If
I got to write the rules for
war, they would be simple, 1. WIN, 2. Don’t kill any civilians. However,
the
US
military has lots of rules to follow. As far as I know, I never shot at a
civilian on purpose. And I never killed a civilian. We carried lots of VC
POWs, never dropped one out of the aircraft, and I never saw one dropped
out. I’ve heard stories about it, but never substantiated.
Most
of the time an enemy was defined as a person that shoots at you with a
weapon. This rule we did not like. This meant that for you to shoot back,
they had to be a bad shot on the first shot. On one combat assault in the
Delta, south of
Saigon
,
the peter pilot was flying, I was backing him up on the controls. Just as
we were touching down to let out the troops, three Viet Cong popped up
from behind a rice paddy dike about 25 feet out my right door. They all
had AK47s and started shooting at the aircraft, us, and the infantry. When
infantry get off the aircraft, they are focused on getting out, not
hitting the rotor blades, and going for ground to hide. They
did not see the three. I yelled at the door gunner to open up on them with
the M60 door gun. It jammed! So, being John Wayne in a flight suit, I
pulled out my COLT 45 from my holster and stuck it out the window and
fired off 7 shots. Never hit one of them. They quit firing, and
started running for the tree line. By this time, we started to takeoff
from the LZ and the door gunner unjammed his M60. We got about 30 feet in
the air, and the door gunner let loose with the M60 and shot all 3 before
they got to the tree line. That was the only time I ever tried to shoot
someone with a handgun. I shot at 3 VC, with 7 shots, and missed.
Many
times we get called into a fight, after it had started, or had just
ended. An artillery fire base near a town of
Loc
Nin
,
about 60 miles North of Saigon got attacked one night and got overrun. We
got called to bring ammo, food, etc up the next morning. We took 3 ships.
When we got up there, we saw lots of smoke. We made our approach to land,
but had to hover around to find a clear spot to set down. It must have
taken us 10 min. to find a spot. The ground near the artillery guns was
covered with dead VC. Where there was not a dead VC, there were fired,
unexploded artillery rounds that did not have fuses installed. The
base took wave after wave of VC attacks and the artillery men fired point
blank back at them with beehive rounds, each containing 2200 small
flechets (metal darts). They ran out of those, so
they fired high explosive rounds. They ran out of fuses for those rounds,
so they just fired the rounds without the detonators. Good thing they ran
out of VC. I’m glad the
US
military doesn’t do wave after wave fighting any more. I think they
figured that did not work after WW1. My view of the American “way of
war” is to send a weapon instead of a soldier. The bigger weapon, the
better. Using that logic to it’s extreme, is to send a Nuclear weapon to
downtown
Moscow
.
That was what the plan was till the end of the Cold War. Now the Air Force
gets in trouble if when they strike a big target, they kill one civilian.
We had planned to kill millions of civilians. Don’t you think this is
strange?
