Reality of War Sinks In for a GI Wounded by ‘Friendly Fire’ : Casualties: The Vietnam refugee is no longer casual about death. He came too close.

It is odd to imagine that a man could have fled Vietnam as a refugee and grown up knowing that a grenade killed his mother, yet come to understand the gravity of war only after he and seven others were blasted by “friendly fire” in the Saudi Arabian desert.

But for U.S. Army Specialist Khiem Ta, that understanding emerged from the volcanic fire that consumed the vehicle he rode in early on Feb. 17, from the terror of watching friends incinerated and from the haunting, burning smell that has dogged him since.

“I was kind of fatalistic about war and casual about death,” Ta, 24, said Tuesday. “My friends and I would sit around and say, ‘If I go, I go. I just hope I’m not crippled.’ But I’ve learned that war is serious, because death is serious. I’ve learned that death hurts the survivors.”

In an interview, Ta acknowledged that he, too, once had shot the breeze with his buddies, saying things such as, “Yeah, I’m going to wax this guy; I’m going to cut out his ears and make an ear necklace.”

But he now said: “I found that I value human life. It was painful for me to see two human lives slipping away.”

Ta, who joined the military for a challenge and to pay his way through the University of Kansas, sat Tuesday in a U.S. Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, with a shrapnel injury to his left thigh, burns on his head and neck. His dark eyebrows and lashes were seared off his face.

Ta, of Lawrence, Kan., was one of six survivors of the pre-dawn incident in which two vehicles on reconnaissance along the southeastern Saudi Arabia-Iraq border were struck by Hellfire missiles fired by a U.S. Apache helicopter, which had been called in to fend off approaching Iraqi tanks.

Two men died in the incident, which is under investigation.

Ta said he was angry when he learned the cause of the tragedy. He wants an explanation, “not a vague explanation, a detailed one.”

But he said the joy of survival has drowned his anger. He even initially regretted that his combat experience was cut short.

“I haven’t even fired a shot yet,” he complained, half-serious and half not. “I thought, ‘What a dumb way to go through this war. What would I tell my friends and family?’ I was a sitting duck. To be honest, I wanted a little more glory.”

Ta was born near Saigon, the son of a university English professor who served as an interpreter for American diplomats and military officials. When Ta was 4, his mother was killed and his father was badly injured in a grenade attack while on a picnic for Red Cross volunteers.

His family fled Vietnam just days before the fall of Saigon in 1975. A freighter took them to the Philippines, then Guam, then Southern California. They moved to San Jose, where Ta’s father got a job as a clerk at Gemco. He died of liver cancer two years later.

Yet Ta’s memories of the Vietnam War were never bitter. He remembers his father’s American friends bringing comics and chocolate. Maybe once a month, someone from his neighborhood in Qui Nhon, north of Saigon, would be brought back dead from the war.

“My exposure to the Vietnam War wasn’t bad,” Ta said. “If you’ve had a slight exposure to something, you build up a curiosity about it. You want to go in headfirst.”

On a whim, Ta walked into an Army recruiting office in Lawrence in spring, 1988. He had taken a leave from college, burned out from the labors of attending school and supporting himself as a supermarket stock boy. He wanted a change of pace--and money to finish school.

“The recruiter said, ‘Ta, what are you looking for?’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘I’m looking for adventure and money.’ He said, “Well, we’ve got both for you. Sit down.’ Looking back, I got exactly what he promised.”

Ta was trained as an Army reconnaissance specialist. He spent two years in Germany on border patrol. He re-enlisted last spring for a two-year stint, then transferred to a unit near Hamburg. The day he arrived, the unit learned it was headed to Saudi Arabia.

“I was happy,” he said. “I don’t think I outgrew my boyish fantasies. I think every soldier has that--coming under fire, the thrill, the fear, the excitement, seeing how well you react, if you can come out alive and unscathed and maybe get some glory.”

On the night of Feb. 16, Ta was part of a five-man crew in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle six miles from the Iraqi border. Although he normally rode in the rear compartment, he swapped places with the gunner in the turret shortly after midnight; the gunner wanted to get some sleep.

“Two minutes later, it happened,” Ta recalled. “I was looking through the night vision device, scanning for enemy tanks. . . . We didn’t even hear the helicopter.”

When struck by friendly fire, Ta said, “I felt as if I was inside a volcano--tremendous heat, blinding light . . . smoke and sparks from the electrical connections.”

Ta and the vehicle commander, also in the turret, managed to escape. But the rear of the vehicle had been blown off. The compartment was ablaze.

“I was the stupidest man alive,” Ta said, remembering his thoughts of trying to rescue his buddies. “If I’d had my wits together, I would have known I couldn’t save them. . . . I stood there for a while before I realized that the ammunition in back could blow any second.”

Ta and the commander tried to run, collapsed and dragged themselves into a slight depression in the ground. They lay there, shaking, while the vehicle exploded, its stored ammunition “cooking off, skimming the dirt all around us.”

“There were two lives being dissolved before my eyes,” Ta said. “I couldn’t believe it. I was talking to those guys a few minutes before. And they’re dead.”

Other soldiers arrived, then medics. There were a series of aid stations and hospitals. On an evacuation helicopter, Ta found his fifth crew member, the driver. Gradually, they figured out that they had been hit by a missile, coming from a friendly direction.

Ta said the experience now feels like a dream. For days after, everything he smelled or ate had “a noxious smell, like a variety of things burning, maybe even human flesh.” He finds comfort these days in talking. Left alone, he said, he becomes “kind of depressed.”

“I was really naive and dumb,” he said sadly. “Unless you witness war and death, you can’t comprehend the emotions that evolve. It was just terrible for me to see my friends burned. And there was nothing I could do.”