What was your most memorable combat mission during the Vietnam War?
10.06.2025 02:13
I turned from the bodies and walked up to the tank. I mounted up, took my tin pot off, hung the strap on the hatch post and put on my Bone Dome (CVC helmet).
I was staring down at two US soldier’s bodies covered with ponchos. The ponchos did not cover everything. Sticking out of one was a pair of jungle boots, with the toes oddly pointing toward each other. Looked uncomfortable. The other soldier had no boots sticking out. In fact, there was no suggestion of legs under the poncho. Just the shape of an upper torso.
The Michelin. Vietnam. We were OPCON to 1/4 CAV. C Troop.
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My beautiful mom and smiling dad, my two older sisters, and my girl who I taped between the hi bean indicator and the main engine fuel shut off. Good space there. Easy to look at right away. She was having a hard time. As a Canadian, I didn’t have to be here but I chose to be, like 30,000 other Canadians helping our neighbour out. I watched as they heaved the body bags into the rear deck of a nearby ACAV to the front of me.
Well, they were dead. Wooden, waxy looking dead guys. What a fucking job packing the dead into body bags. I couldn’t do that job.
Taken from the chicken scratches in the journal I kept.
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There is no glory in war and I wanted to show that. No glory at all.
Indie, our black loader from South Bend, who looked like Richard Pryor, laughed and said, “Yep, you boys breathe nice and deep. Now that’s what a Hoosier breeze smells like. Mmmm, mmmm.”
A Lieutenant stood beside me looking down at them. Then a grunt came by. He was calmly chewing on a chocolate bar as he stopped to look on with us.
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We watched as two soldiers dropped body bags beside the poncho covering the fresh corpses. Suddenly, they whisked the ponchos off the bodies and there they were.
Then the other body was placed in the middle of the bag. He had the same waxy look, not natural, not like he was sleeping, but dead. Two guys nobody got to know. The old timers didn’t want to know them. They figured FNGs would be dead soon, why get to know them? Why make friends with someone who’d be dead soon? War was a funny thing. Many guys died without knowing anyone. Not really that funny.
“You fart again, Reb?” Maverick asked our Tennessee gunner. Farts we noticed right away.
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“Nah, couple of new guys,” I said through the com.
I gave him the thumbs up. I took one more look at the bodies then shoved the last bit of bar into my mouth. “Thanks man,” I said to the grunt who gave me the bar and he waved.
Who said dead people look natural, like they are sleeping? This guy looked like he was made of wax. White face, one eye half open, the other closed, mouth open wide. They zipped the bag over his face and wavy blonde hair.
We all reeked, were full of sweat, our fatigues were greasy, blackened with tank dirt, grease and oil, and stiff with salt, like wearing new, thick farmer jeans and they smelt of, well, just smelled, and terrible at that. Tankers get used to stink. We live in it.
The legless body had belonged to a young soldier, blonde, who had probably just started shaving. Looked like he could be in grade ten. The other had a light beard growth, dark hair and looked Italian. Maybe from Lower Manhattan, New York. Just a guess. You do a lot of guessing in the Army.
“Nope, smells like a South Bend, Indiana breeze,” said Reb.l smiling.
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I thought of their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and on and on, the domino effect. All the lives these guys had touched. Now they were ripped from all these people and existed no more.
“Anything for a guy who lives in a tin coffin,” he smiled.
I listened to more of Indie and Reb’s bantering. I smiled and shook my head. I took a firm hold of the butterfly (steering wheel) and we rumbled away, our pack screaming. A tank is very loud inside even when it’s not shooting. A 750 HP twin turbo diesel makes a lot of noise. We were in for a long drive, but we were alive. Hey, that rhymes.
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“Just got here,” said the Lieutenant, “FNGs, no one even knew them. Kids. That one got hit by an RPG. Hit him from the side at the upper thighs and took out his lower legs. Bled out in no time. RPG was maybe fired at your tank,” he said looking at me.
“Possibly, anyway it missed,” I said, taking another chomp of the bar. “Pretty low shot,” I said, “Maybe aiming for the tracks but usually they aim for the turret.”
‘Last ride boys. You’re out of it,’ I thought. I shifted to hi and heard Maverick say, “Take us home Dutch, swing her over to nine o’clock.”
“When you stop eating those fuckin’ ham and Lima beans bro,” said Indie.
He offered me a bar. I took it, peeled the paper back and bit into the tropical bar which didn’t melt in the heat nor did it have much taste. Who tests these things? Do they think we would like them? We didn’t. LT Kerns told us that if they tasted good we’d just gobble them down. They were emergency bars.
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“Always the new guys,” Maverick said. “Ok, let’s move out.”
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“Quit eating those fuckin’ beans and wienies,” Reb said.
“Hey Dutch! You check the tracks? I don’t want any branches binding them up,” called Maverick our TC from his cupola. We all had nicknames. Maverick loved the western TV show Maverick. I was called Dutch because of my last name, though it is actually an old English name.
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I shifted to low, checked the gauges, and stepped on the gas. Old Deadeye was on the move again. As usual, I glanced at the photos I had taped onto areas of the controls in front and to the left of me.
Later in my life, I didn’t talk about the war much except maybe the humor in war. Started writing it on Quora. I received a comment from a reader who said, ‘write about it all, the good and the bad. People should know what went on.’ So slowly, I started writing about it. You know? The more I wrote, the lighter I felt. A great weight seemed to have lifted off of me. My bad dreams lessened. I feel now that it’s good therapy for me. If all combat soldiers kept it inside them, no one would know anything about the was you fought. They should know.
Funny what war and combat does to you when you are assaulted with it day after day. It doesn’t take long to become immune to seeing death. The first time out, you stand there looking at bodies and you can’t get over that only half an hour before they were living and breathing. After about three or four combat runs, I was numb to it. It numbs you. It does. It numbs your mind, and your soul. Because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t last. You just wouldn’t last, man.
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“Anyone we know?” Maverick asked.
The bodies? The dead bodies? What was I thinking about them? I was thinking that I was glad it wasn’t me being zipped up in those body bags. I was also glad I didn’t know them. Is that bad?
I have reposted this answer from another answer I gave a few years ago. I had reached the end of my journal last year. I repost a few stories of mine now and then. Hope that’s okay.
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“The other one,” the LT went on, “ hit in the throat and center chest. Went down in seconds. No one teach him to hit the dirt when the first shots rang out? Who’s training these guys? Fucking guy stood there looking around.”
I laughed as I checked the speedometer. We needed humor. It’s what got us through all the shit.
I didn’t like the LT calling a recently killed GI a ‘fucking guy.’ I watched as they carefully laid the body with no legs in the body bag. I looked at his face.
I stood in the rain. I was standing under a stinking triple canopy jungle in Vietnam. Stunk like rotten cabbage and decay. Hot and so humid that your chest hurt to breathe. Combat was over, finally. I dismounted my tank to check the tracks for tree branches and pieces of wood that sometimes wedged between the road wheels and sprockets. There was a lot of wood in jungle.
The brain protects you and locks the bad stuff into a closet which sometimes slowly opens and lets the bad stuff out some years into the future. It bothers you worse then and jumps out at you like a spectre in future nightmares.