Sea Stories

Quick Kill; Slow Gnawing Guilt

         Although I was in or around Vietnam much of my life from November 1964 to January of 1973, a dark period of one year as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy on brown water riverboats in 1969 – 70 is what is burned most indelibly into my memory.

            I had volunteered for and prepared for that assignment more thoroughly than I had any other in my Navy career.  This was motivated by my strong desire to survive the experience.  I was ordered to five months of schooling at Coronado and at Camp Pendleton, much of it by Navy SEALs, Marines, and former advisors to the Vietnamese navy.  

Because the Army had found that in Vietnam most firefights took place at ranges of less than 50 yards, their experts had become enamored of a method of shooting developed by a trick shot named Bobby Lamar ("Lucky") McDaniel and began teaching it as “Quick Kill” to soldiers at the Infantry Training Center at Fort Benning on the outskirts of Columbus. 

            Before my official training began in November of 1968, I took leave in Columbus, Georgia, at my parents’ home.  While I was home, my dad arranged with his Army brass buddies for me to undergo three days of this training. 

The training began with a special Daisy BB gun, which had no sights.   You were required to shoot this BB gun with both eyes open pointing instinctively at the top of the targets, which were aluminum disks tossed into the air.   Amazingly, trainees quickly became proficient at hitting progressively smaller disks until half of the trainees could hit a disk the size of a penny most of the time.  The best I could do was hit a quarter size disk about 70% of the time.  Considering that the disk was sometimes edge on as the BB passed and BB guns are not noted for accuracy, I thought that was pretty good.  In the training students transitioned to the service weapon, the M-16 rifle. The key to Quick Kill was not to aim, but to point.  It was hard for me not to aim, for I had grown up in the South where accurate aim was a highly prized skill; one at which I was exceptionally good.

            The training of prospective advisors in California consisted of theories of counter-insurgency, practical knowledge of Vietnamese culture, use of explosives, radio procedures, air and artillery support procedures, small unit tactics, boat tactics, and six weeks of intensive Vietnamese language training. We had a great deal of physical training.  All of this time I continued to practice Quick Kill with a BB gun.

             We were shipped up to Camp Pendleton to learn to use all types of small arms, including mortars, grenade launchers, and portable rocket launchers.  Eventually we underwent Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training at Coronado and Warner Springs.  When all of that was over, I felt I was truly ready to win the war all by myself.

            On the riverboats, I continued to practice Quick Kill.  In free fire zones in the U-Minh Forest, devoid of people, I shot at every target I could find.  Coconuts were my favorite target because, full of liquid, they exploded when hit. 

            One day, an expended small aluminum pop flare casing came floating down stream past our boats lined up on the bank of a stream.  Vietnamese sailors on boats upstream of me began shooting at the inch and a half diameter tube floating with about five inches above water.  The casing danced in the water unscathed by a rain of bullets from the sailors.  As the flare approached my boat, the sailors began shouting, “Dai-uy, Dai-uy!” (Lieutenant, Lieutenant!).  When it was 75 feet away, I picked up my rifle and sank it with a single shot.  The sailors shouted, “Troi-oi Dai-uy, troi-oi Dai-uy!” (Heavens above, heavens above Lieutenant!).  My reputation was made, but this came back to haunt me.

            In several firefights, mostly at night, I never saw the enemy at whom I was shooting.  At night I fired at their muzzle flashes or at the points of origin of their green AK 47 tracers.  I might have ended a whole tour full of combat without any certainty that I had killed anyone.

            One afternoon, however, near the end of my tour as our riverboats were lumbering up a river, the Vietnamese began shouting to me,”Dai-uy, Dai-uy, VC!”  My Vietnamese counterpart, Lieutenant Long, was actually tugging at my shirt directing my attention to a Viet Cong soldier running along the berm of a rice paddy over 75 yards away and opening fast.  The man had an AK 47 and was wearing the faded, torn and patched black pajamas that I had seen so often on VC prisoners and bodies.  Lieutenant Long wanted me to shoot the man, who was already under fire from every available rifle.  All the VC had to do was drop down behind the berm and he would have been safe.  Instead, he ran for his life in full view. 

Ironically, aim was required for this type of target instead of the instinctive Quick Kill method I had practiced so thoroughly.  Using my boyhood skills, I aimed and fired. The small kick of the rifle momentarily disturbed my sight picture.  The man was no longer there.  The Vietnamese were certain that I was the one who had shot him although many of them were shooting.  They convinced me that I had killed the man.

            Although that was war, and I was performing my duty, I felt bad.  Each day in my life since then I have thought about the Vietnam War and the futility of so many lives lost with so little to show for it.  Not a day goes by that I do not reflect on my personal experiences there, but nothing eats at my psyche as much as that one shot.  Although I did nothing wrong, I cannot shake a feeling of guilt.  One’s mind cannot overrule one’s heart.

No religion tortures me with this guilt.  No objective analysis by experts would question anything that I did.  The Vietnamese thought it was great that I shot the enemy.  Had he lived, he might have killed many of them.  However, today I am cursed with an inability forget something that I cannot bear to remember.

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