Combat Story (Ep 8): Hubert Yoshida Marine Corps Officer | Vietnam Veteran | Operation Utah

deaf company they're in tough shape i mean they had gotten caught in an open rice field and all the officers except except one had been wounded i got a briefing from the remaining officer he pointed me in the directional team thought the first platoon was in we had to get them and bring them back so we could withdraw to me it sounded like a suicide mission welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of hubert yoshida a marine corps platoon commander from 1965 to 66 in vietnam with 2nd battalion 7th marines he and his platoon fought in the bloody operation utah a significant battle in march 66 with over 700 friendly and enemy kia hubert's fascinating story begins as a child in a japanese prison camp in the us then volunteering for the marines and ends with an exceptional career in senior executive roles in the private sector he's writing a book about operation utah to tell the story of the brave marines who fought there i hope you enjoy his story as much as i did uh hubert thank you for being here and offering to share your story you're very welcome ryan i'm really looking forward to talking to you thanks so we will get into to operation utah and how you found yourself there in 1966 but i'm really curious to hear how you found your way to the marine corps to begin with and after doing just a little bit of research online about you and your background i would love to hear a little bit more about where you were the years leading up to vietnam what what took you into the marine corps okay well you know my generation we were born i was born just prior to world war so world war ii had a big influence on my life growing up i uh you're much younger than i am so i mean the whole country was focused on world war ii we had our victory gardens and all that in fact my family was in a prison camp because we were japanese americans so we were relocated from california to poston arizona and so i spent several years in a prison camp for american citizens essentially but the japanese ancestry um so of course growing up during that time the war was the the major topic you saw it everywhere uh and so uh and being japanese-american also you know i felt uh the need to kind of prove myself as an american does that make sense because you know we saw all the movies the other kids saw dance of iwo jima and movies like that uh and uh so i guess i always had a a desire to to be in the military and and particularly in the marine corps um i went to uh university at berkeley california and uh of course during the early 60s we started to see a lot of this unrest happening i was working at the lawrence radiation lab at that time as a as a lab assistant and i i heard president kennedy he came to the radiation lab at berkeley and spoke and of course i was very impressed by him and i was turned off by a lot of the uh protests and everything that were going on in around the berkeley campus and so i as i got my degree i applied for an ocs or a commission of the marine corps or to go to basic school and get a commission and i was turned down and uh the the the uh the um reason i was given is that my eyesight was bad but um i enlisted anyway since i wanted to join the marine corps i i went ahead and list enlisted and i did very well in boot camp probably because i was four or five years older than most of the kids that were there it was physically i was stronger and so i was one of the top graduates of all the recruit depots it's called the american spirit on honor medal that's given to uh the highest recruit of the navy marine corps um army and uh and that helped me get my commission and so i went to uh basic school ocs basic school and graduated there at top of my class as well and you know in the marine corps if you graduate in the top 10 you get to pick your mos military occupational skills and of course uh in the marine corps that would be an infantry officer no 300 and so i was able to choose 0300 and i was assigned to camp pendleton okay this was in uh summer of 65. and uh they're just reforming up this uh new battalion second battalion seventh marines um this was a trans placement battalion that had been aboard ship and been in okinawa and so they had a core of very solid uh troops uh junior ncos and all the officers who became platoon commanders uh were some are from my same basic school class and so um it was a good outfit we trained for a year before we landed in well we went to okinawa to train for a while and then we landed in vietnam in uh july of uh 65. okay so if it's okay i'd like to go back and unpack a couple things here fascinating background the first question is was there any military service in your family leading up to to vietnam it sounds like maybe not and you kind of got this desire to go into the marine corps from what you just described but i'm just curious if there was any military background or history there yes i did have an uncle um who served in the 442 that was a segregated japanese american regiment and he was fought in italy of course on the uh japanese side of the family i had cousins and uncles that had uh fought for japan as well wow background interesting fact is uh on my japanese side of the family uh they were from hiroshima and that was a big naval area there there was a naval school there so so my relatives there were in the japanese navy wow amazing well i i'm also curious when you say you spent years in a prison camp i would almost feel it's uh counter-intuitive that you would want to go and join the us military after that but it sounds like that that almost made you want to aspire to do something different how did you wrestle with that or handle that decision coming out of a prison camp and then deciding to go and serve um i well it happened when i was very young and my age that time it wasn't really a hardship i mean it was kind of fun because i had had kids to play with um because it was hard after i got out of the camp and was returning to uh normal life that uh you know we ran into a lot of prejudices because we were japanese americans um and i guess that just wanted to made me want to prove even more that i was uh an american i guess yeah interesting and then i want to go back to this story about you enlisting so you had already gone through college at berkeley you tried to get a commission they say no for eyesight which seems almost comical leading up to the vietnam war with the need for people and then you enlist and excel and then it sounds like coming out of boot camp you did so well that they automatically granted you a commission is that right well no uh although i had won the american spirit medal i was assigned to el toro and because of my college background of course they put me into a data processing unit that time was just key punches and uh but anyway i was i was there for uh about six months or so and um my uh uh officer commanding officer at that time was a war officer and he recognized uh you know my story and uh uh i reapplied for ocs and got accepted wow okay so what was how how long did you spend in between that from boot camp going to ocs uh it was about uh about six months yeah okay and that was kind of your goal to begin with was to be become an officer and and deploy and and to be in combat i didn't want or to be in a infantry unit i didn't want to be in data processing yeah now i i have interviewed some marines before and it does not surprise me you'd want to be in combat as a marine but where did that come from for you it wasn't just that you wanted to serve but you really wanted to be in combat was that where did that come from i think it's probably seeing too many movies i guess i mean everybody in my generation saw those movies yes no but i i've heard that before as well okay um as you were getting ready to ship off to vietnam what was it like at home were you married at the time what were you talking to your parents about how did that feel for you um well of course my parents had uh were disappointed that i joined the marine corps um because i was a physics math major in at berkeley and i had a uh you know good job i was working for dr louis alvarez as one of his rad lab rats uh but um i just felt i needed to do this and so i left they wanted me to go to grad school but i was just sort of burned out on school anyway so uh i just wanted to get out and play animal for a while and and do things and do things that i thought would make a real difference and of course i i read all the books you know the ugly american and things like that that wanted me to do something and i felt i could do something how were you feeling about going over to vietnam at the time i know it like that that transition from garrison to combat can be exhilarating but it also comes with its apprehensions how did you feel about it at the time well i guess i i felt very excited by that i mean we had been training for about a year from july and then we spent about a couple months in okinawa before it went over and it was a real good unit i mean the the marine battalion company platoon i mean they are they're really tight i mean especially if you train together for for a year and i had a good solid core of junior ncos that had been in the prior transplacement uh battalion uh so i was really anxious to go and prove what we could do you know it's interesting it sounds like you had a year of training with the people you were gonna deploy with which was not the norm for a lot of people in vietnam right it sounds like i would imagine because that's how we worked that it would be an advantage to have had that time for cohesion and training did was that noticeable for you going in oh yes yes absolutely that we would not have gotten through operation utah if we did not have that sort of cohesion and trust in each other there were other marine battalions that were also in in operation utah one of them was the third battalion first marines and they had just arrived in country in january and utah was in march and they had just before they shipped out from the us they were they had about 400 people that they pulled in from the different posts and organizations around the marine corps and they only trained for about 12 3-4 months before they were put into combat and they had one of the highest casualty rates and a lot of were ncos because the ncos you know they're the leaders of the squad leaders of fire team leader and they need to be experienced and most of them weren't some of them had been doing uh recruiting duty before some of them had been you know color guards and and all of a sudden they're thrown into combat with um and and the the people in that unit also had just graduated from boot camp and uh infantry training school so they're all new so having an experienced group that had worked together for so long was a real advantage for us i'm sure so if we fast forward then to when you arrive can you just talk to me about where did you where did you step off the plane or the boat what was your base like and did you do a handover with another unit at the time just to set up the context for what we're getting into yeah we um we shipped out uh after training for a couple months in okinawa we we went on aboard ship we made an amphibious landing at queen yang uh of course that was uh the day before we we were to do the amphibious landing we could see firefights along the hillside flashers of light going on but when we you know went down the uh the nets and got in the landing crafts we landed on the beach and the first thing i saw was an army sergeant in his underwear drinking beer all that firing before was probably just jitters oh my gosh so uh from there of course we we went out to the the countryside and the first night there was was horrendous mainly because of the humidity the heat stroke this is in july and mosquitoes all over the place i mean it was it was a miserable time i think troops fell out with heatstroke moving up to this hill um so it was trying to adjust to the country it took us um i'd say a month before we finally could move around with any kind of efficiency even even after being staged in okinawa it was that you still needed to to really acclimatize to to vietnam right yeah it was a different type of humidity i think it was more humidity and and more uh just just uh bugs and things and leeches and all those sorts of things um also we were aboard ship for about two weeks before we landed and of course you lose your you get your sea legs and then you gotta you gotta get out in that humidity and yeah it so when when you landed and you kind of describe kind of moving in inland were you not in a prepared base camp or were you setting up everything from scratch yeah we were setting up from scratch uh this was um in queen yon uh the arvin you know the south vietnamese troops had been there but we were setting up from scratch we were setting up a uh my platoon set up a roadblock on highway one between two uh operational areas uh south of us was supposed to be the south vietnamese and we were we our area of responsibility was north of this place we called kumong pass and so i had a platoon the first action i had was been about uh three months oh no it was about three weeks into this we had landed yeah and um what we had was a outpost overlooking uh highway one and i noticed that on the south me side were several men with rifles uh you know coming in and out of the village and sort of looking like they're sending up the roadblock so i got permission from my co my company commander to take a squat size platoon down there and see if we could capture them okay we went down at night we set up we didn't see anything um couldn't find anything and so we started walking back in the morning with all the uh natives or the vietnamese who are going to market into queen yacht so we were walking with them and all of a sudden they disappear and we got ambushed and fortunately i lost one man and uh wounded another man got wounded um but we made it that was my first introduction to uh to combat there and it was really frustrating because i couldn't see where the shots were coming from i didn't know who who was shooting at us uh these uh vietnamese who are friendlies weren't that friendly or they disappeared on us so so it was a lesson learned and and when i went back in uh 66 no no i mean uh 2006 i saw a monument where our base camp was and i could just send you a picture of that but it's a monument describing how was it uh three they called them commandos were able to kill 50 marines at that spot 50 marines was the size of my battalion and i was there on that date so they took that in blew it up into a major victory for the victim wow so they've got to me in vietnam yeah um so i i'm really interested to hear more about this first contact you had because it it sounds like you go into a village and in fact one of the i think the few advantages of the individual augmentee system was that when people were going on patrols even though they hadn't worked with these other um soldiers and trained previously they had people who had been in country for six to nine months and were attuned to when they're moving through an area and people start to leave and something starts to change so the new people don't pick it up but those who have been there for nine to ten months are starting to pick up on these things to adjust i'm assuming you're in a squad sized element going into a village you've never been in before and you're moving out and all of these new things start to happen to you basically right yes and that's why i said it was so frustrating i mean i should have should have been more aware of what's happening around us um yeah and and we're still what two three weeks into this we're still sort of acclimatizing we're still on the border edge of heat stroke and all that going on at the same time can i ask how did you to to lose somebody on your first contact effectively how did you rebound from that as as a leader how did your platoon handle it because there's a lot of responsibility on you as a platoon leader this is your first contact how did you manage that and how did that set you up for the rest of the your deployment yeah yeah he was the first one killed in our battalion uh he was our point man uh when we were coming back um yeah a lot of self-doubt a lot of uh um guilt for for having been so stupid to go down there and try to try to do this and and not having the experience um and but you know uh in in a sense it it gave us better cohesion i mean we we learned from that experience okay and uh uh it was um i wrote a letter back to the parents of this the marine that got killed um and uh that was one of the hardest things i've had to do i mean um so um it was it was um you know i wrote i wrote up a little article on that and i could send that to you as well if you're interested i i i would i i did read one of your blog posts about your trip back to vietnam um and how you described writing letters back home to the uh to the families of those who are wounded uh and i was gonna ask if you if that's when you started doing it was with this particular event and i i sympath like i can completely understand the potential for for self-doubt you've been high achiever throughout training you're in combat this is what you're there for this happens but it just seems like you you clearly recover from it and learn from it um as you're there so um i can't imagine how difficult that that must have been at that time yeah um especially since i had known this fella for a year and we had been you know one of my better marines it was that's why i had him on point right so with that being your first contact when you get back to your base uh were you were you intense like constructing a base camp or was the intent for you guys to be moving constantly and there wasn't really a situated or stable outpost no i i had like i said i had the responsibility for this road roadblock the human size uh observation point really um so we were there of course we would run patrols out of there every night uh ambushes and patrols um we did have another activity there where the valley next door where we um my platoon was selected to set up a blocking position where we had to travel at night to the blocking position and at the north end of that valley then the rest of the battalion was going to sweep it and so uh during that operation i captured about was 20 to 30 um north uh not uh vietcong and uh we uh killed two who were trying to escape and one had a whole bunch of money with him he had a sack of money with him um of course we we turned that all into the uh to the arvind and disappeared so i'm sure and that happened weapons we confiscated also disappeared and this was you you captured as a platoon that number of of people yeah we had a blocking position at the end of the valley and they just came running down there and we corralled them all wow what was the protocol for that so so you receive them kind of i'm sure separate them or move them to another location for for further um who knows interrogation or investigation is that how it worked yeah we uh we rounded them up and then uh helicopters came in and the arvind took them away to interrogate them wow so and from what you said you guys arrive in july of 65. operation utah doesn't take place until march of 66. yeah what was your experience like leading up to that because i know utah is going to be its own its own event in your experience but what was it like getting there well in in the beginning it was just small uh patrols and actions against the viet cong with their rusty old mousers we did take you know a few casualties due to sniper fire and and actually the country probably probably hurt us just as much um you know a lot of just the wear and tear of leeches and immersion foot and the patties and some drownings people drown or you know you're walking through what you think is a rice paddy and all of a sudden there's a river running underneath it uh so uh fighting the country is just about as much as the heat and all that uh luckily my brother was a pharmacist and he would send me these tubes of things like bacetration that we could use for our all our sores and and things like that i mean the the marine corps didn't have any of these modern types of antibiotics or things used in the field i'm just a tube of attraction but you know people feel for that so anyway that uh we did toward uh in the fall we started to hit some some major operations operational there was a harvest moon double eagle so there was a number of we were about toward well about uh let's see about three months in queen yawn we were relieved by the korean tiger division and we moved up to chulai where uh the marine corps was building their major headquarters and in july is when we started to get into the major operations like um starlight harvest moon double eagle and we're just about on one of these some of these sweeps almost every month in the last part of the 65 double back lasted until about two days before operation um utah if i can ask what was what was a normal day like for you as a platoon leader platoon commander when outside of these operations when you when you're going out and doing a clearing um or you know like a movement to contact out at night or just during the day what was it like for you as a platoon commander were you meeting regularly with the other platoon leaders were you separated like how often did you see the company commander or the battalion commander yeah i mean uh well when i was on the uh the um roadblock or the uh observation points point of course i didn't see the rest of the platoon or company or the company commander on a regular basis i would go i would hike down there uh to meet with them you know um i guess i did would see them every day but um that would mostly it would be taking care of the men you know making sure that you know i was concerned about their health and their welfare and uh making sure that you know they're they're treating their uh their different uh ailments uh and doing some some training too i mean we still you know need to be familiar with the country so map exercises and uh taking out um patrols uh it's just any down time is there anything on time for you as marines i feel like the answer is probably no but i'm wondering there's down time in between uh you know we had to conserve our strength of course in this heat and everything so but you know even when you're not doing anything you know that that humidity is something else but but yeah there's there's some down time and you know people would spend that time writing letters and or just um you know how marines are they just horse around yeah fair fair enough yeah go ahead i talk about marines i don't know what the you know you see the movies and and the the mature you know men um these are boys i mean these are 18 year old 19 year old just barely down to teenagers and you know they they're just out of high school in just a year or two so these are really kids but of course after a month or two they became the men and i would imagine for you you were older as you said even going into training so you even platoon leaders in that day were what 23 or 24 it sounds like you even had a little bit of maturity there so maybe that was helpful uh within the platoon environment leading these guys right and having gone through boot camp like the rest of the troops most of the officers go through ocs but i went through boot camp as well as ocs and uh so i knew more or i related more to how the the troops were yeah and to your point on having 18 and 19 year olds there i had just interviewed a gentleman named eric brethon who was a a little bur or loach pilot in vietnam and he was flying missions there at the age of 19. single pilot and he just described some of the crazy things people do especially at the age of 19 and it's amazing yeah there's a lot of responsibility there you know at that age too i mean they think they're invincible you know that they can they'll live forever that was one of the common themes i heard from eric was just you know i was 19 and felt invincible and did did things i would never have done later on in life that's so true so if we if we fast forward then like you're you're in it sounds like july through thanksgiving christmas and then as you move into operation utah could you set the stage for maybe the spring of 66 what the tempo was like and did you did you anticipate what was coming for operation utah could you have imagined looking back now what you were getting into how significant of an event this was going to be yeah that was a surprise well we had been on a um an operation through january and and well it didn't end to the end of february it was called operation double eagle there's double legal one in double eagle two and it was a a massive uh joint marine army uh south korean um um it seemed to have lost yeah i got you thank you and uh we had just come off of there and then all of a sudden the uh south vietnamese um they had a uh their headquarters was in uh guangnai which was just about maybe 15 miles south of chula picked up some prisoners that indicated that there was a a regiment of north vietnamese that were moving into the area near july now double eagle we had some contact but it wasn't most of the time they eluded us so we didn't have any major uh compac contact during double eagle uh but nonetheless you know you're in the field and there's wear and tear and so we were looking to come back and sort of refit ourselves and get ready and within a day we were told to to mount out again for this we call it operation utah at the time we named it later but um to try to see if we can make contact with these with it was the 21st mba regiment and uh but they decided that this was going to be a joint arvin and marine corps um operation and it would be one battalion of uh of um uh arvin their first airborne battalion and their battalion was about 400 men and then we had second battalion seventh marines we were to be the marine battalion um normally a marine battalion would be about a thousand men but we went in and there would be four companies rifle companies but they decided that they wanted to take one of the rifle companies and give them security of a artillery battery so we were down to three companies and of course we had been a country for six seven months and so uh attrition had taken its toll so we were down to about 600 men going in so total of 400 and 600 and we're going to go up against a regiment that does would have 2 000. okay i don't know why who did the numbers on that but uh but it was um it was sort of crazy and it was very little prep for this i mean this was uh i think they did the first briefing that night to the third and we didn't get our fragmenters until uh about four in the morning in the meantime we're trying to get our troops geared up you know new ammo see rations find out who's able to mount out with us and then get down to the helicopter sites to be flown in we were supposed to leave around 9 30 but we didn't get to the site until uh about one o'clock because the earlier um waves i was in h company we were the last wave to go in the earlier uh flights had gotten shot up so uh they were being hit by 50 caliber uh machine guns um they even shot down an a4 skyhawk um with a 50 caliber i never do that happen but uh so it was it was contested landing um i remember going in on the helicopter and all of a sudden you could see these blossoms of light coming through the side of that helicopter yeah all the noise and everything you can't hear what's going on but to be a weapon you'd see these rounds come through like through the sh through the the uh side of the of the aircraft so effectively you're seeing the bullet hole right yeah these are old uh-34s i don't know if you've ever flown in those i i have not i saw from what i had read uh there was the a4 that was shot down there was a i think a uh-1 gunship that was shot down early on and even a 34 was shot down or crashed at least on landing yeah yeah so um hueys were you know were were used as gunships i mean they they had a platform they had weapons and all that uh but they when by the time we got there the huey's left and we were just going in as on the uh third force they're kind of like dinosaurs you know they're kind of big delivering things and i wouldn't want to be a pilot than that because you're sitting right up top there right so setting up for this operation i guess we should also say what you later find out about utah is and you know fact check me here 600 um killed on the north vietnamese side 98 marines and i think somewhere maybe 30 to 35 killed from the south vietnamese forces that you're working with um significant casualties over a three-day period march 4th to march 6th and you are coming right out of a previous op with your platoon you have effectively a data reset you're getting your orders on on the way and you're going to an area you have you're being airlifted into an area you haven't been to before what's your combat effectiveness at that time like what how many people are in your platoon um going into that yeah i was down to about 38 men out of uh you know a platoon reinforced platoon is close to 50 men okay with the machine guns and rockets and uh so even with my machine gun and rockets i was down to about 38 people 38 men uh when i first when we first landed one of the helicopters was damaged and i was assigned to provide security my platoon to probably provide security for that while the rest of the battalion moved out um they're moving toward hill 50. and um so i i stayed there till you know maybe about two three in the afternoon and they're finally getting the helicopters out and i received a call from my battalion commander now battalion commander doesn't usually talk to the second senate but he said i had to go and uh over to fox fox companies area because they had been uh assaulted and had been split apart and they lost their first platoon and so uh he wanted me to go out there and close the gap with the first platoon and try to rescue them and bring them back so that we could withdraw so i took my platoon across and that this was all across open rice paddies but fortunately we made it across and they're 50 caliber heavy machine guns trained on us i i you know you you're i don't know what you fire in the on the helicopters but 50 calibers are like little cannons yeah you know we're 30 millimeter and yeah 50 cal is serious yeah so um anyway we made it across and i got briefed by the uh but f company they're in tough shape i mean they had gotten caught in an open rice field and all the officers except except one had been wounded including the company commander um their forward absorb observer which is a lieutenant was also wounded seriously so they're in quite disarray um but uh i received you know i got a briefing from the remaining officer he pointed me in the direction which he thought the first platoon was in we had to get them and bring him back so we could withdraw and so um to me it sounded like a suicide mission because the the left flank where this was all occurring the arvin was supposed to be that they had pulled back and so we're completely exposed on the on the left flank so um we didn't know you know how many north vietnamese were there and they were north vietnamese because we could see them in their uniforms these weren't the bc these are north vietnamese and they were all tad branches tied around them you know camouflaged and all that but you know something's happened that are very lucky and fortunate that sort of turn the course of the battle well we're trying to locate that other platoon we're moving forward and one of my one of my corporals noticed a spider hole so he dropped a couple grenades in that spider hole and all of a sudden it flushed out a bunch of these north vietnamese and they jumping out of their holes and uh there were hedgerows uh you know all crisscrossing that area and that sort of confined them you had to realize these are north vietnamese they weren't that familiar with the areas it's just about as badly as we were although they'd been there earlier and um so we were able to take them all out now there must have been about 20 of them and it was it was like shooting fish in a barrel i mean you know that may sound sound callous but uh um so we were able to reach the remnants of that platoon that had been cut off um there they were all they're non-functional those who were still alive were not functional i mean there was only a platoon sergeant and a corpsman that were still functional moving around and doing things um you know they had been you know and they were they were men with 50 caliber wounds and you see a 50 caliber wound on it if it could take down an airplane you could know what it does to it to human body um so there was one man with uh who had been shot uh he was carrying a phosphorous grenade on his belt and that got shot there and it went off and he was screaming in pain the corpsman um it was really bright of him to do this he he got a bunch of waters made mud to cover that wound so that the air couldn't get to the phosphorus and he was asking for water and so i gave him one of my canteens and you know thought crossed in my mind that you know i may need that water later on today but but so i i held back some of that water uh and i i think back of that and to think you know you know in fact i didn't even touch that water the rest of the day so uh yeah you know you do things like this and you kind of think about it later and you think wow yeah i could have i could have done better but uh what happened to the platoon commander he had been caught out in an open field um and he was behind a rice paddy dyke along with a radio operator and i think one of his uh mortar fos uh ford observers um and we tried to reach him but it was all open there's no way that we could reach him with it without exposing and getting more injured in fact one of my fire teams tried to get out there and and one of my men got got injured oh i lost my very hubert can i enter i want to make sure i understand the context here so you went from you went from the helicopter site to the company site f company and they were they were kind of unable to go and recover their platoon that had been separated so that's your suicide mission going there you you locate a portion of the platoon but now you've got the platoon commander and radio operator separated as well that's right right there in the field in front of the uh area that we were at and did you know this platoon commander because you were saying you had gone through training with many of the of the other officers within the battalion did you know this person personally well this is another part of the story at about this time the marine corps decided that they needed to have a rotation plan they couldn't have you know whole units leave at one time so these they decided to rotate companies out of the battalion okay so uh um this this whole battalion that we trained so carefully in in uh camp pendleton in okinawa we lost the first company just at operation starlight um the end of the year and then in february we lost f company and so this was a new f company that was there and i didn't even know that the company had changed i was expecting to see all the officers i knew from the old death company wow so this is this is a whole new company in the battalion and then they had just done the change over a couple days before and of course we didn't know we didn't know them yeah but we we uh um so anyway that was another complication that uh we hadn't trained with this company um and their company yeah their their company was the lead company because they were the closest to being at uh full strength um there are almost um about 180 men whereas my company was about down to about 135. so uh but they were you know they were working in a new area i mean they hadn't worked with our supporting arms group so you know there's some communication you have with the artillery and the air controllers and and um so they were at a disadvantage too and plus all their officers getting getting uh wounded and right off the the first goal okay so so you've located the uh part of the platoon and now you've got the platoon commander and radio operator separated so please continue from what happens from there okay yeah so when we got to that platoon i uh they needed to get their wounded out i mean the wounded was what's trapping them holding there so i gave my second squad over to them to to help move the wounded back to the uh cp and they took the other two squads with me and we went out to see if we could recover the lieutenant who was out there fortunately there they had a radio there and i had gotten a radio from the f company group when i went out because we we you know our companies have different radio frequencies so i so i had a f company radio and i was able to contact the radio man out there and uh ascertained that although they had all been wounded um the lieutenant was dead and the other two they said they could they're mobile and so what i did was i laid down some smoke and some covering fire and said you know we're going to start this um barrage of fire and when we do that we want you to come back to our area because we couldn't go out to get them because there was it was just all open space so we did that and fortunately we were able to get them back the two the wounded marines back and then we were able to then pick up the rest of the wounded and and evacuate that area and that was your first experience in utah then was was this suicide mission yeah and then getting back to the battalion area from there there's this uh a patchwork of open rice paddies so you have to run through that to get back i remember i told my troops just run like hell to get back don't stop don't try to fire don't try to return fire into that um just keep moving so we're able to get everybody back on track back to the battalion area without any more injuries although i didn't know it at the time you know marines never leave their troops behind even the dead we tried to bring we tried to bring them all back and unfortunately you know i couldn't bring back my machine gunner and i couldn't bring back that lieutenant because he was still on the field my did i say my marine my machine gunner was shot killed during this operation uh and we had to leave him there he was he was a you know uh there's so many wounded to bring back i couldn't afford to bring back just the bodies yeah so that and that haunts me today i mean to leave people out there because you don't know what's going to be happening to them you know whether when the north vietnamese get there and then that evening we got into a perimeter and when i was trying to get to scare my part of the perimeter i had another man killed um shot during that and once we're in the perimeter we called air strikes down called artillery um and we lasted through the night by morning morning go ahead north vietnamese had left the hill or left the area and uh i since i uh actually i was very fortunate because my platoon suffered the least of the company platoons i only had two killed and three wounded whereas the other two platoons had trying to repulse an attack on our right flank which was being attacked from a hill they went up to try to capture that hill but were were overrun and they lost many more men than i did i think their one platoon lost 14 killed the other had lost uh six skills so about 20 men were killed plus their just about everybody else was wounded i mean out of some of those platoons that were like 35 36 men only about six or eight were walking by the end of that so i was very fortunate in that i didn't suffer the casualties that the rest of the company did and you you you almost mentioned it in passing but that evening it sounds like you're you're still taking fire you're calling in air strikes and artillery what what was going on there were you were you in close contact or were you simply defending a perimeter for the hill well at the beginning it was it was a close contact i mean this is already dark it was there was a full moon i remember there's a full moon the moon had risen in the afternoon and yeah all those so the beginning of the night was uh there's full moon um and we could hear the vietnamese talking um they were that close uh so we we were in close combat contact with them not not we didn't know what we were firing at and we just see muscle flashes and we were fighting firing back and forth um there was of course mortars going off every time a helicopter tried to land and and take out the wounded they would get shelled with a mortar fire um then toward about midnight midnight or 10 o'clock 11 o'clock uh the moon had set and passed and gone behind the hill so it gave us more darkness to bring in the helicopters but um so we survived that night and when we were calling in uh after the helicopters evacuated the wound we called in more airstrikes and artillery so the next morning uh since my platoon was probably the best shape we i went up on that hill where second and third platoon had gotten run over they had to leave men behind as well they had left about five men back on that hill and so i went up to recover them the the vietnamese had gone away and taken off there dead and wounded fortunately these are north vietnamese and they didn't mutilate the bodies like the viet cong used to do um but you know there was i remember one uh one marine had been sort of drug out of a hole that he been in and um somebody had taken his wallet out scattered around a picture of his wife was torn in half and i just you know just like that sort of upset me i mean uh you know there's no need to do that um and then there was a bomb crater where we found uh three men who were in the same fire team i guess they they kind of tried to do a last stand there and they were killed um there are three corpsmen killed on that on on that hill um so corman you know they're a different breed i mean when they go into battle they're not focused on killing people they're focused on trying to save people um and so uh you know they're they're rush they expose themselves um trying to get to the wounded and fix them up and so forth so we had every casualty of the of gorman wow it did did i know operation utah lasts another day or two were you in contact for that or was your job to hold the hill and other other operations were moving yeah we were there primarily to be a blocking position after that and then the third battalion first marines they came they helped the arvin on hill 50. and they suffered a lot of casualties too but that was the unit that had been kind of cobbled together and deposited in the country with only a few months training so that's i could understand why they could have had so many casualties and a lot of the casualties were the squad leaders and ncos because they were new to that group um and then to the south of us the fourth marines augmented by a battalion or company from the uh south marines uh first battalion had another major battle um at a uh at a place called onto it and although their casualties weren't as heavy i think they only had about six killed but this was a company that was surrounded and they fought all day and all night they're running out of ammunition helicopter pilots came in and saved them by dropping off ammo resupply um and those uh there's an article about them i mean they they had about 50 holes in the helicopters and they dropped off the uh the ammo they couldn't land so they just kicked off the boxes and this was at night so they're flying at night and uh at that time this was uh like eight or nine o'clock so they were silhouetted in the moonlight because it was almost full moon that night um uh so they they it's so under those helicopters those hueys could take a a lot of beating and not not not the hueys i mean the uh-34s oh interacting we didn't have the hueys yeah um i'm curious coming out of that day did you realize i would imagine for you you probably had your own near-death experience that day or you're watching people die and they're part of your platoon did you realize how significant that day was going to be for you later on in your life as it was wrapping up were you able to kind of step back enough to see that or was it just another day oh no it was it was definitely you know there is something that i think about almost every night um you know some things some things haunt me like uh the radio man i got from f company that went with me um to contact you know the the tune commander that was cut off um in the rush to get back and trying to get my men back i lost i don't know what happened to him okay i just you know i forgot about him this is what i did and i uh was until later and i guess he must have taken off fortunately i've been doing research and i found that that he was not killed that he had made it back safely so but you know for years and years i just found out this last year wow haunted me as to what happened to that radio man that helped me that day um yeah um so i've i've been making contacts with people that's part of this thing about doing this book is you know making contacts again finding out and thanking some people who i should have you know considered before um but you know after that it was it was yeah it was it was a life-changing event and was was a very traumatic event in in my life what um when you say that you're you're thanking people that and you feel that you should have what who comes to mind there well one is that that radio man that was was with with me um the lieutenant in f company that survived and briefed me and pointed me in the right direction to to rescue the platoon um i have a uh squad leader uh his name was ralph good um he's the one that was able to um destroy all that uh the north vietnamese that was surrounding the other other platoon i mean his squad was uh was amazing i mean he uh unfortunately i found him recently and uh he's in prison uh for uh murdering his wife's uh husband or boyfriend something like that so you know things seven turned out is good for a lot of the people that and he was my best marine he was my best i mean i would have wow staked my life on him i mean i don't know the story of of how he got into prison and all that i've corresponded with them a couple times um but you know i think for the most part most of the marines that have gone through there have gone on to live pretty productive lives um those who survived of course wow um just one more question about the battle itself and then i think i'd like to move to how you process this afterwards but now i had interviewed another marine eliot ackerman he's an author now um he was a platoon leader in fallujah in 2004 in iraq brutal fighting as you know house to house clearings similar event to just a different environment he went down to 50 combat effectiveness on within 24 hours in fallujah and so trying to deal with that and the morale and knowing that they have additional days ahead of them what was the hardest part of that for you as a leader at the time and people don't know this but you've gone on to to the executive ranks in the private sector but what was the challenge for you as a leader at that time maybe that at the end of that day or the next few days for you i guess it was you know trying to review all the things that happened um writing letters you know to the casualties because there's the wounded and the dead trying to recognize the troops that did well um you know there's there's always a feeling that you know the officers got all the medals and the men didn't and so i tried to you know try to submit the awards and sometimes i was um criticized for that um but you know if if you see a guy who goes out there and exposes himself to try to go to the aid of another marine like that's heroic to me you know it's it's it's counterintuitive to do that i mean it's self-preservation but um not all the awards got approved i just um that was kind of disappointing to me um you know it's not to say that you know my platoon wasn't recognized i'm sure it was but the right people didn't get the right credits for a lot of things or as i seen others um officers who you know i read their recommendations and wonder who came up with that i think some things have not changed in combat yeah oh wow well if we if we look back kind of as you transitioned out so you did utah in march i presume you had another three months in country to wrap up your year three or four months um did you did you end up exiting out of the marine corps immediately coming back home what was your transition out yeah well there are several operations after that um okay not on the scope of there was operation hot springs there was indiana you know there's there's several other uh battles that we went through but um in uh i think in just about a month before i rotated back i turned it over to a sergeant my platoon over to a sergeant and the very next operation he was killed he and his radio operator were killed with booby trap so um i came back aboard ship and when i came back uh you know i had got promoted to captain um i was in the training regiment institute training regiment at pendleton i had a company and then actually i was acting battalion commander for a while there i got a regular commission as a captain and i was ready to stay and uh because i had the combat experience and i was hoping to go back and have a rifle company but then you know one day i was duty officer and at night and i got a telegram come in that said one of the marines had been badly wounded and the wife still lived near the base and if i could go and notify her um i called the chaplain to see if he would come with me and he couldn't come so i went there i took my wife because you know this is a young girl she i think she was like 18 or 19. um and we went to visit her uh and you could see the color drain from her face as soon as she saw me in uniform coming up i was glad that my wife came with me because she was very very she was very good comforting for a young lady because she was all alone but you know i looked at that and i realized what effect this had on our wives you know in those days we didn't have internet or anything like that so it was by mail in some ways it's better because you know took maybe a week or two to turn around a letter and when you put in a red letter you edit and you don't complain about the kids or the car payments or anything like that like i guess the troops have to contend with today but uh even then there was this they didn't know what was going on uh and to put my wife through another one of those i thought well you know i can't do that to her so uh i resigned my commission and um um fortunately i got i joined ibm yeah wow it feels like that was a very difficult decision what was it yes i mean i had uh you know i had put together a pretty good marine corps resume as it were i'm sure i was scheduled to be the commanding officer at uh pickle meadows that's a escape invasion school up in the sierras um of course that meant my wife would have to go up there and uh you know it's an isolated pretty isolated yeah so uh um yeah at that time i decided my my my wife was more important to me than the marine corps are doing anything else in the marine corps yeah so fast forward into 2016 i read something that you were written about taking a business trip back to vietnam and then actually going back to the area finding somebody who a vietnamese person who was there during during the events um could you just talk to me about what it felt like going back there i had gone back with my father and it was a pretty moving event i'd love to hear it from your your side well the area had changed completely it was it was not recognizable to me um you realized back in this 1966 the the hills were more barren because for centuries people have been shopping wood cutters have been chopping down trees and making charcoal because that was their only fuel that they had so the hills were pretty barren plus we had done a lot of bombing and agent orange and all that so it was pretty bare but when i went back there there was a new canal that was dug through the valley they had reforested all the hills the towns of course were bigger now they weren't just little hamlets villages it was it was really unrecognizable uh i although i had this vietnamese i had to go through an interpreter and you know i couldn't ask the more personal types of questions and i don't know if they could answer that either but i walk through some of the areas what's what's a good thing afterwards i found out is that you know as i took pictures on my iphone there are apps where you can get the grid coordinates of that and i can map it out to the maps that i had in those days so that's how i afterwards i came back and i found out where i was and i was off the hills that i thought were where they i thought i was on yeah and you know everything had overgrown you didn't see there were some bomb craters there was still there but it was all it's all different and changed and um that i did find a cemetery where the north vietnamese had been buried some of them and it was very near the battle area um i don't know if they're the same troops that were there before um it was it was uh when i went back to that first area that kumong where where i had that outpost and i climbed that hill and of course everything was overgrown um i could hear semis roaring up and down highway one in fact you know um there's this app called pokemon that my my nephew had and so i put it on my iphone um in the states and then when i was out there i actually had a pokemon notification while i was going up that hill it's the craziest thing uh but i didn't make it up to the top of the hill but i couldn't recognize anything i just didn't recognize anything at all maybe if i had gone there with other veterans who who we could reminisce with i mean um in a sense i guess it was kind of i didn't see the things that i expected to see because everything had just changed so much but i was glad in that life went on and that they seem to have a better life now i mean they have electricity there they have you know propane they don't have to chop wood and create charcoal to fill their fuel their lives um and you know the vietnamese people seem to have no animosity uh to americans i did go to um uh chuchi is it the american uh tunnels of kuchi kuchi and uh i know there's a museum there and uh of course the museum is full of propaganda films and all that um i imagine you must have gone to some of those museums yeah um but you know i i worked with the people in vietnam and most of the business people are in the 20s 30s 30s and 40s and they have no idea the war and they all seem to have a very good impression of americans um i went to a restaurant where uh they had taken president obama and they had pictures of him on the wall and he was very popular there in vietnam and i read this this gentleman that you met there who i think he wasn't fighting at the time but he may have been aiding the north vietnamese and then you had tea with them how did you did you harbor any animosity coming out of the war that changed over time how did you do that no no animosity at all at all you know for me it was rather strange sometimes because the vietnamese look a lot like japanese the little kids there they i mean they look like my little nieces and nephews you know they come running around and uh they're asian people on and i felt i related to them i i didn't have any animosity at all i um yeah you know i maybe for me was a little bit different i know some of the veterans have come back um you know have been very bitter i mean especially if they've seen some atrocities or or you know with the best friends being killed um closely but uh that wasn't my ex that's not my experience yeah and and i know you've written a bit about how important it was to you know like see your own family grow and how difficult it difficult it was to think of these other families who lost their their children in combat not just the americans but also you describe that cemetery in vietnam where these people are buried far from their homes so it's not even easy for their families to come visit the grave sites um i i i wonder as a father of three boys how did you talk to your family children about that experience for you did you want to guide them into the military did you not did you just want them to make their own choices yeah no i i never gave any guidance to my my son about my children in fact i think up until recently i rarely spoke about this to my my family or my kids my wife i did originally when i first came back things were fresh it was kind of frightening for her because i would have have nightmares you know one one day i was she claims i was choking her at night um so it's kind of frightening but you know that that's all gone um you know when uh the first uh kuwait uh invasion came up my son michael was playing water polo for uh uc santa cruz and we were at a meet uh you know and all these young men healthy young men you know you know just playing at athletic events water polo i i was just thinking what if there was a war and they were all there and coming back in body bags and you know i i um that that really frightened me and i guess i would consider having him go to canada i guess unfortunately uh you know he didn't didn't have to go or didn't uh i didn't encourage him to do anything like that when you're a parent right it's a very i i had a six-month-old son when i deployed and i feel like you know i don't know what it was like to deploy without a kid um but i i feel very strongly that that changed some of my decision making at the time um it just weighs on you differently as a parent yeah um i wanted to ask looking back at what what you did the people you interacted with the experiences you had and then what you've dealt with since would you have gone back to your 23 or 4 year old self and advised a different path or would you have done it again yes i would have done it again i would have done it again despite the difficulties yeah i i guess it's yeah i would do it again you know it was just a a chance to prove myself as it were i mean all young men i mean you know you want to prove yourself make your mark i guess um yeah i would do it again i was proud really proud to have been in the marine corps and have been in vietnam when you came back you said you didn't talk about it often i don't know if your uncle who fought in world war ii as you described it if if he was still alive did you talk about that with anybody you know i'm going to talk to my uncle about that and see he was wounded in italy so i wish i could have talked to him more of course uh yeah no i never really had a chance to talk to him i regret that very much and i i remember what i wanted to ask you you mentioned that you've only recently started talking about this what what changed things to make you want to talk more or be more open to talking about these experiences i guess is that um the chance i had to go back in 2016 and visit some area that triggered you know a lot of the the desire to learn more you know in in utah i just saw a very very small part of that battle so i wanted to know what else had gone on there um i've been doing a lot of research and i've retired as well from hitachi i'm i still have an emeritus title but i'm retired and so i'm got time now to spend researching and then the research tools are amazing that the internet and all that so um finding quite a bit um and what i want to do is to honor these men that were killed i'm going to try to post something on their uh you know there's a web page for for all the kias several web pages and i'd like to maybe post some of my um comments on those those pages uh just the last question i have um was there anything that you carried with you into combat that was carried sentimental value was given to you by somebody that you just felt like was a good luck charm or you had to have on you when you were there that's interesting um when i left for vietnam my brother-in-law uh george souda is a very good christian he gave me a pocket bible to take with me okay and when i got to vietnam i kept it with me and then as i worked with the korean tiger division south korean tiger division i got to know a chaplain a korean chaplain there and when i was leaving um to rotate from queen yang to chulai he came to see me and he gave me a bible a small pocket korean bible and so i i didn't have anything so i just gave him the bible that my brother-in-law had given me and although i don't read korean i kept that bible in my in my shirt pocket um especially when i you know went out to do these operations and years later when i was doing businesses in korea i tried to contact him and i found out that he had moved to durham north carolina and it started a very large christian church there and so um anyway that's that's kind of yeah that's what i carried with me i couldn't read it because it was in korean but nonetheless that's a great story well thank you very much hubert i appreciate your time i wish you the best of luck with the book um i know it'll be important and valuable to a lot of people so thank you very much okay thank you i hope you enjoyed this combat story if you want to tell your own story go to combatstory.com if you know someone we should interview send me their info at ryan at combat story dot com hearing these stories can be tough or bring back your own memories if you're battling ptsd please call the veteran crisis line at seven 1-800-273 eight two five five two seven three eight two five five stay safe

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 8,860

Rating: 4.9107809 out of 5

Keywords: Marines, Marine Corps, Vietnam Veteran, Vietnam, Operation Utah, 2-7 Marines, Hubert Yoshida, Platoon Leader, The Corps, Platoon Commander, Prison Camp, Detention Camp, Detention Center, US Marine Corps, Leatherneck, Chu Lai

Id: PCdXfFrwc_I

Length: 83min 30sec (5010 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020