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Home WINTER SOLDIER -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY |
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Once we were picking up a slingload of ammunition, and the army had a habit of putting pick up zones and drop off zones right near well-traveled roads, road traveled by the local villagers.
So we were hovering over this slingload of howitzer rounds, and I was hanging out the window observing what appeared to be a 12-year-old Vietnamese boy standing there watching us. And as we lifted up with the load, the road wash increased because of the weight, and it blew him into the path of a 2-1/2-ton truck with trailer which killed him instantly.
When that happened, my first reaction, and my flight engineer, he was observing this too, our first reaction was, I guess you'd call normal. It would be horror, pain, and then I realized, I caught myself immediately and I said, "No, you can't do that," because you develop a shell while you're in the military. They brainwash you. They take all the humanness out of you.
And you develop this crust which enables you to survive in Vietnam. And if you let that protective shell down even for a second, it's the difference between you flipping out or managing to make it through.
And I caught myself letting the shell down, and I tightened up right away and started laughing about it and joking about it with the flight engineer. He sort of moved on the same logic because I guess it sort of knocked his shell down too.
In one incident we were flying and we took fire from six NVA which caused the ship to explode in the air and make a crash landing.
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