“They dropped the napalm on him...
Even if he was one of us”
The episode told by Rambo in this chapter is real and similar to other episodes that happened many times both during the Vietnam War and other wars.
US soldiers defended their bases by constantly sending out little reconnaissance teams to locate the Vietcong before they could get close, thus hoping to prevent a close range attack.
If reconnaissance teams located large numbered enemies - or particularly well-armed – it could be necessary to shell or bomb them as soon as possible, in order to prevent a larger close range battle that could result in a massacre.
The patrol would then receive the order of withdraw, but under enemy fire it's often difficult to withdraw both quickly and safely.
If the situation was really bad with regard of the base, the zone could be razed to the ground with napalm too soon, even if that would have probably killed those who were still stuck there because of the firefight.
Those kinds of episodes - despite generally being rare – did happen. Usually it's difficult to find any inside history books or movies because they belong to the most painful secrets of any war and commanders forced to give these kinds of orders were then destined to live their lives with this burden.
The episode told by Rambo here comes from the database of www.pownetwork.org, which is a website that collects the stories of every single Missing In Action of the Vietnam War.
The soldier killed during that particular episode couldn't retreat fast enough and was killed by an intentional friendly-fire, exactly as Rambo tells in this novel.
When I finally decided to include that episode inside my book, I had foolishly forgotten the missing in action soldier's name by then, and between the hundreds of names in the database, I never found it again, and this is the reason I can't write his name here.
My apologies.
The usual look of a napalm explosion. It looked like liquid fire mixing upward in the air, just as liquid was the petroleum jelly that produced it.