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Our patrols would often complete their assignment without enemy contact. This could have led to a sense of complacency but that rarely happened. Our Marines remained vigilant and were aware that this was the nature of guerrilla warfare—The VC did not follow patterns or routines. Surprise and unexpected actions were ‘expected’—we knew that at any moment we could be attacked in a variety of ways and by an enemy of unknown size. From time to time one of our patrols would make contact with small VC patrols or snipers in which case our patrols would kill or capture those enemy combatants.
On one such occasion we were fired upon from a treeline near a small Hamlet—
we returned fire and advanced on the location of the small arms fire—we discovered three dead VC—from our returned fire—one of the three combatants was in a North Viet Nam ( NVA ) uniform. All were armed with relatively new weapons. We followed procedure and checked their bodies for intelligence—
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