Extract from “On the Ground: The US Experience” by Bernard Edelman
For the infantryman, Vietnam was no walk in the sun. Michael Patrick Kelley, a machine-gunner with Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, was drafted the day he graduated from college. “We saw very little contact during my tour despite the fact we were out in the bush incessantly looking for Chuck and his boys,” Kelley said. “That was the serendipitous result of two things: rivers of blood spilled by US troops who'd fought so hard before us; and a change in the enemy's strategy following their staggering post-Tet '68 manpower losses. In our AO [Area of Operations], I later learned, the enemy broke up into three-man cells and made it a point to avoid major contact of any kind.”
There were few troops with even an inkling of the Big Picture or first-hand knowledge of anything that might be happening beyond their AO. “I could write home only what I'd experienced in our TAOR west of Da Nang,” said Sergeant Jerry Balcom. “It was always get up, move out, go here, do this - on 'search-and-destroy' operations, patrols, road sweeps, ambushes, perimeter security. That was what our war was about.”
What Mike Kelley remembers most about his war was how extremely difficult and uncomfortable it was beating the bush looking for “Chuck”: the Viet Cong, also referred to, with varying degrees of respect, as Charlie, Charles, Victor Charles, and the VC. Kelley describes what it was like out in the bush, “humping the boonies”:
You were always filthy, always soaking wet, freezing or roasting your butt off; leeches in the trees and in the grass; leeches in the streams; mosquitoes buzzing in your ear; bugs of every sort crawling all over you; spiders the size of your hand in webs at eye level across the trails; jungle rot on your arms; ringworm in your crotch; hunks of congealed grease in your cold c-rats; real rats crawling over you at night; sleeping on rocks; sleeping in the mud; trying to sleep in the rain; never sleeping; sweat pouring down your face, perpetually fogging your glasses and soaking your fatigues when it wasn't raining; trying to figure out ways to make your 60- to 80-pound rucksack comfortable on your shoulders; throwing away gun ammo to lighten your load; wishing you hadn't thrown away gun ammo; straight uphill; straight downhill; slipping and sliding in the muck; weapons rusting; ammo dirty; gasping for breath; so exhausted you could hardly lift an arm day after day after day; dysentery; chronic diarrhea; fevers; common colds; hot beer; hot Diet Fresca; cold food; deafened and driven to tears by artillery fire; deafened by popped Claymores or LAWs; lonely as hell; homesick as hell; occasionally scared beyond words; pulling guard night after night with 5,000-pound weights on your eyelids; no paper for letters; no resupply 'cause of the rain; out of toilet paper; out of bug juice; starving; thinking about killing somebody for their peaches and pound cake.
“And,” he jokes, “those were the good days.”
Mike Kelley's worst bad day, the one incised in his memory, was the evening of September 16, 1970. His platoon had moved to the top of a hill so they could be extracted by chopper after a grueling 40-day mission. “While we were putting out our Claymores, my platoon medic stepped on a big mine next to me, although I really didn't know what had happened at the time.
“When I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit at the 85th Evac Hospital at Phu Bai the next day (I guess), I didn't realize that anybody else had been hurt,” Kelley said. “Doc Smitty was still in surgery then, and I really didn't feel much pain or discomfort at all. I didn't feel very bad - until they wheeled Smitty out and put him in the bed next to mine.
“When I saw Doc and realized who it was, I was really flattened! They'd taken off both his legs above the knee, his genitals, and much of both hands. Above the waist he looked perfectly normal. Below the waist, he was pure hamburger.
“Though I would see a lot of horrific sights during my ten months in the hospital,” Kelley said, “nothing shocked me like my first look at Smitty. It seemed impossible anybody that badly mangled could still be alive.” Smitty didn't stay alive for long, however. His kidneys failing, Stephen T. Smith died on a C-130 flight to Saigon, where the only dialysis machine in the war zone was located.
Marco Polo Smigliani, who was born in a village called Poggiofiorito in Italy and emigrated to the United States in 1958, joined the Marines and was sent to Vietnam, where he found himself manning a machine-gun in the A Shau Valley with the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, 3rd Marine Division in an operation called
Dewey Canyon.
“It was just a living hell,” he said. “I was very scared. We were right on top of the North Vietnamese, right on top of their base camp. Every day people were getting killed and wounded.”
From February 23 to March 6, Private First Class Smigliani was wounded four times. He took a piece of shrapnel in his head and neck. He was hit by an AK-47 round in the left arm; as he went to the aid of another grunt, an RPG exploded, almost blowing off his arm. Waiting for a medical evacuation helicopter (called a medevac, or dust-off), clutching a .45 in his lap in case one of the NVA regulars probing the perimeter broke through, he wondered: “Will I make it out of here alive?” As he was being medevac'd, he almost didn't; he was again hit by shrapnel, this time in his legs. Like Mike Kelley, he would spend ten months recuperating back in the States - and he considered himself “the luckiest guy in the world” that he hadn't bled out in the muck and mire of the A Shau.
Others were not so lucky. PFC Ray Griffiths was sent to Vietnam just after Christmas in 1965. He served in the same unit as Marco Smigliani would three years later. In a letter to his friend Madeline Velasco, he wrote:
It's good to have someone to tell your troubles to. I can't tell them to my parents or Darlene because they worry too much, but I tell you truthfully, I doubt if I'll come out of this alive.
In my original squad I'm the only one left unharmed. In my platoon there's only 13 of us. It seems every day another young guy 18 and 19 years old like myself is killed in action. Please help me, Mad. I don't know if I should stop writing my parents and Darlene or what.
I'm going on an operation next month where there is nothing but VC and VC sympathizers. The area is also very heavily mined. All of us are scared 'cause we know a lot of us won't make it. I would like to hear what you have to say about it, Madeline, before I make any decisions.
Oh, and one more favor. I'd like the truth now. Has Darlene been faithful to me? I know she's been dating guys, but does she still love me best? Thanks for understanding. See ya if it's God's will. I have to make it out of Vietnam though, 'cause I'm lucky. I hope. Ha ha.
He didn't. PFC Raymond C. Griffiths was killed, on the Fourth of July 1966, a few weeks after he wrote this letter. He was 19 years old.