… this isn’t funny. You see, whatever humor from saying “nice” to a sex position is long dead. Like my old friend Tommy. You see, it wasn’t like any other war we, the USA, had ever fought. It was where Middle Age tactics and modern firepower came together. This amounted in millions more deaths than any other war; there were not effective strategies other than trenches, and airplanes were not used at all to their full extent. French still wore brightly colored uniforms and, as the legend goes, more head injuries occurred after helmets were introduced. This brings us nicely into today’s discussion.

One of the weird things about Vietnam was that there was no front line. The enemy, the Viet Cong guerrillas (VC) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) were the topic of conversation, but you never saw them – no dead soldiers, no POWs, no flag on a distant hill that marked their positions.

That war was the first full-scale war that involved the hide-and-seek kind of warfare we’re more used to now. Now the idea of two armies banging it out across a “front” seems as strange as the peekaboo! kind of war did to the Korean and WWII cadre that led us in Vietnam.

It stayed weird, even after I got outside the wire a couple of times. I was mostly firing at bushes and trees. We all were. Sometimes the bushes and trees fired back, and sometimes when we went to investigate there’d be someone dead or hurt behind the bushes.

I was wondering if Americans, South Vietnamese soldiers (ARVNs), the VC and the NVA were ALL fighting some kind of plants, triffid warfare. I thought maybe the bushes were shooting both ways, and laughing at us all.

Seemed that way. The enemy was abstract, almost surreal to us. No one knew exactly where he was.

I was designated as an artillery air observer – I sat in the backseat of a piper-cub-like airplane, or the right seat of an observation helicopter and adjusted artillery from the air on the top of suspected targets that I couldn’t see because of all that damned vegetation. Occasionally we got shot at. The rounds came up at us out of more bushes. Never saw any humans.

The Demilitarized Zone north of Hue was lined with Marine “dye marker” forts, the biggest of which was jammed 50 miles west of the sea at the juncture of North and South Vietnam with Laos. It was called Khe Sanh, and it was a hugeMarine base.

Khe Sanh was the low-hanging fruit the US military had deliberately set up to attract major formations of NVA.

The Viet Minh, the original opponents of the French in Vietnam, had reclaimed half their country from the French at another such base, Điện Biên Phủ, in 1954. They had laid siege to the isolated base, dug zigzag trenches toward the perimeter, to allow their infantry to approach the wire safely for a final assault.

I had read about those zigzag trenches. The general leading the NVA assault on Khe Sanh was the same general who won that old battle. I reckon the US command just decided to package up a firebase out in the boonies to look just like Điện Biên Phủ, let Giap imagine a replay of his glory days.

Well, he fell for it hook line and sinker, so much so that the Americans were kind of surprised, a little worried. I finally got assigned a flight out to Khe Sanh.

My God. There was this huge base, bunkered in and defended like nothing else I saw in Vietnam. We couldn’t have taken that base, if the Marines didn’t want to let us in.

And around it was what used to be jungle but now was a moonscape of bomb and artillery craters. And through the moonscape, I could see them – zigzag trenches heading for the wire. They never made it – always ended in twenty or thirty huge bomb craters.

But that was my first real evidence that yes, there were actual human beings out there trying to kill us. And getting killed, too. Lots of them. Someone, many someones dug those trenches – bushes didn’t do that. And you could see where they died, blown to smithereens.

I guess that was the idea. It certainly worked. Giap spent a generation of NVA soldiers trying to take that camp. It made ALL the papers in the US. Some mighty scary headlines, but really the issue was never in doubt. All they managed to do was get a couple of battalions up to the wire, where they were mowed down and blown up. They needed divisions of men hitting that wire, and that was never gonna happen.

This is a long story about how I finally awoke to the idea that yes, I was actually fighting someone, someone human that is. I mean, I knew that before I came in country, but y’know I don’t think I believed it. 69 isn’t funny.