| I carried a rifle into the field until my last day in country. I even went on patrol the night before the morning I got on the plane to come
home. By the time my second tour was over, I was exhausted, spent and
disillusioned. I was ready to go home, but I regretted parting with my
team. I felt guilty for leaving them and knew I had left a big piece
of me behind. Emotionally and mentally drained, I knew things would not
get better in Vietnam. Nothing good would ever come from all the fighting
and dying. Politicians ran that war not generals, and a great many
people died because of it.
I also knew I had only myself to blame for
serving a second tour in Vietnam. Deep
inside me, I had wanted to go back. Something inside had pushed me. During
my first tour, I’d seen so many young men die needlessly, killed by inexperience,
and every dead American boy broke my heart because chances are, with proper
training and leadership, he didn’t have to die. The newcomers – the
guys with little training and no experience in combat – were always first
to find a bullet. You know what? The whole God damned war was a
God damned mess.
I had once believed the Vietnamese people wanted us there,
but now, I wasn’t
sure anymore. Over and over again, we were told the Vietnamese loved us
because we’d save them from Communism. By the end of my second tour,
that line of crap carried no more weight than the line the NVA tried to sell
to me on that hill two years earlier. I never met a Vietnamese peasant
who wanted anything but the safety of his children and enough rice to feed his
family between harvests. After two years of combat, I finally understood
why Vietnamese children sold bottles of soda to Americans with ground glass inside
and why prostitutes put razor blades in their vaginas. I knew why if you
left a jeep unguarded, you risked getting a grenade in the gas tank with tape
around the handle that blew an hour later when the gasoline dissolved the adhesive. I
knew why women pushed baby carriages packed with explosives into American compounds. No
matter what our leaders told us, I knew above all else, the Vietnamese people
wanted the foreign invaders gone from their land.
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