically under fire. But we certainly didn't look under fire.

Describe in a bit more detail what this scene is like. There are helicopter gun ships, bombers... describe it as you remember it.

It's almost like a, if you, it's like a firepower demonstration. Basically, you've got this area of villages, two villages, each of them maybe half a mile long from your point of view adjacent to one another. So you've got a mile of villages across say a half-mile of farmed ground. The village is just a mixture of palm trees, a few stucco houses, a few stone houses, but mostly mud walled houses with thatch, and it's also jumbled up. From the outer edge of the village you really can't see too much detail. Uh, it's just banana groves and palms, hedges- that sort of thing, very confusing looking villages- very impenetrable visually.

Uh, there's a tremendous uproar at the end where the fighting is going on- just a mixture of bangs and cracks and pops, and the weird thooping sound of the M-79 Grenade Launcher, which is unlike any other military sound I've ever heard. Uh, you can't really see anything at all except smoke and dust. Now and then you'll see, you'll see where a hooch is burning or where maybe a white phosphorous grenade has exploded- there'll be a big rush of white smoke above the palms.

Uh, when the armor came in we got a platoon of tanks and some twin .40 millimeter dusters to support the company that was in contact. You could hear their engines. Uh, you could hear the tank cannon occasionally fire and the very heavy sound of the 50-caliber machine gun, which would cut through any other sound. At the same time as all this is going on, and... you really, you can't see anything you just hear and see the smoke from all this. The rest of the village is being taken apart with, at once, sometimes you'd have Huey gun ships with grenade launchers, rockets, and mini guns.

When you say Huey gun ships, say helicopter gun ships.

Okay. You have the helicopter gun ships coming in on what we called a "Daisy Chain." You might have a half dozen of them, and they'd just be circling, really, with one side of the circle aiming at the village and as each chopper went around that arc, the pilot would unload rockets, mini gun fire, automatic grenade launcher fire, and he'd just circle back around and take another turn. Uh, you'd have eight-inch artillery maybe, 155, 105 uh whole batteries worth- four or four, six guns at once uh firing salvos into the village. And all of a sudden you'd hear the shells coming in like freight trains, and then all of a sudden maybe an acre of the village would appear to just go up in the air.

Uh, you'd have, at least in the 1st Cav, we had what's called "guns a go go", which was a chinook twin rotor helicopter. It was armed with everything. It was like launching a floating battle when it opened up (chuckling). You had a selection of light heavy machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, rockets, uh .20 millimeter cannon. Uh, that would be blowing up a section of the village. Now and then when one of the choppers flew over, the enemy in the village would fire back. And instead of red machine gun tracers going down, and rockets going down and blowing up and tearing up the trees, all of a sudden you'd see a few green tracers rising at one of the choppers and realize that the enemy really was there.

You couldn't see that much. You couldn't see anything of them except the occasional tracers. And you could hear the fighting, but I guess it wasn't until we really saw the tracers that you really said to yourself there is a fight, I mean people are being killed over there right now. And that was the only time it became a little less than a spectator sport. Uh, that was the only time, even in a major battalion fight, if you were not in the contact unit that you really felt part of it.

Even when the sniper rounds went overhead from somewhere within this mass of palm trees and hooches and smoke and uproar- it wasn't quite real because, as I said, all we had to do was sit there and watch for maybe eighteen hours at a stretch. And then finally, maybe the next day around mid day, once it was decided that the village had been smashed enough, uh... you'd move up in support of say the contact unit and sweep through from one end to another with the tanks and the dusters accompanying you.

Over night was the only time where you tended to get nervous if you were not actually in the village- if you were just one of the surrounding units. Because then you’d be sending ambushes out toward the village between you and the village and they were making contact all night long, uh as the North Vietnamese tried to sneak away from the village and make it to the mountains. Uh, one ambush my platoon sent out on this particular occasion made contact with several squads of North Vietnamese during the evening and could have made contact with lots more except they were passing between the ambush and us in the company perimeter.

And the ambush was unable to fire safely at them for fear of hitting us. Uh, during that evening we destroyed two houses when, in the light of artillery flares which were up all night long, we could see movement around them. Uh, and again the spectator feeling was enhanced during periods like that. We were essentially safe. Uh, these North Vietnamese were not trying to attack us, they were just trying to sneak past us. Uh, at one point one of the machine gunners though he saw movement in a large stucco house, a two story house, and called our mortar crew and said, "Hit this target."

And they dropped a white phosphorous round right on the roof, and it was like a keystone cops comedy. I mean, Viet Cong were falling out the door, jumping out the windows. Uh, in the morning you'd never find any evidence of them. For all we knew we didn't hit a single one. But there were lots of them out there. And that's how the evening would go on and if as a supporting surrounding unit, if you were in danger at all, that was probably when it was most likely, when the North Vietnamese might blunder into you on their way out. And, of course, when you went in the next day they were gone.

Describe the, you say there are no, there is no...

Good question. It's a magic act. I could never understand it. It's really, you'd be a part of it, you'd see that you'd surrounded the village, somehow the enemy would get past you in the middle of the night. And he would do it with enough skill. So it wouldn't surprise me if, if he had 100 bodies, he could probably carry them right by you. I can think of one occasion when a trip flare thirty feet down from my hole, this is on a sand bank, it's not like it's in thick jungle, and a trip flare popped and we did see movement. There was something living and no one was ever able to kill it. I don't know how to explain it.

They had much more patience than I can imagine for moving quietly and skillfully and taking the time to maybe just go 100 yards and get to safety, get to a point where they could stand up and walk and not have to worry about getting shot. Oh... you fight 300 or 400 men in a cooped up area like the village and you bludgeon the place for eighteen hours with every weapon at your disposal, you've got to kill some of them. Just the law of averages says you're going to get a direct hit on a bunker now and then and destroy it.

Uh, we'd go through the village the next day, we found three bodies that we felt were pretty surely North Vietnamese and I think there were one or two more killed who were either armed or appeared to be in uniform and of age to be soldiers. Later on we were told 150 North Vietnamese had been killed. But where they, you know, where they clawed that figure out of the air, I don't know. (chuckling) A complete guess as far as I could tell, unless they had a deserter.

What was the effect on...

You sort of had to... find some other value in what you were doing than in terms of military success. I'm not sure how to explain that. I don't wanna make it sound like we were uh... seeing the whole thing as a situation comedy or anything like that. But I think... you, you go through a village like that, you destroy it, whatever wasn't already destroyed, and there wasn't much, you'd destroy the rest of it from houses down to jars. And I think the value I got out of it was just uh... sort of like saying, "...the hell with the results, this is something I've never seen before- this is interesting."

It's like living in a "Victory at Sea" episode. Uh, it looks like war. And sometimes that was really all you could get out of it. Other than that it was hot and sweaty and pointless. And, and that affected us. That made us doubt what we were doing. It made us wonder if there was a point to it. I guess what I'm saying is there was a very limited value you could get out of these operations because of the lack of results. And because even when you did get results, even when you knew that you had damaged an enemy unit, it didn't seem to matter in the long run at all. It didn't seem to make any difference.

Why?

What do you mean?

Why didn't it seem to matter?

Nothing ever changed. Your estimate of the situation never changed.

Did it not matter because you were gone from there the next day or what was it in the sequence of events that made it seem irrelevant?

I think the victory seemed irrelevant to us because even though we were fairly naive and and in some ways I think we understood that the North Vietnamese battalions were not the focal point of what that war was about. The war was a political war, it was, it was the famous VC infrastructure which we heard about, but really only gave lip service to as far as we personally were concerned. So, I think some of us at least realized that you could go out and destroy a whole battalion of North Vietnamese one day and that every one of those villages in that entire area probably had Viet Cong, cadre, workers, whatever.

And that they were the ones in the end who were going to make a difference. That was our view. It didn't really matter how many you killed. And it wasn't just a matter of looking at our area. We could even look around the whole country and if you knew anything about the war, you could say, well, in 1965 you fought the Ia Drang Valley and killed what, twelve hundred North Vietnamese, something on that order supposedly. And, then in 1967 within fifty miles, I guess, of the same location another big battle. It was like it was a repi—it was like a cyclic type thing. That's very confused.

What did you at that time know about VC? How had how had it become a part of anything that you were doing?

During training there was now and then you'd see like a a diagram showing you a village Viet Cong base and how they would creep around under water and and hide stuff and wowls and it might be anyone. The VC might be the farmer next door. In Vietnam there was a I think a pretty strict line drawn between Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars. North Ameri—when you said when you talk about regulars, the R was in capital letters. It was like heavy duty soldiers. VC it was more like wow a bunch of guys in pajamas carrying old carbines or something.

And, I think we realized that the Viet Cong were much harder to find, that there weren't that many Viet Cong in Binh Dinh Province as far as we could perceive as there were North Vietnamese. We were up against the North Vietnamese most often. We were fighting their main forces and I think we realized that it didn't, we could destroy half the 3rd NVA Division and it wasn't going to make any difference unless it was followed up in some political way or some civil action way, and it never was.

Did, did you, were you and and other conscious of that at the time or is that something...?

Oh, ya. Ya. We were conscious of that. Maybe not in a direct sense that we would look at a village and say well, we fought the 7th battalion of the 18th NVA Regiment here. Why, why aren't the ARVNs in there doing pacification or why isn't a rural development team in that village now, whatever. But, you, what would happen you might fight that battalion in late June and hear that you destroyed it. Great. Terrific. Then in August you might go into the Hoi An Valley three times that month and never find a thing, even the first time, but you go in there again and again until you wondered if battalion were just jerking off so to speak and trying to keep something actio—keep some action going out there or whether they really felt that it was necessary to secure that valley and you felt well we swept it once. Fine.

Now, now somebody else should be going in there to make something of it. Then you sweep it again and you sweep it a third time by which time you're really wondering what's the point. And, when you start putting that action in June together with going into Hoi An Valley several times it makes for some that is less than inspiring, less than confidence building. You felt that, I think at a certain point you really felt that our bravery, our willingness to do these things is really being taken advantage of for reasons that we couldn't ah penetrate.

Now, I don't think there were any reasons beyond a certain point. That was what was so dismaying about the whole thing. I'm not trying to say that we were politically astute and we could sit around discussing the VCI and and winning hearts and minds. But, I think at the same time we were a lot more astute than people might give us credit for. We were maybe just a bunch of dumb GI's but we could see things in front of our faces and when something was fishy we knew it. Ah. It's hard to bullshit GI's in that sense. (chuckles) You can't do it beyond a certain point. No one's ever pointed out when they talk about that.

It's true. In a sense you can look at any war that way and say okay people get killed in a war. The thing is that World War II the same villages didn't get killed over and over again. Once you, once you'd gone through Cannes or a town in Brittany, the war was over for that village and you could you could rationalize destroying it because it got rid of an evil. But, you could go through villages in Vietnam and maybe twice a year that village is going to catch it in an act and nothing is going to change. And, that was the evil of it.

That was the evil in that attitude that said well villages get destroyed. Of course, they do, but they don't have to get destroyed over and over again. Once you've done something like that, if you've done something, if you have to do it, it should be over, and if you can't do it and get it over with, then something has to be reconsidered.

Get into the conception of wars as they've been defi...

Definitely we wanted to see the war on our own terms, and our own terms were western military terms. Our own terms were what we were brought up on. Island hopping in the Pacific and storming through Normandy and France and the lowlands and across the Rhine and and reaching an object. A tangible object. Not stumbling along hoping for negotiations. Ah. Not going back and forth through the same area time and time again ah engaged in sort of morphus strategy called pacification or later on Vietnamization or whatever.

Try to think back to to that ah ah that time when and ah if that was a feeling that you did have then somewhat. You talked a bit about that already but try to think back and describe a bit more how that changed your attitude about what you were doing and and the way you did it maybe.

It might be easier to look at it sort of backwards. We didn't go around talking about this, but I think as evidenced by what we did talk about, how we reacted to certain things, that attitude was definitely there. In January, 1968 my company was in in the Phu My area in in Binh Dinh Province and we were very suddenly very unexpectedly put on a maximum alert. Be ready to go in five minutes. Choppers might just all of a sudden appear over the bill and it might be any time within the next twelve hours. Now, we can't tell you where you're going, and within half an hour the rumor was going around that we were off to invade North Vietnam.

By God, the 1st Calvary was going to be, you know, going up there. And, of course, the rumor wasn't half believed by most people, but all of us I think were a little fascinated by it, and we were joking about it. Ya. We're going to be air assaulting right down the main street and a C-130 with, you know, two F-4's on each side of us and no one's gonna come out alive and all this stuff. I think we wanted to see the war in that light though. That you could invade the enemy capital and end the war, that you could do some action, some visible action that would have an immediate effect on the end of the war.

And, it was the, it was not being able to do that. It was knowing that the war was not going to end in some sudden burst of fighting or somewhere. They'd talk about the decisive battle of the war shaping up in Dac Tau or wherever and almost every time a huge battle looked like it was about to pop like at Khe Sanh some some jerk would come off with it's going to be the decisive battle of the war maybe. And, it never was. It was never even close.

And, the GI's certainly knew that probably more clearly than anyone. And, at the same time, the GI's probably had the most to ah gain immediately by wanting to believe that sort of thing but they couldn't because we knew damn well there wasn't going to be a decisive battle, not not in 1967. I don't think so. I think we, we got with the program because we didn't, I don't know if it was a psychological thing if we didn't want to appear soft, if we were trying to measure up to ourselves from six months ago or six years ago or whatever, but I don't recollect that there was any difference in attitude towards the Vietnamese people or towards ourselves. Ah, in terms of how we acted. It was ah just as brutal at the end of that tour as it was at the beginning. There was no mellowing just because we realized this might go on for another twenty years.

To Vietnamese, Vietnamese...

We were tough guys. We were living to some extent an American frontier western. We were the guys who could go into town and take over and no one was going to mess with us. We could, I mean, we could shoot the mayor's daughter, and he wouldn't approach us cause he'd get shot if he did. We were, we were bullies essentially and we acted like it. I think ah I'm sure some of us fantasized about wearing six guns on our hips. I remember when I was carrying a .45 pistol as a grenadier. I deliberately wore it backwards on my left hip because I'd seen Liberty Valance wear it that way (chuckle) in the movies, and it was cool and it was Wild West, and it was cavalry. Pistols on your hips and all this stuff... Ah.

We were very romantic in that sense ah and we were trying to push this romanticism (chuckle) on to the twentieth century revolutionary war. It was insane. But, that, that's how we felt. We had a tough guy image. We were we were strong, tough Americans, and we were going to show the Vietnamese that maybe we weren't brutal but we could be and and as the joke that went around, I don't know... I've heard it before ah I mean you'd hear somebody talk about being the only law this side of the A... wow and it was just a direct takeoff on the only law this side of the Pekos. That's how we saw it or tried to see it. You had to see it some way, and if you couldn't penetrate it on the Vietnamese's terms, what choice did you have but try to overlay your own terms on it. Even if they didn't fit.

You...

You'd go into the villages or you'd be stationed say on one of the highways and you'd see all sorts of things because I can't describe them. I don't know what they were going by all day long. An of, and they've really no idea of what was happening. Things might happen around you within ten yards for a whole day and you never would know what had happened. One or two men in a company might have enough gumption to try to communicate say with the Vietnamese interpreter and say, you know, what's she doing or or what is this guy cooking.

But, ninety percent of the guys would sit there and take a nap rather than try to fi—try to really learn what they were seeing. Ah. We were lazy in that respect. We figured we had enough problems without taking geography lessons. Ah. There are things I saw that I almost can't describe and yet I saw then every day when we were in populated areas and I don't know whether it was apathy on my part of whether it was so mysterious that I couldn't even be interested in it.

The Vietnamese population.

One did not identify with the Vietnamese population in human terms because they were totally alien. The language was enough to drive you nuts. It's a very harsh sounding language, especially if you've never heard it before and especially in terms of the languages that most Americans are familiar with, such as, French, Italian, whatever which are remarkably smooth and pleasant sounding languages. The people are very small. They tend to be skinny. They are, they don't look the same. They dress funny. Ah.

Everything is different. Ah. You didn't really look at them as human beings most of the time. One, because you didn't have to and if you were going to be a tough guy that that's the best situation in the world. It's really easy to be tough to someone you don't even recognize as a human being, and if you start to recognize them as a human being, then you're not going to be so tough with them, and you're reputation is going to suffer. So, in a sense it was a a trap we put ourselves into. We couldn't afford to look at them as human beings. Not considering what we did to them. But, it was difficult. You you'd see them eating.

I mean they they did eat rice and fish heads. It's not a racist joke or anything. That's what they ate. And, it's a little... Ah. One of the, one I, one of the things I think is so difficult for us in Vietnam was that we never really understood that human beings could react totally differently to various stimuli than we, than we could. You talk about winning hearts and minds. Well, our image of liberating people and freeing people comes out of World War II or Seoul, Korea say, and it's an image of people cheering and waving and throwing bottles of wine at GI's and draping them with flowers and everything. You could kick the North Vietnamese out of a Vietnamese village and you literally could not tell if anyone in that village gave a damn. You could, they didn't look happy, they didn't look upset.

They didn't look as if they gave a shit. Who cares. I'm sure, I mean obviously, they felt something. I mean they just had the world drop on top of them for twenty four hours, but you could never tell that. About the only time you could really tell what they were thinking was when they were in pain or they were obviously upset about watching their house burning to the ground or something, or or looking at at a dead brother. Ah. Then they reacted like human beings. Most of the time though in our eyes looking at ourselves as human beings they did not react like human beings, and it was difficult to see them as human beings when they didn't seem to respond in ways that we considered usual or normal.

You went in...

Okay. As I said we were taught originally in training that you probably couldn't tell the VC from the the innocent villagers. There's, when I when I went over there I think I went over there with the ideals of being fair, of playing by the rules, so to speak, that if you couldn't prove he was a Viet Cong, then you shouldn't shoot him. You shouldn't hurt him. That fell by the wayside immediately when I realized that everyone in my view that I knew treated the Vietnamese as sort of between Viet Cong and nuisances. Ah.

It didn't matter, at one point we ca... we took a Viet Cong suspect and we were a little embarrassed to find out that he was an ARVN on leave and had an ID card and everything. And, as far as we could tell, he was what he appeared to be and he just happened to go home to the wrong village the day we swept it. Ah. Well, they told us well it's dark night, it's dark tonight and you're dug in. You shouldn't let him go cause he might be a Viet Cong agent so you'd be compromising you're position. So, try to make him comfortable and keep him there overnight.

Well, we tried to make him comfortable by using wire to tie his hands behind his back as tight as we could. And, when we saw that he was in pain, we tightened it up a little more. I mean absolute contempt for the people. Ah. It was a a way I think of not having to distinguish. If he had turned out to be a Viet Cong in the morning, we would have been heroes and everybody would have said, ya, we ought to treat him rough cause those little bastards. If he was a Vietnamese civilian or an ARVN, we knew we weren't going to get blamed for it.

No one was going to court martial us for tying this guy’s hands together cause Lord knows what they did to the Viet Cong when they captured ah say look they weren't exactly gentle. Ah. I think in a strange way it became a very well developed game. Everybody knew that if you got captured, you're in for trouble. Now... Can deal with right or wrong. It's being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that's how we felt about them. We really ah... They were just there. They were play toys almost. That could be any number of feelings.

If you, if somebody you knew got hit first of all how you felt about it depended on how badly they were hit. How they felt about it immediately ah there were guys who ah got hit for not seriously, I mean, broken bones, torn up arms, whatever, who were happy as hell. I mean you'd see them, you'd see the Medivac take off and you'd see the one good arm waving goodbye to you. I mean like key I'm on the way home. Screw this stuff. Ah. Some guys would deliberately wound themselves or allow themselves to be wounded very frequently. That about...

Yes.

Uh. As an indication of how wounds were viewed, more than once, very frequently at times you'd call in close artillery support because of a sniper or something- and everybody would dive behind a tree to get out of the way of the shrapnel. But every time the shrapnel was thrown out by an explosion and you'd hear it come pattering through the leaves and clicking of the trees uh you'd see arms stuck out, legs stuck out- just hoping for that wound, just hoping to get a broken ankle and go to Japan for a few months, or something. Uh, a friend of mine was wounded by uh jet shrapnel, bomb shrapnel and had one, one oh, about half his arm really torn open.

And he was just screaming like crazy before it was even bandaged, cause he was goin’ home. He only had about three months left- it was going to take at least that long just to repair his arm. He was out. He didn't have to worry any more. You couldn't. You were too damned busy. I remember carrying people who were horribly wounded. I mean, they were badly hurt in a way that if you, if you set them down for a moment, they would scream so much that you'd have to pick them up and keep moving just because the screams were so awful.

And there was no way to shut em up. Uh, I mean, you would've given anything for a medic to show up right there and then and just pump him up full of morphine or something. And somehow you just, you just turned off completely. You just turned it off. And you just did what you were, what you had to do. I really can't remember feeling any real emotion at moments like that. Uh, you'd see a guy screaming and crying and, and screaming at you to stop the blood. And I think, if anything, if there was any thought process at all, it was like, it was almost in an effort to, to put him down. You know, shut up- I'm doin’ the best I can.

And of course I was doing the best I could (chuckling). You just acted. You didn't really think about em. I mean, you'd go crazy if you, I think if you really could think about what you were seeing. I mean, seeing people, you know, with their intestines falling out and stuff. You tried to repair em. And if you succeeded, then you knew that whatever you felt, some of it was gonna be good because you saved their lives.

How did you feel to...

It sounds really weird, but it was interesting. You grow up on cop shows and westerns and stuff like that. And then finally you see what a little bullet can actually do, and how gross the difference is between what you're brought up on and what in actuality it can do. It's beyond, almost beyond being shocked at. Uh, I remember when Bonny and Clyde came out in '67, I guess, it was, it's, one bullet I mean, could hit you right in the forehead and your entire head collapses like a rubber mask. I mean, there is no structure left. It's not just a little neat hole with nice peacefully closed eyes like in the westerns.

It looks, it looks as if every bone has been removed from the head from the neck up. Um... it does not look like a human being- period! It looks like somebody's invention of a human being. Colors change... the whole structure of the body just seems to change. It's unbelievable! And it's probably why there's no real visceral reaction a lot of the time, because it is- it's virtually unbelievable- what we are capable of doing to human beings- and what we do frequently, and certainly did frequently enough. It's beyond anything I, I ever imagined. I mean uh... it was like we'd talk about blowing someone away. And in a sense we did.

I mean, whatever humanity we might have seen in a Vietnamese, say, was literally blown out of him. And there's nothing there but this, this bunch of clothes with what appeared to be rubber skin and characteristics in it, in the clothes. And it's funny, I, I mean like, some of the guys were a little leery about like picking up a dead body to drag it off a trail or something, or going through its pockets. And I don't know, it never bothered me because it was hard to see em as human beings. It was, it never struck me as odd to go over to a body and open up its pockets and drag it off. I don't think I'll, I didn't think I was particularly blood thirsty. It just, they weren't bodies.

Oddly enough, I think the more depressing and more immediate in its emotional effect on me was seeing body bags that had GI's in them. Not even seeing the dead GI's, but seeing the bags with the GI's in them. Uh the first time I saw that I'd seen dead GI's once or twice the day before. And in the next day I saw my first filled body bags. And I remember whatever else had been happening around the perimeter, everything of me just focused in on those body bags, and I just stood there a few minutes just staring at em trying, realizing what they meant. Oh... and somehow it was more impressive just looking at these rubber bags than, than watching a corpse being carried along by its arms and legs.

One of our machine gunners the day before, where you could see his face and his clothes and everything- somehow those bags were more final more depressing. And that was, I guess, probably the first time I ever felt... that I was beginning to feel what was going on- that I was conscious that this really was serious, this wasn't just training anymore. That I really was in a war- that I really might not get home. That was real scary.

Why didn't it continue to be?

I grew up accepting what Kennedy told me, and what Johnson told me and to some extent, as young as I was, what Eisenhower told me. I believe that communists were bad. I don't know that I believed in monolithic communism. I was for the times very much a liberal and felt that, you know every, that communism might be okay in some countries, actually. Or if not communism, socialism or whatever. I don't think I was dogmatic about American principles being swarmed all over the world, whether they liked it or not.

Uh, but I had no reason to believe, no information that really seemed to have the credibility that I would have needed to feel that Vietnam was not in our interest. I had no reason not to believe Johnson. I had no reason not to believe that the Tonkin Gulf Incident took place as described or whatever. I felt that if the, that if South Vietnam was under attack even by North Vietnamese, that we had a right to go in and help them. And I, I saw us as doing that. I didn't feel that South Vietnam should never go communist.

As far as I was concerned, and I remember telling this to people in high school, if the South Vietnamese went communist peaceably or socialist, or whatever, or established a coalition government which included communists, fine! They could have it, they're welcomed to it. But I felt that out and out aggression, which was how I saw it, was wrong. And that... I guess uh, while we might not be the best world's policemen, somebody had to police it. South Vietnam couldn't defend itself and needed help. And so I, I was willing to join up. That's not the primary reason for my joining up. But I do feel that in that sense I was patriotic.

Uh, when I got over there what I found was basically, I guess, that the war was such a jumble that you really couldn't make sense of it. I mean, there were the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and then there were the Viet Cong suspects we weren't sure. Then there were the villagers. Then there were the South Vietnamese soldiers and the South Vietnamese security forces and then there were the Americans and then- you had Thai's over there and you had Australians.

It was a big, it was like a carnival going on over there. There was no way to really tell the players. I didn't know whether I was looking at a Viet Cong or a North Vietnamese or whatever. Despite all my feelings about the worth of the war, it had never occurred to me that it might be a war where because of its nature those feelings might be ridiculous. I mean they would have to be changed or altered in some way to fight it- period! You, you couldn't go into a war no matter how just and try to force WWII attitudes on 20th Century revolutionary warfare.

Just repeat that.

Oh, okay, basically getting over there I think you realize that no matter what your intentions, you couldn't- I guess the word would be "graft" onto this type of warfare the, the Mao's Giap, Ho, twentieth Century revolutionary socialist warfare. The... the tenets of WWII western style warfare, it wasn't gonna make it. Seeing that that's what we were doing.

Summarize it again.

Okay. Basically...

Say simpler than...

Okay. Basically what you had was a 20th Century revolutionary warfare taking place in Vietnam. Maybe it was communist aggression from the North. Maybe, you know, even if you look at it and say, "The Viet Cong were never Southern at all. It was all from the North, it was all the North's fault." The fact was that the war was being fought on principles. We're not gonna win anyway. No! We knew, we knew perfectly well we weren't gonna win. I don't think anybody believed in winning the war in a western style sense. And so why did peasant's get killed? So people could sit down at a table and talk when they could've sat down ten years ago and talked? You lost, I think a lot of faith was lost in that understanding. I don't think we could've expressed it that way at the time. But I think that's what it was. Uh...