Chapter 1

There was no work in our small community so I enlisted in the Army. It would be a month before I would be heading to basic training at Fort Polk, near Leesville, Louisiana. My friend Mel—short for Melanie—was mad at me for enlisting. We were good friends but were never really committed to each other. We dated some in high school and even had sex a couple of times.

She was the neighbor girl that I had known for years. We were more like best buds than lovers. The sex just happened when we were alone at the end of the school year. It was the first time for both of us I think. It was awkward talking to each other after the first time. We finally realized it was all just part of growing up.

The month passed by quickly, and suddenly I was in Columbus for in-processing into the Army, and was surprised that there wasn't a lot of harassment, you know the kind where the Sergeants scream and yell at you.

All the paperwork, testing, physicals and such took about three days, and then we were shipped immediately to Fort Polk on a chartered bus. Then the harassment started. I can only say it was chicken-shit, but later, after I returned alive from Nam I appreciated every pushup I'd had to do. The training I received there and later at Fort Benning helped keep me from not returning at all.

I did all the processing that had to take place at the Army Reception Center. The physical exam was a pain in the ass. Lines of men in skivvies walking here and there to be pushed poked and prodded. And that's not mentioning the damn needles. I swear that the Army has an injection for every letter of the alphabet.

While I was in line, one of the guys told me a story that he swore was true, but I didn't really believe him. It seemed that this guy had been drafted, but really did not want to serve Uncle Sam. So he pretended to not be able to successfully read the eye chart. The doctor, of course, had done thousands of these physicals, and knew every trick. So he had a nude nurse walk across the hallway at the other end of the building. The draftee had the expected reaction.

The doctor asked the young man, "Son, did you see anything down the hall?"

"No, Sir, I didn't."

"Well, soldier, your indicator says you are lying. Welcome to the Army—you have just passed the physical."

I did better than I expected on at the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It was somewhat like the National Merit Scholarship test I'd taken in high school. Anyway, I got a high enough score that they told me I could take about any advanced training course I wanted. I had a chat with one of the sergeants during a break, and he told me it got colder than hell at Fort Polk. The days were usually nice, but in mid-winter it could get down to the mid-twenties. This was around the first of November, so I'd finish basic sometime in late January.

We chatted for a while, and I decided to go to radio school for my advanced training. This was in Augusta, Georgia, so I thought, "Well, how cold can it be in Georgia. So I signed the papers for that—it would be right at the start of spring.

When I finished my in-processing, the bunch of us went to Fort Polk by bus. We were assigned to an administrative company for equipment issue and to wait for the next basic training cycle to start. They were assigning everyone to Kitchen Police like mad—and I wanted no part of KP. I asked around and as a result, volunteered to keep the coal fired furnaces running at night. So I did this every third night. I mean, how bad could it be to sit in a warm room and shovel in coal as needed?

We finally got assigned to a training company, and it immediately became not very much fun. The first night around three in the morning, they started banging on the metal triangles for a fire alarm. I was upstairs, and when I stepped out in the hallway, I saw smoke pouring up the stairwells. I dashed down the hall, wearing nothing but my boxer shorts. The recruits were panicking, including me, as we ran out into a heavy, cold rain, looking for the fire.

Well, what they had done was put a smoke grenade in an empty barrel at each end of the first floor of the barracks. After about ten minutes, the sergeant told us to go back to bed. The next morning, with no warning, we had an inspection. We knew nothing about what to expect, and certainly were not prepared since we had got to the company just before dinner the previous evening.

We were amazingly in two person rooms, but somehow I wound up in a room of my own. When the training platoon and sergeant leaders came into the room, I could see the first lieutenant was bored. Later I found out he had just re-enlisted and was waiting to go to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey for Advanced Signal training. They parked him here to keep him busy. The sergeant looked at me and asked, in a nasty voice, "Soldier, do you button your shirt from the top down or bottom up?"

I froze for a second—I really couldn't remember which way I did it. I blurted out, "Uh, from the bottom up Sir."

God dammit soldier, this gentleman next to me is an officer; you salute him and call him sir. You do not salute me; you do not call me sir. You may call me sergeant or Sergeant Miller. Now give me twenty pushups for not knowing how to button your shirt."

I heard them the next room over, and it was the same—except the private there said the opposite of what I did and still had to do the punishment. I immediately had an epiphany that served me well for the rest of the time I was in the Army. It did not make any difference what you did, how you did it, or even what you knew. If you were wrong about something you caught shit for it. If you were right—well you were wrong and still caught hell for it. I would always remember that when I saw a sergeant in a movie.

The training was a combination of chicken-shit, that is trying to tear us down and rebuild us into a soldier; and a practical course of training that actually did make a lot of sense if we were going to run around killing people and trying to avoid the same fate. Or as General Patton put it so succinctly, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

I surprisingly turned out to be quite good with a rifle. I scored expert using a M1 on the known distance range. It was something that I was really good at since I've hunted ever since I was a kid. I scored the highest on the shooting range. My CO called me a natural. It was my dad's influence that made me such a good shot. He owned and operated a small sports shop in our town. There wasn't much I didn't know about hunting and guns.

I especially enjoyed myself on the pop-up target course. We would walk down a path and when a silhouette of an enemy soldier jumped up we had three seconds to hit it before it went down. To make it more challenging, some of the targets were of non-combatants, maybe children. You kill a kid and you scored zero for the course.

Riding home on the bus I was pleased at how I looked. I knew how to wear the uniform and being in the best shape I'd ever been in made me look sharp. I was so happy to come home after basic training. As soon as I arrived, I headed over to see Mel. Our families knew each other so well that we just walked into each other's house and thought nothing of it. That was the friendly kind of community we lived in.

I walked into Mel's house, and said, "Anybody home?" I looked up and there was Mel kissing Brad; a guy that she once told me she liked.

"Mike, I wasn't expecting you home until tomorrow." I knew we all felt out of place, but this was sure a surprise for me. It had been a couple of months since I saw her, but still!

I talked to them a few minutes and headed home. Seeing her with Brad made me realize I really cared for her. I guess it was best to find out she didn't feel the same now before I went overseas.

I did my best to avoid her for the two weeks I was home. I didn't want to be alone with her; I knew it would hurt too much. The day I was leaving she came over to our house to say goodbye to me. She even gave me a kiss in front of my parents. I did my best not to show much emotion even though my insides were aching.

I knew that I would be gone for at least a year or more. I couldn't help but think that it would have been nice to have a girl back home thinking about me. Even though I would be with a band of brothers, I knew there would be a place in my heart filled with loneliness.

The day before I was supposed to leave I got a phone call giving me verbal orders cancelling my planned training at Fort Gordon. I was to go to Fort Benning in Georgia for Advanced Infantry Training. They told me to tell anyone who asked for my orders that I was traveling under verbal orders of the Commanding Officer Fort Benning. New orders would be awaiting me when I checked in.

I was pissed at this, but I already knew enough about the Army to just accept it. I later learned that they desperately needed grunts to man the foxholes in Viet Nam. When I checked in the Officer of the Day was sympathetic and told he was putting a note in my file to get me to Radio School later if I still wanted to.

They treated us with a lot more respect in AIT, as men and as soldiers. It was intensive training on tactics and weapons. I fired for score with both the M1 and M14. I fired high expert on the M14 which was just being introduced. The range officer talked to me about sniper school. But events kept me from going to sniper school.

There were tons of rumors going around, but very few facts. The truth turned out to be that the 5th Calvary Regiment was being reformed at Fort Benning in preparation for being sent to Viet Nam. Our entire training class—with only a couple of exceptions—was transferred. The 5th was to be an Air Cavalry Regiment with some armored attachments. We were suddenly being giving intense training using helicopters as a means of insertion and extraction in combat situations.

There was a strong sense of mission and urgency. It became clear as we trained over that summer of '65, that we were headed to war as soon as the training finished. I was in the 2nd battalion, and we trained along with the 12th.

Before we had much of a chance to think about it we were in Viet Nam in the Ia Drang Valley. Later it would be hard for "cherries" or new recruits when they arrived in a combat area. No one wanted to be with them because too many of them were killed in the first few weeks. But at this time we were all "cherries" and died all too rapidly.

I wasn't able to receive mail for over a month. I was surprised to find a half dozen letters waiting for me when I received my first mail call. I received two letters from mom and four letters from Mel.

Now she tells me how much she cares for me and how she will miss me. I didn't know if she was just being nice or if she really meant it. She had written me a letter at least every other week. When I received the next letter she told me she was going to college and take up nursing.

I do have to admit it felt good getting letters from Mel. I often thought back and wondered how life could have been different if we would have just talked to each other and said how we felt. I guess it's true when they say, "You don't know what you have, until you have lost it." That's how I felt about Mel.

Being overseas and fighting a war was hell. I knew why we were there every time I helped another Vietnamese family find a safer place to live. I had my parents send me boxes of candy that I could package up and give to the kids. It was just like you see on TV, the smiling kids every time you gave them a box of candy or a hug. They just wanted to feel safe and my being there helped.

I was also growing up fast ... seeing the tragedies of war, my fellow soldiers being shot and some even killed ... the nightmares that you can't get out of your head. I had witnessed more death in the first month in Viet Nam than most people back home see in a lifetime. It was the letters and gifts from home along with the letters from Mel that helped me keep going.

On one of our first missions we had to go recover remains of our soldiers who had been captured by the enemy. The NVA troops slaughtered our wounded men. Most bodies we recovered were shot in the head or back. At other locations, we heard wounded American soldiers were tied to trees, tortured, and then murdered.

We were thrilled with General Westmoreland's new strategy of 'search and destroy'. The objective was to find and then kill members of the Viet Cong. We found this difficult. Our problem was that we never knew who the enemy was and who our friends were. They all looked alike. They all dressed alike. We killed many innocent civilians by mistake. Out Platoon Leader, a sharp First Lieutenant, admitted the friendlies "were usually counted as enemy dead, under the unwritten rule 'If he's dead and Vietnamese, he's VC'."

In the villages they controlled, the VC often built underground tunnels. These tunnels led out of the villages into the jungle. They also contained caverns where they stored their printing presses, surgical instruments and the equipment for making booby traps and land mines. If US patrols arrived in the village unexpectedly, the Viet Cong would hide in these underground caverns. Even if the troops found the entrance to the tunnels, they could not go into the tunnels as they were often too small for our generally larger bodies.

I was asked to volunteer to be a tunnel rat, but I was quick to make them aware of my claustrophobia. Later when I saw Mel, she asked, "But you love to explore caves. Remember that time..." I didn't even try to explain.

One of the hardest things for morale was the booby traps. The worst was the Panji traps. They would take spikes of bamboo or steel rods and coat them with human feces. They had various ways of triggering them, and the results were always nasty. I hated the grenade traps. Triggered by a low strung string, they were terribly lethal. They were often set low hoping to maim as much as to kill. The VC were pretty smart and knew that a wounded soldier sent home in a wheel chair was better propaganda than the casualty statistics.

One thing I was asked to volunteer for that I did agree to, was to spend a day with a sniper instructor. I was the de facto sniper for our company, since I was the most consistently accurate shooter. The platoon sergeants would come looking for me when they got pinned down by an enemy sniper, or needed a machine gun taken out. I wasn't sure about how I felt about killing as a sniper, but I finally justified it as just a different way to kill. Sniping wouldn't kill a man any deader than a claymore or hand grenade or calling in a napalm run; dead is dead. Not to mention that each VC I shot was one more that wouldn't be shooting at me!

The Battalion Sergeant Major had worked out with a Marine friend of his for me to spend a day with a sniper instructor at the Happy Valley sniper training facility in a Seabee rock quarry on the edge of Da Nang. I wasn't going to get any of the stuff about concealment, stealthy movement, Ghillie suits—just an intense day on improving my mechanics. We worked on breathing, trigger pull, target identification ... and shooting until my shoulder was killing me. I was amazed at the improvement in the accuracy and range of my shooting.

The Gunnery Sergeant doing the training emphasized, "The actual shooting is only twenty per cent of a snipers job. You're not learning the other eighty per cent, so keep that in mind. He did give me a new, match grade M1-D rifle. It was a truism that a better tool provides better results. Over the next six months before I ended my first tour, I figured I killed more of the enemy with one ammo belt than my platoon did with thousands of rounds. I told my platoon sergeant that he should get me a bonus for all the money I was saving the Army. He laughed, bought me a beer, and said, "Be happy!"

One situation stuck in my mind. A spotter had an ID on a senior VC commander, but he was over eight hundred yards away. I huddled there with the Company Commander, and evaluated the situation. The spotter pointed out the target and looking through my scope I could see him standing next to a tree. He was hidden from the waist down.

I knew I could hit a target to within one minute of a degree of arc. From a practical standpoint that meant I could hit a one inch circle at a hundred yards, two inches at two hundred and on out to a ten inch target at a thousand yards. I wasn't going to try anything fancy, certainly not a head shot. I was going for center of mass, his sternum in the middle of a two foot by two foot rectangle. I knew from experience I had about a ninety per cent chance of chance of hitting within six inches of his sternum. It wasn't until I felt the recoil that I even knew that I had fired—no flinching here!

It was a clean kill and earned me a couple of bottles of Jack Daniels from the CO. Of course, I shared them with my squad, the platoon sergeant and the platoon leader. The Lieutenant was a good guy and thought nothing of hobnobbing with the troops.

I thought I would be returning home after my thirteen month tour, but it didn't happen that way. I got a couple of weeks off to go to the Philippines, away from the war and all the bullshit. The only problem is that I was alone. I don't know if my mail didn't get forwarded or if Mel stopped writing me. I guessed I would just have to wait and see.

I found companionship with the local bar girls. It seemed odd that the sex was so open in other countries. These women just wanted a good time with the servicemen. We wined and dined them and got all the sex a man could handle. I made sure I was well supplied with condoms. I thought about Mel and felt as though I was cheating on her. I knew we spoke of our feeling for each other but we still didn't really commit to each other. At least that was what I led myself to believe.