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I hadn’t been so frigging tired and gone myself, he wouldn’t be dead.” These dead eyes stared at Bear during the times he tried to kill himself by driving his car off the road in 1974 and 1975.
    After this enemy atrocity Bear’s platoon went berserk, “just went nuts—started cutting heads off, collecting ears. They called us the ‘head hunters.’” The berserk state leaves a permanent imprint on the physiology of a person who has been in it—a permanent hyperarousal of the autonomic nervous system and adrenaline secretion. Mercer suffers repeated adrenaline storms, with racing heart, sweats, and most of all, rage.
    He recalls that for six months, the captain who had ordered Bear to kill the wounded prisoner was the company commander. This captain was dangerously incompetent. During one operation he ordered the company to reconstruct an old night position abandoned by the ------ Infantry. All the seasoned NCOs told the captain not to do it, because GIs always left booby traps behind. One “chow hound” in the company nicknamed Teddy because of his size and hairiness, who always scarfed up any C rations that the other men did not eat, spotted a C ration can in the sump of the abandoned position. When he picked it up, an American grenade with its pin pulled fell out, releasing the safety spoon that had been tucked against the inside of the can—a classic GI booby trap. Teddy died instantly. This same captain, apparently motivated by no more than idle curiosity, ordered a man nicknamed the Italian Stallion to pull the pin on a found Chinese Communist-manufactured grenade and throw it so the captain could see what it was like. All the seasoned NCOs shouted at the man “You don’t have to do it—some of them are rigged!” but the captain’s insistence overcame his reluctance. He pulled the pin and it detonated instantaneously, blowing off both his arms. The Vietnamese enemy had removed its time-delay fuse. Bear recalls screaming in rage at this CO that he was an “incompetent son of a bitch—lucky to be alive [i.e., close to being fragged by his own men].”
    Bear remembers one instance in which his lieutenant ordered him to take his squad into a senseless death trap in a rice paddy and he refused. The lieutenant found three other men more compliant and sent them across the rice paddy, rather than around as Bear had advised. All three died from mines. In another incident, after Bear heard sounds of heavy movement ahead and advised the officer to call in an air strike, the disbelieving lieutenant sent a squad to “make contact—if Charlie’s there at all.” The whole squad was wiped out and the platoon was pinned down on that hill, Hill ------ near ------, for two days.
    Any incompetence Bear encounters in civilian life arouses the same feelings of fear, rage, and grief. When he yanked his general supervisor at the post office across his own desk and screamed at him, he screamed exactly the same words he screamed at his incompetent CO.
    He feels profoundly tainted by the pointless risks and senseless cruelty he participated in while taking prisoners for interrogation. He received his Air Medal for highly dangerous “in and out” helicopter insertions to snatch prisoners for interrogation by U.S. Army intelligence. He particularly recalls that one Viet Cong “catch” his team had captured at great risk was refused as unneeded by Army intelligence. They were told to give him to the ARVN “Tigers” whose base adjoined that of the Airborne. Bear had witnessed these South Vietnamese “elite” troops behave with a contemptible blend of cowardice and sadism. After three hours of listening to the man’s screams, Bear’s whole team walked into the Tiger compound to find the man bleeding from hundreds of little cuts, particularly around the genitals. They shot him through the head, so enraging the