Man of war vietnam weapons cache location

This was true of many farmers in the area, Mrs. They had known each other since childhood, their fathers having been neighboring farmers, who both had difficulty making ends meet. They were married four years ago, shortly after Eriksson was drafted. Eriksson, a Sunday artist, who was present while we talked she is twenty-three and is employed as a receptionist in an insurance office. He and his wife, Kirsten, have a neat, modest apartment of three rooms, its walls decorated with paintings by Mrs.

It was just like when you stick a deer with a knife-sort of a thud-or something like this, sir.вЂќД®riksson talked with me at his home in (I shall say) Minneapolis, where, since leaving the Army, he has been earning his living as a cabinetmaker at a local department store. One of the soldiers stabbed her three times, and when defense counsel challenged Eriksson at the court-martial proceedings to describe the sound that the stabbings made, he testified, вЂњWell, IвЂ™ve shot deer and IвЂ™ve gutted deer. The four soldiers with whom he was on patrol raped and killed her, abandoning her body in mountain brush. He knew Mao for slightly more than twenty-four hours. Eriksson never exchanged a word with her neither spoke the otherвЂ™s language. The girlвЂ™s name-her actual name-was Phan Thi Mao. He learned it, eventually, when the girlвЂ™s sister identified her at court-martial proceedings-proceedings that Eriksson himself instigated and in which he served as the governmentвЂ™s chief witness. For as long as she lived, Eriksson did not know her name. They obscured her figure, Eriksson says, but he has the impression that she was slender and slight, and was perhaps five feet two or three inches tall. Like most rural women, she was dressed in loose-fitting black pajamas. He also remembers that she was wearing dusty earrings made of bluish glass he noticed the trinkets because they gave off a dull glint one bright afternoon when he was assigned to stand guard over her. He does remember, though, that she had a prominent gold tooth, and that her eyes, which were dark brown, could be particularly expressive. Eriksson considers himself hazy about the girlвЂ™s looks. Eriksson and four other enlisted men were then on a reconnaissance patrol in the vicinity of the girlвЂ™s home. The image is that of a Vietnamese peasant girl, two or three years younger than he was, whom he met, so to speak, on November 18, 1966, in a remote hamlet in the Central Highlands, a few miles west of the South China Sea. But, as Eriksson unhesitatingly acknowledges, the fact is that when he thinks of his tour of duty in Vietnam it is always a single image that comes to his mind. An infantryman, Eriksson saw a fair amount of action, so, if he chose, he could reminisce about strong points he helped take and fire fights in which he was pinned down, and one ambush, in particular, in which half his unit was wounded. Just seeing an Asian country, for instance, was an adventure, Eriksson says, its landscape so different from the frozen plains of his corner of Minnesota he had never before splashed through paddy fields, he told me, or stood blinking in the sudden sunlessness of lush, entangled jungle, or wandered uncertainly through imprisoning fields of towering elephant grass. Naturally, ErikssonвЂ™s experiences in Vietnam were varied, and many of them impressed themselves vividly on his mind. Honorably discharged in April, 1968, this new war veteran, who is twenty-four and comes from a small farming community in northwestern Minnesota, isnвЂ™t even sure that he would care to hold on to his recollections, if it were possible for him to control his memory. Former Private First Class Sven Eriksson-as I shall call him, since to use his actual name might add to the danger he may be in-has also come back with his memories, but he has no idea what the future will do to them. Like their predecessors in all wars, American veterans of the Vietnamese campaign who are coming home to civilian life have their heads filled with memories that may last the rest of their days, for, no matter how far from the front a man may have spent his time as a soldier, he will remember it as a special time, when, fleetingly, his daily existence appeared to approach the heroic.

Man of war vietnam weapons cache location