Authors: Wallace Terry
One day in June my team went on a POW snatch. It was hot as hell. It felt like 120 degrees. I was wearing combat boots this time ’cause we would jump out a helicopter from about 10 feet into the elephant grass. I landed on a punji stick. It was about 2 feet long, sticking up in the ground. I don’t know if my weight or whatever pulled the stake loose. But I just kept running because there was no use stopping.
It went right through my boot, my foot, everything. It just protruded through the top of the boot. I couldn’t get the boot off. And I was told not to pull it through the leather. The base said if it doesn’t give you that much problem, don’t mess with it. They would get me out as soon as possible, but not immediately, ’cause they couldn’t jeopardize the mission by comin’ back out and get us.
They didn’t get me out for three days. My foot swell up inside my boot. They had to cut my boot off. It just happened that I was lucky that it wasn’t human urine on the stake, or my foot would’ve been amputated from infection.
After I got better, we was dropped off on the side of a mountain in the Central Highlands. It was so thick in there you could seldom see the enemy. We was to stay in the area five to six days and find out what type of enemy movement was goin’ on in the area. There was suppose to be a VC village in the valley, but the village was empty. That first night, though, we observed somewhat like 500 NVA regulars coming through with heavy supplies from North Vietnam.
On the third night, we were setting up the night perimeter, and we heard this noise coming through the woods. The first thing came to mind was the enemy. We got ready. It sounded like so many of them we thought we would get overrun. And the enemy didn’t come through. It was just about 200 monkeys. Something had scared them. Which is funny now, but it wasn’t funny then.
On the seventh day, we were supposed to snatch a POW to bring back. So we went down on this trail, and they—they ambushed us. Myself, Reginald Solinas, a Mexican brother from California who is my assistant team leader, and one other guy got pinned down in elephant grass. The gunfire was so close that the grass was falling upon us. We laid in the grass for a while too afraid to move. Then us three crawled from under the fire and attacked two enemy positions. I think we got about 16 of ’em, but it wasn’t feasible to sit around and count. We had to get out of there.
In movin’ around so much we lost contact with the base, and they didn’t know where we was. We were out
of food and fresh water, so we started eating off the land—berries, weeds, anything. And we drank whatever water we came upon.
Around the tenth day, I started feeling feverish and cold at the same time. I was aching through my body. I was having nightmares and would wake up in cold sweats. My teammates would get on top of me, holding me down saying, “Hey, man, they out there. They on our ass. You got to be quiet, be cool.” Solinas took up the slack. I was just out of it with malaria.
On the fourteenth day, we got pinned down on the side of this steep hill. We was in a trench. They was out there callin’ to us, sayin’ what they gonna do when they capture us. Kill you. Castrate you. Send your private parts home to your wife. But they didn’t try to overrun us, because I think they didn’t know how many there was of us.
Meanwhile, my mother got a letter stating I was missing in action. The base didn’t know where we was.
On the seventeenth day, they found us. We had a instrument called a emergency beeper. It was sending out a sound that you could hear up to 5-mile radius. We were picked up on that beeper. At two in the morning the medevac helicopter came in and grabbed the other four members of the team and disappeared. Solinas and me, we’re providing cover while they got on. Then the helicopter disappeared. We inadvertently got left.
Solinas looked at me, and I looked at him. We said, “Brother, this is it.”
We was in an open field. We turned ’gainst each other’s back and sat down. Placed our ammunition and our grenades in our lap. We locked and loaded. We shook hands, and we said good-bye to each other.
Then the helicopter came back and picked us up. We broke out laughing.
They think we got about 30 KIAs on that mission. And we sustained no casualties ourselves.
Some days when we came back on a POW snatch we played this game called Vietn’ese Roulette on the helicopter. We wouldn’t be told how many to capture. Maybe they only wanted one. But we would get two or three to find out which one is gonna talk. You would pull the
trigger on one. Throw the body out. Or you throw one without shooting ’im. You place fear into the other Vietn’ese mind. This is you. This is next if you don’t talk.
It was never a regular means of deciding this one or that one. You never know their rank or anything until you start to eliminate them one by one. You would sit them down with the ARVN or
chieu hoi
who has come over to your side. So he’s translating the conversation back and forth. If one talk too much, you might get rid of him. He has no basic information to give you. He just gonna talk to try to save his life. Or you just might say from the start, “Throw this motherfucker out.” The other one will get to talkin’. And then you get that one word of intelligence, one piece of pertinent information.
One particular day we went out of LZ Oasis and captured three prisoners. We on the helicopter coming back, and we radio headquarters we got three bodies. They said, “We only want one.” You had to determine which one of these guys you gonna keep and which ones you don’t. We tied one by the foot to this rappeling rope, and he’s danglin’ on the rope. We even dragged him through the trees. He wasn’t gonna say anything. The other two wasn’t either. So we tied one more the same way, then the other one got to talkin’. We just cut the rope and let the others go. You have to eliminate the others. This was a war-type situation. These two soliders might go kill two of your soldiers if you turn them loose.
I guess my team got rid of about eight guys out of the chopper one way or another, but I only remember pushing two out myself.
One night we were out in the field on maneuvers, and we seen some lights. We were investigating the lights, and we found out it was a Vietn’ese girl going from one location to another. We caught her and did what they call gang-rape her. She submitted freely because she felt if she had submitted freely that she wouldn’t have got killed. We couldn’t do anything else but kill her because we couldn’t jeopardize the mission. It was either kill her or be killed yourself the next day. If you let her go, then she’s gonna warn someone that you in the area, and then your cover is blown, your mission is blown. Nothin’ comes before this mission. Nothin’. You could kill thousand folks,
but you still had to complete your mission. The mission is your ultimate goal, and if you failed in that mission, then you failed as a soldier. And we were told there would be no prisoners. So we eliminated her. Cut her throat so you wouldn’t be heard. So the enemy wouldn’t know that you was in the area.
This other time we were in a ambush site. This young lady came past. She spotted us. It was too late. We had to keep her quiet. We ran after her. We captured her. We gagged her.
We thought, Why kill a woman and you had no play in a couple weeks? We didn’t tie her up, because you can’t seduce a woman too well when she tied up. So we held her down. They didn’t wear what we call underclothes. So there wasn’t nothing when you tear off her pajama pants. She was totally nude ’cept for the top part of her body. But you wasn’t after the top part of the body anyway. We found out she was pregnant. Then we raped her.
We still had five days to be out there without any radio contact. So we wouldn’t let her go. We didn’t want the enemy to know that we were there. She had to die. But I don’t think we murdered her out of malice. I think we murdered her because we didn’t want to be captured.
After a while, it really bothered me. I started saying to myself, What would I do if someone would do something like this to my child? To my mother? I would kill ’im. Or I would say, Why in the hell did I take this? Why in the hell did I do that? Because I basically became a animal. Not to say that I was involved in both incidents, but I had turned my back, which made me just as guilty as everybody else. ’Cause I was in charge. I was in charge of a group of animals, and I had to be the biggest animal there. I allowed things to happen. I had learned not to care. And I didn’t care.
When I seen women put to torture as having Coca-Cola bottles run up into their womb, I did nothing. When I heard this other team raped a woman and then rammed a M-16 in her vagina and pulled the trigger, I said nothing. And when I seen this GI stomp on this fetus after this pregnant woman got killed in a ambush, I did nothin’. What could I do? I was some gross animal.
One time we went to a village to watch for VC, and
this young lady spotted us out in the field. We signaled her not to run, but I guess she didn’t understand. We ran behind her to try to snatch her and keep her from notifying other people we were in the area. By the time she got into the center of the village, everybody start to runnin’ out. Automatically in a combat-like situation you feel that your life is threatened, so you open fire on anything and everything that moves. It was like instantaneous. You couldn’t stop it. That’s how you’re trained. We killed everything that moved. Dogs. Chickens. Approximately 20 some people, mostly women and children. No young men at all. Couple old men. We checked the huts, the bodies. Two was wounded, and we killed them. We was told not to leave anybody alive that would be able to tell.
I remember how we was told to set an ambush up for anything that walked down this trail, because it was being used as a supply route. And the people was givin’ the NVA regulars food and fresh water. We saw Montagnards. They was all dead except these two kids that run away. I found them hidin’ in the woods, ’cause this little girl, about three years old, started cryin’. Her brother was about five, and he was wounded in the stomach.
This little fella reminded me of myself when I was small. ’Bout the same complexion. Big head full of curly hair. I just could not kill him. So I brought him and his sister back.
I grabbed the little boy, and I put him against my body. He bled all over me. From the time I left from the helicopter pad to the first-aid station, everybody was talkin’ ’bout, “Kill the little motherfucker.”
I said, “Naw, you ain’t gon’ kill this one. He gon’ live.”
They took me directly to this officer, and he told me I will not bring another Vietn’ese living body into that unit unless I am specifically told to bring prisoners. If it happened again, I would be court-martialed.
With 89 days left in country, I came out of the field.
At the time you are in the field you don’t feel anything about what you are doin’. It’s the time you have to yourself that you sit back and you sort and ponder.
What I now felt was emptiness.
Here I am. I’m still eighteen years old, a young man with basically everything in his life to look forward to
over here in a foreign country with people who have everything that I think I should have. They have the right to fight. I’ve learned in this country that you don’t have the right to gather forces and fight back the so-called oppressor. You have the right to complain. They had the right. They fought for what they thought was right.
I started to recapture some of my old values. I was a passionate young man before I came into the Army. I believed that you respect other peoples’ lives just as much as I respect my own. I got to thinkin’ that I done killed around 40 people personally and maybe some others I haven’t seen in the fire fights. I was really thinkin’ that there are people who won’t ever see their children, their grandchildren.
I started seeing the atrocities that we caused each other as human beings. I came to the realization that I was committing crimes against humanity and myself. That I really didn’t believe in these things I was doin’. I changed.
I stopped wearing the ears and fingers.
I fell in love with a Vietn’ese girl, and I wanted to bring her back with me.
I met her in a geisha house. Most of the girls in there were orphans or prostitutes. Her mother was the mama san. She owned the place. I think her father was French. She was a very lovely and attractive young lady. She was cleaning up the place.
I had no physical relationship with her at all. The relationship we had was strictly intellectual. We just talked, had dinner. She would teach me some of the language and teach me about the customs and the food. I fell in love with her. And I tried to buy her for $1,000.
But her mother said, “No go.”
Mai Ling, that was her name, was only sixteen and she had to go to school.
Now I was looking beyond the physical appearance of the Vietn’ese and lookin’ at the people themselves. They were very pleasant, very outgoing, very beautiful people. I started disliking myself for what America, the war, and bein’ in the Army had caused me to become.
But I was still a animal.
One day my best friend, Frank Koharry, a white guy
from Detroit, brought this axe over to me.
He said, “Hey, man. I want you to have this axe.”
“Okay. What the hell you want me to do with it?”
He say, “I want you to hit somebody with it.”
And I hit ’im. Hit ’im right there in his arm.
He just looked and said, “Nigger, you crazy.”
He went to the aid station, and they bandaged his ass up. ’Bout 32 stitches in his arm.
But we stayed best friends. He would cover for me if I had got in any type of trouble. We was very close.
I took the axe out on one more ambush. And when I heard the VC come down the trail, I jumped out the woods and chopped a fellow’s head off with it.
I was still a spec four, and I wanted a battlefield promotion to E-6, a high-ranking NCO. But the captain was telling me I had to take a test.
I said, “How the hell I’m a take a test if I’m out here fightin’ and killin’ people everyday?”
I was runnin’ a LURP team. A Ranger unit. I’m takin’ first lieutenants and captains to the field. I got shrapnel wounds. Me and my team was dropped in North Vietnam where American ground troops ain’t s’posed to be. We hiding all the time. We become the Viet Cong. Because they got the tanks, the trucks, the airplanes now. We observing their troops, supply movements. Making drawings of their emblems if we don’t know who they are. We never get discovered in North Vietnam. The whole time I was in the field, North and South, I never had anyone lose their life on my team. Never. I was good. That is the only test I need to take. I wanted the rank.