Vietnam English Creative Writing Coursework

We woke up at around 5:30, not the nicest time to get up, we sorted our equipment out and set off at around...7:15, the weather was really wet and horrible but started to dry off through out the day, we had to get on the choppers most of the way but when we arrived we had to do most of it by foot. While we were on the 'Chinooks', we got orders from Lieutenant Calley to kill anything that walks even women and children, most of us believed that was a bit hard but orders are orders. When we arrived at the village we had to follow the orders and moving slowly we had to kill/shoot everything in sight including Men, Women, children and even animals which I couldn't do, some soldiers didn't even shoot a single round but made out they did, I fired a few but only at two guys that looked suspicious, overall in the whole village there was only one Vietcong soldier and he was over 50 years old and only 3 weapons, not really much of a threat for the amount killed. Once we realised that there were no more VC in the village, we were meant to leave but the onslaught of the civilians began, some soldiers were bent on revenge by having friends killed by soldiers these people aided, they killed everyone in the village when we were meant to only capture the defenceless ones. There was so many Vietnamese people on the floor killed and wounded some of it was sickening there were even everyday normal people lying on the floor with arms, legs and even parts of there body blown off it was the worst thing you could have ever pictured it reminded me of some sort of a firing range. The courage of some of the older kids, seeing the younger children lying on the floor about to be shot, they jumped on their backs and took the shot trying to protect the younger generation, thought that showed more courage and bravery that I had ever seen.

I hope your pleased to hear from me so as you can still have a little hope, just to let u know that I am not addicted to herrowin like some other soldiers you may have heard about, at least that's some good news, honestly I don't think that we're going to win this war it just doesn't seem right, the terrain is different to what we were trained for and the weather is killing us.

Write to u soon and hopefully with some more good news?

Yours sincerely

Private J.Simpson

P.S. I miss you all and really want to come home