Col. Jack Jacobs meets the Viet Cong commander who led a deadly ambush

Return to Vietnam: Meeting a formerly faceless foe
Col. Jack Jacobs meets the Viet Cong commander who led a deadly ambush of his battalion
By Col. Jack Jacobs
U.S. Army (Retired)
NBC News
updated 6/16/2011

Courtesy of Jack Jacobs
Jack Jacobs, left, and Pham Phi Huang, right, in Cao Lanh, Vietnam.

CAO LANH, Vietnam — Col. Jack Jacobs, a Medal of Honor recipient for "conspicuous gallantry" during the Vietnam War, returns to Vietnam for the first time in over 40 years and meets his former adversary.

All the good guys have families, backgrounds and personalities. The bad guys are faceless.

When you live in close proximity to people, when you are jammed together into small defensive positions, when your lives depend on each other, you know everything about them. They become discrete characters, and each is like no other in the world. They are your family. When they are wounded, you bleed, and when their young lives are extinguished in the violence of armed combat, a piece of you dies as well.

But the enemy is an amoebic mass, a single-minded monolithic inhuman force. Killed in action, they are only a logistical problem, and you get a feeling of them as individuals only when you capture them, scared, wounded and shivering. They are no longer part of the enemy organism, and it is only then they come to life as people.

I recently returned to Vietnam, for the first time in about 40 years, to see my old battlefield in the Mekong Delta. And on that day I also visited a man named Pham Phi Huang.
read more here
Meeting a formerly faceless foe