Part 3 Vietnam war "Point Man" Alan Allen battle at Lo Giang, the death of his best friend.

well it was sort of funny because around that time we started bumping into more and more north vietnamese and more viet cong mostly north vietnamese because that's when they we didn't know it but they were planning their big push through tet and uh but about that time as as that time came up we knew what we were doing more pretty well and uh what to do how to act so we thought that at tet the north vietnamese normally took a break because that was like their national one of their national holidays or their biggest one so we were back at base camp and they gave us the duty of i can't remember what they called it but we had the duty of being choppered to any place that was uh having a big battle and there were there were no battles going on so far we were choppered up to lz remember if it was 101 or winchester but anyway they they choppered us up there and we spent the night in other people's bunkers not with them but we were the only ones in the bunker and then uh early that morning before daylight they choppered us on up close to denying and close to the river just south or just across the river uh close to da nang i was not up cl up front at that time and they just we just walked along uh pretty much in the dark and uh i guess people were pretty scared because some marines opened fire on us luckily they didn't hit anybody and we stopped and we let them know that we were americans and then we found out a little bit later that nobody had told the marines that we were coming up there so they had no idea that we were americans until you know we started hollering at them and then that morning about daylight we wound up in a pretty big graveyard and we stayed there till it got good daylight and there was a guy across this big rice pad he prob i'd say oh 200 yards i guess as well as i can remember and he started shooting uh sniping sniping at us just every once in a while and it made captain brennan kind of mad and he said if that guy shoots one more time we're going to go get him and he shot one more time and brennan put a put first and se i mean second and third platoon up on line and we and we walked that way we didn't walk in single file we walked in a skirmish line he called it and he luckily for me he put our first platoon back behind that line about i guess 30 yards maybe a little more than that and we were walking up behind second and third platoon as we crossed that rice paddy and uh we got the second and third platoon got almost across the brass patty and they were coming up on a berm a little built up area of dirt that people used to cross the rice paddy so they wouldn't get muddy and all that stuff but when second and third platoon got right up to the berm a bunch of nvas stuck their guns and heads up where we they could see them and started killing our people and they killed a bunch of us about 19 i think it was that day and of course as soon as they opened up on us we they we opened up on them but we couldn't shoot as first platoon back in the rear but bullets were cracking through all the time and a bunch of them and i never heard it before but those bullets i don't know if they were breaking the sound barrier or what but a little bit ago when i said crack that's what they did they would make this large i mean loud cracking sound as they came through second and third platoon and through us in fact my squad leader at that time uh sergeant shull uh got shot through the calves of both legs just by an nva accidentally hitting him way back where we were he was shooting at second and third platoon but it came through and hit show and i think it was baines and i carried shell back to the graveyard and he had him out and some other people back at the graveyard the tombstones made good protection and uh second and third platoon were having hell as i said a bunch of them got killed and people were crawling around in the rice paddy mud and trying to kill each other and one of our sergeants sergeant bulow uh got in hand-to-hand combat with them and i'm sure some of the other guy our guys got into hand-in-hand combat and bulow always said it was very close to him not getting killed he he couldn't shoot him fast enough so he had to start fighting them hand-to-hand and after it was after i don't know all the stories and there are some good ones but uh after it was kind of slowing down a little bit i remember some of us walked out through the rice paddy after it was over trying to find our wounded and dead guys and we were carrying them back to we were carrying them back to the graveyard and we put the wounded in one little area in the middle of the graveyard and we put the dead people in one little another little area in the center of the graveyard and i also shot two or three in nva that i found alive and wounded out in the rice paddy and also sometimes i would follow up to them by following a blood trail it'd be like a a cleared area about that wide in the rice and there would be blood down in the bottom of it and you'd follow that up until they had either somebody had picked them up and left or they were there and if they were alive you shot them if they weren't alive you didn't of course uh and then that night i will never forget that because we had a bunch of our guys kind of stacked up in the middle of the graveyard and uh i wrote one time that their arms and legs were a kimbo and when a flare would go off that night you could see arms and legs sticking up uh of of our dead people and we also it started raining to really make things nice and uh we put ponchos over the top of our dead people and to protect them from the rain but choppers would come in from the marines who brought us m14 ammo instead of m16 ammo because they were d they did not know we were going to come in there that day uh and the choppers would blow the ponchos off of our guys and we would go put them back on them but they just kept the choppers just kept blowing the ponchos off of and that night don't know the end her story but as i saw it uh two of our guys went out to set up trip flares hand grenades and they and set up claymores uh to protect us during the night if we were attacked which we were scared to death we would be but luckily we didn't get attacked i guess we'd hurt them bad enough they just left anyway he and tj went out to set this stuff up and i marine chopper came over not to bring not to bring ammo but was just flying by outside our perimeter and a big flare went off about that time and when the flare went off tj and this guy other guy got a little scared that people could see them because the flare was going off and they started running back to our perimeter well whether they had told the foxhole next to them that they were going out or whether they did not tell them i don't know but there was a guy sitting there on an m6 m60 machine gun and when williams and this other guy he started running back to our perimeter uh they thought they might get shot at the guy on the m60 thought they were attacking and opened up on them and killed hill pomillo with a shot through the forehead and i went with the with the medic and tried to help him but he was gone there was no way he was going to make it through that my best friend stating uh got killed uh he and i and a guy named carter who was our close friend also especially close friend we walked up on this little hill and they said take a break and i think we're we were eating lunch and the three of us sit almost shoulder to shoulder uh up on this little berm with our feet down in kind of a ditch and uh all of a sudden there was a a really loud sound and there was smoke and dirt flying in the air and you couldn't see hardly anything and i i guess all of us fell down in that ditch at our feet and carter carter was always good at getting away from uh grenades and stuff like that and he came crawling over uh stating and the top of me and uh almost squashed me and got away to a safer area and when the smoke cleared i saw that stating had been wounded and he wasn't alert and uh i went up and started trying to help him and almost immediately a uh a medic came down and started trying to help him and he pulled his shirt open and there was a there was a little sucking chest wound uh in his chest and he had two little holes over his left eye from shrapnel also and i don't know which one killed him but he was alive when we put him on the medevac but he didn't make it to the doctor and boy that that really hurt me uh and that was my first purple heart

Channel: True Stories from the Vietnam War

Views: 47,368

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Id: Rn1NnV5JPRY

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2022