The Vietnam I Remember

25/11/2018

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http://thevietnamiremember.com

23/01/2018

The little boy in this photo couldn’t have been over seven or eight yet he smoked his cigarette with worldly sophistication. He would come visit us most every morning often with other kids about the same age. Many people have asked me why we gave ci******es to kids this young. With all the danger these kids faced daily, the health hazards of smoking seemed like the least of their problems. All the Vietnamese smoked heavily, kids as well as adults. I have never seen a culture where smoking was so pervasive. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see dogs smoking.

23/01/2018

My first time going in to "mop Up." I had all kinds of Napoleonic visions of grandeur. I imagined myself with my M-16 on full automatic shooting a couple of remaining snipers out of a tree just as they were about to wipe out our entire squad. They would fall end over end with all the drama I had seen in the countless war movies in my youth. All the guys in the squad would give me high-fives and the CO would recommend me for a Bronze Star. Never mind that there were no trees.

23/01/2018

I took this photo of my partner and myself at my first duty station to keep my mind from dwelling on all the fears I had that evening. I had an eerie feeling something was going to happen that night, and it did—about an hour after this was taken. I had been in country less than a week and two of the biggest battles of the war had erupted the evening I arrived: Khe Sahn to our north and the battle of Hue, less than 30 miles to our south. Intelligence had warned us that we would very likely be hit. We were under maned and most of the experienced grunts had been sent north to help defend Khe Sahn. We had spent the daylight hours frantically strengthening our positions as best we could and now as the darkness of the evening engulfed us, on full alert, we waited.

23/01/2018

Captured enemy AK-47.
Within days of arriving in Vietnam, my buddy got caught up in the battle of Hue during the Tet offensive of 1968. The battle lasted almost a month with street-to-street, house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat. The casualties on both sides were enormous.

17/01/2018