Free Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli

“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