Title: Happy hunting ground
Description: Written By Bernie Weisz Vietnam Historian June 3, 2008 Pembroke Pines, Florida e mail:BernWei1@aol.com
Title of Review: "A crazy experiment in a deadly war!"

After being very impressed with Martin Russ's treatment of the American fight on the Island of Tarawa against the Japanese in his book "Line of Departure:Tarawa" and even more so in his Korean War chronicle "The Last Parallel",  I eagerly anticipated reading "The Happy Hunting Ground". Russ did not disappoint me. The author states in the preface that since the book was copyrighted at the height of the Vietnam War (1968 and the infamous "Tet Offensive"), he intentionally used fictional names to avoid any harm to anyone still in Vietnam or in the military at the time of publication.  After being a marine and writing about his experiences in "The Last Parallel" Russ gets itchy to experience once again the thrill of combat after being dormant for almost 15 years. Ignoring the inherent dangers of being in an active war zone, he felt compelled to be there, to observe and write about men in combat, and once again to test his own responses to danger and death.  The book I am reviewing is what Russ compiled from journal entries and letters sent to his wife during the six months he spent in the field with U.S., Vietnamese and Australian troops as an accredited but unaffiliated correspondent.  Russ starts his journey at JFK Airport in New York on July 9th, 1966 with a journal entry of having second thoughts about going. As his plane is about to take off, he realizes that unlike when he was in Korea and with the Marines, he has the backing of no one and is going there totally on his own. With stops in both Los Angeles and Japan, he touches down in Saigon, S. Vietnam on July 12, 1966 at Tan Son Nhut Airport. Russ writes:"When they opened the plane to let us off, the heat came flooding in and I wanted to go back". Perhaps he should have! When Russ arrived in downtown Saigon he wrote:"Saigon is teaming and steaming and very uncharming. The traffic is awful. Tiny blue and white Renault cabs and pedicabs and scooters and bicycles everywhere, and U.S. Army trucks and jeeps. The sidewalks are so choked with people it's easier to walk in the gutter".   Being disgusted with Saigon, Russ books a flight north to Danang to hook up with the Marines in I Corps and go out on patrols with them. He laments about Saigon:"I'll be glad to get out of this lousy place". Before going out on various patrols, Russ comments that at his hotel room in Danang, he could look out his window and "see for miles:the city of Danang, Monkey and Marble Mountain, the broad plains of rice paddies and the South China Sea stretching away to the horizon". On his first patrol, Russ is given a .45 pistol by the commanding seargent for protection in case a "human wave" (massive hordes of North Vietnamese Army soldiers in a suicide charge) overruns his position and is forced to fight in a "big hand-to-hand" mess. He is told by the Seargent "If you get hit, give a yell. We don't leave nobody out there. We'll stay and fight to the last man if we have to". Russ's description of his patrols and ensuing scenes of violence and death are memorable, brutal, highly graphic and gory (I cannot report this in this review-it will never get printed!). I have talked to enough veterans to know vicariously that Russ's description of Vietnam is right on the money. Russ relates:"At dawn we broke out some C rations, ate them cold, and resumed patrolling. The sun is awesome. You get the feeling that if you stood out under it bareheaded it'd strike you dead in 30 minutes. It's so strong that when your walking alone a shaded path and you see a clearing up ahead, you dread having to leave the shade even for a few moments. The air itself is the hotest and heaviest I've ever known. Sitting still in the shade is bad enough but moving around in the open fields is worse, especially when the whole countryside smells of death". Throughout Russ's travels, he drops little pearls of what he saw and heard in Vietnam. You read about the leaflets the Americans dropped on the Viet Cong (North Vietnamese sympathizers living and fighting the Americans in the South) urging them to surrender and join the Americans-with full amnesty (called the "Chieu Hoi" or "Open Arms" program), the senseless killings of civilians by American G.I's for various reasons ranging from lack of proper I.D., being a suspected Viet Cong agent or paymaster, and just because (to my horror) the "marine felt like it"!  Russ exhibits xenophobic, anti-Oriental prejudice when he writes:"You know I still suffer from early Parris Island brainwashing (basic training at Parris Island). Often it is hard for me to think of a yellow person as anything but a gook. After all, the Marines have fought only Orientals in the past 25 years-Japanese, North Koreans, Chinese and now, Vietnamese. To a Marine, they are all one, the collective GOOK. my outlook is therefore twisted". Russ goes on to give us glaring examples of the "unwinability" of the Vietnam War. I will quote one bizarre story that Russ relates about a program called "County Fair". Russ relates:"Here's how a County Fair works. Long before dawn a company of Marines surrounds a Viet-Cong controlled hamlet (a small enclosed cluster of huts and clustered families living in a village). At dawn a company of ARVNS (the American-supported South Vietnamese Army, i.e. Army Republic Viet Nam) moves into the hamlet and gathers all the civilians in one spot. Then the hamlet is searched. Anyone found is captured or killed. Tunnels and caves are blown up. The civilians are fed C rations, given medical attention and lectured by the ralliers. A rallier is an ex-VC now working in the Chieu Hoi program. The ralliers tell the civilians about the good work the Saigon government is doing on their behalf, and give them the reasons why they should quit supporting the National Liberation Front-the political arm of the Viet Cong. Whenever possible, one of the ralliers is a former resident of the target hamlet-and is incidentally expected to expose anyone he knows to be Viet Cong". It is interesting to find a prediction Russ made towards the end of the book (remember, this was the summer of 1966-pre Tet offensive) which went like this:"The villagers take what we give them, but in what way do our presents gain their allegience for the Saigon Government? They know the Americans are going to leave someday, just as the French did. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese will return and never leave". So much for our quest to gain the "hearts and minds" of the people's alliegance in South Vietnam. I would like to quote a passage out of a black prisoner of war, Sgt. James A. Daly, who wrote about his Vietnamese War and P.O.W experiences in his book "A Hero's Welcome" a very interesting segment. Daly writes:"In the field (on patrol), the rule to follow was a simple one. Shoot anything that runs. And the Army couldn't be bothered worrying about why somebody might be running away. Like maybe he was scared, or just a kid who didn't know better. In this area, to be Vietnamese was to be the enemy. I soon came to understand that almost all the Vietnamese people, wherever they lived, looked upon the Americans as their enemies:that the only ones who didn't resent our being there, aside from the heads of the government or the army, were the Vietnamese businessmen who had money or owned property, or who were making money on the war. No peasants among the crowd, that was for sure". Daly makes an even more poignant case for our eventual demise in Vietnam when he wrote:"The truth was, if you looked to see it, hatred for the Americans seemed to be just about everywhere. At first this really bugged me, made me angry in a way. Then, as I considered how miserably these Vietnamese peasants and farmers lived, how they'd suffered through so many years of war, how their small straw hootches had been destroyed so many times, or how they's been forced to keep on moving from one place to another, I began to understand why they felt like they did".  Does this sound like the current military situation with U.S forces trying to "pacify" the Iraqi countryside? In either senario, the likelihood of "winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese (then) and the Iraqi populace (now) is slim and none. By the way, Daly's book, initially published (and totally out of print) in 1975, was reissued in Oct. 2000 under the title "Black Prisoner of War:A Contientious Objector's Vietnam Memoir".  It is a hard find, but well worth the quest and definately an informative gem! Back to Russ's "Happy Hunting Ground", at one point Russ interviews an ARVN general and asks him why ex-North Vietnamese soldiers move South and fight against the North. The general claimed that citizens of the North "were too heavily taxed. You have good crop, they (the communists) take. The Communist Government takes small children away from their family and sends them to Communist School". Russ asks the ARVN General why the VC in the South hated the Americans and the General replied "VC say the Americans come Vietnam, take, take, take like the French, no give. Americans have no plan for the people". People's War People's Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries No wonder we lost the Vietnam War with these Vietnamese anti-American attitudes. Russ also spends a few months with the "NASHOS" (drafted National Royal Australian Regiment Servicemen) and details the differences between the 2 countries methods (U.S. vs Australia) of fighting the war, their attitudes, the tremendous respect the Australians have for their superior officers (non existant in the U.S. Army with the practice of "Fragging" (assassinating unpopular officers by throwing fragmentation grenades in their tent while asleep). Going Back: Australian Veterans Return to Viet Nam Russ's book gets bizarre when towards the end of his tour he decides to let himself get captured by the enemy so he can interview them. Martin writes:"Yes. I'm serious about the V.C. thing. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to say goodbye (to the U.S. Marines) and walk into V.C. territory. I'll wait until I can make some formal contact with them. I'm working a couple of angles now. The toughest part of the project may be finding a V.C. official;they don't exactly wear badges. Even crazier, Russ starts walking around no-man's land in between battles with a waterproof, lamanated card translated into Vietnamese that said:"Greetings! I am a civilian. I came to Vietnam to write a book about the war. I've already written half of it-the half concerning the Saigon Government and it's allies. Now I want to write about the Viet Cong. Many Americans will read my book". Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns Obviously Russ didn't know about indiscriminate VC beheadings and disembowelings, or the upcoming massacre of thousands of innocent women and children the VC and NVA killed in Hue during the Jan., 1968 Tet Offensive (read the book "The Viet Cong Massacre at Hue" by Alje Vennema, Vantage Press, 1976)-a very hard find! Russ thought he would be safe if he showed the enemy the aforementioned card and a paperback copy of his last book "The Last Parallel" with his picture on the back which would convince the enemy he was a harmless writer. Fortunately Russ was never captured and eventually grew weary of the senseless killings and endless, nonproductive "search and destroy" missions that did nothing to win the war for us. Eventually, Russ gets shot (a minor wound) twice on a helicopter from enemy ground fire as his chopper was leaving a "hot" landing zone and is convinced of the dangers of Vietnam and departs the country. As a Huey chopper medevac's him out of Vietnam for the last time, his last entry in the book reads:"We lifted off. I was tight inside (the helicopter) expecting a ground sniper shot, but we climbed safely. I watched the green jungle drop away. It seemed so empty and harmless from up there so unlike it was on the ground. I couldn't imagine anyone living down there. But many do, and they don't have helicopters to carry them out". To conclude, this was a book I could not put down. If you are looking for a true, down to earth story of what it was really like in Viet Nam prior to 1968 and the Tet Offensive, this, while being out of print and difficult to find, is every second worth the hunt!
Subjects: American Conscience Questioned!, American Personal narratives, Prisooner Of War, Traitor? Jehovah's Witness and Vietnam Vietnam War, Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975, Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Places: America, Vietnam
People: Hanoi Hilton, James A. Daley, Prisoner of The North vietnamese, The vietnam War
Time periods: Late 1960's