"We are all alone in an Indian country"
"We are all alone in an Indian country"
That was how soldiers described it when they talked among themselves in Vietnam during the 1960s. While not politically correct in the '90s, it summarized how 5,000 select CAC/CAP Marines and Navy Corpsmen felt as they stood for the first time in an isolated Vietnamese village, surrounded by jungle, booby-traps, and thousands of supposedly hostile Vietnamese civilians. They were part of the Marine Corps Combined Action Program (CAP). CAP placed a squad of Marines and one Navy Corpsman in villages from Chu Lai to the DMZ in South Vietnam from 1965 to 1971.
Images of fanatical Viet Cong pouring out of the villages, jungles, and rice paddies hovered in the mind of each of us as we hunkered down for our first night of sleep in such supposedly hostile territory. That first night each new Marine and Corpsman counted the friendly faces of a handful of Americans, then looked with mixed emotions at a poorly equipped platoon of Vietnamese Popular Forces, the local village "militia".
Each Marine or Corpsman certainly pondered the distance to the nearest American military base. Each calculated how long it would take for help to arrive. Each knew that, when needed, help would probably not arrive in time.
Publishers, Michael E. PetersonPraeger, New York, and NYPage 19. "USMC CAP Web Site Home Page." USMC CAP Web Site Home Page. http://capmarine.com/ (accessed October 13, 2011).
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By Joe Mueller for History Salon
