Bob continued: "When it rained in Vietnam, it just about rained for half a year. You couldn't do anything. But after the rains were over, every morning, you saw those fogs in the country side, and the mountains appearing over seas of white clouds, it was the most beautiful scene I have ever seen. It was hard to imagine we were fighting a war over there."

"Was that time the most memorable and dangerous, when you were attacked by the peddler, who was trying to sell you the buns during the day?" David asked his partner. "Hell no. That was just one of those times. See, Vietnamese usually do not 'attack' you. When they 'attack' you, they pretty much got you. Usually, we were after them and when we started fighting, we usually just said 'we made contacts'. There was this company command of ours. He was quite young but knew what he was doing. It was his third tour when I was there. I just had one tour for a year."

David asked curiously, "When was that"? "It was 67, amongst the years with some bloody and heavy fighting. Any way, this company commander of ours was really good at looking at footprints and tracks, you know, like those Indian fighters in Western movies. One day, he looked at a set of footprints and said: 'we are going to make contacts in 10 minutes'. Everybody asked: 'How do you know'? He said: 'Look, these two men on the sides have ordinary shoes. They are soldiers. This set of footprint in the middle is that of tax collectors, because the shoes are of the more expensive kind. They are collecting taxes and they can't travel fast.' About 10 minutes and 10 seconds later, we really made contacts."

After several days in another trip, Bob praised his company commander again: "That guy, I'll tell you. If he was living about a hundred years earlier, he would have been a famous war hero or Indian fighter or something. There was one of them days we were patrolling in the fields. He saw a calf straying in the field. He told us to slow down and said: "They were here. The calf is too young to be by himself alone. Someone must have eaten the cow. After we moved forward a little further, and after he dug up some terds, he told us 'It's OK. These are at least two or three days old'. Then he led us to a house and we found a cache of ammunitions, food, water and everything. It looked like that was one of the important storage places for the Viet Com".

"If it was not for him, I would have died several times and won't be here talking to you now. Because he was the company commander and I carried communication equipments for him. There was this about 1 feet long extendable antenna, he asked me to carry. I didn't want to carry it and finally, he carried it for me, which was really my job, see? One day, we made contacts again with enemy fire and we jumped into this ditch. The antenna jumped out of his pocket and fell right in front of me in a twisted and funny way. I picked it up and looked at it. There was a bullet hole in the antenna. If it was not there in the air, a bullet could have hit me in the face. Even his goofy moves saved my life sometimes."

"There were a lot of those funny things in Vietnam. One day we walked for a long time, and decided to take a break. I sat down and took off my helmet and threw it hard on the ground. As I sat on my helmet, I saw something metallic about 5 feet in front of me. I swept off a little bit of dirt and saw a wire extending somewhere further. We got nervous and called the army mine sweeping expert guy to come and take a look. He found there was a wire attached to a shot gun which if hit, could have blown me into pieces. I started becoming real careful with my helmet and tried to wear it as much as I could afterwards.'

'There was this new guy came in who was very casual with his helmet. One day, I started yelling at him: 'Pick up your helmet. You could get us all killed, man' and then told him my story with the helmet. He started arguing with me and said: 'We are safe here'. 'What do you mean we are safe, put on your helmet' 'Ok'. He slowly put his helmet on. Just after he put his helmet on, a bullet hit his helmet. That was what's like in Vietnam."

David thought Bob went through a lot of danger and said: "Well, it is hard to believe that you don't believe in miracles. It sounded like your mere existence is a miracle".

Bob giggled but disagreed: "When you consider that I was there for a year, and just trying to tell you one year of encounters in a few minutes, that was scary. But those things were not that dangerous really. We can out of those things winning for the most part. But we suffered a lot more than that and the sad part of it all was I saw it right in front of my eyes.

There was this one time our three companies were chasing this group of Viet Com. They just ran and ran and led us to this nice place with a big European style church having fairly solid stone-built walls. Other companies decided to stay there for the night but our company commander pulled us out. He told other company commanders: 'if this place looks so nice, maybe someone wants you to stay here'. We built our camps away from the church and said: 'Oh, no. He's going to get us killed. Why are we away from everybody?' But he seemed to know what he was doing and we followed. At night, there was just this hail storm of fires circling towards the church. First we saw fired shots both directions to and from the church. Then the circle became smaller and smaller. There was nothing we could do, but only talk to the radio guy saying something like 'hang in there. Hang in there'. Finally, the guy said: 'Well, I guess this is good bye' and that was it. It was dark, nobody could do anything. No air support was going to come and we couldn't do anything. We could only watch tracers burning around the church. You know what tracers are, do you?"

David for the first time heard Bob's voice deviated from his usual "don't-give-a-damn" tonal voice and tried to distract him: "Tracer, what tracer? I thought people who measure river pollution levels, or ground water flows would use some kind of dye to trace the water streams. Is that what you were talking about?"

Bob resumed his common voice and explained: "I don't know if it is still true or not, but in US Army, if you operate automatic or semi-automatic weapons, one out of every ten bullets in the rounds would be called a tracer. Those bullets would light a fire when hitting something combustible, so the fire would tell you where you were hitting. We just watched out buddies die in the fires they lit. You know, a lot of Vietnam veterans came back to this country got treated really bad. People gave them all kinds of crap saying they were brutal and all that, as if we should always shoot the Viet Com at their arms and shoot their guns off. It's the same thing with these police brutality crap going on all the time. When a man come at you with a knife or a gun, you just shoot him dead or you were going to die.

Many people, came back from the war, were disabled and couldn't put their life back together and became homeless. I guess some people were just week minded. There were other people who are strong minded like my company commander. He was the kind of person that were just born for war, not that he was crazy or hysteric or anything like that, he would wait on the side of the streets to let those Vietnamese villagers passing by, just like typical Americans, but he sure was excited about wars.

Then you got people like me, who are not strong minded, and not weak minded either. People shoot at me, I will dodge. When I am ready to fire back, I might kill one or two. But I got sick and tired of politics, got sick and tired of people who sent me to war and asked me not to be brutal. I don't vote Republican or Democrat. Nixon got the war lasted longer, because he wanted to be the one who ended the war. He actually made deals with the government of South Vietnam not to end the war with Johnson administration.