As a Vietnam vet, what was the saddest thing you saw during the war?

Abdullah Cheema

18 Sep, 2024

It’s taken me 50 years to write about this, but here it is. I thought about writing anonymously, but that wouldn’t help me get this off my chest.

I was with an infantry platoon in the Mekong Delta in the summer of 1969. We walked out of the trees into an open rice paddy and saw several people dragging an unexploded 500-pound bomb toward a wooded area. They were dressed like the Viet Cong — black pants, white shirts — and were about 500 yards away. That bomb could have been turned into a deadly booby trap.

500-Pound Bomb in Vietnam

This area was a “free fire zone,” meaning all civilians were supposed to have been evacuated, and only the enemy was left. So, we opened fire. They scattered into the trees, and we didn’t chase them. As it got darker, we heard crying and moaning from deep in the jungle.

I went with two other soldiers to check it out. We found a young guy lying on his back, in a lot of pain. When we took his shirt off, there was a bullet hole in his upper chest with no exit wound. He wasn’t bleeding out, but the blood was filling his lung.

The other two guys wanted to call for a medivac to get him out, but I was in charge and said no. I wasn't going to risk a helicopter crew for an enemy soldier who was going to die anyway. He might have been one of the V/C who ambushed us last week and killed some of our guys.

So, we waited. His breathing got slower, and I kept checking his eyes. After about 20 minutes, he died. Or so I thought…

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of a woman screaming. She had come out of nowhere with her kids. There were no villages around. Turns out, the "enemy soldier" I watched die was her 13-year-old son.

I’ve tried to justify what I did over the years — it was dark, the V/C were young, we couldn’t have saved him. But the truth is, war had taken a piece of my soul that night.

I saw a lot of terrible things in Vietnam, but nothing was as gut-wrenching as watching a mother scream for her dead son.