"Doc was our friend, everybody liked Doc. He was a real good medic." They talked about Doc for a while, then they told me about the other man, Sfc. Clarence Lowder, whom they called "Top." Things started to get bad, they said, when Top came into the unit as the new "first-shirt."
"He treated us like machines," said one GI. "I'm not a robot, I'm a human being." Instead of loading supplies on a truck, Top would make the men walk and carry the stuff all the way. He like to belittle men in front of others. "He had no respect for people," Sp4 Benn said.
Top once ordered a private to dig a 6 foot ditch. The soldier dug a 6 foot peace symbol in the ground. "That really blew Top's mind, said Hanusy. After that, Top worked on the Pfc almost constantly for 6 weeks. The Pfc got stoned every night and dreamed about killing Top. Finally, the Pfc cracked and was shipped out.
After his second week in the unit, Top got a warning from his men-a CS grenade under his hooch. "When they gas you, yeah, you know they mean you no good," said one of the men with a smile.
When an NCO warned Top he was pushing his men too hard and might get zapped, Top reportedly fired back, "Not one of them would have the guts."
They didn't hate Top, the men in the hooch told me, they thought he was a victim of the system, just like them. He just didn't know what was going on in Vietnam.
It was just about this time that the Black GIs in Top's units were beginning to tell themselves that if they had to die, they wanted to die for a cause of their own choice. To many of them the lifer sergeant was more of an enemy than the Asian peasant soldier outside the wire. There was also a different kind of white soldier in the unit, like the private who dug the 6 foot peace symbol. Young white soldiers smoked grass, wore beads, and flashed the peace sign as a standard greeting. In the evenings, black and white troops would get together, blow grass and rap. "The lifers are more afraid of what's in this camp than what's outside it."
After about two months with the unit, Top started harassing Doc Hampton about his Afro haircut, telling him to get it cut. Doc's hair was no longer than an inch and a half-within Army regulations-but Top kept pushing him to trim it.
At the mess hall one evening, Doc said that Top had "his thing," the book and the law, and that he, Doc, had his-an M-16.
Hanusey, the clerk, was working in the orderly room when Doc came through the doorway. "His face was cold, stone cold," Hanusey said. The barrel of Doc's M-16 was pointed downward, his feet planted firmly apart. Slowly he raised the barrel and fired a full clip into Top. Then Doc walked out.
"The chase after Doc was like a hunt, he didn't have a chance," said another GI. The lifers cornered Doc in an empty bunker. But Doc was armed-nobody wanted to go in after him. It was a standoff. Taking up positions around the bunker, the lifers ordered him to surrender.
"I wasn't going to let it happen," said Ben Denson, a Black soldier who hadn't spoken before. "If they shot Doc, there was going to be a slaughter, a bloodletting. There would have been a war." When Black troops in the unit started going for their weapons, they saw that there were many whites uniting with them.
As white and Black troops started running out of their huts and bunkers towards Doc, they were blocked by armed MPs. "They wanted to gun him down and didn't want anyone to stop it," said Denson. Both sides were lining up for a confrontation and when the troops trying to save Doc looked around there were more of them than there were lifers and MPs.
Suddenly a single shot sounded in Doc's bunker. One lifer started to make a move for the bunker, but was stopped by Black troops. Two Black soldiers went in. Doc Hampton was dead.
Denson had a theory about why Doc Hampton shot himself. "It was his last protest. He didn't want to be killed by his oppressors."
Hampton and Lowder became statistics in the war, but to the GIs in his unit, Doc was a hero, a martyr in the cause of freedom.
[Hampton and Lowder's names appear on the same slab at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. According to Pentagon statistics, there were 1,100 fraggings or attempted fraggings involving US troops in Vietnam between 1968 and 1972-Ed.]