In our ongoing "Eyewitness to Combat" series, here's another recollection from Pat, the Marine who went to Vietnam right out of high school, and landed in a completely different world. Beware: this entry has graphic images of war that are not for the faint of heart.
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"For the next couple of days we continued to sweep along rice paddy dikes, hedge rows, and toward some occupied villas that had been labeled V.C. During this time we hit more mines and took sniper fire during the day and sporadic mortar fire at night, and lost more Marines but never saw the enemy or returned any fire.
No one had fired a shot in their defense. We couldn’t even hit back. And all the while, the villagers just looked on as if we were just cattle. We would hit a mine and they would look up from their field work, grin, and go about their business as if nothing had occurred. There was just no one to shoot back at. I felt like I was in a shooting gallery.
A few more of the guys in the flank squads stepped into punji pits and had been impaled with punji stakes set out along the sides of the trails. A sniper would open up and take out one of our guys; everyone would dive for cover and become impaled with the punji stakes.
Then when we would try to recover our wounded the snipers would continue to take out our guys, piling them up like the flies that my granddad used to swat on his back porch.
The incoming mortar fire, at night, became so accurate that we would set in just before nightfall; start digging in, and after dark, fill up the holes, move to a different location and re-dig in.
I had been in-country less than 30 days and was real confused about what I was experiencing. I kept waiting for this great enemy attack. I thought that we should be doing something; like getting into the damn fight.
This was a terrible feeling: to know that I could die at any time and not have ever been able to even fire a single shot in retaliation.
We were all exhausted, no one slept, we were extremely angry, we were miserable and everyone was real pissed off and we just wanted to get a crack at ‘Charlie’.
Then we moved into the parameter of a small villa below the Cau Do in the Duong Son II hamlet area. It seemed deserted except for some pigs, a couple of food dogs, and some Water Buffalo that were left in a pit beside a couple of hooches. There did not appear to be anyone around.
Then we took some sporadic small arms fire from one of the hutches, which dropped one of our guys. Everyone instantly opened up and were firing and yelling like crazy men.
The lieutenant yelled, “flames up!” and Nick Sparicino and I moved immediately forward at a run. The lieutenant pointed at one of the hooches and yelled: “Torch It!”
I moved into the open area, struck the match (sparkler like igniter) and started torching it. My heart was pounding so hard that it make my ears hurt.
I fired into the doorway, through the front two window openings, and then up over the roof. Suddenly the most frightening scream I had ever heard up to that time started coming from the inside of the hooch and someone ran out of the doorway still burning with napalm.
I instinctively brought the flame down and followed the gook out into the courtyard and stayed on him until I ran out of fuel. He was holding some form of weapon to his chest and I used that as my target. The heat was so intense that it actually burned the hair off of my arms and face.
Nick and I moved back. The hooch went up faster than I had thought it would. The screams lasted, it seemed to me, a long time. The gook was knocked to the ground and was jerking, rolling, and thrashing his arms and legs kind of like De La Fante and in some way I felt a weird sort of satisfaction. Nick shot him several times and then started firing into the hooch where other screams were still coming from.
One of the other Marines had picked up a couple of the pigs and had also thrown them into the flames of the burning hooch. They squealed like crazy. The hooch collapsed and everything got real quiet. The hooch was burning, the gooks were burning, the pigs were burning and there was an air of electrical energy everywhere.
Nick kicked the weapon away from the gook and it was a small child, and the gook was a woman, probably the child’s mother. Nick and I looked at each other and felt sick. He just said: “Jesus Christ, Pat” and shook his head.
This was the first time that he had fired his M-14, the first time I had fired the flamethrower in combat, and this just wasn’t the type of real combat that either of us had imagined.
The other squads started shooting the other pigs, the dogs, and even the water buffalo in the pit. They had also set fire to all of the other hooches in the villa and there were secondary explosions from the weapons and ammo stored in them.
We pulled back a little further as these intensified. I refilled my tank from Nick’s five gallon re-supply can of napalm. Everything burned for quite a long time. More gooks were pulled out of the hooches. They were black, raw and burned to a crisp.
Bones in the skulls, fingers and legs were showing. The teeth on their faces showed and that really hit me hard. I went over to pull one gook into the clearing and the skin on his arm came off in my hands leaving his arm raw red meat and bone.
This also hit me like a blow in the stomach. When we had gotten all of them out of the hooch that Nick and I had torched there were five bodies; a man, two women, a small boy, and a baby.
Their bodies were grotesque and the smell, like burning hair, was pungent and stung my nostrils. I could never get that image out of my mind, ever. Nick and I couldn’t even look at each other.
I was 19 years old, Nick was 18, the Lt. was 21 and the Sergeant was the old man at age 25. The Sergeant just called in a body count with everyone having the same value, big or little, man or woman.
If it had not been for the rage that had built up prior to the engagement I didn’t want to be there anymore. This was not the kind of war that I had come to fight and I still had 12 months more of it to go. In fact, this process was repeated more or less endlessly over the next three months in the friggin’ rice paddies.
I had lost something important, though, and no longer felt in control of my destiny. I hated everyone who had sent me to Nam. I was still numb, I was still angry, and now I was also emotionally dead.
