For many it was pure hell! They thought they were doing their duty as soldiers for their country and had no idea (because most had never served in a war) or what they were up against. Jungle, snakes, spiders, booby traps, heat, humidity, torrents of rain, foot rot, scabs on their body from cuts that got infected from moisture and dirt. The horrors of this war also led many soldiers into a fog of drugs just to cope. Smoking Marijuana was like smoking a cigarette. They had no idea what type of enemy they were up against and the American Government had underestimated their enemy. Americans didn't have snipers (at first) and it was the Vietcong that had them. They were picking off American soldiers right and left until they in turn relied on their own snipers. The highest casualties actually (although not as many as far as body count) where the helicopters that flew in to get the wounded. There was racism as well. Often the blacks felt the whites were sending them out on the most dangerous of patrols (and, in some cases and some units they did just that.) When Martin Luther King was assassinated this also aroused the Black Americans to rebel to a point. It was difficult for American soldiers to tell the Vietcong from the villagers, and yes, the soldiers had no options but to kills civilians because often the Vietcong would hide behind them or hide their weapons in the villages. Fear was the factor in this case for the villagers (they were caught between the Vietcong and the American soldiers.) Mothers would hand a soldier their baby or a little boy would walk up to a soldier (how was a soldier to know these were not the innocent like in his own country) and the baby would have a grenade attached to it or the little boy would throw a grenade at the soldier. Hard to believe, but it happened. Unfortunately, this is where good old America back home heard the term "baby killers!" You can thank SOME of the reporters for this misleading bits of news. Only a very few reporters actually bothered to care enough to get the real story from the American soldiers. Reports were more into sensationalizing their reporting for a step up the old ladder. Not all were like this, and many lost their lives reporting the Vietnam War. Luckily the truth did leak out back to the U.S.