"American, You Die Tonight", Ninh, the NVA Captain and Sexual Warfare.

I think that my idea of a successful raid was completely different than the Army's idea of a successful raid. Despite the hell raising about the tear gas drop, I got away with it and began planning another Night Hawk mission further to the east near Xuan Loc.

I had no idea that we were going to experience some of that Psychological Warfare bidness but as soon as I began my northward turn to begin hunting for the enemy near Xuan Loc where Wolman and I saw the Jernigan and Stearns shoot down, the radio crackled in my head set and I heard an Asian voice saying: "American, you die tonight".

Nothing ever came from that mission and we never fired a shot. After we returned to Dian, I hit the bed and waited till morning when Sheehan would be awake and on duty. When it came, I approached him with the story above and he was shocked that the VC or NVA was actually on the radio long enough to say that but not long enough for me to get any kind of a track on him.

When I told the guys about it, someone told me that I needed to go see "Budda", an NVA Captain that had been captured after a bombing run by a B 52. He was staying in the compound next door and was serving as an interpreter for the Republic of Korea troops that were billeted there. We referred to them as ROKs and they were some of the toughest troops I'd ever seen.

Ninh had been educated in the USA and spoke perfect English. When I told him what had happened, I asked him to teach me some Vietnamese that I could use as a response in case it happened again. Budda laughed out loud and told me to repeat the phrase: "Ahnie Em My My, Em Dap Lahm, Sook Whahm Dee Do". I asked him what it meant and he told me that once I could say it properly, he would let me know. That's when I began to practice. I must have said it a hundred times and when I finished he told me that he would let me know later.

Later that night, I took off and headed back to the area with the hopes that the bad boys would still be listening for the whop whop whop of the Huey rotor blades. As soon as I entered our search area, the radio crackled again with "American, you die tonight". I didn't waste a second of time and immediately responded with "Ahnie Em My My, Em Dap Lahm, Sook whahm Dee Do". Without any hesitation at all, even though they couldn't see me, the green tracers started coming up from the jungle below. With that, I told the gunners to "light em up".

We put some rounds in the general area that the tracers were coming from, made a couple of circuits over the target area but nothing else happened that night. I was really anxious to find out what my response meant because it had clearly pissed off the bad boys on the ground. We flew back to base and called it a night.

The next morning, after a good night's sleep, I went to the fence that separated the ROK compound from ours and asked for Ninh. They retrieved him and I could tell by the look on his face that he was ready to translate his message to the NVA. When I asked him to translate, he began laughing out loud and asked ME to tell HIM what had happened. As I explained their reaction and the green tracers, his face lit up like a Christmas tree and he laughed harder and harder with each passing second. After a minute of that he explained what I had said in Vietnamese.

"I know your sister, she is very pretty, I've had her from the back side", was his answer and we all began to laugh. He explained that it was the worst kind of offense to say about a man's sister, wife or mother.

Many years later, as I told this story to my friends, I coined the term :Sexual Warfare". As Sean Connery would say: "Thus endeth the lesson".