Young American men went to Vietnam to experience the challenge of danger and the chance to come home heroes. These men had known nothing but security, comfort, peace, and enlisting for some was an act of rebellion (Caputo 8). Junior officers became intrigued by the fantasy of fighting guerrillas in distant places. These officers felt that they had not accomplished what other officers had in other wars by having heroic badges displayed all over their uniforms (16-17). “Napole

One soldier did not have a chance to become a hero, as he stepped on a mine and he was carrying 40 mm grenades that killed him instantly. Caputo used “Sympathetic detonation” on the casualty report. In the same ambush, Corporal Brian Gauthier won two Navy Crosses and the HQ camp was named after him. The military gave him the medals because he continued to lead his men under heavy enemy fire until he died. Frank Reasoner charged one of the enemy machine guns putting it out of use. Reasoner ran to rescue one of his wounded and was killed. The military gave Frank Reasoner the Congressional Medal of Honor, named a camp after him and a ship. The military also sent the medal and a letter of condolence to his widow. Lieutenant Parsons was killed two nights later by American 4.2 mortar shells (Caputo 193-194).

The marines are in the same state of mind in which they feel a hatred for everything and everyone around. “There arms are tanned a deep brown, but the heat had bled the color from their faces, and their eyes have that blank expression known as the “thousand-yard stare (99). The Vietnamese huts are made of thatch, but the Americans use a new material in construction, as houses are built completely with crushed beer cans. The Viet Cong exploit the Vietnamese children by having them sell Coke to Americans after glass and poison have been injected to use as a weapon (107). Vietnam villages let the Viet Cong use them for ambush sites, as Giao-Tri did and was demolished. The marines acted out of retribution as well as learning to hate (110). When the marines were on many of their search and destroy missions, they found photographs and letters that humanized the enemy and the marines wanted to deny the enemy of human qualities (124). The Vietnamese endured the hardship of the war because they were used to bad harvests, disease, and random violence, as they attained an ability to accept and suffer what Americans would not. The survival of the Vietnamese required this (134).

The battalion’s mood matched the weather as it was unpredictable. The mood would swing from depression, to sarcasm, then to fatalism. The Vietnam War was a war without rules and one of survival. Soldiers fought to survive in “that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war.” It was fine to shoot a Vietnamese who was running, but not one that was standing or walking. Even with these wrongs of the war, the soldiers acquired a magnetism to combat (230). The American soldiers were becoming much like the Viet Cong, as there rations became cooked rice rolled into a ball and stuffed with raisins. The soldiers learned to move in the jungle like the Viet Cong and they shared the common miseries of war. The combat soldiers had more in common with the Viet Cong than they did with the staff officers (277).

My mind shot back a decade, to that day we had marched into Vietnam, swaggering, confident, and full of idealism. We had believed we were there for a high moral pur

Some topics in this essay:
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