I was lucky enough to be "given" one Marine's recollections of Vietnam and his struggle with PTSD since, whose storyline he spent 40 years crafting, apparently in an effort to explain the experience to his family, and himself. I have his permission to excerpt it here on the blog and it's great stuff. Not pretty; in fact, often very graphic; hmmmn, just like war. Here goes the first installment:
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When I arrived in Vietnam in January of 1966, I did not get there with any official orders. They had somehow been lost on the way over from the States. I was totally confused and quite anxious because no one knew who I was or that I was even in Vietnam. I didn’t even receive any pay until four months later when I finally wrote to my dad and he went to Senator John Tower.
However, on the 22 of February I was assigned to the “Flames” section of 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment which was operation in the Da Nang Special Sector TAOR from the Cau Do River to the North, Ky Lam River to the South, Highway 1 to the East, and the Da Nang N/S railroad to the West.
After a one week crash course on using the flame thrower, I was sent out with Hotel Company as a Gunner with Nick Sparicino as my A-Gunner and ammo humper. We were all given what were called the Rules of Engagement which meant that we couldn’t return fire unless we could actually see a clear target which was impossible, we could never see them.
This area had hundreds of small villages and hamlets and we were told that about a quarter of a million people, made up of all Viet Cong or V. C. sympathizers-families of the V.C. We were told that there were NO friendlies in our area of operation and that they all knew how to and did set mines and booby traps.
A special amount of time was spent letting us know the seriousness of this threat. Our section leader, a sixteen year Marine by the name of Corporal Cook put a five gallon gas fuel can of napalm in a rice paddy, put a grenade on it and pulled the pin. When it went off it produced a huge fire ball explosion.
He then said: “Print that in your brain because that’s what you will look like if you hit one of the mines while carrying your flamethrower or the five gallon can of extra napalm. That really scared the crap out of me. Choppers were bringing people in from the field all of the time who had hit mines and were literally blown apart, some killed outright.
Cook took us to a group of Marines covered with ponchos that was laid out by the command post for tagging. He threw the ponchos off one of them. There was a Marine, probably 18 or 19 with real blond hair, and deep blue eyes with one arm and one leg missing and the side of his head torn up.
Cook told us to take a good look and that this wasn’t a friggin' game and that if we f---ed up we would be laying there where he was. That was the first time that I had ever seen someone dead up close. The area was mostly rice paddies, tree lines, hedgerows, streams, and grass or thatch roofed hutches.
Punji stakes, punji pits, and booby traps were everywhere and every hamlet seemed to be sitting over huge tunnel complexes and every tree line had bunkers and spider holes (V.C. fighting holes covered with vegetation) in them.
Most of the Battalion’s casualties were from these devices, mortars, or snipers. Mostly we just walked around and played moving target and sitting duck. We would lose people every day and never fire a shot.
We never saw the V.C. They would come up through a tunnel in a tree line and take out one of our guys, then disappear while the “friendly” villagers would stand in their fields and watch us hit ‘Bouncing Betty’ mines that they themselves would set.
We did this day after day, all of the time until I really hated these people.
I was so scared every time that I went out with the flame that sometimes I thought that I wouldn’t be able to go on. But you couldn’t show fear and you never talked about being scared, you just kept functioning and pushing forward into the unknown. We couldn’t fight back and we didn’t know where the mines were until we hit them.
I kept wondering, “What in the Hell are we doing? This is crazy!” Sometimes the feeling of helplessness was almost totally overwhelming.
It was like a very dark cloud engulfing you but again no one spoke of it but when we looked at each other in the eyes you could see it in everyone. So we just kept moving and taking casualties and getting madder and hating the Vietnamese; all of them. We weren’t controlling the war; the V.C. was and we were their targets and whenever they wanted us.
The weather was so damn hot in the rice paddies that we lost people constantly to heat stroke. I carried the 105 pound flame thrower plus an additional 35 to 40 pounds of personal gear; C-rations, ammo, water, a 45 pistol, and sometimes an M-14 rifle. I only weighed 135 pounds and the weight and especially the heat, seemed unreal.
I would hump the flame during the day and run listening posts and ambushes at night with the M-14 rifle. We never completed any “Clearing Operations” because the V.C. was still there after we would sweep through and they would re mine and re booby trap the areas that we had already moved past.
This got so bad that Col. Donahue ordered us to “Scrub the V.C. cancer out of the hamlets”. We were told to destroy everything and anyone that we took fire from. If we took sniper fire from a hamlet, then it was declared a free fire zone and anything that moved could be killed with malice.
Choppers would fly over these hamlets dropping leaflets telling the inhabitants that they had to surrender all V.C. “infiltrators” or they would be killed.
A few days later we would go in and “take the hamlet apart” and torch it. This was a real bad place to be because No one liked us and the V.C. was everywhere.
The entire five months that I operated in this area was so constantly scary that it made me completely numb which was the only way to survive. If someone else hit a mine, they lost a leg or an arm. If I hit one, my flamethrower tank would explode and I would go up like a fireball.
No one ever got near me. They stayed a good distance away and I felt isolated and numb that all I could do was to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
When we took sniper fire, everyone else could lay flat but my tank stuck up like a huge pillow. I always knew that I would die at any moment and couldn’t do a damn thing about it except wonder what it felt like to burn to death. I even tried to get transferred back to a rifleman.
But I was refused by the First Sergeant and told that the Marine Corps had put me where they had wanted me and that is where I would stay. I was trained as a rifleman, not a flamethrower gunner, it bothered me and I hated every minute of it.
From the last of January, 1966 to about the middle of March we had been moving into position to conduct what was called a company sized “County Fair” operation in which the V.C. and V.C. sympathizers of hamlets would either be killed or captured, questioned and then killed.
These County Fair cordon search and destroy operations were directed at the hamlets directly north of the La Th o and Thanh Quit line where we had been hitting a lot of the mines. It was miserably hot and the heat coming off of the rice paddies made us look like ghosts as it shimmered up and around us.
We looked like we were moving through a mirage. We stayed to the trails and the rice paddy dikes because there were punji stakes everywhere else. We had come out of a tree line and were moving along one particular rice paddy dike. The flame was digging into my shoulder and my hands were getting numb.
The column kept moving but I had to stop and readjust the straps, they were hurting me so much. I stopped and squatted down; Nick Sparicino moved up to help me with the tank. De La Fante moved off into the rice paddy in an arch around us. He was still keeping his distance from us.
Then all of a sudden there was a loud bang, and explosion. The field had been mined. We looked up and De La Fante’s body was flying through the air and hit the ground surrounded by dust and grey smoke.
He had hit a mine and it had pulverized his legs and one arm. He was flopping on the ground in shock convulsions like a fish out of water. I was totally stunned.
It was so hot and the load was so heavy that I was carrying that I wasn’t paying attention and was just concentrating on one-more-step. The Sergeant yelled: “Everyone down!”
Nick and I started to move toward De La Fante and the Sergeant yelled again: “God dammit, I said get your asses down, NOW!” De La Fante was screaming: “My legs, oh God, my legs!” Then he went into shock.
I stayed in my position but kept thinking: “What in the hell is he (the sergeant) waiting for? De La Fante is hit and needs help now.”
My gut felt like it was being ripped from my body. I felt absolutely helpless and was getting really pissed off but I had been ordered down and that is what I did.
I was so frustrated that I started to cry as I looked over at De La Fante on the ground and no one moving to help him. I prayed: “God, please stop his pain, let him die.” I think it was more for me than for him. I couldn’t just squat there and watch him like that.
The Sergeant finally called “Corpsman up, Doc, get the f—k over here”, and he and Doc moved very cautiously toward De La Fante.
Upon reaching him, the Sergeant held him down, he was still bucking and jerking and Doc gave him morphine. The Lt. called in a medivac chopper and I thought that it took forever.
I never saw him again and no one ever mentioned his name after that. He had simply disappeared from our existence. While no one ever said anything, war is just like that, I felt unbelievably guilty for stopping to adjust my shoulder straps.
I kept thinking that had I kept going, then he would have not hit the mine. Then I felt guilty about not going to get him after he was hit. Even though we were ordered to stay down, I was also afraid to go get him because I didn’t want to hit a mine too.
Now I felt like a coward and there wasn’t anything that I could do to change anything. We moved out but I was totally numb but the anger started to really well up in me. I wanted to kill someone. I wanted to get at Charlie for De La Fante, for having to hump so damn much stuff in the friggin’ heat, and for not showing himself so that we could get a definable target to kill.
I had been warned and told about this stuff and had seen the results of a mine but this was the first experience of watching it happen. I blamed “Charlie” for every miserable thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.
After that incident, I never complained or shunned carrying the flamethrower. In fact I was glad that it was my weapon because I wanted to get even, and I had developed a mature hatred for the enemy now. I also didn’t want to get to know anyone after that.
