This is a continuation of the Conversations with the Enemy: The Girl in the Green Shirt diary from 20 September. In that diary I wrote of events that took place on my first return trip to Viet Nam after the war, in 1989, and returning to the countryside and the villages where most of my war-time experience had been.
Before continuing on with the story of Thu and of having dinner with her uncle Bon, who had fought against, us I need to give readers some background on events that took place near her village in 1968 during the 5 month period I was there.
We were not heroes but most of us did our best. We really tried to help but we could never fully understand the overall complexities of the situation at hand and in the end we only succeeded in bringing hardship, suffering and death to those we were trying to "save". That being said, on a personal level, many of us who participated in joint USMC - Viet units made friends among the people and we are still remembered there today.
One of my experiences from the first weeks in-country was of being reprimanded by a young Marine lieutenant. "Marine" he barked, "you don't ask these god-damned people anything". With very heavy emphasis on the word "ask" and heavy emphasis on "these god-damned"...
It was over a minor incident. I was trying to practice speaking the language and had asked permission of a local bus driver to allow me to bring on board a heavy item I was assigned to fetch for our unit. The lieutenant, who was from another unit, asked what I was doing. His remarks set the tone for our efforts at "winning hearts and minds" in Quang Nam Province.
It was September, 1967. Our "six-by" truck sped down Highway 1 from Da Nang forcing smaller local vehicles off of the road and some bicycles into the the paddies flanking the raised road bed. Damn crazy driver I thought to myself.
I had my first good look at the Vietnamese countryside. It was a clear morning following a night of heavy rain. The rice and water levels were high in the paddies. Off to the west the paddies stretched hundreds of meters beyond our roadway to mysterious islands of deep green. Coconut and areca palms, bamboo thickets, banana trees and dense tropical greenery sheltered the hamlets within. In the distance, beyond the islands of villages, the foreboding mist-shrouded Annamite Mountains completed a picture of serene beauty. The air was fresh and clean. For brief moments it was difficult to imagine that we were in a war zone.
One of our fellow passengers in the back of the truck with us replacement "boots to the 'Nam" was an "old salt", with a few months in-country under his belt. He shouted obscenities at the local people we passed by on the road and especially the young women. He would spread his legs, grab his crotch and holler "Hey Cô (Cô is the Viet appellation for a young lady, roughly equivalent to Ms, or Miss), hey Cô boom-boom, boom-boom!" and he would rock back and forth and roar with laughter. The girls, women and everyone else we passed ignored him but at one point, near Dien Ban, his taunts triggered a response.
"Fuck yo" a young woman defiantly yelled back, and we all laughed.
Nearly 5 months later, during the opening days of the Tet Offensive, I arrived at our small, joint Marine - Viet Militia, compound near Thu's village. Our helicopter landed under incoming small arms fire and three of us replacements ran out the back ramp as ammo and C-rats were also kicked off. The incoming fire stopped soon after the chopper lifted off. No one was hit.
We were greeted by several Marines, none of them wearing rank insignia, and directed to sand-bagged fighting holes along the northern edge of our compound perimeter. My position, shared with one of our Viet counterparts, and that of two other replacements, Pvt. H. and Lance Corporal B. who were in the adjacent hole, overlooked a small river which was about 80 feet wide. We were told to shoot anything that moved in the village on the opposite side of the river. The village showed no signs of any activity. Our situation was one of siege but without any overt heavy attacks on our position.
Within a half-hour we were hit with some B-40 rockets (RPGs) from across the river but on the opposite side of the road which crossed the river adjacent to our compound. This was Thu's village. It was over in a matter of seconds. We saw no one. Lance Corporal B. was killed in the B-40 attack. We were told to get down that an air strike was coming in.
The air strike turned out to be napalm and it was released on the village directly opposite our compound, not the one from which the rockets had been fired. It was hit by two planes each making two low-level passes and dropping napalm. For a brief moment we could sense the oxygen sucked from the air around us. I wondered who was there, the VC or the NVA en-route to Da Nang perhaps. Where were the villagers?
Readers might wonder how one feels in such a situation. I can honestly say that I felt nothing at the time. No sorrow. Something beyond fear, acceptance of fate perhaps. I think we were all the same. The sorrows would come later in life, as would the fear which would visit us in our dreams. I could not remember LCpl B.'s name. It would be nearly 30 more years before I would learn what it was. One can only imagine how the people who lived there must have felt. As Thu would write to me in the early 90's "the war was a nightmare for our village".
For your reference the grid squares on the map are spaced 1 kilometer, or one "click" as we called them, apart. One click is equal to 0.6 miles.
The following weeks were chaotic and only a series of blurred events in my memory. More of the same kind of incidents with people coming and going, med-evacs, civilian wounded coming to our corpsman for treatment and several different platoon leaders in a period of only a few weeks. We were still in a state of semi-siege. We ran very few patrols.
One patrol was taken out into the village area to our front, across the road and on our side of the river. Sgt. P., our kill-crazed platoon leader at the time - for possibly a week, led that patrol. One of my buddies was also on the patrol. Everyone was pissed when they returned. They said he, our CAP (Combined Action Platoon) leader, shot an old man just for the hell of it, and reported it as a VC KIA.
Still in February, our rented allies, the Korean Marines, committed an atrocity in Phong Nhi hamlet which was adjacent to our AO and just inside the AO of our sister unit, CAP 2.
A year or so in the past there were some Google links to Phong Nhi, one of the 3 hamlets involved. Now Google does not bring them up. The only links I can find are one in Korean which has a brief section in English about Phong Nhi and another which is a recent study of similar atrocities committed in Quang Nam and Quang Ngai Provinces. This report, from a Japanese website includes the massacre at Phong Nhi as well as a larger one at Ha My near the coast of the South China Sea 10 km due east of our location. This killing was apparently premeditated was also committed by the ROK troops.
I don't recall the actual incident at Phong Nhi because of the chaotic situation during that period of time but I do remember the mass burials. Some of those killed were family members of some of our counterparts at our sister unit, CAP 2. Once one of the elderly ladies in the hamlet adjacent to our compound scolded "if you want to help us you should be fighting the Koreans and not us Vietnamese".
Following are a few of the significant events from that period that might well have affected Thu and her family as well as other civilians in that area.
One very dark moonless night while en-route to our planned ambush site we were taken under fire by a local VC unit that had a US made M-79 grenade launcher. Two M-79 rounds hit near the tail of our file but no one was hit. We had to change our plans and set up in another location. Soon a formless figure walked into our ambush site and we opened up. Unfortunately it turned out to be an old lady who had gone out late to relieve herself and we had mistakenly shot and killed her. Her death was reported as a VC KỊA.
Another dark night the VC had set up loud speakers in the village area immediately to our west. They were trying to get our Viet counterparts to join them and help resist our presence. We fired 5 laaws (disposable anti-tank weapons) blindly into the village area in an effort to get them to stop their harangues.
I had been promoted to LCpl and began leading patrols and ambushes in April. On one of these patrols we came under fire and got into a firefight where, as usual, we could not see the enemy. Villagers began to stream out of the area and our Viet counterparts stopped one of them. They claimed she was a VC nurse. We brought her back to our compound where they stripped off her shirt and hooked up some hand-operated generator to her nipples but she still would not talk. They took her away. I don't know what became of her.
There were many firefights at night when the local VC would attack our compound, usually with B-40s and small arms fire. There were times they were close enough that we could yell back and forth at one another. Stray small arms rounds, mortar rounds and M-79 rounds landed about the inhabited areas surrounding our position.
During the time I was there the VC never penetrated our perimeter. We had the river on one side and a minefield, left over from the French Colonial era, on the other three sides. We took WIA and KIA casualties though I cannot give any statistics. If we ever killed any VC at all we never knew about it. Except for the period around Tet most of the fighting was done at night.
Once we were mistakenly bombed by our own planes. It was late morning. I had just finished cleaning my rifle and set it down across my cot and began walking the short distance to our comm bunker and saw a plane diving towards our position and then releasing two bombs and seeing the fins open up. That was the most terrifying incident that I can recall. I dove into a nearby bunker thinking that the NVA now had planes. Two 500 pound bombs hit just outside our perimeter. Our position was underneath the trajectory and all of the shrapnel from the explosion went out into the village to our west.
Several villagers were wounded and one elderly lady carried to our position by her relatives had a huge jagged piece of hot steel completely embedded in her backside. Her relatives were crying "chết rồi, chết rồi", (she's already dead) and did not want us to med-evac her. We had no means to care for her. Since she was a civilian we could get only a "routine" med-evac. We did get eventually get a med-evac chopper but she died and in a day or two her family brought her back from Da Nang. They reminded us, "We told you she was already dead".
The area was also well known for one of its native sons, Nguyen Van Troi. In May of 1963 Troi tried to assassinate Robert McNamara and ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge by setting a mine at a bridge on the outskirts of Saigon. He was captured by the South Vietnamese and sentenced to death by firing squad.
Nguyen Van Troi became the first publicly executed Viet Cong. His execution was filmed, and he remained defiant to the end... His last words were: "Long live Ho Chi Minh!". Troi was 19 years old. A memorial to him, adjoining a martyr's cemetery, has been built near Thu's home. Photo below was taken in 1997 in the Nguyen Van Troi Memorial Center at Thanh Quit 2.
So there you have the background, a small sampling of village life in a war zone. This was typical of the events in this part of Viet Nam in the late '60s. After the 1989 visit I would travel to Viet Nam again in 1993, this time alone, and would visit Thu and her Uncle Bon and his family in Da Nang. I thought it might be interesting to talk with him about his role and the possibility that we might have crossed paths back in 1968. It didn't work out as I had hoped but it was an interesting visit. I'll write about it in Part 3.
Suggested links and reading:
Photos from 1968 Suggest "slide show" option for viewing.
Philip Caputo - Viet Nam in the early period of US combat troop involvement.
The Combined Action Platoons - by Michael Peterson