When I got there, my basic job was combat infantryman, paratrooper, 5th Special Forces Group. There was about 200 some men in my company. Thirty of us were blacks. Forty of us was Latin descent. We had some Italian guys. We even had some German fellows who came into the Army to get American citizenship. We had some fellas who had came over from other Special Forces units to get extra field duty. We were like a unit of misfits who were sort of throwed together and made into a strike combat unit. We would go out and capture prisoners, destroy a certain village, or kill a certain party because it was necessary for the war effort.
I didn’t ask no questions about the war. I thought Communism was spreading, and as an American citizen, it was my part to do as much as I could to defeat the Communist from coming here. Whatever America states is correct was the tradition that I was brought up in. And I, through the only way I could possibly make it out of the ghetto, was to be the best soldier I possibly could.
One day they stood us in a line at orientation, and this colonel asked if anyone interested in being LURP. I didn’t really know what a LURP was, but I raised my hand. Then we went to another formation, and we was auditioned for being a LURP. They said a LURP was a individual who would go out in a five- or six-man group beyond support units of any type, and survey, capture, and destroy the enemy. Bein’ a macho, strong young brother, I joined. I’m bad. It was exciting.
We were assigned to First Field Force, which hired our unit out as a recon unit to anyone who needed our services. Sort of modern-day gunfighters. Or low-priced mercenaries. We was stationed near An Khe. We lived rough. We only got hot meals maybe once or twice a week. We ate mostly little dry-good foods that were in plastic bags. You add hot water and spices, let it sit for five minutes, and you got a perfect meal. A lotta things we had to steal from other units—refrigerators, jeeps, or whatever. We were the type of unit that had no basic supplies. An’ no rear area either. The only rear we had was a ass.
I was still a cherry boy—and that’s what you stay until you get 90 days in country—when we had been dropped in a area s’pose to’ve been classified as a friendly area. We was goin’ ’cross some water. I’m the point man. I’m on the other side of the stream, and now the team’s comin’ ’cross. All of a sudden, the whole world start to explode. People start to screamin’ and hollerin’ and runnin’ around.
I had a white guy in the team. He was a Klan member. He was from Arkansas. Ark-in-saw in the mountains. And never seen a black man before in his entire life. He never knew why he hated black people. I was the first black man he had really ever sat down and had a decent conversation with. Since I grew up in a mixed-race neighborhood, I was able to deal with him on his terms, and I guess he learned to deal with me on mine. And once you started to go in the field with an individual, no matter what his ethnic background is or what his ideals, you start to depend on that person to cover your ass. Arkansas and me wind up being best friends.
They was throwin’ mortar rounds in on us. Man, you talk about mass confusion. Six of us runnin’. I was on the other side covering. A couple fellas on the rear end covering. Arkansas got hit in the chest. Another white dude got hit. They was in the middle of the water.
I started to cry and holler at Arkansas. He was layin’ there with blood comin’ out of his chest, comin’ out of his mouth.
We called in for support. Support comes out. Helicopter full of soldiers lands in a clearing, but the troops would not even come out because contact was bein’ made.
I went out in the water. Arkansas had ceased breathing. And I start to pounding in his chest and hollerin’, “Dear God, please don’t let ’im die.”
Everybody say, “He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.”
I said, “No! He cannot die like this.”
I got to kickin’ him in his chest. I’m stompin’ on him. And he started breathin’ again. And I pulled him from out of the water and dragged him to the helicopter.
There was so many in the helicopter, three of us had to hang on the skids on the underbody of the helicopter when we got out of there. And we were still under fire at the same time.
Arkansas and the other dude survived. But I found out it was friendly fire that we was under. It really made me angry. It made me angry for a long period afterwards. And I began to act a little strange. I was becoming a animal.
Then came the second week of February of ’69.
This was like three days after we had a helicopter go down in some very heavy foliage where they couldn’t find no survivors from the air. We were at LZ Oasis. We were directed to find the wreckage, report back. They see if we can find any enemy movement and find any prisoners.
We’re headin’ north. It took us ten hours to get to the location. The helicopter, it was stripped. All the weaponry was gone. There was no bodies. It looked like the helicopter had been shot out of the air. It had numerous bullet holes in it. But it hadn’t exploded. The major frame was still intact.
The next thing we do is to stake out the observers to make sure that we were not being observed, that the area is safe.
We recon this area, and we came across this fella, a white guy, who was staked to the ground. His arms and legs tied down to stakes. And he had a leather band around his neck that’s staked in the ground so he couldn’t move his head to the left or right.
He had numerous scars on his face where he might have been beaten and mutilated. And he had been peeled from his upper part of chest to down to his waist. Skinned. Like they slit your skin with a knife. And they take a pair of pliers or a instrument similar, and they just peel the skin off your body and expose it to the elements.
I came to the conclusion that he had maybe no significant value to them. So they tortured him and just left him out to die.
The man was within a couple of hours of dying on his own.
And we didn’t know what to do, because we couldn’t move him. There was no means. We had no stretcher. There was only six of us. And we went out with the basic idea that it was no survivors. We was even afraid to unstake him from the stakes, because the maggots and flies were eating at the exposed flesh so much.
The man had maggots in his armpits and maggots in his throat and maggots in his stomach. You can actually see in the open wounds parts of his intestines and parts of his inner workings bein’ exposed to the weather. You can see the flesh holes that the animals—wild dogs, rats, field mice, anything—and insects had eaten through his body. With the blood loss that he had, it was a miracle that the man was still alive. The man was just a shell of a person.
The things that he went through for those three days. In all that humidity, too. I wouldn’t want another human being to have to go through that.
It was a heavy shock on all of us to find that guy staked out still alive.
With an open belly wound, we could not give him water. And we didn’t have morphine.
And he start to cryin’, beggin’ to die.
He said, “I can’t go back like this. I can’t live like this. I’m dying. You can’t leave me here like this dying.”
It was a situation where it had to be remove him from his bondage or remove him from his suffering. Movin’ him from this bondage was unfeasible. It would have put him in more pain than he had ever endured. There wasn’t even no use talkin’ ’bout tryin’ and takin’ him back, because there was nothing left of him. It was that or kill the brother, and I use the term “brother” because in a war circumstance, we all brothers.
The man pleaded not only to myself but to other members of my team to end his suffering. He made the plea for about half an hour, because we couldn’t decide what to do.
He kept saying, “The motherfuckers did this to me. Please kill me. I’m in pain. I’m in agony. Kill me. You got to find ’em. You got to find ’em. Kill them sorry bastards. Kill them motherfuckers.”
I called headquarters and told them basically the condition of the man, the pleas that the man was giving me, and our situation at that time. We had no way o
f bringin’ him back. They couldn’t get to us fast enough. We had another mission to go on.
Headquarters stated it was up to me what had to be done because I was in charge. They just said, “It’s your responsibility.”
I asked the team to leave.
It took me somewhere close to 20 minutes to get my mind together. Not because I was squeamish about killing someone, because I had at that time numerous body counts. Killing someone wasn’t the issue. It was killing another American citizen, another GI.
I tried my best not to.
I tried to find a thousand and one reasons why I shouldn’t do this.
I watched the bugs and the stench that was coming from his body. I heard his crying and his pleading.
I put myself in his situation. In his place. I had to be as strong as he was, because he was askin’ me to kill him, to wipe out his life. He had to be a hell of a man to do that. I don’t think I would be a hell of a man enough to be able to do that. I said to myself, I couldn’t show him my weakness, because he was showin’ me his strength.
The only thing that I could see that had to be done is that the man’s sufferin’ had to be ended.
I put my M-16 next to his head. Next to his temple.
I said, “You sure you want me to do this?”
He said, “Man, kill me. Thank you.”
I stopped thinking. I just pulled the trigger. I cancelled his suffering.
When the team came back, we talked nothing about it.
We buried him. We buried him. Very deep.
Then I cried.
I thought all hell was gon’ break loose soon as I got back. It just about did, too.
They questioned me: “Was there any other alternative to killing him?” I stated the circumstances. His body had been eaten out. There was no feasible way to bring that man back and expect him to live.
They stated that there would be a court-martial procedure to find out if I had killed this man out of just plain anxiety or was it a necessity. They threatened me with a court-martial.
It never went to court. Nothing ever happened.
Now it begins to seem like on every mission we come across dead American bodies, black and white. I’m seeing atrocities that’s been done on them. Markings have been cut on them. Some has been castrated, with their penises sewed up in their mouth with bamboo.
I couldn’t isolate myself from all this. I had gotten to the conclusion today or tomorrow I’ll be dead. So it wasn’t anything I couldn’t do or wouldn’t do.
There was this saying: “Yeah though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, ’cause I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley.”
I figured if I’m gonna be a bad motherfucker, I might as well be the baddest motherfucker in the valley.
I became the company initiator. It was my job to initiate any cherry boys that comes into the company. Even sergeants and officers asked to go in the field their first time with me.
I used to have a bad eye. It was a childhood thing that I grew up with. And I had a operation when I was fourteen years old that corrected the malformity, but the habit of keepin’ my eye closed stayed with me. So around camp they took to callin’ me Cyclops.
But the Vietn’ese, they called me Montagnard, because I would dress like a Montagnard. I wouldn’t wear conventional camouflage fatigues in the field. I wore a dark-green loincloth, a dark-green bandana to blend in with the foliage, and a little camouflage paint on my face. And Ho Chi Minh sandals. And my grenades and ammunition. That’s the way I went to the field.
I dressed like that specifically as the point man, because if the enemy saw anyone first, they saw myself. They would just figure I was just another jungle guy that was walking around in the woods. And I would catch ’em off guard.
When we first started going into the fields, I would not wear a finger, ear, or mutilate another person’s body. Until I had the misfortune to come upon those American soldiers who were castrated. Then it got to be a game between the Communists and ourselves to see how many fingers and ears that we could capture from each other. After a kill we would cut his finger or ear off as a trophy, stuff our unit patch in his mouth, and let him die.
I collected about 14 ears and fingers. With them strung on a piece of leather around my neck, I would go downtown, and you would get free drugs, free booze, free pussy because they wouldn’t wanna bother with you ’cause this man’s a killer. It symbolized that I’m a killer. And it was, so to speak, a symbol of combat-type manhood.
The officers wouldn’t want to be seen downtown. They had a facade to keep up. I would go downtown and cop women and dope for them. I would bring them back in this truck or sneak them through this tunnel that went from the back of this woman’s house for about a hundred yards to our unit. I would get paid or I would get certain privileges.
One day in June my team went on a POW snatch. It was hot as hell. It felt like 120 degrees. I was wearing combat boots this time ’cause we would jump out a helicopter from about 10 feet into the elephant grass. I landed on a punji stick. It was about 2 feet long, sticking up in the ground. I don’t know if my weight or whatever pulled the stake loose. But I just kept running because there was no use stopping.
It went right through my boot, my foot, everything. It just protruded through the top of the boot. I couldn’t get the boot off. And I was told not to pull it through the leather. The base said if it doesn’t give you that much problem, don’t mess with it. They would get me out as soon as possible, but not immediately, ’cause they couldn’t jeopardize the mission by comin’ back out and get us.
They didn’t get me out for three days. My foot swell up inside my boot. They had to cut my boot off. It just happened that I was lucky that it wasn’t human urine on the stake, or my foot would’ve been amputated from infection.
After I got better, we was dropped off on the side of a mountain in the Central Highlands. It was so thick in there you could seldom see the enemy. We was to stay in the area five to six days and find out what type of enemy movement was goin’ on in the area. There was suppose to be a VC village in the valley, but the village was empty. That first night, though, we observed somewhat like 500 NVA regulars coming through with heavy supplies from North Vietnam.
On the third night, we were setting up the night perimeter, and we heard this noise coming through the woods. The first thing came to mind was the enemy. We got ready. It sounded like so many of them we thought we would get overrun. And the enemy didn’t come through. It was just about 200 monkeys. Something had scared them. Which is funny now, but it wasn’t funny then.
On the seventh day, we were supposed to snatch a POW to bring back. So we went down on this trail, and they—they ambushed us. Myself, Reginald Solinas, a Mexican brother from California who is my assistant team leader, and one other guy got pinned down in elephant grass. The gunfire was so close that the grass was falling upon us. We laid in the grass for a while too afraid to move. Then us three crawled from under the fire and attacked two enemy positions. I think we got about 16 of ’em, but it wasn’t feasible to sit around and count. We had to get out of there.
In movin’ around so much we lost contact with the base, and they didn’t know where we was. We were out of food and fresh water, so we started eating off the land—berries, weeds, anything. And we drank whatever water we came upon.
Around the tenth day, I started feeling feverish and cold at the same time. I was aching through my body. I was having nightmares and would wake up in cold sweats. My teammates would get on top of me, holding me down saying, “Hey, man, they out there. They on our ass. You got to be quiet, be cool.” Solinas took up the slack. I was just out of it with malaria.
On the fourteenth day, we got pinned down on the side of this steep hill. We was in a trench. They was out there callin’ to us, sayin’ what they gonna do when they capture us. Kill you. Castrate you. Send your private parts home to your wife. But they didn’t try to overrun us, because I think they didn’t know ho
w many there was of us.
Meanwhile, my mother got a letter stating I was missing in action. The base didn’t know where we was.
On the seventeenth day, they found us. We had a instrument called a emergency beeper. It was sending out a sound that you could hear up to 5-mile radius. We were picked up on that beeper. At two in the morning the medevac helicopter came in and grabbed the other four members of the team and disappeared. Solinas and me, we’re providing cover while they got on. Then the helicopter disappeared. We inadvertently got left.
Solinas looked at me, and I looked at him. We said, “Brother, this is it.”
We was in an open field. We turned ’gainst each other’s back and sat down. Placed our ammunition and our grenades in our lap. We locked and loaded. We shook hands, and we said good-bye to each other.
Then the helicopter came back and picked us up. We broke out laughing.
They think we got about 30 KIAs on that mission. And we sustained no casualties ourselves.
Some days when we came back on a POW snatch we played this game called Vietn’ese Roulette on the helicopter. We wouldn’t be told how many to capture. Maybe they only wanted one. But we would get two or three to find out which one is gonna talk. You would pull the trigger on one. Throw the body out. Or you throw one without shooting ’im. You place fear into the other Vietn’ese mind. This is you. This is next if you don’t talk.
It was never a regular means of deciding this one or that one. You never know their rank or anything until you start to eliminate them one by one. You would sit them down with the ARVN or chieu hoi who has come over to your side. So he’s translating the conversation back and forth. If one talk too much, you might get rid of him. He has no basic information to give you. He just gonna talk to try to save his life. Or you just might say from the start, “Throw this motherfucker out.” The other one will get to talkin’. And then you get that one word of intelligence, one piece of pertinent information.
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