There were times.......

......in Northern I Corps, South Vietnam when I was just awed at the beauty of the country.

There were sunsets and sunrises which would absolutly take your breath away.
Mountains just totally covered in triple canopy jungle, which rose almost vertically from the valley floor, four, five, seven thousand feet into the air.

As a fling wing gunship pilot, I have made gun runs over waterfalls which cascaded one after the other thousands of feet to the narrow valley floor upon which the enemy had the misfortune to be spotted.

Plateus such as Khe Shan, which rose vertically at the end of a long narrow valley to 2000 feet above sea level and then flattened out to a broad plane bordered by mountains and streching to Laos along QL9 to Co Roc on the border, and to 5000' vertical mountains in the Tri Border, where N. Vietnam, S. Vietnam and Laos met.

Got quite a shock one fine day as we were hunting along the southen wall of the mountains there. A wall of black rock that probably rose 3000 ft from the base to almost the top. We were circling our scout with our northern arc maybe 2000 feet up with the wall maybe 500 feet from us when my copilot screamed, "there's people on the mountain"!! That'll get your attention real quick like.

Closer examination showed them to be Rock Apes, (OK, maybe they weren't technically Rock Apes, but we didn't know better) only there for the sceanry, but let me assure you, hearts were in throats since they held the high ground. We let them live, to enjoy the sights another day.

So I can appreciate Michaels article on some of the fauna in Iraq. If you're not reading him, you could do worse things than check him out from time to time.

War, as Sherman is supposed to have said, 'is Hell', but there are times as Patton is supposed to have said 'God help me, I do love it so'.