On the Ground: The Grunt Experience

By Bernard Edelman

Over the past few years, Bernard Edelman has interviewed and discussed the war with dozens of Vietnam veterans, many of whom are his friends, while writing profiles for a web site, veteransadvantage.com. For this chapter, he reviewed his notes and chose incidents and stories to illustrate and illuminate the experiences of troops sent halfway across the globe to do their nation’s bidding in Vietnam. He interviewed several Marines with whom he returned to Vietnam in 2001, and also integrated excerpts of letters from Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, the book he edited for The New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission.

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.
– Myra MacPherson, 1984

War Without End

Of those who served in Vietnam, relatively few spent their entire tours – 12 months if you were in the Army, 13 for Marines – in the bush. In this war without a front, a guerrilla war against a crafty and elusive enemy, a pervasive angst set in among the troops. “I remember being just so annoyed, so frustrated,” said Marine Sgt. Balcom, who spent 20 months in-country. “We’d take some hill at a great cost in blood. We’d leave. And then we’d have to take it all over again.” His point echoed that of Philip Caputo, a Marine officer turned journalist, memoirist, and novelist. He recounted returning in 1971 to the area where he had served. If he had had any doubts, he knew the war was folly when grunts were still fighting over the same village he and his men had fought over six years earlier.

While American forces arguably won the major battles of the war, supported by artillery and by airpower almost unchallenged in the South, the bulk of the combat occurred in small-unit firefights during ambushes and search-and-destroy missions. Booby traps – camouflaged pungi pits studded with sharpened, dung-tipped lengths of bamboo; grenades and bombs that blew up when the trip-wire was tripped – were just as feared, and took almost as many lives as AK-47 rounds and B-40 rockets. Many booby traps were configured to maim, which had the added value to the NVA/VC forces of occupying the efforts of his comrades and giving them the opportunity to shoot down medevacs and helicopter gunships.

Every place had its dangers. Jerry Balcom spent stretches during his tour in battalion headquarters. While not as hazardous as the bush, “Nobody was ever safe,” Balcom said. “No one was immune from hot shrapnel or VC bullets. In the bush we’d get ambushed; in ‘the rear with the gear,’ we’d get mortared and rocketed often, and were hit by sappers before first light.” On perimeter watch one night, Charlie attacked. A tracer round “went over my head by a matter of inches,” he said. But for more than 47,000 Americans, the bullet or booby trap, the mortar or bomb, the rocket or grenade, did not miss; and for more than 10,000 others, accident or disease caused them to be sent home in an aluminum casket.

In a letter to his friend Jim Buckley, who had recently taken a freedom bird back to “The World,” as GIs referred to “back home,” Balcom wrote:

I’m sorry I’m unable to bring you glad tidings, buddy, but I think you’ll probably want to know this news.

Our friend, our happy, crazy, almost always laughing pal, Dave Ranson, was killed during a firefight at 0600 this morning. An RPG [Rocket-Propelled Grenade] took his head, and several others were hurt. Jim, that guy had so much going for him – a beautiful girl to marry, school to finish, RELAD [Release from Active Duty] orders, and under 40 days to go…This ********** war is taking too many good guys. Perhaps I’m selfish, but a few have been friends and I know you’ve felt the same. There’s nothing more to say. I thought you’d like to know…

It was in the rear “where we started having drug problems and racial problems,” Balcom said. It was different in the boonies, where grunts had to be focused and alert, and everyone was “green.” Ben Williams, a grunt with Hotel Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, 3rd Marine Division, could not recall if one of his sergeants was black or white. “In the field we were all the same; we depended upon one another,” Tex Williams said. Everybody bled red.