Basically I felt that it, it was summed about a year before I joined up, when a CBS correspondent on the evening news mentioned – just came out flat and said, “It’s an American war now” or words to that effect. And having been brought up on military history and always wondering what I was reading really, or what I was reading really felt like ah I felt like that was sort of a signal to me that if I was ever going to find out this is the chance, and I’m not sure after that how much of my feelings were rationalizations to let me go over about the political aspects of the war, etc.

I don’t think I ever really paid much attention to them except to feel that Johnson knew what he was doing, that America was, because it was America, was probably doing the right thing, and if was in a fight, therefore, the fight was a fight we ought to be in. ah. And, that was about really the depth of my feelings or my thoughts about the justifica...or the worth of the war. I don’t...

Stop for a second.

Just a second. Any other feelings about ah what you expected the war to be and what kind of an enemy it was, what kind of a place it was.

I think in, in, I, I don’t know that I really knew what to expect given the ah what I – I’d read as much as I could about it and certainly in training you were indoctrinated with certainly ideas and, but I don’t think I had any real expectations. Ah. I know that once I got there it was not what I expected. Ah. Whatever I had expected. It was, it was just totally different than I thought it would be. I guess I had a picture of American military as a, a very tight, ah, shall I say succinct operation, and I found it wasn’t like that at all.

It seemed in a lot of cases to be jury rigged. It seemed very informal. And, I’m not saying that that was that meant it was messed up in any way but it was just that I, I don’t think that you can really expect to find in a war what your preconceptions are. It’s a unique experience. It’s ah, it’s overwhelming in that respect. It’s, it’s nothing like you expect.

Okay.

Just a second. Okay.

I think one of the things that struck me first upon arriving in Vietnam and, and still strikes me now was that it’s probably the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen and the one aspect of it that strikes me most deeply, and it stays with me and is the hardest to describe, is the intensity of the colors. Ah. Especially the greens.

They virtually, I mean, they almost vibrated they were that intense. Ah. It’s a color that you can’t really tell anybody about. It doesn’t really show up in photographs. Ah. But, it was almost a living entity, this, this deep harsh green almost. And, of course, the heat was unreal. Ah. When the door on the plane opened at Bien Hoa.

That’s, that’s okay. I just. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

As soon as the door of the...

One second.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

As soon as the door of the plane opened...

Start again.

Okay. As soon as you arrived in Vietnam and the door of the plane went down and opened...

Just start again. Just start again.

Okay. From that point?

Ya.

Okay. When you got to Vietnam the door of the plane would open and the heat would come in just like, I mean it was like a blanket. It was that intense, that thick. This was like five in the morning when you’d expect it to be reasonably cool. And, it would just sort of wash over you and...

The ah...

Just a second.

Okay.

Would you, would you sit right down, sir. It’s just hard to...

Okay?

Okay.

The area where I operated for most of 1967 in Binh Dinh province on the central coast was probably the closest I’ll ever come to seeing a, a Chinese silk screen print come to live where you have these mountains just rising up out of nowhere. It was all ah isolated mountains just coming up out of an absolutely flat plain. And the mountains, of course, were just this incredible green forest and the plains were mostly patties and fields and villages and it was, they were divided up in such a way you couldn’t help but think that the people who live there were almost like natural mathematicians.

It was so precise and so geometric the way the whole countryside was plotted and, and set aside so that ah it was like some superhuman intelligence at work setting up these land divisions. And that was, it was just amazing. It was really, you really felt you were in a movie more than anything else. Especially since for quite a while after I got over there we didn’t get down into the plains. We were up in the mountains and all you could do was look down and see these just efficient looking sectors and villages and that sort of thing. It was very different from. In America it’s like a sprawl. Ah. The towns don’t seem to have any design compared to the landscape in Vietnam.

Cut. Anything more about your impressions in Binh Dinh?

Not basically. If you want to go into the villages.

Start with the operation that you describe.

Basically, most of the major set peace fighting I was in in 1967 involved villages ah wherein a North Vietnamese, a Viet Cong unit, would sit and we would find out about their presence when an infantry company or one of the Recon platoons would walk into it and get the stuffing kicked out of it. And, at that point the division or brigade, whoever was in charge, would send other companies in around the perimeter of the village and attempt to surround the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, cut off their escape routes and then bomb the daylights out of the village or shell it to bits.

And then usually the next day, after all night bombardment ah one or more of the companies would sweep through the village or try to. One in particular operation in late June, 1967 in An Hoa and Quang, which were like twin villages between a lake and the coast. In a sense it seemed readymade for what we were doing. The escape routes were naturally cut off by water in most directions so it didn’t take too much to blockade the land corridors which led eventually to the mountains and the forests. Ah.

We showed up one afternoon. Set up as a blocking force. I think that afternoon we killed three ah supposed enemy, although the word went around the company that they were actually fishermen just trying to get out of the way and we pretty much believed that and didn’t see, didn’t think it extraordinary. The next morning before we made any attempts to sweep the village or move into it while we were still in the perimeter outside the village one of the radiomen from the company CP ah called out that there was, we were going to have a turkey shoot. And, the idea being that anyone trying to get out of the village was, we were going to assume it was an enemy soldier, and we could do whatever we wanted. Ah.

I know at least three or four individuals at a distance great enough so that we couldn’t tell whether they were hostile or not were hit by machine gun fire at which point an old man started walking directly towards us from the village. He was, he looked like he was in his fifties or sixties, although it was hard to tell ages among the Vietnamese, certainly at a distance. Ah. My platoon sergeant ordered one of the machine gunners to open up on him. Ah. And, it was really like target practice. The machine gunner obeyed the order, opened fire on the man and appeared to hit him in the legs.

The old man went down and I think right after that was the worst part of the incident where the old man got up and I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe he couldn’t believe what was happening because we were supposed to be Americans and he could find safety with us. He kept coming towards us. He was obviously unarmed. He was just trying to get away. And the machine gun opened fire again and hit him again. And, as I remember it ah the last we saw of him he was trying to get back to the village, and the machine gunner hit him and put him down for good. Ah. There were a couple of incidents similar to that.

I’m getting flushed with the excitement of the memory.

Okay, let’s get back to where you were saying about the enemy had gone by that time and maybe why they were gone.

Well, what I was going to say was what aff...

Just pick up.

What affected me about the old man and the village as a whole, that operation as a whole, was that the ol...the incident with the old man, shooting him down seemed representative of the way we conducted operations. There was no reason on earth to shoot him. Even if he had been a North Vietnamese. He was unarmed. He was walking towards us. He, we ha, I mean there were forty or fifty of us with weapons. There was no need to shoot him. We went through the village later. The enemy was gone except for a couple of snipers.

I think we took fire maybe three times during the entire two village sweep. Nevertheless, everything that wasn’t destroyed in that village, we destroyed right down to the wicker baskets and pots. We shot the cattle. We shot everything that was living except civilians and some of those got shot too. And, it wasn’t, I don’t think accidental. Ah. When a tank gun swivels around on a lot of women and kids who are running for safety and then blows them away at point blank range, there’s not much excuse for that. And, yet, no one seemed...

Stop and clear your throat and start again.

When a tank gun swivels around on a group of women and kids who I thought were obviously trying to get to safety and blows them away at point blank range there’s no excuse for that. And, yet, no one in authority certainly seemed upset by it. No one in authority told us we shouldn’t be acting like that. And, in fact when we returned through the village ah the orders were smash everything. Ah. Well, the whole point to our being in Vietnam was that we were supposed to be helping the Vietnamese people make a nation and, and get freedom and fight off Communism, it seemed like a very peculiar way of doing that, if doing that involved destroying villages to the point where putting salt on the ground would have been superfluous.

And, yet, that’s how we operated usually when we went through a village. If we had taken hostile fire from it, it didn’t matter if the enemy was still there or not we tended to, to wipe it out. And, that’s really when my thoughts began turning from even a just an acceptance of the war to what later became an extreme anti-war position. Ah. You can look at that date of that village sweep in ’67 and say that’s when it started happening.

Okay.

Okay. In, in villages, when you were up against an armed enemy obviously if the civilians are there, ah, some of them are going to get killed. It’s something that happens. If you’re going to fight at all, and the enemy chooses to fight from a village ah civilians are going to catch it just as much as, as the combatants are going to catch it. In some cases that happened, and it didn’t bother me. The, the first really big fight I was ever in there were literally piles of dead civilians the morning we went through the village in which had been a battalion of North Vietnamese. And, it didn’t really affect me because I figure, I could rationalize. I could say, well, the North Vietnamese were there.

They were shelling us. We were shelling them. We were ah putting ah machine gun fire on them all night and the civilians, unfortunately, got in the middle of it and diet. But you, I could see it was during an actual combat, and I could accept it. In An Hoa and Quang in late June there had been North Vietnamese there. The day before we swept that village two companies had suffered losses, ah fairly substantial losses, fighting their way, trying to fight their way into that village. But, the day we went through there, there really wasn’t any opposition to our sweep. We had tanks with us. We had heavy support. We took maybe five or six rounds of sniper fire and yet despite that we destroyed the village.

Despite that, civilians were killed during our sweep, and I think that’s what affected me. There was, I couldn’t rationalize it away by saying the civilians got caught in the middle. They didn’t get caught in the middle. We shot em down and we knew better. Ah. Some of the men did express displeasure and I think that had an affect on me also. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that I should feel that what we were doing was wrong. Ah. That ah that infant with his finger chopped off by a bullet was not, was not excusable in that situation. It wasn’t something you could say was just a by-product of war. This was like something entirely away from the war. The war had stopped when the enemy left this village. We kept it going as we went through the village.

The ah the destruction of those villages in June gave me the first opportunity or the first coaxing to question what was happening, what I was seeing, what I was taking part in, after which for the remainder of the tour in ’67 and early ’68 I think I was, I was questioning things a little more critically. I, I was viewing things a little more critically. If something...I wasn’t able to just go along with the program, as you would say in the army. Ah. As an example, you would go in a valley or a, a particular area, a very specific area, three or four times over a period of a couple of months, and maybe never find anything at all. And, you began to wonder why are we, why are we doing this. I mean aren’t we supposed to move on to something else. Ah.

Or you’d go into, or you’d go into another valley a couple of times and every time you went in you’d, you’d make contact, and you’d go in one month and you’d make contact and you’d ambush a few of them and they’d maybe booby-trap a few of you. And then a month later you’d be go...back to the exact same sport, almost the same perimeters at night, the same ambush sites, and you’d make contact again. And, you’d think well what happened. Why, why didn’t something happen over that month.

And, I think if we, if we really thought about it, of course, we were out there to do the fighting. We were infantry and that was it. I think we assumed that someone else was going to come in behind us and do, do the winning the hearts and minds bit. Do the political work. Either the South Vietnamese or somebody. And it just never seemed to happen where I was. I saw no evidence of it ever. And it just, it got very frustrating and every time that happened, I’d begin questioning a little more and wondering why, why was I wasting my time out there, why were people getting killed when nothing seemed to be eventuating from our efforts.

I think after a while I began to feel that someone was taking advantage of our bravery and our courage, and I think there was that, to no good end. Ah. So we were being used really ah for God knows what purpose, at least in terms that we could understand and appreciate in a gut level which was the level on which you operated in, in Vietnam. Ah. Words like peace with honor and negotiations they didn’t pay the bills over there. Not when you were out in the field. Ah.

Okay.

The villages themselves were, the word hidden is what comes to mind. Ah. Physically hidden because they were almost always just surrounded by very think hedges, groves of palm trees. From outside the village] for maybe ten meters away, you might not even see any evidence of a village. And then you’d walk through this hedge and here was this whole society, this whole organism right there. And, it was really impenetrable even when you got into it. Ah. It, in a sense you could say it looked like a village and it smelled like a village, but it, it didn’t feel like a village as any of us I think had ever known a village. As I’ve mentioned there...

Don’t say as I mentioned.

Ah. It didn’t, it didn’t feel like a village as any of us had ever known a village. There, it was so different from anything in America. These were villages were so compact, so tight...

When you went into a village, the village always seemed, in a very subtle way, incomprehensible – it was so alien. It just was unlike any inhabited area that any of us were used to in this country or anywhere we probably ever been. And I think at the time we were always just a little mystified we knew that the people who lived there probably lived normal lives that we might even understand if we were a part of it. But we weren’t a part of it – we never saw that...ah...all we saw were the people staring at us like we were from Mars...and it always...you felt a little intimidated by it ah as we would say would have said “a little flaky”, and you never felt you were really ah penetrating anything or understanding anything or seeing anything understandable...ah.

sense of the enemy between civilian and soldier...

Well it was almost there were three sides – there was the enemy and then there were the civilians and both of them were really just as alien. Ah I couldn’t comprehend the, the civilians any better than I could the Viet Cong...ah, even assuming that there was a difference and that, of course wasn’t always the case. Ah...

Well, it’s so aggravating about these repetitious exercises in this valley and that valley...was the fact that the way we’d been taught to fight and I think the way we’d been brought up was that you performed...

What do you mean the way you’d been brought up?

Well, I think in Western culture you do something you expect something for it...you work forty hours a week you expect...

Western cultures...

Ok. In western culture – in American culture – whatever, you work forty hours a week you expect some visible reward. Ah, it just - I’m not sure if I can really define it better than that, but I think what happened in Vietnam in these places was counter to that – either you do stuff and you, you were losing a lot more than a pay check you were losing people’s lives – you were losing blood even if you weren’t hurt you were losing something just going through that experience.

And then you go into these places over and over again and there was no tangible result – it, it just didn’t seem to make any difference to what was happening and that, that became very aggravating, very frustrating. At the time it was something that we were aware of ah just you know here we go into Hoa AhnValley again and we probably won’t find anything this time – what’s the point? Why keep doing this?

Express the idea of ah of what you mentioned earlier about a lot of walking around a lot tedium a lot of boredom with ah...

Yes, uhm, you sometimes would go for maybe two months without a contact of any sort – not even a stray sniper around and that grew so boring that there were times when even some of the draftees ah who had certainly be presumed to be reluctant to get into fights – I mean, they didn’t want to be there anyway...ah…they’d actually start talking about, you know, gee, it would almost be nice to get into a fight to have some kind of contact just to get some action moving out here.

Instead of just walking around carrying all this weight on your back, sweating a couple of gallons a day, having heat casualties, and for what? So you could walk around for another week ah it got to seem fruitless and you were...right up to the time I left when I had maybe five days left, ah, even with such a short time left in the country there were moments when I was almost looking for a fight even though I realized that all I had to do was keep my nose clean for a few more days and I’d be safe. There were times when I would have welcomed combat – it was so damned dull. This is during the Tet Offensive. Ah...

Whenever you did make contact with the enemy, you’d go from the most horrible boredom – I mean just absolute deathly boredom to absolutely the other extreme – the most intense continual excitement I’ve ever known in my life...ah...I’d – I’m not sure how to describe the energy you would feel and the excitement you would feel however you felt about it in terms of being scared or liking it or disliking it or whatever...the excitement was there I think for everybody. You couldn’t go through combat and remain detached. It was ah the idea of someone shooting at you – someone was trying to kill you – you were trying to kill someone.

You were using that finger to try to take someone’s life and that sends a real charge through you...ah...and when you hear bullets tracking around your head or when ah as in my case ah some green traces fly so close to your face that they literally blind you for a moment, it’s ah it’s indescribable – it’s like ah every thrill ever known all at once hitting you. And sometimes ah it would take sometimes days to get over it. I know some of the fights I was in a week later I would still be writing these letters and reading them it’s obvious I think that the excitement was still going on and that in a way I missed it after the fight was over. Ah.

Once when you were in a fight if you got in a position when you knew you were safe if you were definitely below the line of fire and you didn’t have to get up and run around I think there were probably times when I didn’t want the fight to end – I wanted it to keep going as long as I knew that I was safe...now if I didn’t know that I was safe, of course, you wanted – you would give anything in the world to have it stop.

But even in, even in those times when you were in very severe fights, there was a, there was a distinct beauty to it ah there was a, a sense of exultation and you, you’d swing back and forth like a, like a door going in and out ah a swinging door, but at some sort of hyper speed from any exper, any...any feeling you want – you’d go from that feeling to the opposite to that feeling again just like that and in the space of a second or two, you’d go from being very casually watching someone sitting around with a bullet in them and not even bothering to help them if they were a civilian to five minutes later getting ready to lynch the medic because he wouldn’t put a band aid on somebody’s head or on their hand for a minor injury.