WE BELONG IN VIETNAM
My name is John Wolcott, I was drafted in 1966.
You asked what was my reaction when I got my draft letter. My reaction was damn. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this right now. Six o’clock comes and goes. You know, I can’t go out on ambush. I can’t do this because I don’t believe in this war. So, I spent the rest of the night in a tent; we were sleeping in tents. Big company type tents. I was the only guy in the tent because the whole platoon was out on ambush. I was the only guy in a tent. I was thinking, How am I going to survive the next eleven months, three weeks, or next eleven months, two weeks? I can’t go on like this. I can’t continue refusing to go on ambush. I don’t really want to defect, and I don’t really want to go to jail. What am I going to do? So I finally said to myself, “Okay, for the next twelve months, we belong in Vietnam. This is the right war, the right place, the right time, and we should be here.” So I basically convinced myself that this is how I’m going to survive. I had to believe in this war.
I have some vivid memories. In terms of vivid experiences there was twice in my life in Vietnam where I knew I was going to die, and the first time it happened right around noon. We were walking right through the jungle. Familiar sound, a little Huey action. We were walking through the jungle and we came upon a North Vietnamese VC encampment. So, normally we’ll walk along in about four columns. And when you encounter something you do a flanking maneuver where you branch out and come around and then encircle the enemy. Then what happened was we did our flanking movement and the VC, in anticipation of that, had set up a series of mines or bombs that they were detonating as we swung around. And, as we were swinging around they would detonate one, guy goes down. They detonate the second one, second guy goes down. They detonate the third one; another guy goes down. They detonate the fourth one, and it’s the guy right next to me. We’re about ten feet apart and the mine goes off and he lets out a scream. He’s down thrashing, all bloodied. And, for whatever reason, and their are some reasons, I was counting the time between the explosions, and they were about ten seconds. I count one explosion, it goes off. I count another. Thousand one, thousand two, thousand four, I get to ten, next one goes off. So, I knew I had ten seconds to live when he went down. I just started counting, knowing, when I get to ten I’m going to be blown up. But, somehow that was okay. I knew it was coming, I knew how it was going to happen, I knew when it was going to happen. I get to ten. Thousand eleven? Thousand twelve? And apparently, they only had four mines. There wasn’t anymore, and the rest of us kept swinging around, and I came back from that day thinking it was pretty cool. I faced death and it was no big deal, it was great.
I had about three months left in country and he comes up to me saying we have to go out on ambush tonight, and I say lieutenant please, let me have one night without ambush. He says, I’m taking a bunch of clerks and cooks out on this ambush and I want one guy who I can trust. So I set the machine gun so I can cover both lanes of fire. I got a nice range out here over these intersecting paths and lieutenant is behind me in the center and there are three guys covering our areas and a couple of guys out on the flank and you expect the action to be out on the road, so that’s where the machine gun is. So we’re set up and we’re waiting, and at around maybe one am or so we start hearing noise and I get off maybe fifty rounds before the kick in the belt stops the machine gun from firing. It turns out there were a heard of pigs and I killed two of the pigs. We didn’t know that right away, but we took one of the pigs into base camp the next morning and had pork chops that night.