Human Element of David Johnson
I was lucky in that my base camp for my unit was static so we actually got to know the people in the villages and the people in the surrounding area. And we would do things like, our medics would go out and treat injuries and stuff like that, and the people knew that they could come up to us. Plus, we would trade our ration for local food, we traded cigarettes for local food and everything.
How were prisoners treated?
Our policy was that you treat them they way you wanted to be treated. You did not mistreat a prisoner. In fact, I know a couple people in our unit that were court martialed for mistreating prisoners. You can get a lot of information out of a person. You can’t get much out of a body, we preferred to take prisoners. A lot of time by just treating them with respect they would tell you things because all the sudden they are not being treated the way they were told they were going to be treated. You’re not beating them up or doing anything like that. We would give them water, give them chow, give them a cigarette if they wanted a cigarette. It would totally surprise them how they were being treated, they we were being treated like people. Now when the National Police got a hold of somebody totally different story. I had no respect for the National Police because they would abuse them and mistreat them. There were bad things that happened you would hear about, like prisoners being killed and tortured. But then again, there were the other NVA that were very professional and had respect for them. They were very well disciplined, and they were not afraid to fight, but by the same token they were professional soldiers. VC I had no respect for them, and for the most part NVA did not have any respect for them. One night we were in our base camp and all of sudden, we were getting ready to go out on night patrol and all the sudden we hear weapons fire down in the village. So we went down there and the local VC had come in and killed the barber, his wife, his mother, father, children including the little baby that was six months old. Then, we had another time when the VC came in and actually tortured a bunch of our school children just because they were going to school. They blinded them and actually mutilated them and what was strange about that was about three or four weeks later we have somebody call out, “Hey GI, have something here for you” and it was NVA who brought the VC to us.
What was the scariest or most emotional part of the war?
The most emotional part was that I lost my best friend in high school and I had a fiancé get killed. Crashed in a helicopter. Scariest part though really, delivering set of twins in the village.
Were you preparing for that at all?
I had training as a combat medic, but delivering two babies no, we weren’t trained for that. We were trained to patch someone up that had a hole in them. During the time I was there we delivered five babies.