Into Cambodia (May 1970): LZ Ranch

broad mission was the cleaning out of the nba vc sanctuaries that were on the border between south vietnam and cambodia prior to this the ho chi minh ho chi minh trails ended in cambodia and what they were doing was what the nba and dc were doing was they were storing ammunition and supplies for a larger attack on saigon saigon area in the in the future they used that area for technological uh things uh and support like there were hospitals there there were uh nba hospitals nba hospitals and you know medical facilities and training facilities because all the recruits from the nba used to come down the ho chi minh trail and they used to terminus in the great index in that area and that's where they were educated and put together and groups to go out right so this is this is part of a campaign that's been going on for a long time long time down 46 trails yeah this this series of trails coming down from north vietnam now so this is what you know now and you know you've had decades to learn about you know more about the cambodian campaign and i often hear from combat veterans that they didn't really know what they were part of until decades after the war what what did you know at the time let's say it could be you know may may 6 1970 when you're getting on the hilo and we knew we knew something was gonna have something was happening something was going on um a lot of a lot of helicopter activity i was involved in physically hooking out uh equipment into the helicopter into their c-47s primarily to go from uh kwon loy which was in vietnam to landing zone x in cambodia so i was hooking those out so we knew something was happening uh in that regard there were a lot of spit-shined ue helicopters which were for the generals around cam excuse me around quan lloyd uh lots of things were going on uh you could tell there was a a vibe there was a vibe in the air that uh something was happening actually actually the u.s went in may 1st so we were like five days behind sitting on our hands we wanted to we wanted to get get out there too but we had this like i said this thing earlier with the 25th infantry division where we're adjusting areas so yeah we kind of knew something was happening now you knew that you were going into cambodia well that seems like the only place we could have gone you know we could go we were in vietnam so it potentially got blouse but uh you know cambodia was right there yeah so you know you keep heading west and you're in the southern part of south vietnam you're going to be in cambodia um did i mean do you remember anybody saying that you know specifically we're going into cambodia or well you know scuttlebutt you know it's just the other just the guys you know talking yes i'm sure i'm sure it came up but nothing of any nothing from captain blah blah blah that i can you know right had you seen combat before this time just a little bit of light stuff in in vietnam we had some we had some activity in march and april some some there but the volumes and the quantity of the tonnage of the uh the you know the the shells and the armament it was just it's just times 10 anything that i seen prior to that we've got you into cambodia but let's back up um and then we'll we'll get back there um when did you go into the army uh september 1918 1969 september uh in 1969 all right where were you living uh pittsburgh pennsylvania were you drafted or did you volunteer i was i volunteered but i volunteered for the draft because my date was coming up in six weeks so i just went forward just to kind of get it over with yes well yeah get it started yeah how old were you when you enlisted i was nine i was just turned 20 this time how aware were you of all of the protests and all that i mean i'm sure you must have you must have known about it but what i think was it really in your consciousness uh i was i was kind of a blue-collar guy raised in a blue-collar neighborhood so i would say that for the most part i was kind of with the sentiment that was coming from washington i was kind of with that i didn't really have a chance to i felt that a lot of my peers were going after that 2s deferment to uh not serve um and actually that's that's another reason i i've i kind of lost my 2s deferment in the the end of the summer of 69 so it's time for me to go anywhere you know going to college with the 2s deferment that was a a lot of people struggle for that to not have to worry about in the service were you were you going to college at the time and dropped out yes yes yes i lost now is that because you just wanted to do the army thing or college wasn't working out for you at the time i would say uh a little bit of both yeah yeah you described your job in the army a little bit but what was your what was your basic job or what were you trained to do i was i was in artillery and um there's there's a quick story i always i always think that one of the questions that you might ask in the future is when you're interviewing somebody is what how did you get that mos military occupational specialty assigned to you and there's usually a kind of it kind of ends up there's a big old sergeant an e7 or an ea sitting in the uh the testing facility and you walk up to him and he says well what do you want to do and uh you know he i told him my father was in the artillery that was it and i was gone i mean there was no there was no i as for all the testing that was given 50 plus years ago for all the for me you know it was just that was it so uh i was i was an artillery and i was what was called a cannon cocker 13 alpha 10 um was the mos and everything you wanted to know about 105 houses um went to fort sill for um ait and um you know learned all the nuances at fort sill and then had to forget them all when i got to vietnam because everything changed different equipment and uh but generally speaking i was trained very well i felt at fort sill yeah and so then uh fort still so i go to vietnam and i'm working on the cannons there's usually five or six personnel per cannon and uh and then i was also an rto uh for some brief time and carrying a prick 25 uh a radio operator greater yeah but mostly it was the cannon cocker and i eventually uh even though i wasn't a shaken bank i'm not sure if you're aware of shaken bay i i i got a gun i got my own gun uh before the end i had i had my own cannon for the last three months of my tour so i kind of came up through the uh through the inside without uh obstruction run me shaken bake is that that's the um isn't that the those are the guys that were educated for example at fort sill and when they graduated for it was an additional two weeks i think for the training they came out as a sergeant and when they went to vietnam which and they had to go to vietnam but when they went to vietnam they uh they were sergeant they got a gun so some of those guys were good and some of them were you know lacking and lacking in certain areas now this this didn't happen to you but you still had your own gun yeah your way up worked my way up because of uh they saw how competent it was wow so what how what what was your rank when you then were in command i was i was what was called a brevet sergeant and what brevet means i'm sure you know what brevet means it means you're a sergeant when you're there but when you when you're not there you're corporal so i was a brivette sergeant but i was a corporal um wow um when you are doing this job before may 1970 did you get um did you have was part of your work having missions called in from guys on the field of course yeah that's what that's what it is you get the call and somebody tells you where the grid or where the um where the target is and you fire it up when you think about those calls that came in these are from guys out in the field they're in firefights they've seen nva they've got something going on they want artillery support coming in do you remember do you have any particular memories of hearing things on the radio hearing things on the radio coming in that have kind of stuck with you over time where you can tell well basically one of the one of the good things was that they were we got we got a couple of a lot of thank yous because of the the exact target that we hit that they called in you know just 10 adjust 10 yards and just 50 yards level you know they we got a lot of complimentary chatter thanks guys that's what we needed you know that that sort of thing uh there was a lot of channels that the communication went through before it got to me so i can't speak of what happened you know when the captain was talking to the lieutenant in the field or sergeant field right let's um let's get on the plane to vietnam um where do you fly out out from you play out from san francisco or um yeah actually it was uh flew to san francisco san francisco to anchorage anchorage to some place in japan i can't remember the the base and then to vietnam we on uh a passenger airline yeah it was uh not passenger it was a commercial but it was you know i remember they they burned they burned the green beans on the point and you get the meal the green beans were burnt so it was pretty hard to burn green beans i think it was world airways i'm not mistaken i think it was world airways or olympic airways what what memories do you have apart from the burned green beans what what um what memories do you have of that flight now we've got a number of flights getting you from the us to vietnam but it's a long way in the air you had a long time in these planes um yeah do you have any other memories of the of the flight i was lucky that there was a guy that i knew from basic training from pittsburgh and we were on the same exact itinerary from pittsburgh to san francisco san francisco to alaska alaska to japan japan to vietnam and then we went our separate ways so i was kind of we were kind of hanging out the whole time you know smoking cigarettes and you know just just chatting up yeah so it was uh it i wasn't it wasn't a singular thing for me it was something that i shared with this guy would you describe yourself as looking forward to an adventure as apprehensive as indifference how do you describe i would say adventure adventure and then the closer it got to vietnam it was like it was like ah well maybe not but i i would say mostly it was adventure you know where did you fly into cameron bay or like i guess it was constantly and then i went to the 90th replacement as either evacuation center or replacement center i'm not sure which one what with what the proper name was and then from there they went to uh all the paperwork was already cut he had to get uh uh you know inoculations right for um at that location and uh i guess they gave you your assignments where you were going to go and who you're going to be with um you know that's when i got the calf you know yeah did you have this experience of the very steep descents the very rapid stop and them opening the doors and telling you basically get off as quickly as you can or know what your entrance was like no it was it was it was more like a commercial commercial airport there was no there was no hurriedness or anything for the big plane i'm assuming you're talking about yeah playing across the ocean the commercial yeah no i didn't we didn't have anything but i do remember that when you walk out the door you get the smell and you know you keep that smell for um for a year and change you keep that smell um and it's it's because they use that they you at that time i don't know if it's still true they used human feces for um fertilization of their of their of their food plants and stuff you know so yeah and they you can smell it yeah veterans almost always say the first sensory experience they had in vietnam was either the smell or the heat or a combination of both well i would say yeah we we were at night so the heat was kind of minimized but but the smell was smell was memorable when did you arrive in vietnam was it 69 i know it was in 1970 so it would have been in january 1907 january 1970 so you know vietnamization is is underway but as you know personally there's still a lot of combat to come um you know you're going into a war zone um [Music] but still it's it's not something that's really been driven home in a personal way what's the first thing you saw heard heard about experienced that really drove home to the point that this is a war zone this is a dangerous place i saw some damage some damaged equipment some helicopters that were damaged and also a cannon from my unit that was damaged so that when you see that it's like okay you know that's kind of uh evidence if you will of um the realities uh didn't see any didn't see any bodies you know right right initially but uh the the damage to the to the various equipment that was difficult was that the second day the first day i would say it's it's probably the third or fourth day because when when i was assigned in the 90th and then went to the the first cav had this little like mini camp it was like two or three days that you had to go through there it gave you their structure and their esprit de corps and they had to learn how to rappel out of uh out of towers and a couple of other things specific to being air mobile but so it would have been like three or four days after i was in country that i ended up you and where where were you where um after you get through all this preliminary stuff where did you go in south vietnam a three core uh in uh fuchfin province cambodian border that's pretty much where it was um if you think about saigon it would be uh west and uh northwest will saigon about maybe 60 miles 70 miles 80 miles right and are you it's right by the michelin right by the michelin rubber plantations which is another vietnam thing and yeah you can be tied to that but it's right by the michelin river a lot of a lot of plantations old plantations that were uh you could still see the the rows of the rubber plants that the french had set up yep yeah yeah were you at a firebase there oh yeah yeah which which firebase was i can't i'm sorry i can't remember the name of the harvest because we moved so many times we had we we had a different firebase about every three weeks okay we're just boom boom boom boom so was that your your job then for the next um several months being on the firebase waiting for fire missions to come in and then responding to that is that most and moving you know moving every three weeks to a different firebase location so we could have different uh areas of opportunity with uh with our friends the northeast northern north vietnamese yeah um did you have much interaction with south vietnamese no actually i didn't and i have zero exposure zero where we were where the first cab was was a free fire zone so anything that moved was a legitimate target for us wow so everything i read about the arvin was at best neutral um i have no arvin experience the only arvind thing would be maybe some kit carson scouts that we used to see and uh some of those guys loyalties were questionable in my mind as it went on these are kit carson's if i remember right these are nva who would switch sides and right two nights before we got hit uh he was walking the perimeter and walking from parapet to parapet or bunkered a bunker and the speculation from him was that it was kit carson and gave the exact you know measurements of where they were to shoot 48 let's come to may 1970 so what are the what are the very first memories you have that something you know you've been on these firebases you've been getting these fire missions um but what are the first inklings you can remember that now you're going to be part of something that's um the right word is more frenetic bigger with my with my exposure to the guns i also had exposure to the helicopters and i was i was one of the taller guys in the uh in the battery so i was i was called with the task to hook out to physically hook netting and the nylon strapping that went along with it to underneath a tree underneath a helicopter and it was trucks deuce and a half trucks um cannon all sorts of ammunition you name it whatever we could get on there so with that activity increased activity you knew something was going on and you run into these helicopters that come from you know 50 miles away or 20 miles away and there you get a little scuttlebug if you will from those guys um the other thing that happened was i mentioned earlier that we shared that geography with the 25th infantry division we had just we the first cabinet just finished building this brand new lz firebase and two days later we give it over to the 25th infantry and so so they just kind of walked into something we had to leave it and go out and recreate if you will so that's that's kind of how we we knew just by no no formal formal words yeah and then [Music] did you know when you yourself get into a helo and fly into cambodia did you know that that was coming or did the order come no we were on the hero i was one of the last guys to leave the quan lloyd air air pad to go to kim to lz ranch uh so yeah i knew something was going on and all my all my guys were already there so i just had to come in and find them when you set foot in cambodia i mean you you just assumed you're in cambodia or did somebody actually tell you you were in cambodia no they told us we were right okay so you you told us you knew when we left the we left the landing pad the in quan loy and we were all in yui's said we're going to cambodia guys walking low yeah so what did that mean anything to you at the time i mean other than okay yeah i think i think it did because if if you were um if you were in the field and you were fighting against the nba you knew that they would pull off and go behind the border to the sanctuaries it was like that you know like a little kid kind of a situation so we didn't have a chance to fight it out but we were excited i was excited to move forward and kick some butt across the line not stopping online like like a little kid so anyway that was that's kind of my obviously my personal feeling sorry was part of this um you know a sense that this isn't a fair fight because they can hit us and then run across the border and so now going to be fair because we're going to go across the border too i mean like i think i think i think yes and no i mean i think for the most part you know we we had so much more equipment so much more sophistication of equipment the transportation that we had with the air mobile was just pretty much dwarfed anything that they had they had they had some trucks but everything was mostly moved on by bicycles and by their feet yeah there were there were a lot of things that we had clearly an advantage over yeah and then they they all said they were taking advantage of the geography in which was right well that's what i mean by unfair in that they can hit you and then run back across the board but now okay no now we're going across the border too so that game is not going to work anymore is that exactly exactly the feeling that was that was the strategy and that was i think that was the feeling for most of the guys you know you listen to veterans from different um different wars and they talk about the enemy in certain you know in different ways um did you and your fellow soldiers how did how did you think of the nba i mean obviously you know they're the enemy and everything that goes along with that um did you take them seriously as combatants what was what was your view of them i would say i took we i took them seriously and i would say that we took them seriously as opponents and and as you know we wanted to kill them and uh or we wanted to kill them or stop him or capture him and that was it i mean i i you know one of the things you you decide or i decided when i got off the plane and tons of newt was you know i'm going back in the year you know i'm know my goal is to get back on this plane and uh what whatever i have to do you know to do that that's pretty much what it was but i think for the most part we respected them uh we respected their professionalism if you will and then how hard they how hard they fought how little and when you see one of those bodies when i saw some of those bodies it's kind of scary because they're so small and they're so tiny tiny little guys but then they they came together as best they could now you arrive in cambodia may 6th is that right right the message so describe that period between let's let's take it may 6 through may um or may 16. so the day okay what kind of stuff are you doing well it's pretty much it's pretty much what we talked about where um there's the officers go around and they they pick different geographies or sites for an lz and then maybe you get some air force cluster bonds to come in and blow up the trees to give you a base the marine excuse me the engineers would come in with uh with some bulldozers and create a berm a circular berm and then um you know all that can happen within a couple of hours and then you just come in you come in with the pop smoke and the helicopter comes in and you come right down along with the cannon and excuse me artillery a couple of trucks uh the uh the trying to think of the name of the they used to have this metal this metal thing it's like corrugated um it's like a battalion uh what do you call it headquarters they have a battery headquarters and a battalion headquarters and those aren't but anyway you can get up and running in probably less than 24 hours and that's what happened to us um you know we find when when we first came in is you get out of the helicopters and you go to the perimeter of the of the field and there were actual mock-ups of helicopters and tanks and cannons there there were bleachers where they were conducting the tests or excuse me conducting classes and they put it and we found out also that the school that they put us in geographically was a sapper school so all these nba guys would come down from it from north vietnam they'd go to the sanctuary and they'd go to sapper school and sappers were you know the guys that went through the concertina wire to get in and infiltrate so you find a lot of different things when you when you come down and land because it's a popular location for everybody not just not just u.s nba too so did you know at the time that you were setting up shop in what had been an mba school we knew we knew what we saw but we saw the things yeah knew that and that was kind of like give me a break dude what's going on here but so that was you know that was kind of the uh the thing and there were you know like i said uh hospital or medical facilities there also so it was you know you could tell that oh yeah for sure yeah yeah and so over the next week are you doing fire missions yeah we're doing fire missions one of the things that you do in artillery is you you dig a lot of sandbags so so you're just digging sandbags and filling sandbags and then using those sandbags to protect different bunkers and things that you have and building a parapet around the cannon to protect and absorb any shrapnel or anything that would come in so you're just digging you're digging and you're you're you know you're digging different uh different latrine kind of scenarios just their general maintenance around the uh the lz to get ready and we were shooting we were shooting within 24 hours so so we were out there and we're just building up so you said you know when your first month's in south vietnam you're you're doing fire missions you felt like you know something was up something big was up now you're in cambodia you're firing fire missions after a few days did it just feel like really no difference i mean sound from cambodia or did it always feel like it was different it was different how so well we got a lot of attention from uh from the lifers and um lifers meaning career military uh who probably would be you know colonel and above in the army colonel and above and uh so those those guys were coming out quite a bit we got a lot of fire missions they wanted to uh president nixon had you know put down a lot of markers for us we wanted to show the success of or show the success of going into cambodia by capturing all these tons and tons of rice and ammunition and trucks and different things that they crew served weapons and a big big machine guns 51 caliber machine guns and uh so we we wanted to we were seeing all that and uh they wanted more and more and more so it was it was a lot different than other uh other areas that i am so you're getting a lot of attention from senior officers i'm guessing then setting up the landing zone in this former nba school that was part of that then you could you know report with in a sense captured in nba school and well i i think maybe yes but i think more no because the there was a there was a colonel that picked the spot of this lz and his i i don't want to say his name but after we were attacked like two or three nights later they meaning the lifers that came in from saigon and benoit they decided that the location of the base was too close to the tree line and therefore we didn't have an adequate safety distance between um us and the tree line so that was that made the sapper attack that much more of a thing that would happen but i don't think that he knew that it was going to be a sapper school when we came down you know but they just wanted to get close to an area that they could land the helicopters in create an lz and go from there did any of you guys you know you're a you're an e4 did any of you junior enlisted guys when you got there look around and kind of make the point we're too close to the tree line oh yeah yeah sure i mean everybody when you're there after a while you become very cautious about everything and you try to be as safe as possible and it was like hey guys this this is pfc you yeah so is this is one is this one of those cases where the junior enlisteds are looking around and saying this isn't right and the senior guys are saying it's fine well it's not fine maybe yes but you know i mean you you can you can look back on that you know over 50 years and you can second-guess that both ways yeah i think i mean i think that i think their intention his intentions were honorable and you know everything he wanted to do the right thing it just didn't happen right let's come to um may 17 1970 um at what point what's the very first memory you have that something you know that something pretty significant is about to happen we were in we were asleep the bunker and usually for guard duty there were there were two guys on guard duty and i was sleeping and all of a sudden i hear this loud very loud boom explosion knocked me out of my uh airbag my airbag my air mattress and uh right when i you know we got up and the sergeant section chief said let's go to the guns right now go to the gun so we just everybody went up five or six guys we just went right up everybody knew their job on the gun that particular night and about i don't know maybe five minutes after we got out there uh we started to fire um rounds directly over the berm into the tree line so directly so we put out i would say close to 100 rounds of different um different types the primary one was high explosive and that would be set up with it with a fuse that explodes on impact there was some white phosphorus which kind of explodes in an air burst and starts little fires and if it gets on your it's on you you can't put it out and then the third one was a beehive ron which is called a flesh chat and you shoot it and there's all these little tacks little nails that come out and it would impale potentially impale whatever was in front of it wow just just slamming those out as quickly as we could we were getting some fire coming in from the tree line uh but uh we just kept on going and uh about i would say 3 30 4 o'clock in the morning the helicopters came in our blue bluemax helicopters you know the the apache tar you know the uh can't remember the name of the helicopter now the the you know the the warrior not the warrior the apache i guess it is um i'll remember it anyway they came in and worked out on the tree line you know with 40 millimeter mic mic and and some rockets and stuff and it's just you know just what was ever in the tree lines was mincemeat in addition to what we were doing and then um all that time i i was all the charges for the guns for the cannon have um there's seven charges of powder in a shell so each time you shoot close you only use one bag of powder so i had to take all those six packs of powder per round out so we had a big stack of powder unused powder over there so um we had to take care of those uh a little bit too later on but um just just firing it up and now you're so you you've got these seven charges but you're taking out six because the range you're correct going forward is so close how how um in your estimation how far away was the target you were aiming for uh less than 500 meters yeah less than 500 meters and uh you know so so you had to and it was also a danger thing too because we were when we were loading the cannon uh because of the incoming fire you had to be down instead of standing up so uh if if there was a bad if one of those bags wasn't pulled the guy that was ramming ramming the shells in he could have got really screwed up big time uh he could have got killed he could his legs could have been smashed whatever so we had that additional um variable we put fuses on them too like i said the fuses were for the white phosphorus for the beehive and for that high explosive but uh and the funny thing was that it wasn't funny i'll go i'll go back about after the helicopters left after blue maps finished you could smell the the cordite you know and the sun started to come up and uh that's when we found out that uh that sergeant hamilton had been killed and they said it was a satchel charge and there were five or six of his guys five or six of the guys on that gun they were all hurt but sergeant uh hamilton was the only one that was killed and so you know needless to say everybody was kind of blown away by that and um we uh we carried on you know we carried on so a sapper had got had gotten close enough to them apparently because it was a satchel charge so i've never really had the uh that's the right word the final definition of what actually did happen but my information is it was a satchel charge therefore somebody maybe our kit carson guy could have just thrown it in you know so they got him he was on guard duty when he got when he got hit how long did that battle go on it's still going on it's still going on i would say probably from six hours five hours from from 2 a.m 2 30 a.m to five or so well probably just three hours what do you mean it's still going on i still go on you know think about things like that i do um do you think about it every day yeah every day you

Channel: Stuff of Life

Views: 23,394

Keywords: lz ranch, ptsd, nixon, ho chi minh trail

Id: Mr1rX48c_IQ

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2022