The Vietnam War produced a rich and graphic literature: novels, journalists’ reports, interviews, and personal letters. These brief selections suggest the war’s profound impact on those Americans who experienced it firsthand.

Donald Whitfield

Donald L. Whitfield was a draftee from Alabama who was interviewed some years after the war.

I’m gonna be honest with you. I had heard some about Vietnam in 1968, but I was a poor fellow and I didn’t keep up with it. I was working at a Standard Oil station making eight dollars a day. I pumped gas and tinkered a little with cars. I had a girl I saw every now and then, but I still spent most of my time with a car. When I got my letter from the draft lady, I appealed it on the reason it was just me and my sister at home. We were a poor family and they needed me at home, but it did no good.

My company did a lot of patrolling. We got the roughest damn deal. Shit, I thought I was going to get killed every night. I was terrified the whole time. We didn’t have no trouble with the blacks. I saw movies that said we done the blacks wrong, but it wasn’t like that where I was. Let’s put it like this: they make pretty good soldiers, but they’re not what we are. White Americans, can’t nobody whip our ass. We’re the baddest son of a bitches on the face of this earth. You can take a hundred Russians and twenty-five Americans, and we’ll whip their ass. …

I fly the Rebel flag because this is the South, Bubba. The American flag represents the whole fifty states. That flag represents the southern part. I’m a Confederate, I’m a Southerner. …

I feel cheated about Vietnam, I sure do. Political restrictions — we won every goddamned battle we was in, but didn’t win the whole goddamn little country. … Before I die, the Democratic-controlled Congress of this country — and I blame it on ’em — they gonna goddamn apologize to the Vietnam veterans.

Source: From “Donald L. Whitfield” in Landing Zones: Southern Veterans Remember Vietnam, by James R. Wilson, pp. 202–211. Copyright 1990, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, www.dukepress.edu.

George Olsen

George Olsen served in Vietnam from August 1969 to March 1970, when he was killed in action. He wrote this letter to a close female friend.

31 Aug ’69

Dear Red,

Last Monday I went on my first hunter-killer operation. … The frightening thing about it all is that it is so very easy to kill in war. There’s no remorse, no theatrical “washing of the hands” to get rid of nonexistent blood, not even any regrets. When it happens, you are more afraid than you’ve ever been in your life — my hands shook so much I had trouble reloading. … You’re scared, really scared, and there’s no thinking about it. You kill because that little SOB is doing his best to kill you and you desperately want to live, to go home, to get drunk or walk down the street on a date again. And suddenly the grenades aren’t going off any more, the weapons stop and, unbelievably fast it seems, it’s all over. …

I have truly come to envy the honest pacifist who honestly believes that no killing is permissible and can, with a clear conscience, stay home and not take part in these conflicts. I wish I could do the same, but I can’t see letting another take my place and my risks over here. … The only reason pacifists such as the Amish can even live in an orderly society is because someone — be they police or soldiers — is taking risks to keep the wolves away. … I guess that’s why I’m over here, why I fought so hard to come here, and why, even though I’m scared most of the time, I’m content to be here.

Source: From Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, edited by Bernard Edelman for the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, published by W.W. Norton & Company, 1985.

Arthur E. Woodley Jr.

Special Forces Ranger Arthur E. Woodley Jr. gave this interview a decade after his return.

You had to fight to survive where I grew up. Lower east Baltimore. … It was a mixed-up neighborhood of Puerto Ricans, Indians, Italians, and blacks. Being that I’m lightskinned, curly hair, I wasn’t readily accepted in the black community. I was more accepted by Puerto Ricans and some rednecks. They didn’t ask what my race classification was. I went with them to white movies, white restaurants, and so forth. But after I got older, I came to the realization that I was what I am and came to deal with my black peers. …

I figured I was just what my country needed. A black patriot who could do any physical job they could come up with. Six feet, one hundred and ninety pounds, and healthy. …

I didn’t ask no questions about the war. I thought communism was spreading, and as an American citizen, it was my part to do as much as I could to defeat the Communist from coming here. Whatever America states is correct was the tradition that I was brought up in. And I thought the only way I could possibly make it out of the ghetto was to be the best soldier I possibly could. …

Then came the second week of February of ’69. … We recon this area, and we came across this fella, a white guy, who was staked to the ground. His arms and legs tied down to stakes. … He had numerous scars on his face where he might have been beaten and mutilated. And he had been peeled from his upper part of chest to down to his waist.

Skinned. Like they slit your skin with a knife. And they take a pair of pliers or a instrument similar, and they just peel the skin off your body and expose it to the elements. …

And he start to cryin’, beggin’ to die.

He said, “I can’t go back like this. I can’t live like this. I’m dying. You can’t leave me here like this dying.” …

It took me somewhere close to 20 minutes to get my mind together. Not because I was squeamish about killing someone, because I had at that time numerous body counts. Killing someone wasn’t the issue. It was killing another American citizen, another GI. … We buried him. We buried him. Very deep. Then I cried. …

When we first started going into the fields, I would not wear a finger, ear, or mutilate another person’s body. Until I had the misfortune to come upon those American soldiers who were castrated. Then it got to be a game between the Communists and ourselves to see how many fingers and ears that we could capture from each other. After a kill we would cut his finger or ear off as a trophy, stuff our unit patch in his mouth, and let him die.

With 89 days left in country, I came out of the field. What I now felt was emptiness. … I started seeing the atrocities that we caused each other as human beings. I came to the realization that I was committing crimes against humanity and myself. That I really didn’t believe in these things I was doin’. I changed.

Source: Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (New York: Ballantine, 1984), 243–263.

Gayle Smith

Gayle Smith was a nurse in a surgical unit in Vietnam in 1970–1971 and gave this interview a few years later.

I objected to the war and I got the idea into my head of going there to bring people back. I started thinking about it in 1966 and knew that I would eventually go when I felt I was prepared enough. …

Boy, I remember how they came in all torn up. It was incredible. The first time a medevac came in, I got right into it. I didn’t have a lot of feeling at that time. It was later on that I began to have a lot of feeling about it, after I’d seen it over and over and over again. … I turned that pain into anger and hatred and placed it onto the Vietnamese. … I did not consider the Vietnamese to be people. They were human, but they weren’t people. They weren’t like us, so it was okay to kill them. It was okay to hate them. …

I would have dreams about putting a .45 to someone’s head and see it blow away over and over again. And for a long time I swore that if the Vietnamese ever came to this country I’d kill them.

It was in a Vietnam veterans group that I realized that all my hatred for the Vietnamese and my wanting to kill them was really a reflection of all the pain that I had felt for seeing all those young men die and hurt. … I would stand there and look at them and think to myself, “You’ve just lost your leg for no reason at all.” Or “You’re going to die and it’s for nothing.” For nothing. I would never, never say that to them, but they knew it.

Source: Albert Santoli, ed., Everything We Had (New York: Random House, 1981), 141–148.