by Donald Z. Smith

Created on: July 19, 2011   Last Updated: July 20, 2011

The memory of war is always so lingering throughout your lifetime.  Many wars are put to rest in the minds of most after a passage of time.  My hardest time with those memories lingers over the death that one encounters as a marines corps infantryman.  

I still remember the young Vietnamese soldier who was lying on his back after engaging our ambush.  The general practice after executing an ambush is to have the marines rise and perform a frontal assault on the survivors of the ambush.   On the ambush I constantly recall, a young Vietnamese soldier was dying after being shot numerous times.  

As we swept through the survivors eliminating threats, I came upon this soldier.  He had taken a photograph out of his back pack of a family and was staring at it crying.  I swept by him and allowed him his last moments of peace before he died.  He stared at me briefly as though begging for a few last moments.  After we swept through the bodies of the fallen enemy soldiers, I ordered my men to strip all of the clothing that is sent to the rear area to be scrutinized for unit designation or other information in pockets or otherwise.  When I returned to the dying soldier who had been looking at a photograph, I found that he had died still clutching the photograph and looking at it with his lifeless eyes.  One of the marines bent over to retrieve the photograph from his crimped hands.  I told him to leave it. We stripped all of the bodies of uniforms and other items.

We left the area, knowing the enemy would often retrieve their dead after a safe time had passed.  I still recall that day and many others where I was involved in death dealing from my occupation.  

On one patrol through the jungle, I had my squad fill their canteens from a creek that ran alongside the trail we were travelling.  Our patrol was headed upstream looking for enemy contact.  After filling our canteens and drinking water from the creek, we travelled upstream about a mile and found ten dead enemy soldiers, who had been killed days before, laying in the creek. We had drank water and fill our canteens downstream which certainly had passed over the corpses before reaching our locations.  Other than the usual dysentery associated from jungle survival, only the sickening memory of these deaths remains due to drinking the water before discovering the corpses.  

The memory of war is often the memory of death for those who fought directly with the enemy on a daily basis.

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