Diary of an Unbroken Child: My Autobiography Chap. IV

My first impression of Vietnam was: Why the fuck would anybody want to live here? Before I got a hundred feet across the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut, I was soaked. The air was so thick you could feel it. I got billeted for the night there in Saigon and the next morning got airlifted to the base at My Tho. At first things were pretty basic, we stopped and searched boats in the river. They were mostly little more than big canoes or dugouts and every now and again a sampan, I'd stand with the .50's and keep watch while the guys on the PBR searched for weapons. Sometimes we'd take some fire from the shore when we were patrolling and I'd jump on the .50's and light up the jungle. It was pretty much the same every day.

Sometimes we would run the SEALs around providing transport. We'd drop them off and then do an extract. I had my M-14 and they's drop me about half a click from the pickup spot and I'd find a spot where I could lay down cover fire if the X-point was hot. This was more like what I imagined it would be like. Shooting machine guns into the jungle is one thing, but honest to God- I wanted to kill some gooks. I know this sounds fucked up, but it was a fucking war- that's what you're supposed to be doing.

About three months into my tour something happened. I got called back to Saigon and some government guys wanted to talk to me. They start out with the whole patriot thing...you want to save American lives right? Your country needs you... They said they had this special program they wanted someone like me for. I had scored high in marksmanship and I was a patriotic guy that loved his country- so I wanted to help, right? This was back before they had the scout/sniper school so they wanted guys with high marks for shooting, plus I had been through the BUDs school. They also told me they knew my Social Security number was a phoney and they could send me home, or to prison. But they didn't want to do that, they wanted to give me an opportunity to serve my country. Honestly, that was the biggest selling point... I definitely didn't want to go to prison. Hell, I could have done that back home. I figured it out much later- if something happened to me, there was nobody to come looking, or put up a fuss about me being missing. I was a perfect patsy.

They said that to do the stuff they wanted, I couldn't be in the service. My military records would be destroyed but I'd still get paid in cash. Here was the choice I had... stay in the service and get a BCD or Dishonorable and maybe go to prison, or go along with the program these guys were selling. I don't mind telling you, this shit was getting weird. The head government guy looked like some kind of geek or something. He had those old time glasses with the see-through frames like Harry Truman and weird eyes. He was one scary looking motherfucker, just the way he looked at you. I could have kicked his ass easy, but there was something in those eyes that turned my blood to ice, it was like he was looking through you. The other guys looked like military types or jocks or something like that- they had crewcuts and short sleeved white shirts with ties. One looked like a football player, he was big. I figured he was the muscle. The other guy just sat there and didn't say a word, he just wrote stuff down. Oddly enough, the quiet guy and I got to be good friends- we still are. He was Air Force Intel- a Lt., an expert in Russian, he left Nam, went back to college and studied Russian cryptography and went to Cheyenne Mountain. He retired a "Bird" Colonel and went to work for the DOD and still works as a consultant.

The guy with the glasses was nice as it turned out, pleasant, like he wanted to be friends. He smiled and talked nice, but there was something really creepy about him. I guess once I bought into the program I was OK too. I only saw him one other time, at a restaurant where we met and I started to like him better, he was kind of fatherly... I don't know, maybe I was looking for a father. The big guy was supposed to be the guy I would deal with and get paid from, either that or the quiet guy. Then they brought a Vietnamese guy in named Hue Pham. He was an Lt. in the Army of Vietnam and he was going to be my partner. He knew the country and naturally the language, being from there, so he was my guide and spotter. I guess he was really the brains behind our operations- I was just the nigger on the trigger.

This was before the Phoenix Program, or just at the beginning, who can tell with that government shit, all they do is lie anyway- they say it started in 68, but I've heard 64 or 65 too. We weren't always out in the shit so we did a little bit of intel gathering too, when we were at base camp. Sometimes we teamed up with some Special Forces guys but usually we worked alone. We'd go into villages and "recruit" informants. Hue Pham spoke the language and I wasn't terribly averse to putting a little pain on somebody if the payoff was good informationwise. The best way to extract information was to take 4-5 VC up in a helicopter blindfolded... we'd throw one out and let his buddies listen to him scream on the way down. That was an effective way to loosen up tongues. I know this is going to sound bad but one time we had this one guy and he wouldn't talk, so we blindfolded him and took him up in a chopper. We had the pilot go up and down, up and down and hover about 4 feet off the ground. Then we threw the guy out, figuring he'd talk after that... the fucking guy had a heart attack and died! I know that that's pretty sick, but it was pretty fucking funny too. You probably won't understand this- I hope not anyway- when you live in a culture of death, you have to become a part of the darkness... I became the darkness.

Hue Pham spoke pretty good English, he had been to college for a while in America and came back to fight the Commies. His family had been killed he said, they were from up North some place. So we took off on a chopper for Pleiku. There was a base there so Americans didn't look so out of place. We mostly operated out of there or at the SF base at Plei Me up in the Central Highlands. I wore tiger stripes like the South Vietnam Army but no insignias or anything like that. The soldiers looked kinda funny at me but didn't ask too many questions because I was supposed to be some kind of "spook." Mostly they just left us alone, it was me and Hue Pham. Plei Me was pretty cool because most of the SF guys there were part of MACV, so they knew the score. I had an M-14 set up with a B&L 10x scope. Hue Pham carried an AK. Up to this point I had never really shot anybody that I knew of. I had sprayed the jungle with the .50's but I don't know if I ever hit anybody or not. Also when I was covering for the teams, I probably hit a few, but nothing confirmed, unless you count a couple of guys I threw out of helicopters.

My job in Vietnam was to find people and shoot them from far away. Actually, Hue Pham found them and I shot them. Now here's where it gets a little weirder: The Ho Chi Minh Trail wasn't a super-highway that ran from Hanoi to Saigon- it was a series of trails that ran through Laos and Cambodia and back into South Vietnam at different points along the border. The only way the North could get supplies to the Viet Cong in the South was with the consent of Laotian and Cambodian politicians... provincial governors, mayors, tribal chiefs, etc.. The State Dept would send in emissaries to negotiate (probably buy off) these guys who would take the money and keep doing the same thing. Then they would send me and Hue in and I'd "neutralize" them. Because we weren't at war with Laos and Cambodia, who were supposedly neutral, it wouldn't look too good to have American soldiers whacking these civilian guys- so they sent me. The Rules of Engagement were that non military personnel were off limits. Given that I was also nonmilitary, they didn't apply to me. That Lt. Calley guy got prosecuted for shooting civilians- I was shooting politicians in neutral countries. Fuck it, the money was good and they were enemies of the Vietnamese and us too, I guess. Truthfully, I didn't think a lot about it at the time... now I live with a shitload of ghosts.

The first time I looked through that scope and saw a man, I thought it might bother me or something, but I just squeezed off a round and watched through the scope as he went down. I don't know why but I just kept looking and Hue Pham had to grab me by the back of my shirt to pull me up and run to the extract point. I once saw something in a movie or TV or somewhere where they asked a sniper what he felt when he shot somebody. "A little recoil," he said. That was about it. Well, that's about all I can say about that except I could have stayed home and made a lot more money for doing the same thing. Well, there it is... The guy with the glasses in case you couldn't guess was Bill Colby. I want to say one thing about him... he was a decent guy in a cesspool full of shit- a patriot that did all the wrong stuff for all the right reasons. I respect him.

Here's something else: The CIA had a big outpost right there in Laos. Why weren't these guys, who knew the territory and the score doing the stuff I was doing? Hell, they even had their own airfield. Hell, we ran an op about 20 clicks from where these guys had their compound. They could have gone out and did the job and been back in their air-conditioned bungalows by dinnertime. It was about 20 years later that I finally figured it out... This was the so called "Golden Triangle" where they were running drugs out of. They weren't going to risk any of their own guys when they had chumps like me. Another thing... I don't for a minute believe that I was the only one doing this shit- I could be wrong, but it wouldn't make any sense.

Most of the time we would have to hump 15 or 20 clicks from the drop point and make our way to the target. The points where the supplies came back into South Vietnam were called "choke points." Our job was to choke off these points of entry by neutralizing whoever was in charge. Then they could put their own guys in place, I guess... I don't know, you couldn't trust anybody over there (except Hue Pham, he was A-OK). Once we were in enemy territory we'd have to crawl 2-3 clicks to get a shot. Believe me, doing that wearing tree togs in 100 degree heat with almost 100% humidity was a bitch. And the "wildlife"... mosquitos so thick you couldn't see through them. Snakes- I'm a street kid from Boston and we don't have 30 ft snakes there, or cobras. They had little green snakes called "three-step" snakes... you get bit, walk three steps and you're dead. I saw an old Vietnamese guy get bit once- he just sat down.

By Spring of 66, I figured I was pushing my luck. I'd been doing this for over two years and nobody can do that shit forever without finally getting whacked themselves. Hue Pham and I had been in some pretty tight places. The whole death thing was getting to be too much, I was becoming too much a part of the darkness. There's an indescribable power about it, something seductive, in retrospect. There's a point that once you cross, you can never come back and I was getting close to that threshold. If you've never looked into a man's eyes after you've cut his throat, you can't understand... and you shouldn't. It should be horrifying to any normal person, but in the circumstances I was in it felt right. That's how I could laugh throwing a guy out of a helicopter to his death. Shoving a knife into a man's neck just under his ear and pulling forward through his carotid and juglar you can hear the blood gurgle in his throat. They get this surprised look on their face and their mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water. It's almost comical... except that it isn't- but it makes you feel like God at the time.

Well, now you know why I live with a bunch of really noisy ghosts and don't really sleep much anymore. I pray to God constantly for forgiveness... not for fighting in a war, but for learning to enjoy the power it gave me. For that I truly am sorry.

https://www.citizensforfreespeech.org/