Jewells of Thought

Let me warn you some of this is graphic. This all comes from his words I am not changing his words although I did use a less harsh word after using the original one. The brackets show what I have added. Uncle Tom did not participate in those atrocities; but American personnel did.

“In Edwards Air Force Base in California and that is where we received all our gear to get ready to go to Vietnam. We got our uniforms and everything, we got our flight plan and all that and we flew to Vietnam we had two stopovers. One in Honolulu and one in Guam and then we went to Saigon and the first thing I remember when they opened up the door of the plane …”

“was the stench and the heat. It stunk when they opened it up and it smelled like burning poop”

“When we were training and they [would] pour diesel mixed with gasoline and burned it [manure] in a big 55 gallon drum that was cut in half and they put in these port-potties. That’s the kind of smell I smelled when I got off the plane and of course the next thing I saw was body bags. I said well this is not a good sign.”

“I knew I wanted to go to one particular outfit, the 11th Armored Cavalry assigning units and stuff. I got to go with the 11th Cav. Well when they left me in the jungles of Vietnam they were in the middle, just started the invasion of Cambodia. I was in the 3rd day of the invasion and we were chasing a North Vietnamese Regular Army Tank Battalion. We were heading towards Phnom Penh which was the capital of Cambodia, never did run into that Tank Battalion, but we did run into two tanks.”

“Well it surprised us real quick you know, cause we were trying to scare the we had the whole battalion with us and the two tanks didn’t fire on us. We wondered why and so we sent a team up to investigate and one tank we found out was disabled and the other had a Vietcong not a North Vietnamese Regular which is a peasant. They had him chained to inside the tank where one round of ammunition in the chamber of the main gun and that round was so green that if they’d have shot it it would have blown up in his face. So that’s the kind of treatment they treated their people.”

“Of course, we did atrocities too while I was over there. Shortly thereafter we sat up at a certain place; it was a trail visited by Vietnamese or Vietcong. We used claymore mines they’re sink-charged booby traps. We placed 3 on each side and they are daisy-chained with vetcort which makes them go off simultaneously. That night we heard them go off so the next morning we went out and found 3 dead North Vietnamese Regulars and that’s the first time I saw a dead body. That was kind of disheartening to me because I never saw a dead body before.”

“Not only did the Vietcong did atrocities, but so did our guys. We had one man that went off over there and cut the ears off.. he collected ears… of the dead enemy which I thought was very bad, but another thing… I didn’t particularly care for is that we stuck a round with a[n] ace of spades card in their forehead and pounded them in the forehead making a hole in the skill because most of them were Buddhists. They believe that if they have a hole in their forehead they can’t go see Buddha. We humiliated them by doing that and doing so there was a bounty on us because we did that.”

The tone of his voice in talking about this was disgust and horror at the memory…