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comin’ out of a helicopter. And attacking a beach in helicopters was just out of the question. The planes and the napalm would go infirst. Then, the helicopters would have eased in after the fact. That was wild.
    By making us look insane, the people who made that movie was somehow relieving themselves of what they asked us to do over there. But we were not insane. We were not insane. We were not ignorant. We knew what we were doing.
    I mean we were crazy, but it’s built into the culture. It’s like institutionalized insanity. When you’re in combat, you can do basically what you want as long as you don’t get caught. You can get away with murder. And the beautiful thing about the military is there’s always somebody that can serve up as a scapegoat. Like Calley. I wondered why they didn’t get Delta Company 1-9 because of Cam Ne. We were real scared. But President Johnson came out and defended us. But like that was before My Lai. When they did My Lai, I got nervous again. I said my God, and they have us on film.
    I was in Washington during the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982. But I didn’t participate. I saw all these veterans runnin’ around there with all these jungle boots on, all these uniforms. I didn’t want to do that. It just gave me a bad feeling. Plus some of them were braggin’ about the war. Like it was hip. See, I don’t think the war was a good thing. And there’s no memorial to Cam Ne, to My Lai. To all those children that was napalmed and villages that were burned unnecessarily.
    I used to think that I wasn’t affected by Vietnam, but I been livin’ with Vietnam ever since I left. You just can’t get rid of it. It’s like that painting of what Dali did of melting clocks. It’s a persistent memory.
    I remember most how hard it was to just shoot people.
    I remember one time when three of our people got killed by a sniper from this village. We went over to burn the village down. I was afraid that there was going to be shootin’ people that day, so I just kind of dealt with the animals. You know, shoot the chickens. I mean I just couldn’t shoot no people.
    I don’t know how many chickens I shot. But it was a little pig that freaked me out more than the chickens. You think you gonna be shootin’ a little pig, it’s just gonna fallover and die. Well, no. His little guts be hangin’ out. He just be squiggling around and freakin’ you out.
    See, you got to shoot animals in the head. If we shoot you in your stomach, you may just fall over and die. But an animal, you got to shoot them in the head. They don’t understand that they supposed to fall over and die.

Specialist 5
Harold “Light Bulb” Bryant
East St. Louis, Illinois
    Combat Engineer
1st Cavalry Division
U.S. Army
An Khe
February 1966–February 1967
    We were in a fire fight one morning. We had our mad minute at six o’clock. We received some fire, and so we just started shooting. I guess maybe about eight o’clock a dust-off came in to take out a wounded guy. And they came and asked for me, and they told me that I was rotating. Going home right in the middle of the fire fight. I hadn’t kept up with my days. I didn’t have a short-time calendar. So I was a little surprised. So they took me back to An Khe for me to clear base camp.
    I went downtown and bought a few trinkets to give people. A opium pipe. Four or five of those little jackets that said on the back, “I know I’m goin’ to heaven, ’cause I done spent my time in hell.” I grabbed my stuff out of the connex and put it in two of those Air Vietnam suitcases and my two duffel bags. And I went to the airstrip for the Caribou that would fly me into Pleiku.
    When I got to Pleiku, I guess it was about 4 P.M . Theysaid the plane was gonna be comin’ in about seven. Then Pleiku started gettin’ hit, and the plane didn’t come in. And they had us in a secure area with no weapons while Pleiku was being mortared. So we had to spend the night.
    The plane to