Vietnam 67 (1 Viewer)

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A Mistake Has Been Made by Jim Larsen, a retired community newspaper editor.

My brother, Joe Paul Larsen, worked the summer of 1966 for the Washington State highway department as a road worker. He was the good son. Dependable, hard working, likable, devoted steelhead fisherman, duck hunter, dairy farm worker and a Future Farmers of America kid who raised blue-ribbon winning black angus cattle at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe. He only had two angus, but he regularly beat the big Snohomish River Valley ranchers who raised scores or even hundreds of angus. He backpacked baby fish into high mountain lakes, hiking the high trails with snowshoes.

His road job ended that fall, and he prepared for year two at Everett Junior College. He got a part-time job as a janitor at General Telephone and signed up for 12 class hours, the minimum required to avoid the draft. It made our parents happy. Our dad had carried a mortar through North Africa, Italy, Germany and Austria, and was no fan of war.

Classes soon started and before long Joe received a draft notice. Neither he nor our father could believe it. A mistake? Yes, a mistake had been made. Joe had signed up for a five-credit math class, three-credit English class and five-credit biology class. Or so the latter was listed in the course catalog. In fact, the two-hour lab portion of the biology class did not count, so he only had 11 hours. A college cleric made the error, or perhaps a typesetter hurrying to meet a deadline. Whatever, he got drafted. The draft board in Everett was hard nosed. A rule was a rule.

Joe entered the Army in October. He earned a sharpshooting medal, came home for Christmas and after more training soon departed for Vietnam.

He liked the Army and felt the United States was doing the right thing, because of how the peasants in Vietnam were being slaughtered by the Communists. One day near the Cambodian border his platoon came under heavy fire. Twenty-two, including Joe, were killed. The sergeant leading them that day was among the dead. He was awarded the Medal of Honor.

My family got the news early Sunday morning. The green car moved slowly up the long driveway toward the house. Two car doors were opened. A knock on the door. Mom screamed, so did my sister. Dad ran up the stairs to where his other son was still in bed. A junior college dropout, I’d worked the night before at the plywood mill. It was May 18, just over a month away from my 19th birthday and the inevitable draft notice.

Dad sat on the bed, which he never did, and grabbed my shoulder. "They're not getting you," he said.

Dad took Monday off from the mill. We drove silently to the draft board, located under a tavern on Hewitt Avenue in Everett. "You took my oldest son, you can't have this one," he told the desk clerk. Embarrassed, I watched from a distance. Dad didn't get the answer he wanted and was directed to a door. He entered and after a few minutes, came out. "Let's go," he said.

I never found out what happened. A draft notice never came. When the lottery began, I didn't get a lottery number. Eventually I researched the draft regulations. There didn't seem to be an exemption for a surviving son. Whoever Dad talked to that day must have simply erased his younger son's name from the draft rolls. Improper, no doubt.

Joe would have been a forest ranger, or something similar. Smart and well liked, he would have led a department. He would have had a large, loving family, living perhaps in an expansive log home in the area around Index, a small town in Snohomish County, which he loved. The hole left in the family never healed.

I took 10-years to get a four-year degree and ended up spending several decades in the community newspaper business. I always felt like a coward for not enlisting.​

Joe Paul Larsen

 

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Returning to 'My' Vietnam by Nancy Smoyer, author of "Donut Dollies in Vietnam: Baby-Blue Dresses and OD Green."

In April 1993, I went back to Vietnam for a month with the Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project. Our group was small, three combat veterans and myself, a former Red Cross Donut Dollie. Our job as Donut Dollies was to visit the G.I.s with games on base camps, forward LZs and fire bases and in hospitals, in an effort to bring a touch of home to the men.

I had been thinking about returning to Vietnam for many years, but with reluctance. I knew that if I was ever going to get over the anger and animosity I’d carried for the Vietnamese for 25 years, I had to go back. I was pretty sure that those feelings would disappear almost immediately, which is, in fact, what happened, but I was flooded with other feelings I hadn’t foreseen.

Our VVRP group spent two weeks renovating a clinic at Cu Chi, northwest of Saigon, where I had served in ’67-’68, and two weeks traveling north to Hanoi. We worked and traveled with former Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers, which added an unexpected but very welcome and therapeutic element to the experience, especially since I was stationed at Cu Chi during the Tet offensive.

It was unsettling to be introduced to a fellow worker who was the head of the local veterans group and learn that he had been at Cu Chi during the entire war, that he had been lobbing mortars and rockets at me during Tet. Still, during the two weeks we worked together on the clinic, we formed a special relationship in spite of our language difficulties. He gave me his gold star pin and I gave him a pin from the 10th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall; we joked and teased and spoke of friendship and peace. His face became the face that finally humanized the enemy for me.

Even as we were driving from Tan Son Nhut Airport, near Saigon, to Cu Chi, I found myself thinking, “What are all these Vietnamese doing here; where did they come from?” and “Where are the G.I.s?” It was so strange and upsetting to see no American presence, nothing to indicate that we had ever been there. It made the whole thing – the war, the losses, the pain – seem even more of a waste.

During the first few days I found myself growing depressed, even as the guys in the group were getting more and more excited about how wonderful the country seemed. I wasn't interacting with the Vietnamese people on the worksite or getting involved the way I normally do when I travel, and I couldn't figure out why I was acting so differently.

Then, at the end of the third day, I had a revelation. I realized that I was mourning the loss of "my" Vietnam.

As I thought about it, I was able to identify the stages of the grief. My denial has been in thinking about Vietnam as being unchanged since I left, complete with G.I.s and fire bases and choppers everywhere. Instead, I was hit in the face with a completely different country, a new reality, which I didn't want and couldn't accept. My bargaining has been that if I keep connected with vets and activities related to Vietnam, then the experience stays alive. The anger I've felt has been toward the Vietnamese people, the Vietnamese government, and the American people and the American government. Those feelings of anger have spilled over in many parts of my life. And then there was the depression which I've dealt with in various forms for years, and which was hitting me full force again right then and there.
I had already dealt with my anger toward the Vietnamese people – that left immediately. As I read about the tunnels at Cu Chi and even crawled through them (a threat during the war, they’re but a major tourist attraction now), saw pictures in every home we visited of family members who had died in the wars, visited the huge graveyards and memorials to the war dead, heard about the 300,000 Vietnamese who are still missing, I gained a compassion and understanding that I hadn't allowed myself to feel before. I had accomplished what I came back to Vietnam to do.

But even though I now understood much of what I was feeling and had even gotten over my negative feelings toward the people, I was still not at the point of acceptance. As I told the guys, I wasn’t ready to give Vietnam back to the Vietnamese.

Finally, after a week or so of being unable to talk about my changed feelings toward the Vietnamese people without choking up, I realized that my conflicted feelings were over. I was done with Vietnam. Not done with the vets or with the aftereffects of the war, but done with the country and with the people. It’s their country, they fought for it (on both sides), they earned it; and, although I’ve come to care for them, that part is finished. I still have all the other aspects of Vietnam (the war, not the country) to deal with, but at least one is taken care of.

Now I have two Vietnams – the one in my memory and in my pictures and in my vets, and the Vietnamese Vietnam. It had been “my” country for a while — my G.I. Vietnam – and yet it was theirs, as it should have been, all along. I had been afraid of losing my Vietnam, of having to replace it with the “real” one, but now I realize I can keep them both – different but the same, separate but together, entwined.

Traveling north after that was almost anticlimactic. It was wonderful to finally see Khe Sanh and other Marine fire bases, to get sand from China Beach, to go to the village near Da Nang where my brother was killed, to search for the Red Cross villa in Da Nang (which I never could find), to look for bullet holes in the Citadel at Hue, to visit the fascinating and disturbing war museum in Hanoi where the possessions of the captured and missing American soldiers have been stored, to just take care of unfinished business.

I recognized nothing. Oh, Marble Mountain near Da Nang looked the same, and I think a field just before a bridge in Da Nang looked familiar; but I could have been dropped anywhere for all I knew. The hospital where I worked is empty sand dunes, the bomb craters are mostly filled in (especially in the south), the rice paddies are green, cows graze on Khe Sanh (at least inside the perimeter – mines are outside), there are tons of water buffalo, the kids are a joy – and the war is over.

The Vietnamese people were as friendly toward Americans as I had heard. They carried no grudge that I could see. I asked several of the former enemy why that was, and their response was that they had been told by their government, and they firmly believed, that American G.I.s were not there because they wanted to be but because their government sent them.

After we had seen the museum and site of the My Lai massacre, our Vietnamese veteran guide told us that he didn’t like going there because the violence wasn't representative of the American G.I.s, that it was an aberration. (His son was killed at Khe Sanh in 1972 and has never been found. Seeing our guide standing on Khe Sanh with a Marine who had been there during the siege is an image that I will never forget.)

Curiously, when I asked the Vietnamese I met whether they experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, like so many Americans, they said no: They knew what they were fighting for, and their country’s response toward them was totally different. Whatever the reality is, what struck me was how puzzled they were by the very idea of PTSD.

I’d heard that others who went back to Vietnam before I did reported a change in themselves after returning. I was skeptical, and yet somehow that change has happened to me. Friends noticed it: I’m a little more tolerant, a little less impatient, a little more open and less negative. Somehow the cloud has lifted a little bit – I feel lighter.

I’ve heard that when one feeling leaves, space is made for something else to move in. I know that a lot of anger has left, but I can’t identify what it is that has taken its place. I keep being afraid that the old me will return, and it may; but this reprieve has shown me that there is another side, another way to be. That realization is what makes me want to share this experience with others in hopes that they, too, might find, or make, the opportunity to let go of some of the pain.​

 

[jazzeum]

My Father's War, and Mine - The author (who served in Vietnam) and his father (who served in the Pacific during WW II) were both Marines but there the similarities seem to end.

 

[Go for Broke]

Because I've been busy and I hate to read on the computer screen, I've read only a few of these. Recently, I read the last one about the different war experiences between the father and son and enjoyed it. I plan to go back and read more. Thanks for posting Brad.

 

[jazzeum]

Thanks. Glad to post them and hope you find some of them interesting. I think the best articles are the first person ones.

 

[jazzeum]

A Little Piece of Hell - The fighting at Con Thien (right below the DMZ), as recounted by a network correspondent who was present at the battle.

 

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Vietnam's South Korean Ghosts - The story of the 50,000 South Korean soldiers who fought in Vietnam.

 

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The international aspects of the Vietnam War.

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Not Just an American War

If you look at the Vietnam War’s historiography — the history of the history of the war — it moves outward in concentric circles. When people first started writing history books about the war, in the United States at least, they focused on the American experience, with just a few passing references to the lives and experiences of the Vietnamese — and then, usually limiting it to the politics of the Saigon government. And that makes sense; the need to understand the American experience during the war, for Americans, was pressing, and the material was close at hand.

But in recent decades, the focus has widened to include the experiences of the South Vietnamese civilian population and, even more recently, the North Vietnamese. There’s a trend among historians generally to go beyond the confines of the West when looking at post-World War II conflicts. But it’s also about having a better toolkit. Thirty years ago, most historians of the war didn’t speak Vietnamese, and even if they could, doing research in Vietnam was practically impossible. Work by young historians like Ed Miller and Lien-Hang Nguyen, who have done groundbreaking work on the politics of North and South Vietnam, would have been almost unthinkable a generation ago.

But there are even wider circles to come. Scholars are starting to break ground on the history of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which lost as many as 225,000 soldiers during the war — multiples more than the Americans. And while the war was fundamentally an American and Vietnamese conflict (and French and Vietnamese before that), it unfolded within the dense context of Cold War geopolitics. Historians are only now grappling with the way the war reverberated through China and the rest of East Asia, how it influenced Soviet-Chinese tensions and its subtle but significant impacts on Middle Eastern politics. Vietnam popped up in the most obscure places; in July 1967, the Peruvian minister of the interior had to resign after the police in Lima cracked down on organizers planning a protest against the war.

Meanwhile American involvement in Vietnam undermined its role in NATO and encouraged the Soviets and their proxies to take more risks in hot spots across the developing world. It drove a wedge between Europe and the United States: In the summer of 1967, envoys from the Soviet Union and France issued a joint communiqué condemning the American role in Vietnam. And the war left a lasting scar on America’s international reputation, undermining its foreign policy as far away as Africa and Latin America.

The war drew in 50,000 soldiers from South Korea — and if Americans have too easily forgotten that contribution, the Koreans have not. As the Cambridge scholar Heonik Kwon writes in our series this week, the Korean mission to Vietnam figures heavily in the country’s popular memory, and it featured prominently in President Moon Jae-in’s Korean Memorial Day speech this year. More than 7,500 Australian and New Zealand troops served in Vietnam, and more than 500 were killed. And 30,000 Canadians volunteered to fight in the American armed forces.

The Vietnam War had many actors, but it was not a world war, in the traditional sense. As with the Iraq War, decades later, the Vietnam War was driven by American schemes and interests. But we can’t understand it by looking simply at the American experience, or even at the Vietnamese experience. It has to be seen at the regional and global levels as well.

 

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'My Boys' by Allan Sells who served in Vietnam as a Vietnamese-language-trained Marine and later became intelligence chief for the Marine Combined Action Program in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin Provinces.

I first met Vo Van Tam and Huynh Ngoc Chanh in late 1966. Officially, in Vietnamese, they were “Hoi Chanh Vien,” roughly “members who have returned to the righteous side” — Vietcong who had flipped to the South Vietnamese cause and went to work with Americans as scouts. We called them Kit Carsons.

The idea was the brainstorm of a Marine counterintelligence team in Danang. The first defectors assigned to the program had little training and communicated with us through South Vietnamese interpreters, but the scouts mistrusted their South Vietnamese countrymen. So the Marines decided to search for an American with Vietnamese language skills. They found me, and soon I was working with Tam and Chanh.

Tam had been an assistant platoon leader with the 409th Sapper Battalion, an elite unit charged with assaulting fortified positions. Chanh had been an assistant platoon leader with the 38th Local Force Battalion operating primarily in Quang Ngai Province. Both had been wounded and had defected to get medical care.

The three of us spent much of the first half of 1967 accompanying Marine units on combat operations. Living and fighting alongside Marines in the field, we were involved in active combat almost every day. Together we were an odd trio, and Marines everywhere wanted to hear their stories and ask me what it was like to live with two defectors. Did I trust them? How did I know they were not spies? The answer was yes, I trusted them completely. Both scouts took special care to protect me, and I may owe my survival in Vietnam to their dedication and alertness.

“My boys,” as I called Tam and Chanh, offered vital insights about how the Vietcong interacted with civilians. We entered caves and tunnels together to search for documents. More than once, a hand on my shoulder stopped me from moving through a booby-trapped hedgerow or stepping on a mine in the road hidden by a piece of dried dung. During one large operation, we began to draw friendly fire when one of my scouts fired his carbine in response — at his former comrades-in-arms.

Tam once recognized four members of his former platoon among a group of captives and called to them by name, and he later participated in their interrogation. Both men were continually pointing out people and places where enemy fighters and weapons lay hidden. We shared foxholes on operations and lived in the same tent back at the base, although we spent most days out in the field.

It took time, but eventually I grasped what motivated Tam and Chanh. Although these Kit Carsons had been soldiers of the National Liberation Front and had undergone extensive indoctrination in communist and socialist thinking, I never once met a defector who had been a member of the Communist Party. And Tam and Chanh never expressed hatred for their countrymen on the other side. They regarded the war as a popular movement to free their country from foreigners and empower a legitimate government of their own choosing. They just disagreed on how to do that.

Eventually I moved on; I kept in touch with Tam for a brief time, but lost contact by the end of 1967. I worked again briefly with Chanh in early 1968, but he was rounded up and sent to a government camp after the Tet offensive, destined to be drafted into the South Vietnamese Army. I got him out before he was drafted, but I had lost touch with him by the time I went back to the States in mid-1968. I never heard from him again. I assume he survived the war. If he did, he would probably have been sent to a reindoctrination camp. But I don’t know.​

Hyunh Ngoc Chanh, a former Vietcong soldier who worked with American soldiers as a guide, in a program nicknamed the Kit Carson scouts.

 

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The Skunk Alpha Encounter - Capture near Da Nang of a Communist freighter by a Swift Boat.

 

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What It Was Like to be Drafted - Experiences of a draftee from being drafted until redeployment to Vietnam.

 

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The Body Escort - How in early 1969 Marine George Masters escorted the body of Lance Corporal John Michaels from Philadelphia, Pa to his home in Moscow, Pa.

Lance Corporal Michaels was killed in Quang Nam Province on December 20, 1968 after being only in Vietnam for six months.

The article is moving and not an easy read.

 

[Go for Broke]

That was a good story. It reminded me of a story my friend told me. He had a fellow soldier in his squad who wanted to be an APC driver, because he didn't want to walk. The APC hit a landmine, which killed and burned this guy. Nobody wanted to retrieve the body from the wreck, so my friend pulled the body out. Later he insisted to escort the body back to the base, despite the co wanting him to continue the patrol.

 

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"Give My Regards to Cam Ranh Bay", by Lary Bloom, a public information officer in 1967 and now an author and a playwright.

In the summer of 1967, Wyatt Earp lingered at the bedsides of wounded soldiers. At least, that’s how the men in the amputee ward at Cam Ranh Bay referred to the actor Hugh O’Brian, the star of a TV western featuring the fabled lawman. They told him about their hometowns, and the girls they left behind. They thanked him for being there.

As they talked, I took photographs. It was my role as public information officer to send press releases highlighting the progress of the war effort and the selflessness of Americans who fought.
O’Brian wasn’t in Vietnam just to meet wounded troops. His television career was on the slide; the Earp series had run its course. So he took the lead role in a U.S.O. production of “Guys and Dolls,” playing the hero, Sky Masterson.

For the men in the amputee ward, O’Brian wasn’t the only reason to see the show. They were agog at the Hot Box Girls, the leggy starlets headed by Adelaide, whose love laments drive the musical’s action. Among Adelaide’s chorus was an obscure actress who, backstage during intermission, was in tears.

As the official Army escort for the show, I became her momentary shrink. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

She told me her boyfriend had waited until she was thousands of miles away, dancing and singing for soldiers, to dump her. “Just like a man,” I said.

I did what I could. (My shoulder, apparently, was a comfort.) And I often thought of that vulnerable time, particularly in later years when Sandy Duncan left the chorus line to became a Broadway star in “Peter Pan.”

This crushing episode didn’t affect her stage performance. She must have been thinking, if the war must go, so must the show. And, as so many things connected to America’s inscrutable war, those tender and private moments stuck in my memory, if not in official histories.

A decade after I came home, I was the Sunday magazine editor and a feature writer at the Akron Beacon Journal. One day I was assigned to interview the former Wyatt Earp, who had been cast in the lead role in a summer stock production in nearby Canal Fulton, Ohio.

As O’Brian and I settled into a booth at a restaurant near the dinner theater, I read the frustration on his wrinkled brow. His shock of black hair now had a tinge of gray the temples, but it still framed his chiseled facial features made for television.

We ordered glasses of wine, and then he sighed, sat back and prepared to submit himself to the usual array of numskull questions. (“What was it like to play a Western legend?” “Do people call you Mr. Earp?” “Where did you learn to ride a horse?” etc.) But my approach was different.

“This isn’t the first time we met,” I said.

“No?” he replied, unenthusiastically.

“I was your producer, your stage manager, your publicist, your lighting designer, your photographer, your agent, your medical consultant.”

“What?” he said, more out of annoyance than keen interest. I was of course allowing my ego to interfere with my job.

I reminded him of the U.S.O. tour.

O’Brian seemed mildly interested. “You were there?”

“You relied on me for everything at Cam Ranh Bay.”

His eyes strayed to the waitress.

But then, hoping to rescue my journalistic mission, I brought out a box of photographs I had taken during the performance at Cam Ranh Bay. He suddenly perked up.

“Take a look at the Hot Box Girls,” I said.

“That’s Sandy Duncan, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing at her. “She looks great.”

“She was going through a hard time then.”

“Really?”

I told him about her boyfriend, and about how I tried to console her.

Then, looking at me as if I had just become his best friend, he asked, “Do you have her phone number?”

I didn’t, of course. But I thought, well, we were a tight group, those of us who had the privilege of participating in a war that served, at the very least, an unforeseen purpose. Vietnam, if it did nothing else, would surely collapse once and for all the façade of American invincibility. For a moment I hoped that public figures would never again pretend to be something they weren’t, to pretend our military was something it wasn’t, to send kids off to death for something they didn’t understand.
We should have known, though. It was all showbiz.​

Marines at a USO Show in 1967

 

[jazzeum]

The Day Nixon Began His Comeback - Nixon's speech for a post Vietnam world.

 

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Waiting by Cynthia Beach Guthrie whose husband served in Vietnam.

​

I'm an Army brat, an Army daughter, an Army wife; I was even an Army mother for three years. I have spent a lot of my life waiting for warriors to come home from war: my father; my uncle, who did not make it home. Later, I waited for my husband, brother and brother-in-law, and way too many friends.

In 1967 my husband, Dick Guthrie, an infantry company commander, deployed to Vietnam. I became one of the millions of family members and loved ones who waited for the 2.7 million Americans who served in the Vietnam War to come home. I became a “waiting wife.” While no two of our stories are alike, here is mine.

I learned I was pregnant with our first child the day we left Panama for Fort Hood, Tex., where Dick joined a mechanized infantry battalion on alert to go to Vietnam.

Only weeks later, he took me to Hawaii, where I would live with my parents and sisters for that year. I remember standing with my father and watching Dick's plane lift off. I kept a stiff upper lip as befits a member of a military family whose "business" is war. Inside, I wondered if I would ever see him again, or if he would ever meet our unborn child.

Shortly after he arrived in Vietnam, Dick wrote me that he was about to meet up with our good friend Dave Decker, who was also a company commander in the same area of operations. My mother and sister never forgot the tortured wail I let out while reading his next letter, which said Dave had been killed the day before he and Dick were to meet.

My mom and dad drove me to Tripler Army Hospital right before Christmas. I gave birth to Laura, and felt all the joy and hope one feels when holding her child for the first time. Then I found myself sobbing uncontrollably because Dick was not there, but in Vietnam.

Since I lived in Hawaii, I hosted a number of wives and friends who came from the mainland to meet their husbands. I also heard the stories from the R&R Service Center at Fort DeRussy, on Waikiki Beach, of personnel having to knock on doors of hotel rooms to notify wives who'd arrived early that their husbands would not be coming, after all, because their leave had been canceled.

All of the friends I welcomed to Hawaii, and their marriages, were affected by the war. Some husbands went on to serve two or more combat tours in Vietnam, by choice. One friend was killed on his second tour, just two weeks before he was to return, leaving a widow and three young children; one was badly wounded and lost an eye. Another friend arrived home to be met at the airplane by a wife who wanted a divorce. Of the couples I hosted in Hawaii, only Dick and I are still together.

Dick came home when Laura was 9 months old. We met him at the airport wearing brightly colored flowered muumuus. As we put plumeria and pikake leis around his neck, I breathed a sigh of relief. He was home from Vietnam.

Dick stayed in the Army, and for the next 20-odd years we lived the normal military gypsy life. Our last active-duty posting was to Fort Monroe, Va., a manicured, stately post across the mouth of the James River from Norfolk. In 1991, a man named Brian Thomas contacted Dick. He said he had been searching for him for several years. The last time Dick had seen Brian, his old First Platoon leader, was on Dec. 10, 1967, when Brian was severely wounded and evacuated from the battlefield. Our son Park, by then in college, said that when Brian hobbled up the sidewalk to our 100-year-old quarters, it was the first time he'd seen his father cry.

Dick retired not long after, and I thought the waiting was over. I was wrong. Maybe it was Brian’s visit, but in the following years Dick became focused on the story and the men of his Vietnam unit — Company B, First Battalion of the 50th Infantry Regiment.

I waited as he traveled to reunions, to research archives, to Vietnam to rewalk the old battlefields (in 2001, I went with him). And for the past several years, I've waited for a man who spends hours each day, five or six days a week, writing his memoir, “Gone to Soldiers, Everyone.”

I've learned that I will always share Dick with Company B. None of them — and by extension those who love them — will ever get all the way home from Vietnam. Now we're waiting together.


A wife embracing her husband as he arrives in Honolulu, on leave from duty in Vietnam

 

[jazzeum]

"My First Fire Fight", by Bob Allen, who served as an infantry officer in Vietnam.

I had been a platoon leader in Vietnam for just under six weeks when I experienced my first battle, against the North Vietnamese Army at a place called Hill 830, not far from Dak To at the intersection of the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian borders.

It was a day of normal monsoon downpour with low-hanging clouds; as a result, we couldn’t get air support in. And artillery could not be used because of our proximity to the enemy. From the four companies that made up the 4th Battalion, 503rd Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, 26 men were killed, and 49 were wounded. It was my first fire fight, but not my last.
The battalion was moving up the hill, named for its height in meters, when we ran smack into an N.V.A. base camp. The North Vietnamese were waiting for us.

I was stunned by the volume of gunfire, yelling, explosions. I had never heard anything like it. It was a sound one would only hear in combat.

Alpha Company was in the lead and took the brunt of the initial fighting. Dog Company – my company – trailed Alpha Company, and Bravo Company was behind us in column formation. I closed the front of our formation to make sure we didn’t have any gaps in our position. Then I ran to the back of the platoon to check our connection to Bravo Company. But Bravo Company was gone – ordered to hit the N.V.A. on the other side of Hill 830, and had therefore moved out without my knowledge. My platoon was alone. I closed the gap in the rear and told my men to shoot anything that moved.

It was not long before Bravo Company ran into the same buzz saw that Alpha Company did, and took heavy casualties. As soon as that happened my company commander, Capt. John Deems, known as Mike, ordered me to move First Platoon to reinforce Bravo Company.

I was crawling up a trail towards Bravo Company when I encountered a dead sergeant lying on his back. He was ripped open from his neck to his navel and the monsoon rain was washing the blood out of the open cavity. Not only was this the first dead soldier I had ever seen, but the first dead person I had ever seen, period.

I crawled over him and up to the Bravo Company location where there was a machine gun position. The gunner had burned up both barrels of his gun. Dead soldiers were scattered all around. Darkness was approaching and I expected the N.V.A. to counterattack that night. I sent a listening post a few meters to the front of our position to warn of a possible counter attack. But they never came.

The rain continued all night. I was under my poncho listening for the enemy, but could hear only the wounded screaming and dying. Medivac helicopters tried to evacuate the wounded, but were driven off by the weather and enemy fire.

Just before dawn I was ordered to move up the hill to either engage the enemy or to reconnoiter if the N.V.A. had pulled out. I called my listening post and told them that the rest of First Platoon was coming up the hill to meet them. One of the three men in the post was called Chief; his real name was William Dunson from Sapulpa, Okla. To my astonishment, he told me they were already at the N.V.A. base camp. It turned out the base was only 10 meters or so in front of our position. The N.V.A. had pulled out during the rain and pitch-black darkness of the night.

A few days later we were headed up a hill not far from Hill 830 when our point team was hit by friendly artillery fire. Three died and three were wounded. We had to cut a hole big enough in the triple canopy to lower a stretcher from the medevac. The canopy was about 80 to 100 feet tall.

When the hole was finished it was like a tube up through the jungle, and the prop wash circulated in it like a whirl pool. One of the wounded trooper’s legs was almost completely blown off and as the stretcher was being winched up by the medevac, it began to spin and the harness at the head of the stretcher broke. The soldier was hanging head down on the stretcher while the prop wash caused it to spin violently. The soldier’s leg came undone from the harness and his foot was hanging in his face. Sometime in the course of the debacle, he died.

Less than six weeks into my tour, I was no longer an anxious young lieutenant wanting to be in a war. I would do my duty as well as I could, but I’ll never forget those few brief, interminably awful days​

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Gun crewmen blasting support fire for infantrymen patrolling in the heavy rain near Dak To, in July 1967

 

[farmertony]

Jazzeum,thanks for posting this series.Having lived through this period and the turmoil of emotions it produced,I am finding it very useful to revisit it with the vantage of hindsight and an extra 45 years of life experience.Thanks and keep up the good work.TONY.

 

[jazzeum]

Tony, I'm glad that you find them interesting. I, too, lived through this period, which is why I also find these articles fascinating.

Brad

 

[jazzeum]

South Vietnam's Daredevil Girls - The story of the Women’s Armed Forces Corps, that was created to help out families whose husbands and sons were off fighting.