TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

A Year in the Provinces
the press implied and poor histories repeat, eyes held
askance. Not withstanding the privileged insights of those
far removed from a battlefield, it is possible for those
actually present to decide on whether to believe their
learned betters or trust their own lying eyes.
Consider our lieutenant’s encounter with the NVA
812 th regiment. He never reported a single confirmed NVA
soldier killed. Consider the near simultaneous
happenstance of an NVA regiment already being shelled by
the biggest guns in the U.S. arsenal then revealing its
position underneath the wings of flight of Marine F­4’s.
That sort of thing kills folks. Anyone who has ever watched
that happen would know: the regiment perished. But the
lieutenant couldn’t cross the open field, whip out his platoon
cmdr’s note book and start counting bodies. Not and be
marked present at the TBS reunion. So not a single NVA
soldier was confirmed killed.
He was then very new to it. Six months later he
would be cagier, as wise­ass in reporting as only a 2 nd
lieutenant can be having survived that long. One fine, quiet
afternoon he looked down from a OP west of Camp Evans to
see a FO’s target­of­the­tour: a company of NVA crossing a
big open tact of land with zero cover. Three hundred rounds
of 155 later four Marine gunships arrived to say howdy, left,
and the arty recommenced re­arranging the bodies. Finally
the regimental COC at Camp Evans asks for a SITREP, with
body­count. The lieutenant says, “I dunno, I counted a
hundred and fifty or so NVA out in the open and you hit
them hard; can’t be many lived.”
“Well­­ ” he hears back, “you’ll have to go down and
count them or we can’t report any confirmed kills.”
“OK, you send some grunts from your pos out to pass
the word with bayonets to any NVA who may have missed it,
that they are dead. Then the six of us will start counting.”
Crickets.
No one watching Combat from a trench would be
disposed to disagree with Churchill that there is nothing
more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result. A close
second, however, surely was to be of an age and
circumstance (not dead) so as to be unconcerned with
telling senior officers how foolish they sounded. Sure, but
the real point is that while over counting of enemy casualties
was widely implied and is now simply assumed to be fact,
our own lying eyes may suggest the opposite was true.
A‐20