Vietnam

Part 1

Names Clyde Barlow, stationed in '62. At the time I was 21, filled with hope and innocence. Bein' 21 I thought I was invincible. I believed I could do anything, take on anything. After my third week of deployment in that damn unforsaken hell hole I watched my fellow brothers get shot and chopped down by them rat bastards that wanted to spread their commy communism. Before that, I never saw anyone die in front of me. Don't get me wrong I've seen the dead before in funeral homes; but nothing like watching my brothers drop dead right in front of my own black eyes.

During my third month in hell I learned that in order to get back home I had to shoot first, die last, one shot and one kill. But it had to come from skill not luck; if you believed in luck there was a good chance you ain't comin' home. The longer I stayed the more things I began to learn about surviving. We gotta kill to survive and kill to get home. All the horrible, unforgettable, and unimaginable things we had to do to survive.. They all slowly killed the once innocent  fire burning inside.

I remember storming into this town with gooks running everywhere shooting at us. We gunned down the gooks and returned fire. I could hear the screams and moans of our fallen. But we had to keep moving, to keep fighting. Soon after the impasse, in what we called the swamp town, we moved into the rice beds to move over the nulle and patrol the area. It was so deafening quiet walking through the town and rice fields that you could hear a mosquito touch the top of a puddle.

" Barlow!" Johnson, a shotgunner in our platoon looks to me then looks down and says " I'm on a mine! Watch where you step!". Instantly the platoon had to think of a way to get Johnson off the mine without blowing his legs into bloody stubs. We stood there for an hour tryin' to think of a way to make sure that mine didn't go boom. Slowly I watched my every step, praying to miss the mine, and very carefully dug around his foot with my knife. Thankfully them damn gooks didn't set the trigger on that mine; slowly Johnson took his foot off and we got the hell out of the rice bed.

Getting over that nulle we got to the top and saw that we found one of their small radio stations and signalers, but we couldn't call in airstrike or any fire because we needed to get down there and see if we could get one of their plans or papers that tell where their next possible attack was. We laid out on top of that hill for 4 hours thinking of a plan, eventually once the base went dark, Johnson, Elliot, Patson, Hernandez and I all moved in and used the darkness as our best friend.