Page 98 - Stand Down Vietnam

The navigator saw there was a Forward Air Controller
plane floating around up there, so he called out over
his radio: “Hey, I’m down here, I need rescue.”, so
that got underway. He called out something that had
his “keyword”, something like “I love my dog” or “bow-
wow”, something like that. So, with that wording, they
started the rescue procedures.

The rescue took ten or twelve days. He told us he ate
nothing but green corn and raw, unripe bananas. He
said he wound up killing a man over a chicken. He
didn’t know if the man was friend or foe. But the man
was trying to protect his chicken. The man didn’t make
it, or the chicken.

My personal service, I was okay with. I found myself
asking “what are we doing here?”; I wasn’t seeing
anything being won. Like the Marines; they’d go out
beat the heck out of the VC, take a hill, then give it
back to them the next day, just to fight the same fight
over again. What was the point in getting all those
guys killed? Was it to keep the population down in
this country? I quickly learned that it ain’t what you
think it is.

We at Bien Hoa; my squad, we didn’t know where our
weapons were. We had not been assigned any and didn’t
know where they were. We didn’t know if they were

locked up in a Conex (a large, steel-reinforced
reusable container for shipping military cargo)
somewhere, or we just didn’t have them.