Emotion Beyond Description
Emotion Beyond Description
I have many memories of my year in Vietnam. Yet, one sight still gives me chills to this day. As I was going upriver after the fighting died down in the Battle of Dai Do (May 1968), I saw a flat bottomed boat loaded with the bodies of dead Marines being removed from the battlefield. They were stacked up like so many logs, so many bodies that the boat seemed to be in danger of capsizing.
Although I had seen death in many forms before, that really hit me hard. Those Marines were just kids really. Most of them were the little older than the high school students I had taught before entering the Navy. They died while fighting to keep South Vietnam from falling to the onslaught of the North Vietnamese Army, a thankless and ultimately futile task, given the cowardly way the war ended.
Captain Herman W. Hughes, PhD, US Navy Retired