Jim Morris has been kind enough to extend the offer to share with me a column he wrote before we got into Baghdad. I am delighted to be able to share these pieces with my readers. He owns the copyright; so I’m going to be publishing it on Sundays until we run out. My apologies Jim, I missed posting this on Sunday…so I’m posting it today. Jim, you have been immensely helpful and a delight.

Jim Morris is now a retired professional soldier who began military school at eleven, and eventually joined the Army and Special Forces where later he rose to the rank of major. Three tours in Vietnam, four Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars among numerous other decorations were among his accomplishments serving in SF before a medical discharge for wounds cut his career short. After Vietnam and graduate school Morris traveled to Cambodia, to cover the war for Rolling Stone. Besides four novels Morris has also written The Devil’s Secret Name and Fighting Men. Operation Dumbo Drop, a Disney movie starring Ray Liotta and Danny Glover, is based on a story Morris published in Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1980.

COOKING THE BOOKS by Jim Morris

It’s been highly amusing to watch the flow of charges and counter-charges over cooking the intelligence books on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

“The administration deliberately bent the data to make “the Merkin people” believe the WMDs were there!”

“Did not!”

“Did so!”

Sure they did. I don’t think I’ve ever met a spy who doesn’t have his, “I told Œem, and I told Œem, and I told Œem, and they juuuuuust wouldn’t listen,” story.

I suppose the classic example, at least for Special Forces, was in 1945, when Colonel Aaron Bank, of San Clemente, now over 100 years old, and still active, who later went on to become the founder of Special Forces, was with the OSS in Indochina. He was returning from a meeting in Hanoi, to his jungle headquarters, and bummed a ride with Ho Chi Minh to get there. He and Ho spent three days in the back seat of that car, working out every detail of American-Vietnamese cooperation, in the establishment of a workable, non-colonial Vietnam, one in which Vietnam and America had a solid strategic alliance, and Vietnam had a socialist, but democratic government.

Bank filed a complete report of this meeting, along with his recommendation, in the strongest possible terms.

Some months later a couple of “striped-pants boys”, in their twenties, from the State Department came out for a whirlwind tour, and recommended we give Vietnam back to the French. “After all,” I’ve heard President Truman quoted, “we’ve got to give them something.”

Sixty thousand American deaths, and three million Vietnamese deaths later, that country is as brutal a dictatorship as exists in the world today. And, if you were an ally of the Americans, it is hell on Earth.

The echoes of that one extremely stupid decision will reverberate forever.

On a more mundane level, I once knew a retired Military Intelligence lieutenant colonel who lost his chance for promotion this way. He had been a spymaster in Czechoslovakia for four or five years. He had run a lot of agents, but he stayed too long at the Fair. He was burnt. The other side knew who he was.

He went home, did his mandatory Pentagon tour, and three years later was reassigned to Czechoslovakia.

Immediately he went to his superiors and told them that it was a
mistake to send him back. “I’m burnt there,” he said. “I won’t be able to run agents, and any I try to run will be at great risk.”

I don’t know how they do these things today. But at that time nobody wanted to hear it.

He went to Czechoslovakia. He tried to run agents. It didn’t work. He got a terrible efficiency report, was sent home in disgrace, and retired involuntarily.

I, too, have such a story.

In April of 1964, my commanding officer, Crews McCulloch, led a patrol into the Chu Cle Ya Mountain area of Phu Bon Province, Republic of Vietnam. The patrol itself was a bitch. They ran into heavy opposition and were totally outgunned. Our chief communicator, Ken Miller (not Kenn Miller, author of Tiger the Lurp Dog) had to beat out his own evacuation message with the wounded hand he was being evacuated for. Our junior medic, Bill Foody (who later retired, from the Air Force as a full colonel, surgeon), had his left ankle shattered by a burst from an enemy Browning Automatic Rifle. It was actually the worst patrol of our six-month tour.

So this stuff was on my mind when I got a message to pick the Old Man up on the road, ahead of our trucks, when they walked out about twenty miles south of the camp. I grabbed a jeep and headed south. I was alone, but unafraid of an ambush, because I had given no prior warning that I planned to travel.

I found Crews, flaked out by the road with the troops. He got in the jeep, and said, “Get me to the camp ASAP.” I floorboarded the jeep, which was kind of pointless, since it only meant we were going 45 miles an hour on a dirt road. On the way back he briefed me. Philippe Drouin, the Cowboy, our best, and most aggressive, interpreter, had decided that we were trustworthy. He told Crews that the Montagnards were going to revolt against the South Vietnamese. I could tell you many horror stories about South Vietnamese treatment of the Montagnards, but suffice it to say that such a revolt was more than justified.

What they wanted us to do was be ready. They didn’t want to fight the Americans too. They just wanted to be treated decently, and have the same rights and privileges as any other citizen.

He had provided Crews with everything; their constitution, their plan, their organization (FULRO‹Fronte Unife de Lutte des Races Opprimees “Unified Fighting Front of the Oppressed Races”), their leadership. Even their flag.

He had already radioed our next higher headquarters in Pleiku, and Major Rick Buck, the commander of that headquarters was supposedly on his way to Buon Beng, our camp, by helicopter.

Crews briefed me on the way home. As soon as Buck got there he briefed him. Then he went to Saigon, and made the rounds of the intelligence services, giving them all the same spiel. We all volunteered to stay in Vietnam until after the crisis had passed.

A week or so later the Vietnamese intelligence service, also know as the Surete’, sent a fake malarial spray control crew to the camp. They were obviously not a real malaria crew, because they were sharply uniformed and started to work before noon. Also, they would enter a longhouse, asking anyone there subtle questions, on the order of, “Say, how about that revolt,” and then leave without having used their props, the spray cans.

Another week passed. A CIA spook, posing as a cultural anthropologist, arrived by helio-courier, an airplane used only by the CIA, and asked to see Crews. He said, “Captain, we’ve received reports on this revolt from you, from the MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group), and from USAID (US Agency for International Development). All of those reports can be traced back directly to you.”

“What I want to know, captain, is what you hope to gain by making up this preposterous story?”

We threw him out of the camp, and went back to Okinawa on the 6th of June, 1964, the 20th anniversary of D Day in Normandy.

In October the revolt happened. We had not been the only team that knew it was coming. Some teams handled it well, some not so well. A lot of Vietnamese and a few Montagnards were killed. The Montagnards took over the radio station in Ban Me Thuot (now Buon Ma Thuot).

The Montagnards got a lot out of the revolt. They got slots for their better leaders, including Cowboy, to their Officer’s Candidate School. They got eligibility for passports. They got title to many of their ancestral lands, and the Vietnamese Ministry of Ethnic Minorities was formed.

But they might have achieved all of that without bloodshed if the CIA had believed us.

So, I am not outraged that the Bush administration cooked the books on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. As far as I know every book is always cooked. At the least it is spun.

As far as I am concerned, Saddam, at one time, had WMD. It was not up to the US or the UN or anybody else to prove that he had none. It was up to Iraq. They couldn¹t do so, because they had no credibility. But that was their own doing.

The WMD may well turn up yet. We¹re talking about a country the size of California, made mostly of sand. How hard is it to bury barrels under sand?

Assuming that Iraq did, in fact, destroy all of its WMD, this was obviously done because the US was building up to invade, and they were trying desperately to pre-empt the invasion by getting rid of the ostensible cause for it. It seems logical that, had they succeeded, as soon as the US military left Kuwait, the WMD programs would be back on the front burner.

The real spin, in my view, the real cooking of the books, was that we invaded Iraq, not because it had WMD, but because we needed a win, and we needed it badly. American morale was in the toilet because of 9/11.

Afghanistan was changing from partial payback into a permanent running sore. Even our client states in the Arab world hate us for our support of Israel. We had been hurt, and the Arab world was pretty happy about it.

Meanwhile the War on Terror was going well, but not in any public way. It was a shadow war of three a.m. arrests and confiscated bank accounts. We needed a large public win.

So we invaded Iraq because it’s large, obviously evil, and we could actually find it. The fascinating thing is that it seems to have worked. Americans don’t feel impotent anymore. We are no longer merely hated, but also feared, in the Arab world.

We can all feel soooooo much better.

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© Jim Morris, all rights reserved.

Jim Morris has been kind enough to extend the offer to share with me a column he wrote before we got into Baghdad. I am delighted to be able to share these pieces with my readers. He owns the copyright; so I’m going to be publishing it on Sundays until we run out. Thanks, Jim, you have been immensely helpful and a delight.

Jim Morris is now a retired professional soldier who began military school at eleven, and eventually joined the Army and Special Forces where later he rose to the rank of major. Three tours in Vietnam, four Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars among numerous other decorations were among his accomplishments serving in SF before a medical discharge for wounds cut his career short. After Vietnam and graduate school Morris traveled to Cambodia, to cover the war for Rolling Stone. Besides four novels Morris has also written The Devil’s Secret Name and Fighting Men. Operation Dumbo Drop, a Disney movie starring Ray Liotta and Danny Glover, is based on a story Morris published in Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1980.

Chimps With Nukes by Jim Morris

In Jared Diamond’s book, The Third Chimpanzee, he points out that we share about 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, which is not much greater than the difference between chimps and bonobo pygmy chimps. He also postulates that human behavior is merely an elaboration of basic primate behavior. Bands of chimps hold a territory and the young males instinctively patrol its boundaries, keeping watch for leopards and the young males of adjacent bands who sneak in and steal bananas. When that happens they beat them up or kill them if they can.

I’ve found that a great deal of puzzling human behavior becomes perfectly clear if one thinks of our species as chimps with nukes.

All of our statecraft and “military science” is an elaboration on the theme of stealing and protecting bananas. We just do these things more intelligently than chimps, which is where the real danger lies. A behavior pattern that results in a dead chimp may make sense. One which results in a dead planet does not.

There is probably no one of average or better intelligence who does not believe that war, the way we wage it now, is insane. Yet we keep doing it, blaming each other, captive of our primate genes.

This article is not an argument for or against war. Winston Churchill was right that slavery is worse than war. Dishonor is worse than war. Lots of things are worse than war. What it¹s an argument for is leaders who know this first hand.

Harry Truman fought in France in WWI. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, all took the oath and wore the uniform. Even Reagan did that, though he only made training films in Hollywood as a captain in the Signal Corps.

FDR didn’t serve, of course. He was wheelchair bound. But his son Elliott served as second in command of a Marine Raider Battalion. There is no more hairy assignment than that. From a geopolitical standpoint it makes no sense to have the son of the head of state subject to capture by the enemy. Young Roosevelt undoubtedly wanted to be in the war, but if his father allowed it, this must have been, at least partially, to make an egalitarian statement to the country.

Vietnam was not a popular war. Getting out of it replaced baseball as the national pastime in the early seventies. Though his father had served in World War II George Bush skated in the Texas Air Guard. Cheney, Wolfowitz and Pearle had deferments. Only Rumsfeld was a Navy pilot, prior to Vietnam.

These are not bad men. But if you haven’t seen your best friend’s face turn to red goo before your eyes, or watched a child die because you made a simple mistake throwing steel around at supersonic speed after three days without sleep, well, if you haven’t done that, then, by definition, when it comes to war, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

In March of 1964 I was the “Senior Advisor” of a patrol of four Americans and a platoon of Jarai Montagnard tribesmen. We were out hunting for the entire population of a Jarai village which the Viet Cong had kidnapped to use as slave labor in the jungle. It was a small patrol, put together quickly. Frankly we knew that the chances of finding the village were almost nil, but we had to make a good faith effort or risk losing support from the other villages.

We had mounted the patrol so quickly that there was no interpreter available. I was ‘advising” the Montagnard “commander” with hand and arm signals and about a hundred and fifty words of survival French I had learned on Okinawa. Ksor Yul, the platoon leader, also remembered some French from his service in the Indo-china War. Some of them were the same words.

Oddly, this worked well enough. We couldn’t discuss philosophy, but we could patrol.

About noon of the second day we crossed the Li Piao River, Ayunapa in Jarai, and moved parallel to it, hidden in the bush. Most of the Central Highlands was dense jungle, but this was open and parklike. Then my left flank guy signaled that he had spotted something. It was three Bahnar tribesmen, young boys working in a rice field by the river. I wanted to ask them if they had seen our VC and their group of villagers. We moved around them in the jungle, surrounding them on three sides, with the river on the fourth. The river was three feet deep and more than a hundred across. No one but a fool would try to escape across it under such circumstances. A fool or a kid.

The boys broke for the river. I charged after them, into the water wearing forty pounds of gear and clothes that soaked and dragged me back. It was like running in a nightmare. My Americans fired warning shots. We had taught our Jarai a lot, but not about warning shots. They had been at war with the Bahnar, on and off, for about 900 years. They shot to kill. I screamed, “No g’pow! No g’pow!”, g’pow being Jarai for gun. Probably the only thing that saved two of them was that my troops had to shoot wide to avoid hitting me. But they hit one of them and blood ran down his back as he ran. The other two scampered over the bank and into the jungle on the other side, but this kid wavered and fell by the river.

He was bleeding from a head wound. We bandaged it, but that didn’t stop the bleeding. I didn’t have an American medic, but we pulled a can of blood expander out of our Montagnard medic’s pack. He had filled it with aspirin.

Then a sniper opened up from across the river. I took a squad, moved back in the jungle again, crossed the river out of sight around a bend, and moved through the jungle toward the sniper. None of my squad would take the point, so I did. I knew the sniper, if we found him, would have the first shot. I have great confidence in my marksmanship. If he missed me on the first round I’d kill him before he got off a second. That’s a big if, and I was more scared than I’ve ever been.

But the sniper had bugged out.

I crossed the river for the fourth time. When I reached the bank I stood and watched the boy die. And I watched him die in my dreams every night for the next ten years. I will probably see him die on the day I do, and I will still grieve for him. I bear responsibility for his death and I never knew his name.

In war every digit of every casualty figure has a story like that attached to it, and every one is a tragedy for a family and for the comrades of the dead. We have objectivised language in the military. Dead babies are “collateral damage”. Dead teenagers, last May’s bright and hopeful high school grads, are “friendly” or “enemy casualties.” There’s a reason for the language. As long as you can think like that you can keep fighting. But in the dark of the night for all the long years that follow they’re just dead kids, and the tears that you’ve managed to postpone come at strange and inappropriate times.

But our leaders will not have these troubles with their dreams. Somehow this country is now run by people who think they’re too good to fight for it.

This was dramatically brought home to me a few years ago when I was an editor in New York publishing. I learned that the editor-in-chief of our literary imprint had actually known James Jones, the author of From Here to Eternity, a book I’ve read nine times. So I talked to her about Jones, and in the course of the conversation she mentioned that I was the only Vietnam veteran she had ever met.

My God that was stunning. This woman was in the upper reaches of New York society. Her husband tried cases before the Supreme Court. She’d had Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her husband to dinner the previous week. But she had never, either socially or professionally, knowingly met a Vietnam veteran.

But when our offices were moved in a corporate takeover I stood in the halls and played Where-was-you-at? with the moving men. “Were you there for Tet?” “Were you in the Ia Drang?” Yes, they were.

About ten years ago the armed services pruned all the Vietnam vets they could from their ranks. The Nammers had had that experience of being sold out by the people they risked their lives for, their lives expended needlessly by people who did not go and did not send their children. For the most part these men were still brave, still willing, if necessary, to die for freedom. But they were entirely too prone to ask the question, “Is this trip really necessary?”

It would probably be politically impossible to invade Iraq with an army of draftees. With the all-volunteer army we are spared those embarrassing questions about inequality of sacrifice.

I have heard and believe that during the entire course of the Vietnam War the son of only one congressman served. But those Congressmen who did not send their sons, and did not send the sons of their college-deferred big contributors, voted with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to send the sons of their less affluent constituents. This is as grand a betrayal as I can imagine.

So we are now led by people who did not serve, and whose children do not serve. There is no Lieutenant Rumsfeld waiting for the new gas masks for his platoon. There is no Navy pilot named Bush in this generation. Somebody’s daughter will die, but it won’t be Barb or Jenna.

It’s interesting to me that no Vietnam vet has achieved the office of President of the United States. Those who have climbed as high as the Senate have done so under special circumstances. One wonders if John McCain would have been elected if he’d merely been a fighter pilot and not a POW. One wonders if Bob Kerry would have gone so far if he’d not lost a leg. But both of them know the full horror of war. I’d be far more comfortable if the decision to invade or not invade Iraq were being made by such a man. They don’t see “collateral damage”. They see dead babies.

Since Vietnam I don’t think America trusts her military anymore. This is something of a mistake. There were next to no Congressmen’s sons in Vietnam, but every three or four weeks I’d pick up a Stars and Stripes and read where Lieutenant So-and-so, the son of General So-and-so had been killed leading a Marine platoon. The military is probably the only segment of our society left which has that sense of noblesse oblige.

Saddam’s military capabilities compared to those of the United States are almost laughable. Šunless we’re right and he has poison gas and biological agents, and uses them. We’ll still win but no one will be laughing because nothing will be funny.

The notion that we, the United States, can create a stable democracy in the Middle East strikes me as hubris of the highest order. But it’s possible. We managed to create fairly stable, fairly democratic regimes in Japan and the Philippines after World War Two, and they’re still functioning more or less in that mode. So maybe this will work. But it’s a very long shot. I’d just feel ever so much better if the people making the decisions carried the same risk as the people carrying them out. The only dogs they have in this fight are their money and their power. Bush won’t personally know anyone who dies.

With the British upper classes the oldest son became Lord of the Manor, and the number two son went to the army, and number three to the church. The British Empire lasted a long time. But I do not think America will long be top nation. The people will lose faith in a leadership that expends their sons and daughters like used Kleenex, but sends its own to Harvard and Yale.

In Rome the Praetorians finally took to installing emperors from among their number. Then came the Visigoths.

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© Jim Morris, all rights reserved.

Jim Morris has been kind enough to extend the offer to share with me a column he wrote before we got into Baghdad. I am delighted to be able to share these pieces with my readers. He owns the copyright; so I’m going to be publishing it on Sundays until we run out. Thanks, Jim, you have been immensely helpful and a delight.

Jim Morris is now a retired professional soldier who began military school at eleven, and eventually joined the Army and Special Forces where later he rose to the rank of major. Three tours in Vietnam, four Purple Hearts, four Bronze Stars among numerous other decorations were among his accomplishments serving in SF before a medical discharge for wounds cut his career short. After Vietnam and graduate school Morris traveled to Cambodia, to cover the war for Rolling Stone. Besides four novels Morris has also written The Devil’s Secret Name and Fighting Men. Operation Dumbo Drop, a Disney movie starring Ray Liotta and Danny Glover, is based on a story Morris published in Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1980.

Urban Combat

Here’s the bottom line on urban combat. You don’t want it.

When the Israelis went into Beirut in ’82 I was one of an army of correspondents who went with them. At that time the main Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, were allied with the Israelis. It only took the Israelis a couple of weeks to roll the Palestinian fighters all the way back to West Beirut. The Palestinians were backed to the sea, prepared to make their last stand.

The Israelis stopped. They thought it would be nice if the Lebanese Forces went into West Beirut and cleaned it up for them. After all, they said, it was their city.

I was in the LF press headquarters when the Christians presented their reply. The LF Press Officer took a certain umbrage at the Israeli attitude. “Yes, it’s our city and the people on the other side, aside from the Palestinians, are our friends and relatives. We’re not going in.”

There was a stalemate of a couple of weeks while the Israelis and the Lebanese Forces played, “After you, my dear Alphonse.”

The Israelis calculated that their casualties taking West Beirut would exceed all their casualties in all their wars to date.

The Lebanese Forces were an all-volunteer force, and they volunteered on a mission by mission basis. Nobody wanted it.
In the end they, the Israelis and the Lebanese Forces, let the Palestinian leadership escape to Tunisia rather than try to take West Beirut.

There was no cowardice in their decision, and no ignorance. At that time the Lebanese Forces were probably the best city fighters in the world. God knows they had more practice than anybody else.

As it happened I had been in Beirut the summer before, and at one point I’d been to lunch at the apartment of the same LF press officer, with the idea that we’d see some combat training that afternoon.

His apartment was in East Beirut, only a couple of blocks from the Green Line that separated Christian East Beirut from Muslim/Palestinian/Syrian West Beirut. It was a very nice luxury apartment, except for a couple of rips in the couch where shrapnel had come through the window. That must have happened recently, because the window was still boarded rather than replaced.

I dined well with my press officer friend (who would prefer I not use his name here, since mortal enemies now control his country) and his live-in girlfriend. We were served by a maid from Sri Lanka, a delicious light fluffy meat I had never encountered before.

He’s a big guy with a deep voice, who rolled his Ls and Rs, “Llllamb’s brrrains,” he replied to my query. “More wine?”

After lunch I started assembling my gear. “Where are you going?”

“We were going to training.”

“Let’s watch it on television. It’s easier.”

I was amazed. This was 1981. It was the first VCR I’d ever seen.

What I saw was a training facility made of old tires, stacked to create a corridor with doorways in it, as in an apartment house or a narrow Arab street.

Young men in the tailored insignialess fatigues I’d come to associate with Lebanese Forces worked the corridor with the smooth precision of a well-drilled basketball team. There were three fire teams of three men each and a squad leader. The squad leader stayed in the corridor, directing traffic. The fire teams leapfrogged from room to room. The first man tossed in a grenade and, right after the explosion, the other two went in side by side, one sweeping left, the other right, firing a long burst as they entered.

They would kill anything alive in there, but anything alive and armed had a microsecond to kill them.

Later I went into the Sannine mountains with my friend and he showed me some of their firing techniques. I learned to put two slings, made into one long one, on an assault rifle, hung around my neck to support the weight, with the buttplate of the rifle just below my navel (the hara for you marital artists, the center of the will for Castaneda fans, the third chakra for the meditators), guiding the weapon with the left hand, firing with the right. This wasn’t as accurate as taking a well-aimed shot, but critical milliseconds quicker, and much more accurate than firing from the hip. We were firing at a couple of dumptruck loads of gravel, and every time I fired the spot I was looking at exploded into flying rocks.

That’s all my training in urban combat, but I had fought one very grim twenty-four hour day in the city of Nha Trang during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

A small Vietnamese signal unit, with only about 25 guys left in the compound, because of the holiday, had come under attack by what later turned out to be a battalion of 600 hard-core Viet Cong who had prepped by taking opium, and had notes pinned to their shirts which said, “We volunteered to die for the glory…”blah-blah-blah, whatever. They launched their attack at first light.

At that time I was a captain, Information Officer of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). My assistant, 1st Lt. Frank Orians, heard that there was some war downtown and woke me. We grabbed our rifles, patrol harnesses with about ten clipped twenty-round magazines apiece, and a couple of cameras. By the time we were ready to go a couple of recon guys who were passing through the headquarters joined us.

We parked two blocks from the compound and walked in.

When we arrived they were still under attack, but, we had been preceded by a company of Mike (Mobile Strike) Force, maybe 100 guys with six Americans. They were Cham people, Muslim fishermen from the seacoast around Nha Trang.

The enemy was in a neighborhood to the north. We were pretty much pinned down by a machinegun in a second story window. We couldn’t seem to shut it down. The Mike Force wanted to flank on the left, but there were open paddies there, and moving through that muck in the open would have been suicidal. On the right a crowd had formed to watch the battle, and vendors moved among them, selling soup.

By noon Frank and I had enough pix for a good little feature, so we went back to the SF compound. Then I got a call from Sy Wohlen, the CBS bureau chief in Saigon. He wanted us to take a crew down there. I sent a man to pick them up at the air base and we went back to the fray. The correspondent, Don Webster, later told me it was some of the best footage to come out of Tet, but they got it out too late for the Cronkite show.

A number of other SF guys had showed up, and Captain Scott Gantt had taken command. All the people who lived in that neighborhood to the north were still there, “human shields” for the Viet Cong. We didn’t want to kill them, but we had to get the VC out.

Scotty speaks Vietnamese, so he got a huge loudspeaker set from the Vietnamese signal detachment and announced for the people to leave. The VC realized that the people’s presence was keeping heavy fire from being brought to bear on them and refused to let them go. A few sneaked out, but they were shot at by the VC. Then Scotty had a helicopter gunship fire one rocket into the neighborhood. He made the same announcement again, and people poured out into the streets, running toward our position, their “liberators”, the VC, shooting them as fast as they could.

One Mike Force guy, Sammy Coutts of Cupertino CA, ran into the line of fire to pull a little Vietnamese girl to safety.

More things happened that day and the night that followed than I have space for here. Frank Orians had been an enlisted SF medic before OCS so he treated the wounded, mostly Vietnamese civilians shot by the VC. We were running low on ammo and he had a truckload of patients to take to the province hospital. We asked him to get more ammo on the way back. The ammo dump NCO wouldn’t give it to him without a signed requisition so Frank just drew down on him with his M16. “Load her up,” he said.

The VC set fire to a fuel dump and it looked like the burning of Atlanta all night long.

After the Mike Force left for another hot spot there were never more than forty of us there that night. We were not a unit, but just a bunch of clerks and jerks that showed up to help. We weren’t trained for urban combat, although we were well armed and motivated. We were attacked all night long by over 600 well-armed and trained enemy. They didn’t have any more luck than a cat trying to scratch its way into a bowling ball.

There were 200 enemy dead in the neighborhood when we moved through it the next day, one-third of their original force. We didn’t lose a man from our ad hoc defense force.

If it was me, and I had the choice, rather than fight house-to-house in a city, I’d build a fence around it and call it prison, then let anybody out who was willing to leave unarmed. Let them rot in there if they want to.
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© Jim Morris, all rights reserved.

Thanks to Stop the ACLU