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pins and moving away from the ‘fire in the hole’ zone—it appeared to work as there was a huge explosion and just fragments of the mortar round left.
The problem with fighting in a ‘civil war’ is that your enemy looks exactly like your friend. There was no discernible difference between VC, PAVN, ARVN or North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese.
Couple that with decades of French occupation wherein many of the Vietnamese were of French extraction and often looked taller and European. At a distance we often had to make life or death decisions based upon the description of the people we were seeing—friend or foe? We would often pass people by who looked like simple farmers working in the paddies only to realize moments later that we were being fired upon by that same simple farmer —as we turned to return fire he would disappear into the village nearby where he would simply disappear into one of the huts or into a tunnel whose entrance was disguised as a mud puddle! ( actual situation).
Marine and Army units all over Viet Nam faced this same situation day in and day out. This was not a battlefield situation like Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima where you could open fire on a tree line when fired upon—often, we had to hold our fire— wade thru the brush—search those huts and the village to find that one sniper and nine times out of ten we wouldn’t find him because he would be hiding in plain site—removing his hat—changing his shirt —hiding his weapon and simply standing there among the other villagers as we passed thru looking for ‘that bad guy’!
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