By Paul Churchill
There isn’t too much going on here right now except for patrols, riots, and small scale revolutions in the villages. Just the usual stuff, you know how it is. The other night they hauled us out to rescue some general when the VC hit his area. Can’t say too much for the security company he has. Maybe they just wanted to share the fun. As for us we would just as soon sleep, but that’s hard because of the heat and rain anyhow.
These riots were taking place in most of the cities all over Viet Nam for a while but we were not involved in any of this action because it was considered internal and was handled by the Viet Namese military, mostly their police, such as they were and their Marines. We on the other hand were more or less out in the boonies running patrols and ambushes in rural areas doing our best to help the local farmers be safe to work their rice crops. This often meant crossing five or six hundred yards of open area on two to three foot wide paddy dykes with nowhere to go but into the paddies for cover if we were fired on. This was especially hazardous at night when we had to more or less feel our way along. If it happened to rain this added to the problem as the dykes were made of dried mud and became extremely slippery in a matter of minutes. When you are doing your best not to be seen things would get hairy when one of the marines would slip and fall into the paddy and reflexively let out a yell to go along with a splash into the slime below. He would then have to be helped back up onto the dyke so we could resume the patrol hoping that our position had not been totally compromised by the noise. Villages in these areas were basically small islands of trees and hedges in the middle of several acres of rice paddies where three to ten grass shacks provided the shelter for an equal number of families. If one of them had a water buffalo they were considered to be quite well off. The problem for us was that the water buffalo sensed something different about us and could be extremely aggressive toward us as described in the May 1″ chapter.
Several letters from here on were written on 101S Air borne letterhead paper so I included the following P.S.
Sorry about writing on Army paper but I thought that since I let the Air Force bring me over here from the Navy for the Marines that the Army should have a chance to get in on the show somewhere.
Gotta maintain that inter service rivalry you know.
