Since the VC often popped smoke when they heard or saw helos, it was important to confirm color to ensure you didn’t land in the wrong place.

12

The Vietcong often dug trench lines behind the hedgerows that frequently bordered trails, leaving them there as ready-made ambush spots.

13

U.S. assets went to U.S. units as the first priority.

14

The same was true of the enemy. Something like eighty-five percent of contacts were initiated by the VC or NVA. They always tried to fight on their own terms and to refuse battle whenever it wasn’t to their advantage to engage.

15

Clausewitz’s term for the key capability of a combatant. Without it, he loses.

16

The senior adviser stayed with the battalion commander, but the junior adviser had to be out in the field where the fighting was.

17

Later, I got chewed out again for “letting him go out toward the east,” but I explained again that I’d told him not to go out that way. Nothing more came of the incident.

18

This fine U.S. Army captain was later killed in action.

19

The rest of the Marine battalion caught up with us later the first day.

20

Normally, a grenade can be lobbed about forty meters. Earlier during the Vietnam War, units had been equipped with the M-79 grenade launcher, which the troops called “the Blooper,” which lobbed a grenade about 150 meters. The Super-Blooper had an even greater range and a drum full of grenades that could be cranked out in a stream. This gave units the capability of covering with bursts of grenades an area between that covered by the 60-millimeter mortar and the M-79. It jammed often and was experimental when the Pacifiers got it. The flamethrower was a multishot—four cylinders in a boxlike frame.

21

Kit Carson Scouts were former VC who’d come over to our side. After an indoctrination program, they were assigned to units operating in areas where they had operated as VC.

22

The enemy didn’t have a code of conduct as Americans do; there was no “name, rank, serial number” kind of thing. It was simply assumed that everything they knew was compromised. Some VC and NVA proved to be open; others were harder to crack. Though Loi gave us a lot of information, we could tell that he was having a hard time deciding where his actual loyalties lay; and there were times when his wavering proved to be tense-making.

23

Any who survived were put in reeducation camps and not released for many years. When Zinni’s friend Hoa and his old battalion commander Tri were finally released, they were allowed to come to the States with their families.

24

Zinni learned later that eighty-five American cars, mainly military police cars, were burned that night during the communist attacks on U.S. posts around Koza.

25

Called MOSs—Military Occupation Specialties.

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