What are your favourite first-hand accounts of war? I'm reading Nam by Mark Baker, a compilation of personal stories about the Vietnam war, and I'm finding it pretty fascinating. Here a few stories that were short/interesting enough to type out:
You take a group of men and put them in a place where there are no round-eyed women. They are in an all-male environment. Let's face it. Nature is nature. There are women available. Those women are of another culture, another colour, another society. You don't want a prostitute. You've got an M-16. What do you need to pay for a lady for? You go down to the village and you take what you want. I saw guys who I believe had never had any kid of sex with a women before in that kind of scene. They'd come back a double veteran. These were not men who would normally commit rape. They had not had psychological problems. Being in that kind of environment, you give a guy a gun and strange things happen.
A gun is power. To some people carrying a gun constantly was like having a permanent hard on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.
I remember riding down to Hue City with a couple of guys and one officer one day. I had a .45 in a shoulder holster and a grenade launcher in my hand. I was making eyes at all the Eurasian women, the children of the French. Most of them spoke more than one language and they were educated women. I'd annoy them all to hell. Finally, when she'd say something to me, it would be in Vietnamese. And it would make me crazy. I'd want to kill her. The problem was, I could have.
I was enjoying the feel. There were a couple of guys saying they didn't enjoy the feel. That was junk. We had a sense that we was no longer that GI who had to march, who had to salute. That was shit. We didn't have to salute nobody. We dressed the way we wanted to dress. If I wanted to wear the boony hat, I wore the boony hat. If I wanted one sleeve up and one sleeve down, I did it. If I didn't want to shave, I didn't. Nobody fucked with nobody in the field. An officer knows if he messed with you in the field, in a fire fight you could shoot him in the head. This was standard procedure in any infantry unit. Anybody tells you differently, he's shitting you.
If you mess with my partner as an NCO or something like that, in the unwritten code there, I had the right to blow your brains out. And the guys would do it. Those lieutenants and the CO didn't mess with nobody in the field. They didn't say "Hey, soldier, why is your boot unbloused? Why is your hair long?" Everybody just said fuck it.
I had a sense of power. A sense of destruction. See, now, in the United States a person is babied. He's told what to do. You can't carry a gun, unless you want to go to jail. If you shoot somebody, it's wrong. You're constantly babied till you go to the grave. The only people's got authority is the judges or the Establishment.
But in the Nam you realised that you had the power to take a life. You had the power to rape a woman and nobody could say nothing to you. That godlike feeling you had was in the field. It was like I was a god. I could take a life, I could screw a woman. I could beat somebody up and get away with it. It was a godlike feeling that a guy could express in the Nam.
We were riding in a jeep, about five of us. The driver said jokingly, "Will anybody bet me that I won't hit that old woman walking along the side of the road?" There was an old woman walking along with a long pole over her shoulder, a big bag of rice on each end.
"Yeah, I dare you," one of the guys said. He just turned the wheel real quick and broke her damn hip.
The officer decided, "Well, I guess we better call somebody." We called a medevac. It flew overhead and a I threw smoke out for it and the guys landed.
They took the old woman and threw her on a stretcher and threw the stretcher onto the helicopter. I've seen sanitation men handle garbage cans with more delicacy. One of the other guys asked the medevac crew, "Hey, what's the problem? Why you treating the old lady like that?"
It seems we interrupted their ice cream run. If you had access to an aircraft, you had access to things available in a rear area. There were such things as pizza, fresh ice cream, cold beer. This particular medevac crew had pulled ice cream duty. Our pulling them in to this emergency, they lost their ice cream that night. I try to rationalise that, but the only thing I can come up with is, here we are in a war zone and we messed up their free time - she was just another gook. They could give a damn. That was the worst thing I saw over there. I didn't see any massacres. It was a guy on a dare. He wasn't a psycho, he wasn't a nut. For some reason something compelled him to run that old lady down.
>>5808 It's funny how people just swallow this and not even call for these people to be tried for war crimes. Oh, they "won" though didn't they. So no foul.
Fun fact: even despite the reports of Soviet rape on the front lines during WWII, German soldiers did not retaliate in kind. In fact, Germans were shot by their commanders in front of the rest of the regiment in France if they even looted.
By the end of the war, American soldiers had raped more women in one year at their own bases, on their own land, than the Germans did anywhere, for the entirety of the war in all occupied territories.
I hate the glorification or sensationalism of rape. Utter evil.
The whole Nam situation was fucked. I got to talking to a Vietnam vet in America once (Jesus Christ, never engage with them), and amongst stories of sex with prostitutes and child abuse, he told me about his experiences, including that of shooting a 12 year old girl with a .50 cal while he was over there. "There was nothing left of her" combined with the haunted look on his face after all these years will probably stay with me. He said he often thought about her, what she would have done if she grew up, how she would have looked, etc.
Then there were the stories of his fellow soldiers practically doing whatever they pleased there, including to kids. I asked him why he did nothing and his response was "These were men that would kill you if you tried."
I know war is a fucked up situation to be in, but how can people let it damage them to the point where they become the very people, or worse than that, that they're meant to be protecting people from? It worries and unsettles me that there seems to be a fairly substantial amount of people who cannot handle power.
>>5815 >how can people let it damage them to the point where they become the very people, or worse than that, that they're meant to be protecting people from?
Because of propaganda. 99% of the time, the enemy was never that evil at all. But, they have to be painted out as evil so that people feel justified in fighting them. Then, once the brainwashing is done well enough, they view the enemy as inhumane. This makes them feel it's "right" to do inhumane things to them.
Also, military types are usually quite thick, so easier to brainwash. Especially (but certainly not only) the grunts.
It worries me that apparently neither of you read the first post properly and realised that the book is a compilation of first-hand stories from people who are not the author. Avoiding an entire book of (supposedly) truthful first hand accounts of a real life event because you took a dislike to a small sample of those accounts is ignorance in extremis.
>>5822 There were quite clearly three extracts ("Here a few stories that were short/interesting enough to type out: "), implying that they are in all probability narrated by different contributors.
Whether the above posters were mistakenly talking about the author, about a singular contributor/extract, or about all three contributors/extracts my point still stands.
The convoys had to go through the An Khe Pass and there was a lot of places in there where the boys would get ambushed. Nobody was too crazy about driving those big trucks through An Khe Pass. This eighteen-year-old kid was celebrating one night, because the next morning was going to be his first time through there. He was going to do it up big, get drunk and get himself a prostitute and spend the night doing whatever it is they do.
She was a sweet little thing. She brought a satchel charge into his APC with her. They did their thing. She went home, and shortly thereafter the charge blew up. Of course, being in a confined area, he not only got the shrapnel, he got the full load. He came in with no arms and his legs were gone below the knee. All he had was a head and a trunk.
I was the lucky one. I got to take care of him. He was so bad, he got a 'special': one nurse just for him.
He had these huge gaping holes and he has lost so much blood. You give somebody a lot of blood and they have problems coagulating. They couldn't stop this kid from bleeding. So he's got these big dressings on his stumps that are bleeding and his arms are bleeding. He's recovering from anaesthesia. Yet, you don't want him to recover, because he's going to freak out when he sees what's left of him.
Plus, there were some other guys on the ward who knew him and they are waking up. They see him and they're going nuts. There's nothing you can do for them. All you can say is, "If you don't like it, man, you can just look the other way. I'm sorry, but there's just nothing we can do about it."
Every time the kid tried to open his eyes or even lift his head to see how he was, we just gave him a blast of morphine. It took him two days to die. What an awful price to pay for a one-night stand.
It was a big thing to be a man in Nam. They went out and they got laid and they used to brag about how many times they got the clap. I'd be walking down the ward with the big syringes of penicillin right out of the refrigerator. I'd roll it between my hands to try to warm it a little bit. It used to be a big joke about who was going to get it. Well, hey, you're a man if you got the clap. The more times you got it, well, even better. The fact that you were going to take it home to your wife or your girl friend, they didn't think about that.
That poor kid, eighteen years old. After a while, it got to the point that I didn't even let him open his eyes. If he even looked like he was coming round, I just blasted him.
I'm just typing down a few more stories into notepad for easy reference, may as well post them here as well.
I once was with a Cambodian whore in the field on an operation. She spoke no English. Her entire vocabulary was fuck and suck and yes and no. We talked for the entire evening, believe it or not. We were totally able to converse.
She would go, "Me no suck-suck. Me fuck-fuck."
I replied, "Me no want you to fuck-fuck. Me want you to suck-suck. You bien?"
"No-no-no-no-no, me no suck-suck. Me fuck-fuck."
"Listen, I want you to suck-suck first, then we fuck-fuck later. Okay?"
"No-no-no-no-no, me no suck-suck, me fuck-fuck." That's how we passed the whole evening and I had a marvellous time. I swear to God.
The whores were amazing. We would sometimes take tremendous pains not to discuss our missions because they were so secret. We would be flown in by Air America. Two minutes after we landed you'd hear, "Putt-putt-putt-putt." The whores would be coming on those fucking Honda motorbikes, in the middle of the fucking jungle. It was unbelievable how these hookers found us. I don't even know of any roads that were near where we were.
Sure, there were missions where they wouldn't pull up. They would find us later on. But, usually, you would land and there they were, "Candy, soda, dirty pictures, boom-boom, dope." Not necessarily in that order.
I never got the clap and I always went in bareback. I was insane. I never had crabs or syphilis. Even when I got back and was going to marry my wife, I said, "I don't want you to get uptight, but I'm fairly certain that I'm going to fail this blood test. In Nam I fucked some of the dirtiest whores you have ever seen in your whole life and there's just no way I can pass it". But I did.
I know that some of the whores were putting glass up their vaginas and other ones were infected with a strain of syphilis that was very virulent. The spectrum of antibiotics they were using at the time was not wide enough to get rid of it.
The Viet Cong and NVA figured a combat loss is a combat loss. It doesn't matter if a guy can't go to war because he's got the clap and it hurts when he takes a leak or if he can't go to wear because he's got a bullet through his head. Either way it's a loss.
The more diverse stories you post the more I realise that I want to read this book. I won't post again in this thread if I can avoid it but will instead just pony up for the book.
Nam is an excellent book. I was going to type out some comments on some books about war, but it wouldn't have really added much. Instead, here's a list of books dealing with war that I found worth a read. You may or may not like them. If there's no author, it's because I can't remember the author off the top of my head and am posting from a tablet and research is a hassle. Apologies.
Dispatches, Michael Herr
The cat from Hue
My war gone by, I miss it so
War junkie
The bang bang club, about Sowetto, but pretty much a war zone
A rive in May
I last saw Hiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam. He was nineteen then--my wonderfully skilled and maddeningly insubordinate radio operator. For months we were seldom more than three feet apart. Then one day he went home, and fifteen years passed before we met by accident last winter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. A few months later I visited Hiers and his wife. Susan, in Vermont, where they run a bed-and -breakfast place. The first morning we were up at dawn trying to save five newborn rabbits. Hiers built a nest of rabbit fur and straw in his barn and positioned a lamp to provide warmth against the bitter cold.
"What people can't understand," Hiers said, gently picking up each tiny rabbit and placing it in the nest, "is how much fun Vietnam was. I loved it. I loved it, and I can't tell anybody."
Hiers loved war. And as I drove back from Vermont in a blizzard, my children asleep in the back of the car, I had to admit that for all these years I also had loved it, and more than I knew. I hated war, too. Ask me, ask any man who has been to war about his experience, and chances are we'll say we don't want to talk about it--implying that we hated it so much, it was so terrible, that we would rather leave it buried. And it is no mystery why men hate war. War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since. And how do you explain that to your wife, your children, your parents, or your friends?
>>6203 Really did intend on legally getting it, went through with the order on Amazon but just got bored waiting so I hit up the local library and wanted one that'd last through the years.
>>6205 Now I have two copies, tell you what, if someone is brave enough to give me their address through a throwaway, I'd send you the paperback one for free.
>[20:44:30] <dayve> the guy in the war thread doesn't know it but i rubbed my cock all over the nam book, put it as far into my arse as it could go and just spread around my sweat from the general bum and balls area for about 20 minutes
>[20:44:40] <dayve> he should have expected it
>[20:44:51] <dayve> you don't give gifts without the gift of poz
>[20:52:59] <maroon> "I have AIDS" -Dave 2015
...However, your book should be fine. This is most probably an elaborate fiction designed to get attention, because he's a sad lonely bastard. It's the only way he knows how to communicate. It has to be said though, things like this are why this lad is perma-banned from both the boards and the IRC, has his home range banned and why London has been range banned twice on 2 different mobile networks. I wish I could say this is the worse thing he has claimed to have done, but he's a disturbed individual. "The Mentalist" a few users have mentioned is none other than he.
We try our best to deal with the loonies, some of them are more disturbed than others; this fella being the worst of the bunch, but we don't always get it right. Mainly, because how can you kill that which has no life?
Best not to accept gifts from strangers on the internet in future, just in case.
>>6228 No you idiot, you were meant to make the post on the board!
Now you've drawn my name into it and they won't even believe anyway. Anyone could rub a book on their balls, pubes would have been something that actually got transported up there.
