Messing With The Enemy Dead

[exlrrp]

I personally never saw people mutilating the dead although I remember running up an kicking one I was so stoked--take THAT mother fcker!! It was personal.
Part of the problem with the perception of Vietnam Vets as "souvenir Takers" was that we encouraged it!! I mean the perception.
Look at the card below, this was from my platoon, the 4th, after the LRP company i was in (E Co/20th inf (LRP)] had been renamed C Co/75th Rgr
This card is shown right at the gateway to the 4th platoon pictures at http://www.e20-lrp-c75-rgr.org/ (Photo archives> platoons>4th platoon)
Ive written to comploain that this bullshit card insults everybody in that outfit!! Yeah we joked about it but it never happened--like Tom says who want to be carrying around all this stinking shit?
I never saw it in either off the units I was in
But its hard to blame other people for the perception when theyre waving this around 40 years later

stay good
james
PS, this came after I had left the unit--when i was in it, the name for the platoon was The Professionals and we tried to act that way

[39mto39g]

I never thought much about them after they were dead, Fuc um.
I did see a couple things though. One time our Machine gunner Cut this dear NVA head off with a Dull Machety, Must have taken him 10 wacks. After he gets it off he put it on hs sholder and said Look Two heads are better than one , then he through it down, Pretty sick puppy but he being 6 foot 8 and a little over 300 lbs and packen heavy, there weren't a lot of E-6 that would tell him to do anything,
Then One time I seen a guy take two enemy and stick there knives in each and put there hands on there knives like they stabbed each other, I have no Idea what that was about and didn't care.
Most of the time we would take there servisable clothing and anything else that was military off them and burn the stuff and just leave them .

Ron

worst thing I ever did was take 200 piaster from a Dead VC, and take some MPC found on a dead NVA in the Chu Moor Mountain area. Other than that didn't do much of anything to the enemy dead, 39mto39g didn't allow my troops to do anything to the dead.

[Andy]

Hey Scamp,

I was just going thru this thread and thought I?d tell you, you might be partly wrong. Not sure what you were firing in support of the ground troops but if it was big, those weapons didn?t always leave Charlie looking like ?raspberry jam?.

When we followed up fire from a 175mm or 8? gun or a B-52 strike, there was something strange that happened. A bad guy might be sitting or laying some place near ground zero, not have a mark on him but he was dead. If close enough to a big enough explosion, all the air gets sucked out of a person?s lungs.

We actually had one that was sitting with his back to a tree, the tree was partly still standing. Suddenly spotting a bad guy sitting there facing your direction would sort of freak you right out.

Stay healthy,
Andy