Go Joe, No!

Joe, it's not that don't want to say how many bodies I've made, but it's simply that Viet Nam was so long ago.  Back then, everybody assumed that if you were in the military, you were a killer, there was that strong a hate of our policies.  Be that as it may, I just want to put most of that behind me and not have to relive it over and over for the edification of friends and family, I re-live it enough in my dreams and nightmares. 

Every time I speak with someone about some of those experiences, I end up reliving them in my head, over and over and over.  You go off saying, "Oh, man!  That must have been some firefight!" smiling and wishing you had been there.  Well, I'm here to tell you that you better be glad that you weren't there, be glad that you don't have to fight it all over in your head.  Be glad that you don't have to see your partner's head, three feet away, blown off his shoulders, by two .50 caliber rounds, leaving nothing but a fleshy mask where his face had been.  Worse, you  don't even think about it, you don't even think!  You just roll away and slap another magazine into your M-14.  The gunfighters flying in with their 40 mm guns lay fire not only on Charlie, but half of it ends up on us and all you can do is hug the earth as close to the thitkas as you can and pray that none of those rounds hit you. 

The Patrol Leader is screaming into the radio to "cease fire," but Charlie has done that to them so many times that they have to hear an authenticating code word before they'll lift their fires.  Meanwhile the Patrol Leader is suddenly silent.  He's likely dead and all you can do is hang onto the earth and try to become part of it, thinking illogically that if things don't go right, you will become one with it. 

They finally run out of ammo and run back to reload.  We try to regroup, but there's too many dead to make any kind of a coherent unit.  Recon 4-5 comes up and I use their radio to call my higher and report.  Charlie has done his usual trick of picking up his dead and wounded and disappearing into thin air.  My medic is still alive, bleeding from a cut on his forearm and we go about marking bodies and collecting dog-tags.

It wasn't fun Joe, it wasn't "exciting."  It was what we enlisted do do, never realizing the price that we would have to pay to maintain the "honor" of our country.  We still believed that.  Still believed that we were defending the gates of freedom, defending your right to be what you want to be. 

But it wasn't "fun," it wasn't "exciting."  It was survival.  Body count, theirs and ours, was incidental to survival.