Not that all those pictures he brought home from Vietnam can tell the whole story, the real story of a man going to war, a man barely past childhood.

Tiny prints made with an Instamatic camera can’t show how dense the jungles really are or how hot and itchy 135 degrees feels when you haven’t had a bath or clean clothes for about three weeks and you’re carrying an M-1 rifle and 20 or 21 magazines with 19 bullets each and a canteen of water and a lot more.

They can’t make you feel the heat napalm throws or the fury of helicopters stirring up foliage and dirt or the stillness of your buddies huddling in a bunker.

But all those pictures ....

“Everybody carried a $10 Instamatic,” Larry says, “but when I was shot, my camera was shot all to pieces, so there are no pictures of that battle — before or after.”

Except in his head.

He’s got a million of them in his head.

Pictures of how his arm looked hanging backwards and Tommy’s face spattering in another man’s face and Kearnes falling half in two when they propped him up because his spine was shot out.

He probably took shots before the real shooting started, but then a bullet got him and the camera, and somebody said, “Buddy, your combat days are over” and all of a sudden, he says, “You were out of a war and back to where people were more normal.”

Except nothing about war in Vietnam was normal.

He got drafted in 1969.

“I didn’t have a problem going,” he says. “I just didn’t have no idea what was ahead. Not being experienced in the world and all of a sudden you’re pulled into something of that magnitude, and being young, you don’t give it a thought that you’re facing death. You knew the war was real, but you only faced it from a distance. Then you get there ...”

He stops, desperately searching for exactly the right words that will say exactly how he feels.

And what he says is that war puts a lot of things in perspective. What’s important and what isn’t. A person’s race isn’t important when your life depends on him.

“The travesty of that war,” he says, “was we were told we were supposed to stop communism before the country stopped discrimination right here at home.

“Black and white is a big issue in this country. I can sympathize with the black soldiers. Nobody was protesting that they couldn’t go, but when they came back, they weren’t allowed to eat in the same restaurants. And even now .... ”

Even now, the country has its prejudices.

“But you didn’t give that any thought being raised in the South, going to Wiley School and having devotions and pledging allegiance to the flag or to Knox Junior High when schools were being integrated. I was raised that blacks were different. And I had the same animosity as anybody else because I was raised like that.

“But you’re supposed to respect people because they’re human beings.”

And he saw black soldiers get hurt in Vietnam just like white soldiers.

“I saw one of them killed when I was shot. And they weren’t treated right. Nobody said, ‘You boys can’t go over there and die,’ ” he says, “like they said, ‘You can’t go in there and eat.’ ”

Vietnam taught him blacks are not different.

“They’re human, just like you and me. They have the same feelings. Tommy Stanfield didn’t have to carry that radio, but he stepped up — and got killed.”

And Larry Beattie will never forget it.

“The value of life changes when you face death as many times as I did, as many times as I thought I’d never see Salisbury again.

“I was drafted in March of ’69, went through basic at Fort Bragg, infantry training at Fort Dix, and then to Vietnam. It was around July 3, 4, something like that. It was pretty fast.

“We knew we were drafted for the war.” They’d seen it on TV, like watching a movie. “Then, all of a sudden, it was like a bad dream.”

Basically the guys in the infantry were all from the same group, he says.

“We’d come out of high school, didn’t go to college, worked a job and then got drafted. Some of them got married. Most of them were still single guys. That’s the kind of guys who were in the infantry. If they’d been in college, they got to be lieutenants. I didn’t have a problem with that.

“An infantryman’s life in Vietnam was not a good life. Everything you owned, you carried with you. You didn’t have anywhere to go back to.”

For every man in combat, they were told, nine worked in the rear providing support, taking care of pay, supply, things like that.

“We worked out of fire support bases. We’d catch up on the mail, stay a day,” he says, and then head out again. “The grunts were the ones in the mud. You stayed in the monsoon. It rained all the time. I’ve seen guys had ring worm that big.”

His hands describe a circle as big as a Frisbee.

“You didn’t even own your own clothes. You got one pair of pants, your shirt and a pair of socks” when clean clothes were dropped in by helicopter. “But you owned your own equipment.”

Only the necessities

Gun, water canteen, ruck sack, poncho liner that you slept on — not a mat, a piece of cloth. And C rations with an explosive to light and heat your water for food, not shaving.

“Shaving was unheard of in Vietnam. In a monsoon you had plenty of water, but when it dried out, water was real scarce.

“You never forget that. I remember one time I drank out of a tank track. I was so thirsty Idrank that water. It’s just unreal. Everybody takes a drink of water for granted, but over there ... ”

Nothing was taken for granted over there.

His outfit — Delta Co., 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, or the Big Red One — was on reconnaissance missions.

“We were setting up ambush,” he says. And it was not fun.

When he came home, people would ask, “Would you like to go back?”

“And I’d say, ‘No, I have no desire to go back. There’s a lot of death there.’ I’d say, ‘Here are two of us not going back — me and the fellow that tries to make me go back.’

“The reason I survived the war was because I tried to put it behind me, but it’s something you’ll never forget.”

Especially getting wounded.

“The first time we were in a village in November 1969. We had run into the gooks there checking things out, and I tripped a booby trap, a wire stretched across this open place. I felt it when it blew. I jumped, got shrapnel in both legs, and I got med-evac’d out. They took the shrapnel out, but left the pieces that were deep in there and sent me back. About three weeks after I was wounded, I was back in the field. Until February, I still had open wounds in my legs. In that water and all that dirt and stuff, they just stayed infected all the time.

“But that was just part of being in the infantry. The medic could only do so much.”

He was shot three months later, Feb. 8, 1970, seeking out a suspected Viet Cong camp where there had been an air strike. It was a Sunday morning. But that didn’t matter. “The only way you knew the days was the doc gave everybody a malaria pill on Mondays. In the infantry, you forgot the days. War don’t stop.”

Moving up the ranks

Larry was squad leader, “due to other people getting shot up. We choppered in, and moved up and come up on a latrine where the Viet Cong used the bathroom. I told the lieutenant,‘Those gooks evidently have moved back in. What we need to do is back up, hit this thing with artillery and go back.’ And he said, ‘We don’t get paid to find s——holes. We get paid to kill gooks.’ That’s exactly what he said. It kindly got me upset. That lieutenant was basically a good fellow.

“I took five guys up — Tommy Stanfield, a black guy from New York, and me and him had our ups and downs, but when it really came down to it, he took care of the radio, and we had a Smith boy from Georgia, and Kearnes in the back from Kansas, and I can’t remember the other fellow’s name. I was the squad leader, so instead of putting someone else in front, I took the point.”

They moved up to the bunker and it looked like the Viet Cong had left. Larry prepared to drop a grenade.

“Not like you see John Wayne do it in the movies. They were taped so the pin wouldn’t get loose. ... But about the time I got the grenade out, the gooks — they were in a trench hidden by a tree — opened up on us. It took me down, spun me around. All I could see was Tommy Stanfield’s leg go over his head. It blowed three quarters of his head off. When the Smith boy from Georgia come up, he had pieces of Stanfield’s head in his face. ...

“When they knocked me down, Smith hollered, ‘You’re hit!’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but I don’t know where.’

“I still had that grenade in my hand. I rolled it towards the ditch and killed two or three of them.”

But he couldn’t get up.

“I said to myself, ‘This is it. This is my number. I’m going to die today.’ I knew when I got up, they were going to shoot me, but I had to get up. I got over to the tree, and Smith pulled me over the tree. There was Stanfield. You couldn’t even see he had a face any more. I called Doc up there to see about Stanfield, and he said, “Ain’t no seeing about him. He’s dead,’ and he raked off a big piece of my arm.”

Then he went looking for Kearnes and tried to prop him up.

“He fell in two. He was shot three times in his chest area. His spine was shot out. I’d heard it before, that gurgling sound. Blood came out of every opening in that boy’s body. I will never forget him saying, ‘I don’t want to die,’ and Doc shaking his head.

“I said, ‘Kearnes, you’re not going to die. We’re history. We’re going home,’ and he hung on to my arm. When he died, his eyes were big wide open. He died there in that field.

“The way they choppered you out of there, the dead was thrown in first on the floor; the wounded, on top.

“That lieutenant came over. It was the only time he ever called me by my real name, Larry. He said, ‘Larry, I hate this happened.’ I said, ‘Sir, don’t worry about me. Worry about them boys laying over there.’ They’d done bagged them.

“... When we got to the hospital, we’d been in operation for 30 days. I knew we smelled. I was worried my feet were going to smell, and that nurse said, ‘Don’t worry.’ I said, ‘Don’t cut my arm off. I’m not but 20 years old. I need that arm.’ ”

Then he lost consciousness.

“I woke up and I was in this field hospital, and a nurse come and asked me how I felt, and I said, ‘All right, I guess,’ and she said, ‘You want something to drink?’ and I said, ‘Some water if you’ve got it,’ and she said, ‘You can have a Coke if you want it.’

“That was unheard of. She had ice. That was the first time I’d seen ice over there.”

He drank and slept again.

“Then I woke up and my arm was still intact, and I was so glad, and then the doctor come in and said, ‘We’re sending you to Japan for surgery. I’m not going to beat around the bush. You’ll lose that arm. You’ve got a lot of nerve damage.’

“I said, ‘If y’all didn’t get it now, you’re not going to have that arm,’ and he said, ‘Well, you’ll have to deal with that when you get there.’ ”

He did.

When he got to Japan, he said he wouldn’t sign any papers about his arm.

“I’m going to save that arm,” the doctor said.

He went into surgery, staring at the clock. It was 7:01.

“When I woke up, I could see that clock. It said 9 something. I said, ‘Well, that didn’t take long.’ And the nurse said, ‘You’ve been here all day.’ Fourteen hours. The hand was going around again. They put 400 stitches and clamps in to pull this elbow around. He saved my arm. You can’t tell it’s crippled.”

He never went back to Vietnam.

But he never forgot what they did there. Or what they saw.

“I’ve seen the real side.”

Murder and war

“When Lt. Calley was tried for My Lai — well, war is murder. How many people were killed for no other reason than they were just there?”

He had to do so many things he wouldn’t tell his children.

“I didn’t want them to think their daddy was a murderer.”

But so much was binding, too.

Soldiers were thrown into Vietnam together, he says, “and there was no rich, no poor, no color.”

“When it came time, Stanfield stood up. I got to meet his mom and dad. He told his mom and dad, ‘There’s a red-headed guy from North Carolina ... ’ They gave me the last letter he wrote, and I still have it. He was their child. That wasn’t some illegitimate child nobody cared about. They weren’t welfare-drawing people. They raised that boy, and when they lost him ... ”

The conversation always goes back to that day, that battle.

The guys in it were right out of high school. Larry had no idea where Vietnam was on a map.

But it showed him how sacred life is.

And how scared men — men, who are barely more than boys — can get.

And that he’d do it again or expect his children to go if the country calls.

“We live in the greatest country in the world, the best country. There’s no other country I would want to live in, so if the country deems it necessary to call on you, you put your life on the line. People died before so we can enjoy the freedom we’ve got now.”

He points to his medals, framed and hanging there on the wall and to so many more in cases, and to the bronze star with a “V.” That’s for valor. During combat.