Finding the Viet Cong was difficult and if they suspected ones were found they were hard to determine from normal villagers. One fore SEAL who worked in the Mekong Delta told the Washington Post, “It was literally pin the tail on the donkey. Half the time you ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And this led to a number of tragedies and dead civilians.

The film maker Oliver Stone fought in Vietnam and made movies about the war such as Platoon and Born on the Forth of July . He told Time: “I was in villages where villagers were killed and abused. It came from anger, fear. There were rapes, beatings and murders. I heard stories from people I was close to. You’re in a hot fire zone. A villager comes up from behind, say a sand dune. He’s surrendering, but sometimes a guy would just pull the trigger and plow him away.”

A U.S. soldier responsible for clearing out tunnels told Time, “We were passing by a monastery when mortars started flying around at us. Guys were screaming and yelling, ‘Mom!’ I was 18 years old. I was scared. I had a rocket launcher, and I fired it into the monastery. It went quiet. When we went in to look, there were a lot of dead. A French priest and some nuns.”

Sgt. Major Len Koontz told the Washington Post he had drank some water from a well where dead bodies had been dumped and came down with a severe case of diarrhea. His best friend Zach took his position. “We got ambushed . Zach got shot in the leg and falls. ‘Lenny, come and get me! But I’m getting shot at too, and I can’t move because I have the runs so bad. They shot him again and again, and he’s calling for me to come and get him, and I can’t move.”

Koontz told the Washington Post, “Consequently, Zach died of course.” Soon afterwards another friend Shelton,” took “a 50, caliber round in the stomach. As he’s falling, he takes another one in the head. A fierce firefight takes place, and I couldn’t get him out of there. He was alone, dead…In the morning we get reinforced and go back up with two platoons. Shelton isn’t there anymore.. they took his body and stripped it and mutilated him and stuck him in the middle of the a bomb carter.”

Describing the Batangan Peninsula in Quang Ngai province Time O’Brien wrote in the New York Times: “The Graveyard we called it. Littered with land mines, almost completely defoliated, this spit of land jutting eastward into the South China Sea was a place Alpha Company feared the way others might fear snakes, or the dark, or the bogey man. We lost at least three men here; I couldn’t begin to count the arms and legs.”

On the Batangan Peninsula O’Brien’s company battled the 48th Viet Cong Battalion. “It was the 48th that Alpha Company chased from village to village, paddy to paddy, during my entire tour in Vietnam,” he wrote. “Chased but never found. They found us: ambushes, sniper fire, nighttime mortar attacks.”

The commander of the 48th, Ngu Duc Tan, a man with sixteen battle scars scattered around his body, later told O’Brien, “U.S. troops not hard to see, not hard to fight. Much noise, much equipment. Big columns. Nice green uniforms.”

To make the searching easier, the Americans dug canals to drain the swamps and used napalm and herbicides to clear the vegetation. Describing an area in northern part of the Mekong River, one former Viet Cong fighter told National Geographic, “The Plain of Reeds was an ideal hiding place. We were not afraid of anything but chemical warfare. Then we were helpless.”

Describing a search-and-destroy mission in Khe Sanh, platoon commander Andrew DeBona told the Washington Post, “Mike Company was used as screening patrol force. We’d usually work out from the combat base and conduct six-to-seven day patrols looking for the NVA or any sign of them…We were in our forth or fifth day…The plan was to have two platoons, 1st and 3rd…conduct a large semi-circle sweep operation. The terrain was largely elephant grass that varied in length form waist to shoulder height. The area we were sweeping towards was somewhat wooded…The 2nd Platoon, along with the section of 81-mm mortars, remained in our night defensive position [as ] the reaction force if we made contact.”

After “smelling” the enemy and finding flattened elephant grass that was slowly rising, he said, “I said, ‘Oh man…Keep your eyes opened. Keep moving.’ We hadn’t gone more than another 20 steps when all hell broke loose. Rounds were zipping everywhere….The really nasty twelve-sevens [.51 caliber machine guns] normally used for anti-aircraft—when those thing are coming at you it sound like the biggest bullwhip, and they were snapping all around.”

The man in front took a bullet in a grenade on his belt, “and suddenly there’s this tremendous flash and plume of white smoke…he’s screaming and thrashing around because this thing is burning him [and] there’s mass confusion.” “I had an M-16 in each hand. I said, ‘C’mon, we’ve got to find those missing guys.’ We went booming back up there and we found all of them…deader than a doornail. All five of them were within 10 or 15 feet of one another. It was like a shooting gallery for the bad guys.”

Much of the grunt work done by American GIs involved search and destroy missions, in which soldiers, often dropped off by helicopter, hunted for Viet Cong guerrillas or NVA regulars to protect villages and slow infiltration. Many search and destroy missions took place in the Mekong Delta, where patrol boats were used like helicopters to deliver troops and draw enemy fire.

There were very few conventional battles in Vietnam and much of the fighting took place during search-and-destroy missions in which American GIs were frequently ambushed by Viet Cong guerrillas who found many good hiding places in the lush jungles, swamps and high grass, moved freely at night, and often received food and assistance from local villagers.

On November 2, 1962, David Halberstam wrote in the New York Times Magazine: “recently American and Vietnamese officials, in an attempt to change the pattern of the war with the north, designed a new tactic: The idea was to strike quickly into the heart of the mountains, defy the laws of guerilla warfare (the laws say you don’t attack the enemy unless you have a 7-to-1 manpower edge, but heck it should be more like 10-to-1), hit a larger enemy force by surprise, tear him—and run like hell.”

American units were constantly harassed by sniper fire. Describing a sniper attack, in 1967, Tom Buckley wrote in the New York Times, “The siesta ended with the buzz-buzz-buzz of bullets passing close and the crack of distant rifles. ‘Snipers!’ someone shouted. The men in the squad rolled over cautiously. They put on their helmets and reached for their rifles. From the other side of the big house Bennet shouted: ‘Here, here!’ The squad followed the sound. It came from a hut that looked as though it were about to fall down. The child, a girl of around 2, was held tightly by her mother. She was a thin, worn woman, barefoot…Here eyes were expressionless…In her face was only intense fatigue.”

Free-fire zones were places pounded with artillery or annihilated with napalm and bombs in an effort to drive out the enemy. American soldiers were authorized to shoot at anything that moved. Large swaths of the Mekong Delta, believed to be dominated by the Viet Cong, were declared free-fire zones. Some places were described as “Wild Wes-like shooting galleries.”

Villagers in free-fire zones were encouraged to move to “strategic hamlets,” but often they didn’t want to because their families had lived in their home villages for generations and they were afraid of losing them. If the staid they could be regarded as “target of opportunity” and fired upon.

The policy of village destruction, heavy bombardment, free-fire zones, “relocation” of peasants and other indignities created hundreds of thousands of displaced people and wounded. In Quang Ngai, the province that surrounded My Lai, 70 percent of the villages had been destroyed by B-52 bombs, bulldozers, napalm, artillery fire, lighters and matches, gun fire and other means. Some 40 percent of the population lived in refugee camps and civilian casualties were in the neighborhood of 50,000 a year.

“The wreckage was all around us,” Tim O’Brien in the New York Times wrote, so common it seemed part of the geography, as natural as any mountain or river. Wreckage was the rule. Brutality was S.O.P. Scaled children, pistol-whipped women, burning hootches, free-fire zones, body counts, indiscriminate bombing and harassment fire, villages in ash, M-60 machine guns hosing down dark tree lines and any human life behind them.”

The Viet Cong traveled light and were very mobile. They remained hidden during the day and came at night to infiltrate villages, ambush American soldiers and run other missions. In the day, the Viet Cong donned farmer clothes. American had no idea who was a farmer, who was Viet Cong, who was a Viet Cong sympathizer, and who was farmer fighting for the Viet Cong.

Former OSS officer Carelton B. Swift Jr. wrote in the Washington Post: “Consider Giap’s poor soldiers: An old woman carries a covered basket that contains arms for hiding Viet Cong. Kids try out a little English on a passing GI, learn which way his unit is moving, and pass the information on. American forces could not deal with this kind of enemy; they grew frustrated and guilty when forced to fight them.”

A former Viet Cong soldier names Nguyen Huu Vy told Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post that when he began fighting for the north he had no weapons. “his first squad armed itself with fake rifles carved from the heavy, butt end of coconut palm fronds. With them they ambushed [South Vietnamese] soldiers who were apparently too frightened to look closely at the weapons. The squad built up an arsenal by stealing the weapons of Diem’s forces, usually in ambushes. With new weapons he could expand his force to a platoon, then a company, then a battalion.

The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese for the most part didn’t have the powerful heavy weapons, helicopters, high-altitude bombers and tanks that the Americans had. They often made do with AK-47s semiautomatic guns, ingenious and deadly booby traps, and mines, often made from unexploded bombs harvested after American bombing missions. Some weapons such as tanks were of relatively little use in the mountains, swamps and rain forests where much of the fighting took place. The most useful—and often most advanced—heavy weaponry the North Vietnamese possessed were its Soviet-made anti-aircraft guns and artillery. In Moscow’s Museum of Armed Forces you can see a Kalashnikov used by a North Vietnamese soldier to kill 78 Americans on April 7, 1968.

Booby traps employed with deadly effectiveness by the North Vietnamese were often inspired by traps used to catch wild animals in the forest. They included neck snares that choke animal to death when it struggles to escape; spring snares that lift the animal in the air and hold it upside down; jaw traps that clamp down to the bone; falling weight traps that crush skulls; bamboo and wooden spike traps that skewer prey; hidden pits with spikes lying at the bottom; and pits with large spike-covered plates that enclosed on victim like a giant bear trap. Continue reading →

The kind of ground fighting the Americans did in Vietnam was unlike anything U.S. soldiers had been subjected to before. “In Vietnam,” Karnow wrote, “there were no front lines to advance; the war was pervasive. An apparently benign peasant could be a guerilla, a pretty prostitute a clandestine agent, the kid who delivered the laundry a secret informer, Flooded rice fields concealed spikes, booby traps permeated jungles, and barracks were vulnerable to terrorist attacks… No wonder the grunts were so paranoid and their commanders frustrated. So strategy was reduced to a basic formula: kill as many as of the enemy as possible in hopes of breaking their morale.

Col. David H. Hackworth wrote in Newsweek: “I spent five years in Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Commanding U.S. infantry in the field and advising South Vietnamese troops. I was wounded four times, decorated often. I saw America’s young men, many entrusted to my care, march into a meat grinder.” Continue reading →