Wayne Gilchrest: “As a young soldier in Vietnam, I like to speak to my colleagues through the eyes of many young soldiers in Vietnam where…”

“As a young soldier in Vietnam, I like to speak to my colleagues through the eyes of many young soldiers in Vietnam where we would every once in a while help corps men deliver babies, some alive and some dead. We as very young men saw leprosy for the first time. We saw the eyes of the dying Viet Cong. We saw the eyes and looked into the eyes of dying young Americans and said good bye. We laughed and cried with the Vietnamese people, the very old and the very young. One incident, we moved into a small little village, pulled an old man out of a grass hut with one leg, and the old woman in the grass hut began to cry because we thought he was shooting at us and we were going to take him away. And a little girl about 10 screamed and cried and grabbed at our clothes as we were walking this old man away from the village, and then suddenly we young soldiers just stopped. We looked into the eyes of the old man. The old woman froze in fear as to what might happen next, and the little girl just stopped crying, and then the old man looked at us, and we looked back at him, and we suddenly realized something. We were just all people together caught in a horrible struggle, none of which we created.”