TET OFFENSIVE
I particularly recognize the Tet offensive. The Viet Cong attacked one of the cities in Vietnam. By that time, I had joined the army for four years. I had a chance to return to my hometown to visit my mother, who was so old and sick. My town was attacked by [the Viet Cong]. Most of the villages bordering the capital city were taken over. Even the battlefields, the air fields in the city – they took over part of it and the war down there was all terrible. One day, we got up – all over the area were guns. The Communist guerilla as well as the regional forces from all over the country in our city – they took almost a couple of weeks to re-take the city. Not a single city but a lot of cities were overrun or attacked by the Communists. They killed a lot of people, regardless of civilians or soldiers, armed or not, because they just got in the city, picked up the young people, the well-trusted people – shot them down! All over the city. It’s all terrible. My family had to move over to hide from [the Viet Cong] in the Catholic Cathedral. From there, they tried their best to return to my unit in Ca Mau. Ca Mau was the same at that time. They took the air fields and bordering outposts around the city. They burned all the houses, they tried to scare the people. They made a lot of damage there too. I’m lucky that I had a chance to ride an American medical supply to Ca Mau. At the moment, a lot of people are talking about war atrocities or the dead in Cambodia [reference could be to the Khmer Rouge's ruthless rise to power or the "secret bombing" of the United States on neutral Cambodia]. In any war, when we’re talking about atrocities, they’re killing the people regardless of old, young, woman or man. In a big, big hole, with bulldozers to help evacuate and refill by dirt. There’s so many, many. Even a thousand people were buried down there. That’s sorry about the war.