VIETNAM

THROUGH AN INFANTRYMAN'S EYES

Gary McMahon

(3 Platoon, Alpha Company, 6 RAR.)

Civilians will never understand what the average infantryman went through in Vietnam.  A General once exploded to a war correspondent:

"I get so eternally tired of the lack of understanding of what the infantry soldier endures...I get so fighting mad because of the general lack of appreciation of real heroism - which is the uncomplaining acceptance of unendurable conditions..."

VIETNAM. To the fighting men there, half a world from home, the name meant many things - none of them good.

It meant a long way from those we loved. It meant the closest place to death. It meant the place where I lost my best friend; it meant a place where we all surely and without doubt lost the last remnants of our boyhood.

Vietnam was stagnant rice paddies, red clay, jungle vines, bamboo thickets and elephant grass. It was weeks of 120-degree heat and 100% humidity. It was drought and monsoon and flood. It was two seasons, hot and dry and hot and wet. Or both. A soldier said, "This is the only place in the world where you can be shoulder deep in mud and have dust blowing in your face at the same time".

It was the red ant, the malaria mosquitos, the bamboo flea and the bamboo viper, the pit viper, the banded krait, the cobra, and a couple of other snakes that go under the alias of Mr. Two Foot and One Step Charlie, of course all were poisonous.

Spiders, flies, lizards, rats, bats, leeches and a million insects - no two alike live there. So does malaria, jungle rot, typhus, fungus, immersion foot, sunburn, dysentery, pneumonia, heat prostration, tuberculosis, leprosy and other ailments we didn't even have names for.

They lived there and they thrived. But, so did the spirit of the Infantryman. Every day he met the challenges of that cruel, agonising war. He survived. He even triumphed.

It didn't take much to make us happy. We got overjoyed at little comforts like a squirt of insect repellent on a leech eating into our skin. Or a dry cigarette.

We did everything that was asked of us and more. We fed on courage and selflessness and dedication, and a camaraderie that no one who shared will ever find anywhere else again. And we got by on the most simple and pathetic, most god - awful important little pleasures. A sweat stained photo or a letter from home; a night’s sleep in a bed or water without leeches.

We were young Australians and Americans, who would have given anything to be back home doing other things, but we weren't, we were in Vietnam doing our duty for our country. By all accounts we were the smartest, strongest, best trained, most spirited and competent fighting men our country had ever sent to war anywhere.

We were young but we were old beyond our years because that war was a rush course in maturity and survival. We would do anything for a mate, anything except leave him on the battlefield. We shared our last drops of water, or our last cigarette. We patrolled together, we slept together, we laughed together and we fought together. We even died together.

We trusted each other with our lives but we learned to mistrust the slightest movement in the bushes, the snap of a twig at night, the old villager with a concealed hand, the child who looked so young and innocent. We learned to live by our senses and our instincts.

We lived like this because we were up against a tough, resourceful, tenacious and brave enemy we called "Charlie." Whether he was the local village Viet Cong (VC) we called "Victor Charles" or the main force North Vietnamese Army (NVA), we fought them both, and he was good. He stood about five feet six inches tall and weighed about eight stone wringing wet, but in my opinion he was one of the best guerrilla fighters in the world.

He was a master of camouflage and concealment and surprise. He dug into holes, faded into the jungle, or submerged for hours in a rice paddy breathing through a bamboo tube. He moved a lot at night and was always agonisingly hard to find.

He was also deadly and treacherous. He would bury village people alive when they refused to help them or to pay rice taxes. He would employ assassination and torture whenever it served him. And he would kill his own wounded to keep them silent.

We could never relax because he was everywhere. He was sometimes farmer, or civilian or woman or child, and he had many, many tricks: Bombs hidden on a woman’s or baby's body, fruit injected with snake venom, ice for drinks filled with slivers of glass, acid in Coca-Cola.

And they were not afraid to die.

As good as they were though, so were we, and in my opinion, on the battlefield we were better. We fought the enemy at every opportunity and we never lost a battle. It was a strange, bitter, frustrating, personal war. A war of contrasts. Of modern technology and primitive conditions, of mud and dust, of outgoing and incoming, of contact and no contact and the contrasts of hit and near miss, the difference between the body bag and the good war story.

It was a war where you learned to trust fate or God. There were not many Atheists amongst infantrymen in those days...It was that kind of war.

Gary McMahon

(I found the above piece on the internet and do not remember where, but it says it all. I have added to it but if the original writer objects please contact me and I will remove it.)