Review Written by Bernie Weisz, Historian, Vietnam War, June 3, 2008 Pembroke Pines, FL USA Contact: BernWei1@aol.com Title of Review: A crazy experiment in a deadly war! After being very impressed with his treatment of the American fight on the Island of Tarawa against the Japanese in his book "Line of Departure:Tarawa," and even more so in his Korean War chronicle "The Last Parallel," I eagerly anticipated reading "The Happy Hunting Ground." Russ did not disappoint me. The author states in the preface that since the book was copyrighted at the height of the Vietnam War (1968 and the infamous "Tet Offensive"), he intentionally used fictional names to avoid any harm to anyone that was still in Vietnam or in the military at the time of this book's publication. After being a Marine and writing about his experiences in "The Last Parallel" Russ gets itchy to once again experience the thrill of combat after being dormant for almost 15 years. Ignoring the inherent dangers of being in an active war zone, he felt compelled to be there, to observe and write about men in combat, and once again test his own responses to danger and death.

This memoir is derived from what Russ compiled from journal entries and letters sent to his wife during the six months he spent in the field with U.S., Vietnamese and Australian troops as an accredited but unaffiliated correspondent. Russ started his journey on July 9th, 1966, at JFK Airport in New York City, with a journal entry of having second thoughts about going. As his plane was about to take off, he realized that unlike when he was in Korea and with the Marines, he had the backing of no one and was going there totally on his own volition. With stops in both Los Angeles and Japan, he touched down on July 12, 1966 at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, South Vietnam. Russ remarked after:"When they opened the plane to let us off, the heat came flooding in and I wanted to go back." Perhaps he should have! When Russ arrived in downtown Saigon he wrote:"Saigon is teaming and steaming and very uncharming. The traffic is awful. Tiny blue and white Renault cabs and pedicabs and scooters and bicycles everywhere, and U.S. Army trucks and jeeps. The sidewalks are so choked with people it's easier to walk in the gutter."

Being disgusted with Saigon, Russ booked a flight north to Danang with the intention of hooking up with the Third Marines in I Corps and going out on patrols with them. He lamented about Saigon:"I'll be glad to get out of this lousy place". Before going out on various patrols, Russ commented that at his hotel room in Danang, he could look out his window and impressed with the view, he wrote that he could: "See for miles:the city of Danang, Monkey and Marble Mountain, the broad plains of rice paddies and the South China Sea stretching away to the horizon." On his first patrol, Russ was given a .45 pistol by the commanding sergeant for protection in case a "human wave" (massive hordes of North Vietnamese Army soldiers in a suicide charge) overran his position and was forced to fight in a "big hand-to-hand" mess. He was told by the Sergeant: "If you get hit, give a yell. We don't leave nobody out there. We'll stay and fight to the last man if we have to". Russ's descriptions of what he witnessed on patrols and ensuing scenes of violence and death he described are memorable, highly graphic and gory. Russ's description of search and destroy missions, savage combat assaults and agonizing patrols in the blazing Vietnamese sun is extremely accurate when juxtaposed with other memoirs. Russ explained:"At dawn we broke out some C rations, ate them cold, and resumed patrolling. The sun is awesome. You get the feeling that if you stood out under it bareheaded, it'd strike you dead in 30 minutes. It's so strong that when your walking alone a shaded path and you see a clearing up ahead, you dread having to leave the shade even for a few moments. The air itself is the hottest and heaviest I've ever known. Sitting still in the shade is bad enough but moving around in the open fields is worse, especially when the whole countryside smells of death."

Throughout Russ's travels, he dropped little pearls in "Happy Hunting Ground" of what he saw and heard in Vietnam. Russ chronicled witnessing American airplanes engage in psychological warfare by dropping leaflets on the Viet Cong (North Vietnamese sympathizers living and fighting Americans in the South). These leaflets urged the V.C. to surrender and join the Americans-with full amnesty. This was the infamous "Chieu Hoi" or "Open Arms" program. According to Russ, small mini atrocities were commonplace. Chronicled are Martin's witnessing of senseless killings of civilians by Marines for various reasons. They ranged peasants lacking proper I.D., being a suspected Viet Cong agent or paymaster, and just because the Marine "felt like it!" Russ exhibited xenophobic, anti-Oriental prejudice when he wrote:"You know I still suffer from early Parris Island brainwashing (basic training at Parris Island). Often it is hard for me to think of a yellow person as anything but a gook. After all, the Marines have fought only Orientals in the past 25 years-Japanese, North Koreans, Chinese and now, Vietnamese. To a Marine, they are all one, the collective GOOK. My outlook is therefore twisted."

Russ went on to give glaring examples of how the Vietnam War presented the U.S. military with a victory that was never attainable. Russ described one bizarre story regarding a program that was called a "County Fair." Russ elucidated: "Here's how a County Fair works. Long before dawn a company of Marines surrounds a Viet-Cong controlled hamlet (a small enclosed cluster of huts and clustered families living in a village). At dawn a company of ARVNS (the American-supported South Vietnamese Army, i.e. Army Republic Vietnam) moves into the hamlet and gathers all the civilians in one spot. Then the hamlet is searched. Anyone found is captured or killed. Tunnels and caves are blown up. The civilians are fed C rations, given medical attention and lectured by the ralliers. A rallier is an ex-VC now working in the Chieu Hoi program. The ralliers tell the civilians about the good work the Saigon government is doing on their behalf, and give them the reasons why they should quit supporting the National Liberation Front-the political arm of the Viet Cong. Whenever possible, one of the ralliers is a former resident of the target hamlet-and is incidentally expected to expose anyone he knows to be Viet Cong."

It is interesting to find a prediction Russ made towards the end of the book (remember, this was the summer of 1966-pre Tet offensive) which went like this: "The villagers take what we give them, but in what way do our presents gain their allegiance for the Saigon Government? They know the Americans are going to leave someday, just as the French did. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese will return and never leave." So much for our quest to gain the "hearts and minds" of the people's allegiance in South Vietnam." Hearts and Minds was a euphemism for a campaign by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, that intended to win the popular support of the Vietnamese people, particularly in rural area. These were the groups most susseptable to Viet Cong propaganda and forced recruitment. The program was inspired by then President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He used some version of the phrase "hearts and minds" a total of 28 times in different speeches from January 16, 1964 to the last time he mentioned that phrase, on August 19, 1968. The Campaign in South Vietnam was intended to win the popular support of the indigenous population. U.S. Army Civil Affairs units, attempting "pacification" of the countryside with programs such as the "Strategic Hamlet Program" were all attempts to isolate, win the allegiance of as well as protect South Vietnamese civilians from an omnipresent V.C. infrastructure.

Russ's description of a "County Fair" made this loyalty of the natives highly unlikely to succeed. This is corroborated by Sergeant James A. Daly, who wrote about his experiences in his book "A Hero's Welcome." Daly remembered in his memoir his tour in Vietnam as follows: "In the field (on patrol), the rule to follow was a simple one. Shoot anything that runs. And the Army couldn't be bothered worrying about why somebody might be running away. Like maybe he was scared, or just a kid who didn't know better. In this area, to be Vietnamese was to be the enemy. I soon came to understand that almost all the Vietnamese people, wherever they lived, looked upon the Americans as their enemies:that the only ones who didn't resent our being there, aside from the heads of the government or the Army, were the Vietnamese businessmen who had money or owned property, or who were making money on the war. No peasants among the crowd, that was for sure."

Daly made an even more poignant case for the eventual demise in Vietnam of the American war effort as well as any chance of winning their "hearts and minds" when he wrote:"The truth was, if you looked to see it, hatred for the Americans seemed to be just about everywhere. At first this really bugged me, made me angry in a way. Then, as I considered how miserably these Vietnamese peasants and farmers lived, how they'd suffered through so many years of war, how their small straw hootches had been destroyed so many times, or how they had been forced to keep on moving from one place to another, I began to understand why they felt like they did." Does this sound like the current military situation with U.S. forces trying to "pacify" the Iraqi countryside? In either scenario, the likelihood of "winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese (then) and the Iraqi populace (now) is slim and none. At one point, Martin Russ interviewed an ARVN general and asked him why ex-North Vietnamese soldiers moved South and fought against the North. The general claimed that citizens of the North "were too heavily taxed. You have good crop, they (the Communists) take. The Communist Government take small children away from their family and sends them to Communist School."

Russ asked the ARVN General why the VC in the South hated the Americans and the General replied "VC say the Americans come Vietnam, take, take, take like the French, no give. Americans have no plan for the people." Russ felt it was no wonder the U.S. could not militarily prevail in the Vietnam War when confronted with these anti-American attitudes displayed by the indigenous South Vietnamese. Russ also spent a few months with the "NASHOS" (drafted National Royal Australian Regiment Servicemen) and detailed the differences between the United States and Australian method of fighting the war, their attitudes, the tremendous respect the Australians have for their superior officers. Martin mentioned the incidence of "Fragging" (assassinating unpopular officers by throwing fragmentation grenades in their tent while asleep) within the Australian military in South Vietnam was nonexistent. Russ's book took a turn for the bizarre when at the end of his tour he decided to conduct an experiment of interviewing the enemy by letting himself get captured. Martin explained:"Yes. I'm serious about the V.C. thing. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to say goodbye (to the U.S. Marines) and walk into V.C. territory. I'll wait until I can make some formal contact with them. I'm working a couple of angles now.

The author conceded that his experiment was unlikely to succeed: "The toughest part of the project may be finding a V.C. official; they don't exactly wear badges. Even crazier, despite Marine protests Russ walked around no-man's land in between battles with a waterproof, laminated card translated into Vietnamese that said:"Greetings! I am a civilian. I came to Vietnam to write a book about the war. I've already written half of it-the half concerning the Saigon Government and it's allies. Now I want to write about the Viet Cong. Many Americans will read my book." Certainly, Russ didn't know about indiscriminate VC beheadings and disemboweling's, or the upcoming massacre of thousands of innocent women and children the VC and NVA killed in Hue during the Jan., 1968 Tet Offensive (read the book "The Viet Cong Massacre at Hue" by Alje Vennema, Vantage Press, 1976)-a very hard find! Russ thought he would be safe if he showed the enemy the aforementioned card and a paperback copy of his last book "The Last Parallel" with his picture on the back which would convince the enemy he was truly a harmless writer.

Fortunately, Russ was never captured and eventually grew weary of the senseless killings and endless, nonproductive "search and destroy" missions that did nothing to win the war for the U.S. Eventually, Russ did get shot (a minor wound) from enemy ground fire while on a helicopter, as his chopper was leaving a "hot" landing zone and was convinced of the dangers of Vietnam and departed the country. As a Huey helicopter medevac'd him out of a combat zone for the last time, his last entry in the book read: "We lifted off. I was tight inside (the helicopter) expecting a ground sniper shot, but we climbed safely. I watched the green jungle drop away. It seemed so empty and harmless from up there so unlike it was on the ground. I couldn't imagine anyone living down there. But many do, and they don't have helicopters to carry them out." To conclude, this was a book I could not put down. If you are looking for a true, down to earth story of what it was really like in Vietnam prior to 1968 and the Tet Offensive, this, while being out of print and difficult to find, "Happy Hunting Ground" is a unique memoir that is well worth the hunt for it!