Viet Cong Soldier Quotes

Army intelligence said the French owners paid the Viet Cong a million piasters a year in protection money and paid the Saigon government three million piasters a year in taxes. The plantation billed the U.S. government $50 for each tea bush and $250 for each rubber tree damaged by combat operations. Just one more incongruity.

Prevost was an imaginative gladiator of the air. He persuaded Vann to give him a pair of the new lightweight Armalite rifles, officially designated the AR-15 and later to be designated the M-16 when the Armalite was adopted as the standard U.S. infantry rifle. The Army was experimenting with the weapon and had issued Armalites to a company of 7th Division troops to see how the soldiers liked it and how well it worked on guerrillas. (The Armalite had a selector button for full or semiautomatic fire and shot a much smaller bullet at a much higher velocity than the older .30 caliber M-1 rifle. The high velocity caused the small bullet to inflict ugly wounds when it did not kill.) Prevost strapped the pair of Armalites to the support struts under the wings of the L-19 and invented a contrivance of wire that enabled him to pull the triggers from the cockpit to strafe guerrillas he sighted. He bombed the Viet Cong by tossing hand grenades out the windows.

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

Viet Cong, young men carelessly eating their breakfast, never suspecting the Americans would be out so early. They paid with their lives. Most of us were pretty excited whenever we actually, but rarely, saw the enemy, much less killed them. But Barnes was cool, so cool, no big displays ever. Having reported the incident, and stripping the dead men, he soon had us under way, no credit taken, looking for further action ahead; considering there had already been contact, the likelihood of more that day was in the air. Whereas some of us were not looking forward to such an encounter, the thought excited Barnes. He was a great soldier, probably on his second or third tour — but why? Why would he come back after a facial wound like he had? I never asked, and he never told. You hear things in the army, as in all society, and some kind of narrative emerges; in this case, the story was that he’d been literally shot or sustained shrapnel in the face, skull, head, requiring a major reconstruction job as the scar branched deeply around his eye, nose, and cheek; even his lips were affected. And as he had clearly once been a handsome man, the scars perversely heightened his visage into a Phantom of the Opera echo — a man distorted, perhaps, by anger or revenge, or really a question mark. What was he about? He never hinted in all the time I was around him. I watched him with both curiosity and trepidation; he’d get back to the rear after we’d been out in the field a week or more and relax with booze, poker, cigarettes, sometimes a cigar. It was said he’d been in Japan in the hospital about eight months, rehabbing from the wound. And there he’d “married a Japanese gal.” And now he was back. Sort of an Ahab looking for his White Whale. And here I was, like Ishmael, walking five or ten steps behind him, always expecting that something was going to break because, like a fly, he smelled the blood of war. As good a soldier as he was, I was relieved when he got rid of me as his radio operator.

CV-17 Chinese Point name: Shan Zhong;20 English translation: “Chest Center;” Special Attributes: Intersection Point of the Spleen, Small Intestine, Triple Warmer and the Conception Vessel. Additionally, it is the alarm point for the Pericardium Meridian; Location: On the centerline of the body on the same level as the nipples; Western Anatomy: Branches of the internal mammary artery and vein are found with the anterior cutaneous branch of the fourth intercostal nerve; Comments: This is a major point of interest to combative martial artists. A blow to CV-17 can affect the electrical pattern of the heart resulting in arrhythmia. Western science refers to this as Commotio cordis and it is documented with strikes to the chest as in a baseball striking the chest of a child. While interviewing a former infantry point man who served in Vietnam confirmation was added to the lethality of a strike to CV-17. According to this individual, a life-long karate practitioner, while he was walking point one night he actually bumped into an enemy soldier who was traveling down the same trail from the opposite direction. The American struck the Viet Cong with a strong punch to CV-17 killing him instantly. His small frame combined with the larger stature of the American allowed for a perfect 45-degree strike (strikes to CV-17 should be downward at a 45-degree angle). These strikes will generally be open palm or hammer fist type strikes given the height of an average sized opponent and the location of the point. Additional energetic disruption can be added by rotating your striking hand outward on contact.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Vietnam war from the Army's point of view is that as far as logistics and tactics were concerned we succeeded in everything we set out to do. At the height of the war the Army was able to move almost a million soldiers a year in and out of Vietnam, feed them, clothe them, house them, supply them with arms and ammunition, and generally sustain them better than any Army had ever been sustained in the field. To project an Army of that size halfway around the world was a logistics and management task of enormous magnitude, and we had been more that equal to the task. On the battlefield itself, the Army was unbeatable. In engagement after engagement the forces of the Viet Cong and that of the North Vietnamese Army were thrown back with terrible losses. Yet, in the end, it was North Vietnam, not the United States, that emerged victoriously. How could we have succeeded so well, yet failed so miserably? At least part of the answer appears to be that we saw Vietnam as unique rather than in strategic context. This misperception grew out of neglect of military strategy in the post-World War II nuclear era. Almost all professional literature on military strategy was written by civilian analysts - political scientists from the academic world and systems analysts from the Defense community. In his book War and Politics, political scientist Bernard Brodie devoted an entire chapter to the lack of professional military strategic thought. The same criticism was made by systems analysts Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith who commented: "Military professionals are among the most infrequent contributors to the basic literature on military strategy and defense policy. Most such contributors are civilians..." Even the Army's so-called "new" strategy of flexible response grew out of civilian, not military, thinking. This is not to say that the civilian strategies were wrong. The political scientists provided a valuable service in tying war to its political ends. They provided a valuable service in tying war to its political ends. The provided answers to "why" the United States ought to wage war. In the manner the systems analyst provided answer on "what" means we would use. What was missing was the link that should have been provided by military strategists -"how" to take the systems analyst's means and use them to achieve the political scientist's ends. But instead of providing professional military advice on how to fight the war, the military more and more joined with the systems analysts in determining material means we were to use. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among many Army officers was that "the Army doesn't make strategy, " and "there is no such thing as Army strategy." There was a general feeling that strategy was budget-driven and was primarily a function of resource allocation. The task of the Army, in their view, was to design and procure material, arms and equipment and to organize, train, and equip soldiers for the Defense Establishment.

When the Republicans caught us around a dead Viet Cong fighter, we had to act like we didn’t know what was going on. We would tell the soldiers that nobody knew who the dead person was, even though his family might be standing right there, holding back their tears. We would claim the dead man was a vagabond or someone from another village. “Would you soldiers like to haul him away for us?” No, they would not. So we’d bury him ourselves and the relatives would mourn in secret.