Remembering The Vietnam War: Combat

arts and cultural heritage fund infer the production of remembering the Vietnam War was provided by a vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th 2008 the voices of our veterans remembering the Vietnam War he said you're the first one to be shot that was quite an impression on me one of the one of the one two twos blew up you could put a Jeep in the hole and not see the top of it I uh was scared for a year I combed the days until I could get out of there you never get your soul back you born in 1949 and in Duluth group lived on Raleigh Street for a while then my dad bought a place outside of Proctor where I eventually went to school the 60s was great for me now I graduated after graduation it was I just having a ball well I got a school deferment and I went to st. Cloud State and I worked at it but not as hard as I should have I discovered beer and I discovered that there was an incredible amount of good-looking girls and my age group and between the two of those it took away from my study time so I wasn't doing the best in school and I was just wasting my time I was really too immature it only lasted a year I went into secondary education that's what I was gonna major in and after that I didn't have a high enough grade so I got my draft notice and when I got my draft notice I didn't want to go to Vietnam so I enlisted not knowing I was going there anyway by then I was dating my wife my tobe wife and I was flipping hamburgers and Henry's hamburgers and I thought there's got to be some more to life than this and so I saw the Marine Corps drill team on television and had to dress whites on and I thought boy that's a really sharp I love their uniform so I got up and went on the Marine Corps Recruiting Office and joined for two years that to my neighbor buddies they were both home on leave from the Marine Corps they were both in Vietnam both women live together their brothers and I got to talk to them and I was kind of excited about what they were doing and since I didn't have a direction as far as what I wanted a major in at college I thought well maybe a good idea to go in this dinner Marine Corps for two year enlistment and get my GI Bill and go back to school so I did that I went enlisted in September of 1969 and I went active in actually January of 1970 I did my basic at Fort cam Kentucky and all in all basic was great I had no problems with it be honest with you they couldn't dish out enough stuff for me I loved it and reason I say that was a I was pretty physically fit teenager at that time training was a breeze because I was we had we got wrestling in our school my last year and I took third and state and we just worked out all the time well I know it was the physical physical part of it to me seemed like I was gonna be in like 10 or 12 weeks in a row I haven't fired that that part of it was just kind of fun I was you know I played college football and was in training and I was in pretty good shape so the physical part of basic training didn't really affect me that much the mental training was a little different I you know my parents I had a nice strict family and we had rules I had to follow but they didn't necessarily yell at me all the time the training itself wasn't all that difficult I I was a boxer I played judo for several years and wrestle and did a lot of individual cross country sports and that type of thing so I was in really great shape the mental process was was scary it was it was it was a lot different than today it was it was pretty brutal my basic training was in Fort Bliss Texas we're supposed to go to Fort Ord but they were fault they had no room for any more troops on everybody that in Southern California went to Texas that was quite an experience there and after the boot camp was done we went to Pendleton for our individual training with the big guns bazookas and the machine guns and m16 and so on and so forth and after that I got I was assigned as a field radio operator MOS was 2531 field radio operator which is actually a glorified grunt yeah carrier radio with you when you're in in Vietnam went to radio school back at MCRD MCRD in San Diego we received our our orders for our MOS military occupational specialty was going to be and he hauled it all Danielson and then I responded and he said you're 2531 field radio operator I had no idea what that was at the time he said you're the first one to be shot and that was quite an impression on me my MOS was I was a crypto computer repairman and we fixed the machines that would turn typewritten messages into cipher and you know if I'm gonna communicate with you I would I would type it out and we'd feed it into our machine and it would come out of them with these crypto machines as a real garbled mess when you would get it you'd get that garbled mess your machine would then turn it back into print so that we could get the message well coming out of on a bootcamp you receive your MOS which is your mill military occupation specialty and mine was a machine gunner and and I remember calling my dad on the phone and saying dad I just got a just got my MOS and I'm a machine gunner and he says well why are you so happy about that I says well you don't have to walk point you're almost like seven or eight guys back in the in the line so I guess so many point men got shot right off the bat so but he he kind of grumbled something like I didn't know what I was talking about which I didn't and so then that went through after boot camp through went through what they call infantry training several weeks of infantry training then machine gun school and then staging getting ready to go to Vietnam and then off to Vietnam and then after they said told us you're going to Vietnam and I didn't go get a map and look where it was I just knew it was someplace in the Far East so that was it I got unbolt and the wife asked me how was that Fergie getting on the boat I says I didn't know no better I says and I hopped on the boat like I'm going to the Far East get this big donkey moving it was just what to crazy there was 15,000 troops landing in lucca 12 ships and it was just the chaos of dust trucks people and it was awful but to continue you seen about about getting to like a place where you could sleep and food rations it was a chaos but it was just the way it was to me it was just another part of life because I grew up in the army and I never had a job before the army so I just took everything as this is the way it is and we got off the plane and everybody was looking around trying to figure if they would be dodging bullets and it was just like really quiet for an airport and they took us a lot of two or three blocks away in a kind of an underground Quonset hut type of thing that was sandbagged up you know they can remember the smells it was it was just terrible it was like rotten rotten fecal matter and things like that it was steaming hot it was probably 110 112 degrees and just and we had stateside what they call utilities or and not not the jungle utilities that would dry in the air these are real heavy thick stuff and everybody was sweating and we could look out the window and we could see the planes of loading and and and they just kept us there for a couple hours and and when I watched our plane that we just got off with that they were loading the caskets coming back and it seems I bought as many people I got off that plane we're hauling coffins back to the United States also we were it was a real eye-opener it's stunk I mean by that when I when I got off the plane off the plane near the he'd hit me or eating the doorway and and the country just smelled like one big cesspool it smell like eating death you know it's just yeah just the stench that stays with you forever I knew when I got off the plane that camera on bay it was like a hundred and ten or 112 degrees and and the stench of that country that's always embedded in my mind that in a smell of blood does those things won't go away then after three months I got orders from Vietnam yeah and I wasn't expecting that I figured I was in the Navy I should be onboard a ship I wasn't going to Vietnam well I did and I was a Tesla Swift Boat squadron I got with the machine gun team that was securing a highway and it was really pretty much a perimeter and you checked identification cards and you provided security well I was only there about three weeks and then my outfit the second battalion 7th Marines was activated as a battalion landing team and they took us all out of Vietnam put us on ships back to the Philippine Islands if we refitted and regrouped and add people to our roster and then our job was to go into all the places that were people were being hit real hard so our job was to be able out either by helicopter by Amtrak or whatever and so I guess that would be my typical dave was out in the bush we didn't have a rear area most most Vietnam vets will say well I was in a I was in camp this camp that or fourth to support that and we were always out in the bush normally about every month or so that we would come back in on board a ship throw our clothes away and take a shower maybe the first one in six weeks or a month and get refitted and new ammo and cleaned up and most of the guys would be full of jungle rot and sores and who knows what a worms and Oliver's been drinking the water and so the average day would be getting up about 4:30 in the morning unwrapping yourself out of a poncho liner which is a big deal like a big tarp to keep the mosquitoes off you and never took my boots off yes you see a lot of times and pictures that guys are sitting on with their boots off is you don't want to be out in the bush and get hit and have not have your boots on and so you pretty much dressed the way you were for the day maybe washed your face if you had any water and you'd hear him howl or saddle up ultimately I was assigned at the first Marine Division which turned out to be a third Battalion first Marine 1st Marine Division and I was assigned to the HMS company which is a support company for the other four line companies India kilo Lima and Mike field company companies so my first station their duty was a tea ad to the India Company I did I went in the field with them as a field radio operator I set up the command post and that was the major part of a field radio operator and I would get with each squad and I would go on patrol with them occasionally set up night ambushes and be with the line company is pretty regular I was supposed to be a field postal operator I went to I went to AIT for that but anybody that went to Nam was was there their first MLS was 11 Bravo that was infantry although we didn't get infantry MOS I stayed in I stayed in the postal for a couple months and then I started volunteering for different things and and I ended up a squad leader eventually on a reactionary squad we had 12 guys in my squad and they put us way down by the wire and the compound and just left us alone so we'd go out at night and and do our thing and then come back in the morning we had to hook our crypto machines up to radar that would shoot out the messages and you know from one station to another one spot to another but carrying that machine machine weighed about 35 pounds or so that just put an extra target on you I mean that to the enemy you appeared to be a little more important you know that that was kind of the downside of all that and so I I honestly was scared for a year I counted the days until I could get out of there and but tiring I was back to guns big guns big artillery guns the bullet that that came out was just too tall it had an air timer in it it had a hundred pounds of powder behind it and I gotten back at the guns and I was so tired so beat out that I got into a pup tent and the next morning the guys were laughing at me because I didn't have a pup tent over me and they told me that night the guns were going off of missions and I was bouncing off the ground I was so tired it didn't even bother me no more and the guys thought it was kind of comical that I didn't even wake up that that's all tired you get an everyday especially when flying the helicopters would be up in the morning and going heaven breakfast plane out and doing numerous missions hauling troops into or for picking up coups at another landing zone and a day would often there was no beginning or end it often run can close 14 hours in a day I'm calling or flying or crawling under the helicopter to get in some shade so basically this is living outside for a year you know you're outside for you're sleeping and sleeping on the ground and you basically chase the Vietnamese around or the NVA around during the day and then you dig in dig a perimeter and dig the foxhole and you're all or you know your former permit or try and find some high ground and a former perimeter and dig foxholes and then you sleep by your foxhole and then they try and attack you at night you know we camouflage our radios as best we could they called PRC 77s we would put them in our pack sack and it looked like it was just personal gear so we have two types of antennas that we use on the radios one was a whip antenna and was a tape antenna a whip antenna extends maybe a six eight feet in the air and it whips back and forth when you're walking and when you're in a patrol in the grass and the grass might be up to your waist or higher and the enemy can see that whip antenna so they know where the radio man is so they'll direct afar there so what we did was take our tape antenna and it was only about a maybe a two-foot tape almost you know very similar to a tape that used the measure we would screw that in the back of the antenna and we would fold it over and we put it in the work shirt so that you couldn't tell if it was our antenna about every third or fourth day we'd run into some an ambush of some kind or run into the enemy and that's what being back in the line machine-gunner most of the time for some reason they didn't figure the enemy didn't figure out that that if they waited to half of your people to go through the ambush they could split you in half and do some damage normally they shot the first two or three Marines that were there and and so then we think machine gunners don't do anything until they're told to so when the firing starts you drop you start snapping on extra ammo my gunner would carry maybe a hundred rounds attached to the machine gun I would carry 700 rounds and that's 49 pounds of ammunition and we would snap on a couple extra hundred rounds we would we would take cover and we would lay there and I remember the first couple of times they said well what do we do and the Gunners are safe we don't do anything until they say guns up and maybe a third of the time they never called for guns up would be an ambush if you know maybe one or two people injured or something like that and and they didn't they didn't need an assault so we'd sit until he called guns up and then we had probably six gun teams of four guys so we'd have 24 guys ready to fan out and open up with automatic fire so my gunner was he was kind of a crazy hillbilly and he wasn't married but I had got married by that time and and and he'd kind of kneel up and he grabbed me by the back of the head and tried to push me down I said leave me alone yeah and he'd say you're married get your head down so we always have a running commentary of who should be watching what as a matter of fact I turned 21 in Vietnam and Bob Marunouchi and some of the other guys were a little bit younger because I was 21 they called me grandpa and to this day they still call me grandpa when I go up there and maybe half a dozen of the guy his friends that I met through Bob hey grandpa how you doing you know and so I thought that nickname still stuck with me from from Vietnam from turning 21 I was the oldest one in my and my platoon the field radio operators are 25 31 guys I was all as one 21 we were on a apply mission one day on long highway one which ran north and south to Vietnam and from our battalion rear area we had a convoy of approximately six seven trucks resupply trucks with men on it and ammunition and water and sea rats and cases sea rats and I would drive in the Jeep at the time and its of mobile a mobile chief had a radios and not along the back of the side of the Jeep and as it was north of Danang on high bond pass area we got ambushed there was a mortar ambush small arms fire and I was very lucky during that ambush one of the enemy mortars landed directly in front of the my Jeep blew out the windshield of the Jeep the dash of Jeep and the radiator received some damage and that was probably the closest I'd come to a direct hit in an ambush and of course we'd bail out of that Jeep and one of the trucks went over the edge of the road and exploded and nobody got hurt on that truck they jumped out too and were safe but from that point on we could see where the enemy was firing at us and we returned fire and that incident is where I received my Combat Action Ribbon I had a lucky day I don't remember I don't remember dates or anything hardly over there in fact there's a lot of it I don't remember at all but we had a we had a 122 rocket came in and took the last two rows of sandbags off of our bunker and then blew up behind us that was a lucky because when I write one on one of the one tutus blew up you could put a Jeep in the hole and not see the top of it then after we got a compound out if Charlie would look a tunnel underneath our wire and then put bookie Yankee go home on the plane that was sitting in a compound that was scary because they could come in and cut your throat and you wouldn't know I got the Vietnam in a approximately the middle of the month in January 68 and two weeks later the Tet Offensive took place in Vietnam and the Tet Offensive actually started in the city that I was at was called not trying I was a Aiken a central part of Vietnam right on right on the ocean and the times for the Vietcong got mixed up somehow and it was supposed to I don't know exact times its gonna use an example but it was supposed to start at like 6 o'clock throughout the country that that offensive was going to start it started at 4 o'clock in the trying there was a two-hour communications gap with them and it started two hours early in our city and the the base camp that I was at we got overrun we were off of dung island and dung Island it was a haven for the Vietcong and we had there was two things it was all kinds of junk floating down this river and we were worried about Mines two things number one a floating mind that would hit the hit the ship and number two we were worried about a UDT team that would swim underneath and actually put mines on the bottom of the ship and so we had a boat that went around us it was had 30 caliber machine gun on and shoot the stuff floating down a river and one night they fired on I don't know if it was a mortar or RPG or whatever from the shore you know lit between our boat and the ship so they just missed us I was on the right hand side of the machine gun with my left arm over the barrel of the gun and as they start sweeping up the hill and the first round that was fired was by their sniper and it went through my shirt and under my armpit and and and then the second shot is he tried to finish the job hit in front of me I remember getting splattered in the face with gravel and stuff like that but so that was my luckiest day had I've been right-handed I've been on the other side of the gun that would have been a perfect shot our veterans voices continue on the next episode of remembering the Vietnam War [Music] you

Channel: WDSE WRPT - PBS

Views: 1,463,290

Keywords: Remembering The Vietnam War: Combat, Remembering The Vietnam War, Vietnam War, Vietnam, mn, Minnesota, WDSE WRPT

Id: 0l4pj4agv58

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2017