- Do you remember
the first time you killed someone?
Yeah.
We weren't a family that carried guns
or, any kind of
weapon for violence or anything, though.
We played war and stuff like that
but you know, it's never real.
And my dad and my mom,
they told us, it’s like,
to hurt people or kill or
never, ever--
You always learned that when someone died,
it was, it was something that was detrimental.
Someone felt it.
Someone else needed that person in their lives.
I grew up, you know, protected all my life,
even when I joined the military,
you know, my guys treated me as a kid brother.
I was protected.
- Have you ever killed anyone
- and if so, what happened?
Ah, which time?
We were in a couple different villages
in Surobi, which is a city right next to Charbaron.
We were going to the border of Albania,
to a town nearby.
We set up claymores,
they're bomb devices that you face
and they have like 700 steel balls in them.
We were ambushed.
My bus was blown up.
I was the only one up there
that wasn't hurt.
And scared to death,
scared to death,
really, really, really, really scared.
So I started asking, screaming for help.
"Somebody get up here and help me.
"I'm alone."
And then, and then, then,
two little heads.
As I took the first three steps,
I just was bounding up, basically,
that's when the gunfire started.
We gunned down these two guys
holding a larger machine gun,
a PKM, and another guy holding his ammo.
So they were just running from point A to point B.
We happened to just gun 'em down.
And they were right next to a qalat.
A qalat's a house,
like a little mud-hut,
and a lady came out.
That one guy is as close to me
because Iranian, they come,
they come very close to us
and they attack us at night,
so, we shoot everywhere.
My head was ringing.
Everything was in slow motion.
And there was a rifle on the ground
that had gotten blown out of the bus.
I picked it up and
ran towards the gunfire.
I was down and all I could see was his
head and shoulders, he had a hard hat on,
and then I saw the red emblem.
It was definitely, it was,
and then when his,
when I could see a silhouette,
I blasted ‘em. Silhouettes.
They're not real people, they're just targets.
You don't shoot women or children on the battlefield.
But we were just so, we were just so into the moment.
We watched her pick up the rifle and that was,
well the machine gun,
and that was, that was the cue
and we just lit her up.
And I remember just watching, you know,
there was three of us and we just opened up
and it was just blood up against the wall.
She just slumped over and it was like,
"All right, we got her."
We found a very young Vietnamese person
with his legs mostly gone.
I come to him, I looked at his face
with the flashlights.
He told me just,
just finish me, just finish, I don't want to live, so,
so I kill him.
A bunch of the guys had caught up to me
and they were like, "What did you do?"
And I'm like, "What are you doing here?"
I thought I was dead.
I didn't realize I was the only one that got off the bus.
The whole situation is like almost
an out of body experience where you're looking down
on this situation.
You know, I could've picked a bullet out of there.
Every second, every small little
detail of that exact moment.
I can tell you that, what the dust felt like,
you know, how, how the air tasted on my breath.
Every little detail, you, you know.
Because that's the first time you've done something so big.
If there's a hell, that's probably
what it smells like there.
It penetrates you and it just,
won't go away for a long time.
It's horrible.
Once you realize they're gone, they're dead,
then what death looks like is nothing.
There's nothing there.
There's a body there,
but there's nothing at all there.
One minute you have somebody walking along
and the next, there's just a lump of flesh.
It goes from something, a big something,
to the smallest nothing that there can be.
It goes from dreams and aspirations
to nothing.
You know, you can kick it.
You can hit it with a stick.
You can throw rocks on it,
you can do anything and it won't bother it,
because it's dead.
I know it's not right, it's not right to do this,
but I have to.
If I focus about all this stuff,
in one minute if I focus, I lose my mind,
but I never focus about this stuff.
I didn't feel any personal guilt.
I just, I felt sorry for them,
but, no personal guilt, no.
It was strange, you know, you could disassociate
when you're, you're shooting
at a spot in the jungle,
but this guy was right there and I felt
very compassionate and I was thinking about,
you know his girlfriend, his family, whatever.
I didn't give a fuck who he was.
I was trying to keep me alive.
I wasn't, it wasn't me and a Vietnamese.
It was me and anybody that's got a gun,
anybody, I was, oh man this is hard.
- When they find out that you served in Vietnam,
- do they ask you if you've killed anyone?
Yes.
What is normally your answer?
I say,
I'm not sure.
I may have.
Outside of the Army,
when is it okay to take someone's life?
Do you want to go home and see your family?
Hmm?
Nah, the question's back on you.
Would you want to go home and see your family?
Well then I guess it's okay.
I mean the difference in war
and in civilian life,
you got no choice on one,
on one of those.
If they mean to do harm to myself or my family,
I'll do anything I can to prevent them from doing it.
If it means taking their life, fuck 'em,
they've chosen their path.
Outside of war,
is mostly never justified.
But in war, neither side deserves to die, honestly.
I mean, that guy over on that side is fighting
for what he believes in and
you're fighting for what you believe in.
Both have families and children probably and, you know.
I think there are people that just,
it's not that they don't deserve to live,
it's, well, it's not that they
don't deserve to have been born,
but maybe they don't deserve to go on living.
There are, I do have that belief.
That there comes a point, when,
you know, enough's enough from one person.
Enough's enough.
You can't live in our world.
That's just the way it, you know,
the problem there is somebody, someone
has to have the power to say
that you can't do that.
And now who, and then somebody has to give them that power.
That's, it's all so confusing to me.