(This material in this post is reminiscent of and confirms that in the recent one from the OEF/OIF era, that talks about how it's best to "shut down, block out, give up being yourself" -- if you intend to survive the psychological rigors of combat trauma. Two different wars, separated by decades: same "coping" strategies of combat veterans.) --- In our ongoing series of "eyewitness to combat," here are some more remiscences of Pat, the young Marine's, first tour in Vietnam: Sometime around the middle of April, I was still attached to Hotel Company and we had been moving south toward Highway 4. It was constantly hot as hell and we had been taking sporadic and effective sniper fire and had encountered a few mines and some booby trapped gates. However, we had not made any real eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the V.C. even though we knew that they were all over the place.
There was an abandoned ARVN Army outpost at Phuong Thu. We set in our position just north of Highway 4 right across the road bed. We dug two man fighting holes or fox holes, and where I was, we were defending an area about the size of a football field.
It got dark, real dark with no moon at all, and was very hot and still. Again no one had slept much during the sweep and the mines had us all keyed up. Several squads had been sent out to establish ambush sites and listening posts had also been sent out. We rotated these every night with different squads going out, ambush one night, parameter defense the next, and sweeps during the day.
I had just finished my watch and had passed the watch to Worsley. Just as he was waking up we started receiving mortar and recoilless rifle fire and all kinds of stuff broke out south of the road where one of the ambush squads were. Tracers were going everywhere. Worsley jumped up and said; “What the Hell?”
Then the V.C. attacked from across the road and began to really lay down a high level of automatic AK 57 rifle fire.
Through the flashes we could see that there were really a lot of them. The mortars kept coming but were primarily hitting toward the center of our position. Everyone was shooting and hollering and we shot a lot of them as they crossed the road toward our position.
Whenever they came upon the road they were completely exposed and made a somewhat easy target. A bunch of them were killed in the rice paddy in front of us. Our own mortars were putting up illumination rounds as well as our artillery.
When our 155’s started coming in, the V.C. shelling of our position stopped but they kept coming in to drag off their dead and wounded. People were getting hit all around us and the call for “Corpsman Up” was going on from everywhere.
After a real intense period of time, they stopped their main attack but continued to probe us the entire rest of the night, again mainly to get their dead. I was real frightened and excited at the same time and for a while wasn’t real sure of the outcome.
When daylight finally came, we were all completely exhausted from the intensity of the battle and from the gigantic adrenalin rushes we were experiencing. However when we finally were able to take an accounting of the fire fight, all that we found of our elusive enemy was a whole bunch of blood trails, body parts and some clothing and a few weapons and scattered ammo.
There were only about ten or so V.C. bodies that could be absolutely counted but we had experienced a whole lot more Marine Corps casualties than that: killed and wounded.
This really did a mind job on us and made the hatred for them very engrained. We had fought most of the night and the only thing we had to show for it was a bunch of our guys hit. I think that we had almost 50 plus casualties but it looked like a hell of a lot to me.
Choppers came in the next day to take them out. There were a bunch of medivac Hueys.
This was really discouraging. I thought that finally we had had a real shot at ‘Charlie’ and we still got our asses kicked.
After all of the casualties were gone and the battle field was sanitized; we just filled in the fighting holes and continued on south of Highway 4 toward the Key Lam River, again as if those people never existed and to never be mentioned again. You learned to survive the casualties by “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. Once you were hit and removed, it was like you’d basically never existed.
