What It Is Like to Go to War

I’m occasionally asked, “What’s it feel like to kill someone?” Sometimes I’m not asked what killing someone feels like; I’m told. “It must feel horrible to kill someone.” And, infrequently, but harshly enough to sting, I’ve been judged. “How could you ever kill a fellow human?”

When people come up to me and say, “You must have felt horrible when you killed somebody,” I have a very hard time giving the simplistic response they’d like to hear. When I was fighting—and by fighting I mean a situation where my life and the lives of those for whom I was responsible were at stake, a situation very different from launching a cruise missile—either I felt nothing at all or I felt exhilaration akin to scoring the winning touchdown.

I used to hesitate to say this, worried it would only further fuel the accusation that we Vietnam veterans were the sick baby killers we were being told we were. Maybe some veterans did feel horrible and sick every time they killed another man, just the way many people think they ought to. I’m also sure some of the people telling me they’d feel horrible and sick could very well feel that way if they ever had to do it. But they didn’t have to. I did. And I didn’t feel that way. And it makes me angry when people lay on me what I ought to have felt. More important, it obscures the truth.

What I feel now, forty years later, is sadness.

There was one particular NVA soldier whose desperate fearful eyes I still vividly recall, standing out like black pools in an exploding landscape of mud and dying vegetation. With my mind’s eye I can still see him rising from his hole to throw a hand grenade at me. The wild desperation, the animal cornered, looking for a way out, and there was no way out. The panic. The lips pulled back showing his teeth. His friend crumpled over next to him, dead. He was a teenager, like my radio operator.

My platoon had just broken through a line of bunkers that circled a hill. The fighting was fierce. What now lay before us was a band about 30 meters wide of interconnected fighting holes and trenches that circled the top of the hill. Fire would suddenly come from one side or the other or directly above us. The hill was so steep we could see only pieces of the system at a time, the uphill positions always hidden from our sight.

Ohio, my radio operator, and I kept moving upward. Fire teams of three or four individuals would go after each position as it was discovered. Our turn was announced by Ohio, screaming, “Chi-comm!”7 I looked directly uphill and saw the dark shape of the grenade tumbling in an arc against the silver-gray cloud cover, coming right toward us.

We scrambled up the hill to try to get underneath the arc, hoping the grenade would hit behind us and bounce a little farther down the steep hill before exploding. We buried our faces in the mud; pulled up our legs, trying to stuff ourselves into our flak jackets; and waited for the explosion. It went off below us without hurting us. We both pulled grenades out and tried to do the arc in reverse. Again we buried our heads against the clay as the two explosions pounded our eardrums. We looked up. Out of the smoke above us two more Chi-comms came tumbling through the air.

This exchange went on three times.

It seems incredible that it took me three times to figure out that one time the unseen grenade throwers above us were going to get lucky. It probably occurred to me because I was down to one grenade. Immediately after the explosion of the third Chi-comm, instead of throwing another grenade back, I took off around a small nose on the hillside. It immediately hid Ohio and me from each other’s sight. I scrambled up the muddy hill, falling on my elbows and knees, churning with my legs. I remember seeing Ohio’s grenade sailing over my head a little to my right and hoping he’d given it a good throw. With the grenade in midflight I caught a glimpse of the hole. A dead NVA soldier was crumpled forward in it, his upper body sprawled over the lip of the hole. I threw myself flat as Ohio’s grenade exploded next to the hole. Shrapnel, rocks, and dirt whammed over the top of me.

I looked up as the stuff was still coming down, settled the stock of the rifle into my shoulder, and waited for the other NVA soldier to stand up to throw his next grenade. I had switched the selector on my M-16 to single shot instead of automatic. Don’t ask me why. Somehow in my addled brain I decided to take this guy with one clean shot. The fighting hole was in plain view about 15 feet above me. There was the dead crumpled soldier. Apparently one of our grenades had connected. I didn’t feel anything. Thinking of nothing else, I waited for that unseen grenade thrower to pop up.

Then he rose, grenade in hand. He was pulling the fuse. I could see blood running down his face from a head wound. He cocked his arm back to throw—and then he saw me looking at him across my rifle barrel. He stopped. He looked right at me. That’s where the image of his eyes was burned into my brain forever, right over the sights of my M-16. I remember hoping he wouldn’t throw the grenade. Maybe he’d throw it aside and raise his hands or something and I wouldn’t have to shoot him. But his lips snarled back and he threw it right at me.As the grenade left his hand I pulled the trigger, trying to act as if I were on the rifle range. And just like on the rifle range I “bucked my shot.” I jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it and, anticipating the recoil with my shoulder, caused the tip of the rifle to lower just slightly as the shot went off. The bullet struck the lip of the hole in direct line with the kid’s chest, spraying dirt right into his face and body.

My feeling? I felt embarrassed that I’d bucked my shot and it wasn’t a clean hit. I felt chagrined that I had been foolish enough not to put my rifle on full automatic. I knew instantly that, had I not switched off automatic to play Deadeye Dick, the continuous recoil of automatic fire would have ridden the front of the barrel upward, putting several bullets in a straight line right up through the kid’s chest and head.