“We were going to spend eight long weeks at Parris Island and we had a lot of training to do. It was training that was vital. At times it seemed ridiculous. At other times it was almost sadistic. In the past boot camp would have been 12-15 weeks long but they had found a way to cram it into 8-9 weeks because they needed more troops. It was training we had to have because we all knew that when boot camp was over we were going to Vietnam.”
Graduation Day at Parris Island.
“The next morning we gathered all our gear and began to move inland. We were headed for a village about four or five miles away. We started walking early in the morning and already the sun was beating down on us. The area appeared pristine, almost like a picture postcard. We walked along small trails and roads. The rice paddies were lush and green and there were large mountains in the background. There were little kids on the backs of water buffalos riding through the rice paddies and old men and women up to their knees in brown, muddy water planning rice. It was beautiful but it was also deadly and we had to keep telling ourselves that. The irony was that rice paddies just like these would soon be places of combat and death.”
John Barber on the far right with the plastic spoon in his pocket (17 yrs. old) in Con Tien, Vietnam 1966
“If the purpose of Operation Prairie was to keep the NVA from infiltrating to the South we weren’t very successful. But we did them a lot of damage and not a lot made it through where we were stationed. Obviously they had found many other ways to get troops to the South. Even though they didn’t get much past us they found other ways. It was hard from my perspective to follow the larger strategies of the war. We were in the thick of the fighting, day to day warfare. We were trying to survive and make it home while at the same time carry out our assignments. I had become a weary, battle-tested, combat Marine. My buddies could count on me and I was focused on what I needed to do to survive.”
Excerpts from Vietnam Requiem: A Memoir by John Barber
Click on the image to read Vietnam Requiem