Vietnam Stories from Nam by Mark Baker

You take a group of men and put them in a place where there are no round-eyed women. They are in an all-male environment. Let's face it. Nature is nature. There are women available. Those women are of another culture, another colour, another society. You don't want a prostitute. You've got an M-16. What do you need to pay for a lady for? You go down to the village and you take what you want. I saw guys who I believe had never had any kid of sex with a women before in that kind of scene. They'd come back a double veteran. These were not men who would normally commit rape. They had not had psychological problems. Being in that kind of environment, you give a guy a gun and strange things happen.
A gun is power. To some people carrying a gun constantly was like having a permanent hard on. It was a pure sexual trip every time you got to pull the trigger.
I remember riding down to Hue City with a couple of guys and one officer one day. I had a .45 in a shoulder holster and a grenade launcher in my hand. I was making eyes at all the Eurasian women, the children of the French. Most of them spoke more than one language and they were educated women. I'd annoy them all to hell. Finally, when she'd say something to me, it would be in Vietnamese. And it would make me crazy. I'd want to kill her. The problem was, I could have.



I was enjoying the feel. There were a couple of guys saying they didn't enjoy the feel. That was junk. We had a sense that we was no longer that GI who had to march, who had to salute. That was shit. We didn't have to salute nobody. We dressed the way we wanted to dress. If I wanted to wear the boony hat, I wore the boony hat. If I wanted one sleeve up and one sleeve down, I did it. If I didn't want to shave, I didn't. Nobody fucked with nobody in the field. An officer knows if he messed with you in the field, in a fire fight you could shoot him in the head. This was standard procedure in any infantry unit. Anybody tells you differently, he's shitting you.
If you mess with my partner as an NCO or something like that, in the unwritten code there, I had the right to blow your brains out. And the guys would do it. Those lieutenants and the CO didn't mess with nobody in the field. They didn't say "Hey, soldier, why is your boot unbloused? Why is your hair long?" Everybody just said fuck it.
I had a sense of power. A sense of destruction. See, now, in the United States a person is babied. He's told what to do. You can't carry a gun, unless you want to go to jail. If you shoot somebody, it's wrong. You're constantly babied till you go to the grave. The only people's got authority is the judges or the Establishment.
But in the Nam you realised that you had the power to take a life. You had the power to rape a woman and nobody could say nothing to you. That godlike feeling you had was in the field. It was like I was a god. I could take a life, I could screw a woman. I could beat somebody up and get away with it. It was a godlike feeling that a guy could express in the Nam.



We were riding in a jeep, about five of us. The driver said jokingly, "Will anybody bet me that I won't hit that old woman walking along the side of the road?" There was an old woman walking along with a long pole over her shoulder, a big bag of rice on each end.
"Yeah, I dare you," one of the guys said. He just turned the wheel real quick and broke her damn hip.
The officer decided, "Well, I guess we better call somebody." We called a medevac. It flew overhead and a I threw smoke out for it and the guys landed.
They took the old woman and threw her on a stretcher and threw the stretcher onto the helicopter. I've seen sanitation men handle garbage cans with more delicacy. One of the other guys asked the medevac crew, "Hey, what's the problem? Why you treating the old lady like that?"
It seems we interrupted their ice cream run. If you had access to an aircraft, you had access to things available in a rear area. There were such things as pizza, fresh ice cream, cold beer. This particular medevac crew had pulled ice cream duty. Our pulling them in to this emergency, they lost their ice cream that night. I try to rationalise that, but the only thing I can come up with is, here we are in a war zone and we messed up their free time - she was just another gook. They could give a damn. That was the worst thing I saw over there. I didn't see any massacres. It was a guy on a dare. He wasn't a psycho, he wasn't a nut. For some reason something compelled him to run that old lady down.



The convoys had to go through the An Khe Pass and there was a lot of places in there where the boys would get ambushed. Nobody was too crazy about driving those big trucks through An Khe Pass. This eighteen-year-old kid was celebrating one night, because the next morning was going to be his first time through there. He was going to do it up big, get drunk and get himself a prostitute and spend the night doing whatever it is they do.
She was a sweet little thing. She brought a satchel charge into his APC with her. They did their thing. She went home, and shortly thereafter the charge blew up. Of course, being in a confined area, he not only got the shrapnel, he got the full load. He came in with no arms and his legs were gone below the knee. All he had was a head and a trunk.
I was the lucky one. I got to take care of him. He was so bad, he got a 'special': one nurse just for him.
He had these huge gaping holes and he has lost so much blood. You give somebody a lot of blood and they have problems coagulating. They couldn't stop this kid from bleeding. So he's got these big dressings on his stumps that are bleeding and his arms are bleeding. He's recovering from anaesthesia. Yet, you don't want him to recover, because he's going to freak out when he sees what's left of him.
Plus, there were some other guys on the ward who knew him and they are waking up. They see him and they're going nuts. There's nothing you can do for them. All you can say is, "If you don't like it, man, you can just look the other way. I'm sorry, but there's just nothing we can do about it."
Every time the kid tried to open his eyes or even lift his head to see how he was, we just gave him a blast of morphine. It took him two days to die. What an awful price to pay for a one-night stand.
It was a big thing to be a man in Nam. They went out and they got laid and they used to brag about how many times they got the clap. I'd be walking down the ward with the big syringes of penicillin right out of the refrigerator. I'd roll it between my hands to try to warm it a little bit. It used to be a big joke about who was going to get it. Well, hey, you're a man if you got the clap. The more times you got it, well, even better. The fact that you were going to take it home to your wife or your girl friend, they didn't think about that.
That poor kid, eighteen years old. After a while, it got to the point that I didn't even let him open his eyes. If he even looked like he was coming round, I just blasted him.


I once was with a Cambodian whore in the field on an operation. She spoke no English. Her entire vocabulary was fuck and suck and yes and no. We talked for the entire evening, believe it or not. We were totally able to converse.
She would go, "Me no suck-suck. Me fuck-fuck."
I replied, "Me no want you to fuck-fuck. Me want you to suck-suck. You bien?"
"No-no-no-no-no, me no suck-suck. Me fuck-fuck."
"Listen, I want you to suck-suck first, then we fuck-fuck later. Okay?"
"No-no-no-no-no, me no suck-suck, me fuck-fuck." That's how we passed the whole evening and I had a marvellous time. I swear to God.
The whores were amazing. We would sometimes take tremendous pains not to discuss our missions because they were so secret. We would be flown in by Air America. Two minutes after we landed you'd hear, "Putt-putt-putt-putt." The whores would be coming on those fucking Honda motorbikes, in the middle of the fucking jungle. It was unbelievable how these hookers found us. I don't even know of any roads that were near where we were.
Sure, there were missions where they wouldn't pull up. They would find us later on. But, usually, you would land and there they were, "Candy, soda, dirty pictures, boom-boom, dope." Not necessarily in that order.
I never got the clap and I always went in bareback. I was insane. I never had crabs or syphilis. Even when I got back and was going to marry my wife, I said, "I don't want you to get uptight, but I'm fairly certain that I'm going to fail this blood test. In Nam I fucked some of the dirtiest whores you have ever seen in your whole life and there's just no way I can pass it". But I did.
I know that some of the whores were putting glass up their vaginas and other ones were infected with a strain of syphilis that was very virulent. The spectrum of antibiotics they were using at the time was not wide enough to get rid of it.
The Viet Cong and NVA figured a combat loss is a combat loss. It doesn't matter if a guy can't go to war because he's got the clap and it hurts when he takes a leak or if he can't go to wear because he's got a bullet through his head. Either way it's a loss.