Hi Bilow, I wasn't well versed on the articles you referenced. It is interesting for me to read these statistical assessments.
I have knowledge of the training techniques the army was using in 1969. One of the techniques was to have us bayonet straw filled dummies while yelling "kill." Another was to have us batter each other with sticks with pillows on either end. We did use targets that were torso shaped and there was a lot of talk about garroting and other means of graphic "killing."
What's more interesting to me, however, is the reality of something that occurs gradually when you're constantly in a life-threatened survival mode, or at least it did with me. The thinking part of my mind had nothing against the NVA. We had a lot more in common with them than we did with the lifers that sent us out and designed meat grinder tactics to get the "body count" up. We lived like the NVA did, we suffered the hardships of the jungle like they did, we were a long way from home and so were they, and their life expectancy was as bad or worse than ours. I admired their toughness. They were truly capable, determined fighters and they knew what they were doing in the jungle.
Still, I was one of the ones that would pull the trigger. I had a realistic grasp of the fact that the best defense was a good offense. I had listened to every war story I could coax out of the grunts in the rear in the few days I had before I was sent to my unit and I really understood and appreciated the deadly threat that the NVA presented.
I'd grown up in the mountains with a rifle in my hands and I was a deadly accurate offhand shot with both eyes open. I knew what it meant to shoot something and I was ready. What I didn't know was that after a while I'd not only be WILLING to shoot another man; I'd WANT to do it.
One day when I was talking to the man that walked backup for me as I walked point I voiced it. I told him "I want to kill a gook." It was shocking to say it. He was from Kentucky and he was slow to talk. When he'd thought it through he simply said, "I do too." It was true, though, and we didn't live with what ought to be over there, we lived with realities.
I've thought about that since and I've lived with the faces of NVA men that I saw die so that I would live. I left the "right or wrong" of it until later. It always bothered me in two respects; one because it's a hard thing to live with the faces of men that die at the end of your rifle, even when they were milliseconds from ending you, and, second, it's even harder to live with when you'd "wanted" it to happen.
I think it's because a person can, on an intellectual level, think one thing and yet, on an emotional level, feel another. The jungles of Vietnam required right-brained thinking to survive. You had to "know" things that your left brain couldn't understand and you had to move before your left brain could even decipher why you were moving. I think your right brain took out the last barrier to that lightning quickness that was literally the difference between life and death for some of us. I think it took it out by removing the split second hesitation to killing another human being. That's the only way that I can explain it because when I said I wanted to kill NVA soldiers, I didn't mean that intellectually I wanted to do it, I meant that emotionally I "felt" like doing it.
I'll tell you something else, the NVA percentage of soldiers that would shoot to kill, at least the ones we faced, was a lot higher than 5%. Either that or we ran into some bad luck in the NVA we faced. They were deadly in ambushes and firefights. In almost every firefight that started when we were on the move there were dead and wounded Americans to demonstrate their willingness to shoot AT us. But this was in 1969 and 1970 and these guys had been at it for a long time. I think that, like me, they'd visualized it over and over and probably done it a few times already.
Another fact that would seem to contradict the 5% figure in Vietnam is that whenever the Vietnamese and American units met in longer-term firefights on fairly even terms, the NVA killed a large percentage of the opposing American forces. I thought then, and think now, that these people were ready, willing and able to kill and to do it very efficiently.
On a separate issue, it's correct that men in battle are not interchangeable parts, no matter that they have the same training or experience. In a squad of 6-10 men there were some men that marked the backtrail, men that walked point, men that carried the radio, men that packed the machine gun and men that walked backup to the point man or walked third in line. The key was to know what place each man should fill and then hope he ended up there. In the jungle we "knew" almost from the first day a new guy arrived where he would ultimately fit in the line of men. I felt I could tell in the first look at him and I don't remember ever being wrong.
That kind of pressure cooker existence has a way of reducing human behavior and abilities to their essence and you can see deep into a man's soul. One of the most valuable things about being there was that no one pretended in the jungle, it was as close to total honesty as you could imagine. Of course the minute we got back on an LZ after weeks or months in the jungle, everyone started "posing" again, but then their lives weren't going to be lost by pretending on the LZ.
I'm still working through much of the personal "whys" of it all. I was one of the least "knee jerk" soldiers, I had much more empathy for the "other side" and after I saw the looks on the faces of our S. Vietnamese "friends," I never even believed in the justifications for the war. Yet I had a reputation that would have belied all of that because I was driven by a huge survival instinct and an overwhelming urge to protect my "clan."
Of course there were also times when we had a chance to think about it and make choices on whether to kill fairly vulnerable NVA sodiers that presented no immediate or long term threat to us. We ALWAYS let them live because we knew none of that killing made us safe.
What a waste it all was. Life's ironies would be funny if they weren't so often sad.
Well, enough of my musings. |
