The very personal story of a young lieutenant’s gradual disenchantment with the war in Vietnam. What especially comes through is the distinctness, often becoming bitterness, the soldiers feel toward the ARVN and the total lack of empathy for the “dinks.” Everything seemed pointless, They would spend days and weeks taking a piece of ground, taking casualties, only to pack up and leave after a period. Just as a company would become familiar with territory and feel like they are making progress, they would be relieved by a brand-new company of recruits who will have to learn their lessons all over, taking casualties in the process. In the meantime, everyone knows the one constant will be the permanence of the Vietnamese people who will be there and return to an area as soon as the Americans leave.
Some relevant selections:
However, we traveled in a vacuum of understanding among the villagers and farmers because neither we nor they understood the other’s language. Whenever we found a booby trap in or near a village full of people, we were powerless to question anyone or do anything about it. We couldn’t take the whole village prisoner, so we were forced to vent our anger by destroying the hootch closest to the booby trap.
The American strategy was to draw them into a fight so we could use our superior firepower to destroy them. To win a battle, we had to kill them. For them to win, all they had to do was survive.
*The trouble with Nam was that we didn’t control anything that we were not standing on at the time. Anything that moved outside our perimeters at night was fair game because the night belonged to the enemy and both sides knew it. The reality of only owning the ground you stood on meant making sure you continued to stay on that ground.
Why did we want to kill dinks? After all, we had been mostly law-abiding citizens back in the world and we were taught that to take another man’s life was wrong. Somehow the perspective got twisted in a war. If the government told us it was alright and, in fact, a must to kill the members of another government’s people, then we had the law on our side. It turned out that most of us liked to kill other men. Some of the guys would shoot at a dink much as they would at a target. Some of the men didn’t like to kill a dink up close. The closer the killing, the more personal it became... I didn’t believe in torturing or in allowing a dink to die a lingering death. In the jungle we never took prisoners if we could help it. Every day we spent in the jungle eroded a little more of our humanity away. Prisoners could escape to become our enemy again.
I stood alone on the side of the road, smoking a cigarette and thinking, perhaps for the first time, that we could lose this war. Standing alone under the cloudy sky, I felt alien in this land. We had just finished an operation back in the jungle and these men now were going out to a different part of the jungle to play the same deadly game of hide and seek with the enemy, probably with the same inconclusive result.
Perhaps the most authentic Vietnam War memoir I have read.
