The Entire 364 Days
It wasn’t just one or two events; it was the entire 364 days. I participated in a couple of raids where we went into the villages at two or three o’clock in the morning with the South Vietnamese army. It was just complete chaos, unbelievable chaos. Where human beings were just not treated as human beings. There was no ‘knock, knock, knock, Mrs. Jones may I come in?’ We had troopers going in just dragging people out, abusing people, you know. I was on a particular raid with a bunch of South Vietnamese guys and I was the only American and my particular job was to find out how many weapons they picked up, this and that, out of the raid and if they were Viet Cong. The only way we suspected Viet Cong was if you didn’t have your national ID card, we were going to suspect that you were V.C. [They'd say] ‘We no V.C. We no V.C.’ and we’d be like, ‘Yea right, as soon as you finished this drink if you could shoot us in the back you’d damn-ass, do it.’
The South Vietnamese army did everything in order to kind of counter-work everything we were trying to do. In some instances – well, in many instances – we didn’t trust them. We trusted some of the elite troops, but not the regular army, or what we called the ARVN. If they were participants in the raids in the villages, they were very, very unkind to people. And brutal. And I could see why the Vietnamese would hate us because we were the guys who backed them up. We were the guys who taught the Vietnamese how to fight the Japanese, we were the guys who supported the French, and we realized that that was a mistake but we were in there because we helped liberate France during the World War II.