(6 of 16)
I had just arrived at the bottom of a narrow creek bed when I heard several sharp cracks. Incoming fire, the first I had ever experienced, rifles and submachine guns, I guessed. I heard a scream up ahead. The men began shouting and running around in utter confusion. I repressed my own terror and started to make my way forward to find out what had happened. When I got to the head of the column, I saw a knot of Vietnamese huddled around a groaning soldier, a medic kneeling at his side. An ARVN noncom gestured toward the creek. Another small figure lay there in a fetal crouch. His head was turned sideways, and the creek flowed across his face. This man was dead. We had been ambushed. We had taken casualties from attackers who had vanished before we had ever seen them. The whole cycle--silence, shots, confusion, death and silence again--was over in a couple of minutes.
As night fell, we camped on high ground where we would be less vulnerable to attack than down in the valley. The usual tumult of rattling pots, squealing animals, shouting men and billowing fires began. I threw down my pack, my carbine, my helmet damp with cold sweat, and slumped to the ground. I felt drained. The lark was over. The exhilaration of a cocky 25-year-old American had evaporated in a single burst of gunfire. Somebody got killed today. Somebody was liable to get killed tomorrow, and the day after. This was not war movies on a Saturday afternoon; it was real, and it was ugly.
We were ambushed almost daily, usually in the morning, soon after we got under way. The point squad took the brunt of the casualties. We switched companies around, giving everybody an equal chance at being blown away. Still, I found it maddening to be ambushed, to lose men day after day to this phantom enemy who hit and ran and hit again, with seeming impunity, never taking a stand, never giving us anything to shoot at.
The entry in my notebook for May 18 is significant. "Contact 0805. 1 V.C. KIA..." We had been patrolling a gorge fed by a rushing stream that covered up our noise. For once, our point squad spotted the V.C. before they spotted us. For once, we did the ambushing. We nailed them. A hail of fire dropped several V.C., and the rest fled. We approached gingerly. One man lay motionless on the ground, the first Viet Cong that I could definitely confirm we had killed in action. He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes. The man was slightly built, had coarse, nut-brown features and wore the flimsy black short-legged outfit we called pajamas. My gaze fixed on his feet. He was wearing sandals cut from an old tire, a strip of the sidewall serving as the thong. This was our fearsome unseen enemy. I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs. We took the wounded V.C.s prisoner and left.
The first confirmed kill produced a boost in morale among the ARVN. The numbers game, later termed the "body count," had not yet come into use. But the Vietnamese had already figured out what the Americans wanted to hear. They were forever "proving" kills to me by a patch of blood leading from an abandoned weapon or other circumstantial evidence. Not good enough, I told them. I became the referee in a grisly game, and a V.C. kia required a V.C. body. No body, no credit.