Page 120 - Stand Down Vietnam

War is hard, the thing that bothered me the most was
seeing a Viet Cong soldier hanging from an arch. He
was strung up naked and cut. I saw that as torture. I
think, and hope, it was the Vietnamese people that did
that, not Americans. That remains a vivid memory for
me; I can close my eyes and still see it. I try not to
let it bother me because that’s just part of the war.
I just remember what I saw.

You know the stories about drug use; there was a bunch
of it in our command, abusing drugs and alcohol. All
you had to do was to step outside the gate and you
could buy anything you want. Marijuana, or anything;
my forte was alcohol, I drank too much.

Every day; every day, we were serving in a combat
situation. We had to deal with incoming rounds every
day. We had weapons, M16s, recoilless rifles, and M60s
used on our perimeter.

A Seabee friend of mine, Marvin Shields was awarded The
Medal of Honor. I am the God Father to his son.

I did not trust the Vietnamese people, a lot of them
were stealing from our supplies. I also think many of
them were Viet Cong sympathizers.

Looking back, I never did fully understand why we were

in Vietnam. You’d hear that our economy was better
because of the war, but that didn’t prove to be true.

Leadership was not good. They didn’t have it together.
The young officers wanted to be saluted, that is a
stupid thing to do in a war zone. Just stupid stuff
like that.