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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.
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
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