TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

John Burwell Wilkes
barefoot children returned, the mine field had functioned
perfectly.
I was quite angry with the Marines and gave them a shaming
tongue lashing. In retrospect, this minor incident was the worst,
and the only, maltreatment of civilians by Marines that I ever
witnessed, or even heard about, during my entire tour in Viet
Nam.
As a side note, we were probably near a grave yard on another
hot siesta afternoon in the same area. Little cemeteries were
everywhere with eight­inch long centipedes living around them.
The word was that they feasted on the dead bodies. For poetic
justice, I believe it was the instigator of the cactus mine field that
had fallen asleep and allowed one of the little beasties to attach its
many feet to his belly. As I remember, the corpsman killed the
centipede but was afraid of attempting its removal. The Marine
was sent to the battalion surgeon with the disgusting centipede still
attached to his belly.
The 27th Marines’ compound had several sand bagged
observation posts perched high atop steel observation towers. The
junior officers were tasked with making nightly inspection rounds
to make sure the Marines manning the posts stayed vigilant. One
night on my watch, I climbed up into one of the OPs. I found some
excitement brewing as the Marines had sighted a few ostensible
Viet Cong skulking around about two hundred yards from the
perimeter. The Marines had a Starlight Scope zeroed to an M­16
rifle with which they were getting glimpses of armed Viet Cong
moving between bushes. These VC were in a no man’s land where
all the area civilians had been warned and certainly knew to stay
far away at night. A Marine handed me the Starlight scoped rifle
so I could see for myself. I saw a man carrying a rifle move
quickly and then abruptly stop behind a bush on the edge of the
cleared buffer. After a long moment of nothing, I was almost ready
to hand the rifle back when a sharp point of light penetrated
through the bush. One of the VC had lit a cigarette. I put the cross
hairs on the beam of light and squeezed the trigger. The light
immediately went out and no more movement was detected. The
next day we went out to see what we might find at the location
where I had fired the bullet, but it was obvious the area had been
swept of any telltale footprints. If I had killed or wounded an
enemy that night, it would be the one and only time I would take a
life directly by using a weapon in my hands. However, before I
was to return to the States, the numbers of enemy KIAs taken
indirectly by my artillery would be a staggering number if known.
My first firefight came unexpectedly after a very long day of
maneuvering in the heat. I had been tasked to go with a platoonsize
patrol simply as the forward observer, since the platoon
commander, a new infantry second lieutenant, would lead the
patrol. The afternoon part of our mission was to function as a
blocking force for a sweep by the Korean Marines across the
adjacent sector. As we sat in defilade in a tree line along the edge
of a sandy area that looked like the Sahara Desert, shimmering
mirages wafted up off the sand. But instead of escaping Viet Cong
being chased through the mirages, we suddenly were confronted
by a hundred or so civilians from the next village running straight
for us. I shouted at them in Vietnamese to stop, but they paid no
attention, because they harbored no fear of us at all. But they were
terrified of the Korean Marines who were notorious for executing
heads of households in front of their families wherever and
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