In late 1967, my platoon spent a day trudging up and down the desolate, charred and cratered terrain abutting Vietnam's Demilitarized Zone. I was a corporal, one of 20 or so enlisted Marines commanded by a brand new second lieutenant. We had been detached from Echo Company and sent on this long patrol to look for the enemy.
The DMZ was established as a dividing line between North and South Vietnam after France was defeated in the First Indochina War. It was created at a Geneva Conference in 1954. In theory, troops were barred from this six-mile wide strip but, in reality, the North Vietnamese operated there at will.
The area around the DMZ was dangerous and spooky. It was littered with the rusted remnants of abandoned war machines destroyed during years of brutal combat and haunted by the ghosts of soldiers who had perished fighting each other there.
By sundown, we had covered a dozen miles and were exhausted. Our lieutenant ordered us to halt on some high ground and said, "Establish a perimeter."
We formed a circle, used entrenching tools to scrape shallow foxholes in the damp earth and hunkered in for a long night.
As darkness descended, I was peering north from my foxhole when I saw a lone enemy soldier walking along a path about a hundred feet away. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. In Vietnam, the enemy was mostly invisible. You rarely, if ever, saw him. When you did, it was usually just a fleeting glance, and always during an attack.
But this soldier was no hallucination. He was a regular, dressed in the distinctive combat uniform of the North Vietnamese Army, complete with pith helmet, backpack and an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. And he was surprisingly young — not much more than a boy.
The soldier was so close that if I'd had a football, I could have thrown him a pass. It was an easy rifle shot and even though he was oblivious to me, under the rules of engagement, I would be perfectly justified in shooting him dead — which was what I was about to do.
I lifted my rifle and carefully aimed at him. I let out a half-breath and began to slowly squeeze the trigger, exactly as I'd been taught on the rifle range at Parris Island. But then I hesitated.
Something about this didn't feel right. A voice in my head said "Stop! This isn't combat."
Combat always had an element of self-defense. This experience was new and different and nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment.
The soldier wasn't attacking me. He didn't realize I was watching him and preparing to end his young life. For all I knew, he was goofing off and daydreaming about his girlfriend back home.
At that moment, as I was about to become an executioner, I saw the soldier as just another young guy caught up in a war he didn't start, and executing him did not seem fair or morally justified.
I hesitated, the moment passed and the soldier disappeared, unharmed, back into the darkness. I never saw him again.
Or did I?
Only a few weeks later, an enemy soldier shot me and I almost died. Another Marine, heroically pulling me from danger, was shot through the spine and paralyzed for life. And a hundred days after that, my best friend in the Marine Corps, the man we called Gunny Z, perished in a firefight.
I've wondered ever since whether any one of us was shot by the young soldier I spared. And thus my moral dilemma.
Did I spare one human life or cost many?
Did the NVA regular I could not bring myself to shoot live to harm my fellow Marines?
I will never know for sure if my decision was right or wrong.
So if you happen to see traces of the "thousand-yard stare" on the face of an old veteran today, don't be too judgmental.
He may still be trying to figure out whether he did the right thing when he was young. And fighting a war.
Terence L. Kindlon is an Albany lawyer. He was medically retired as a Marine Corps sergeant and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. His email address is tkindlon@aol.com.