Interview with Arthur B. Wiknik, Vietnam War veteran. CCSU Veterans History Project

who knows at that time in the late 60s you wasn't too many ways to get out of the draft either you can be have a college be pursuing your college education could be or enrolled and you could be pursuing a college education you could be married hmm you could be a sole surviving supporter of a family that would keep you out of the draft but most guys my age 19 20 years old we didn't have any of that going on and back in those days most parents couldn't not afford college so we were caught up in the draft now you weren't going to college but you did have some form of technical training correct I took an extra year of school after high school of automotive training just to avoid the draft but I had a real problem with authority at school so I couldn't stand it anymore so I took my chances welcome Sam but that vocational training did set you up for some different circumstances correct once you were drafted well what it did the when I got into the army the military thought that my extra training might also relate to leadership skills which they were mistaken there but as far as I was concerned I would have taken anything in the army offered me as long as I didn't have to go to Vietnam so what exactly were they offering you at that time well when you when you first get drafted you start in basic training and you fill out what they call a dream sheet this is what do you want to be in the military it's a document I had no idea what I wanted to do because I didn't want even be there so I put down I wanted to be a chaplains assistant I figured that's a good safe job and so go before an interviewer and he's looking at the document he says Oh chaplains assistant do you have any formal seminary training no well do you plan on taking any training after military I said no so he's the wait can't be a chaplains assistant fine so then he asked me is there something else you like to be see yeah I'd like to be a pastry chef and he asked the same questions you have any specialized training no then at that no he says you're going to Nathan and that was that so finished basic training and then I went to Fort Polk Louisiana to take advanced infantry training and while I was there still I have this authority problem and you know I'm joking around a little too much and the military thought it plus my my automotive training I don't know how that relates to leadership skills but it's a little more training than most guys had so the army asked if I wanted to go to noncommissioned officer candidate school for small unit leadership nicer sure now why not it's gonna keep me the state's another six months and as far as I was concerned maybe the war would be over by then but the warden wasn't even peaked yet and then I was sent to Vietnam but one of the things that when I came out of an COC training noncommissioned officer candidate training is they they give me the rank of e5 which is a sergeant and there's a lot of guys who don't get that rank that fast I'm getting less than a year so they nicknamed guys like me shake and bake sergeant or instant NCO yeah when I got to my unit in Vietnam now I'm a squad leader over guys that had four six eight months experience coming experience I had no experience so there was a little problem there initially trying to get these guys to to have faith in me which was for them why would they have faith in the guy who had no actual experience just so how did you address that walking in and how did you even show up when you first met these guys walking in from NCO C training coming in country and then showing up to this group that you're supposed to lead what were you thinking and how did you take that leadership position well initially I was a little nervous because it all kind of hit home when I first got over to Vietnam you know guys looked at me a little funny I had sergeant stripes on it was in the spring here in the state so when I go over I'm white skin I don't have any tan these guys are all rugged look under you know you can almost they have a look of veteran about them I had the look of whippy about me so they knew right away that you know this guy who is this guy his little runt there's gonna be my squad leader so they the guys are actually pretty good about it they just kind of let me left me alone the lieutenant tried to take me under his wing and try to convince me that there's a lot of opportunities for advancement in military if you wanted to really put your heart and soul into it and I was an interested now I just wanted to stay alive keep my guys alive and you know try not to be too gung-ho and the NCO training helped a lot because it it made me realize how to deal with the individuals and also gave me a little more insight over tactics and strategies which the average infantry guys didn't get any of that and can you think of some examples of times when that training really came in useful well there was a couple of times when I first got there the heat was unbearable and so we would go on patrol the middle of the day instead of in the morning or late in the afternoon so I would recommend that we do that and the lieutenant didn't like the idea that this new guy was changing you know trying to redirect the way he wanted the conductor his little part of the war so we got over there but the guys liked it they say hey you know at least this guy doesn't want to go out in the heat so another thing we used to do we used to do these big sweeps are online and what would happen is we trip off a booby trap and it's some poor guy would get wounded and I I told our Litella you know we should be walking in line not in a sweep this way here if we come across the booby trap you know we can identify it right away because you have a guide a point man is watching the ground for the ending wires or booby traps the guy right behind we call him slack man he can keep an eye out out in front to see if there's any enemy soldiers out there or anything that looks suspicious well we did that and the booby trap incident stopped so there was another little thing that the guys liked lieutenant didn't like it too much because again I'm I'm shakin bacon Co shakin bacon Co and no experience but you know it just to me just common sense things now one of those things that you mentioned where he wanted to avoid going on patrol in the middle of the heat of the day seems to have caused some friction with some other NCOs how did that end up playing out we would go out in the middle of day we had some guys who suffered some heat exhaustion really that found because well it's it's the tropics it's anywhere around 100 105 degrees very humid and of course we're carrying all kinds of gear and so we would go out on these different patrols that lieutenant would give me a map and say here's what I want you to go and then radio in these different spots as you get there so I wouldn't found a nice shade tree I went down there and I told the guys we're gonna call in these different spots as if we're there and we're not going anywhere so we sat in the shade and plus we were in the area number one it was highly booby-trapped number two though it hasn't up in any enemy activity except for the booby traps we never saw an enemy soldier in this area so I figured it was pretty safe to do this I was taking a chance but it's a chance I was willing to take so while we're sitting under the shade tree one day another patrol from one of our other platoons spotted us and that sergeant was a guy that just like me is shaking bake like me but he was a really gung-ho he thought that I was the war would be lost because of me sitting under having my guy sitting under the shade tree so that that was a problem that I didn't expect that he wouldn't find issue with that but he did and what he did in turn he turned me in to our captain and the captain came out to visit me and told me that there'll be no more sitting under shade trees and calling it false locations so I had to stop doing that but those little things helped the guys say hey this guy's on her side he's not crazy he's not gone home he he doesn't want to melt out there in the doesn't want tripping in booby-trap ceases we just wants to you know survive without getting hurt so that helped a lot so once the guys realize that your objective was not only for yourself to get home safe but for all of them to get home safe they kind of accepted you more that happy accurate that helped that helped quite a bit was there anything else that in particular right well month after arriving in country again I hadn't seen any any action to be of any substance after about a month in country I was in country about a month and we had something called the stand down which is a company which is a company sized Wrexham realize relaxation period at a place called Eagle Beach it's outside of Danang it's it's like having a big picnic - a picnic and we had beer and hot dogs and things like that so I thought this was great man this is what Vietnam was like no enemy activity a couple of booby-traps picnics every month this is this is the way I wanted to be so right after that stand down we were brought back to our base camp Camp Evans and our captain got us all together and said gentlemen you're some of your buddies are in trouble off the A Shau Valley and we're gonna go in and help them and I heard a couple of remarks the A Shau Valley the NVA drive trucks down there that knows there's no more booby traps there's no more Vietcong these are hardcore NVA soldiers are gonna have to deal with now so a couple guys were a little worried my first thought was what kind of trouble could these guys be in that we have to go help them you know I had no idea what was right so the next morning through early next morning we were brought down to the shock chopper pad and everybody had usually carried 200 rounds of ammunition everybody got 300 rounds so he usually carried two grenades everybody carried four good night for grenades guys the machine gunner he carried each guy carried 50 rounds for the machine gunner now each carried 100 rounds for the machine gunner so the loader ourselves down with all this extra ammunition so how much would a normal pack way and then how much would have weighed this time well the number the poundage iowa's here is around 60 pounds depends on how big you are and how much water you water's very heavy guys would carry usually about a gallon of water or more I only a couple carried a couple quarts that's all I that's all I ever needed and there was always streams around what the guys would perspire some was the some guys really had a guzzle down the water to keep themselves hydrated so it besides the water you carried all your food which at that time with sea rations canned food it's not no dried food like like today so it was the weight of that any personal effects you had writing paper and things like that everybody kept that in the ammo can to keep it dry your cigarettes any any little sundry items you wanted to keep dry and kept in that ammo camp can and then 10 then it's all your ammunition your rifle your helmet a poncho to keep the rain off you an extra pair of socks which socks don't weigh anything but it's all there's a lot of bulk and so I would say sixty pounds for me was about what I carried some guys the average guy who needed a little more probably carried 70 or 75 pounds so that's a lot of weight so you know we all pile in the in a Chinook helicopter that brought us out to the A Shau Valley floor and while we were there they just dropped us off up out in this area there's no there's no bunker there's there's no wire there's no protection we just put ourselves out and out into a perimeter guard and then a lone helicopter comes in now this is about 125 of us waiting to be airlifted to wherever this action is and a lone helicopter comes into the lands and who's in it to chaplains and now we're thinking wait a minute why are the same chaplains out here to see us so well it's Sunday all right well even though it was Sunday you know we still were suspicious because we wanted to go to church we could have gone to church in the safe area well the chaplains came out it's not that they gave us last rites they just wanted to know if anybody had they want to discuss with the chaplain maybe have some communion so this made a lot of guys nervous we now now we're worried no what are we in for late in the day small helicopters came and little transport helicopters came in and picked us up and while we're we've got all the Hulk helicopters up in a circular flight pattern and we're flying over the valley and then over the mountains and back over the valley and there must have been 30 or 40 of these helicopters just circling around and then I then I noticed I looked down on one of the mountains and it was a brown area against the green backdrop okay that's this is what we're going and as you watch and you can see helicopters you know working their way down there one at a time and what came our turn to go down the door gunner says to me we're not landing you have to jump out because every every chopper come in and it's taking a sniper fire well I got 60 pounds on my back I don't want to jump out cuz I gotta land flat on my face well it didn't really matter as we got down close we were hovering six to eight feet off the ground the door Gunners yelling at me jump out jump out well land and then I got kicked in the butt and out I went landed flat on my face so I you know I get myself back together night and I and I crawl up the little embankment and who's standing there but a two-star general and I thought well that's pretty neat two-star general out here and then it hit me there's a two-star general out here a two-star general and then I looked more I looked around I see GIS everywhere there's hundreds of them I said this is not good none of this is gonna be good and we still didn't really know what was going on but once we settled in for the night we found out that the third of the 187th from the hundred first airborne had been engaged for the last seven days trying to take this mountain and we were brought in as another support group to help take them take this hill which was later called hamburger hill and so it was a pretty tense thing to find out we're going into a regular battle this is not we're shooting at shadows in the dark this is where an enemy had had positioned himself hina mountain in Bunker's and had been bombed shot at had been attacked several times and they weren't leaving and now it was our turn to give it a shot now that seems a huge departure from the maneuver warfare or the the flexibility of tactics hidden fade that was so common for the NBA or the North Vietnamese Army why did they choose to hold on to this hill why did they face a full-on assault by the issuer Valley was a major artery of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and they would use that to bring their supplies and to be able to attack the coastal cities and with us being there we blocked the road basically blocked the road and we blocked their access to get get any of their supplies in so they they wanted us out and they also looked at it as a as a chance to have a big victory against us and so they stood their ground they just were not going to leave that mountain and as we poured more and more troops in they they just learned leave so they just hard they just hung on they had daily they had daily assaults you know we we assaulted that mountain daily we'd be in the hundreds airborne I I haven't gone up yet they had a drunkard chili on it daily they had airstrikes napalm gunships were firing up that that mountain and when I say it's a mountain its history it's a 3,000 foot peak so you're talking a big mountain and a lot of a lot of activity around that hill at night there our first night there we could see fires burning up on the hill you can hear voices you can hear noises up there so the enemy knew where we were we know where the enemy was and this was just a daytime battle at night nothing nothing went on so it was it was a very it's very unlike the Vietnam War where a lot of things happened at night was all daytime so that night you guys pretty much you guys showed up late in the afternoon like the day you kind of found a place for yourselves and then what happened all right we stayed we stayed in a bivouac area the first night the second night we we moved into a position around the base of the hill and that took a little bit of time because we had to cut our way through some jungle and other companies were doing the same thing now we're working on surrounding nothing the entire base of the hill and it took a full day to get all these other companies all surrounded around the base of that mountain so we can launch a final assault in the morning and if you count all of the companies from the hundred first airborne plus we had some South Vietnamese Army Rangers there there was close to 700 people that had surrounded the mountain on that on the night of May 19th early the next morning we get up and a NVA soldier started was just seeing walking toward toward our one of our positions didn't have a rifle and as he came closer people one of the guys noticed that he had a grenade in his hand so what they did they just shot and killed him and the grenade never went off you never had a chance to arm it so at that my lieutenant Bradey of the command post tell them what happened the call came back everybody put your bayonets on we're not gonna take any prisoners today so that was kind of a chilling what did you think when you heard that or that now when I heard that order fix bayonets no prisoners no I'm scared because this is you know it all good conscious I don't want to kill anybody but now that these people are the NVA there were very tenacious they were there for a purpose their purpose was to kill as many of us as they could and you know I'm gonna return the favor but it's not having never killed anybody I it wasn't what I was prepared to do at least mentally in my mind until it till it all started happening but here what was that what was that shift light going from the mindset of in all good conscience not wanting to kill someone to facing the very real very real thing of attaching a bayonet to the end of your rifle and getting ready to decline this moment the if you look around everyone was doing the same thing everyone everyone's putting a band that's on everyone's checking their ammunition getting ourselves prepared so he had to put in your mind that this is all real this is this is serious this could be very dangerous some of us are gonna get hurt the idea then then you that's when the training kicks in there you go you know what we're gonna take this hill we're gonna beat these guys you realize that we're gonna do this thing we're going to take this hill and I'm going to take as few casualties as possible okay so what happened next well after that incident with the the enemy soldier walking up to our positions and after the fix panic command our lieutenant says all right you guys get ready they're gonna start bombing the hill and for close to an hour there was an artillery bombardment every firebase within the A Shau Valley that was within range of that hill was firing rounds and there's so many rounds coming in that for any one moment it was not a moment of silence it's almost it sounded like if there was a artillery machine gun that's what it sounded like it was just explosion after explosion after explosion some were closed somewhere far to us you can through the vegetation you can see that our guys were had a pattern for their bombardment and you can almost watch the rounds go and just like a grid across that hill and it was very impressive so with this going on the air strikes the day before when I was there all the inlets assaults I figured you know what this is this is gonna be easy there's nobody up there or if there is it's gonna be with 700 of us down here the few guys that are up there this is gonna be fairly fairly easy assault how true did those words to have to be well it wasn't that easy what happened as soon as we got out of the cover you know out into the open the enemy opened fire on us and of course we were giving them backs what we call suppressive fire guys were firing their weapons at the mountain and it was tough to pick out a target I never even saw anybody I saw one NVA soldier running and by the time I got pulled up to shoot at him somebody else got him so but there was so much firing going on it was hard to distinguish which way the shooting was going and you know this is the first time I'm in any kind of battle any kind of action and I see guys crawling on my left on my right they're running they're dodging they're rolling they're firing the weapons I'm thinking I'm not gonna use up all my ammunition I'm just gonna keep going and I pretty much was walking around and and just kind of leaning up against the stop or something and and I noticed on the ground that there was these little bubbles coming out of the ground I wasn't sure what that was so I leaned down the look and then I realized those are bullets coming in because I was the only one exposed an NVA had targeted me he was trying to hit me but luckily I was too far for him to get a good good shot at me so then I was on the ground rolling around crawling just like everybody else what was that moment of realization like what did that feel like that was a shock to realize that someone was actually there's a thing there's we it's bad enough with someone shooting at you but when you find out someone shooting at you then then it all up then and hit me like this is not this is not good this is dangerous I gotta find a place to hide not just shooting in your general direction but actively trying to kill you scarcely this guy had me targeted he was trying to get me one of the things I should have mentioned before we got into position for the final assault we met some guys who have been assaulting that hill the previous days and I had read sergeant stripes on and the guy said to me sergeant you got to take those stripes off because the enemy was looking for leaders and you're gonna be a target so just get those stripes off and I thought this guy's kidding me I'm gonna take my stripes off you know I worked hard to get these stripes so now and I thought about is as men they are shooting at sergeants so or it could be just that I was I was exposed but either way maybe realize that that guy wasn't kidding so what I did then I CRO I got I got into a bomb crater with another guy and we said we laid there for a minute and it was kinda it was a look in his eye I probably the same looking at my eye not terror but of maybe disbelief shock you know what are we going to do you know this is neither one of us may survive this you know how we gonna get out of a spot where do we do next so just before I even get my thoughts together he got shot in the leg so I called for a medic medic came over started fixing him and I figured we were too good of a target two three of us there so I crawled over to another bomb crater and now I want to get up I want to get out of there because the guy next week got wounded I've never been near anybody who had shot been shot before so as I'm looking over the berm of this bomb crater something suddenly blinded me when I reached up to protect my eyes something hit me in the chest of knock me backwards so now I'm laying on my back and I'm in pain in my chest my eyes are stinging and I figured I've been I know I've been hit and I just didn't know how severe it was and so I'm laying there not even moving at first and I'm thinking well if I'm gonna die I just let let it be gradual and I figured that the pain would go away as I drifted off but the pain got more intense my eye stung more my chest hurt more so then I'm thinking what do I have to do suffer before I die so but then suddenly I caught a glimpse of light and I started getting the dirt out of my eyes and I looked down on my chest and my clothes were on fire so I beat out the flames and and I and I start pulling all my ammunition out there that was that was smoking or the bandoliers that were smoking and then I'm trying to figure out what the heck happened to me oh why am I on fire the only thing I could think of was the first round came in and blessed dirt in my eyes and the second round when I got up he must have hit me with a tracer round and it didn't have enough power to impact all of all my equipment but lodged in it instead and that was burning so so I pretty fortunate that I didn't explode so now now now I know this is all for real this is this is no more fooling around there's no more jokes if nothing funny about this I gotta get the hell out of here so I picked up a little bit I fired my rifle without even looking at I probably hit a dirt in front of me I don't know what I was hitting I was just firing at that hill put another magazine and sprayed up there again I'm looking around for an escape route and I noticed that off to my left there was a some shrubs and had nothing bombed away it offered a little bit of covering so I'm gonna make my way over there and so as I get up to run I noticed there's some more GI s-- laying there shooting at the hill and there were my guys they said come on follow me we're going up the hill and I ran over there let me start going up the hill and I just kept going and going and going and my adrenalin just just bolted me forward and get up near the top I'm looking around for a good spot for us to set up I turn around to tell the guys this is we're gonna set up there was nobody there I went up by myself so now I'm thinking looking down and I'm thinking I can't go down like I can see the battle going on below me now what do I do so they're all by yourself I'm like myself and now I'm even again the nervousness the the freshmen now that got so much frustration but its anxiety what do I do now I a I don't know what to do I don't know where to go and I'm looking off to the side I can see some movement and I don't know if it's the GI I don't know if it's an enemy soldier so I'm not gonna go over there this is only a hundred feet away I can see movement and I'm not gonna expose myself I'm all by myself I you know I'm not a one-man army so I just hunkered down I got behind the tree and I and I got down facing that direction so if anybody came my way it was an enemy soldier I was just gonna blast them if it was a GI one of the things we did the way we similarly each other was given the peace sign even though it was wartime everybody knew this that the peace and the fact sometimes we would meet each other on a trail the jungle which flashed the peace sign and then everything was cool you know you know that it's a friendly so I stayed there for about I would say 10 or 15 minutes when somebody came up behind me and turned out to be one of the guys my squad and another guy and then three or four guys I mean and we stayed there together for a little while the shooting had pretty much died down every once awhile it was an explosion off in the distance you can hear some yelling and you know the rattle had really died down and I thought to me this all took a half an hour little that I know this was four or five hours of my by doing all this crawling and running and shooting and things like that so it was it was kind of a lengthy battle but once the once we had taken the hill GIS hundreds of gee guys just swarmed over that hill like ants and there was the explosion of grenades being thrown in any bunkers whether does an enemy soldier in there or not everyone can take any chances in goes with grenade and then you heard a couple burst of machine-gun fire or m16 fire in the enemy bodies just to make sure that they were dead no chances we're gonna be taken and within you know within five or ten minutes of all that then all shooting stopped altogether and another thing get here then was helicopters flying around you heard people on radio and and and another gi's are just they just kept coming up to the top coming up to the top so now now we felt safe you know with hundreds of guys again and no one shooting at us and then we had one so it was a pretty good feeling initially after bombings from airplanes and artillery and grenades and gunfire what was it like when all of that shooting stopped and you just heard those there's few other things a relative normalcy it was it was an eerie it was eerie but spooky becoming at the same time it was all of those things because just moments before there was you cook them a smoke that was yelling there was screaming those all the shooting and then you know I just didn't stop like that but it stopped fairly quickly that's it once it came though halt that stopped within 10 or 15 minutes and then you could hear other than the helicopters you can hear the wind you couldn't hear any birds because all the birds took off but you can you can hear the sounds of of normal countryside and and it was it was a strange but it was calm so what happened next this was this seems like it wasn't the average day for you what happened afterwards well this was far from an average day for me but once we got to the top somebody has said hey you know they call this hill this battle hamburger hill and there's a sign over there oh really so I'm going over to look at the sign and I and the g---eight act on a little note to the bottom that asked a question was it worth it and that sign stayed up for like a minute because an officer saw it and saw the was it worth it note on there and said take this sign down we're not gonna have that here so the sign came down and I thought that was kind of you know we just we just went through a big battle that lasted ten days although my part was only four or five hours but these other guys they've been here for ten days they deserve a chance to vent their feelings about about what the adventure oh and and then an officer decided that you know we we don't have that luxury so that was that was that was a little discouraging so once we once we we got all the guys back together we knew where our platoon was guys start digging in and I was asked to go down and help you know find any wounded walking wounded and help them down which I did and then I came back up through a different area and there was some some body bags with GIS and that was kind of discomforting because you know realizing that there's somebody in there you know some family at home doesn't even know their their son is dead yet and he's laying on the side of the trail of this body bag but there was also a stench about the hill because this battle been going on for so long that a lot of the enemy soldiers who had that been killed their body parts remain different places and they have been decomposing out in the Sun so there was a that odor of decaying flesh an odor of human waste there was an owner of the the gunpowder that they call it cordite also sap from the trees there's all these different odors and and it's a just kind of a sickening sweet smell that in that hot tropical air it was it was nauseating without making you nauseous what else what else thinks out besides this no well what was it like to walk down the hill back up the hill that you thought it's just a little while ago fought so hard to climb for the first time and this time to just walk back up it it must have been strange well the the hill itself the whole battle area encompassed probably the size of a couple of football fields there was nothing left for vegetation there was stumps boulders that were blown out of the ground deep cratered bomb craters if you can imagine a world war one movie in in Europe where they called no-man's land that's what it looked like trees there was it was stood the pounding it looked like crooked telephone poles after a tornado there was some evidence of bunkers and there was a lot of guys going around there was a lot of souvenir hunters going around checking out NVA bodies taking their wallets looking for money or insignias off the uniforms and things like that the first thing I did when I got back down at the bottom I went back and look for the the magazines that had been shot that when I got shot that I found him and I put them in my pocket I was gonna carry them for good luck charms for a while so how did things go in the a shot did you guys stay in the your unit stay in the A Shau Valley afterwards or what did you end up doing next that night we stayed on the night of the of our victim we stayed on the hill that night and there was GIS everywhere so I felt pretty safe there was there had to be a lot of guys got flown out that that but there's probably three or 400 guys that stayed there that night and one of the things that they told us is because so many bunkers enemy bunkers were crushed from all the bombardment is there's a good chance that there might be some enemy soldiers digging their way out of the ground and after dark so kill anything that moves was that our command keep your bayonets on and just be just be ready for anything so another command I didn't really want to hear and it was a moonless night it was quiet it was still and everyone said well you can hear a guy cough off in the distance or you can hear a little piece of equipment clang or something but I still felt pretty safe with all these guys up there on the hill so during the night I I wasn't on guard I was having a dream while I was sleeping that I was looking for my entrenching tool my shovel no so I start feeling around for my shovel and the guy next to me named Jackson he was having a dream that the enemy was digging their way out of the ground and we're gonna strangle us in our sleep so here I am feeling around looking for my shovel he's dreamed that the enemy is coming on the ground and I started putting my hands on him well he wakes up with a howl screaming started he grabbed me starts choking me and we roll into the next guy who weak something doesn't know what the heck is going on and he I'm yelling it's me it's quickening it's Whitney and then Jackson finally stopped he was gonna kill me suck and the other thing I can think of that it's not it it wasn't funny at the time when in retrospect it's funny but all the other guys who are you know in positions around that hill it was so quiet that I so still and you hear this blood-curdling scream so those poor guys they didn't know what the heck was going on and it was us and they didn't want to move from there but check it out if it moves kill it right right so once once you spent then him one last harrowing night with a couple of nightmares but what came next next morning we woke up it was a beautiful warm sunny day and you know in the mountains it if it wasn't a war if there wasn't a war zone there you would have thought you're in New Hampshire or Maine or someplace because it was it was cool it was sunny it was it was a nice clear blue sky it's still stuck on the hill because the orders were we're all around us and around I would say late morning helicopters came in and took us airlifted us out to a firebase firebase airborne which was in the A Shau Valley which had been the subject of a zapper attack four or five days before so that was in a state of disrepair and we're going in as a company to help rebuild the bunkers clear clear the treeline back ways and provide security for the for the artillery guys and that's we spent a couple of weeks doing that and then there are other companies in our battalion would rotate out of the firebase because it was relatively light duty you know you can't go anywhere it wasn't much moving around but you give a chance to get some rest write letter song get some hot food they even had every once in a while doughnut Dolly's these girls from the Red Cross they would come out and entertain the guys and while another company well ever well they're at the firebase and other companies are patrolling the jungle you know within a couple of miles of the firebase looking for the enemy how secure was how secure did you feel there compared to up on the hill with a few hundred guys around here when you're on a firebase you have a false sense of security because you have bunkers so if there's a mortar attack if you know you can get under cover but you also have wire you know rows and rows of barbed Constantino concertina wire around you but it gives your false sense of security because the enemy is not going to you're not going to hear them sniffing wire if they're going to come in they they usually strip themselves down naked or just to a loin cloth and work their way through the wire and get close as as possible as I can to the bunker line before they launch an attack if they were going to while I was there we got mortared once and it killed three GI so we're sleeping on top of the Bakr so to sleep inside the bunker but we never got actually never had a ground attack so then what was the day-to-day like after that point on the firebase are just in general I'm the firebase or even after you left the firebase life on a firebase is it's actually harder work than being in the jungle cuz every day you're filling sandbags you're building bunkers you're taking a bunker down and moving it over ten feet because it gave me a better field of fire and that became kind of boring even though we got mail every day we got it had food you had a place you can go to the bathroom we had a little--it reen there you know he had a few amenities that you didn't have on the jungle but you worked every day and in the jungle when you're all patrolling you were at least in the shade you're on a jungle trail movement was slow and deliberate on a firebase you didn't even carry a weapon around half the time so it could because you were working it was just work and it was working from the time you get up in the morning until it gets dark and ready for guard duty so after working all day guys have trouble staying awake on guard duty because they're tired and nighttime is a time that the NVA usually attacked fire bases they don't attack in the daytime because your your your alert at night is when you're when you're not alert so one of the things we would do there was usually a couple of suspected avenues of enemy approach that we would send out these physicians called listening posts that would be three or four guys and to go out with a radio up four or five hundred feet from the firebase and just be out there listening to see if you can hear any enemy activity in other words if the enemy was it was going to attack or send a group of soldiers in to probe our defenses from four or five hundred feet out they're not going to they're not going to worry about themselves being quiet the listening post will be able to hear these guys qualifier base and alert them and there's somebody out there luckily every time I was on listening post nothing ever happened but that is probably one of the scariest jobs you have to do because you're out there by yourself well not break even with four guys but you're you're away from all the other defenses and if you if the enemy stumbled upon you you're just four guys to get it up you got to defend yourself or you might want to be able to call in and say hey well we have and if we have enemy movement to our front we want to come back alert the bunker line so they don't shoot us when we come in luckily that never happened I never had to worry about it but just the thought of it is is worrisome how important was it to get the mail from home and during the firebase time you said on a daily basis but even a regularly getting mail from home is the sweetest thing in the world if guys are very some guys are very visibly disappointed that they didn't get a letter especially out there his work as far as we were concerned we were put on a planet somewhere and forgotten about because the you know the nation as a whole was not 100% behind the war which which worked on our emotions and letters from home letters of encouragement from girlfriends parents friends it lived to get that mail and for me you know I was lucky my girlfriend is writing me almost every day so I always got plenty of mail I thought it was great my sister's ro me my mother somebody family friends were writing so I always got a lot of mail and never dead the mail just keeps you going and they also sent what we call care packages and we get these goodies in a can and all kinds of neat little things little you know candy bars can fruit and things so one of the things that I did is my mother had sent me these little cans of apple juice and from a some time up in New Hampshire so I wrote that company letter and said hey I'm here in Vietnam the apple juice my mother sent me was such so refreshing from water on streams how much for a case of this stuff no I want to give it to my guys so I get a letter you know it takes a week to get the letter out we could get the letter back and the letter from the this company New Hampshire said Senate no money we're going to give you a free case of these advantages just to show our support so a few days later a case of the apple juice shows up I handed out to all the guys they loved it and now I got an idea I said you know what I'm gonna go around and pick up all these cans that these guys get from home and write down the addresses of all these companies and said letter it send the same letter to every one of them you know Here I am in Vietnam you know how much for a case of your product to give to my guys I'll be glad to pay it and out of all the companies I wrote to I would say if 75% of them sent me free stuff and I would give it to my guys and you know I took advantage of these companies but you know what we we loved it we appreciate it so much if if anybody listening is from one of those companies it was appreciated isn't really taking advantage to give them an opportunity to do what they wanted to do well I felt like I had lied to them in my letter I felt like I was being dishonest because I and I did have a third alternative motive was to try to get something free out of these guys once it happened once and I knew I can it would work I kept doing it so I I wasn't a hundred percent honest and my intentions but but the result was was very much appreciated and you very much took care of your guys oh absolutely I had to do it because if I was gonna hard that hard that stuff those guys would have killed me okay so so after hamburger hill you know and what happened to me you know getting shot at and being one of the first up there the guys looked up to me then they either thought I was crazy or brave and I took starts not gonna turn on both and I want them to think that and then as I got these foodstuffs nobody knew how I was doing and I was going anybody cuz I don't want them doing that you know I can't saturate the market so I just kept getting this stuff up you know getting the food and I told him I had a cousin in the in the food industry that was a whi tool but but it worked so one of the little things I did what came next in terms of your personal timeline in Vietnam after we left the firebase we started working the jungles jungle trails and the A Shau Valley and you know the if you can think of you know trails in the in the forests around in this country that's kind of what they look like he always ran along the ridges and every once in a while you'd run into a bunker complex luckily for us they were always abandoned there was nobody there we really didn't hit a lot of enemy activity like some guys did I have to overall my tour as far as enemy activity was was fairly light some guys had real terrible tours they saw enemy action on a frequent basis me hey hamburger hill was enough for me and it was a few other things we ran into a couple of ambushes from time to time but overall my my combat actual combat was kind of light compared to most so what price doesn't answer your question all right in some ways it does but what was it an average day like for you from the time you started to the time you guys actually talked about to sleep average day for us is well I have to start at night we set up at night in three or four main positions and one guy had to keep guard while the other guys could sleep and and every hour you'd rotate each guy would have had a luminous watch so you know when your time was up and we put claymore mines out which is something that it's a command detonated mind the end of a plunger that goes out a hundred feet so if there's anybody out there walking around we could hit that plunger and blast them and that blast would alert everybody else that there's that there's enemies so what is a claymore mine all right a claymore mine is a anti-personnel mine that has probably close to a thousand quarter inch diameter ball bearings in it and when that thing is is is detonated all these ball bearings go out and in a spray and they'll take out anything that's it's a that's in its way in Natalie Wood what else would it do other than destroying the area wouldn't alert the other centuries oh and what's that once that lets somebody detonated a claymore mine of course that's a lot of explosion so all the other positions know there's something going on get ready so that everybody will wake up and actually you guys wake up pretty fast you know when you're in that situation your senses you become super sensitive to your surroundings you you don't sleep like you're in a bed you had a very light sleeper so if you hear a twig snap you'll you know you'll be alerted if you smell something you'll be alerted so there's always once you're out there and you you become actually part of the environment you become very sensitive to everything going on around you so what would come next after you guys spent the night with rotating through one hour of watch each and it comes towards morning time in the morning you know last guy on guard would just make sure everything looks secure out to our front he'd wake up the other guys you know hey it's time to get up or some guys would just wake up so soon as it started getting white guys just knew it was time to get up and you know your daily routine you brush your teeth you may go to the bathroom you'll you'll have your morning chow you know I have a seat Russian can and probably hang around for a little while until the lieutenant got a some kind of order of what we're gonna do for the day and usually it would be a squad or platoon to take a turn going if we came through trail junction we didn't know which way we're gonna go the bulk of the company would stay at the junction and the lieutenant would take you know a squad or until then and go down that trail see if it led anywhere in the meantime staying in complete radio contact with everybody else so if something did happen they we can come running down the trail and and assist and also we would have the firebase on online on the radio with us as well so if we needed some kind of artillery support those guys would be ready at all times so it wasn't like we were just out there walking around you know not paying much attention we had a lot of people in support of us and and ready to assist us at a moment's notice did that had a relative sense of security to have all those people ready to sport at a moment's notice like that having all those guys ready to support us was was good to know but it was only as good as the guy on the radio as long as he could look at a map and know exactly where we were because if he's gonna call in an artillery strike or an air strike through this triple triple-canopy jungle you better know exactly where we are you better be able to read that map pretty good otherwise we will be bombed by friendlies now there's there's something called being short or coming on to the end of one's time in country what was that like for you we had a average tour of Vietnam was a year these for the guys in the army and once you hit the six-month milestone now you're short so here you're on the short end of your tour but six months really isn't short you're not even though we counted our days because everybody they knew you knew the day you came we knew the day you're leaving so people watched it they had these little short timer calendars they count of the days and actually made time dragged by doing that but everybody did it once you became considered short less than six months now you've got something to look forward to as the bulk of my tour is over when a guy had less than a hundred days they called ourselves two-digit midgets so you had 99 days or less year two-digit when you got down to less than 10 days people make jokes I'm so short I can't see up I'm so short you know whatever the heck it was now I'm really sure I'm super short but there was but along with being short that was also a your mind takes another trip and when you first get to Vietnam it's probably the most dangerous time that you're there because you know you're clumsy you don't know the terrain you don't know how to act you know you've never been in combat before so and guys kind of keep away from you because they don't know if you can be trusted and as you learn your experiences you become more trustworthy you make some friends and then you just go from day to day so tell me some more about what it is to be short or to be down to double digits or even single digits what's what once you've experienced Vietnam the daily routine guys depend on you more they trusted you more and as you got close to your time to rotate out guys would take out a new personality and it happened to me we had something we called short-timers syndrome and that is now you know you become super nervous because especially when you get down to two months or less now you know you're really close to going home and you don't want to be around new guys you didn't want to be around you don't want to be around people you want people to keep away from you because if you had two or three people in one spot one round could kill yo ha that was this this thing that was a favorite saying hey back off one round kill us all so you you become very agitated easily very you didn't trust anybody because you you know you've gotten this close you don't want to take you don't want anybody to screw up your chance of going home in one piece so it's just they it's one of those you morph but it's part of your vietnam metamorphose that's right word so having this short-timer syndrome is just part of the cycle of the whole Vietnam experience and as you get closer to being home you know you change you you know you're thinking more about home you're not really paying attention to what's going on you pay attention because you want to stay alive but your thoughts of more about home when I get home I'm gonna do this at home and and then in some respects you actually become useless to the people out in the field because you're not focusing on on the on the environment on the on the goals of the of the platoon you're focusing on your own personal goals and that's one of the bad things about going to Vietnam as an individual when I went over there I was on the plane with 300 guys I didn't know a soul on that plane I had nobody to talk to except some casual conversation it really didn't mean anything and so if if you didn't go over as a unit you don't know anybody you're not part of you you're part of it for a little bit of the time but not for the whole time if you go over it if you if you train as a unit you or as a unit you serve as a unit you know everybody you know all their little quirks you know where you can depend on and then if you come home as unit you can you can download all that all the things that happen to you as a unit and you can all feel pretty good about yourselves can you help each other survive the way we did it we you went over as an individual you you made friends for a little while but then that guy rotated out or got wounded or something now you got a friend a new friend you know it was it was very difficult to to just to keep your mind focused on the goals at hand cuz you you were just concerned about survival you want personal survival you didn't care about the rest of the unit because you weren't part of the unit you didn't you didn't come over as part of the unit so when it dawned on you then a few days away you'd be heading home what did you look forward to most I came time for me to go home the one thing even though my the thing I look to the most was seeing my girlfriend again even though she had it's broken up on me when I was on our R&R in Hawaii I still wanted to see her I figured just the distance you know she was a 19-year old girl at home by herself waiting for her soldier to come home I understood that she would date other guys and I figured out when I get home chances are we'll get back together so that was my main that was the main thing I wanted that I thought about the other thing I thought about was my parents my parents I'm sure we're worried about me all the time I was gone of course I knew I was safe even when I was in a dangerous situation you know I survived all the things that happened to me but they didn't know that and I always go back and think about those guys who got killed on hamburger hill or people that I had watched die their parents didn't know they were dead and you know the parents are going about their lives at home without knowing anything about their their son what had happened to him and so I'm sure my parents once were the same thing they were in their own personal agony while I was gone what was it like to come back home after being immersed in the jungle what was it like to be back into the real world and I think when I came home from Vietnam I actually got an 11-day drop from my service time so I came home 11 days early and I wasn't going to tell my parents I wanted to be able to walk through the front door and surprising and they the surprise was on me they went to Maine for the weekend the weekend I came homes they weren't even there when I landed at Bradley Airport I called my cousin to come and get me that's when I found out my parents were gone so I said well this is all right you know come up and get me so while I was waiting at the airport I'm in my uniform I got my chest out I feel great got my medals and you know I just returned from the war I survived this this horrible ordeal of Vietnam and I looked around the airport and I didn't see anybody else in uniform just me and I thought well that doesn't mean anything and then as I'm walking around waiting for my cousin to pick me up I see people look at me and look away in flinch or the they kind of give me a look like oh it's a soldier and then I started thinking that all these things I've read in the newspaper both GIS Vietnam veterans not being treated too well I couldn't believe would be that way in my home state and nobody spit on me nobody said anything but you can feel that there was there was some tension there and it made me very uncomfortable so I went to a waiting area oh I want to get away from the where the most of the people were so I sat in this waiting area and other people were coming in to sit down to wait as well for their ride or for the next flight out and as they came in they came around the corner I'd be sitting there in my uniform they walk around a corner and look and I got that same look Oh a soldier and they'd move over to another area of that waiting area and as people kept filing in same reaction out of almost everybody and when the room had filled up there was a seat vacant on each side of me and left and right and nobody even sent there people would rather stand up against the wall and come over and sit next to me so that's when I knew that I gotta get home and get out of this uniform because I don't feel welcome I'm not bitter about that I'm very disappointed after I had what I had been through but you know today I can look back and say you know that was the mood of the country at the time I didn't like it but I can't change it so I just have to act a little bit were there any difficulties in adjusting being back in the real world anything other than the that reaction that you just described when I first came home again the first thing I wanted to do was get out of my uniform and I I had no reason to feel embarrassed because I didn't do anything that that I was ashamed of I didn't do anything to bring shame on my family or my unit and but I still had to get out of that uniform because the reaction I got at the airport you know it affected me so when I would when I came home and I went out and visited people who I hadn't seen for a while hey where were you I was away that's all the time I wouldn't tell him I was gonna be Aetna because I was a I didn't I don't know what the reaction was gonna be I just said I was away what's Australia know I'd make up anything just I didn't want them to know I was in Vietnam but the the thing one of the things I like most about being home is flush toilets my brother must have thought I was nuts because I know when I just go in and flush the toilet just to hear it flush because I hadn't had a flush toilet so long the other thing I would do is and and of course there's only lasted for a couple of weeks you know I was a flushing the toilet for months the other thing I did - I wanted to sleep with the light on after sleeping in pitch-black jungle night after night after night I wanted a nightlight these are simple things but and I think the white is was kind of a comfort so when I woke up in the middle of the night look around I'm in my room great I can go back to sleep I was safe you know I didn't have to worry about the war I didn't have to worry about somebody trying to get me in the middle of night I was home I was safe I felt secure when did things change from from the time when you had to take the uniform off just to feel comfortable - when you rush your book and began speaking about your experiences in Vietnam after a few months after being home I my cousin's were asking questions what was it like over there they're they're very curious so I would tell some of my stories and they like the stories they thought they were good and he said you know nobody else tells us this stuff well you know just ask me anything you want and I would tell him anything they asked me and some of my stories were a little on the bizarre side because of the way I I got myself in trouble a lot and so they said you know you should write some of this stuff down okay and that's why I started writing it down and I know I always wanted to write a book anyhow even as a little kid I always thought I'd have a book someday so now we had a good subject so the more I talked about it than where I wrote this stuff down and for years and years I just kept writing little little snippets and I kept a pad in my pocket and whatever even at work if something came into my mind I'd write it down and I had piles and little notes and my mother also saved all the letters I wrote her my sister saves all the layers I wrote her so when I got heavy into into putting my book together I took all my little notes I took my the letters I wrote to my mother which were very sanitary and I took the letters wrote to my sister which were not very sanitary I put all that stuff together now I've got you know I had a timeline for all my activities when I was in Vietnam and I told my sister a lot of stuff that I would never tell my mother so I had all the information that I needed I put it together as best as I could and then one of the guys in my unit Howard signer who was a very good friend of mine which in Vietnam he only lives two hours away from here right I gave him the manuscript had him look at it and he started rearranging some of the incidents he said well this didn't quite happened like this or we weren't at that location at that time so he he was able to move things around a little bit and make it as accurate as possible and so I just kept working out and working on it and once I was thought it was published or ready I sent it off and I got rejected I fixed it up a little bit send it off get rejected my book was rejected 32 or 33 times before a publisher finally took it in in 2003 so I'm very proud that of of that and one of the read one of the main reasons I wrote it wasn't just to tell my stories but also because the meet coming in that for any one moment it was not a moment of silence it's almost it sounded like if there was a artillery machine gun that's what it sounded like it was just explosion after explosion after explosion some were closed some are far to us you can if through the vegetation you can see that our guys were had a pattern for their bombardment and you can almost watch the rounds go and just like a grid across that hill and it was very impressive so with this going on the airstrikes the day before when I was there all the inlets assaults I figured you know what this is this is gonna be easy there's nobody up there or if there is it's going to be with 700 of us down here the few guys that are up there this is gonna be fairly a fairly easy assault how true did those words tonight debate well it wasn't that easy when it happened as soon as we got out of the cover you know out into the open the enemy opened fire on us and of course we were giving them backs what we call suppressive fire guys were firing their weapons at the mountain and it was tough to pick out a target I never even saw anybody I saw one NVA soldier running and by the time I got pulled up to shoot at him somebody else got so but there was so much firing going on it was hard to distinguish which way the shooting was gone and you know this is the first time I'm in any kind of battle any kind of action and I see guys crying on my left or my right they're running they're dodging they're rolling they're firing the weapons I'm thinking I'm not gonna use up all my ammunition I'm just gonna keep going and I pretty much was walking around and and just kind of lean it up against a stump or something and and I noticed on the ground that there was these little bubbles coming out of the ground I wasn't sure what that was so I leaned down the look and then I realized those are bullets coming in because I was the only one exposed an NVA had targeted me he was trying to but luckily I was too far for him to get a good good shot at me so then I was on the ground rolling around crawling just like everybody else what was that moment of realization like what did that feel like that was a shock to realize that someone was actually there's a thing there's it's bad enough with someone shooting at you but when you find out someone's shooting at you then then at all then it hit me like this is not this is not good this is dangerous I gotta find a place to hide not just shooting in your general direction but actively trying to kill you yes guys this guy had me targeted he was trying to get me one of the things I should have mentioned before we got into position for the final assault we met some guys who have been assaulting that hill the previous days and I had my sergeants stripes on and the guy said to me sergeant you gotta take those stripes off because the enemy is looking for leaders and you're gonna be a target so just get those stripes off and I thought this guy's kidding me no I'm gonna take my stripes off you know I worked hard to get these stripes so now and I thought about is as men they are shooting at sergeants so or it could be just that I was I was exposed but either way it made me realize that that guy wasn't kidding so what I did then I CRO I got I got into a bomb crater with another guy and we said we laid there for a minute and it was cut it was a look in his eye I probably the same looking at my eye that terror but of maybe disbelief shock you know what are we going to do you know this is neither one of us may survive this how are we gonna get out of spot where do we do next so just before I even get my thoughts together he got shot in the leg so I called for a medic medic came over started fixing him and I figured we were too good of a target the three of us there so I crawled over to another bomb crater and now I want to get uh I want to get out of there because the guy next week got wounded I've never been near anybody who had shot been shot before so as I'm looking over the berm of this bomb crater something suddenly blinded me and when I reached up to protect my eyes something hit me in the chest of knock me backwards so now I'm laying on my back and I'm in pain in my chest my eyes are stinging and I figured I've been I know I've been hit and I just didn't know how severe it was and so I'm laying there not even moving at first and I'm thinking well if I'm gonna die I just let let it be gradual and I figured that the pain would go away as I drifted off but the pain got more intense I stung more my chest hurt more so then I'm thinking what do I have to do suffer before I die so but then suddenly I caught a glimpse a light and I started getting the dirt out of my eyes and I looked down on my chest and my clothes are on fire so I beat out the flames and and I and I start pulling all my ammunition out there was it was smoking or the bandoliers that were smoking I'm trying to figure out what the heck happened to me why am I on fire the only thing I could think of was the first round came in and blessed dirt in my eyes and the second round when I got up he must have hit me with a tracer round and it didn't have enough power to impact all that all my equipment but it lodged in it instead that was sitting there burning so spike pretty fortunate that I didn't explode so now now now I know this is all for real this is this is no more fooling around there's no more jokes and nothing's funny about this I gotta get the hell out of here so I picked up a little bit I fired my rifle without even looking I probably hit a dirt in front of me I don't know what I was hitting I was just firing at that Hill put another magazine and sprayed up there again I'm looking around for an escape route and I noticed that off to my left there was a some shrubs that had not been bombed away it offered a little bit of cover so I'm gonna make my over there and as it so as I get up to run I notice there's some more GIS laying there shooting at the hill and there are my guys they said come on follow me we're going up the hill and I ran over there and I start going up the hill and I just kept going and going and going and my adrenaline just just vaulted me forward and I get up near the top I'm looking around for a good spot for us to set up I turn around to tell the guys this is we're gonna set up there was nobody there I went up by myself so now I'm thinking looking down and I'm thinking I can't go down I can see the battle going on below me now what do I do so they're all by yourself oh my myself and now I'm even again the nervousness the the freshman not so much frustration but it's anxiety what do I do now how are you I don't know what to do I don't know where to go and I'm looking off to the side I can see some movement and I don't know if it's the GI I don't know if it's an enemy soldier so I'm not gonna go over there this is only a hundred feet away I can see movement and I'm not gonna expose myself I'm all by myself I you know I'm gonna want to be an army so I just hunker down I got behind a tree and I and I got down facing that direction so if anybody came my way it was an enemy soldier I was just gonna blast them if it was a GI one of the things we did the way we similarly each other was given the peace sign even though it's wartime everybody knew this that the peace sign and the fact sometimes we meet each other on a trail in the jungle which flashed the peace sign and then everything was cool you know you know that it's a friendly so I stayed there for about I would say 10 or 15 minutes when somebody came up behind me and turned out to be one of the guys my squad and another guy and then three or four guys and we stayed there together for a little while the shooting had pretty much died down every once a while it was an explosion off in the distance you can hear some yelling and you know the rattle had really died down and I thought to be this all took a half an hour little did I know this was four or five hours at my doing all this crawling and running and shooting and things like that so it was it was kind of a lengthy battle but once the once we had taken the hill GIS hundreds of gi just swarmed over that hill like ants and there was the explosion of grenades being thrown in any bunkers whether does an enemy soldier in there or not they were not kind of taking the chances in goes of your nade and then you heard a couple burst of machine-gun fire or m16 fire in the enemy bodies just to make sure that they were dead no chances we're gonna be taken and within you know within five or ten minutes of all that then all shootings stopped altogether and another thing get here then was helicopters flying around you heard people on radio and and and another G eyes are just they just kept coming up to the top coming up to the top so now now we felt safe you know we're with hundreds of guys again and no one shooting at us and then we had one so it was a pretty good feeling and initially after bombings from airplanes and artillery and grenades and gunfire what was it like when all of that shooting stopped and you just heard those there's a few other things around of normalcy it was it was an eerie it was eerie but spooky becoming at the same time it was all of those things because just moments before there was you could there was smoke there was young there was screaming those all the shooting and then you know I just didn't stop like that but it stopped fairly quickly what's it what's it came though halt that stopped within ten or fifteen minutes then you could hear other than the helicopters you can hear the wind couldn't hear any birds cuz all the birds took off but you can you can hear the sounds of of normal countryside and and it was it was a strange but it was calm so what happened next this was this seems like it wasn't the average day for you what happened afterwards well this was far from an average day for me but once we got to the top somebody has said hey you know they call this hill this battle hamburger hill and there's a sign over there so really so I'm going over to look at the sign and I and the g---eight act on a little note to the bottom that asked a question was it worth it and that sign stayed up for like a minute because an officer saw it I saw the was it worth it note on there and to take this sign down we're not gonna have that here so the sign came down and I thought that was kind of you know we just we just went through a big battle that lasted ten days although my part was only four or five hours but these other guys they've been here for ten days they deserve a chance to vent their feelings about about what the adventure oh yeah and then an officer decided that you know we we don't have that luxury so I that was that was that was a little discouraging so once we once we we got all the guys back together we knew where our platoon was guys start digging in and I was asked to go down and help you know find any wounded walking wounded and help them down which I did and then I came back up through a different area and there was some some body bags with GIS in them and that was kind of discomforting because you know realizing that there's somebody in there you know some family at home doesn't even know they're there son is dead yet and he's laying on the side of the trail of this body bag but there was also a stench about the hill because this battle been going on for so long that a lot of the enemy soldiers who had been killed their body parts were laying in different places and they had been decomposing out in the Sun so there was a that odor of decaying flesh an odor of human waste there was an odor of the the Gunpowder that they call it corn and also sap from the trees there was all these different odors and and it's a it was just kind of a sickening sweet smell that in that hot tropical air it was it was it was nauseating without making you know what else what else thinks that besides this smell well what was it like to walk down the hill back up the hill that you thought it's just a little while ago fought so hard to climb for the first time and this time to just walk back up it it must have been strange well the the hill itself the whole battle area encompassed probably the size of a couple of football fields and there was nothing left for vegetation there was stumps boulders that were blown out of the ground deep cratered bomb craters if you can imagine a world war one movie in in Europe where they called no-man's land that's what it looked like the trees there was it was stood the pounding it looked like crooked telephone poles after a tornado there was some evidence of bunkers and it was a lot of guys going around there was a lot of souvenir hunters going around checking out NVA bodies taking their wallets looking for money or insignias off to uniforms and things like that the first thing I did when I got back down at the bottom I went back to look for the the magazines that had been shot that when I got shot that I found him and I put them in my pocket I was gonna carry them for good luck charms for a while so how did things go in the a shot did you guys stay in the your unit stay in the A Shau Valley afterwards or what did you end up doing next that night we stayed on the night of the of our victory we stayed on the hill that night there was GIS everywhere so I felt pretty safe there was there had to be a lot of guys got flown out that that afternoon but there's probably three or four hundred guys that stayed there that night and one of the things that they told us is because so many bunkers enemy bunkers were crushed from all the bombardment is there's a good chance that there might be some enemy soldiers digging their way out of the ground in after dark so kill anything that moves was that our command keep your bayonets on and just be just be ready for anything so another command that I didn't really want to hear and it was a moonless night it was quiet it was still and if you want some what you can hear a bike off off of the distance or you can hear a little piece of equipment clang or something but I still felt pretty safe with all these guys up there on the hill so during the night I I wasn't on guard I was having a dream while I was sleeping that I was looking for my entrenching tool my shovel so I start feeling around for my shovel and the guy next to me named Jackson he was having a dream that the enemy was digging their way out of the ground and we're gonna strangle us in our sleep so here I am feeling around looking for my shovel he's dreaming that the enemy is coming on the ground and I started putting my hands on him well he wakes up with a howl screaming started he grabbed me starts choking me and we roll into the next guy who weeks something doesn't know what the heck is going on and he I'm yelling it's me it's Whitney it's Whitney and and then Jackson finally stopped he was gonna kill me stop and the other thing I can think of that it's not it wasn't funny at the time when in retrospect it's funny but all the other guys who are you know in positions around that hill it was so quiet that I so still and you hear this blood-curdling scream so those poor guys they didn't know what the heck was going on and it was us and they didn't want to move from there check it out if it moves kill it right right so once once you spent then him one last harrowing night with a couple of nightmares but what came next for the next day next morning we woke up it was a beautiful warm sunny day and you know in the mountains if it wasn't a war if there wasn't a war zone there you would have thought you're in New Hampshire or Maine or someplace because it was it was cool it was sunny it was it was a nice clear blue sky it's still stuck on the hill just because the orders were we're all around us and around I would say late morning helicopters came in and took us airlifted us out to a firebase firebase airborne which was in the A Shau Valley which had been the subject of a zapper attack four or five days before so that was an the state of disrepair and we're going in as a company to help rebuild the bunkers clear clear the treeline back ways and provide security for the for the artillery guys and that's we spent a couple of weeks doing that and then there are other companies in our battalion would rotate out of the firebase because it was relatively light duty you know you can't go anywhere it wasn't much moving around but you give you a chance to get some rest write letter song get some hot food they even had every once in a while donut Dolly's these girls from the Red Cross they would come out and entertain the guys and while another company well they were well they're at the fire base that none of the company is out patrolling the jungle you know within a couple of miles of the fire base looking for the enemy how secure was how secure did you feel there compared to up on the hill with a few hundred guys around here when you're on a fire base you have a false sense of security because you have bunkers so if there's a mortar attack if you know you can get under cover but you also have wire you know rows and rows of barbed Constantino concertina wire around you but it gives you a false sense of security because the enemy is not gonna you're not gonna hear them snip and wires they're gonna come in they they usually stripped themselves down naked or just to a loincloth and work their way through the wire and get close as as possible as they can to the bunker line before they launch an attack if they were gonna attack while I was there we got mortared once and it killed three GI so we're sleeping on top of the bunker so to sleep inside the bunker but we never got actually never had that ground attack so then what was the day-to-day like after that point on the firebase are just in general I'm the firebase or even after you left the firebase life on a firebase is is actually harder work than being in the jungle cuz every day you're filling sandbags you've building bunkers you're taking a bunker down and moving it over ten feet because it gave me a better field of fire and that became kind of boring even though we got mail every day we got you had food you had a place you can go to the bathroom we had a little latrine there you know he had a few amenities that you didn't have on the jungle but you've worked every day and in the jungle when you're all patrolling you you're at least in the shade you're on a jungle trail movement was slow and deliberate on a firebase you didn't even carry a weapon wrong half the time so it could because you were working it was just work and it was working from the time you get up in the morning until it gets dark and ready for guard duty so after working all day guys have trouble staying awake on guard duty because they're tired and nighttime is a time that the NVA usually attacked fire bases they don't attack in the daytime because your your your alert at night is when you're I mean you're not alert so one of the things we would do it was usually a couple of suspected avenues of enemy approach that we would send out these physicians called listening post that would be three or four guys and to go out with a radio up four or five hundred feet from the firebase and just be out there listening just see if you can hear any enemy activity in other words if the enemy was going to attack or send a group of soldiers in to probe our defenses from four or five hundred feet out they're not gonna they're not going to worry about themselves being quiet the listening post will be able to hear these guys qualifier base and alert them and that there's somebody out there luckily every time I was on listening post nothing ever happened but that is probably one of the scariest jobs you have to do because you're out there by yourself well not break even with four guys but you're you're away from all the all the defenses and if you if the enemy stumbled upon you you're just four guys to get it up you got to defend yourself or you might want to be able to call in and say hey well we have and it we have enemy movement to our front we want to come back alert the bunker line so they don't shoot us we come in luckily that never happened I never had about it but just the thought of it is is worrisome how important was it to get the mail from home and during the firebase time you said on a daily basis but even a regularly getting me up from home is the sweetest thing guys are very some guys are very visibly disappointed if they didn't get a letter especially out there because work as far as we were concerned we were put on a planet somewhere and forgotten about because the you know the nation as a whole was not 100% behind the war which which worked on our emotions and letters from home letters of encouragement from girlfriends parents friends you lived to get that mail and for me you know I was lucky my girlfriend was writing me almost every day so I always got plenty of mail I thought it was great my sister's Romy my mother some of my family friends were writing so I always got a lot of mail and that way that the mail just keeps you going and they also sent what we call care packages and we get these goodies in a can and all kinds of neat little things little you know candy bars can fruit and things so one of the things that I did is my mother had sent me these little cans of apple juice and from a some time up in New Hampshire so I wrote that company letter and said hey I'm here in Vietnam the apple juice my mother sent me it was such so refreshing from drinking water out of streams how much for a case of this stuff I want to give it to my guys so I get a letter you know it takes a week to get the letter out but we could get the letter back and the letter from the this company in New Hampshire said Senen no money we're going to give you a free case of these packages just to show our support so a few days later a case of the apple juice shows up I handed out to all the guys they loved it and now that I got an idea I said you know what I'm gonna go around and pick up all these cans that these guys get from home then I write down the addresses of all these companies and send letter send the same letter to everyone over Here I am in Vietnam you know how much for a case of your product to give to my guys I'll be glad to pay it and out of all the companies I wrote to I would say if 75% of them sent me free stuff and I would give it to my guys and you know I took advantage of these companies but you know what we we loved it we appreciate it so much if anybody listening is from one of those companies it was appreciated is it really taking your fingers and give them an opportunity to do what they wanted to do well but I felt like I had lied to them in my letter I felt like I was being dishonest because I you know I did have a third alternative motives was to try to get something free out of these guys once it happened once and I knew I can it would work I kept doing it so I I wasn't a hundred percent honest and my intentions but but the result was very much appreciated and you very much took care of your guys oh absolutely I had to do it because if I was gonna hard that hard that stuff those guys would have killed me okay so so after hamburger hill you know what happened to me you know getting shot at and being one of the first up there the guys looked up to me then they either thought I was crazy or brave and I took not gonna turn on both and I want them to think that and then as I got these foodstuffs nobody knew how I was doing and I wasn't gonna tell anybody cuz I don't want them doing that you know I can't saturate the market stuff I just kept getting this stuff up you know getting the food and I told him I had a cousin in the in the in the food industry that was a why to but but it worked one of the little things I did what came next in terms of your personal timeline in Vietnam after we left the firebase we started working the jungles jungle trails in the a shot valley and you know the if you can think of you know trails in the in the forests around in this country that's kind of what they look like he always ran along the ridges and every once in a while you'd run into a bunker complex luckily for us they were always abandoned there was nobody there we really didn't hit a lot of enemy activity like some guys did I'd have to overall my tour as far as enemy activity was was fairly light some guys had real terrible tours they saw enemy action on a frequent basis me hey hamburger hill was enough for me and it was a few other things we ran into a couple of ambushes from time to time but overall my my combat actual combat was kind of light compared to most so what price doesn't answer your question all right in some ways it does but and what was an average day like for you from the time you started to the time you guys actually talked out to sleep average day for us is I have to start at night we'd set up at night in three or four main positions and one guy had to keep guard while the other guys could sleep and and every hour you rotate each guy had a luminous watch so you know when your time was up and we put claymore mines out which is something that it's a command detonated mine at the end of a of a plunger that goes out a hundred feet so if there's anybody out there walking around we could hit that plunger and blast them and that blast would alert everybody else that there's there's enemies so what is a claymore mine all right a claymore mine is a anti-personnel mine that has probably close to a thousand quarter inch diameter ball bearings in it and when that thing is is detonated all these ball bearings go out in a spray and they'll take out anything that's a that's in its way and not only would what else would it do other than destroying the area wouldn't alert the other inner centuries oh and what said once that lets somebody detonated a claymore mine of course that's a lot of explosion so all the other positions know there's something going on get ready so that everybody will wake up and actually guys wake up pretty fast and when in that situation your senses you become super sensitive to your surroundings you you don't sleep like you're in a bed you had a very light sleeper something if you hear a twig snap you'll you know you'll be alerted if you smell something you'll be alerted so there's always once you're out there and you you become actually part of the environment you become very sensitive to everything going on around you so what would come next after you guys spent the night with rotating through one hour of watch each and it comes towards morning time in the morning you know last guy on guard would just make sure everything looks secure out to our front he'd wake up the other guys you know hey it's time to get up or some guys would just wake up soon as the Sun does it started getting white guys just knew it was time to get up and you know your daily routine you brush your teeth you may go to the bathroom you'll you'll have your morning chow you know I have a see Gretchen can and probably hang around for a little while until the lieutenant got a some kind of order of what we're gonna do for the day and usually it would be a squad or platoon would take a turn going up if we came to a chair trail junction we didn't know which way we're gonna go the bulk of the company would stay at the junction and the lieutenant would take you know a squad or two till them and go down that trail see if it led led anywhere in the meantime staying in complete radio contact with everybody else so if something did happen they we can come running down the trail and and assist and also we would have the firebase on online on the radio with us as well so if we needed some kind of artillery support those guys would be ready at all times so it wasn't like we're just out there walking around you know not paying much attention we had a lot of people in support of us and and ready to assist us at a moment's notice did that add a relative sense of security to have all those people ready to sport at a moment's notice like that having all those guys ready to support us was was good to know but it was only as good as the guy on the radio as long as he look at a map and know exactly where we were because if he's gonna call in an artillery strike or an air strike through this triple triple-canopy jungle you better know exactly where we are you better be able to read that map pretty good otherwise we'll get bombed by friendlies now there's there's something called being short or coming on to the end of one's time and country what was that like for you we had a average tour of Vietnam was a year at least for the guys in the army and once you hit the six-month milestone now you're short so you're on the short end of your tour but six months really isn't short you're not even though we counted our days because everybody they knew you knew the day you came you knew the day you're leaving so people watched or they had these little short timer calendars they count of the days and actually make time dragged by doing that but everybody did it once you became considered short less than six months now you've got something to look forward to as the bulk of my tour is over when a guy had less than a hundred days they called ourselves two-digit midgets so you had 99 days or less year two-digit when you got down to less than ten days people make jokes I'm so short I can't see up I'm so short you know whatever the heck it was now I'm really sure I'm super short but there was but along with being short that was also a your mind takes another trip and when you first get to Vietnam it's probably the most dangerous time that you're there because you know you're clumsy you don't know the terrain you don't know how to act you know you've never been in combat before so and guys kind of keep away from you because they don't know if you can be trusted and as you learn your experiences you become more trustworthy you make some friends and then you just go from day to day so tell me some more about what it is to be short or to be down to double digits or even single digits once once you've experienced Vietnam the daily routine guys depend on you more they trusted you more and as you got close to your time to rotate out guys would take out a new personality and it happened to me we had something we called short-timers syndrome and that is now you know you become super nervous because especially when you get down to two months or less now you know you're really close to going home and you don't want to be around new guys you don't want to be around you don't want to be around people you want people to keep away from you because if you had two or three people in one spot one round could kill you all that was this this thing that was a ferret saying hey back off one round kill us all so you you become very agitated easily very you didn't trust anybody because you you know you've gotten this close you don't want to think you don't want anybody to screw up your chance of going home in one piece so it's just they it's one of those you morph but it's part of your vietnam metamorphose knows it's right word so having this short-timer syndrome is just part of the cycle of the whole Vietnam experience and as you get closer to being home you know you change you know you're thinking more about home you're not really paying attention that what's going on you pay attention because you want to stay alive but your thoughts are more about home when I get home I'm gonna do this when I get home and do that and and then in some respects you actually become a useless to the people out in the field because you're not focusing on on the on the environment on the on the goals of the of the platoon you focusing on your own personal goals and that's one of the bad things about going to Vietnam as an individual over there I was on the plane with 300 guys I didn't know a soul on that plane I had nobody to talk to except some casual conversation it really didn't mean anything and so if if you didn't go over as a unit you don't know anybody you're not part of you you're part of it for a little bit of the time but not for the whole time if you go over it if you if you train as a unit you go over as a unit you serve as a unit you know everybody you know all their little quirks you know where you can depend on and then if you come home as unit you can you can download all that all the things that happen to you as a unit and you can all feel pretty good about yourselves can you help each other survive the way we did it we you went over as an individual you you made friends for a little while but then that guy rotated out or got wounded or something now you got a friend a new friend you know it was it was very difficult to to just to keep your mind focused on the goals at hand cuz you're me you were just concerned about survival if you want personal survival you didn't care about the rest of the unit because you weren't part of the unit you didn't you didn't come over as part of the other so when it dawned on you then a few days away you'd be heading home what did you look forward to most it came time for me to go home the one thing even though my the thing I look to the most was seeing my girlfriend again even though she had pretty much broken up on me when I was on our R&R in Hawaii I still wanted to see her I figured just the the distance you know she was a 19 year old girl at home by herself waiting for her soldier to come home I understood that she would date other guys and I figured out when I get home chances are we'll get back together so that was my main that was the main thing that I thought about the other thing I thought about was my parents my parents I'm sure were worried about me all the time I was gone of course I knew I was safe even when I was in a dangerous situation you know I survived all the things that happened to me but they didn't know that and I always go back and think about those guys who got killed on hamburger hill or people that I had watched die their parents didn't know they were dead and you know the parents are going about their lives at home without knowing anything about their their son what had happened to him and so I'm sure my parents once were the same thing they they were in their own personal agony while I was gone what was it like to come back home after being immersed in the jungle what was it like to be back into the real world and I think when I came home from Vietnam I actually got a 11 day drop from my service time so I came home 11 days early and I wasn't gonna tell my parents I wanted to leave it a walk through the front door and Surprise them and they the surprise was on me they went to Maine for the weekend the weekend I came homes they weren't even there when I landed I Bradley Airport I called my cousin to come and get me that's when I found out my parents were gone so I said well this is all right you know come up and get me so what I was waiting at the airport I'm in my uniform I got my chest out I feel great got my medals and you know I just returned from the war I survived this this horrible ordeal of Vietnam and I looked around the airport and I didn't see anybody else in uniform just me well that doesn't mean anything and then as I'm walking around waiting for my cousin to pick me up I see people look at me and look away in flinch or they kind of give me a look like oh it's a soldier and then I started thinking that all these things I've read in the newspaper both GIS Vietnam veterans not being treated too well I couldn't believe it would be that way in my home state and nobody spit on me nobody said anything but you can feel that there was there was some tension there and it made me very uncomfortable so I went to a waiting area oh I wanted to get away from the most of people work so I said in this waiting area and other people were coming in to sit down and wait as well for their ride or for the next flight out and as they came in they came around the corner and I'd be sitting there in my uniform they walk around a corner and look and I got the same look Oh a soldier and they'd move over to another area of the waiting area and as people kept filing in same reaction out of almost everybody and when the room and filled up there was a seat vacant on each side of me and left and right and nobody even sent there people would rather stand up against the wall and come over sit next to me so that's when I knew that I got to get home and get out of this uniform because I don't feel welcome I'm not bitter about that I'm very disappointed after I had what I had been through but you know today I can look back and say you know that was the mood of the country at the time I didn't like it but I can't change it so I just have to have to live with it were there any difficulties in adjusting being back in the real world anything other than the that reaction that you just described when I first came home again the first thing I wanted to do is get out of my uniform and I I had no reason to feel embarrassed because I didn't do anything that that I was ashamed of I didn't do anything to bring shame on my family or my unit and but I still had to get out of that uniform because the reaction I got at the airport you know it affected me so when I when I came home and I went out and visited people who I hadn't seen for a while hey where were you I was away that's all the time I wouldn't tell him I was in Vietnam because I was I didn't I don't know what the reaction was gonna be I just said I was away what's Australia know I'd make up anything just I didn't want them to know I was in Vietnam but the the thing one of the things I like most about being home is flush toilets my brother must have thought I was nuts because I know when I just go in and flush the toilet just to hear it flush because I hadn't had a flush toilet so long the other thing I would do is and of course there's only lasted for a couple of weeks was a flushing the toilet for months the other thing I did too I wanted to sleep with the light on after sleeping in pitch black jungle night after night after night I wanted a nightlight and these are simple things but and I think the white is was kind of a comfort so when I woke up in the middle of the night look around oh I'm in my room great I can go back to sleep I was safe you know I didn't have to worry about the war I didn't have to worry about somebody trying to get me in the middle of night I was home I was safe I felt secure when did things change from from the time when you had to take the uniform off just to feel comfortable to when you wrote your book and began speaking about your experiences in Vietnam after a few months after being home I my cousins were asking questions what was it like over there oh they're they're very curious so I would tell some of my stories and they liked the stories they thought they were good and he said you know nobody else tells us this stuff well you know just ask me anything you want and I would tell him anything they asked me and some of my stories were a little on the bizarre side because of the way I I got myself in trouble a lot and so they said you know you should write some of this stuff down okay and that's why I started writing it down and I know I always wanted to write a book anyhow even as a little kid I always thought I'd have a book someday so now we had a good subject so the more I talked about it the more I wrote this stuff down and for years and years I just kept writing little little snippets and I kept a pad in my pocket and whatever even at work if something came into my mind I'd write it down and I had piles and little notes and my mother also saved all the letters I wrote her my sister saved all the letters I wrote her so when I got heavy into into putting my book together I took all my little notes I took my the letters I wrote to my mother which were very sanitary and I took the letters with my sister which were not very sanitary I put all that stuff together now I've got you know I had a timeline my activities from those in Vietnam and I told my sister a lot of stuff that I would never tell my mother so I had all the information that I needed I put it together as best as I could and then one of the guys in my unit Howard signer who was a very good friend of mine in Vietnam he only lives two hours away from here right I gave him the manuscript had a look at it and he started rearranging some of the incidents he said well this didn't quite happened like this or we weren't at that location at that time so he was able to move things around a little bit and make it as accurate as possible and so I just kept working out and working on it and once I was thought it was published or ready I sent it off and it got rejected I fixed it up a little bit send it off get rejected my book was rejected 32 or 33 times before a publisher finally took it in in 2003 so I'm very proud of that and one of the read one of the main reasons I wrote it wasn't just to tell my stories but also because the media looked at a Vietnam vets as backup for a second get my thoughts together

Channel: ccsuvhp

Views: 53,842

Rating: 4.637681 out of 5

Keywords: Vietnam Veteran (Profession), Interview, United States Army (Armed Force), Vietnam War (Event), Central Connecticut State University (Organization), Veterans History Project Of The Library Of Congress American Folklife Center

Id: U4BFnRvbgmU

Length: 109min 11sec (6551 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2013