"CARE packages from home"

The sun was up, the enemy had retreated. 861 had held, so did 881 south and 881 north. The main Khe Sanh Base down in the valley was still there and functioning as well. As we starting inspecting our hill in the daylight, the unmistakable stench of death was everywhere, our guys and theirs.

There was one particular dead Marine I remember seeing on the Northside who was laying crumpled over with his M-16 beside him. His gun was opened up at the swivel pin with the bolt carrier assembly part way out-----as if it had quit him, and he'd been trying to take it apart when he got hit. It reminded me of my OWN '16, so I quickly made my way over the top to the other side, and down to that spot where I'd left it.

I passed 1st Sergeant Goddard, (the old salty dog back in Camp Evans whose sister had sent him those socks for Christmas------the guy with the Tommygun). He was being treated for a neck wound. During the battle for the hill, HE had been running all over the top, shouting orders and directing everybody to where they needed to be as the situation called for it. He got hit in the neck by shrapnel, yet pinched off the wound with his thumb and forefinger, and CONTINUED to run back & forth giving directions! He should have been decorated for that, but probably wasn't. He would be medivaced out.

I passed my OWN "Luke" as I headed down to get my rifle. That grenade had gotten him. I remember the scream as it went off. This was HIM alright.

I picked up my "Mattel Toy" and started back to my own hole on the southside, but there was so much activity in the trenchline, I found it easier to just climb OUT of the trench again and take the "shortcut back over the crest of the hill. Goddard was still being worked on, and a couple of our guys had taken a "Luke" alive. He was standing with his arms up, with 2 or 3 of our guys keeping him covered. As I passed, "Luke" was saying "Dow......Dow", which is Vietnamese for "head". Maybe his ears were ringing from a close explosion, or maybe he just had a headache. (If I'd had a working weapon, I'd have CURED his "Dow" problem for him.)

But I WOULDN'T have a working weapon until I got back to my hole and UN-jammed my '16 that I had now recovered.

I was on my way back down the slope, when one of the guys in my platoon (I can't remember to this day who it was), yells "HEY BRADBURY!.....COME OVER HERE!............YOU AIN'T GONNA FRIGGIN' BELIEVE THIS!!"..........

As I got there, he was bent over a dead "Luke", going through his pockets and backpack. He said "Ain't you from California?"

"Yeah"................."Well take a look at THIS!"

What I saw made me sicker than anything I'd seen that morning. A First Aid Kit that was stamped "Donated to the North Vietnamese Freedom Fighters by Students of the University of Berkeley, California." I was stunned. Shouldn't have been maybe, but at 19, I was still pretty naive, and thought our country was behind the troops, even if they were against the war.

By noon, all the dead bodies inside and outside of the perimeter had been searched, and SEVERAL of these "first aid kits" had been recovered. Hostility started to set in, as word got passed around. If it had been possible to take us all off that hill-------with weapons--------and have flown us back to California, I can guarentee you that Berkeley College would not be standing today (unless it was rebuilt later!).

Try to picture this if you can...........You endure the grueling pace of stateside training, the pounding and sweat of becoming a Marine, the monsoons, swamps and rice paddies and jungle, the leeches, the hard way of life--------and you THINK you're doing this for "Mom's Apple Pie", "Old Glory" and all. You've just fought the fight of your life, holding on to a stinking hill, buddies being blown away......

....and now you've emerged "victorious".............you've withstood the onslaught and come out on top for "God, Country and Corps"........just like the Marines of the past, Belleau Wood, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, the Chosin, Reservior--------nnd now, Khe Sanh.

And then.......while you're helping to load your dead and wounded buddies out on the choppers, you're finding FIRST AID KITS supplied to YOUR enemy from "YOUR CITIZENS" back home. Can there be a greater betrayal? Dirty little scumbags, and then they spit at us when we DO come home.

Some of the guys knew I was from the San Francisco/San Jose area, (just ACROSS THE BAY from Berkeley), but nobody gave me a hard time about it. I was ashamed and humliated though, because the little yellow-bellied pukes who donated these kits were from MY home area of record!

Now, as the years have passed, I've become exremely bitter about how we were used, killing soldiers in a country that never did anything to US, and we ourselves lost 58,000 of our own doing it------not counting the wounded and amputated, and it was all for nothing. I MYSELF am still dealing with Agent Orange and the lymphoma I've been fighting the last several years from it. If I knew then what I know now, I'd probably have joined the Air Force and tried to work in a Warehouse somewhere in Kansas.

But I was a 19-year old Lance Corporal, doing my job as best I could. The "flower children and pot-smokers" back home had a right to protest. GOOD MEN over two centuries had made that possible. So if you wanted to NOT fight-----DON'T.

If you want to stay out of it............then stay out of it.

But STAY out of it!--------you do NOT provide aid and comfort to the OTHER SIDE! It's a pretty safe bet that a LOT of those Berkeley pinkos had brothers and cousins in Vietnam, but there they were, listening to Marxist professors and sending stuff to the North Vietnamese.

You stood there totally bewildered on 861, and you asked yourself, WHY am I even here? For WHAT? For WHO?

Those first aid kits left a permanent scar on me. I will forgive those traitors when I forgive Jane Fonda, and I will forgive Jane Fonda when the Jews forgive Hitler.

The "other sour note" was the M-16. It was no longer just a passed-around story. They really WERE underpowered and unreliable. When they DID work, sometimes it TOOK 2 to 3 shots to drop an enemy. "High-speed 22's" do not operate on the same level with big 30-calibers. never have, never will.

By contrast, "Luke's" AK-47 worked just fine, and some of the ones we took off of THEIR dead, hadn't been cleaned in MONTHS, if at all, even SURFACE RUST on a few, but they still worked perfectly. We were not allowed to keep and use them, though, as their distinctive sound might draw "friendly fire" out in the brush.

It's a marvelous weapon though, and shoots a short-cased 30-caliber bullet that has plenty of knockdown, doesn't deflect off of tree branches, doesn't need constant attention (you can't keep a weapon "clinically-clean" in the middle of a firefight".)

It's archaic and simple by design, steel and wood. NOTHING on the "AK" is "high-tech", which is probably why it's worked so well over the past 64 years. It is the weapon of choice of the world's "bad guys." I own one myself today, and it's pretty easy to see why it IS their choice.

Anyway, back on 861, afetr I got MY piece of junk working again, I went back over the the 2nd Platoon area, found the guy with the M-14 that I'd loaded magazines for, and asked him when HIS tour would be up. "In about 3 months." We made a pact, that if we were both still alive, he would trade guns with me before he left, if they'd let us. I kept a "third eye" on that dude as the weeks went by, just to make sure he didn't somehow get out of sight!

To this point, I had still not functioned as a bazookaman yet. They are long range weapons, and the sights are useless at night as well, so the "tube' was never an option when my '16 quit. I WOULD get some "rocket time in before my tour was over, though. One time, right from 861.

And life on 861 resumed.