Magnificent Storyteller Soldier Reveals What He Saw In Vietnam

Well, when I arrived in Vietnam, I literally expected the people of Vietnam to welcome me with open arms. I had in my head the black and white newsreels I had seen on Walter Cronkite's 20th century show of American troops parading through towns in France and being showered with wine, flowers and kisses. And as we were driving, a guy from the battalion I was assigned to picked me up in a jeep in Danang and we had to drive 20 miles to where my battalion was located. And I was really disappointed that there weren't people stopping along the way greeting me and you know, offering me flowers and stuff like that.

I really expected to be welcomed with open arms as a liberator and it was like I was invisible, like I didn't exist. And that was a little disconcerting. Plus, they looked funny and acted funny. I mean riding in this jeep the first day I got there. They lived in little straw huts and had animals in their backyards and they weren't like us. They smelled bad, the whole country smelled bad. You could smell it, it hurt your nose and that was disturbing. And then I was there for about... On the third day I was there, this guy who had picked me up in the jeep, a corporal who I was eventually going to replace, he and I were in the intelligence section of the battalion.

We were sent to the tractor park, in the fibbies tractor park, to meet a group of detainees. It was our responsibility to take care of the prisoners and the detainees were a classification of civilians. They were not combatants, they could be detained for interrogation. That's how they were, that's why they were called detainees. And Jimmy and I went there to the track park and two tractors came in and they had a bunch of Vietnamese on them. Tall flat-topped vehicles about eight or nine feet tall and when the tracks entered the park, the Marines on top immediately started throwing these people around.

They were tied hand and foot so that they had no way to stop their falls and they were elderly, women, children. There were no young men and I couldn't believe these guys were treating these people this way and I turned to Jimmy and said, I grabbed his arm and said,

what

are these guys doing? These are not, we are supposed to help these people. And Jimmy turned to me and looked at my hands on his arm, I kind of took them off, and he said, Erhard, you better keep your mouth shut until you know

what

's going on around here.

And I think it was at that moment that I realized that things weren't exactly what I expected. It all went downhill from there and again, I can't even begin to explain in the space of time you have all the things that were involved, but I began to understand that it became obvious that the enemy was the same people in these villages. around us. We were in a very populated area at the time. They were the enemy or at least the enemy was somewhere and we couldn't tell one from the other and day after day our patrols went out and we ran into snipers and mines and snipers and mines and snipers and mines.

I saw four armed enemy

soldier

s during the first eight months I was in Vietnam, and yet our battalion during that same period suffered 75 mining and sniping incidents per month, more than half of which resulted in casualties. This is for a unit of about a thousand men, but there was no one to defend against and you start to think that these people are the enemy. They're all enemies and then you go through villages and you know, they attack you and then you call an airstrike on the village and the whole village rises up or you go through a place and search it and burn houses and blow them up.

You know the common perception, the idea I heard when I was in high school was that the Viet Cong were terrorizing the Vietnamese population and forcing them to fight the Americans under penalty of death. What I began to understand in Vietnam was that there was no need to do things like that. All they had to do was let a marine patrol pass by a village and with whatever was left in that village, they had all the recruits they needed. I began to understand why the Vietnamese didn't greet me with open arms. Why they actually hated me, but of course that didn't change the fact that my friends were getting killed and hurt every day and the only place you could focus your own anger and fear was on the civilians there.

And so, it was a self-perpetuating mechanism. The longer we stayed in Vietnam, the more Viet Cong there were because we created them and produced them. None of that was distilled into the kind of clear expression I'm presenting now. What I began to understand within a few days and became clearly clear after months was that what was happening here was not what I had been told. What was happening here was crazy and I wanted out. I knew that if I were still alive on March 5, 1968, they would put me on a plane in Danang that we used to call the freedom bird and I could fly away and forget everything.

It turned out that it wasn't that easy to forget, but that was the idea and certainly during my last eight nine months in Vietnam I stopped thinking, I literally stopped thinking about why I was there or what I was doing. . The only purpose of being in Vietnam at that time was to stay alive until I could get out. So the reason is that, you know, the kind of questions that started being presented were fair, the questions themselves were ugly and I didn't want to know the answers. It's like they knock on a door, you knock on a door and the door opens slightly and behind that door it's dark and you hear loud noises like there are wild animals there or something and you look in the dark and I can't see what's there but you can hear all these ugly things.

Do you want to go into that room? No way, you just quietly back away, close the door behind you and walk away from her and that's what was happening. The questions themselves were too ugly to even ask, let alone have to deal with the answers. Now, part of what was happening was that I couldn't have understood what I was seeing and doing in Vietnam because I didn't have a full deck of cards. I needed to understand the historical political realities that brought us to Vietnam before I could understand what I was seeing. I started acquiring the other cards in the deck during the three years or so after I returned from Vietnam, but while I was there nothing made sense.

Because I kept trying, you know, to play this game with 27 cards instead of 52 and it still didn't turn out well and I didn't know why all I knew was that it was crazy and it became, it became clear in three or three four months. That my reasons for being in Vietnam were not clear. I'm talking about this notion of defending the people against these North Vietnamese invaders; The people hated me. The Vietnamese people hated me. and it was perfectly, that was perfectly clear. I mean people didn't say good morning to you, people didn't, I mean people hated me.

I know other people's experience was different, but in my own experience the Vietnamese people hated me and I gave them every reason to hate me. I beat them, sometimes I kill them, I destroy their houses, I destroy their crops, I destroy their fields, I destroy their culture. Why the hell should those people like me? And I could see that it was doing that, and I could see that nothing we were doing had any impact on the war itself. The funny thing about Vietnam is that I received Time magazine every week. It arrived in the mail and I was able to read about my war even while sitting in the middle of it.

And I would read about what Lyndon Johnson would say and what McNamara would say and what Russ would say and I could look around and see that uh-huh, I don't know what war they're talking about, but that's not what's going on here. . In fact, we had an incident where one of our line companies came across a fairly large cache of Viet Cong weapons and ammunition and I read in the Stars and Stripes, the diary that we received. This small action made the newspapers and we read that we had delayed the Viet Cong effort by at least four months in our area.

A week after that article appeared in the newspaper, ten days after the incident itself, Viet Cong sappers threw the bridge one hundred and fifty meters in front of our battalion compound. An Amtrak coming from the Horseshoe area of ​​one of the line companies struck a 50-pound box mine, several men were killed and many more were injured. A patrol that was outside the circuit was ambushed, several people were killed and several people were injured. I mean, no one told the Viet Cong that they were delayed for four months, and yet this is what you read in the papers.

This is what they tell you in the United States. I could see that the war continued day after day endlessly at the same pace no matter what we did. I'm wasting your movie. When I left Vietnam I was at that time, I was in the middle of the battle for the city of Hue on February 10, 1968 and I had been in the city for two and a half, three weeks. And I knew my day was coming, but I wasn't sure when and at the time we weren't thinking about things like that. And we're in the middle of a discreet shootout.

We were exchanging fire with some guys across the street along the eastern, northeastern section of Hue City, what was left of my unit, there were about six of us scouts. And a jeep comes crawling up the street along the river and enters this little complex where we were and says Erhard, the orders are here, let's go. My boss is a lieutenant and I stood up, I didn't exactly stand up but I immediately began to take off my equipment and distributed it to the other guys who were there and told them see you later in the world, I got into the jeep.

The last I saw of those guys that were covering the fire for us, we burned our way back to the street there was a helicopter parked in the LZ. I got on the bird, it was 3000 feet above the city of Hue. Ten minutes later, I knew it was coming out and did some processing. I finished... They took me out early because one of my older brothers had already arrived in Vietnam by then and they arranged for me to spend a couple of days with him. And I came back when I came back in early March it was...

I came in at night, I went through more processing place called Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay and then I was free to go and I still had time in the Marines. . I basically had a month of leave before having to report to another duty station in North Carolina. And I took a taxi and there it was, my first view of the United States and really, I could hardly wait and it was absolutely impenetrable fog. We crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge, we couldn't see 10 feet, I couldn't see anything, we got to the airport there was...

Part of what affected my return, I was happy to be alive, I was excited, but at the same time It was very ambivalent. I was scared partly because I had a girlfriend when I went there and in September, eight months after I was there, I got a letter from her about dear John and I kept hoping I could fix this once I got back and I didn't know what kind... and that , that woman, that girl had become the center of my life while I was in Vietnam. She had done it, she had stopped being a real person, she had become this icon and then, of course, you know, she had taken a hike.

But you can't just let go of a vision like that, of what it has kept you going for. So I was afraid of all that. I didn't know what I was going to find when I returned. I finally returned to the east coast.