which direction the firing was coming from.
But by the end of three months, I could tell which kinds of weapons were firing, where they were firing from, and about how far away they were. I could also get a pretty good sense of what was happening by the way the firing was taking place: Was somebody just taking potshots? Or was the firing building up to a larger engagement? Was the enemy going to stand and hold in place (and all the implications of that)? Or were they simply going to engage us and then try to move away?
By three months, I could quickly process situations like these with just a few sensings.
Something similar goes on with really good athletes when the play is really intense.
I remember going to a playoff football game in which the Miami Dolphins were playing San Diego. I had a really great seat right down near the field, which gave me the best possible visibility; and I was able to observe Dan Marino, one of the greatest quarterbacks ever, at the very height of his powers. The San Diego quarterback (I forget his name) was a good, solid player, but he was several rungs down from Dan Marino.
Very often, Marino would come out of the huddle, go up to the line, and call an audible. You’d expect he would take a panning scan over the entire defense before he did that. But he didn’t work that way. He’d look at one guy in the defense and then make his call — and it was almost always the best call he could have made.
The other quarterback, though, would come up to look over the defense the way you’d expect. He’d have to look all over the place before he could make his decision. And I thought, “Dan Marino has reached a level of expertise that allows him to key on only one thing, and from that picks up what he needs to know. He has a much greater ‘sensing’ ability than the other quarterback.”
This has analogies with combat: The more experience you’ve got, the larger is your inventory of pattern analysis that allows you to pick up on what you need to know; and like Marino, you can make a solid decision based on a very few key indicators, rather than having to try to mentally process a complex or even chaotic set of inputs. So after I’d had sufficient experiences of firefights, I was able to process one or two indicators fairly quickly and come up with a satisfactory course of action.
I have to add that the kind of sensing I’m talking about is not just a matter of experience. It also involves understanding what you were sensing. There’s a strong analytical component, involving reading, research, and applied intelligence. If you don’t have a background of knowledge and understanding that allows you to appreciate these “sensings,” you might undergo these experiences and miss everything they’re trying to offer you. For example: Now that I know I’m hearing an AK-47 and not an M-16, I need to judge from the pattern of firing whether this is somebody who’s just taking a couple of random shots and moving away or somebody who’s hanging in there in a fixed position and plans to stay.
How is it that I can judge that the firing is coming from five hundred and not two hundred yards (in the beginning I couldn’t tell you if it was twenty or two thousand)? The answer: You estimate by means of the flash-bang method (as we called it): There’s a delay between the flash of a firing weapon and the bang. As soon as you see the flash, you begin counting seconds—1001, 1002, 1003. You then use a formula you’ve learned that lets you determine the distance of the weapon.
Why do sounds seem much closer at night? The answer: Because of atmospheric conditions and because activity levels are lower, creating less interference from white noise.
I gathered in information like this wherever I could find it — from reading, from Vietnamese Marines, from other advisers, from training.
There were times of course when what I’d learned did not compute with my own experience, and I had to come up with a different solution.
One example: In training, we were always told when you see a flare pop at night, you freeze. You don’t move. When they pop the flare, they’re looking for motion. When they detect it, they have your location.
This didn’t make sense to me. Your natural instinct is to go to ground and take cover. “Follow your instincts, go to ground,” I told myself. “Better they detect a motion but I end up under cover than me sitting there sweating and thinking, ‘Hope he didn’t see me.’ ”
You also have to understand that there are different kinds of flares, each sending a different kind of message: A hand flare or a grenade flare tells you something different from an artillery flare — though they all illuminate. An illumination grenade or a hand flare tells you your enemy is fairly close to you and he’s shooting it because he expects something, he heard something, or thought he heard something, so his senses are up. What do you do? Get your butt down.
My own processing of this information led me to a different conclusion from the one I received in training.
Later, I became directly involved in improving Marine Corps training — challenging much of what I had learned. I made several videotapes that are still used at basic school. Some validated what I’d been taught and some didn’t.
Zinni’s plunge into Vietnam was not confined to military operations. Along with his Vietnamese Marine companions he lived much of the time with ordinary Vietnamese in their villages and hamlets. Vietnam had a quartering law that required the people to allow troops operating in their area to move into their houses. This was not the burden on the people that it might seem. The Marines didn’t take a place over and throw people out of their houses. They treated the local people with respect, paying for their food and helping with the village chores. (The country-bred troops especially enjoyed helping out with the familiar tasks that reminded them of their own home villages.)
But for Zinni, moving into somebody else’s home was initially hard to get used to; he thought of it as an imposition and an intrusion. But after he saw that the villagers seemed to accept it, and in most cases welcome it, he began to overcome his own discomfort and realize that the kid from Philadelphia was onto a very positive thing. In time, he came to a further realization that all the hardships and extremes he and his companions had to endure were worth his interactions with the Vietnamese people.
Here are some memories of life in the villages — and of related encounters with the enemy:
Rarely did my contemporaries serving with U.S. units ever get to really know the Vietnamese; and then they viewed them with suspicion and even contempt. But living among the people gave me long-lasting insights into a very rich and wonderful culture… and into the impact of so many terrible decades of war and suffering.
When I’d talk with families at meals or during their daily chores, I always found them warm and friendly, yet shy, polite, and reserved. But once I took time to get to know them, they opened up. Making friends was harder, since they didn’t make friends easily. In their eyes, friendship was a serious long-term commitment — not lightly undertaken. But once you made a Vietnamese friend, you had a friend for life.
Where the war touched them, they were enigmatic and stoic. I never encountered self-pity; and this was hard to get used to. Where did they find the resources to stoically accept the pain and anguish I often saw them endure? Why did they so rarely show emotion even after the most traumatic experiences?
Though American units passed through the villages in large numbers, there was little contact. Neither the Americans nor the Vietnamese wanted it. So a lone American taking up residence in a Vietnamese village was a novelty — a curiosity to be checked out. In fact, the local kids were often initially unsure if I was real. They liked to give me a poke, to test if I was.
Though I always had a wonderful time with the Vietnamese, and was always treated with respect, it was hard to know what they thought of Americans in general or of our part in their conflict.
One memorable insight into that came during a warm, friendly conversation with the family of a village chief (I was sharing his house). It was a welcome cool evening in a picturesque hamlet, and we were sitting outside the house after an enjoyable meal.
