It makes you wonder about the motive for it,'' he said. Patrols in Vietnam are the stuff of Mitchell's private nightmares. You learn to make split-second decisions. If you hem and haw, you've lost everybody. So you make a decision.
People die, sometimes innocent people.
That's not because soldiers are bad people. Jim Hall of Augusta was an Army infantryman in Quang Tri Province in 1968. He said it was difficult to determine just who was the enemy in Vietnam. You'd be walking through a rice paddy and a woman would pull up her dress, pull out an AK-47 and open fire. You couldn't tell friendlies from enemies.