Part 4 Vietnam War stories with Don Kaiser. He concludes his memories of Lo Giang and Alpha Company

and these things are probably all mixed up and everything because that's the way the battle as it was it was mixed up and uh a lot of times I'll remember something that that happened to me and then I'll forget about it and then later I'll remember something that happened but I remember as I was crawling along out there just without any direction just crawling back and forth I remember I am on Kettle Hut had rolled over onto the top of a rice Dyke and about that time I saw his hand he got shot through the hand and he hollered pretty good and at about that time I saw him get shot in the eye and took his eye out and I thought well he's gone but he's he made it he got into the hospital with us and he lost his eye but he's fine and um I remember Sheridan was crawling along and all of a sudden he hollered and I looked over at him and his helmet was just flipping straight up into the air like in slow motion and I thought well he's dead and he was in my squad and he was a good guy and uh I mean one of my best friends but it didn't do anything to him gave him a tremendous headache it just hit his helmet and knocked it straight up in the air and did nothing went into his head and so he made it out of there okay and uh several other guys uh you know I saw get get wounded and I can't remember some of them is you know who it was or or whatever but I know that uh the end at the end of the day there were 35 wounded and 19 dead out of two platens of men and it was a it was a terrible battle so many people were in that graveyard laying there some of them unconscious some of them hurting bad and uh I was hurting pretty bad but my wounds really were superficial compared comparatively but I had a like I said I had a tremendous concussion and and so they evacuated us out we they put us on a marine evacuation helicopter that one of those banana looking helicopters and I remember we we took off and all of a sudden the chopper was uh took a bunch of hits they just stitched the chopper with AK-47s and all these holes just opened up in the chopper and miraculously nobody got hit and the chopper sat back down real hard on the ground and then I mean it really revved its engines up and uh it took off and boy we went straight up then and got out of there and headed over to the field Hospital in devang but I remember Jim Brewer as he was crawling before Wendover called him and asked him who was behind him and he told him that he was wounded and and he had been shot in the top of the shoulder and the bullet had been uh had split and went on both sides of his heart where they're still there today and uh it was a real serious wound he spent several months in the hospital and they were never able to get the get the bullets out of his chest my actually probably best friend I had in Vietnam was a guy named James lock a couple would call him Jimmy he hitchhiked to yoke him to my home with me on many weekends we would hitchhike from Fort Hood Yoakum and uh I had a girlfriend back there in Yoakum and so he'd go home with me and we'd go to the movies and just kind of hang out and uh when we were getting hit the hardest I remember that he and martachi the machine gunner and he was martachi's assistant machine gunner they were they were over in this these little bushes to our right and uh they were doing a lot of heavy firing and and everything and martachi told me later that he saw the North Vietnamese firing rockets at two or three of us that were out there and he kept holding them off with his machine gun well when we got back into the graveyard uh right before we got evacuated Sergeant Bartley came into the graveyard and he came straight over to me and he said Don lops been killed and it broke my heart it just just really broke my heart he was such a good guy he stuttered a lot he was he was a smart guy I remember he and I had uh hitchhike home one weekend and we were hitchhiking through Luling Texas and these girls kept riding past us uh and finally they turned around and stopped and Lop ended up writing one of the girls that had stopped and talked to us and uh I had to write her and tell her that he had been killed and I really got a really emotional but heartfelt letter back from her and and it just was a sickening situation Lop was was a wonderful kid when I don't remember much about landing at Danang I just remember I was what you call walking wounded ambulatory and I remember that I helped somebody off the chopper and I was helping them hop into the to the little uh it was it was a pretty big tent hospital just a station and uh they had all of these bunks in there and every one of them were full and I remember I helped somebody in and the corpsman grabbed the grabbed the uh the person I was helping I don't even remember who it is now I was just too far out of it and they grabbed them and put them on a on a gurney a little jungle caught there and put an IV in them and they just kind of forgot about me and I remember standing there leaning against his tent pole and I think the full in impact of what happened hit me it impacted me I mean it hit me like a ton of bricks and I remember I started just to cry and I was missing lop and and about that time this doctor looked up and he saw me standing there squalling and I was just laying against his tent post and of course I was Bloody from head to toe and I remember him saying somebody grabbed that man of course he deleted expletives and I don't remember anything else until I got out to the hospital ship but somebody grabbed me and put me down and put an IV in me sometime that late that evening late that afternoon we were put on a helicopter and taken out to the USS Sanctuary hospital ship off the coast of dongha which is north of Danang and I remember waking up getting off the chopper and they put us in this little like a hallway they call Triage and uh I remember thinking I was in pretty bad shape I felt you know I was exhausted we hadn't had any sleep in two nights and you know just totally exhausted I'd crawl through 400 meters of sloppy rice paddy with all my equipment on and and pulling a wounded man and uh all of a sudden another Chopper came in behind us and I was laying on a little pallet on the floor in this uh triage section and it was a chopper full of Marines from caisson and they had been under siege for like I said before for a couple of months the guy's clothes were rotting off of them they were so wounded it was it was horrible so one kid came in and his eyeballs looked like grape jelly just stuck in the sockets of his head looked like they just blob jelly in his eyes and it was his eyeballs and one kid came in and both of his legs and both of his arms were were broken and shot up one guy had he must have had 500 little holes all in him he was still alive had several of his fingers missing and and next thing he knew I was sitting up on the Cotton then pretty soon I was sitting up smoking a cigarette thinking you know I'm not bad at all these poor guys from caisson if they were mangled it's it's unbelievable I don't even know how to describe it uh the the feeling that I had laying there knowing I was hurt but knowing I was blessed so much and it was really a sad day a couple of days after I got out of the hospital ship um none of the none of this shrapnel that I had went through my skull and entered my brain I was very lucky I have a piece right in the center of my forehead which is a sliver of that bullet but I had a horn on the front of my head about that long it just made a perfect little cone and they couldn't figure out why it lasted so long so they I was on the ship almost a month before that went down but one day a couple of days after I got hit the doctor decided he needed to take some shrapnel out of this part of my head but so they didn't have hardly any supplies left on the ship because Cason was just draining them so he gave me one shot of Novocaine then he cut me open and immediately the blood just gushed out well that washed most of that novocaine out so he just kept cutting and he was trying to and he did dig one piece of shrapnel out but it's I have several pieces bedded under a network of nerves that goes across your forehead here and uh by that time all the deadening had washed out of my head and uh he just didn't have any more that they could spare for something like that so he told me he said I'm gonna have to sew you back up he said I can't operate on you you're two tents and I was tearing the sheets off that bed and off that little operation table and so he so he put I think 10 stitches in my head without a lick of of uh deadening and I don't want that to ever happen again and he sewed me back up but I still have trouble with that I can just tap my head right here and it shoots pains all down through my jaw and and sometimes down to my my hand right here and uh and it'll give me a headache if I tap on it a few times and it's just real tender it feels strange you know the the the a company first of the six the original gun Fighters probably one of the best Bunches of the best bunch of guys I've ever known in my life uh they came from all over the United States Madison was from California and Mets was from New Jersey uh several guys from New York from Wyoming from Wisconsin from Texas Louisiana from all over the United States and yet it's amazing how we all fit together different yet so much alike and to this day 2007 we still meet and we still have so much in common and like like the movie says we're truly a Band of Brothers and you know we've bled together uh I remember at one point most of us had dysentery and we had to kind of tend to each other and it was nothing but a mess it's horrible uh we got in fights with each other in base camps and even sometimes in the field but yet we would die for each other we were willing that day to uh we we'd made up our mind we were going to stay with wounded man and and die with him because we were getting overrun and we just weren't going to leave him to die by himself and I'm not saying that like Hey we're we're heroes I'm saying that because we loved each other and we cared about each other and that's what family does and that's what we were we were the gun fighter a company family and uh Captain Brennan was like our dad and our Squad leaders were like our big uncles and it was amazing and like I said we get together still once a year and all of our all of our wives come and they get together they uh fit together just like just like family it's really a unique company I feel like different than any company and we seem to have a closeness that the other companies didn't have therefore they called on us to do things a lot of times instead of the other companies [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music]

Channel: True Stories from the Vietnam War

Views: 12,745

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Id: BjYpr-MBlcY

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 06 2022