Boys at war

There was another day when I saw two Vietnamese boys dead on the highway, their motorcycle run over by a huge truck...blood and body parts scattered down the highway before the truck could stop.

We were riding past this on the other side of the highway in a convoy of trucks. What bothered me more than seeing the deaths was the fact that a lot of of our GI's laughed. Some shook their heads in disbelief. Some looked away. But some laughed.

When we got back to base where we were headed, I asked the chaplain to come visit our company. Those who laughed made me think we were loosing touch with reality. Chaplain would have worked with us if we stayed in the rear, but that was only about 7 hours before we loaded back on the helicopters for another combat assault.

And chaplains seldom, seldom, seldom would come to the field where they were really needed. (Why do I feel like a creep for revealing this? I've known other chaplains who were really front line ppl, but ours weren't -- I think they took their cue from the colonel who would seldom go to the front himself).

Re the boys your vet mentioned...it was hard to tell the age of kids there. We had some boys who claimed to be 14 who traveled with our company as unofficial interpreters and errand boys. Our colonel often ordered us to make them stay away. All the time I suspected that they were over 17 or 18 and staying with us to avoid conscription into VC army. One of them saved my life. I'd be dead if I'd obeyed the colonel's orders that time.

When you think of it, the entire army on both sides was made up of boys. 19 might be a man in a sense, but in our culture, they are still boys ... and only a few in either army wanted to be there, almost all were conscripts. Teenagers running through the jungle with guns ... with a license to kill.