Trautman, my friend,
You know, here in Vietnam everything's stranger...
And day by day, it's always worse.
The most unreal thing is that the Vietcong have no corruption: inside the villages occupied by the party, people trying to ask for a bribe wake up the following day with a bullet in their head and a sign hanging from their neck, with 'corrupt' written on it.
That's the way the Vietcong keep the problem under control.
And let me tell you... In my opinion, training the South Vietnamese to wage war against the Vietcong is a little meaningless.
They are too poor, often starving, and so much that all they think about is asking for bribes or opium trafficking, and they don't do it to get rich, but just to survive.
There's no guns for hire in Vietnam. You just ask the right man on the street, you offer him 500 dollars and he will probably accept asking no further questions, because that way he is going to feed his sons for almost a year.
Everything here is crazy....
And everything looks as if it’s governed by madness.
Some days ago I caught one of my best South Vietnamese officers asking a family for a bribe.
If the family hadn’t paid it, he was going to shoot them even if they weren't Vietcong.
As I got there he had just taken the money and was raping the daughter in front of her parents.
I am talking about a little girl, and he was fucking her in front of her father tied to a chair.
He was one of my best South Vietnamese officers, one of those I really needed.
That's Vietnam's absurdity.
He was one of those very rare soldiers I have seen risking his own life for real while fighting against the Vietcong.
My hands are shaking while writing it down, but I have to tell someone... Then burn this letter my friend, because my life is at stake because of it.
Because when I saw what was happening, I went blind with rage.
I pulled out my 1911 and shot him in the head without even thinking what I was doing.
But then I felt sick.
I felt the need to puke, because I am not you, Samuel.
I had never done anything like this before.
It was disturbing.
The 1911's forty-five is a devastating bullet.
It opened a fucking hole up in his head with extreme ease, as if it was a fucking melon.
But I knew this man.
It wasn't like shooting an enemy in the heat of a battle.
And do you know the most absurd thing?
I do think that it worked for real.
War is a really perverted thing, my friend.
For fifteen days there were no similar episodes.
I hate this country.
In Vietnam, the dirtiest things a human being can do are always rewarded.
I can't stand it anymore.
Sometimes I think that even Diem was right, when he used to say that in Vietnam <<'the only way to get something from people is by killing a few >>.
Sometimes it seems that violence is the only language the Vietnamese can talk, together with briberies, of course.
Opium and money are two languages that any Vietnamese can talk very well.
But the truth is that I am not like you at all, Trautman, and that I chose the wrong job.
Coming here was a bad mistake and it scares me the kind of man this country is changing me into.
I did everything wrong and I don't know how to get out of it.
I don't know how to get back.
Sometimes I think that if I can just get back home alive, I will probably never again be the kind of man I was before.
It was the first time I had done something like that, and I hope to never do it again.
I am a civilian, for god's sake.
An advisor, a trainer, a man wishing to make things work. I am the last one of the '63's military advisors, the real ones, when all of this still had a real meaning of its own.
But now I can't stand it any longer, and I don't believe in anything anymore too.
I can't do it any more Samuel, not like you did back then, when you could raise your head again despite everything that happened to you, no matter what, without ever giving up and always keeping your head straight at the same time too.
I am sick, tired, embittered and disappointed. I am looking forward to the time you'll be here again, to launch a proper and real campaign of targeted killings against the Vietcong cadres, just like we used to. No agreements with the Corsican mafia at all, this time. We need to get back the weapons that are getting out with the bribes, because here in the Quang Tri the gun smuggling of US weapons is really getting out of hand.
Fuck em all.
I hope you at least, in Fort Bragg, are getting on all right, and away from all of this, because here I am well and truly a fucking civilian, and I always have to behave under someone else's rules even while commanding one thousand gooks.
And fuck, I have to say it, since you went away I don't trust any of them anymore, not a single one, and those who have my own life in their hands as well.
I am afraid that one day you will wake up and read in the papers that they have fragged me*.
They could stab me any time.
Saying I live every single second of my life in terror, is putting it simply.
And everything just because of the shitty corruption that Loyd and Boyle persist in using in their favour because << it's the way to keep things on their feet >>.
I can't stand it any longer.
Try to get re-assigned to the triborder zone the sooner you can.
I need you here and I need you now, or everything could go to the dogs in a few months.
So much for 'everyone's home before Christmas' (*)... Who believes in that bullshit? At home before Christmas, but with a lost war.
Fuck em.
We do really have some shitty generals, Trautman.
Goodbye my friend,.
And don't forget to burn this letter.
Patrick Nelson
* Fragging: coming from 'fragmentation grenade' , it's a slang term used to identify the murder or severe wounding of a US officer at the hands of his own troops, usually by means of a hand grenade, from which the term comes. The hand grenade left no finger prints evidence and left the door open to the doubt of it being a simple accident.
In1969, there were two hundred incidents, with twenty four deadly ones.
Suspicious cases throughout the duration of the conflict were one thousand and four hundred.
** Sarcastic quotation of general Paul Harkin's words who was the commander in chief of US forces in Vietnam and, in 1963, got everything sensationally wrong in predicting the end of the war before Christmas of the same year.
In fact, the war lasted eight years more for the Americans, and almost ten for the South Vietnamese, and general Harkin's mistake became so sensational that his words 'home before Christmas' became legendary on US soil.