Eyewitness to History: student writing contest winners

Q: What was it like when you first arrived in Vietnam?

A: We took an American Airlines plane, and it was a nonstop flight. We ended up landing in Japan. It was actually weird because I left on a Tuesday and arrived on a Thursday, so somewhere while I was on the plane, I lost a day of my life.

[Then] we got on another flight that headed right to Vietnam. We got our last supper on the aircraft.... At the time I didn't realize how much I would miss a full meal. We landed [in] ... Vietnam, and when I looked out of the plane's windows, I could see fighting everywhere. I could see smoke coming from burning houses. The pilot didn't turn back from the chaos.

When [the plane] landed, the people were throwing rocks at us.... Soon after, our sergeants came to guide us. They loaded us onto the choppers, and we left for another air base. The air base we arrived at was for the crane units (a unit that used a machine called the crane to pick up and fly away with trucks or wreckage).... We weren't there long, only for about a month.

Q: Where did you go from there?

A: They assigned us to the 227 Pathfinder Unit, which dealt with "jumbo warfare." It consisted of a 13-man hit-and-run unit.... If a unit needed to be moved to a hillside, we would go in and clear it.... Of course, our orders were always different. Sometimes we got orders to destroy bridges or burn rice [fields]. Other times, we had to check hostages and check villages for tunnels. ... And sometimes we killed off all the water buffalo or even burned the locals' huts.

Then we got orders to go and protect a village that they already knew was safe.... That was an uplift compared to most of the things that I'd had to do, but it turned into a disaster real quick. When we arrived, it was too late ... everyone was already dead. There were women and children lying around just baking in the hot sun.... When you looked at the people, you could tell they were tortured, some were burned, and several of the babies were decapitated. All we could do was secure the area and head off to our next assignment.

Q: Did you ever get shot at?

A: Of course. My worst was during a mission to go into the jungle where a plane was shot down. They thought that the pilot might still be alive. Most of the way there was swampland, so we ended up walking through the water up to our necks with our guns over our heads. You could hear and see animals everywhere, and we kept finding ... pieces of the plane. When we finally found the pilot, his neck was broken, and there were no signs of life in him.

We ended up setting [up] a perimeter of defense because it was already nightfall, and [it was] not safe enough to go through the jungle at that time. The night was restless, and at about 4 a.m., all of the animals grew still, and we could hear footsteps in the water. One of the men shot a flare, and people in black clothes with straw hats started coming out from all around us. Everyone's guns were going off. The fight only lasted about 15 to 20 minutes, but it seemed like forever. It wasn't until afterward that I realized that I was shot in my right leg. It didn't hurt--it just burned-but it ended up taking a fair amount of meat out of my leg. Just about everyone around me was shot; a lot of them were dead.