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"I could tell you things that would scare you to death."
"The incident involving Lt. Calley at My Lai? It happened every day. Calley just got caught."

From the long series "Rendezvous with Death"
Paper: Boston Globe
Title: LIVING IN HELL
Date: September 16, 1996

In the midst of the worst of wars, it was the worst of years, 1968. In Memphis, Martin Luther King was murdered. In Los Angeles, Bobby Kennedy.
In Chicago, antiwar demonstrators were beaten by police. Throughout America that year, 19-year-old boys were smoking pot, dancing to the Beach Boys, chasing girls and hoping for sex. In Vietnam, 19-year-old boys like Marty Smith were smoking pot, listening to Dylan, chasing Viet Cong and hoping they would  not be blown to hell by land mines. As Marty said in a letter, "You grow up real fast here." It wasn't merely the Viet Cong. There were environmental enemies, too, heat and diseases that festered everywhere and caused rashes, fevers, headaches, stiff joints. "Man," said Marty to a friend over beer one night in Saigon, "they got diseases here they ain't got names for." "Ho Chi Minh is smart," Marty said. "He's flooding Vietnam with drugs, pure stuff from France, the best of heroin, vials of speed that keep you awake for days." In Vietnam, the hatred Marty had developed for his drill instructor, Sgt. Rivera, was transferred into a loathing for Asians, whom he learned to think of as small people, thieves in tennis shoes who despised Americans. On leave in Melbourne, he saw the
counterculture musical "Hair," and he began to question the war. One day, he heard his sergeant scream in protest that he had been refused a leave to see his wife in Hawaii. "I know someone in Bien Hoa who can cut the orders," Marty offered, "but I'd need a pass." When Marty returned with the orders, the sergean  was so grateful that he awarded Marty an Army commendation medal. In the summer of 1969, Marty received a letter from his brother, Frank, who'd been ordered to Vietnam and didn't want to go. To prevent the Army from sending Frank to Vietnam, Marty signed up for another year. As months went by, Marty's senses dulled. He became numb to atrocities. In a letter home, he wrote: "I could tell you things that would scare you to death." But he kept to himself the horro  of American soldiers wearing necklaces made of the ears of dead Viet Cong, or the day Marty's patrol found the body of an American who had been savagely disfigured. "So we did the same thing," he explained years later. "If we didn't have anything else to do, we'd take up a plane, buzz rice paddies and shoot at Vietnamese farmers. We'd kill water buffalo, their sacred animal. We were young, man, and we were high. Everybody was high. We were nuts. "I was in a truck that ran over a Vietnamese baby. We even tried to kill our first sergeant, who was a pig. We had grenades that we put underneath the stoop. When he walked in, if he had cleaned his feet, he would have set off the grenades. "Viet kids were all around us with diseases, and Americans did things. We gave them C-4. That's a plastic explosive in antipersonnel mines. It looks like candy, and Americans gave it to kids and it would kill them. It's like speed, I guess. It would inflame their insides. It was nuts, totally insane. "I was crazy," Marty confessed years later. "I was doing all these things, hurting people. I had no respect for life. But you end up doing it. I was very bitter. Our government let us get away with murder there, literally. The whole scene, man, was just brutal, and it happened day in and day out. "All that stuff I did there, all the trouble I caused people, what a waste. Americans never really knew what we did there. The incident involving Lt. Calley at My Lai? It happened every day. Calley just got caught." In the autumn of 1969, at Quan Loi, 70 miles from Cambodia, Marty came down with fever. He was weak and unable to speak coherently. He was airlifted to Long Binh. Doctors thought he had malaria. Eventually the fever broke.
 At the same time, for political reasons, President Richard Nixon granted some early discharges, and so, in November 1969, Marty headed home to America. When the plane landed in San Francisco, Marty went into a clothing shop at the airport. He bought a civilian shirt and civilian trousers. He walked into a public toilet. He took off his Army uniform and he put on the civilian clothes. Then Marty took his Army uniform with his six medals, and he rolled it into a ball and he stuffed it into a trash can. When he walked out of San Francisco International Airport, Marty had shed all reminders of the Vietnam War save three. First was the manila envelope with his discharge. Second was the guilt from which he would never find peace. Third was the virus within his body, a fatal disease. Marty didn't know it, but he had pawned his future. Long after the guns fell silent, within Marty Smith, the Vietnam War never would end.
Copyright 1996, 1998 Globe Newspaper Company
Author: Jack Thomas, Globe Staff
Section: Living
Page: C5
Copyright 1996, 1998 Globe Newspaper Company