PUERTO RICAN
REPORTS LOW MORALE AMONG U.S. TROOPS IN VIETNAM
A young Puerto Rican, who has just returned from combat duty in. Vietnam, has some bitter things to say about his experiences there. He was interviewed by Ramon Arbona for Claridad, the weekly newspaper of the Movimiento Pro Independencia {MPI]. At his request, the identity of the soldier was not revealed, and he is identified in the October 16 interview simply as "Roberto."
"Every soldier in the United States Army, when he finds himself.in Vietnam, becomes obsessed with a single idea -- to leave, to get out, not to be there. All he thinks about is how to get out of there soon and alive," the Puerto Rican veteran said.
Roberto was assigned to combat duty in Vietnam and was there for six months, until he was wounded.
"If it wasn't for being wounded," he said, "I would have had to stay another six months in that hell."
When he arrived in Vietnam, he received some strong impressions. "The first thing I saw there was the people...you know, hearing about them is not the same as seeing: them. They tell you they wear black and things like that, but when you get there it's different. I felt real sorry for them when I saw them, I mean the people in the port; they were poorly- dressed and they looked like skeletons, almost dead from hunger. '
So how could such people fight so successfully against such a powerful invader armed so heavily?
"Because they are very shrewd and are fighting in their own country and know what they're fighting for. Their morale is very high. They fight with anything at hand, with the same arms as the Americans, with bows and arrows, with bamboo stakes, with old-style’ arms‘ they make themselves, with anything they find."
The U.S. troops, in contrast, according to the young Puerto Rican soldier, are quite demoralized. The officers tend to handle the troops with kid gloves because they are afraid they might get shot in the back. "Everybody is against everybody else.
-In Vietnam, the American soldiers become caught up in hatred against the whole Situation. And they take this out against the Vietnamese. Roberto confessed that to his own shame he was not without guilt in this respect. He ascribed it to the nervous tension that builds up from the beginning.
"When I came to Vietnam," he said; "we were met by a band playing marches and things like that. But even the music made us nervous. For example it set my nerves on edge.
"From there we went to a zone to get ready for combat and then'we went to the combat zone. We would dig foxholes six feet deep where we stayed for the night -- we stayed because nobody slept. The next day at six in the morning we'd start hiking. We would hike eighteen, twenty, thirty miles to where we were going. We were looking for the’ so-called enemy. But we never saw this enemy. During these hikes we searched the villages we ran across. At six in the evening, back to a foxhole. And in two or three hours they would. begin shooting from here and there -- the so-called enemy, that is. The Vietnamese fired away and made a Lot of noise to scare the United States troops so they would give away their positions.
They generally succeeded in this. "The American soldier is so demoralized that he always falls into the trap. He hears a shot and he begins shooting wildly, in all directions, wherever he thinks the shots came from. But each one thinks it's froma different spot. And this plays right into the hands of the Vietnamese. They soon know their position and fire away at a marked target.
"Sometimes our officers calculated on the basis of the ammunition we had used up that we had killed more than 400 Vietnamese. But in the morning, when we went to check the bodies, there wasn't a single one. It's possible that we killed some, although we were shooting wild, but if there were any bodies, they carried them away, to demoralize the American soldiers still more."
As to relations among the troops, the Puerto Ricans and Negroes get along better among themselves than the others do. They also tend to mix together. "This is because we Puerto Ricans don't practice discrimination, because we Puerto Ricans have feelings about this. Besides, while the North Americans don't appear to discriminate, they are guilty of it in practice because they always give the most dangerous missions to Negroes and Puerto Ricans."
Asked about how things were when he was on furlough, Roberto responded: "Very boring. I never left the base. Why leave? The only place you could go was Saigon and I went there only two or three times to see it. But in Saigon sometimes it's more dangerous than in the jungle. They can let an American soldier have it without him ever knowing where the blow came from. Besides in Saigon what you have is whorehouses, whorehouses, and more whorehouses. It's like a big whorehouse because that's where the Americans are and they're the ones who keep this business going."
Roberto has strong feelings about the use of Puerto Ricans in Vietnam. "For my part I tell everyone -- no Puerto Rican should join the army; no one should go to Vietnam. It's against our rights. Why should we have to go to Vietnam and commit murder? And we can all be sure that for every 100 Puerto Ricans taken in the army, 98 will be sent to Vietnam right away. I still have four years left in the Reserves and if they call up the Reserves the way they're saying they're going to, I may have to spend those four years in jail, but I'm not going."
FIVE PUERTO RICANS REFUSE TO SERVE IN U.S. ARMY
Five young Puerto Ricans -- Anselmo Rosas, Gabriel Ferrer, Rafael Rivera, Juan Benito Dorna Joy and Sixto Alvelo -- all of them members of the Movimiento Pro Independencia .MPI], have been charged with refusing to serve in the armed forces of the United States, reports the October 16 issue of Claridad, the weekly newspaper of the MPI. They object to serving as "cannon fodder" for the U.S. in its aggressions "against peoples who are struggling for their sovereignty and national liberation," according to the Puerto Rican independence paper.
The five are seeking to test the legality of applying the U.S. military conscription laws to Puerto Ricans. The U.S. federal officers are seeking to evade this, however, by claiming that Puerto Ricans are not required to swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S. when they are drafted.
After Sixto Alvelo's stand became known, he was fired from his job at the Puerto Rico Container Company which makes cartons. The company is owned by a millionaire, Luis A. Ferré, who is head of the pro-U.S. Partido Estadista Republicano.
"BANDIERA