My God, what have we been doing for the past ten years?
Sitting here waiting for one of the last choppers out of Saigon, hoping like hell our air support doesn't break down.
Da Nang, Khe Sanh, My Lai. All of those names indelibly etched on my memory. Even worse, the men and boys whose lives were lost over here. And for what?
In case anybody has forgotten, we came here (it seems like centuries ago) to stop the communists. Unfortunately for all of us, the decision was made, it seems like, in one
generation, but carried out by the next. Different people were growing up and having their say, the enemy was quick to take advantage of our indecision, and the steam ran out of the original ideals real quick. Nobody really wanted to be at war, and the way we looked on the evening news did nothing to help our ratings.
For a while, the home front was behind the body counts and all the rest; they got tired of it pretty quick when we started coming home in bags. Mom and Dad, who had fought
and won in World War II, couldn't understand why we weren't beating up on a bunch of little guys with no fancy technology.
What most people haven't yet realized is that this war is totally different from other wars we've fought.
We only got a taste of what this war would be like from our experiences with the Japanese in WWII. The enemy wasn't playing by the same rules that we had come to expect from a
war. I'm not just talking about the Geneva Convention. I'm talking about the rules that bind people to the human race.
Using old ladies and kids. Torture. Wiping out entire villages to make a point. Terrorism. Fanaticism. After a while, some of our guys got tired of the one-sidedness and
started playing, not by the rules of the human race, but by Charlie's rules, and that made the evening news.
Damn, that last one was close! I hope those goddam pilots get the lead out and get back here. I don't like sitting in one place long enough to get scared. I only remember two emotions during my years here: scared and numb. No, I take that back. My first two weeks I didn't know enough to be scared. The blowouts in the bars don't count, they're just transition from scared to numb. Another thing that didn't look good on the evening news was the drugs. I don't blame the guys that were high over here. It was a bad situation and we all have our vices. I just prayed every night that the guys I had to rely on tomorrow had their heads screwed on straight.
Mostly the days have been ours, but the nights definitely are Charlie's. Where are guys are good, they're the best, but we had no training or experience in the close-in, night terror of this war. The natives smile at us during the day and lay minefields at night. That's the worst. Fighting in a country where the man next to you just might be shooting over the enemy's heads to use up ammunition, so you won't have any tomorrow when you really need it. Alarms at night three nights running is a lousy way to be ready for an all-out assault. Everybody's so jumpy, the main assault is almost a relief when it comes.
We were so unprepared for this. By the time we knew what manner of enemy we were fighting, the home front had lost its spirit, and we had lost the war.
