Chu Lai

The following passages are excerpted from the chapter.

". . .What we saw was primitive -- the people, their industry, their homes and villages. Most of the people we saw were simple fisherman or rice farmers. Occasionally we would come in contact with some of the merchants from the small towns -- a barber, the owner of a tiny hut of a restaurant. The enemy we came to fight looked no different from the poor people we came to defend. The enemy did not have distinctive uniforms with telling insignia, the kind of image we remember from war films of World War I and World War II or the news photos from Korea. They wore the same loose fitting black pajamas as any innocent farmer, the same straw hats, the same sandals. And they were little skinny people, not like the tall and robust marines who had come to fight them. They had punji stakes and old rifles, a few small mortars. They were just ragtag; how could they occupy us long in this country? We had surrounded and eliminated most of them on Operation Starlite, hadn't we?"

". . .It took some months before I had any sense at all of the staying power of the Viet Cong. We would continue to kill them, and they would seem to keep sprouting anew. We could destroy the 1st Viet Cong Regiment only to find it reincarnated a few months later, operating in the same region from which we had eliminated it. It was as if they somehow regerminated from their own remains.

So we would continue to fight and kill the same enemy, often in the same place. It was some kind of morbid play that would repeat and persist with casting changes forever."

". . .The location chosen for the observation post was a rock pile at the top of Hill 213. It was a few miles from the Chu Lai perimeter, and it gave us an excellent view of most of the roads and trails that ran from the inland mountains and coastal plain eastward toward the base and the Vietnamese coast.

The only way you could get to the OP, unless you were a mountain goat, was by helicopter. Even that made little sense because there was no suitable place for a helicopter to land. The 'landing zone' was sufficient for only the two main wheels of the UH-34 landing gear; it was just a small clearing in the rocks. The tail wheel would be suspended in air, a few feet above the rocky slope, with the pilot keeping enough power on the aircraft engine to keep the helicopter stable while troops labored on or off, or we unloaded supplies.

Often when there were high winds and rain, a resupply helicopter would not risk touching down at all. The pilot would move in as close as he believed he safely could, and a crewman would unceremoniously heave our C-rations, radio batteries, and whatever else to the ground. We could not fault them for their caution because the winds would often gust, shifting direction and whipping around the treacherous boulders at the peak."

". . .It seemed that the Viet Cong used to play with us at night. They took good advantage of the natural mystery of nighttime and the tendency for some of the men in the outposts to become lackadaisical, perhaps dozing off. I don't recall any heavy attack on the Chu Lai perimeter while I was in the base camp. Often, though, one or two VC would attempt to get through, presumably to take a howitzer out of action or blow up an ammunition bunker and then escape in the resulting confusion. More often they would be headed toward the Chu Lai airstrip in search of aircraft, munitions dumps, and fuel storage facilities. Some of these infiltrators were kamikazes, traveling naked with explosives. I have never figured out the advantage a naked man could have in these circumstances."

". . .the lantern fell unceremoniously on my head, bouncing off and onto the floor of the tent. The base of the lamp broke apart and the kerosene poured out, draining on and between the wooden slats of the flooring pallets. Then the flame from the wick ignited the whole thing.

So here I am, hot shit first lieutenant forward observer, alone in his tent, monsoon like rains on the outside and an imminent inferno on the inside. That's all I needed for my image. Standing in the rain watching my tent burn. Joe Field Marine."