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A friend of mine told me that there was a soldier returning from Nam, would cry his heart out when hearing a particularly song.
And yes, all of us, in all the wars had a song, it must be to give the heart and the brain the anesthetic to survive the carnage and the hole made by the fallen buddies.
Some of the fresh grunts from Camp Pedleton were confronted, after settling down with a few words of opportunity:
Nam, “if you gonna be a sniper there are two thing you should
consider, you will be shooting at real people in cold blood, no
target practice…but real people” “if you ain’t got the stomach…”
Nam, “going inside the goons tunnels ain’t funny promenade
holding a knife, you will be cutting throats and getting a lot of
gore over you, because you need to silence people before they
can alarm their beehive, you will be alone, even if your buddies
come behind, you a point man” “if you ain’t got the stomach…”
Nam, “you gonna drop on Cong territory ‘bout two hundred
miles inside, the fly boy spotters zeroed on a POW little camp
there, probably a tunnel full of people too, get the pilots or
whatever is there to the rescue choppers and make as more
damage as you can, break radio silence only to call the cavalry
for a clean up, better haul ass before the Napalm gets there,
now, who’s chicken out?” “because, if you ain’t got the stomach…”
Nam, “there are the approximate coordinates of a possible
big cache of weapons, fuel and personnel, the brass thinks
you will need two or three weeks to penetrate there from
Laos, we can’t drop you by plane so to no give you away
being there, prepare yourselves for a diet of worm and
leeches, because you wouldn’t have provisions to talk about,
you need to travel light, pinpoint the place with orange flares
and get from that living hell as fast as your feet can run,
this a voluntary gig” “if you ain’t got the stomach…”
That’s what the music get a man to think. But there are those
that were cold hearted, didn’t lose sleep, or have Post Traumatic
Syndrome. They were the Snipers and Tunnel Rats and the
Infiltrators that took back home the prisoners from bamboo jails.
After Omaha Beach in 44 and Korea’s Inchon Beach in 51, Nam
was just another battle, you had no heart no more, no home to go
back to, you became the perfect killing machine, a soldier that
could go through the jungle without making a noise, the man
without tears, remorse or memory.
But then, a tune will take him back to the damned places, like the old tune
Lily Marlene, or Robin Williams screaming “Goood morning Viet-naaam!”
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