Preface

           

I had the unfortunate experience of standing next to a marine who would be killed in an ambush because he did exactly what he was taught to do in jungle warfare school. He would have lived had he done what everyone else knew to do, but he wasn’t there long enough to know that. The next day his body was placed in a green plastic bag and shipped to Okinawa. There, it was then loaded onto an airplane along with scores of other body bags by a detail of marines who had just completed their tour of duty in Vietnam and were awaiting orders to fly home.

The daily work detail of loading body bags onto a baggage conveyor took a long time, not because it was being done in the scorching afternoon sun. Everyone there was used to that. It was not because these were salted vets who were biding their time and didn’t care about anything -- though it’s true, they stopped taking orders from anyone in starched utilities a long time ago. It took a while because it was mentally impossible to load a single body bag without examining every tag, reading each name, rank, and serial number, and trying to remember if you knew the guy, and thinking about everyone you did know who was shipped home in that exact same fashion. I know, because I had that detail.

The young man standing next to me would be shipped home in this manner. He hadn’t been out of high school three months before he joined the Marine Corps; he hadn’t been in country three days before he died. He was one of a total of fifty-eight thousand young men who were shipped home in body bags before the Vietnam conflict would end in 1975.

* * *

The Vietnam conflict was a war that was impossible to win. Our government initiated this conflict without ever having any clear military objectives. Our mission, as ordered, by General William Westmoreland, was to find, engage, and defeat the enemy. Once a village was secured, we were immediately told to leave and find the enemy elsewhere. The Vietcong, or NVA, were at home in a rural society. They never had any real estate to defend; they could simply retreat into the safety of Cambodia, Laos, or North Vietnam and choose to fight another day. It was this misguided approach to the war that made victory impossible and instilled a growing resentment in every man who served. This resentment would slowly transform into an indignant rage and would finally manifest itself into one simple decree that could be heard over and over in a variety of profanities: Survive your tour of duty, and then rotate home.

            The story you are about to read is true. It’s my story. Many of the names have been changed, not to protect the innocent -- there were no innocent. They were changed because of so much time having passed, and my inability to match the faces I can still picture in my mind with actual names.

What happened to me could have happened to anyone who graduated high school during the mid-1960s and lived in a community where the heroic adventures of World War II were expanded upon each Friday night in the halls of the VFW and American Legion. Where war was constantly romanticized on TV and in the movies and its heroes placed on pedestals as role models.

Although my view of Vietnam is constricted, barely ever reaching beyond the eyesight of my company, this book is an attempt to convey what actually took place on a day-to-day basis, where emotional chaos was woven into the fabric of survival, and feeling scared, and more often then not, terrified, was a constant reminder of just how fragile life is. If our society is to change its acceptance of war as a political solution, than the stories themselves must change; they must become authentic. We must stop making war palatable by adding romantic adventure as a catalyst and sensationalizing the experience.

This book isn’t the whole truth about Vietnam, but it’s a beginning. I refuse to believe that after forty-one years, the American people are still expected to accept the injustice of it all. We deserve more than the sour remainder to forgive all the wrong.

Semper Fi