Conventional Warfare No More.

    In an excerpt from A Rumor of War we read about a particular soldier's perspective on combat during Vietnam.  He opens by stating that this sort of fighting is much more tedious than conventional warfare.  More taxing than the fighting is sometimes waiting for the fight.  He claims that most of the war was a matter of waiting for weeks on end only to fight at random intervals.  They would conduct manhunts while American troops were being cut down one by one by booby traps.  This is clearly not the large scale war type atmosphere that many soldiers had come to expect. 

                                                             

"There is also the Vietnam War that distinguished it
from other American conflicts-it's absolute
savagery.  I mean the savagery that
prompted so many American fighting men-
the good, solid kids from Iowa farms-
to kill civilians and prisoners.

                                                     

This soldier claims that many atrocities committed in Vietnam were popularly being blamed on racist theory.  Since the American soldier found the Vietnamese people to be less than human, he had no problem killing them.  He claims that while this may not be the case 100% of the time, there is an element of truth to the theory. 

    The soldier goes on to describe how many of the men fighting could not withstand the stress of guerrilla warfare.  At all times, soldiers are expected to be alert and ready for attack, ambushes from within, and attacks even from friendly soldiers who have had mounting emotional pressures and can no longer stand it.  Many men in Vietnam were turned into a "creature who destroys without hesitation."

"A sergeant in my platoon, ordinarily a pleasant young
man, told me once, "Lieutenant, I've got a wife and two
kids at home and I'm going to see 'em again and don't care
who I've got to kill or how many of 'em to do it."

    The soldier claims that most American soldiers in Vietnam could not simply be divided up into the good and bad.  He claims that each of them had roughly equal measures of both qualities.  Many soldiers "behaved with great compassion toward the Vietnamese one day and then burned down a village the next."  This new type of warfare was creating a new type of soldier.  Many Americans perhaps were just not ready for the type of Warfare they were going to be faced with.  In my opinion you can never predict how a human will act until they are faced with the situation and make the decisions for themselves.