Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

By George Olsen

17 Sept, 69

Red,

Thanks for the letter, but now you've made me self-conscious about my writing, You used some words that rather jolted me: Morbid, Chaplain, and a few others. They belong to another world about which I've forgotten an amazing amount as it's irrelevant to anything going on now. I've just about forgotten what college was all about, though there are a few memories that stick in the back of my mind.

Yesterday we took to the bush to recon a river crossing on one of Charlie's major supply routes coming in from Laos....It was an uneventful patrol, but I committed the mortal sin of small-unit patrolling: I broke contact with the man in front of me and split the patrol into two elements something that could easily prove fatal in the event of contact with the enemy. We'd just crossed the river at a ford to join the team reconning the other bank and were going through fairly green stuff when the man in front of me dropped his lighter. I bent to pick up and by the time I straightened up he was out of sight and hearing. Had we been hit then, It would have been a bad situation made worse by my stupidity. I've picked up most of the patrolling tricks - taping metal parts to prevent their making noise during movement, wearing bandoliers so the magazines are on your chest and stomach and form makeshift body armor, and other tricks that stretch the odds a little more in you favor and give you a little more of an edge in combat - but I'm still new and yesterday I really loused up....

The fact of the matter is that I was afraid - which I am most of the time over here - but I allowed my fear to interfere with the job at hand, and when that happens to someone, he ceases to be a good soldier. It's all right to be afraid, but you can't allow that fear to interfere with the job because other people are depending on you and you've got responsibility to them and for them. From now on I'll be keeping that in mind and I won't louse up so badly again. Had that happened under fire, people might have died unnecessarily due to me.

One other impression from the patrol is that anyone over here who walks more and 50 feet through elephant grass should automatically get a Purple Heart. Try to imagine grass 8 to 15 feet high so thick as to cut visibility to one yard, possessing razor-sharp edges. Then try to imagine walking through it while all around you are men possessing the latest automatic weapons who desperately want to kill you. You'd be amazed at how much a man can age on one patrol.

We're supposed to go on a very hard sortie soon which, unless it's canceled, virtually guarantees some hard fighting. I'm not trying to be mysterious or anything, but common sense precludes giving too many details before the operation. We're going to raid one of Charlie's POW camps and attempt to free some GIs, but that's about all I'll say till we pull it off, if we do.
I many have played up my unit here a bit too much, but I'm proud to be in it and might be inclined to brag. We're not supermen or anything like that, and we're not about to walk into bars, where music automatically stops at our entrance, and proceed to demolish anybody and everybody in the place. But as far as being soldiers, we're proud of our outfit and its history, and are definitely among the best troops over here....Men have gone on operations here with broken ankles in order not to let their buddies down. So you see, we take our business seriously.

I'm going out now for a fun in the sand to toughen my feet up. So I'll be signing out....

George

Sp/4 George Olsen, Co. G, 75th Inf. (Ranger), Americal Div., Chu Lai, 1969-1970, He was KIA 3 March 1970; he was 23 years old.