Part 2 - Vietnam War memories from Don Kaiser about arriving in Vietnam & the battle at Lo Giang.

our first assignment was actually about a week of refreshing refreshing courses and training courses on mines and booby traps that we took right there in july and then they loaded us on trucks and moved us down south of july to duck foe and we landed on a on a base camp in duck foe and they divided us up and our first assignment was bridge security and they sent us uh parts of the platoons to several different bridges and that's what we did the first week or so on the bridges we thought we were in good shape when we went to when we got through with our training in fort hood we thought we were just about as good of shape as we could get cause all we did was uh run up and down the hills in fort hood and i carried a 90 miller recoilless rifle which was heavy and so i thought well you can't get in much better shape than i'm at i'm in but when we got to vietnam and we didn't get any sleep all of a sudden we're carrying live ammunition we're carrying food on us and everything and the the weight that we carried would vary from 75 to 100 pounds depending on what all you had to take and how much food you had to take if depending on how long your mission was or how much ammunition you wanted to carry and i remember about the probably the end of the first week i thought i would die from exhaustion i literally felt like my system couldn't handle anymore then all of a sudden one day i woke up and after a couple hours sleep and i actually felt pretty good and that's when i knew that i was going to probably make it if somebody didn't shoot me one time we went three and a half days without eating uh simply because it was uh we were up in some mountains or down in some valleys and the monsoons had set in and the fog was heavy and you couldn't see the mountaintops so the helicopters couldn't get in to resupply us so we went about three and a half days without eating and whenever you weigh 150 pounds and you're carrying a 100 pounds of weight on you and you're not eating anything there's not much for your body to work on and we were we were desperate and we were looking for animals to kill and nothing was there no birds no anything and we finally crawled on top climbed up a mountain and got on top of it where the helicopters could find us and they brought a hot meal out to us and we thought that we would be able to eat two or three steaks and everybody was complaining because they gave us a little bitty piece of steak and one spoonful of english peas and one spoonful of mashed potatoes with gravy and we were all hollering at them you know we were starving and they they told us if you can eat all that you can have more all you want but eat that first and hardly anybody could finish that plate because their stomachs had shrunk up so much it's a miserable feeling our leadership in a company was some of the best i believe that that existed in vietnam we had a captain that was tough he was a good guy he was fair he believed in men being in shape he had a purpose he somehow managed to keep our morale up better than any company over there and what he did uh before we left is he rounded out his company with the best possible cadre he could find and he went around fort hood locating people that he had heard about or that he had read about or whatever that had already been to vietnam and was willing to go back so he sent us back with platoon sergeants and some squad leaders that had experience in combat and so i believe that we had one of the best uh managed and best commanded companies in vietnam and captain brennan named our company the gun fighters before we ever left fort hood and we actually uh earned a pretty good reputation in vietnam sergeant bartley was was one of the best leaders non-commissioned officer leaders that we had he was a sergeant e5 when we left fort hood but he had come to us from the first cav where he had just been a year in vietnam and he had been wounded and so forth and so then he decided he'd go back with us and he had met captain brennan somewhere and and captain brennan decided to uh ask him to come back with us and he accepted and it was probably the the ultimate soldier he looked like a soldier he acted like a soldier he wasn't particularly what you'd call gun ho it's just his job and his mission was to kill the enemy and he did it very methodically and he did it very business-like he didn't believe in molesting bodies once they were dead he didn't believe in harassing unnecessarily the people he believed that if if they were enemy and you knew they were enemy kill your enemy and leave him alone get get his belongings for intelligence purpose and leave leave the body he was he was so in tune with being in a war zone or being in the woods or in the jungle i always tell people he's the only man i ever knew that went through the monsoons and never got wet and and he was just a unique person and sergeant bartley had he not been there with us i believe we would have lost a lot more men he and sergeant burks were extraordinarily good and just great leaders when we first got to vietnam like i said we went on bridge security and we had our first little fight there on the bridges uh they attacked us at night one night they came through the water and started shooting at us and that was the seventh night we were in vietnam and that night my squad leader got killed and uh of course that that put the fear in us uh that's when we realized that we were truly in a war zone and i think every one of us without doubt probably were thinking to themselves i want to go home now and it was a shock to lose one of our guys and i thought it was pretty pathetic that it had to be my squad leader and on the seventh day we were there and uh we really didn't get into a lot of heavy fire fights the first couple of months we were there we got sniped out a lot a couple of times we got pinned down by several snipers and that's scary because you don't know where it's coming from uh i remember one particular sniper was had me and martinez uh down in this rice paddy and he kept shooting at us and we could hear his uh weapon operating but we couldn't find him he was in the sugar cane and he kept shooting and he would miss us by a foot or two and finally we just started laughing every time he hit fire he had misses a little bit and it dawned on me we must be hysterical we're laying out here with some food shooting at us and we're laying here laughing and so i told martinez i said man let's get out of here so we jumped up and ran but we didn't get into a lot of firefights it started increasing and elevating as we got closer to the tet offensive we had come in out of the field off of a fairly long three or four week operation out in the jungle and we thought we were going to get two or three days stand down to be able to shower and clean up and clean weapons and just lay around play cards and relax and eat hot food and just have a pretty good time and we had uh i'd gotten a shower and a bunch of guys got had gotten a shower and i went and got clean clothes before i did anything else but about half the company hadn't made it to the showers yet and all of a sudden the word came down that we were fixing to leave again that everybody had to go get fresh ammo and get ready to get their field gear ready to go and we had like 45 minutes to an hour to to get everything together to uh meet on a helipad for uh departure to areas uh unknown to us so we went down to the helipad and i we sat down there about uh seemed like several hours and i remember when we were sitting you know when you're sitting on the helipad waiting for the chopper to come in to pick you up you get pretty bored and i remember turner was sitting there philip turner he was my machine gunner and he had a green one of those locust type grasshoppers on his fatigues and he said i'm going to give this thing 10 seconds to get off of my leg or i'm going to eat him and he started we all started counting down so when he hit zero he just picked him up and put him in his mouth and started crunching and munching and then he opened his mouth and showed us all what a chewed up grasshopper looked like and it was pretty gross so uh we finally the chopper got there they loaded the whole company up on a chinook and we still didn't know where we were going we just knew we were going north and there were so many things going on at that time that any place we went was probably going to be bad we the rumor got out that we were going to caisson to help relieve the marines up there they had been under siege for several uh like a couple of months already and they were taking a beating so we went on the chinook and it seemed like we flew for hours and hours and i'm sure it was a couple hours and we landed in da nang south of da dang at an old marine base camp and uh so they told us to go ahead and set up for the evening it was just before dark okay we we left this old marine base camp and we started walking down this railroad track and it was kind of a high burn and the track itself had been torn out but you could still tell that it was a railroad track someone opened up on us with a 50 caliber 50 caliber machine gun and uh sergeant burks uh asked for a green star cluster flare to fire to show that we were friendly forces but somebody handed him a red one and he fired that and that marks an enemy position so boy they really opened up on us then and luckily uh the berm was high enough to where they didn't kill anybody or hit anybody and finally we we were able to get through on a radio to someone who put a stop to the firing and uh so we were able to go on from from there to this uh close to this old graveyard where we spent the remainder of the night it must have been about 2 30 or 3 o'clock in the morning normally you would we would dig a foxhole and and uh take precautionary measures but everybody was so exhausted and we knew we were only gonna have a few hours to to sleep everybody just kind of laid out in defensive positions and slept on the top of the ground and uh got our two or three hours sleep uh right you know and then it gradually became daylight when we woke up that was the morning of february the 8th we started almost immediately at daylight we started receiving uh a round over our head a sniper would pop around a good way's over our head you can kind of tell the way it breaks air whether it's close to you or not and we would get one every 10 minutes or so one round and then after about 30 minutes we'd start getting a couple of rounds and they again they were pretty high and then it got got a little heavier we would start getting one just every couple of minutes and then two or three every couple of minutes and at one point captain brennan made this statement he said if we get one more round he said we're getting online and we're going over to that village which was lojeng so we got that other round that captain brennan had said that if we get another round we're going to go online and go kill or capture some snipers so he put the second platoon on the left of the right on the left of the line third platoon which is my platoon on the right the first tune stayed back in a tree line to offer us covering fire if anything happened and the martyr platoon was behind them so we started moving out online the two platoons toward a village called lojing named lojing and there was about a four to six hundred meter wide rice paddy that we had to go through to get to that village and i remember when we first took off from that uh graveyard night logger position there was a cobra that had ran ran out in front of captain brennan and some of us on the right right side and i mean he was boogieing he was really going and i remember captain brennan and sergeant burks tried to shoot at him and i don't know if they hit him i'm sure they didn't because he just it just accelerated that much more and he got i don't know what happened to the snake so we stayed online and we got out we got out about a hundred yards and i noticed that the sniping had really gotten a lot heavier and uh it it got to the point where it was more than sniping and it started getting pretty intense and after we had gone out about maybe 200 yards it really got bad so captain brennan uh well maybe we were out about three or four hundred yards and captain brennan told us all to get down behind this rice dike well my squad leader had gone out in front of us and we got down and sergeant captain brennan was calling for airstrikes or calling for support and trying to figure out what was going on because no one had told us that there was a north vietnamese battalion in front of us they knew it but no one had given us a word so he's trying to figure out what was going on and he requested helicopter support and he popped a green smoke grenade and threw it behind him to mark our position so they wouldn't strafe us or hit us and when he did that the north vietnamese put the smoke grenade out with a with a martyr they dropped a martyr right on top of the smoke and lieutenant swank was there with captain brennan lieutenant swank was the artillery fo and he started trying to get a fire mission coming from the artillery and about that time the the firing had intensified the point where where we uh it was unbelievable and all of a sudden i realized that they had machine guns set up on the corners of the of the rice paddy and the firing was uh just about just above the tops of the rice dikes and so we were all down behind the rice dikes and uh my squad leader had just gone down like he had been hit well he was out about 10 yards in front of the rice dyke and so i thought he had been shot so i i told somebody to go get him because i was a 18 18 leader and uh everybody just looked at me because we were all kind of in shock so the medic and i got up and went out and picked him up but just before we picked him up we tried to find a wound and we couldn't find a wound on him anywhere so we picked him up and brought him back behind the rice dike well when we bent over to pick him up all of a sudden the uh the medic a bullet came between his lips and clipped the left front tooth out of his mouth and i remember he hollered and he had this shock this look is total surprise on his face and he said oh man they just shot my tooth out and i remember looking at him thinking man this is getting serious and so we dropped the uh dropped the sergeant behind the rice dike and we were working on him when captain brennan told us to pull back and uh the the firing had gotten so intense it was just breaking rice straws off in front of front of our faces and and you could you could hear the bullets pop in the air all around you i felt bullets hitting my clothes and hitting my pack and my the web gear on my on my pack and um so captain brennan told us to pull back and i told him that we couldn't pull back that we had wounded men out there that we had to attend to and i didn't know it at the time but he was wounded uh and uh that was the reason well and he had seen something i hadn't seen and that he knew that there was probably a thousand troops headed toward us uh they had come up out of a trench and attacked us and i was busy working on this wounded man and uh hadn't seen that yet but i could tell by the firing that it that it was so bad i remember that brennan captain brennan whom we all uh highly respected uh had told us again you got to pull back and i still didn't know that he was wounded and then about that time his rto was hit and i remember him screaming so bad and and just it drove me crazy i mean he was hurting and he was scared and he knew captain brennan was having to pull back and he thought captain brennan was going to leave him out there and i remember him begging him not to leave him and uh you know we were working on on my squad leader to get him back to the to the rear and so we decided rather than stay there at first i was going to stay there we were going to stay there me and my squad with this wounded man and just fight it out right there and die if we must but uh when i realized that it was far more serious than than i first thought uh and i started hearing other people scream and and were as they were getting hit and either dying or just being wounded i decided we needed to pull this man back to the graveyard that we had uh spent the night at the night before so myself and smize sheridan the medic and pelino started pulling pulling him back and we were in heavy uh sloppy mud and everybody had all their equipment on and uh it was almost impossible to pull him through the mud but we were doing that and at some point i remember uh the whole world just kind of going red and i felt this searing pain in in front of my head and and i remember just going out and i realized i'd just gotten hit and a bullet had gone through the front of my helmet and whacked me on the head right in the middle of my forehead pretty pretty hard and knocked me out and um well it didn't knock me out at first uh but about three or four minutes maybe five minutes after i got hit i was just rolling around out there bleeding a martyr hit close to me and it kind of flipped me around and all of a sudden i couldn't see anything and i put my hand up on the corner of my head i had a real real bad pain up here and all i could feel was goo coming out of my head and i couldn't see anything out of my right eye and i thought the corner of my head was missing and when i thought that i started letting the whole world know i'd been hit like some of the other guys were doing and uh after a few minutes of that uh my eyes started clearing up and i kept putting my hand back up here and all it was was the martyr had blown mud into my eye and i had mud all over my face and the bleeding mixed with the mud just felt like my brain's hanging out and so i remember i was i was getting sick because i lost so much blood and had a tremendous concussion and i don't remember a whole lot about what i did other than i kept crawling around out there and without any direction and i remember three guys there was a guy named a black guy named holloway a guy named johnson and i believe avant had crawled out there to put a bandage on my head and and to get me turned around back to the right direction going back to the rear

Channel: True Stories from the Vietnam War

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Id: fBu-KvSBweE

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022