U.S. Army Sergeant Recalls Harrowing Combat in Vietnam and Near-Death Experience

they left me for dead actually i woke up in a body bag and i'm laying in on the ground with this body bag and i don't what in the hell am i doing you are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression and make no mistake about it good will prevail i was born in florida i was raising the u.s air force you're a military brat i am and uh what uh what is your dad doing in the service he was a b-36 pilot at and was he in world war ii or korea he was in world war ii korea uh when he was uh finally got out of the the uh air force he flew for the cia oh i'm not supposed to say that uh yeah air america it's probably declassified by now i'm sure it is hopefully um so was his service influential and well no actually i know this because you were drafted unlike i was drafted he actually told me what i really needed to do because the draft was coming down in 68 was to go and enlist in the in the army didn't think the air force was a good idea in the army and go to flight school i did and i didn't obviously i got drafted first but i did get a chance to qualify for flight school and they wouldn't let me fly because of my eyes i could be a crew chief i could be a gunner i could do all that stuff but i couldn't fly it and i went nah i don't want them i don't want to do that so what did they have you do um i went to a communication school my own mos was a 72 b20 and i was supposed to be working in a comm center and i graduated 10th in my class and i said man you got or sixth in my class and you have 10 spots in the world that you can choose from and they'll all be civilian status so i picked rome italy um a badass abeed or wherever you pronounce it ethiopia i was supposed to be a good duty station and the last one i went uh god you know what i think they're going to send me to vietnam anyway so i said thompson and that's where i went matter of fact all 240 guys in my class were on the airplane with me when we went to vietnam we flew in country uh gosh i want to say it was the 15th or 16th of october and 68 and we were supposed to land in ton snoot and and they waved us off we circled the uh the uh runway for about an hour circled and they waved us off said can't take in we're getting shelled and so then they sent us to da nang so we went up to we flew up to da nang and danang said we can't take you and they said well somebody's got to take us because we're running out of fuel i mean that's basically you you know the guy was real honest with us on the airplane the the pilot and uh so we circled danang for about 45 minutes and then they sent us to cameron bay and we were in the flight pattern and they called us off because there was a bunch of rocket explosions going on around the airfield and he said you can't come in can't lanny goes we're coming in we ain't got nothing and we landed in the middle of that they took it all the way down the end of the runway pulled to the side and down at the end of the runway there was big berm and they pulled to the side dropped all the shoots we slid down climbed up the berm right into a ditch and then that ditch led over to the uh the tent the welcoming tent for all new incoming recruits and we were there about uh i don't know 12 15 hours so they were you know because everybody was supposed to go they had orders to go to different units you know mine was a calm center that i had a at a fairly high uh clearance and uh so i worked crypto and uh i never saw the inside of a comm center i never saw the inside of anything that had to do with communications when i got there they they lined us all up and they said well we're giving you a new order so let me have you order so we got everything here and we'll give them back to you and i i looked at the first start and then went well top i don't think i can give these to you because they're top secret and he went son how long do you want to stand in this son and i looked at him and went i think he really does have a point you know i mean i was as cocky as anybody else i handed over my orders never saw the inside of a comp center um they sent me to knight support battalion of the 198th infantry brigade and that's a story in its own okay they uh at the same school 72 b20 and i don't i don't know what the mos was for field wiremen but they're the ones that have to climb you know the pole climbers for the electric companies and the telephone companies and uh and we used to march to our classrooms every morning and watch these guys trying to get up a pole and it always kind of made us laugh you know like man i ain't doing that anywhere they're flying bullets so the first thing i ever did was climb a pole and fix a wire and i had absolutely no idea what i was doing other than there's two wires up there and you split split them you splice them and you tie them together and you get down as quick as you can so i did that for uh i don't know a couple weeks a couple of weeks before we had our first uh attack on on our little compound and uh and uh i can tell you this i didn't want to do that i told him i didn't like doing that i said well what do you want to do and i said anything but standing out in the open i don't like that so i did a couple of um convoys i i rode shotgun and convoys to a little place 11 miles south of us south of chile called duckvo the 11th m3 infantry brigade was uh was stationed down there and it was it was a hot zone and once a week we down we'd do a convoy down there for supplies with supplies and our path would take us through a place called milai and this was uh this was in probably november of 68 and uh every time we went through there we got hit every time what's that like to come under fire like you were just saying uh you ever peach pants sure yeah yeah it's pretty scary in the beginning you know i resolved myself that i wasn't gonna come back alive anyway by that time and i think my attitude started changing and it wasn't uh it wasn't a cocky attitude it was just you know if it's there it's there i'll never feel it i'll never hear it and if i do hear it i'll never remember it you know but it was just a matter of survival day to day you never planned anything for the next day because you didn't know whether you'd be there or not so i just decided you know what i'm they tell me what to do i'm going to go do it well i did i did a lot of field wiremen work uh whether i liked it or not they dropped us in on lz one time and and uh and i didn't have anything but an m79 grenade launcher and a 45 hanging on my belt but i had two big large uh rolls of of field wire to uh to go out string wire for claymore mines and and for communication and uh fortunately they'd give me a couple of guys to be my you know my backup my my guys that were watching out for me because i couldn't i couldn't fire back if we got hit that i did a few few of those and uh did a couple more convoys and then they asked for a volunteer to a place um or to a unit called suli defense command and and i volunteered i had met the colonel that was the ceo of cldc and [Music] i met him earlier and he was impressed enough to take me on site and july defense command was uh was a brand new unit it was a bastard unit over there there's no supply line supply lines are tough even when you're in a in a unit that has designation and you know like the ninth support battalion or the 198th infantry again i mean you're getting you're getting all kinds of stuff but we didn't have that uh but they put us up in in hooches uh and uh i i i can't tell you what they called it but it was in the middle of the runways at july but our job was to control and secure the bunker line for chulai which ran from [Music] i can't tell you the name of the point but it was out towards the anton river on the right hand side with it where the coast guard was all the way up probably about 10 miles and then straight across the peninsula and then down towards a place called batanga peninsula how intense was the enemy effort to break your line all the time men women and children they used anybody and everybody and who's they the viet cong and the north vietnamese and the people that were in charge so yeah you tell me what were your rules of engagement when especially involving women and children uh they changed all the time uh almost permanently they changed when uh westmoreland became commanding general of uh i think uh he started at i-corps and then and then he became the uh big muckety-muck of the of the whole vietnam war and his first order to us was no loaded weapons on the bunker line they had to have you had to have a clear chamber and you could have the the clip sitting next to you but if you saw movement you had to call the officer of the day you had to wait for him uh collect myself to come down see what you saw and he couldn't fire off a flare he had to do that so he had to confirm that you saw what you saw and and then he would make a decision and believe me he felt the same way we did because he had better know what he was getting into to say open fire or to hold back so you can imagine that that did cost us a number of guys because by the time the viet cong had come through the fence they'd take out a bunker or two sometimes a sapper would get through and go to a hooch and blow himself up so it wasn't like they were trying to attack the whole base and take it down because it was huge but any little thing they could do was disruptive so that's um that's kind of the way they fought their little war later on it didn't matter to me i loaded my weapon anyway i didn't think i'd ever come back alive but i wasn't going to kill myself and that's all that is of suicide so yeah the the rules of war of engagement when they come down from above i don't know who they're making them for because they're sure not making them for us if they're going to fight a war you fight a war you get it done because there's only one option and that's to win that's what they're doing i live from minute to minute and i did get wounded uh my uh rocket attack and rocket exploded next to uh or out in front of the jeep that i was driving blew us off into a culvert and and i was thrown out of the jeep and ripped the top of my head and they left me for dead actually i woke up in a body bag in the middle of the night sitting next to the jeep laying next to the jeep and it was all chained up and locked and completely destroyed and uh and i'm laying in on the ground with this body bag and i'm what in the hell am i doing what what is going on and i could not remember i couldn't remember nothing matter of fact i think it took me five six seven years before i even remember what i was doing that caused me to be next to that jeep so it was pretty heavy duty wound were you able to unzip the bag or do you have to wait till the morning yeah no no no the i unzipped the bag i was sitting um i was sitting on uh i don't even know what maybe a rock and uh and the mps showed up and it was late in the evening and they showed up and and uh so what are you doing here i said i don't know i i don't know i have no idea well where'd you come from man i don't know i don't know where now i am i don't know where i came from and i don't know why i'm here then one of the mps with the light on says god this guy's got he's bloody you know so they looked at me and i had all the blood and matted and so he took me to the hospital 50 years later what does your service mean to you didn't finish the job i think uh i think most of us are uh i don't want to use the word proud but i don't i don't know i don't know a better word but it's an inner pride that i went um i went i did the job that was asking me but we didn't finish it and uh boy i get almost as emotional thinking about the boys in afghanistan because i know huh they feel the same money

Channel: American Veterans Center

Views: 504,567

Keywords: AVC, American Veterans Center, veteran, veterans, history, army, navy, air force, marines, coast guard, military, navy seal

Id: GkD4VcahMgg

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022