When Heroes Cry

Want to experience a chilling sensation in the jungle where it’s 105F and humidity at 90+% literally? Walk unwittingly into a minefield and suddenly find out exactly what you just did.

Want to experience something even more chilling? Unwittingly step on a mine and hear it click.

One of our boys did. After everything was cleared and secured, it took him about half an hour to pull his underwear out of his ass.

And we’ll all probably have nightmares about this for the rest of our lives, if not, at least for a couple of days.

Most of the encounters I experience were either in a village or at a place near one. The civilian contacts most often took place, of course, in a village or in their crop fields. One day, we were sent to a village where smoke was observed by a recon plane the day before. The village was known to be a hot spot at one time but during the time we were there, the bandit activities had all but ceased in the region. Expecting a recurrence of bandit activity, we went in hot, “full combat gear”.

Once we arrived we saw villagers gathered in the center of the village mourning and one of the huts burnt to the ground.

As precautionary procedures, we secured the perimeter and conducted a search of the village. As the village was being secured, one of the villagers told us what had happened to our interpreter. He said a group of men had come to the village about a full moon ago, and taken away the husband of the woman who had set fire to her own home. The husband was found dead not too far away from the village following the day he was taken. The woman, the widow, had prepared everything that was to be cleaned up and gave away some of her possessions. She made sure there was nothing left that other villagers would have to do on her behalf after she had committed suicide.

It took her about a month to get ready to kill herself and left no traces of their existence. Even going as far as burning down her own home.

The murdered husband evidently had different political beliefs then the regime back then and someone remembered that.

After witnessing these kinds of atrocities time after time, it did nothing but to fuel our passion for pursuing the perpetrators who had no humanity in them and hang them by the neck until they died. Slowly.

He loved his call name. He used to say it made him sound and look way cooler than he really was.

He made his way into the service unit from the information section. He was a nerd, a tough nerd. Actually, he was more stubborn than anything else. That’s not to say it was a bad thing. He had the determination from hell, lets just say.

I had worked with him on more than a few occasions and we work well together right off the bat. We worked so well together because we really listened to each other.

We didn’t know each other, but knew what the other would do on the job every time.

Just about the time he was being discharged to go live on the west coast of the US, he was diagnosed with cancer.

I blame Agent Orange residue for that.  The last I heard of him was that the cancer was in remission and he gained 25 pounds. I blame his beautiful girlfriend for that. I wouldn’t doubt if he had beat the cancer.

He was the X.O.

He was Scepter 5-5.

His was a job that drove other, lesser men into the ground.

It was the job that made him what he is now, he’d always say.

He took his job seriously so that it wouldn’t be too hard for us, like, for us to stay alive.

I couldn’t tell you if the man was born for the job or the job was invented for a guy like him. Nor would i be able to tell you if I could have done his job one tenth as well as he did.

He knew the meaning of the word sacrifice down to the molecule.

He knew us. All of us, down to the molecule. That’s why he was our boss’ right hand man.

Rest in peace, Scepter.

I was  invited to a lunch at a home of a former captain of the NVA.

He was a gracious host. We had a long and interesting conversation. We talked about movies, to music, to foreign politics, mostly in broken English. This lunch invitation lasted past 10 pm.

Two things he said to me that I’ll never forget. One, had it not been for the M-16 rifle to jam not once but three times in three battles against three different US soldiers, he would not be here having lunch with me. Two, had the South Koreans been spearheading the conflict, he said he would definitely not been here talking to me. And things in Vietnam would have been very different.

He said America didn’t lose the war, they quit. They didn’t want to fight, but they had to help the French. Too many people died on both sides because your side and our side both had stupid people running the government.

When the pain goes away and forget that this ever happened, people will get stupid again.

I couldn’t have agreed more and it seemed to me that the leaders back then had forgotten about the past themselves.