I, Soldier - part 3

I volunteered for a deployment to Vietnam and arrived just in time for the Tet Offensive. Don’t get too excited. I got hit by shrapnel my third day in country and was sent back to the US without having led any troops or even firing my own weapon. I did stay long enough to help heave some bodies into a mass grave. That was my introduction to the reality of war. There was one VC pinned to a tree by flechette rounds. I helped rip him off but had pry out the some of the flechettes first. Flechettes are like big nails fired out of a cannon all at once. Some went by my head once. It sounded like a swarm of bees. If it was not possible to bury bodies, they were simply burned in massive funeral pyres. Bodies were stacked with alternating layers of dry bamboo and doused with gasoline or aviation fuel. The smell was like a combo of bacon and burnt hair. I had read once that in parts of Polynesia where cannibalism is practiced, human flesh is called long pig.

I decided I should study Vietnamese as there were very few Army officers who knew more than a few words of it. I spent the next year at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) learning as much Vietnamese as I could. My interest in foreign languages began when I was young and obsessed with dinosaurs. I wanted to know what the names meant and ended up learning a fair amount of Latin and Greek. Dinosaurs are such a great way to get children interested in reading and learning.

DLI is in Monterey, California. It’s a beautiful with wonderful weather, beaches, and night life. It was very difficult to enjoy any of those things while I was studying Vietnamese for 50 hours per week, plus doing physical training and keeping up with all the other demands of the Army. The bright side was as an officer, I had fewer obligations and more freedom than most of the students there. Because of my good grades and the recommendations of my teachers, I was volun-told to join Army Special Forces, AKA the famous Green Berets.

Before I could deploy, I had to complete the Q course. It seemed mostly silly to me, but by this point I had learned the Army was full of overgrown juvenile delinquents and other mediocrities. I heard a lot of bragging about run times, pull-ups, and push-ups, but very few about education or language knowledge. I saw that as a troubling omen. I passed the course, got my Girl Scout hat, which I never wore after graduation and got on a plane bound for Vietnam. On a side note, the beret is meant as an homage to the French Resistance who wore such headgear. The Office of Strategic Services, which later became the CIA, worked closely with the French Resistance in the build-up and aftermath of D-Day. The French word for woods or brush is maquis, and a person who lives in it is called a maquisard, or woodsman. Later, the word came to mean a French resistance fighter. In a similar way, the French called the people who lived in the highlands of Vietnam “Montagnards”, which means “moutaineers”. The motto of my home state is Montani Semper Liberi, which means “mountaineers are always free”.

I was sent to an outpost in the Central Highlands where the Montagnard people live. Most spoke Vietnamese as a second language which made it easier for me to communicate with them. I worked closely with a volunteer fighter named Binh Nghia which means “Just Cause” in Vietnamese. His parents gave him a Vietnamese name instead of Montagnard name in the hope it would make his life easier. He had a tattoo on his arm that said SAT CONG, which means “kill reds” (communists) in Vietnamese. There’s a myth that American soldiers spent a lot of time teaching the friendly locals about things like weapons and tactics. That’s bull because by the time I got there, Vietnam had already been wracked by 27 years of war. The Japanese fought there from 1941 to 1945, then the French came back and fought until 1954, and then the Vietnamese turned on each other.

Partly for my own safety and partly for style, I did not wear a name tag on my uniform. If I got killed, they could always check my dog tags for my name anyway. I remember once watching a western movie where the main character was never called by his name. I think even in the credits the character was listed as “the man with no name”. Being anonymous adds an aura of mystery which can be useful.

Unfortunately, most of the Americans sent to fight in Vietnam knew nothing of this or would have cared if they were told. For them, they were all just gooks, and they were either scared of them or thought they were worthless. I knew from my time at DLI that just wasn’t true. On a side note, I will add that the term gook entered GI slang during the Korean War. Miguk means American in Korean and whenever Koreans saw American troops, they said “miguk” a lot. The GIs though they were say “me gook”, as in “I am a gook”, and so gook became Army slang for an Asian person. Vietnam is a much older country than the US and has had to fight off invaders many times. They even fought off Genghis Khan, one of the few countries that was able to do so. While I was learning Vietnamese, I also studied the writings of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the communist Vietnamese. He spent a lot of time overseas, taught himself French and English, and studied the works of the French and American Revolutions. He did that because understanding your enemy is the first and most important step towards defeating them. By the way, Ho Chi Minh was not his real name, it means “bringer of light” in Vietnamese. Very few Americans knew this or bothered to learn it.