Bloods Read Free Page B

that died in each battalion of the 9th Marines that landed was black. And they were killed by our own people. Comin’ back into them lines was the most dangerous thing then. It was more fun sneakin’ into Ho Chi Minh’s house than comin’ back into the lines of Danang. Suppose the idiot is sleeping on watch and he wake up. All of a sudden he sees people. That’s all he sees. There was a runnin’ joke around Vietnam thatwe was killing more of our people than the Vietnamese were. Like we were told to kill any Vietnamese in black. We didn’t know that the ARVN had some black uniforms, too. And you could have a platoon commander calling the air strikes, and he’s actually calling on your position. It was easy to get killed by an American.
    They called me a shit bird, because I would stay in trouble. Minor shit, really. But they put me on point anyway. I spent most of my time in Vietnam runnin’. I ran through Vietnam ’cause I was always on point, and points got to run. They can’t walk like everybody else. Specially when you hit them open areas. Nobody walked through an open area. After a while, you develop a way to handle it. You learned that the point usually survived. It was the people behind you who got killed.
    And another thing. It’s none of that shit, well, if they start shootin’ at you, now all of a sudden we gonna run in there and outshoot them. The motherfuckers hit, you call in some air. Bring in some heavy artillery, whatever you need to cool them down. You wipe that area up. You soften it up. Then you lay to see if you receive any fire. An
then
you go on in.
    I remember the first night we had went out on patrol. About 50 people shot this old guy. Everybody claimed they shot him. He got shot ’cause he started running. It was an old man running to tell his family. See, it wasn’t s’posed to be nobody out at night but the Marines. Any Vietnamese out at night was the enemy. And we had guys who were frustrated from Korea with us. Guys who were real gung ho, wanted a name for themselves. So a lot of times they ain’t tell us shit about who is who. People get out of line, you could basically kill them. So this old man was running like back towards his crib to warn his family. I think people said “Halt,” but we didn’t know no Vietnamese words.
    It was like shootin’ water buffaloes. Somebody didn’t tell us to do this. We did it anyway. But they had to stop us from doing that. Well, the water buffaloes would actually attack Americans. I guess maybe we smelled different. You would see these little Vietnamese kids carrying around this huge water buffalo. That buffalo wouldsee some Marines and start wantin’ to run ’em down. You see the poor little kids tryin’ to hold back the water buffalo, because these Marines will kill him. And Marines, man, was like, like we was always lookin’ for shit to go wrong. Shit went wrong. That gave us the oppurtunity.
    I remember we had went into this village and got pinned down with a Australian officer. When we finally went on through, we caught these two women. They smelled like they had weapons. These were all the people we found. So the Australian dude told us to take the women in. So me and my partner, we sittin’ up in this Amtrac with these women. Then these guys who was driving the Amtrac come in there and start unzippin’ their pants as if they gonna screw the women. So we say, “Man, get outta here. You can’t do it to our prisoners.” So they get mad with us. Like they gonna fight us. And we had to actually lock and load to protect the women. They said, “We do this all the time.”
    One time we had went into this place we had hit. We was takin’ prisoners. So this one guy broke and ran. So I chased him. I ran behind him. Everybody say, “Shoot him. Shoot him.” ’Cause they was pissed that I was chasin’ him. So I hit him. You know I had to do something to him. I knew I couldn’t just grab him and bring him back. And his face just