The Hell in Vietnam

During our training in Recondo, we were instructed that having found
ourselves at gun point, seemingly with no chances of survival, we should
smile at our foe. Surprised by such behaviour, he would hesitate for a
fraction of a second. This unbelievably short period of time meant the
fine line between death and life. It gave way for other arguments and we
had full cartridges of them. We would kill hundreds of enemies this way,
leaving behind dead bodies, with the eyes telling the story of surprise
and our smiling faces.

By no means was it an ordinary war. Our foe was faceless, bereft of
identity. The whole Vietnam was our enemy. Its climate, terrain, mud,
jungle, mosquitoes and short, weird inhabitants, armed with Chinese
weapons and unreal ideals.

In terms of military strength, we outpowered the enemy. We had state-of-
the-art technology, napalm, helicopters, artillery support,
communications, supplies of equipment. No way we could lost? Way. It is
hard to imagine any army capable of defeating foe who is nowhere and
everywhere at the same time, foe who fights on his own ground, which for
us was hostile, alien and hard to understand. With time, we learnt some
rules of that world, we grasped the gist of fighting there. However, it
was primarily the fight for survival.

Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the communists in Vietnam, once said: you can
kill ten of my men with the loss of just one of yours, but you will still
lose, and I shall prevail. At the early stages of war in Vietnam, we
treated those words as a madman's babble. Towards the end, we had to
acknowledge they were true.

In October 1967, having spent some time training at a school for special
forces in Nha Trang, I was transferred to a temporary military base in
Don Dien, as the leader of a distant recon squad of four men. We all had
been in service for long, trained in sabotage, communication and intel.
We were invisible to those who themselves tried to be invisible. We were
the assassins of killers. Ready to bite. Yet, the winter offensive of
North Vietnam army smashed our teeth.

In 1968, a base located on the hill outside Don Dien found itself on the
marching route of a regular communist army, preparing for the strike on
the ancient, imperial city of Hue - the Binh Tri Thien province capital.

Al. Capone used to say that you can win more if you supplement outspoken
words with a gun. We were not trained to give speeches. As for the guns,
we had plenty of them...