So far we hadn’t “officially” affixed our bayonets to our M-14s. They stayed in our footlockers—except for those few minutes between chow and lights out when you might have a moment you could call your own and sneak out for a game of Mumbly Peg.

I remember sitting on my footlocker attaching my bayonet to my rifle. I had seen way too many WWII movies, and my mind went straight to a foxhole—about to be overrun. The perimeter collapsing, the enemy coming at me—until suddenly one of them is there wide-eyed at the end of my bayonet.

We were about three weeks into Basic when we were told to bring our bayonets to morning formation. No one told us whether to carry them or fix them to the rifle.

We fixed them.

We were already starting to think like soldiers. If it was a test—we passed.

As we marched into the bayonet training area with our newly adorned rifles slung over our shoulders, we carried a mix of confusion and something close to fear. The idea was simple enough—drive a blade through another human being—but it didn’t feel simple.
Was this something we were actually going to have to do?

We didn’t know it then, but this was the Army’s way of erasing any hesitation we might have about killing.

We were called “at ease” and told to take a seat on the ground. A Drill Sergeant stepped in front of us. “There are two types of bayonet fighters—the quick and the dead.”

If that didn’t get your attention, the “FTA” spelled out in white rocks on the hill behind him did. Our new favorite acronym—Fuck the Army.
It broke the tension.

For about five seconds.

Then came an afternoon of “thrust and parry” and “butt stroke,” driving the rifle forward, smashing it into rubber tire targets—screaming “Kill Victor Charlie” with every movement.

Who’s Victor Charlie? The Army’s phonetic spelling for VC, or Viet Cong. A name that had recently been introduced into our vocabularies.
For some reason, the National Guard guys always seemed to yell louder than the rest of us draftees.

When it was over, we moved straight into hand-to-hand combat training—finishing up with a bonus lesson on how to kill a man with a piano-wire garrote.

That left me with one main thought: “Are there a lot of pianos in the Vietnam jungles?”

As we marched back to the barracks, I’m pretty sure we were all thinking the same thing.

We hoped we’d never have to use our bayonets.