The Forgotten Warriors

(6 of 11)

area I was from, I guess you would call real patriotic." Samples first saw action in June 1968 at Chu Lai. When he started firing at Viet Cong in a paddyfield, he told himself with a certain wonder, "This is fun." That day he won a Bronze Star for taking out a V.C. position at great personal risk. But there followed a different kind of killing. Samples came upon a Viet Cong gunner who was wounded, lying on his back, begging for help. "We radioed the company and said, 'What do you want us to do with him? He's still alive.' They said, 'Kill him.' So we did." Samples never discussed the killing with anyone. Ever. He never had problems readjusting to civilian life. But the killing haunts him a little now.

Viet Nam was different from other wars; that difference defines the distinctive isolation and grievance of many Viet Nam veterans. Douglas MacArthur warned against an Asian land war; he was right. There were no front lines. Reality tended to melt into layers of unknowability. The same person could be a friend and an enemy—the smiling laundress in the morning carried a V.C. satchel charge at night. The enemy might even be a child with a basket. The ambiguity made Americans twitch. "My Lai?" says Larry Mitchell. "There were lots of My Lais."

Larry Mitchell would know. He understands the murderous brew of rage and fear and firepower that produced My Lai. A Philadelphia-born black, Mitchell, 38, went to Viet Nam in 1965 as a sergeant in the Green Berets. "They told us that we were going to make the country a democracy," he remembers now. "I still thought of war in John Wayne terms: only the bad guys got killed." Mitchell was chastened in a hurry; he was rocketed a few minutes after he arrived in the combat zone. "You never saw the enemy. That was the most frightening part. Even though you shot thousands of rounds, you never saw no bodies but those of your friends. We knew the enemy was all around. But he was invisible."

Mitchell went back to Viet Nam for a second tour in 1967, this time as a lieutenant assigned to a combat squad. "The big thing when I came back," he recalls, "was the body count. It put pressure on you to kill." One day Mitchell was running a search-and-destroy mission in the Central Highlands. "As we approached the village," he says, "we drew fire. The shooting got started good. Then we got into the village and started going through it, house by house. I was searching one of the houses, when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. I just turned and fired a full clip. Then I looked ... It was a woman, maybe eight months pregnant. The burst had taken her right across the midline. The fetus was hanging out ..." His voice is halting and husky in the telling. "I was so cold about it. When we were adding up the dead, I counted the fetus. It was a body."

Mitchell spent most of 1968 lurching between alcoholic numbness—he was drinking a fifth a night—and the surreal alertness of hunt-and-kill missions. At his tour's end, he was captured by the Viet Cong and held for 2½ years. Abruptly, in the spring of 1971, he was freed. His homecoming was "devastating." The American air was dense with hostility. Outside a veterans' hospital in New York City, Mitchell was pushed