I got it all the time. Usually from civilian friends. My answer, if I liked them: "If it's alright with you I'd rather not talk about the war right now." Then I'd change the subject and go get another beer. I had one work acquaintance, a smart-ass former hippie chick ask me, "How many babies did you kill?" I was always ready for that one. "You mean weekly? Or year-end total?"
The motivations were different in Vietnam. The Viet Cong never flew planes into the World Trade Center. They weren't at the outset of your tour the living embodiment of evil like Al Qaeda or the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. So that hate had to build and the first one made you feel rotten, like your soul was blackened, like you'd crossed some threshold into a dark place you'd been taught all your life--in church, in school, at home--never to enter. The macho rhetoric of bootcamp and infantry training seemed cheap and hollow...and you stayed quiet for a few days, introspective, turning the whole thing over, coming to grips with it...and then finally you're training, your sense of responsibility to your teammates, the demands of the job, your present duties all combined to bring you back down to earth. You said "fuck it, it is what it is and the motherfucker had it coming." And then you'd be ok. They're not human anymore, now they're just fucking assholes that you need to kill if you ever want to see the Land of the Round-Eyes again. And after a few more weeks you can sit near a pile of dead dinks and eat your C-rat peaches and pound cake or ham and motherfuckers and not bat a fuckin eye. From now on you just didn't give a shit how you killed them, you just yearned to fuck those motherfuckers up. Revenge for that ambush, revenge for your bro who got his foot blown off, revenge for having to hump 100 lbs of gear through thigh-deep rice paddies, revenge for open sores, revenge for leeches, revenge for lousy fucking canned food, revenge for no pussy, revenge for warm beer; revenge for the sake of revenge and finally revenge for trying to kill me and my bros you slope-headed non-human fucks. Let's kill as many as we can so at the end of the month our team has the most ear silhouettes on the Captain's Ear Board back at the compound and we get a case of Black Label choppered out to us.
There was a saying among the trigger-pullers in Vietnam: "It don't mean nuthin." And those four words meant everything.
