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‘VC friendly resources’ including ‘storage centers’ for rice and weapons concealed in certain village shacks. Our Marines had to enter the ‘homes’ of innocent looking women and children and search for enemy caches—this bothered our Marines who felt they were intruding on the innocent lives of vulnerable people—we did not take our missions lightly. There were those who were critical of the United States’ involvement in the Viet Nam conflict—our Marines didn’t fully understand why we were there other than that’s where our Country and our Marine Corps wanted us to go. Our mission was to help the Republic of South Viet Nam defeat and fend off the enemies of that government and who wanted to overthrow it—this included North Viet Nam and Ho Chi Minh with support from Communist China and The USSR—at the same time we were to ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the Vietnamese people thru education, medical resources, community improvement projects for clean water and sanitation. As time passed and we repeated our ‘Search and Destroy’ operations over and over I often doubted what we were doing and why we were doing it. The First Platoon did not torch villages—we did not beat up innocent Vietnamese—I was still bothered personally whenever we had to destroy a cache of rice that I knew the farmer had worked hard to harvest. These thoughts, of course, I kept to myself. When speaking to my troops or answering their questions I attempted to be as supportive of our mission as possible. Our troops, read the news articles about the war in the mail sent from loved ones at home—so there was no secret that Many americans were opposed to our being in Viet Nam this ‘movement grew with each passing day.
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