Page 12
University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, April 28, 1964
Battle is Vocation—
(Continued from page 1)
His legs torn up by shrapnel from a Viet Cong booby trap or mine, calmly lying on a stretcher waiting to be bandaged and evacuated, his dark peasant's face, a mask of resignation.
To the Vietnamese soldier the American advisers are an endless source of fun and "good-smelling" cigarettes. He smilingly watches the tall, lanky large-nosed foreigners—whom he generally considers somewhat naive, and uninitiated—with ill-concealed amusement.
When a unit has to cross one of the thousands of narrow canals which slice the Mekong delta, Vietnamese soldiers will stand aside and gleefully watch the American wobble and sway his way along the single slippery log which serves as an excuse for a bridge. If the foreigner loses his balance and tumbles into the muddy water they will giggle uncontrollably, for Vietnamese rarely laugh in the boisterous fashion of Westerners.
The Vietnamese soldier is quick to acknowledge the American's dedication and bravery but somewhat skeptical of their ability to advise him how to fight his communist enemy.
In Vietnamese eyes the American also takes the war too seriously and is too eager to plunge ahead with frontal attacks and risk his life in close-in combat.
ALTHOUGH THE AMERICAN has only a year to serve in Vief Nam, the Vietnamese soldier has been fighting most of his adult life. For him, the war is endless. He knows that if he survives a battle today he will only have to face another one tomorrow or next week.
He is not highly motivated politically or psychologically, as is his communist enemy, because he receives little effective political training.
A Vietnamese will uncomplainingly accept a drab diet of boiled rice and fried fish if he must. But because war is a way of life, he carries as many of the comforts of home with him as he can.
A Vietnamese unit marching off to battle is an incredible sight, with blackened and battered pots and pans and live chickens and ducks dangling from the troops' bulging knapsacks.
GOOD EATING is a traditional Vietnamese pleasure. At the slightest halt, the troops light fires and cook themselves a snack. Unless it is actively engaged with the enemy, a Vietnamese unit usually stops for a combined lunch and siesta, another traditional Vietnamese pleasure. Orders are sometimes curiously slow coming down from headquarters at lunchtime because
plan now for A SUMMER SEMESTER IN THE NATION'S CAPITAL
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the commander is eating, too, and his staff doesn't want to disturb him
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mann doesn't want to disturb him.
Vietnamese soldiers like fresh food and consider the American habit of eating from cans an unnecessary barbarian. An American-inspired attempt to introduce specially-prepared canned Vietnamese C-rations for field use was a miserable failure.
When they run out of their own fresh food the troops help themselves to the peasants' cocoutan, chickens, ducks and eggs but in many cases now are forced by their officers to pay for what they take.
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Because soldiering has been for centuries such a common occupation in this country, it has become a favorite theme in Vietnamese literature and popular music. Hundreds of popular songs are written around the romantic situation of a soldier fighting at the front while his sweetheart pines for him back home.
HE WILL SPEND a month's pay to buy a Japanese transistor radio so that he can listen to these songs in the field from the nearest government radio station.
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One of these tunes, a sad, litling melody called "A Rainy Evening on the Cambodian Border," has become almost the theme song of the Vietnamese army, a kind of "Lili Marlene" of the second Indochina war. It was banned by Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu during the days of the now defunct Ngo family regime, but re-appeared on the government radio as soon as the Ngo fell.
The young girl calls to her soldier-sweetheart, "What are you doing under the evening rain at the Border? Why do you stand waiting at the edge of the river? Look at the dark and rain-soaked jungle. It seems to tell you to come home and bring joy to your loved one here."
THE SOLDIER ANSWERS. "I am yearning at the front for my sweetheart back home and I love even the color of the shirt she sent me. But I am a man and I also dream of courage in battle and my path lies through the driving rain."
When the sun sets on the rice paddies of the Mekong delta the government soldiers button up inside their little mud-walled forts and hope they will live to see another dawn. The night, they know, belongs to the Viet Cong.
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