Bringing It All Back Home

by Philip F. Napoli

  Giannini graduated from boot camp on May 12, 1966. He requested his family not come to South Carolina for the ceremony, as he would have only a few hours of liberty and wanted to spend it with the other recruits. He was proud of his accomplishment. In a May 13 letter to his family, written as he rode on a Greyhound bus headed to Camp Lejeune for the next phase of training, he wrote: “Mom, Dad, Flo, I think I am finally turning into a mature young man. Never have I felt more confident in my own ability to do something, anything.”

  On June 8 he wrote that he had finally received his PFC designation, and he found that the new status suited him:

  Oh, I made PFC (Private First Class). I was given my stripes! The Lieutenant handed out our certificates. I’m really proud to receive my first stripe. Only 24 privates made it out of the whole company. A stripe puts the finishing touch on our uniforms … Being a PFC is really different than being a mere private. I give the orders now. One private gave me some lip, we fought, he obeyed my orders after we fought. I’m in charge of seeing that the whole barracks is cleaned out every morning. This means I give orders to almost everyone, but I don’t do any physical work.

  Giannini completed Individual Combat Training in June 1966. By the end of July he was working at battalion headquarters at Camp Geiger, waiting to hear about Officer Candidate School (OCS). At Camp Geiger, he found what he called the MCW (menial clerical work) boring. He was accepted to Officer Candidate School, arriving there on October 5, 1966.

  He graduated from OCS that December, and his mother put the lieutenant’s bars on his uniform. There was a break in letter writing as Giannini went home on leave after graduation from OCS to wait for his orders. By the time Giannini arrived in Vietnam in June 1967, he was a married man.

  Assigned to the First Battalion, Third Regiment, Third Marine Division, Giannini belonged to the Special Landing Force (SLF), a unit of two Marine battalions that could be called on to support other Marines who were in-country fighting on the ground. By July 4, 1967, he was on board the USS Iwo Jima, floating in the South China Sea, assigned to an 81-millimeter mortar platoon.

  Before explaining what happened to him in Vietnam, Giannini wanted me to understand the sense of foreboding and fear that arriving in the place generated. He spoke of the heat and the smell, as many veterans do. But he also told me two stories indicating that communicating the atmosphere of Vietnam was key to my interview with him.

  He was sent to a place near the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, to join his unit with two other freshly minted lieutenants he had met in OCS, Keith Gregory and Jim Grosshans.

  We flew by C-130 from Da Nang to Dong Ha, and we spent the night at Dong. The next morning we went to the LZ [landing zone], the three of us, and we’re waiting and we ask where is the First Battalion, Third Marines. This guy says, “You see all those clouds of dust out there?” It’s like maybe three or four miles away, and we’re like, “Yeah, what is that?” He says, “Well, that’s…” I think he called it an “arc light.” I said, “What the hell is that?” He said, “It’s a B-52 mission, that’s where your battalion is.” So when I heard that, my vision was that we were going to land right in a firefight, and I mean there’d be a big battle going on. And we’d be right in the fight. The earth was actually rumbling from this arc light.

  Giannini wanted me to know that combat made the earth move, both metaphorically and physically.

  He continued his story:

  We flew north. Dong Ha was a pretty big base then. It was mostly red earth, a lot of dust, and we flew north and we flew over jungle and then we came down in a small clearing. A little jungle, well, it was all jungle, but we came down in this clearing, and they said, “Get off.” We got off, the three of us, and there was nobody there. It was like just all jungle. I said, “What the hell?” All of a sudden, I swear, just like ghosts coming out of the jungle, these Marines coming out of nowhere. “You the new guys?” “Yeah.” “Okay, come with us.” And we followed them, and they took us into a ravine. And down at the bottom of the ravine there were some more Marines.

  What I didn’t realize and I found out really fast was that we were in the DMZ.

  I remember the first night; it was beautiful. Pitch-black; beautiful stars. They had been under some severe rocket attack. All of this I found out later, they had actually, there were a lot of Marines from my battalion, there were a lot of tanks. But the tanks were piled with body bags.

  Transferred to Bravo Company within the battalion and stationed aboard the USS Duluth, he took over a rifle platoon that had just returned from an area just south of the DMZ. Being part of the SLF was a strange existence. On July 31, he wrote a long letter home to his wife:

  There are a lot of things we are doing wrong over here. We just aren’t meeting the V.C. on their terms. The concept of a force in readiness is a farce when fighting the V.C. They just won’t meet us when we have such force. They’d rather sit back and harass us until we make a fatal mistake.

  We are really driving ourselves but the returns for our endeavors are miserable. My men, and sometimes myself, are drained of physical endurance. They are so tired they can’t stay awake when they know the V.C. are all around them. If we don’t get some slack soon we might get into a real bad mess one night.

  In a letter dated August 6 he responded to a request. His wife had asked him to supply her with arguments in defense of the war. It is tempting to speculate that she was being challenged by friends and acquaintances over Joe’s military service. After all, by 1967, antiwar sentiment in the country was rising. Unfortunately, he had little to offer, except his sense of duty to his country:

  I just received your letter asking for some good pro-war arguments. To tell you the truth there isn’t much I can say to support this war. I believe we have made a mistake in getting involved in the first place. We should never have committed American troops to this dirty war. Now it’s become a war of attrition, in which we are afraid to lose face … I live in a society that calls upon its young people to suffer a few hardships, like waging a war. You might say I’m paying for what I’ve taken for granted in the last 24 years. If I didn’t come over here, I would be cutting myself off from this society. This nation has committed itself, I believe mistakenly, but to go against its policy would be unwise for a person in my position. For me it has become a personal struggle, I have to survive this perplexing mess. That’s my cause.

  However, in a letter to his father, dated August 5, he does cite one more reason to do a good job: “Although I can’t wait to get out of the Far East, I’ve decided to do the best possible job I can. If I don’t owe it to myself, I owe it to my men.”

  In mid-August 1967, his unit moved into the Que Son Valley, southwest of Da Nang, in Quang Nam province.

  What I didn’t know about the Que Son Valley was that it was a very hotly contested place. I think Marines might have called it “Happy Valley,” but that’s because it was just the opposite. We started on a battalion sweep. I know now exactly the dates when this happened. It was August 12 when we went into the valley. Up until that time I had taken only four casualties, three from booby traps and one from friendly fire. That night I would lose my first Marine.

  He had sent Marines out beyond the company perimeter to listen and watch for any enemy that might approach. A firefight ensued, and in the confusion there was a friendly-fire incident.

  That was my baptism of fire. It was in the Que Son Valley. I only had about twenty-six Marines. Twelve or thirteen were hit that night.

  This particular incident would have relevance later, after Giannini returned to the United States.

  As the days and weeks passed, he knew the war was changing him, even as it happened, and he tried to make this clear in letters home. In a letter to his sister dated September 12 he wondered:

  Whatever happened to the student that was so interested in world organization and ways to keep the peace? I studied for 4½ years the efforts man has made and is making to bring world peace. Now I find myself fig
hting a meaningless war, in contradiction to everything I believed in just a short while ago. I just can’t go along with thinking that we have a good cause.

  By the end of September, Giannini found himself locked in a personality conflict with a superior officer. As the conflict had escalated, he wrote home that the officer wanted to relieve him of command because he believed that Giannini “lacked maturity” and had grown too close to his men. The tension reached a peak during an incident Giannini will never forget.

  [The officer] called me up for a meeting. We were on a hill looking down on a village across a small river, and he’s telling me that he wants my platoon to go down the river about a mile because the battalion is going to cross the river in the morning. My platoon’s going to be flank security. A mile down the river. This is ridiculous.

  It’s about dusk and this woman walks out of the village by herself. She’s carrying empty water cans, and she’s walking down to the river. I could see this clearly. I mean, she’s not far away, maybe forty or fifty meters away. I’m looking downhill at her.

  All of a sudden I’m standing there with [the officer] and someone opens up on her, a Marine. And they fire at her, but they miss. You could see the bullets, and [the officer] yells down to these Marines, “What’s going on down there?” And they said, “We’ve got a VC across the river.” And [the officer] said, “Well, if it’s a VC, kill it.” And I said to [the officer], “That’s no VC. It’s just a woman.” And they just opened up, and she actually—they were missing her, it’s weird, I mean, she actually bent down, got the water. She turned around and started to walk away, and I hear [smack], like that. A bullet right in the back. You could hear it. And she went down. I, at that point, didn’t make any more protests. I just said, “She’s not a VC.” And he just gave them permission to open up, and the whole Marine squad opened up on her.

  I turned around and I had this thought that I was losing my humanity, but I would just hold on. I felt like it was still there, but, I mean, I didn’t cry. I just turned around and I walked away. But I felt like, you know, I was losing it. I was losing it. But, then again, I felt there was just a little bit left.

  The next morning we went out early, my platoon. We get down to the river, and it’s deep, and it’s flowing fast. So we get across the river, and now we are making our way back to the battalion. And on the way back, we had to pass by the woman. She was still there. It must have been midday by now. She was just lying there in the sand. No one had come to get her or anything, and we passed by her. There were no repercussions. I didn’t think about turning [the officer] in, but it was out-and-out murder and nobody said anything, nobody did anything.

  He says it again, as if to drive the point home.

  I felt like I was losing a bit of my humanity. But I would hold on.

  The memory of this event echoes through his life. The sights and sounds are as vivid for him today as they were in 1967.

  In the next letter to his sister he wrote:

  I hate being away, I hate everything I’m doing and seeing. I’m getting by but I feel like I’m being skinned alive. I’m losing something out here, I just hope it returns when I leave this place. I wouldn’t mind carrying such a heavy burden if I could believe in what we are doing.

  On February 14, 1968, Delta One, a sister Marine company, was on point just ahead of Giannini and walked into a minefield. Six or seven Marines were badly injured. Giannini was ordered forward by his company commander, “Mad Dog,” to assess the situation and report back. When he arrived at the scene, Giannini found Delta One’s platoon commander crying from grief. The helicopters couldn’t land; they were forced to hover off the ground for fear of detonating additional mines. As casualties were loaded on board, Giannini stayed with a Marine who ended up being the last one put onto the chopper.

  When we got him to the chopper, he was right there. His head was right there in front of me. And what happened is, when the Marines went to pick him up to put him on the chopper, his head went forward. And I surmised that he must have seen his legs for the first time because all of a sudden his head fell back and his eyes were wide open. And you could see he was turning white. The blood was draining from his face. And that’s it. That’s the last I saw of him. He was gone in a swirl of dust. I don’t know if he lived. I’m hoping that he did live. If he did live, I would say that he looked like he would be a double amputee. It was that bad. It was bad. But all these other Marines were the same way.

  Maybe the next day, I guess, we went back to Quang Tri. Back at the base, the battalion tells the company commander they want me to go out. They’re going to send out a section of 81-millimeter mortars with me. They’re heavy mortars, and they want us to establish a combat base out from the battalion. So, again, here we go the next morning, my platoon. We load up on slicks [a Bell UH-1 helicopter used for troop and ammunition transport], with a section of 81-millimeter mortars. And my platoon, altogether seventy-eight Marines, we go out west. I don’t know how many klicks [kilometers] out west, but pretty far.

  And they drop us on a hill, and here I am, by myself. I’ve got seventy-eight Marines. I’ve got a section of mortars which I’m not allowed to fire. Only battalion fires these things. You’ve got to go through the battalion fire center. I don’t have authority to fire these things. I have to clear it through battalion. But as we’re flying in, I notice we’re not too far from the village and the minefield [where the Marines had detonated the mines].

  We’re on the hill. I’m by myself. We dig in. I send my listening posts out. I set my defensive fires. And while we’re on the hill, one of my sergeants walks up to me. He’s got a little pup in his hand. I mean, a little newborn pup. He said, “Lieutenant, I found this pup down the hill.” He said, “What should I do with it?” I said, “It’s got to be a pup from a VC tracking dog. Kill it, but do it silently. Slit its throat.” And he just turned around, and he walked away with the pup.

  So I’m out there by myself, and I decide I have to send out patrols. I just can’t just be sitting there. They obviously know where we are. I mean, here we are on a hill among them. They know we’re there. I call it Indian Country.

  I had to be aggressive. So I sent out a patrol. I kept them away from the village and away from the minefield.

  Anyhow, they went out and they started radioing the checkpoints, and they got on the ridgeline across from us, like a small valley. And all of a sudden there was a loud explosion. They’d hit a land mine. They radio back. They radio to me that the squad leader, Baker, stepped on a land mine. So I called in a medevac. They go out there to pick up Baker, and they’re now taking him back to Quang Tri. And the rest of the squad comes in. Now it’s getting toward dusk, and they radio out to me that Baker’s dead.2

  Every dusk and every dawn, we would do a thing called stand-to, where every Marine would get in his fighting hole and face outboard, and we would remain that way until it was stand-down. But when we stood down, you couldn’t smoke. You couldn’t have any fires. I mean, they could see you light a cigarette from half a mile away. And they would shoot at the flame. So, you know, we would run silent. Stand to for a while and then stand down, smoking lamp is out. Nothing.

  Well, I ordered stand-to, and every Marine got in his fighting hole and faced outboard. This is what we did every dusk. And I went over to the 81-millimeter mortar position, which was in the center of our position on the hill. And I walk up to the sergeant, the section leader, and I said, “Fire mission.” And he looked at me and he said, “No can do. You can’t do this. You need battalion’s permission.” And I said, “Sergeant, I’m the commanding officer on this hill. You follow my orders. Fire mission.” He figured it out pretty quick, I think. I gave him a fire mission and I gave him the coordinates and everything, and he fired the mission, heavy explosive, and he fired away. So I had four heavy mortars firing ten rounds apiece. That’s forty rounds.

  And while these rounds were starting to hit, battalion called. It was the executive officer. He wanted to
know basically what the fuck is going on. And I said—they called him Five—“Five, I’ve got buku movement out here.” And he said, “Lieutenant, you know, what do you mean by ‘buku’?” I said, “Well, I’ve got a hundred enemy troopers advancing on us.” He said, “Are you sure?” He said, “Because you’re in a lot of shit. You know you can’t do what you’re doing. You have to go through the battalion fire control.” I said, “I’m sure I’ve got enemy coming straight at us.” He says, “You better be sure because you’re in a world of shit [if not].”

  Got off the radio. I went back over to the platoon section sergeant, and I said, “Fire again.” So that’s another forty rounds. And then all of a sudden the rounds were hitting. It was four tubes. Each one, ten rounds. Eighty rounds had hit, high explosive. I ordered stand-down, and the Marines got out of the fighting holes, and they all were facing northeast. They were facing northeast looking at the village. It was burning. And the same sergeant who had had the puppy walked up. Sergeant King. He walks up to me and he says to me, “Lieutenant.” I looked over at him, and the fire was making his face glow. And he said, “You know, Lieutenant, I didn’t kill that pup.” I said, “Okay, Sergeant.”

  Then he said, “Lieutenant.” I said, “What, Sergeant?” He says, “Payback is a motherfucker, isn’t it?”

  The narrative conveys the ambiguity Giannini found in Vietnam. Who was paid back, and for what? Did the Vietnamese get what they deserved because Baker stepped on a land mine? Was Baker’s death payback for Giannini’s order to kill the pup? Morality in Vietnam, for Giannini, was not clear in that moment. All those meanings are possible, and Giannini is describing himself as someone every bit as compromised as the officer who ordered Marines to shoot a woman. He was angry and made angry decisions that intended destruction. This is what war did to him, and why now he is against unnecessary wars.