<Begin Segment 26>

TI: So let's start talking about you as your role as an officer. So talk about what you did.

HY: Yeah, I had a platoon, rifle platoon. And...

TI: Explain to me what that is. I mean, how large is a rifle platoon?

HY: Yeah, a rifle platoon is about forty-five men. And then they were reinforced, you know, when you go into combat you're reinforced with machine guns and rockets, and so it's about fifty men in total when you're at full strength. But after a few months and attrition and so forth, most of the time I had about thirty-five men. And I was fortunate in that, again, serendipitously, that I had trained in the U.S. This group I had trained formed up and trained in Camp Pendleton, and I took to Vietnam. And we were a unit, it was like a band of brothers. After that, they started rotating people in and out piecemeal. And so that's why morale and everything, I think, went down during the course of the war. Because people weren't going there... in World War II, you went in as a unit, you came out, refurnished, and went back as a unit. In this case, after us, it was all piecemeal.

TI: Why do you think they changed that? This is a true and tried, almost tradition in terms of...

HY: Well, one thing, the way they used the Marine Corps in Vietnam was entirely different than World War II. In World War II, we were an assault force. We went in, assaulted a unit, came back out, and then came back, went in again. In Vietnam, the Marine Corps was used as a, for protracted land warfare. You came in, like an army, you came in and stayed and you rotated. And the Marine Corps was never designed for that. You had fifteen days of supply. So when we first went in after the few first months, we were, our uniforms were rotting away. Everything was, we lived on c-rations, two rations a day, and so it was very difficult in the beginning. Later on, I guess, they started building more permanent facilities. But in Vietnam, the Marine Corps had more casualties than in World War II. Most people don't know that.

TI: Oh, I did not know that.

HY: Because we were constantly... you know, in World War II, a Marine had maybe forty-five days of combat and went back in, whereas you were just having combat continuously through that period. So I was fortunate in that I had a platoon that I had trained, and we were a unit. And yeah, we started to replace some of the, we had some attrition and replaced it, but it was never the same. You lose some of the good NCOs, non-commissioned officers who were squad leaders, and guys who really ran the platoon. I mean, I was a platoon commander, but the real work was being done by the squad leaders and the fire team leaders. And they were rotating out, and it was, toward the end it was not, you didn't have the unit cohesion that you had before, and that was the sad thing. And they were rotating us out of battalions. I mean, in the old day, a battalion was your core, that was the core of the Marine Corps. You know, you were 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, and you remembered that all through your life. But then they started moving companies out of battalions. By the time I got to one of the major battles, I didn't know who the other companies were in my battalion, and who I could trust and depend on. So that was part of the disintegration of the services during the Vietnam War.

TI: Because by that time it was kind of like a hodgepodge? You still had your platoon that was pretty cohesive, but some of these other ones weren't like that, they had pretty much...

HY: Yeah. And that's when they started having drug problems and all the other problems.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.