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One had to find ways to endure. Morale in the battalion was never such that Cominos ever seriously considered bagging a patrol, but he did discard his shirt and T-shirt. He wore his flak jacket over a bare chest, and he shit-canned most of the vest’s fiberglass plates; he left only four—one over his heart, his chest, and two in back over his kidneys. He also threw away his Marine-issue pack and used a captured NVA rucksack; it was more comfortable and utilitarian. The most-used piece of gear was his green towel, tucked between neck and flak jacket collar, to wipe the sweat from his face every couple minutes.

It was a brutalizing existence, made even worse by stagnation. During its weeks in the Arizona, 1/7 Marines made no solid contacts with the enemy. Their prize kept eluding them; mostly what they found were booby traps and stolid, unanswering villagers who populated the few hamlets still left in this free-fire zone. Frustrations simmered in the grunts, but they did not become murderers. Sergeant Lowery noted:

We definitely did not go over and just blow civilians away for no reason at all. We never did that. All these stories you hear about search and destroy where they went through and they killed every man, woman, and child is a bunch of bullshit. We did kill every duck, chicken, and water buffalo that we came across. We poisoned all the wells. We burned all the hootches with the old Zippo lighter. These hootches would go up and you could hear all kinds of stuff popping inside of them—it was ammunition they had hidden inside the straw. These people were all supporters of the NVA and VC, and they deserved whatever happened to them. But unless a gook had a weapon we didn’t kill him.

Still, the psychological pressures of Search & Destroy could be intense. There were too many gray areas. On his first tour, Lowery had taken out a night ambush near a ville. He set his M60 team in atop a small hill, then was placing the ambush below the mound when he noticed the girl—a Vietnamese woman was squatting in the brush, peering intently at the machine gun pos. Lowery ran towards her, shouting, “Halt! Dung lai, dung lai!” The woman bolted and he triggered a hurried burst; her arm jerked, but she kept running. Lowery crammed a fresh mag into his M16, braced, and emptied it into her back. They gathered around the mamasan. She was a pretty girl, they all commented, clean, her teeth unstained by betel nut. And she was still alive, breathing in labored gasps. Their new corpsman looked at her in horror, mumbling, “What do I do?” “Fuck it,” Lowery said, “put her out of her misery.” The corpsman pulled out his .45 automatic and started shooting. He kept pulling the trigger until the slide locked back, and he kept mumbling, “What do I do, what do I do!”

Was that an atrocity? No, it was necessary.

But you gotta understand, Lowery continued, the new corpsman didn’t give a shit what happened to these worthless gooks; and in that, he spoke for a certain percentage of all grunts.

Most did what they had to do to survive in an alien, hostile environment.

Most men didn’t have time for much thinking. Cominos, from a solid Greek Orthodox family, had joined the Marines after college graduation, a rarity in the grunts. What was also rare was that he volunteered for the bush not only because he wanted to prove something—but because he believed. Deep down, though, the only thing that seemed pertinent were the men in his squad. The only questions he asked were how many klicks we going today, which squad’s got point, who’s taking out the ambush tonight? The most lasting impression Corporal Cominos had of the operation in the Arizona was not the daily pain or the occasional cruelties, but the quiet courage of the grunts. They endured and they endured and they endured, he thought. Everyone bitched and cursed, but they had a job to do and they did it. He always remembered his M79 man, “Carbo” Carbahal from California. The man was in intense pain for days, but only when he could barely