In 2015-16, The Sentinel honored local Vietnam War veterans with a year-long series of stories that were published every Saturday in our History section.
Called “Voices of Service,” the weekly feature examined how the war shaped officers and enlisted personnel from every branch of the military in every phase of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Those stories are presented here.
Moments after stepping off the helicopter into the Ia Drang Valley at Landing Zone (LZ) X-Ray on Nov. 14, 1965, Spc. Four Bill Beck, a native of Steelton and current resident of Cumberland County, realized this was not going to be a routine search and destroy mission.
“(W)e went into the battle, soon as we landed, the gunfire started,” he said. “When the action started, guys got shot and killed, to the right in front of me, the lieutenant, Taft, my buddy got shot in front of me.”
Beck and his unit had landed practically on top of two regiments of enemy troops. They were outnumbered by more than 2 to 1.
Beck was an assistant gunner with the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division. “A machine gun crew always had three members,” Beck recounts, “you had the gunner, the assistant gunner, and the ammo bearer. When we went in LZ X-ray, my buddy, Russell Adams, was the gunner... (a)nd we had an ammo bearer that carried extra ammunition, extra two maybe 300 rounds.”
When the shooting started, Adams went to work with his M60 machine gun. But Beck soon realized that their ammo bearer was missing.
“Russell breaks off with the machine gun, my job’s to stay with him and assist him with the machine gun. I have extra ammunition plus I help feed that belt in the machine gun. He breaks off (to the) the left, we end up where we ended up, in our position, so we’re looking around, no John. His name was John. I won’t give his last name. John’s not there with our extra ammunition. So, we’re doing our fighting, doing the best we can for, you know, half an hour or whatever it is and we’re getting low on ammunition. We don’t have extra ammunition because John’s not there. So that’s when I tell Russell I’m going to get some ammunition. I run back to the rear.”
On the return trip, Beck stopped to give first aid to a wounded soldier. He continued back to Adams location, taking fire the whole way. “I was being shot at the entire time. I’d run 10, 20 yards and I had to dive on the ground to dodge these bullets.”
By now the enemy was close enough to throw hand grenades.
“(O)ne threw a hand grenade out at me from the creek bed,” he recalled. “I got my ammo, heading back to Russell, and that was about 50 yards from Russell. I’m running parallel to the creek bed, this grenade comes out, rolls right in front of me ... (W)ent to go to the left, jump out of the way, it went off ... Big white burst, here it was a concussion grenade. You know, been shrapnel I’d probably been wounded, seriously. I don’t even think I hit the ground. I looked down and it went off.”
Soon after returning with the ammunition, Beck spotted a wounded soldier nearby.
“I tell Russell, ‘I’m going, give this guy some help over here.’ So I run over there ... he has a bullet in his chest. I spend like a minute with him, wrap him up best I can, get back over to Russell, because that’s where my job is supposed to be, but I took time to help this guy out. Call for a medic, he actually came and got him. And then, uh, the irony of this thing is, just as I get to Russell, Russell gets shot in the head.”
Taking over the machine gun, Beck held his position for several more hours before being relieved and sent to regroup with his company.
But the battle was far from over. His company soon moved forward to assault the enemy again.
“So I’m out there with this M-60, and it was very hard to see the enemy over there, I don’t care where you were at because they were hidden in the trees, bushes, behind ant hills, and they blended in real well. And they weren’t a large target so they could look like a hump of dirt, in nice camo, nice uniforms on that blended in, so you had to look for movement or some gunfire or something if you had a good fix on them. Otherwise, you just sprayed the area, which I was doing a lot of the times. I thought ‘Well, we’re getting fire from somewhere over there, anywhere, at least spray the area, so they’ll keep their heads down so we can advance.’”
Beck’s company continued to try to advance against the enemy for the next two days. Beck recalls the end of day two.
“Well then that day was over and we’re more tired and we’re counting our losses. You’ll look around and say ‘where’s so-and-so’ and they say ‘oh, he got wounded’ or ‘he got killed’ and geez, you look around and figure how many men are still with us but we were getting reinforcements along the way, but they were strange guys, you know, they were newer guys that were strange people to us. The ones we knew, our buddies and stuff, were starting to be missing, you know, and your best buddies and stuff weren’t there anymore. You only had one or two of them that you knew. So we went into the third day, pretty much the same thing the third day.”
By the time the 1/7th withdrew from the battlefield they had suffered 121 wounded and 79 dead. The three-day total for the entire battle of the Ia Drang was 308 killed, 540 wounded, and four missing. Beck and his companions returned to Camp Holloway to rest and recuperate, and to try to figure out what had happened to their missing companions.
“We’re few in number, we’re standing around, the ones that made it and we’re talking about where’s so and so, where’s this guy and where’s that guy, and I’m actually telling them my buddy Russell Adams that got shot in the head, ‘I think he was killed’ because of the wound, the severity of it. They said ‘Oh, no,’ somebody else comes up and ‘they sent him to Japan to the hospital’ so I thought ‘Oh, thank God, there’s hope for him.’ And they’re asking about John, my ammo bearer. I said, I said ‘Where’s John’ or something like that, expecting they’d say he was wounded or killed. They said ‘He’s down in his tent,’ down in his pup tent, we had pitched there at our base camp. I said ‘You’re kidding me.’”
Beck learned that John had simply returned to the landing zone and climbed aboard a departing helicopter.
“So I go down there mad, I go down there and I’m thinking of doing harm to this guy, now it turns to anger, not in a good mood anyhow, none of us. So I go down there, flip the tent open, John’s sitting in there, on his helmet and he’s got his face in his hands. I looked down at him and start reaming him out, giving him hell. He never does say anything to me. They gave him a medical discharge.”
Russell Adams survived his wounds, and he and Beck are still friends to this day.
Beck still struggles to relate his experiences. The psychological wounds are still fresh. The emotion and pain are evident in his voice, but he tells his story with the same bravery he showed on the battlefield on those three days 50 years ago. At times it seems as if he does so out of a sense of duty to the fallen, although only Beck knows for sure why he is willing to face these events again and again. Perhaps he is still searching for an answer to a question posed long ago:
“I don’t know how I made it out of that and, uh, there are other people that were the right and left of me, one of ‘em being my Captain Nadal, who’s right with me, and he missed the bullets also. Men beside him and beside us and between us, they were all killed. And he and I talked today, we look at each other and we say ‘We don’t understand’ you know, how we made it ... and why. That’s what I remember about that.”
Philadelphia native and current Hampden Township native Lou Frank was once stuck for three nights straight in what he described as a potentially lethal Fourth of July fireworks display.
“There were tracers going back and forth all the time ... All kinds of flares and rockets,” the Vietnam War veteran said. “I got my front row seat for the battle. I saw the fighter bombers. They would drop bombs and napalm.”
It was April 1968 and Airman First Class Frank was on temporary assignment at a forward base in the A Shau Valley of South Vietnam close to the border with Laos.
A mix-up in orders caused the Army Chinook helicopter to land Air Force personnel at a dirt strip in an unsecured area of the countryside. An air cargo specialist, Frank thought he was there to load and unload supply planes as they came in.
He was told instead to hunker down and wait for a plane to arrive that could take him back to Da Nang, the major U.S. airbase in the northern part of South Vietnam.
“It was pretty scary,” said Frank, now 66. “I was not trained for that kind of stuff. The soldiers kept us safe.”
Frank first arrived at Da Nang on Feb. 15, 1968 about two weeks after North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive – a coordinated strike against multiple targets in the South.
“Three hours after I landed, we were hit with rockets,” Frank said. “That’s when I found out that Da Nang was called Rocket City.”
He quickly learned not to take a shower in the crude wood frame building near the base security fence. The building only had walls high enough for privacy but was sturdy enough to withstand bullets from enemy snipers. Frank took no chances and switched to the Quonset hut near the base hospital that was more secure, offered better protection and had individual shower stalls with curtains.
His job in the service was to operate a forklift and other equipment tasked with hauling all kinds of supplies in and out of transport planes. Sometimes the work involved breaking down the payloads of larger aircraft coming in from the U.S. into smaller loads for tactical aircraft bound for bases out in the field.
“The cargo could be anything the soldiers and Marines needed to get the job done,” Frank recalled. This included food, ammunition, weapons, vehicles and even artillery.
Home for Frank was an eight-man shelter in a vast tent city on an airbase subjected to occasional rocket attack from Viet Cong insurgents. He worked at night and slept by day on a top bunk where the heat and humidity was so bad at times that Frank woke up soaked in sweat.
Because he was the youngest among them, Frank was called “sand box” by the seven other guys in his tent. They had a birthday party when he turned 20 on Nov. 23, 1968.
Frank could have served his entire 18 months in Vietnam in the relative safety of Da Nang working 12-hour shifts six days a week from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. But instead he volunteered for at least 20 supply missions at different forward bases spending two days to two weeks in the field at a time.
He volunteered because he wanted to break away from the tedium of working night shifts at Da Nang and because he wanted to make a more direct contribution to the war effort. Frank worked during the day when on field assignments.
“Once it started to get dark, we were free to hang around,” he recalled. “Being Air Force, we didn’t have to go out on patrols. We had it easy because the soldiers and Marines were doing their jobs.”
That didn’t make it safe. Frank recalled a time when he was loading leftover cargo onto a transport plane that was about to take off from a small dirt airstrip. Enemy mortar shells started to explode behind the aircraft as it was moving down the runway.
“They were zeroing in on us,” Frank said. “If they would have slowed down the aircraft, we would have been hit.”
Growing up in Philadelphia, a soldier to Frank was a veteran from World War II or Korea. Yet in Vietnam, there were “kids” his own age heading out to fight.
“To me, those soldiers and Marines did everything they possibly could to keep South Vietnam as a country,” Frank said. “They could not do their jobs properly because they had restraints all the time.”
He added one lesson to be learned from Vietnam was for politicians to allow soldiers and Marines to do their jobs. “It was just crazy,” Frank said. “I saw a lot of men who should not have died. I loaded the body bags in the field. We took them to Da Nang and put them into silver coffins to send home.”
Da Nang was one of the main mortuary points for the U.S. military during the war. Remains were brought to this airbase for processing before being shipped stateside.
“It was kind of hard at first,” Frank said, recalling what it was like to handle the fallen. “I just treated them with as much respect as I possibly could. When I loaded the bodies, I would just say a quick little prayer ... Something out of respect for the guys. They were guys my age. They were dead and I was alive. The best I could do for them was to make sure they got home.”
Niven Baird joined the Army in 1952 and served two tours in Vietnam, first as an adviser in the 3rd Corps area around Saigon in 1964, then as executive officer of the 1/5 Mech attached to 3rd Marines up near the DMZ. What follows are a few of the many highlights of those tours.
Baird said he missed the Korean War and so had volunteered to go to Vietnam. He worked to learn the language with the aim to be an adviser.
“It was just a tremendously good course,” he said. “I felt so sorry for the young soldiers who came over later and had never any contact, never any knowledge of what the Vietnamese people were like. They just missed an awful lot.”
Baird go to Vietnam on April 18, 1964, and his second night there, the Viet Cong put a mine on a cargo ship anchored where he was billeted and blew it up, causing a giant explosion.
“That was my introduction to Vietnam,” he said.
Baird was assigned to be the senior adviser for the Vietnamese Army’s 1st Armored Calvary Squadron, staying around Saigon as an anti-coup defensive unit.
“We ran operations all over basically that area north and west and east of Saigon, through what’s called, along the Cambodian border, and the lower part of what was called the Iron Triangle. It was mostly operations among the rice paddies, but some of the area was taken up by the Hobo Jungle: triple canopy and bamboo thickets. We would send one cav troop here, one cav troop there, and so on. When we made contact, the APCs gave us a mobility advantage, so we were very successful in keeping hard corps units down that were coming in through what later to became known as the Parrots Beak, we didn’t call it that, off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“Sometimes we would go along inside the Hobo Jungle with the troop, and there’d be a shot and some young soldier sitting on the last track would get killed or wounded. We’d go back and check it out and here we’d find a spider hole. Some guy popped up, shot, and popped back down. We didn’t go in, we didn’t have time, we just dropped a grenade in and were gone. It wasn’t until much later we found out that this whole area, all the way across to Cu Chi, was a solid maze of tunnels.”
Baird was older than many of the soldiers in Vietnam and recalled issues with trying to reel in young soldiers who were both angry and frightened.
“But later, some Americans got over there they didn’t have that experience, so things like My Lai occurred. We made sure that didn’t occur. When you get shot at the commander puts out the call on the radio and tells them ‘Nobody move.’ But, as I said, that’s a matter of experience. You just know you can’t allow a tragedy like that to occur, of shooting up a hamlet.”
Ranger unit
Baird also helped train some of the Vietnamese Ranger units.
On one of the training missions, he remembered, “We went into a big clearing in the jungle, 50-60 acres. We got two thirds of the way into this huge opening, and the Viet Cong had moved in an anti-tank battalion, hard-core, and set up in a huge horseshoe. They had nine recoilless rifles and a lot of .51 caliber machine guns, and they opened fire from the flanks. Hit two tracks immediately, they started burning. We tried to get around them, had no luck doing that, so we pulled the Rangers to go back because they’re just getting eaten alive. We kept attacking that afternoon, trying to break through. And in the end we left seven tracks in the middle of that field burning.
“The Viet Cong, it was a hard-core battalion, they specifically had been trained for this purpose. They withdrew. We came back in, licked our wounds that night, got our wounded out. Went back the next morning and they were gone. Our tracks were still there. We saw what their fighting holes looked like. I’d never seen a fighting hole like that before.
“They didn’t have a foxhole like we had, they’d dig a long, about 4-foot long trench about 2 feet wide, put the dirt in front, and two guys would be in there and one would shoot from the right side of the dirt, and one from the left side of the dirt, and the dirt would take care of the impact of the bullets coming in. Then they had a grenade sump under there, and they could get down and crawl under the dirt when the artillery started coming in, so you couldn’t get them. Very well done, very well trained.”
Later in his tour Baird was ordered to take a team to open Highway 13, which had been closed by the Viet Cong, so that commerce could get through. The VC would tear up the road at night, ARVN would make repairs by day, but the VC would tear it up again the next night.
“It was interesting, perhaps the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my life ... We’d leave at about 0130 in the morning, in the dark, get into the jungle, and hole up somewhere until light. Then we’d move around, diamond formation, until we found a path, then set up an ambush. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I learned that the Viet Cong, when you did something different, they did not react immediately. They would stop what they were doing, back off, and watch and see what was going on, and learn how to deal with this new whatever it is. They never organized a large operation against us. The road stayed open from late August until mid-December, when I got pulled out to do another operation, and I guess that operation just fell apart. Too bad, because that was the way to fight that war.”
Second tour
Baird’s second tour lead him up north, which he thought was ironic. “I knew every inch of the 3rd Corps area. I think I’d set a foot in every foot in all of 3rd Corps, so of course I got sent up to the DMZ. I was the (executive officer) of the 1st Brigade, 5th Mech, attached to the Marine Division. We were reinforcing the 3rd Marine Division.”
Among his many experiences on his second tour, one poignant moment stands out as an appropriate conclusion to this series. This incident occurred at a firebase near the DMZ, within sight of North Vietnam.
“I came in one morning after being out a couple of days, and I was filthy, covered in red mud. I was told to report to my helipad to meet someone with a call sign I didn’t know. My sergeant major and I stood around the helipad a while, and here came this big navy blue helicopter. ‘What in the world?’ On the side was a blue plate with four silver stars on it. ‘Holy mackerel, a Navy admiral, a full admiral!’ The door open and a guy came bounding out. ‘Hi, I’m Jack McCain!’ We shook hands and I said: ‘Sir, I apologize for looking like this.’ He said: ‘Son, don’t you ever apologize to me for looking like a soldier.’ So we walked around and talked about what we did there. He said, ‘I notice you can get on top of that building there.’ ‘Yes, Sir, that’s my TOC.’ ‘Can we get up there?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ So we get up there and I give him some binoculars, and as he’s looking north he said ‘This is the closest I’ve been to my son in two years.’ John McCain, of course, was a prisoner during that period.
“The admiral said he wanted to talk to my men. ‘Sir, most of them are asleep, except those that are on duty.’ ‘Well, I want to talk to them.’ So my sergeant major went around got them up and gathered around the hootches, most of them half-dressed. Admiral McCain went around and shook hands with every single soldier. Everyone, not just the commanders, every soldier, and told everybody how much he appreciated what they were doing. I thought that was the mark of a real gentleman. Then he got into his helicopter and went off.”
They were the epitome of the American soldier in action – support troops with limited combat training and experience pressed into service to man the perimeter defenses.
Their mission that day in Vietnam was to hold the line and save the base camp by letting loose enough firepower to confuse and unnerve the enemy.
The situation had looked grim only a short time before as Col. John Hoefling peered down from his command helicopter at the hostile force closing in on the ground.
It was spring 1969 and the Milwaukee native was in command of the second brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. Hoefling was tasked with leading an assault up the A Shau Valley, the main route for enemy troops to move supplies into the South.
“I went back to check on the base camp ... We left people behind,” recalled Hoefling, 91, now a retired major general living in Monroe Township.
On landing, Hoefling entered the compound and announced, “I want to see the senior man on this base.”
“That would be me, colonel,” answered an officer who was shaving. Hoefling alerted the man to the approaching threat and ordered every available soldier to man the defenses.
Cooks in white hats and aprons emerged from the mess hall while company clerks, more skilled at desk jobs than firing a rifle, also answered the call. But the most stirring memory for Hoefling was the medics who carried the wounded on their backs to the foxholes
This show of strength by those least skilled or able to fight offered just enough resistance to turn the enemy away. It created a false impression the base camp was heavily defended.
Guerrillas in the plains
A West Point graduate and decorated Korean War veteran, Hoefling arrived in Vietnam in June 1968 and would spend the next year in heavy combat. The early months of his tour saw the use of combat battalions in daily air assaults against targets on the plains around the city of Hue and LZ Sally.
Typically Hoefling was in a helicopter flying above the operation where he could direct his field commanders and help them call in airstrikes and artillery support. The main enemy on the plains was Viet Cong guerrillas who Hoefling called terrorists comparable to ISIS.
One day a guerrilla fighter got off a lucky burst with his AK-47 and shredded the tail rotor off the command helicopter. Though this forced a crash landing, Hoefling and his crew were rescued by another helicopter. Later he was on a helicopter that crashed after losing power.
Hoefling was lucky neither craft caught fire, even though the design had a reputation for going up in flames. “Ours never burned,” he said. “I think it was divine intervention.”
NVA in the valley
While Viet Cong fought from ambush under the cover of darkness, North Vietnamese Army regulars would dig in and fight to the last man. The NVA had tunnels so deep in the A Shau Valley they could survive numerous strikes by B-52 bombers, which hit the supply route almost constantly.
A deeply cratered dirt road ran down the middle of the valley that was flanked by jungle on the hillsides. The second brigade went in with the 101st Airborne Division to cut the supply route, destroy enemy base camps and uncover buried weapon caches.
The operation started with the establishment of fire bases on the hillsides to provide artillery support to friendly forces advancing in the valley. The first step was for aircraft to release daisy cutter bombs designed to clear away swaths of jungle growth.
Large flying crane helicopters were then brought in to haul bulldozers to further clear the debris field, allowing combat engineers to build the fire bases. “The main brigade was airlifted by helicopter in one day – an awesome event,” Hoefling said. “Once in the valley the second brigade engaged in numerous battles.”
As with operations in the plains, Hoefling directed each battle from a command helicopter. There he made good use of Army heavy artillery and Air Force timed delay fused bombs that would go underground before exploding, killing the enemy in their bunkers. Once he even called in support from a battleship offshore that hauled a shell the weight of a car onto a NVA position in the valley.
Attached to his command was a platoon of military dogs trained to sniff out underground caches of weapons and equipment. While hovering over the valley one day in April 1969, Hoefling received a radio message “White Owl, you’ve got to see this.” Named for a brand of cigars, White Owl was his call sign as the brigade commander.
By the time his helicopter landed, the dog platoon and combat engineers had unearthed a massive find that included 832 new rifles. It was the largest cache found in the valley during that campaign.
The Battle of Vinh Loc
Hoefling is best known for the battle at Vinh Loc in Oct. 1968, which he planned and executed. Reported in detail in the March 1968 issue of Army Magazine, this battle used a classic soft cordon, in which the enemy were taken by surprise and surrounded on all sides before ground troops closed in to sweep the battlefield.
“In a soft cordon, little or no artillery and aerial bombs are used to avoid hitting civilians in the surrounded area,” said L. James Binder, who wrote the magazine article. Binder added the plans used troops for the 101st Airborne Division along with soldiers from a South Vietnamese division along with Popular and Regional Forces companies.
Navy Swift boats and South Vietnamese patrol craft blockaded Vinh Loc island, which is located off the coast of Hue and was being used by the Viet Cong as a recuperation and training base. “In effect, the cordon was to consist of two long lines of troops facing each other since the island is only three miles across at its widest point,” Binder said.
“Operation Vinh Loc was highly successful in one sense because of the speed, surprise and thoroughness with which it was carried out,” Binder wrote. “Hit hard on all sides before they knew what was happening and denied escape by the tight cordon, the enemy quickly became disorganized and unable to commit himself to any one course of action.”
It was during the Battle of Vinh Loc that Hoefling earned a Silver Star for valor. As the command helicopter was flying overhead, the crew spotted a group of Viet Cong guerrillas. The helicopter landed and a firefight ensued during which Hoefling made good use of a revolver.
After a year in combat, Hoefling was rotated to the United States in June 1969. He retired from the Army in 1976 and went to work as a consultant in Saudi Arabia to train its national guard.
Married 70 years, Hoefling has three children and five grandchildren.
The following is the second part of Jerry Comello’s story. Details of his first tour in Vietnam ran in the Sept. 9 issue of The Sentinel.
Jerry Comello returned to Vietnam in 1968. In the years since his first tour, he had married his fiancée Miss Karen Fogarty. They had their first son, Joseph, during the next two years as he commanded a basic training company completed the Armored Advance Course at Fort Knox. Upon his return to Vietnam, he was delighted to have the opportunity to return to the 26th Infantry in the 1st Infantry Division.
“It was (May 25), during Counter Offensive Phase IV, when I reported to Lt. Col. Gil Stephenson and took command of Company C, 1st Battalion 26th Infantry. I had met him in 1958 when he was the coach of the plebe team at West Point. Not needing any more slow ends he cut me. He didn’t remember me but I remembered him.
“The 1st Division was very doctrinaire and its area of operations included Phuoc Binh Thanh Special Zone where I had served as an adviser to the ARVN 31st Ranger Battalion in 1964-5. The 26th was in Phuoc Vinh where the Special Zone headquarters had been. So I could hit the ground running. The battalion was assigned to the 1st Brigade and was conducting reconnaissance in force operations.
“We enjoyed many of the same frustrations of the first tour. We had far more and better intelligence, but it came from division and by the time it was integrated into operations, the enemy appeared to be aware. We were operating continuously but having only occasional contacts. On (June 3) the situation changed markedly when the 26th was deployed to the 3rd Brigade area near Di An.”
Comello said there was a perceived threat to the main water plant that served Saigon. The Viet Cong that participated in the Tet Offensive had suffered casualties but were still operational and holed up.
“So now we’re going to find them. And then the way you found them was by stepping on them.”
Firefight
On June 16 at 9:50 a.m., the A Company commander opted to go through a large overgrown orchard adjacent to a wooded area next to the Vietnamese National Police compound. In that area was what was left of the VC battalion.
“This area was so thick you can hardly see anything, perfect for those who don’t want to be seen,” Comello said. “The assumption was that they had limited supplies since we had been ambushing the river, which, we believed, was their line of communications. They were assumed to have only the ammo that they carried. They could live there and probably sustain themselves off the local community as long as they didn’t cause trouble.
“The VC would not have engaged had we not stepped on them and there would have been no action. Partway through the area, A Company’s 1st Platoon came under heavy fire and suffered severe casualties including their platoon leader who was killed. The company commander was traveling with the 2nd platoon, which also came under fire and was pinned down.”
C Company that afternoon was heading out to ambush the river that night given the amount of traffic seen on the river. Comello’s company instead was told to get to the road and help Alpha Company.
“When we arrived it was chaotic. The vegetation in the overgrown orchard is so thick you can’t see anything of A Company or the enemy.”
C Company arrived at the fight at 4:03 p.m., with a lieutenant colonel overhead in a helicopter directing gunships and giving directions.
“I was traveling with the lead platoon whose platoon leader was putting his best machine gunner in position to establish a base of fire,” Comello recalled. “As he’s firing, the first burst the gunner is shot and the platoon leader is wounded. The rest of First platoon comes up on line, second is going to be on the left, and we start returning fire, but I don’t have everybody up yet. Right behind us comes B Company Commander with a platoon. He jumps in the hole saying ‘Six (the battalion commander) says we’ve got to go in right here!’
“But my First Sergeant is trying the get the machine gun in operation again so that we have a base of fire at least at this point, while others are evacuating the gunner and platoon leader. I tell Bravo company commander ‘Wait till we get the gun up, and he says ‘No, Six says we’ve got to go in now,’ jumps out of the hole, gets less than 20 yards forward and is shot. It’s so thick we can’t see if he’s dead or wounded. When the gun joins the fire a sergeant crawls forward and drags the B Company Commander back to be evacuated with the other WIA.
“So here we are: Bravo company commander’s out, Alpha company commander is really beyond it at this point, not giving coherent information or directions. By 1800 we win the firefight, but they withdraw.”
Comello said they worked on recovering the wounded and evacuating them, taking what’s left of the three companies south to establish a night defensive position on a high point. Unbeknownst to him and the others, the Viet Cong were also heading south.
“In retrospect, as far as I can tell, they wanted to get to the river. So every time we get anywhere where it’s clear enough to see, the point exchanges fire with them. That happens at least twice. Eventually, they got around us because we reached the designated NDP.”
Second encounter
It wouldn’t be until June 17 that Comello would see the same Viet Cong battalion again.
“We stepped on what was left of them again in an area between the NDP and the river. By the time the mission was over, the 26th had taken heavy casualties. At the end of that day, we were down – with the exception of the mortal platoon that was in the base, to 53 guys a platoon leader and me.”
Pulled out of the line, Comello and his men were sent to a base camp to build an NDP while receiving replacements. There he had an experience that runs contrary to what many people believe about Vietnam.
“You’ve seen ‘Platoon’ and other sources claiming our troops were all smoking pot or taking dope, etc. We’re building an extensive NDP near Song Be, and using local people to fill sandbags and haul building materials. My sergeants would come up to me and report when they or their soldiers were approached with offers by the locals to provide pot or drugs, and we would eliminate those making such offers from the workforce. This is 1968, and my guys weren’t smoking that stuff—they were turning that junk in.”
Later on in his tour, Comello and his men were called out on a joint operation with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR). The Cavalry had armored personnel carriers, which, as he was about to learn, involved some tactics he did not expect.
“The 26th was assigned to assess a B-52 strike in Phuoc Binh province and was given operational control of A Troop of the 11th ACR. It was our first interaction with the 11th ACR. We set up an NDP with the tracks, M113’s incorporated inside the perimeter, and put out observation and listening posts (LP/OPs) outside the perimeter. After dark the observation posts become listening posts. No one in the battalion at that time knew how the Cav conducted a perimeter defense at night. They don’t have enough troopers to dismount and form a perimeter around their tracks, so they begin randomly firing from the tracks with machine guns at EENT. Needless to say, that was a shock to the LPs especially. That introduced us to the Cavalry’s curious standard operating procedures. We told them that ‘When you’re under our operational control, don’t do that.’ As it turned out there was nothing in the strike area and we were withdrawn.
Comello recalled a very close call on another operation in the bush.
“While under the operational control of the 11th ACR, on one operation, our reconnaissance route had been extended so we were out of water and called for resupply. We received an air drop of ‘water sleeves.’ We had not seen or used them before. We picked them up, but you can’t share them while we’re moving, so we put them over our shoulders and continued on the route. As we moved over a hill, my forward observer saw an L19 spotter aircraft fly over. He decided to contact him and in the process heard the L19’s pilot giving a call for fire on VC in the open wearing red scarves at our location. ‘That guy’s calling for fire on us!’ Just by the grace of God, the FO decided to contact that aircraft and prevent a tragedy.”
Comello eventually transferred out of the bush and was assigned to lead the 1st Division’s Mobile Training Team, consolidate its five brigade-level training schools and command the 1st Division Training Command (Provisional).
He returned to the states in June 1969. He stayed in the Army for 30 years, joining the U.S. Army War College faculty in 1988 where he began studies for a doctorate in military history, retiring from the Army in 1992 as a full colonel. Following his Army service, he taught at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College from 1992-1995 and the U.S. Army War College from 1995-2010.
Time was ticking in the magic hour when life and death were minutes apart.
Dr. Robert Hall knew where to go when the alert came over the PA system.
“Everybody ran back to the triage unit,” said Hall, 75, a retired radiologist living in North Middleton Township. “Casualties could arrive within 10 to 15 minutes of the wound.”
The alert meant a helicopter from mainland Vietnam was inbound to the hospital ship USS Repose cruising off the coast between Da Nang and the DMZ. Torn-up bodies of Marines and sailors were about to land on the helipad as the medical staff mobilized in a battle to save lives.
Of all the war memories Hall carries forward, the story he wants to share is the admiration he felt for his colleagues who struggled most everyday with small victories and defeats.
The New Cumberland native wants readers to understand how devotion to duty and a desire to heal came together to make a difference to the men who cycled through the 800-bed floating hospital.
Nurses and corpsmen in particular stand out in his mind as the heroes who made it all happen. All too often, they were the last person seen by a mortally wounded man too far gone to recover from the trauma.
“They were the ones who changed the dressings,” Hall said. “They were the ones who held the hands. They did the dirty jobs…the record-keeping…the double-checking and there were times when they would call you on something.”
Hard decisions
Hall was a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve when he served on the Repose from May to June 1969. He was filling in for a fellow officer who went on leave from the hospital ship. Prior to that, Hall was the medical officer for a squadron of patrol ships tasked with intercepting fishing boats suspected of smuggling in weapons and contraband.
Wounded flown to Repose landed on the helipad where they were off-loaded and moved down a ramp to the triage station. There medical staff sorted through and prioritized the cases based on the severity of the trauma.
Minor cases were classified as “walking wounded” while the critically hurt were sometimes set aside to make way for men more likely to survive with immediate surgery.
had to be made quickly on how best to allocate limited resources.
Though equipped with x-ray equipment, the Repose had none of the diagnostic devices modern hospitals take for granted such as MRIs, CT scanners, ultrasound, angiography and nuclear medicine. Instead, the doctors on board had to resort to more invasive techniques.
“If you had a hole in you, somebody is going to have to look inside to see what was damaged,” Hall said. That meant cutting the body open to perform exploratory surgery before going in to make repairs.
When not in triage, Hall worked as a first assistant in the department of general surgery holding retractors, tying knots or lending an extra pair of hands to the surgeon.
The goal was to stem the bleeding and stabilize the patient for transfer off the hospital ship and on through the military system of medical evacuation, treatment and recovery. The Repose came into port once every two weeks or so to offload wounded bound for a stopover facility in Japan, Guam or the Philippines before heading stateside.
Some surgery involved removing a core of dead tissue from around a wound before packing the opening with gauze. The goal was to allow the wound to heal from the inside out to prevent an abscess from forming inside the body.
Wounds were called “dings” after the sound bullet and shrapnel fragments make when hitting the side of a metal surgical tray, Hall said. His last night onboard the Repose included surgery on a young Marine whose back was riddled with about 40 shrapnel wounds.
A Bit Renegade
Dark humor worked its way into the deadly serious business of saving lives. Hall recalled a case where a bullet had gone through the head of a buzzard tattoo. A colleague joked about treating the wound as if it were a facial injury.
Hall remembered another case where a soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was treated for gonorrhea. A pattern soon emerged leading to questions and the shocking discovery that the enemy was using a biological agent on U.S. troops. It turns out an enemy collaborator was taking his infected sister around to different military camps.
The intensity level made downtime precious leading some among the medical staff to resort to creative stress relief. Hall was once invited to the corpsmen quarters where the men had rigged a multi-colored lamp shade to rotate on a turntable.
“They would just sit back, relax and watch the colors,” Hall said. It was their way to space out without the use or abuse of drugs. “We were bit renegade and marched to a different drum.”
International law bars combatants from attacking hospital ships. To minimize the risk, the Repose was painted white and clearly marked with the Red Cross. Floodlights were used to illuminate the ship at night.
One doctor used this to his advantage and lowered nets into the water along the ship. The man was fishing the South China Sea for highly poisonous sea snakes that were drawn to the light. “He was trying to develop anti-venom,” Hall recalled. “He would milk the snake of its venom.”
Acts of Charity
Hall remembered an act of charity by the ship cardiologist. The Repose had a ward set aside to treat civilians. One day the staff noticed how a Vietnamese girl had blue lips and fingernails. The cardiologist diagnosed her with a congenital heart defect and operated on the girl whose color improved after the procedure.
“He did it simply because it was a young girl who needed it,” Hall said. He also remembered the case of a boy so disfigured by serious burns that scar tissue had fused the right side of his face to his shoulder, arm and chest. Lucky for the boy, the Repose had a plastic surgeon on staff.
His most tragic memory involved Marine PFC Dean F. Smith Jr. who died at age 20 on June 8, 1969. Smith was wounded through the pelvis and had developed kidney failure. The medical emergency made it necessary for Hall to escort Smith to Da Nang where the young man was airlifted to the Philippines for dialysis.
“I told him to call his mom and tell her he is coming home…His war is over,” Hall said. “When I flew home, I stopped at Clark Air Force base and went to the ward. I talked to the hospital corpsman.”
There he learned the awful truth. PFC Smith died when an abscess had eroded into an artery causing the young Marine to bleed to death alone and in the dark. “I never found out if he called his home or not,” Hall said.
There was reason to believe in miracles of faith. He recalled the story of one man who was spared from a significant injury by the copy of the New Testament he kept in his left chest pocket.
Hall remembered how another man predicted his own death. The young Marine had a tattoo on his arm pledging his life to God and country. The tattoo depicted a Marine dead from a bullet hole to the head.
Hall served in the Navy until 1971. He later returned to Cumberland County where worked as a radiologist for the old Carlisle Hospital and the Carlisle Regional Medical Center before retiring in 2013.
Married, he has two grown children and two grandchildren.
Dennis O’Connor knew he was going to be drafted.
“In March of 1970, a friend of mine who was draft 254 got drafted. My number was 256, so on May 27, 1970 I enlisted because I figured my number was up,” O’Connor said. “I served until May of 1985 when I was put out on a medical discharge.”
Originally from Los Angeles, O’Connor came to Carlisle to work at Carlisle Barracks as a civilian. He retired from the War College in 2003. He now lives in Mechanicsburg.
O’Connor enlisted to be an Aircraft Repair Parts Specialist, 76 Tango, and served in Vietnam from December of 1970 to December 1971.
“I didn’t even think about Vietnam until I got out of AIT (Advanced Individual Training) and then my whole class went to Vietnam,” he said. “They were short of 76 Tangos. I was pretty surprised to get assigned to Vietnam. They kept us in a holding company for two weeks waiting for one guy to turn eighteen because they couldn’t send a 17 year-old to Vietnam. As soon as he turned 18 we got on the bus.
“We had two weeks leave, then straight to Vietnam. Normally people got 30 days of leave before going, but we were so critically short that we got only two weeks.”
O’Connor departed out of Oakland Army Deport, flying eventually out of Alaska. He then flew into Japan, then to Bien Hoa airbase.
“My first thought on arrival was ‘What they hell have I gotten myself into?” he said.
“We got on a bus to Long Binh and heard the sound of rockets or jet engines overhead, and everyone was looking out to see what it was, and the driver said ‘Those aren’t jets, that’s outgoing artillery. Watch that hill over there.’ And we all watched and a moment later the hill disappeared under the bombardment. It was a VC training camp, we were told.
O’Connor joined a liaison team in Saigon to work on this team at the Aviation Material Management Center under the 34th Support Group, where he spent three months. His main duty included obtaining high-priority parts, including rotor blades for UH-1 helicopters.
“We had to go to Long Binh to the open storage depot. There was a Chief Warrant Officer 4 there who was equivalent to a Brigadier General as far as his power went,” O’Connor said. “We went through the open storage area, and here were stacks and stacks of these rotor blades, and we got the stock number. I mentioned to my driver, Sgt. Mack, that I noticed those rotor blades were back ordered and we couldn’t get them. They were necessary because we have hundreds of aircraft that needed these rotor blades.
“So I went into this Warrant Officer’s office. He’s a gruff old guy. I wish I could remember his name. And he told us that we were full of crap, there weren’t any rotor blades out there, his stock control computer didn’t show any in stock. So we took him out to the storage yard and showed him where they were about 100 of them. Anyway, we got them on the next flight out, and he quit using their computers after that and went back to the card index.”
O’Connor said the only time he had guard duty came during the week of Tet in 1971 when he was a perimeter guard for the open storage area.
“So the first night of guard duty I was a little nervous,” O’Connor said. “I had a captain who was Special Forces that was the duty officer that night. He came out with a fancy rifle with a night scope, and he swept the area and it was clean. So we relaxed.”
“But on the night of Tet — you have to understand: we use red tracers. The VC and NVA use red tracers. The night of Tet, all hell broke loose at midnight. It was just firing in the air. All these Vietnamese were having a ball celebrating the New Year. But the thing that was scary was that there were more green tracers than red tracers. And that’ll get you nervous.”
O’Connor said he got even more nervous during a mortar attack.
“One time I got done with one 16 hour shift, it was midnight ... I was in there taking a shower, and it was ice cold water,” he said. “I took 365 cold showers. I don’t take cold showers anymore; I swore when I left country I would never take a cold shower again.
“So, just as I lifted my leg up to wash my foot a round went off. They sent in three or four mortar rounds that landed on our runway and blew some holes in it. I was just harassment, but we were close enough that the concussion knocked my on my butt. I high-tailed it out of the latrine to my hooch. By the time the third round went off I was in my hooch; I got my steel pot, put my pants on, got my flak jacket, and was in the bunker. I hauled it down the company street buck naked. I didn’t care; I needed my steel pot and flak jacket.”
According to Dennis, the food for most of his tour was horrible.
“We ate water buffalo seven days a week,” he said. “They said it was roast beef, but I’m convinced it was water buffalo.”
He and his buddies started liberating c-rations to avoid the chow hall.
“For the last three months I was there we ate c-rations. They couldn’t figure out where they c-rations were going, so they put a chain link fence around and on top so we couldn’t get in,” he said. “They didn’t bolt it to the floor though, so we got a forklift, picked it up, got the c-rations, and set it back down. Now these were dated 1949, and this was 1971, so you do the math. But they were still edible and better than the chow hall.”
O’Connor said all in all it was a good tour.
“I was fortunate,” he said. “I had some post-traumatic stress and dealt with survivor’s guilt for a long time, but I’m pretty well over that. My wife says I have some violent dreams, but I can’t remember them.
“I was going to extend for six months, but I had the occasion to go to the USO to use the phones and talk to my parents, and they talked me out of it. In retrospect I’m glad they did. My unit was disbanded and moved up to Pleiku. They got hit pretty hard in the spring offensive. So I might not have survived that. Coming how was a unique experience. I couldn’t talk to my parents about it, so I had no one to talk to. So I didn’t enjoy my leave. My friends didn’t know where I was coming from, so I couldn’t talk to them.”
Dennis does say much about his experiences with the anti-war movement, but when the subject came up his wife commented: “I don’t think anyone who served and wears the uniform of our nation deserves to be spit upon.”
“The Vietnamese people were good people. We did them wrong. We should have fought that war to the end. We didn’t, we quit on them. I’ll never feel good about that. But I don’t have to answer for that, the politicians do.”
Gregory Pace thought he was dreaming when he woke up to a nightmare in the wilds of Vietnam.
“I heard this chatter,” the Carlisle native recalled. “Then a group of men and women walked right through the ambush. There was supposed to be somebody on watch.”
Near as Pace could figure, the whole squad of Marines had fallen asleep as they waited to spring the trap they had set for the enemy.
“I was not very well concealed,” he said. “I was afraid they were going to see me so I slowly reached over to my M16 and put it on full automatic.”
A Navy corpsman, Pace was ready to open fire if necessary had the group spotted him. Instead they passed through without stopping, setting his mind somewhat at ease.
He noticed how the men and women were carrying supplies while dressed in the black pajamas, characteristic of the Viet Cong. After they left, Pace alerted the squad that fired in the general direction the group was heading.
Pace will never know if anyone was killed or wounded that day in 1968. There were no bodies when the squad searched the area in the morning. Nothing left but frayed nerves.
“I felt I was in pins and needles the whole time I was there,” said Pace, 69, now of South Middleton Township. “It was one of those things. You were constantly concerned.”
Mutual respect
Pace had reason to be leery. The enemy had placed a special bounty on the head of corpsmen. Anyone who shot and killed a field medic for the Marine Corps could earn an extra ration of rice.
Knowing that the enemy had placed a bounty, the squad worked with Pace to help him blend in. They had him carry weapons and ammunition so that from a distance he would appear as a Marine.
Corpsmen were the most vulnerable when they were doing their job and patching up the wounded. The enemy would key in on men using medical equipment and try to take them out.
Though there is a tradition of mutual respect between Marines and corpsmen, each individual had to earn the trust of his brothers in arms.
“You have to prove yourself with them,” Pace said. “Once they understood I knew what I was doing, they would do anything for me. I didn’t like Vietnam, but I did enjoy the fellowship ... the camaraderie.”
Brightest spot
Like anyone experiencing combat, Pace struggled with self-doubt. “If someone gets hurt, am I going to have the knowledge to take care of that situation?” he would ask himself. “Even if I have the knowledge, am I going to able to act and do something necessary?”
Once while walking through camp, Pace felt the urge to enter the tent of a Marine he never knew before. The man lingered in a back corner. He was obviously distraught and had something in his hand.
The Marine had taken a snowball shaped clump of C4 plastic explosive and covered it with rocks. He then took the detonator out of a hand grenade and plunged it through the center of the clump.
With eyes on Pace, the Marine had his finger on the metal pin and was ready to pull it out. Pace knew he could not clear the space in time to spare himself so he talked to the distraught Marine.
“I convinced the guy not to commit suicide,” Pace recalled. “I told him ‘This is not the right thing to do,’ and ‘I am getting whatever help he needed.’ I took him down to the sick bay. That was the brightest point I had over there ... Where I did the most good.”
It was not his only brush with death. One day Pace came close to becoming a statistic.
“I almost got hit by a sniper,” he recalled. “He shot at me, but hit a tree right in front of me.” The squad fired back.
Pace’s first taste of combat came during a night patrol shortly after Pace arrived in country on July 11, 1968.
His squad was moving through a gully heading for its designated spot when they got caught in the middle of a firefight. Though the Marines were concealed, the shooting pinned them down, hearing soldiers on both sides shouting among themselves.
“Tracers and bullets were just whizzing by my head,” Pace said. “I remember hugging Mother Earth as close as I could. There was a lot of shooting back and forth. It seemed like hours but it was less than a half hour. That was my introduction.”
Corpsman
A 1965 graduate, Pace had been out of Carlisle High School almost a year – working a job at the C.H. Masland and Sons carpet factory – when he was drafted. Rather than go into the Army, Pace enlisted in the Navy thinking his classes in clerical studies would come in handy as a yeoman.
But the Navy trained Pace as a corpsman teaching him lessons in first aide, minor surgery and patient care. His first duty station was the orthopedic floor of the Navy hospital in Philadelphia.
In May 1968, Pace was transferred to Camp Pendleton, California, and the Field Medical Service School. There he learned how to amputate limbs, treat gunshot wounds and handle tropical diseases. It was all the gritty work that went with stabilizing casualties for medical evacuation.
Along with the training came rigorous physical conditioning at the hands of Marine Corps drill instructors. The next stop was Vietnam, and Pace had to be ready. “I can’t say I was happy about it,” he recalled. “I knew what was going on. We were told things were pretty bad. I knew of people that went there but never came home.”
Pace had arrived in Vietnam just months after the TET offensive. This campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command centers seriously depleted the South Vietnamese, the U.S. military and their allies. Pace was assigned to C Company, 1st Battalion of the 7th regiment 1st Marine Division.
“They were down by half,” he recalled. “They really got nailed. We were in a build-up phase.”
Corpsmen in his unit were put into a loose kind of rotation. Sometimes they were expected to accompany a squad out on a patrol. Other times they were ordered to man the sick call tent and handle routine medical complaints.
Still other times they were assigned to go into a village and provide health care direct to South Vietnamese civilians who may or may not be enemy collaborators in disguise.
Rude awakening
From July 1968 to February 1969, Pace was assigned to the First Hospital Company. This duty station was more in line with what he initially learned stateside in corpsman school except for the fact there was no such thing as a secured area in Vietnam.
He awoke one morning to the sound of incoming rockets and mortar shells exploding near the hospital compound. The headquarters nearby was being overrun.
“Bad guys were throwing satchel charges into buildings,” Pace recalled. “It was mass hysteria. It was nighttime, and you couldn’t tell between the good and bad guys.”
Pace survived by running to the nearest bunker where he hunkered down and waited out the attack.
He left Vietnam in 1969 and reported for duty at the naval hospital in Millington, Tennessee. There he worked as the head corpsman in the emergency room before his discharge from the service in March 1970.
Pace returned to the Carlisle area and his job with Masland’s carpet factory, which would later become Lear Corporation and later International Automotive Components. He stayed on for 42 years retiring in March 2007. The factory closed in December 2008.
Pace is married with two grown children, including a daughter who is a registered nurse in the maternity ward of Holy Spirit Hospital.
Charles Biedel married his wife Edna three days after graduating from high school. But being a newlywed with a child on the way did not save him from the draft.
“Uncle Sam sent me a notice and said ‘I want you,’” he recalled. “I went to Chambersburg to the recruiter and enlisted for an extra year so I could get the schooling I wanted. On Jan. 7, of 1968, I was inducted. Took Basic at Fort Benning, Georgia, and then came home for a short leave before AIT at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where I went to small wheeled and tracked vehicle mechanic’s school. Vietnam was looming over everything. In all of our minds, Vietnam was a pretty good guess for most of us. Very few of us did not go.”
Biedel was in Vietnam for three days when he and his wife had their first child.
“To leave and know that a son was on his way, it was hard,” he said. “I think it would probably have been just as hard to stay home until he was born. I did have a two-week extension on my leave, but she wasn’t having any complications, so they said, ‘Sorry, we can’t do any more extensions.’ Okay, I do what I got to do. I’m thankful for a good family that helped her out.”
Biedel was with B Company, 801st Maintenance at Camp Eagle.
“When I first got there we were in tents, metal framing with canopy over it, and connex containers for the work force. The Seabees came in later and build us wooden hooches. Portable facilities, no modern conveniences.
“The chow hall wasn’t bad,” he added. “They had fairly decent cooks. Sometimes when we were out on the road we tried to get in to a Navy base where we could get some better chow. Most of the time we had to stay at one of the Army bases because we were delivering ammunition. We didn’t get in too many times, but if we had the opportunity we would definitely go. And they would feed us, it was good.”
Convoy
When Biedel first got to Vietnam, he reported to the motor pool working on tanks and vehicles. There, he received an opportunity to replace the five-ton wrecker operator, and giving him E-5 status in a few months that would mean better pay. The job meant going on ammunition convoys.
“I said, ‘Alright, that sounds good to me, I got a wife and child. All dollars are acceptable.’ So I took the job. It was rough, E-5 pay was a hundred and some dollars, plus she got allowance for quarters. I sent everything home except $10 a month. It went directly to her. I didn’t have anything to use it for anyway.
“The guys that I worked with were like, ‘Are you sure you really want to do that?’ I said ‘Yeah, I’ll get to see some of the country.’ They said ‘Nah, I’m going to stay here safe.’ But I was an adventurous person, and I think the biggest thing was the pay. If he hadn’t said that I might not have taken that opportunity.”
The wrecker was tapped whenever there was a convoy run, and was used by transportation companies.
“The transportation company, I can’t remember the name, would call over to our company and say ‘Hey, we need the wrecker, we’re going to Da Nang to pick up ammunition and supplies’ or whatever. So we’d go over, me and the shotgun, pack clothes, c-rations, whatever we needed. It was a two-day thing, one down, one back. Same route every time, Highway 1.
“It was a funny route,” he added. “You’d come to a stream where there was a long single lane bridge. Certain times of day you could cross, sometimes you couldn’t because of the oncoming traffic. They’d have M.P.’s at both ends with radios, like when we have construction here. So we’d go down to the side and wait for our turn. Of course when that happens, you have all kinds of kids on the equipment, they want candy, they want this and that. That was kind of a scary moment when that happened because they were known to do things to the troops. Thank goodness we never had that problem.”
Attacks
Biedel knew some of the areas he was driving through had Viet Cong activity.
“We’d go through small villages, which was kind of scary. There’d be incidents with people in the road slowing us down, maybe on purpose, we didn’t know. Things happened, no one wanted to stop. My shotgun, he was new in country, he was saying ‘Ain’t we going to stop?’ I said ‘No, we can’t stop. We stop we’re going to get ambushed. I don’t want to take that chance, and I don’t think you want to take that chance.’ So the convoy continued on.
“That stuck in my mind. I know all the guys, it stuck in their minds, too. I keep in touch with some of them and every time we see each other that conversation comes up.”
Biedel would get involved in ambushes, but escaped the worst of it.
“We got in ambushes with the convoy. Thank goodness no one ever got seriously wounded. We lost trucks. I lost a wrecker one time to a land mine. I didn’t hit it, it was the percussion. That’s scary, you’re not expecting that. You just jump and go for cover. It was a just a land mine, then small arms fire, but they didn’t come at us. We fired back until things settled down, then went to see if the trucks were still operable.”
Biedel did not tell his wife about his job.
“Whenever I sent pictures to my wife I made sure they were from on base, back in the motor pool. I never told her that I accepted this job as truck driver on the road. She didn’t know that until probably 20 years after I came home. I kept kind of quiet, like most guys do. I went into the workforce right out of the service. There were other vets at work, but I never associated too much with them. Then I got involved with the Vietnam Veterans in Carlisle, we had some husband and wife sessions. That’s when I told her. A lot of the wives didn’t know what was going on.
“My dad served in World War II, my grandfather served, my son served, it’s our heritage. I’m very proud that I served. Would I have done it if I wasn’t getting drafted? I don’t know. I didn’t try to fight it, I did what I had to do, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone. It might not be for everyone, but you have to try it to see.”
Vietnam was just another stretch of tropical coastline from seven miles up and 150 miles out.
“It was all green with nice sandy looking beaches,” recalled Wayne Wachsmuth, 81, of North Newton Township. “It looked like a nice place to visit.”
Edging closer to target, the landscape changed and from his vantage in the cockpit of the B-52D bomber, the Butler County native could see towns, cities and villages take shape across the horizon.
There were roads cutting through the countryside linking supply dumps to mountain outposts. White stripes clearly defined by the necessity of war.
“You didn’t want jungle up to the edge of the road,” said Wachsmuth, once an Air Force captain now a retired lieutenant colonel. The convoys could come under attack
So the U.S. military during the war defoliated the land out to 100 yards along the cart way denying the enemy the cover they needed to set up ambushes.
“Rather Impersonal”
A pilot on a heavy bomber, Wachsmuth never set foot in Vietnam but flew over hostile territory during 133 missions logged in between March 1966 and July 1968.
All but three missions were against targets in the South including base camps, ammunition dumps, truck parks and troop concentrations. The rest were aimed at cutting supply routes from Laos into the North.
Wachsmuth never saw the bombs drop or explode on target. Once while flying close to the Cambodian border, he had to execute a sharp and rapid turn. This allowed him a glimpse of the smoke rising up from the ground marking the aftermath of a bomb run.
The ordnance was dropped by radar off a return echo from the ground. Only the radar navigator near the center of the bomber could view the drop zone and that’s if he was looking through the optical sight.
“He would do that to see if there were any secondary explosions,” said Wachsmuth as that was a sign of a direct hit on an ammunition or fuel dump. “It was all rather impersonal.
“Our effectiveness was strictly dependent on how good the intelligence was,” he added. “They tried to find where the sensitive points were.” For example, experts once used the radio transmissions of enemy ground forces to hone in and triangulate the coordinates of a base camp.
Token Resistance
War had evolved since the generation before when bomber crews had to brave fighter planes and heavy flak in missions over occupied Europe and Nazi Germany.
The only sign Wachsmuth saw of anti-aircraft artillery was a single puff of black smoke that appeared suddenly off in the distance to one side of his aircraft during a mission over the Demilitarized Zone.
“It was very inaccurate,” he recalled. “So far away…It didn’t make sense to pay attention to it.”
There were tense moments on a few missions when the electronic warfare officer warned the crew the plane was being scanned by surface-to-air missile fire control radar. Nothing ever came of it except jittery nerves.
The enemy had to be careful to use radar sparingly as turning on the gear would risk detection by U.S. attack jets that could swoop in with anti-radar missiles.
“At night, when we flew over there, you could see flares from different outposts where they might be under attack,” Wachsmuth said. “You could hear the emergency transmissions. Once in a while you could hear a beeper go off when a parachute opens up.”
The beeper was a signal that the pilot or crew of a tactical aircraft had to bail out over the combat zone. The hope was rescuers could pinpoint a location to evacuate the downed airmen.
Three tours
Wachsmuth had three tours of duty over Vietnam. The first tour ran from March and September 1966 and consisted of about 53 missions flown out of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.
The typical mission profile called for a take-off time around 1 to 2 a.m. for the start of a six-hour inbound flight to the war zone. The goal was to hit the target around dawn in the hopes of catching enemy personnel either sleeping or in a concentrated area for maximum destructive effect.
The learning curve for bomber pilots flying out of Guam included a big dip in the almost two-mile long runway. “It was downhill for the first third…Uphill for the second two-thirds,” he recalled.
A B-52D at take-off weighed about 445,000 pounds including 200,000 pounds of fuel and 45,000 pounds of bombs. The sheer size of the aircraft required the pilot to pull all the way back on the flight control yoke to have enough lift to clear the edge of the runway.
Once at cruising altitude, the crew relied on auto pilot for level flight to a point just west of the Philippines where the B-52 was refueled in midair by tanker aircraft.
The pilot or co-pilot was at the controls for this delicate operation which involved the transfer of fuel by a way of a boom that connected the tanker with a receptacle on the bomber fuselage.
The bombers usually flew in a three-plane cell and dropped the bombs together onto a “target box” roughly 1000 ft. wide by 3000 ft. long. It only took the ordnance half a minute to reach the ground.
Some bombs were set to explode in an airburst just above the surface to kill soft targets like vehicles and troop concentrations. Others were set with a time delay fuse so that the bomb could penetrate and destroy underground bunkers and tunnel complexes.
Vietnam veterans who have witnessed a B-52 bomber strike have compared it to an earthquake with shockwaves going out miles from the point of impact, Wachsmuth said. “It was exceedingly impressive. That was an awful lot of Hell.”
After the drop, the bombers turned around for the return flight of six hours back to Guam.
Rules of Engagement
Wachsmuth was a co-pilot during his first tour and for part of this second tour which ran from April to May 1967. The following year he returned as a pilot in command of his own crew from mid-January to early July 1968.
As the war progressed, the number of launch points for B-52 bombers increased. Early on bomber missions were staged out of Guam but gradually bases were added in Okinawa and Thailand.
Bomber crews were frustrated at every turn by rules of engagement developed by a national command authority out of touch with conditions on the ground, Wachsmuth said. “We could not hit everything in the Hanoi area. It had to be approved by the White House.”
He added targets around Hanoi included a system of dikes along the Red River used to control flooding. The U.S. government announced early on the dikes would never be attacked from the air. The enemy took advantage of this and used the dikes to store fuel oil and gasoline drums.
Hai Phong port was also off-limits to B-52 bomber strikes out of fear that Russian ships were using the harbor as a base, Wachsmuth said. There was a sanctuary area 20 to 30 miles along the northern border with Red China which restricted the ability of U.S. aircraft to bomb a railroad line bringing in supplies to the North Vietnamese war effort.
The enemy also knew that B-52 bombers crews could not drop ordnance within 9,000 ft. of a friendly position. “We didn’t want to risk casualties,” Wachsmuth said.
The North Vietnamese exploited this policy by building their support structure as close as possible to the front-line of a ground assault. “They had an expression: If you are going to fight the Yanks, grab them by the belt buckle and be right up tight,” Wachsmuth said.
During the siege of the Marine firebase at Khe Sanh, there were B-52 bombers flying support missions around-the-clock. Orders came down from the command authority to move the restriction on bombing near friendly forces from 9,000 ft. out to 3,000 ft. out.
This change in policy caught the enemy off guard and resulted in massive damage, Wachsmuth said. “They took it in the shorts on that one.”
Following his third deployment, Wachsmuth returned stateside to become part of the initial cadre of pilots trained on the FB-111 fighter-bomber. He served 30 years in the Air Force from 1957 to 1987.
Wachsmuth later worked as a licensed battlefield guide in Gettysburg from 1994 to 2014. He is married and has a grown son who works for the Air Force as a civilian.
Georgia native Benjamin Purcell received his commission upon completing ROTC at the University of North Georgia and embarked upon a long and eventful military career.
A veteran of Korea, Purcell was serving as the executive officer of the 80th General Support Group in Vietnam in 1968 when his helicopter was shot down. The highest ranking Army officer taken prisoner during the Vietnam War, Purcell was captured on Feb. 8, 1968, and held until March 27, 1973.
He was a prisoner for five years, one month, nineteen days, and a wake-up.
After returning home, Purcell was assigned to the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks. On Nov. 12, 1973, less than eight months after his release, Purcell gave a presentation at Carlisle High School where he shared his story with the students.
A transcript of that speech can be found in the collection at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center. The following narrative is drawn from that speech.
“I was taken prisoner by the communists while serving in South Vietnam and that I remained a prisoner for 62 months – 58 of them spent in solitary confinement, totally out of touch with my loved ones and the real word.
“On the 8th of February, 1968, I was a passenger aboard a helicopter when it was hit by machine gun fire, caught fire, and crash landed in a cemetery about 5 miles southeast of Quang Tri City. One of the pilots was hit by a bullet and the other passenger was severely burned.”
Before long, the enemy showed up. “After the crash we were surrounded, taken prisoner, tied up (thumbs and arms behind our backs) and searched. After dark we were marched off towards the mountains to the southwest. The passenger who had been burned was permitted to stop for a short rest and the others ordered to continue on up the trail. Within minutes I hear the sound of a pistol shot and had the terrifying thought ‘The VC killed him!’ The young soldier has not returned and has been officially declared Killed in Action.
“On Feb. 14, ’68, I was forced into a small underground bunker for refusing to answer questions. Cold, despondent and sick, I remembered it was my 40th birthday and had to smile when I thought of the old adage ‘life begins at 40.’ Frankly, at that particular moment, I’d just have soon stayed 39.
“After dark that day, I was permitted to come up out of the bunker and lay down on the ground by the fire to get warm. I soon fell asleep and was awakened sometime later by the other American who said, ‘Supper is ready.’
“The Vietnamese interrogator then handed me a small plate and said, ‘It is the custom of the Vietnamese people to remember special days in the lives of their guests, and though you’re not a guest in this man’s home, he wants to give you the only thing he has to offer you on your birthday – this egg.’ I shall long cherish the memory of this man’s act of kindness for I believe it was prompted by a genuine concern for a fellow human being.
“While in South Vietnam we received very little food or medicine. I lost weight rapidly and became very ill. On 31 March 1968, we started our journey north, traveling through Laos via the Ho Chi Minh trail.”
But upon arriving in the north, Purcell’s situation hardly improved.
“I was issued two pajama-type uniforms, separated from other prisoners, and placed in a solitary cell, 3 feet by 7 feet. All prisoners were subjected to harsh interrogations for military information. Some were tortured, and all were deprived of food and medicine. I found it difficult at first to lie convincingly but soon became quite experienced. Our food at Bao Cao consisted of boiled rice and a thin soup twice each day. With a poor diet and no medical care, I became even more sick and weak from malnutrition – losing about 50 pounds in three months.
“The interrogations ended after about six months, and these were followed by attempts to re-educate (brainwash) me. Their efforts failed for I had learned to counter their propaganda and distortions with what I knew to be the truth. You see, the communist’s politic cadres were unable to comprehend how a person could possibly disagree, for in their ‘closed society’ no one is permitted to question any statement of the communist party.
“On Dec. 7, 1969, I escaped from K77 after several months’ preparation, which included the training and use of a chicken to stand guard in front of my cell as I drilled tiny holes in the door. This particular chicken would come to my cell after each meal and I’d toss bread crumbs to it. If the guard came near, the chick would run away and I’d immediately stop drilling and begin a more acceptable pastime. During the 10 hours I was out of my cell, I succeeded in getting a ride on a bicycle into Hanoi, but my luck ran out and I was returned to K77 and punished by two weeks in stocks.
“In mid-December 1971, I was transferred to a newly constructed prison. Living conditions were better for the cell was larger and had a straw mattress on the wooden bed. There was also a toilet at the rear of each cell and a small exercise area (I called it a cage) out front where I could get a couple of hours of fresh air each morning. My health improved a little as a result of a self-imposed exercise program.
“In March 1972, I succeeded in escaping again and remained free for about 30 hours. To assist my escape this time, I ‘conditioned’ the guards to expect to find me using the toilet at the time they came to pick up the supper plate and lock the cell door. I fashioned a dummy from an extra uniform and suspended it over the toilet, and apparently it fooled the guards because for 12 hours they were not aware I had escaped. As punishment, I was given only half my normal food ration and kept locked in my cell for 30 days.
“On Jan. 27, 1973, President Nixon, backed by the American people and supported by millions of servicemen, concluded a ‘Peace with Honor.’ That same day all the prisoners from outlying camps were assembled into Hanoi where I was placed in a cell with other Americans for the first time in 58 months.
“Living conditions improved even more in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ as the Vietnamese tried to prepare us for our release. Medical care and the first emergency type dental care was made available. We received double rations and even cans of meat for two weeks in a futile effort to fatten us up. I was permitted to write a letter on the 6th of February but it has never arrived and no letter from home ever reached me. The one and only parcel was one from the American Red Cross, which I received on March 12, 1973, just two weeks before my release.
“On March 27, 1973 I was released as one of the 32 who came out last. Our welcome at Clark Air Force Base was simply fantastic that day, and the American people have been wonderful ever since as they warmly welcomed us back home.
“What sustained me during these months? I wish I could accurately describe the many sources of strength which did help me in order that others might seek and find the same sources if the heed ever should arise. Certainly high on my list was my faith in our nation and our leaders, for I had every confidence that America would never forsake her prisoners. I recall telling the Vietnamese interrogators numerous times that his country would never have peace until their leaders were willing to resolve the POW issue correctly. Such confidence in our government’s policy was a constant source of strength.
“Secondly, I had every reason to believe that the Army was ‘looking out for its own,’ and I was not disappointed. Throughout the years of my imprisonment, the Department of the Army provided advice and assistance to my family and all the families of all prisoners of war.
“Further, I experienced and ever deepening love and appreciation for my wife and children. I knew how much my wife loved our children and was absolutely certain that she was caring for their every need and guiding their young lives with unbounded love and near superhuman effort.
“I also had a considerable amount of time to reflect upon my experience. I became aware of how very little I really understood and appreciated our free society and American way of life. Though I never saw any of the anti-war personalities in North Vietnam, all prisoners heard about them and much morale damaging propaganda resulted from their visits. I realized that as American citizens, these personalities enjoyed the freedom to go and speak as they pleased, but they should have been responsible enough in their actions so as not to use their freedom to the detriment of other Americans.
“I appreciate the free press of America and see it as a necessary precondition to our continued freedom as a nation. However I also know of instances where the media released information to the public which damaged our cause – and most of the time there was simply no reason to do so. I suggest that a free press is a must, but at the same time the media must act responsibly.
“In any case, these lessons have made me acutely aware of the value of human life, for it is man’s most precious possession, and of individual freedom, for it allows a person to contribute his utmost effort to the cause of human progress and happiness.
“In closing, I wish I could say to you that peace is guaranteed, that peace is permanent, but that would be unrealistic as history shows a different pattern. Will Durant has written that ‘in the last 3,400 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war.’”
Purcell retired from the Army with the rank of colonel in 1980. He went on to serve as a representative in the Georgia legislature, and died in 2013 at the age of 85.
Jerry Comello entered the Army upon graduation from West Point in 1962.
“We already had interests in Vietnam, but we were preoccupied with completing the Officers Basic Course, Ranger School etc., at the Infantry school and anticipating our first assignment, so we didn’t think too much about that.”
In fact, his first assignment was at Fort Riley, Kansas and Germany with the 2nd Battle Group of the 26th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. There he cut his teeth as a new officer, and met people and had experiences that would influence both of his two tours in Vietnam. The orders for Vietnam came after he was promoted to 1st lieutenant.
“Back then, when you made 1st lieutenant, you were 'available' for assignment to Vietnam because a 1LT had been added to the battalion advisory teams. In early summer 1964 I attended the Military Assistance Training and Advisor (MATA) course at Fort Bragg and deployed to Vietnam. That course was exceptional. I couldn’t pick up the language as fast as I would’ve liked, i.e., I never had a 'conversation' in Vietnamese beyond the task at hand because most of my counterparts spoke English. But I never had a problem getting fed."
Comello was assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Command (MACV)'s Third Corps area in the Phuoc Binh Tanh Special Zone.
“Col. Manh was in charge, and his counterpart adviser was Lt. Col. John Hill. Initially I was assigned as a watch officer in the Tactical Operation Center (TOC). The Special Zone had three ARVN regiments and one Ranger battalion the, 31st Rangers. In my interview with Lt. Col. Hill I requested assignment to the 31 Rangers and he approved.
With the previous captain wounded and evacuated, the new advisory team would be comprised of Comello, Capt. David Longacre and Sgt. Bennet.
“The first thing we did was to review the notes that Capt. Thorsen had left behind, principally his maps. They were the 1 over 100,000, variety. He had marked and commented on all the recon routes they had used. To the east there was an area called War Zone D. Only part of the map had topography and color. Most of war Zone D was white, and in that space Capt. Thorsen had written: ‘There be dragons.' And he was right, there were plenty of dragons in there.”
Protection
“Two companies, the battalion headquarters and advisory team were stationed at a rubber plantation owned by a Frenchman named Legay near Phuoc Hoa. The other three companies were stationed at Phuoc Vinh, guarding the Special Zone Headquarter about eight miles to the north. Legay looked just like Lou Costello with red hair. He told us he had been in Vietnam during the World War II and been interned by the Japanese. He had been freed, he said, by Americans. After WWII he had gone to Africa to manage a rubber plantation, and he had been invited back by the Diem regime.
"He had an excellent operation. There was an old triangular French fort on the property, which was unoccupied. He had a smokehouse and processing mill, an enormous water tower, a school, a contingent of Vietnamese women that taught there, and a little railroad that ran bulk items around. The property abutted the Song Be River. He was being intimidated increasingly by the VC.
“Legay needed support to make sure his workers could get to and from the fields, and protect his convoys shipping the rubber south. So the battalion patrolled the area surrounding the plantation and cleared the road for his convoys. To clear the road, approximately 15 miles, the 48th Regiment would come north from Tan Uyen halfway, and the 31st would go south to meet them. But to coordinate with the 48th and control the operation, the best we had was the Korean War vintage PRC 10 radio, so communications was always an issue.”
It was an issue that would come back to haunt the 31st later.
“The enemy would, on occasion, mine the road, but the real concern was keeping the date of the convoy’s departure secret. Then the VC knew as much as you did, when you did. That was one of the enduring problems over there. Not only then, but on my second tour as well. The people who were ostensibly on your side, weren’t always. Anything you knew they knew, that’s for sure. As a matter of fact, to me, it appeared that what the ARVN knew the VC knew, and we advisers were the last to know. That’s not a good thing.”
“Enemy contact was sporadic. During this period of time, I believe we had the initiative, and were doing it as well as it could be done with the resources. On one occasion we overran a camp that was within striking distance of the road, but they apparently knew we were coming and had evacuated shortly before we arrived. If you engaged with them it was accidental, somebody made a mistake. They always seemed to have had the edge of knowing where you were and where you were going. On occasion you’d engage a sniper, but they were avoiding us unless they knew they had the advantage."
Assignments
“After you came off TOC (Tactical Operations Center) duty, (Lt.) Col. Hill had a policy. He had operational control of Air Force Maj. Bristol, and four Forward Air Controllers (FACs) and their aircraft. He insisted that when one of the FACs went up that there was an Army officer in the back seat in case the FAC went down. So after TOC duty, you’d ride the back seat of one of these aircraft.”
“The Air Force FACs were super in spite of their initial attempt to make you airsick. Maj. George Bristol commanded the FACs and he was a great big guy. If I was flying with him it would take that O1-F half the time of the flight to get to altitude because it couldn’t haul us with the radio suite he had in it, his master set. ”
"About half way through my tour, the ARVN decided to form a new division with an area of operation inclusive of War Zone D and using resources from Phuoc Binh Tanh Special Zone. As a result Lt. Col. Hill reorganized the advisory teams and I was reassigned as assistant battalion adviser to the 1st Battalion, 48th Infantry Regiment, in the new division."
In the interim of that new assignment, Comello said he was back with Tactical Operations Center while a new team joined the 31st in clearing the road one more time - an effort that would cost the soldiers their lives.
"We’d been through there a number of times, we knew there were houses under which there were rooms for 10-15 men and what that implied. Nonetheless, if you are going to make a reasonable attempt to clear that road and communicate with both ends, you have to be right there (in the middle of the road). That’s what happened once too often.
"The VC knew it was going to happen. A battalion-sized force overran the 31st headquarters."
Comello said the 31st fought until they were out of ammunition and had fought long enough to establish an aid station where they could tend to the wounded. But that didn't save them.
“In the end, the VC executed any who surrendered and all the wounded. They were all killed where they lay. I was in the TOC at the time. I was very fortunate because I would have been right there with them if I hadn’t been reassigned.
“When you ask about actions, that’s the kind of thing that was going on. You didn’t find the enemy until they were ready. They picked the time and place, they knew what you had to do and what constraints you enjoyed.”
Comello returned to the United States at the conclusion of his tour, but would return years later for a second tour. His story will conclude in next week’s column.
Benjamin Cero was born and raised in Danville, one hour up the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg. He graduated from Danville Area High School in 1959 and went on to attend Dickinson College in Carlisle.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1963, Cero taught English in Haverford and Sunbury for four years and tried his hand at being a salesman for another year before volunteering for the U.S. Marines.
“It’s not a job, not a profession. It’s a calling,” Cero said.
With his wife and two daughters at home in Sunbury, Cero went to Officer Candidate School in 1968 at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, where, at 26, he was the oldest in his platoon and nicknamed “Gramps” as a result.
“It’s a funny experience as long as it’s not happening to you,” he said. “The drill instructors are along the lines of what you may have seen in the movie '(This Is) Parris Island.' They had the Smokey-Bear hats and they get up close and yell at you and scream and make you do things you never thought you could do or ever really wanted to do, for that matter.”
Cero still remembers standing in formation with 40 other men during one inspection when an M14 rifle cartwheeled across the room in front of him because it was found to be “unsatisfactorily dirty.”
After five months of training, Cero was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Reserve. He was then sent to The Basic School for six months to learn how run an infantry platoon. After graduation in June 1969, 249 of the 250 graduates in Cero’s company received orders to Vietnam.
Vietnam
Cero went to Communication School where he learned all about radios and telephones, which were the primary lines of communication at the time.
Two months later, Cero flew from Harrisburg to the West Coast where he waited for a week before boarding a contracted civilian flight with other troops to Okinawa, Japan. Once there, the troops were stationed at various bases before traveling “in country.” He said his first impression of Vietnam was of the heat, which he estimated to be about 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Here, in Harrisburg, you think August is hot and muggy,” Cero said. “Then you go down to Washington, what they call ‘Foggy Bottom,’ and then you say, ‘Man, this is nasty down here.’ Then I flew to Okinawa and thought, ‘... This is bad.’ Then I got to Vietnam and I thought, ‘Jeez, it was nice on Okinawa.’”
On Sept. 15, 1969, Cero arrived as a radio platoon leader in the 5th Communications Battalion stationed at Camp Hoa Long in Da Nang, Vietnam. Five days later, he received his first decoration, the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, for simply being there.
Cero’s company had 2,000 telephones and all of the equipment necessary to construct an entire telephone network. His platoon had five big radios, the same long-range radios his instructor had glossed over while he was in Communication School.
“So I said, ‘lance corporal, we’re going to have a school session here. You show me how this thing works.’ And away we went,” Cero said.
Cero learned that with these long-range radios, his platoon could send signals from central Vietnam to Hawaii or even the East Coast. For the next year, he spent the majority of his time on China Beach, where his hut was 100 yards from the South China Sea. He pointed out that his experience was nothing like the '8os television show "China Beach."
“There were no nurses. It was just our communications unit,” he said. “It was known as the rear echelon ... If it were any closer to the rear, I would have floated at high tide.”
Duties
His platoon’s primary job was to maintain communications between the III Marine Amphibious Force, which was one of the largest Marine units in Vietnam, and Marine headquarters in Hawaii. Over the course of his 12 months in Vietnam, Cero remembers going on only two or three missions to support combat units.
Otherwise, Cero’s time was spent carrying out his secondary duties, which included the job of Slot Verification Officer.
“I thought they were kidding,” he said. “It was my job once a week to take whatever tools I had and go check all the slot machines in the various clubs ... I would go check to see that these slot machines were functioning properly.”
Cero and several other Marines with teaching experience also taught in the military compound during the night in order to help Marines work toward their GEDs while they were in Vietnam.
During Cero’s tour, so many of the troops joined recreational sports leagues to pass the time. Cero played baseball, basketball and football, and his baseball team won the Army baseball league in Vietnam.
On Feb. 1, 1970, Cero was promoted to first lieutenant and left Vietnam several months thereafter. He received his law degree from Dickinson School of Law, returned to active duty in 1975 and went on to conduct sea trials as a defense lawyer, prosecutor and military judge at various points in time for the Marine Corps and U.S. Navy. While conducting sea trials, he would travel to any Navy vessel in his circuit requiring his services, whether it was in Scotland, Spain or Italy while he was stationed in Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii.
Cero retired from the Marine Corps as a lieutenant colonel in 1992 and continued to work as a lawyer and then as a judge until 2006. During his service he also received the Meritorious Service Medal, a Navy Unit Commendation, the Vietnam Campaign Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal and a National Defense Service Medal.
Like many young men in the 1960s, Dave Calhoun joined the Army because he expected to get drafted.
“I started college when I was 15. I studied with the Jesuits," Calhoun said. "My mother wanted me to be a priest and an attorney. After a year and a half of school I decided that I like wine, women, and song, and really didn’t want to be a priest or an attorney. I joined the Army basically to get it over with.”
Calhoun enlisted in 1964 and took Basic Training at Fort Knox. As an Artilleryman, he served as an enlisted man through his first enlistment, then passed the officer’s exam during his second. In 1968, he received orders to go to Vietnam as an advisor.
“Flying into Tan Son Nhut, as we came up the coast we were met by American aircraft and escorted in," he said. "There were three of us seated together: there was an Air Force colonel in the center seat, a priest in the window seat, and I was on the aisle. The priest was looking out and said ‘Oh, what a lovely country with all the little lakes.' This colonel and I looked at each other, he leaned over and said, ‘Father, I hate to tell you, but those are bomb craters filled with water.’
"We landed at Tan Son Nhut in the middle of a shelling, the airbase was being mortared. They came aboard the aircraft quick, and told us to run off and get in the bunker."
Calhoun was assigned as an advisor for a South Vietnamese Artillery unit near the DMZ in the northern portion of South Korea, a posting that gave him some unusual opportunities.
“I got a chance to shoot the [battleship] New Jersey," he said. "The Naval Gunfire Team was just down the road. One day I happened to be there when they spotted a target across the DMZ. The New Jersey was available. I actually got to shoot the target in conjunction with the Naval Gunfire Team, adjusting fire with the 8-inch guns then firing for effect with the 16-inch guns."
“I got a chance to fly out to the New Jersey and was invited to a dinner. I enjoyed the Army, but boy, the Navy eats great. I had two steaks, a baked potato, two quarts of real milk, and ice cream. I had to pay for my meal by telling the officers aboard, the commander was a one-star admiral, about how I lived and what I did. I learned later on it was a subtle threat that they would be assigned to shore duty to live in a bunker if they messed up.
“We had a four gun battery. We would take on operations and they would be lifted out by Chinook. On some rare occasions they would be hooked right out of their revetments. Normally, as in the case of Fire Support Base Torch, they literally cut the trees off the top of a hill and we set the battery in there. From there we could traverse to almost any point to support Infantry units going out on search and destroy missions.”
For Calhoun, the night of April 12, 1969 is burned into his memory.
“We were in Laos on an operation to support the Marines making a sweep," he said. "It was an extended operation. I had a Marine lieutenant with me. One of my sergeants was with me, but had to go back in the course of the operation. So it was only myself and the lieutenant, but he was wounded the night before we were overrun and was medevacked out.
“It was the only night, and I still blame myself, it was the only night I failed to check the wire. And what they had done was, the sleepers had cut the wire around the perimeter and had taped it back so it looked, from a distance, it looked like it was intact.”
“About 2300 hours we started taking a probe, and before I could react, my bunker, which was about three or four sandbags high, most of it was underground but there were about three or four sandbags above ground, I took two B-40 [rocket propelled grenades]. The first one blew up, it hit the wall and shrapnel came in, and I lost my hearing in my right ear, and took shrapnel.
"I was lying down, I was tired, it was a long day. I just had on my fatigue pants and socks, didn’t even have a shirt on. My boots were on the side of the ammo crates I was sleeping on. I remember getting up, I picked up the radio mike, gave my call sign and I said ‘I’m hit, I’m hit’. Then another B-40 hit and tore the radio from me and destroyed it, and I got hit again."
"... As I started to go out to get to the gun battery, to the FDC [Fire Direction Control] position anyway, because I knew the commander would probably be there, a rocket hit the wall there, and I had a piece of shrapnel blow into my chest, it struck the steel plates. I was out for a little bit, how long I don’t know. It hurt like hell, everything was ringing, and all kinds of noise. I remember going out and I immediately ran into an NVA. I looked him square in the eye. Having worked with and fired the AK-47, I know it’s a very reliable weapon, but apparently he forgot to change the magazine, and it was empty. I made it from there to a slit trench [latrine], I smelled terrible for a long while, to get my bearings. It seemed to be the only safe place.
“The NVA, there were literally individuals everywhere, there was close in fighting. I saw this PRC-77, a captured American radio. I didn’t have a radio, and he did. I needed it, he didn’t. So I got that radio, and I made it to one of the firing pits, basically you have the gun sitting and you have a sandbag perimeter to give it some protection. We had lost two of the guns and the other two, the barrels were depressed, we were literally doing direct fire.”
Calhoun said he knew he needed help if he was going to survive the night, so he made a desperate call for artillery fire.
"I put out a call, I said ‘I’m deaf, I’m under attack, if you can hear me, from my position’ and I gave an azimuth ‘give me some ranging rounds.’ The first two rounds came out, and I saw them amongst everything else that was exploding. Apparently they had fired HE [high explosive] and smoke, and I could see it bloom up. That was great, someone was really thinking back at the American unit that was supporting us. I walked the rounds in, danger close, because they had already breached the wire.”
“About 0600-0700 in the morning the Old Man sent his bird, his personal bird, the Black Cat came in. There had been an attempt to come in before but the fire was too heavy and they broke off. This time my Gunny, my Staff Sergeant, was on the bird, there were two birds, and pulled me aboard. I still have the pin from the last frag I threw in anger, I pitched it out as we were lifting out. I don’t think the other ship made it. I remember helping some wounded and some dead aboard the helicopters when my sergeant grabbed me and just literally dragged me on, and we got the heck out of there. That’s the part that I remember."
Calhoun was sent to the USS Sanctuary offshore for treatment. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his actions that night.
Later, in Germany, he ran into his old commanding officer, who gave him a photo that had been recovered from a dead NVA soldier after the base had been retaken. That’s when he learned that he had been specifically marked for death.
“The picture of me that was found on a VC sniper after the recaptured the base, was actually taken by Sgt. Trung, who was a part of the unit, but unbeknownst to me was a sleeper," he said. "I remember posing for the picture. Sgt. Trung had one of the Kodak Instamatics, and he would take pictures. I remember he called to me and I gave him a pose, and that was the picture that was later developed and fed to the NVA that overran our base.”
With so much going on, it was easy to get hurt on the flight deck of the USS Coral Sea.
Gary Stackhouse was lucky that most of his time on the aircraft carrier was spent below in the hangar fixing up A-6 Intruder attack planes flying missions over Vietnam.
But every so often the York county native was ordered topside to brave flight operations to make a quick repair to an air mask or some other piece of safety or survival equipment.
“The pilots had all kinds of problems when they were going through their checks,” recalled Stackhouse, who recently retired as a security guard stationed at Carlisle Barracks.
Standard gear for a crewman on the flight deck was a helmet fitted with front and back plates to protect the head from injury. “I ran into a lot of wings and stabilizers,” the former Marine said.
He added how ear muffs were attached to the skull cap to shield the ears from the noise of warplanes taking off and landing. There were also goggles to keep out flying debris kicked up by the violence of machines in motion.
Crossing the deck, Stackhouse had to be mindful that every step could carry him closer to an afterburner, a jet intake or spinning turboprop. He wore an inflatable life vest in the event a near disaster knocked him off the ship into the ocean below.
“You could get a heat blast and the next thing you know you’re on your (butt),” said Stackhouse, now a resident of York Springs, Adams County.
Duties
From August 1971 to August 1972, he was a lance corporal assigned to Marine attack squadron VMA-224. The carrier Coral Sea was in a task force patrolling Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin. Its mission was to launch air strikes against enemy targets.
It was not unusual for him to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, when flight operations were in full swing. “The more you fly those things, the more they break,” Stackhouse said.
Every so often, he was ordered to board a helicopter for a flight to Da Nang to repair a plane that could not return to the carrier. “They would send in somebody from every work center,” he recalled.
While he specialized in ejection seats and safety and survival equipment, there were other specialists on the helicopter trained in the repair and upkeep of avionics, engines and airframes.
“Da Nang was hot,” Stackhouse recalled. “The jungle heat was ... killer. We went to fix the aircraft, get it done and get out of there.”
Other times he was tasked with the repair of aircraft damaged in battle. Most times this took the form of holes in the fuselage and tail section from ground fire. “We had 20 aircraft,” Stackhouse said. “We came back with 15 of them. The other five were shot down.”
The near-constant flight operations made the resupply of bombs, rockets and other ordnance vitally important. Underway replenishment was also used to feed a crew that numbered in the thousands.
“It was ongoing ... constant,” Stackhouse recalled. “One night food ... several nights later ammunition ... The Navy had it locked down.”
Hangar
Typically helicopters airlifted cargo pallets from supply ships to the carrier flight deck. The pallets were lowered onto the massive elevators that carried aircraft between decks. The cargo was taken below to the hangar deck.
There Stackhouse waited with other crewmen equipped with forklifts and power jacks to break down each pallet into manageable loads that were taken to other parts of the massive carrier.
“Food went one way ... Ammunition went another,” he recalled. “It was manual labor.” By the time one load was ready, another pallet was waiting when Stackhouse returned to the flight deck. “It started all over again.”
Food onboard the ship was pretty good with two mess hall lines offering a daily schedule of meals, he said. A snack food line near the stern served up hot dogs and hamburgers virtually around-the-clock. While convenient, the limited menu options got old real quick.
Crewmen spent their off hours playing cards, watching movies on the hangar deck or visiting the crowded gym or library. When flight operations were suspended, the flight deck was clear for crewmen to head topside to relax, sunbathe or run laps.
Sleep onboard the carrier was a challenge at first with all the noise from the ship engines, flight operations and crewmen milling around at all hours of the day.
The U.S. Navy was not alone in the Gulf of Tonkin. All too often, the carrier task force was shadowed by Soviet aircraft off in the distance and by spy trawlers “fishing” for information, Stackhouse said. “The other ships kept an eye on those guys.”
Stackhouse would go on to spend 22 years in the Marine Corps, retiring in 1992 as a gunnery sergeant. Since 2001, he worked as a security guard at Carlisle Barracks assigned primarily to Root Hall and Collins Hall on post and to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center.
Don Boose received his commission as an Infantry officer in the Regular Army in 1962. After his initial post in Korea, he was assigned to a training company at Fort Gordon, Georgia, providing Advanced Infantry Training and preparing troops to go to Vietnam.
“They all knew for sure that they were going to Vietnam," he said. "Not only that, they knew they were going to be replacements for Airborne units. We had soldiers who had been enlisted, and we had some who were drafted and turned out to have a real aptitude for soldiering and enjoyed it.
"But we had a lot of guys who were not all that enthusiastic about going to an Infantry unit in Vietnam," he added. "There were some discipline problems, not widespread, but some. This was the '60s, but it was the pre-Tet '60s. So demonstrations had begun, but it wasn’t until I came back that they became so intense and the anti-war sentiment became so strong. Before I went, it was just getting started.”
In 1966, word came down that he would be going to Vietnam as a military adviser. Surprisingly, Don did not receive extensive training for the job.
“This was the time of the big buildup in Vietnam," he said. "U.S. units were being sent to Vietnam, and the Army wanted to leaven those units with experienced Infantry captains. So they took 50 advisers who were in Vietnam and had experience as advisers and transferred them into those units. They took 50 random captains in the U.S. and said ‘You guys are going to be advisers.’ Now the Army had an adviser course at Fort Bragg along with six months of Vietnamese language training.
"We had one week in a compound in Saigon. At the end of the week I was flown down to the Delta and plunked into the middle of a Vietnamese Infantry battalion. We were in Vinh Binh Province, between two branches of the Mekong Delta.”
Don was assigned as an adviser with the 1st Battalion, 9th Regiment, 9th Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). “1st Battalion had the best commander and the best reputation. I had two absolutely crackerjack sergeants, both Korean War vets, Baker and Martin.
"I was issued a .45 calibre pistol, two clips of ammunition, an M-1 Carbine, two banana clips, a paper sack of ammunition, and the regular web gear and steel pot and stuff like that. The Vietnamese troops had old World War II weapons and equipment.
“Down in the Delta the intensity was nothing like it was up north, this was nothing like the Ia Drang Valley. We were conducting counter-insurgency, so we were trying to avoid a lot of collateral damage. So I recorded a lot of helicopter 'assaults,' which, with one exception, means we went in in helicopters. The door-gunners did not prep the landing zone with machine gun fire, we were trying to avoid excess casualties. They might fire back if they took fire, which they often did. They would land, troops would get off, form up, move into the treeline, maybe not a shot was fired. Frequently there would be a couple of shots fired, but whether it was a one of our soldiers with an itchy trigger or a sniper in the treeline, we couldn’t tell.
“Most of the casulaties over the course of the next year were mines or snipers. Onesies or twosies, a steady dribble. The two exceptions where when the battalion was guarding a bridge that had been blown up - we were hit hard and took heavy casualties - and Easter Sunday.”
Easter Sunday
Don laughed when asked about his role as an adviser.
“Our battalion commander, Major Thành, was very experienced. He had been a lieutenant in the French Army fighting in Vietnam when I was in junior high school, so I didn’t have a lot of military advice to give him about running his battalion. Occasionally there were things Major Thành and I could talk about, he didn’t ignore me completely. But the main thing was I had a radio and could get gunships and medical evacuation helicopters – dustoff – so I was valuable to him as a liaison officer who could bring in the fire support that wasn’t available to him. I could also direct close air support.”
That ability was critical during the Battle of Easter Sunday.
“We carried carbines for personal protection, and we also (did) on rare but important occasions for directing close air support. We had two clips, I think Baker and Martin had a few more. Thirty rounds in each clip. One was ball ammunition in case you ever had some target to shoot at, I never did. The other was full of red tracer bullets. On Easter Sunday, when we found out that the VC were in front of the treeline rather than in it like we thought, Baker and I got up on the rice paddy and fired our carbines at their position, and then the gunship came in and fired on them.
“On Easter Sunday, 1967, a Vietnamese unit went on a sweep and clear operation and ran into trouble. They got hit by the VC and barely got out. The next day they sent in another unit, and they ran into a buzz saw. They ended up with a U.S. helicopter down, and the U.S. adviser, Tom Mitchel, was killed trying to get to the crew.
“They sent in a dustoff ship, which was normal, except on this operation instead of a motley collection of snipers in the treeline, it was the 306th VC Main Force Battalion with machine guns and a lot of weaponry. The dustoff ship took an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) in the engine compartment and went down. Col. Dempsey, the commander of the 13th Aviation Battalion went down, and he was shot down and killed.
“The ARVN decided they needed some help, so they called for another Vietnamese armored cavalry unit. Those tracks would have gone right through the VC, but they never got there. So they called us. We had no idea, we weren’t on standby, we were on stand-down. I got woken up around dawn by the regimental adviser, Major Gary Riggs, Special Forces. He said ‘Wake up, Boose.’ And honest to God he said, ‘First battalion flies at dawn.’
“We headed out to the airstrip and lined up, no idea what was going one. Major Thành was on leave, so Lt. Xuien was acting battalion commander. He was asking me what was going on, and I’m saying ‘No, you tell me.’ Eventually the helicopters showed up, and as we’re getting in we see that there’s brass (from the machine guns) on the deck. As I mentioned, we didn’t prep the landing zones, so that meant they hit something bad. And I can still see Baker and Martin’s faces as they looked at each other.
“We board the chopper and fly north, and I’m following along on my map. All of a sudden we drop down low below the trees, 25-50 feet above the ground. We cross the rice paddies, pop up, and Martin says ‘Jesus Christ there’s helicopters burning on the ground.’ Black smoke against the treeline and three burning helicopters. We drop down again, and because I haven’t been able to orient myself on the ground I have no idea where we are. So I go up between the pilot and co-pilot and say ‘Can you show me where we are?’ The pilot says ‘Get out of my God damned helicopter we’re taking fire!’ So we jump out, and things go quiet, as they do, except we now hear this continuous rumble.”
After sorting out the confusion about which way to go, 1st Battallion arrives on the battlefield proper.
“We came up out of the treeline and see all the smoke and flame, F-100’s dropping cluster bomb units, and helicopters occasionally. They’re still trying to figure out what to do because they’ve still got guys on the ground. We found a dirt bunker and took shelter behind that. We’re trying to figure out what to do and I remember saying to Baker, ‘You know, at this moment, my little boy is hunting for Easter eggs.’
“The next thing we heard (was) a .50 caliber machine gun. One of our great fears was always that the VC would get a hold of a .50. Turned out that the aviation unit had gone back to their base and put a .50 caliber sideways in one of their helicopters, mounted a smoke generator in another, and come back. With the smoke and the .50 firing they managed to get four birds on the ground and some of their guys out.
“Shortly after that Lt. Xuien started yelling 'We go!' So we all started trotting down to the next paddy dike, and that’s the way we spent the day: one dike at a time. Finally we got to the point where we were about 100 yards from the treeline and we realized that the VC were not in it, they were in front of it. That’s when we fired the tracers. Finally sometime around twilight we got into the trees, and the VC broke contact and left.”
Don finished his tour in Vietnam and returned to the states to resume his military career. He left everything behind except his class A uniform and photographs. As he was leaving, Major Thành gave him one last thing to think about.
“When I left Vietnam, Major Thành, said to me, 'I want you to remember something: this battalion, when you arrived here, only 13 of those soldiers were here. All the rest have been killed or wounded over the course of the last year.'”
It hit Jack Ziegler as soon as he landed in Vietnam.
The assault on his senses began with the overwhelming stink of open sewers combined with sweat from the living and the occasional whiff of dead and decaying bodies.
A short time later, the Carlisle native heard gunfire off in the distance and saw explosions on the horizon. He had arrived at the warzone in pouring down rain.
“I had taken up smoking when I was going to technical school in Williamsport,” recalled Ziegler, a retired carpenter living in Penn Township. “That day I smoked two packs of cigarettes. I was so nervous.”
It was early September 1966. Vietnam was heating up. The Navy needed skilled tradesmen to serve in construction battalions tasked with building barracks, guard towers, fire bases, bunkers and roads.
“They always kept us busy,” said Ziegler, adding how his unit of Seabees was ordered on occasion to patch up holes made in runways by enemy fire. In between jobs, the battalion was assigned to fix up native villages as a show of good will to improve relations with the Vietnamese. One “civic action” tested his resolve and physical endurance.
“We heard this machine gun fire come across the rice paddy,” Ziegler recalled. “Bullets were skipping over the water. We froze what we were doing and said ‘What was that?’ They did it again.”
As before, Ziegler and company stopped what they were doing and pondered the seriousness of their dilemma. The Navy had ordered the Seabees into a village but had not issued them weapons. They were defenseless as the enemy opened up yet again with machine gun fire over the marshy rice paddy.
While some crew members scrambled for a vehicle to retreat from the scene, Ziegler took off running in the general direction of the base gates. “The Hell with that truck,” he recalled. “I was doing a beeline. I was booking.”
Sure enough, he beat the truck back to base but was barred from entry by the gate guard. Ziegler, after all, was away from his unit. Rules were rules. He had to wait for the truck to arrive.
While Ziegler understood his duty to follow orders, situations like the one above caused him to question the “dumb, stupid stuff” that puts lives in jeopardy. From day one, Ziegler learned not everything goes according to plan.
Vietnam
A 1964 Carlisle High School graduate, Ziegler went on to study at the Williamsport Technology Institute where he earned an associate’s degree in building construction in early June 1966.
Ziegler thought at first the federal government would wait until September 1966 to change his deferment status and issue him a draft notice. Instead the change of status came the second week of June, with the draft notice following a week later.
Though willing to serve, Ziegler wanted to avoid being drafted into the Army because he would have no say on the selection of a military occupation. The Navy recruiter in Williamsport told Ziegler the job of Seabee would keep him away from the fighting.
So when the notice came, Ziegler called the recruiter and offered to enlist in the Navy before he was officially drafted. He knew he would have to serve in Vietnam but thought it would be in the rear echelon.
The boot camp for Seabees was in Davisville, Rhode Island. Instead of Naval personnel, they were trained by Marines. “I didn’t expect that part of it,” Ziegler said. Advanced training in Virginia also came as a surprise because it included a mock POW camp.
The purpose of the camp was to instruct Seabees on what could happen if they were ever captured. The trainers took on the role of guards and would rough up the trainees who were the prisoners.
There Ziegler learned techniques on how resist torture and interrogation and the importance of revealing only his name, rank and serial number. Wearing only underwear, he was locked inside a “hot box” with no ventilation and then forced into a pit filled with water and capped with a wooden lid.
Skilled at swimming, Ziegler made the best of the pit by floating with his head just above the surface. Compared to the “hot box,” the water was nice and cool so that simulated torture did not have desired effect.
“I could stay there all day,” Ziegler said. “They were knocking on the lid asking ‘Are you Ok?’ When we were kids we used to play war. We didn’t realize this is no game. This is for real.”
When Ziegler first arrived in Vietnam, he thought the Seabees would set up temporary camps, but he soon realized all the buildings were permanent structures. This was not a promising sign, but proof of a fundamental flaw.
“Vietnam was a political war,” Ziegler said. “It was not handled right to me and to most vets. The politicians were pulling the strings. They would not let the military make the calls.”
In his view, this prolonged the war and made it more costly in blood and treasure. When the enemy figured out that any construction would be permanent, it made the Seabees more of a target.
“They didn’t want us there,” Ziegler said. “They just knew what was coming. We were constantly being fired at. We were always in it.” His 60-man unit lost 15 men killed by incoming fire over the course of his tour of duty.
Ziegler served a year and a day in Vietnam before returning to Carlisle. He followed the war in the news faithfully until about 1969 when he put it out of his mind.
If he saw the war in the newspaper, he turned the page. If he saw footage on TV, he switched channels. If anyone brought up Vietnam in a conversation, he walked away or changed the subject.
“It disgusted me that all those guys were killed,” Ziegler recalled. Meanwhile he went on with his life. When he got married in 1971, Ziegler moved to Penn Township where his wife was from.
There the couple bought land off her grandmother and raised two children. Ziegler pressed on in the construction field by working for 46 years as a carpenter before retiring in 2010.
Even while holding his draft notice, David Watkins knew he didn't want to enter the Army as a draftee.
He was 19, having just graduated high school in 1966, when the draft noticed arrived in August.
"Wonderful as it was ... I didn’t want to go in as a draftee, I wanted to enlist," he said. "My grandfather fought in World War I, my father fought in World War II, I had many uncles who fought in the Korean War, and it was my turn. Besides, I did not really want to be a grunt. So I enlisted in the Army as a 36K, Field Wireman.”
David was assigned to the 198th Infantry Brigade, and traveled with the newly formed unit by boat to Vietnam.
“The trip took 28 days," he recalled. "We had one fellow jump overboard, so it took us a little longer because we couldn’t leave the scene until they sent out a cutter out of Hawaii. He only bobbed once, and they figured he was sucked under and cut by the propeller. That was our first fatality.
“Arriving was just like those World War II movies where they throw the net over the side of the ship: we climbed down, got into LSTs and came ashore in Chu Lai. We marched through the jungle (it was a secure area to our hooches. We crawled into bed at about 2 a.m. At about 5 a.m. they woke me and a several other folks, gave us three grenades and a case of ammo and said, ‘You’re going to the field for the next month.’”
David flew to Duc Pho and trained with the 196th for a month before getting out into the field.
“I was a wireman, I didn’t go out that much, but I went out several times that month carrying a PRC-25 (radio). This was not a secure training area, you could run into the enemy. My second day there, I saw my first booby-trap. It was a grenade in a coke can. They strung a wire from the grenade across the path and pulled the pin. The can holds the spoon in place until someone hits the wire. One of the guys up front caught it, and we stopped and had a little conversation about booby traps.”
Memories of Vietnam
David recalled the first time he saw dead soldiers, and it wasn't due to enemy fire.
“One day there we heard an explosion up at the helipad. A Huey had landed with a guy they’d flown in from the field. He had grenades on his belt with half the pin broken off so it would be easier to pull. One caught on something and blew up, killed him and the gunner on that side, wounded the crew chief, and several other guys. The pilot and co-pilot were both trapped inside. The blade was still turning, but we tried to get the co-pilot out, but we just couldn’t get him out. The pilot managed to pull him out the other side but he was badly burned because the aircraft was on fire.
"It was the most incredible thing I think I’ve ever seen in my life. They don’t really burn, they melt. It’s magnesium, it just kind of melted right straight down to the skids. And before the blades stopped turning, the engine fell off. That was my first encounter with death over there.”
It also took time for David to get a handle on interacting and understanding the people of Vietnam.
“Later, heading back to Chu Lai in trucks, the truck in front of us hit a little boy," he said. "We stopped and he lay in the road in front of us. His mother came out, screaming and crying. The company commander came out with an interpreter and talked to her. After a while he handed her some money. I have no idea how much. She took the money, turned around, grabbed that little boy by the foot and threw him in the gutter like you would throw a dead dog.
"And it literally blew my mind. I have never in my life, before or since, seen something like that. I just couldn’t deal with it. I went and found the chaplin and I said, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on here, I just don’t understand it.'
“He said to me, “David, they’ve been fighting here for over 200 years. She can always have another child, but she will never again in all her life see that much money.' And it just brought home at least for me the cheapness of life. When you’ve been fighting that long and living in poverty that long, death is just another incident during the day. It literally destroyed me at the time. I’ve managed to overcome it because I saw worse things than that by the time it was over."
Carrying the radio, David spent most of his time at the base, never going downtown or where he thought he shouldn't be. His focus was getting home. But it wasn't completely safe on base.
"One thing I didn’t like was we had a lot of Vietnames kids who would come in and do a lot of work on the compound, and I didn’t like that," he said. "We had an incident at one of our other bases where a kid threw a grenade and killed six guys in a chow line, so I didn’t like that. I didn’t trust them, and I had nothing to do with them.
“I was at Chu Lai when the Tet Offensive hit," he added. "The enemy attacked Division HQ with rockets, and one hit a bomb dump. We were about eight miles away, and when that bomb dump went up it looked like an atomic bomb. There was a huge mushroom cloud, and you could see the shock waves moving through the air. My helmet was on the edge of our trench and the shock wave knocked it into the trench, we had hooches that were destroyed.
"I went down to HQ, and on the way I found two guys lying on the ground crying. I said, 'We have to go, we could get hit at any moment,' and they said 'There's no sense, that was an atomic bomb and we’re all gonna die.' There were a lot of panicked people, but when I got to the command post they told me it was just a bomb dump, and to get back and get ready to get hit. We never got hit, and I believe it was because the enemy started too late and didn’t get into position before the sun came up, and the choppers got them out in the rice paddies. We got away pretty easy."
End of tour
"I spent the rest of my time in Duc Pho, and it was probably the worst time when I was there.”
David recalled one night that would change him for the rest of his life.
“The 28th of May, 1968 is a night I will never forget. It haunted me for a long, long time. We were mortared, and at Duc Pho we were mortared about every other night. Our problem was if the shells hit a tent, they would go off when it hit the ridgepole and kill everyone in it. That night the first round hit the tent next to me. Fortunately there was nobody in it. I was laying in bed and a piece of shrapnel came through my tent and hit my dog tag that was hanging about two inches above my head.
“We had been mortared before, and my policy was that before I went to bed I would put my web gear and clothes in my bunker. The only thing I had by my bunk was my rifle, helmet and flak jacket. When that round went off I grabbed my dog tags and my stuff and out the back door I ran. There was a young man running for the bunker and I dropped in behind him. When we reached the entrance he stopped, and I just ran around him into the bunker. He stepped in behind me. The next mortar round went off right behind him and blew the two of us into the bunker. He was killed. I never got a scratch, he took all of that shrapnel.
“I pulled him in, put my bandage on him. He never moaned or cried, but he was obviously alive because he was bleeding terrible. I held him for about 45 minutes, then they took him away. The next morning I went to the field, so I had no idea who he was, all I found out when I got back was that he was killed.
“I had a thousand questions: Why? Why did he stop? If he had turned that corner it would have been me behind him. That was the part that haunted me. For years I had nightmares, always the same dream, and I’d wake up screaming. My wife knew nothing about Vietnam for the first 19 years because I couldn’t talk about it, all because of this young man. Why did he stop? Was he married, did he have children? What was he doing out there by himself? It haunted me.”
Years later, David finally found a way to make a kind of peace with the past while in semminary when a mentor forced him to admit he was avoiding Vietnam Veterans.
“I broke down and told them the story of May 28th, 1968, and they saved my life. I thought I had done nothing for him, and they said, ‘You did do something, you held him while he died. He did not die alone.’ I never thought of it that way. My supervisor told me to write him a letter asking all my questions, and had me read it to the others in the seminary. And they said, ‘You’ve done all you could do for him, now you have to let him go.’ I said I still didn’t have any answers and they said, ‘You may never have answers.'”
Eventually David visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the volunteers there helped him find out his name: Robert Randel Huff, a corporal from California.
Looking back, David says, “I did my job. I was never in a position where I knew I had killed someone. I was in several firefights. If you made it to the ground in the first 10 seconds, your chances of living were very good. But I was never face to face with someone I had to kill. But seeing that little boy, and this guy who gave his life for me, and the helicopter, these things haunted me for a long time. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned from war it’s that the more you talk to people about it, the easier it is to lay it down.”
Ken Gatten will never know the decision behind the tragedy that claimed the life of a fellow Marine.
Combat engineers were trained to avoid touching any out-of-place objects they came across while on ambush patrol in the wilds of Vietnam.
Yet there it was - a bell just like the type used to summon a hotel desk clerk. The fellow Marine, a lance corporal, knew the risk but grabbed it anyway and started to play with the ringing mechanism.
“Why in the name of God would he push that button?” Gatten of Enola asked, recalling that moment from his tour of day. “Was he suicidal?”
The Carlisle native can only speculate that the Marine figured he was going to die so why not speed the inevitable. Sure enough, the booby trap exploded causing fatal injuries from shrapnel.
This memory coupled with a grim statistic stirred a sickness in Gatten’s heart. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in July reported that 20 veterans commit suicide a day - a number that some argue could be higher.
Not every wound from war is physical. Not every scar is visible. But talking about what happened could provide a release and free bottled up emotions.
Gatten learned this about himself the day he was interviewed for this story. The questions brought back memories from 13 months spent in Vietnam from August 1968 to September 1969.
Vietnam
Born and raised in Carlisle, Gatten quit school at age 16 and enlisted in the Marine Corps on Feb. 1, 1968. He had joined to serve his country and get away from a difficult home life.
Upon arrival in Vietnam, he was assigned at first to the An Hoa fire base about 55 miles south of the port city of Da Nang. Situated in a rear area, it was relatively secure in a valley near a village north of a mountain.
An Hoa served as a refuge for combat troops coming off the line. It also hosted a battery of 105mm howitzers that lobbed shells on enemy positions at night, making it difficult to sleep. There he accompanied the infantry on ambush patrols tasked with intercepting enemy soldiers moving in the darkness.
“We traveled with the grunts,” Gatten recalled. “My main job was to blow up enemy bunkers and booby traps. I’d been in quite a few firefights and shot at the enemy, but I can’t recall hitting anyone. I’m sure I buried quite a few alive in bunkers.”
In Vietnam, some men trained to be “tunnel rats” who were assigned the task of probing bunker entrances with a bayonet for any sign of booby traps. These men also used smoke grenades and pistols to root out and kill the enemy. Marine infantry would call engineers forward to use C4 plastic explosives to seal off underground emplacements.
On one mission, a tunnel rat caught a glimpse of an enemy soldier hunkered down in a prone position with a rifle at the ready to fire on any Marine who ventured underground. The man was trapped with nowhere to go, completely unaware that his rifle had given away his position.
The tunnel rat alerted Gatten who promptly tossed an explosive charge into the bunker entrance causing the tunnel to collapse around the enemy soldier.
Dangers
The scary part of planting C4 was in the approach to the target. Combat engineers could encounter a missed booby trap, a bullet from an overlooked enemy soldier or a hidden nest of bamboo vipers – one of deadliest species of snake in the world.
Known for its ability to be molded into different shapes, C4 can only be made to explode by way of a blasting cap or by a sharp blow from a sledge hammer or some other blunt tool, Gatten said. Marines in Vietnam often used plastic explosives as a fuel source to heat up cans of C-rations while in the field.
Another danger common in Vietnam were punji pits. These were holes dug into the ground lined with sharpened bamboo sticks coated with some form of poison. Sometimes the enemy used human feces to infect the wounds.
Each pit was covered over with dirt and camouflaged. Stepping on the hole would cause punji sticks to penetrate the boot and cut into the flesh. The U.S. military issued boots with steel plated soles to protect its soldiers and Marines, Gatten said.
Then there were “Bouncing Betty” landmines that when tripped are propelled upward by a coiled spring to explode in midair. But the most shocking weapon was the use of children as suicide bombers.
“Terrorism was going on in the world long before 2001,” Gatten said. In Vietnam, the enemy would sometimes strap grenades to children who would fool American soldiers and Marines taken in by seemingly innocent requests for candy and attention.
When the moment was right, the child would pull the pin setting off a chain of hidden explosives wounding anyone nearby, Gatten said. “One hand grenade has the potential to kill three people if it is set off in the right situation.”
Other pitfalls were the result of poor choices. Gatten recalled how one Marine wore a red beret on his head. Together they dug a foxhole for the night. Gatten was seated at the edge while the other Marine was standing in the foxhole.
A sniper bullet came in and struck the Marine with the colorful hat in the back of the arm, shattering the limb. The projectile had missed Gatten by only a couple of feet.
Gatten left the Marines soon after returning home from Vietnam in September 1969. He reenlisted again in 1976 and served until 1978 before departing the military for good. His second stint was at Camp Lejeune in the control tower of the rifle range Marines used to requalify as marksmen.
Because of his own experiences, Gatten discouraged his three sons from joining the military because their service may involve fighting a war on foreign soil. He believes if the government wants to fight a war overseas, then the full weight of the U.S. military should be brought to bear to win the war without prolonging the conflict on the ground.
He asked why the country should send young men overseas to fight in other countries that don’t care about the United States or its values.
Tom Foor knew the draft was coming.
“I went to the head of the draft board and asked when I might get drafted. He said probably early spring 1969. It was spring of ’68, so I thought ‘I’m not going to wait around.’ I went in under a two-year enlistment on June 25, 1968.
"The day before we shipped to Vietnam I overhead some guys talking that early the next morning they were going to go to Canada. There were three of them that left. I don’t know if they made it, but they were headed north. That really surprised me, I thought once you really commit to something why would you want to do that?
“We landed and Bien Hoa. When you walk out that door it just hits you in the face like a sledgehammer, the stink and the heat. First thing I smelled was garbage and diesel fuel. Even now, if I smell diesel and garbage together it’s like a flashback.
“It was scary. There were guys putting on a brave face but it was scary. I was assigned to B Battery, 1st of the 21st Field Artillery, 1st Cavalry Division. I flew out to B Battery at LZ Clara. My first day in the bush was an eye opener. It was a small LZ with a six gun battery.”
Not long after arriving, Tom had a brush with death.
“One night we just got done shooting H & I (harassment and interdiction), and we started getting a mortar barrage. We got hit really hard. They walked them in and through us. Then the Old Man, our battery commander, comes running up and says ‘We know where those tubes are, get on the gun.'
“So me and another guy get up on the gun and a shell fell right on the parapet. Captain Swain got hit pretty bad ‘cause he was standing up. I got hit in the neck, chest, arm, and a little in the leg. Somebody yelled. It wasn’t me, but somebody screamed. I think it might have been the other guy because he got pretty well beat up too.
“I was gurgling in my throat, I didn’t know whether I had a sucking chest wound or what. The executive officer laid me on my back and was talking to me. I started going into shock, and I was freezing. The medevac came in, and they stacked us on racks in the bird. I knew there was someone above me because I could feel something falling on me. In triage in the hospital in Cu Chi, the medic thought I had a head wound. I told him ‘That guy above me was bleeding on me.' He came over and wiped me off and said ‘Oh, you’re right.’ They gave me a shot, took me into the operating room, and then it was the next day.
“I got up and I was hurting. My left arm was banaged and my chest was wrapped. I had seeped a little in the night, my sheets were a mess. I asked the nurse ‘Ma’am, can you get someone to change these sheets? It’s a little sloppy over here.’ She said, ‘Soldier, you’re going to have to change your own sheets.’ So I got up, my left arm was disabled, and started stripping the bed. This guys comes over to help. He had his intestines in a plastic bag. You could look in there and see ‘em. I said ‘What’s up with you, man?’ He said. ‘They need to give it a couple of days to make sure there isn’t an infection in there.’ He was pretty cool about it, and he helped me make the bed.
“I went to a rehab at Cam Ranh Bay. It was great, right by the South China sea. The sand was pure white, it was just like being in Bermuda with the blue water and all. One day I was laying in my bunk and I hear a familiar voice. This guy walks up to my bunk and says ‘How you doing, soldier?’ I say, ‘A lot better now.’ He asked ‘Where you from?’ and I told him Pennsylvania, and he said ‘Me too!’ It was Jimmy Stewart, he was visiting and making his rounds, and I got to talk to him for a while.”
Another round
“I got hit the 29th of December and got back to my outfit in the middle of February. The second night back we got hit. I thought, ‘Man oh man my luck’s not very good.’
“We moved around a lot. Setting up an LZ, the black hats would always go in first and set up. Then they would fly us out with our guns. We would land, and the first thing you do is set the gun up: you get your base plate down and your aiming stakes up, your ammo ready. Then you dig a foxhole. That’ll get you through the first night, and the next day they’d fly in these half culverts and then you start filling sandbags. Thousands and thousands of sandbags.”
Tom witnessed a tragedy at one LZ.
“This photo, this is live ammo with me. This is LZ Phyllis, you can see it spelled out on the ground in mortar tails that we collected after we got hit. They’d be stuck in the ground and we could dig them out. They brought unused ammunition, enemy ammunition, they brought it in to the LZ in a trailer. One of the rounds cooked off and killed 12 guys: two of our guys and ten grunts. It was just bouncing around on a trailer behind a Jeep.
Tom made a point to tell one story. “We were at a Special Forces camp in Bu Dop, and General Abrams came out to look at some intelligence reports. The battalion commander picked me to drive the general to the district capital in a Jeep. So General Abrams in the rear, asking me questions, ‘Where you from?’ standard stuff. We get up to the capital, and General Abrams says thank you, and the Sergeant Major says ‘Okay, you can go back now.’ I said ‘Isn’t anyone going to ride with me?’ I didn’t even have a weapon! I never went anywhere without my weapon, but that day they told me not to worry about it. The Sergeant Major says ‘You’ll be alright.’ Boy, I tell you want I was hotfooting it cross the country. I was out there by myself! I got back okay though.”
It was on a holiday that Tom was able to go back to the States.
“On Thanksgiving Day 1969 I’m standing around and the battery commander and the 1st sergeant came in an said ‘Sgt. Foor, you ready to head home?’ And I said ‘Oh man, you believe it, yeah, I’m ready to go.’ He said ‘Well, when they take the containers from Thanksgiving dinner back, you can ride back on the slick.’
"I got my stuff, said my goodbyes, and an hour later I was in the air. You’re allowed to pop a smoke grenade on your way out, so I threw my smoke and went.
“We flew to Hawaii, then into OaKland. They fed us and fed us and we showered. In the evening we had to go to San Francisco airport. We had to go out the back gate because the main gate was swamped with anti-war demonstrators, yelling and screaming, so they took us out the back gate, went to the airport, flew to L.A., flew to Pittsburgh, and my mom and dad were there. Great day.
"Looking back a couple of things really bother me," he added. "That episode with the ammunition, that really bothered me, always has. When you were in Nam, your main thing was to get your butt out of there and your buddy’s butt out of there. We had no love for that country. The only interaction we had with the people was when they wanted to sell us something. Nobody ever smiled at you or thanked you. I guess they were afraid of us, there was so much going on. Those people were under tremendous stress, I can understand that.
"What hurt me the most was in 1975 when the country fell, seeing those tanks going through the palace gates. The worst was when they had the Huey’s on the aircraft carrier and they just pushed them over the side. It made my physically ill; I had to shut the TV off. I just couldn’t watch it anymore. I jut think of all the stuff we went through and all they guys that died and got shot up.
"They say it wasn’t a waste, that it stopped things from happening in South East Asia, but I don’t now. It seemed like a big waste of lives to me. I hate to think that way. I wouldn’t trade my memories in the Army for a million bucks, but that’s the way it ended, and that’s the way it was."
Mike Cross knew the war was lost by all the fireworks going off in the night sky above South Vietnam.
The California native thought at first the rockets and flares were a warning that a TET-like offensive was underway around Da Nang that May 19, 1970.
“It was coming from all over ... It was everywhere,” said Cross, a retired Marine Corps colonel living in West Pennsboro Township.
He recalled how the light show extended over the camps of friendly forces across the horizon leading him to believe the enemy had launched a coordinated strike on multiple targets.
A second lieutenant, Cross was in command of a rifle platoon tasked with stopping Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces from setting up rockets within range of Da Nang.
The work involved splitting the platoon into squads to set up ambush points along known walking paths and other approaches to the city. Cross was waiting for the trap to spring when the fireworks went off.
It turned out soldiers and civilians North and South were celebrating the birthday of Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader they compared to George Washington.
Knowing that made Cross realize there was no way the United States could win the war when both sides admired the same leader.
Tour
Cross was assigned to the second battalion of the First Marine Regiment for about the first four months of his tour of duty.
During that time he developed a healthy respect for the ingenuity of an enemy that had a knack for using grenades, punji sticks and even dud artillery shells to wound, maim and kill Americans.
“Our area was called Booby Trap Alley,” Cross said. “We didn’t like walking around there. You literally walked in the footprints of the guy in front of you.”
By that time in the war, ambushes set by Cross and his platoon yielded sparse results. “We hardly ever hit pay dirt,” he recalled. “After TET, the Viet Cong were just decimated. It was a horrible military defeat for them but a great public relations victory.”
One night enemy infiltrators triggered a firefight and pursuit that led Cross and his men to a villa on the coast of the South China Sea. There was a sound coming from inside leading the squad to believe the enemy was in hiding. They had it wrong and what followed is a beef that Cross has with the 37th President of the United States.
“I personally blame Nixon for the loss of hearing in my right ear. He declared we would have Vietnamization ... That we had to take with us one Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (AVRN) soldier with each squad.”
The standard tactic for clearing a house was to throw a grenade through a window, wait until it exploded and then jump into the room. The first Marine in would fire his weapon left to right followed by the second man firing right to left. Together they would sweep the room. The trouble was that procedure got lost in translation.
Though Cross went in and fired left to right, the ARVN soldier who followed miscued and also fired left to right. “The muzzle was right next to my ear,” Cross said. “I could not hear anything for three hours. Now I can hardly hear anything at all.”
A farmer was housing a pig inside the villa. The animal came away without a scratch.
Recon
From September 1970 to April 1971, Cross was in charge of Marine recon teams that went out on daylight patrols behind enemy lines to collect intelligence, raid base camps and ambush soldiers. At night, they would hide within the deepest brambles of the jungle.
Normally random chance ruled the battlefield, but one day the war went off like clockwork. It seemed that every two hours a new source of mayhem crossed the path of his Marine recon team.
The first encounter took place around 7 a.m. as the team was walking on a trail down a hill. An enemy soldier suddenly appeared from around a boulder, but the man was gunned down before he could react.
The second encounter took place around 9 a.m. when the team reached a stream. Cross and his point man went over the water to the opposite shore to search for the trail. They could not find it at first, so they walked back across the stream.
They were halfway across when teammates opened fire on enemy soldiers advancing down a hill on the opposite shore. Caught in an exposed position, the point man told Cross to go ahead and make it to safety while he laid down covering fire.
Cross took one step forward, slipped on a rock and fell face first into the stream. Needless to say, it was embarrassing. “Our motto was always better to be dead than look bad,” Cross recalled.
Cross then ordered the point man to run for safety while he provided covering fire. Trouble was Cross had no clear target and was still trying to recover from the fall when the point man leaped over him while firing at full automatic.
“I felt hot brass coming down the back of my neck,” Cross said. “It was like the Three Stooges at war.” Eventually the enemy soldiers were killed.
The third time was a charm for the recon team. It was 11 a.m. and they had decided to rest on the footpath by hunkering down out of sight behind a growth of elephant grass. The men were on alert while Cross used the break to fill out an intelligence report on a base camp they had encountered after the stream.
Suddenly the point man started shooting followed by the other men on the team. “I yelled ceasefire! I thought they were just nervous.” It turned out the commotion was justified.
There was an enemy soldier on the path ahead that was crossing a different stream. The man tried to run down the streambed but was killed in the hail of metal. One bullet went through his hand and into a grenade he clenched in his fist without setting off the explosive.
Patrol
A normal mission involved four days of patrol followed by an extraction by helicopter on the fifth day. Cross once survived a mission that lasted nine days where it rained almost continuously.
The team had landed in the old tennis court of Ba Na Hills, a luxury hotel that had fallen into ruin. Their goal was to use the washed out driveway to descend the mountain. They got part of the way downhill when the radioman slipped and fell off a shallow cliff. His injuries and the weather delayed their descent and extraction.
Cross was feeling lucky on Friday, Nov. 13, 1970 when the skies cleared enough for a Marine helicopter to pick up his team using a special kind of rigging that lifted the men directly out of the jungle.
Normally a helicopter using this rigging would land a short distance away to allow the men being rescued to climb onboard the aircraft. But for whatever reason, Cross and his men were left to dangle by the fuselage as the chopper made the half-hour trip back to Da Nang.
“We were going 90 knots,” Cross said. “We were freezing to death.”
Cross later became a pilot and retired after 30 years in the service. He is married to Barb Cross, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who served as a Cumberland County commissioner.
Lonnie Frampton’s 20 years of Army service as a member of the Army Security Agency included a tour in Vietnam, where his skills at electronics repairs helped make the Army’s signal intelligence, sometimes referred to as Radio Research, possible.
Frampton joined the Army after high school to get his military obligation out of the way. “At that time in Somerset, a guy graduating from high school was sometimes hard pressed to get a job. They were reluctant to hire somebody they might lose to the draft in a couple of years. So in December of 1954 I joined the Army.
“Every story has to have a beginning somewhere,” Frampton said of his first tour in Vietnam. “Mine begins in Berlin Germany in 1966. The day before Thanksgiving I got a phone call from the personnel office at headquarters in Frankfurt. I got on the phone and this captain got on the line. He said ‘Sgt. Frampton, you’re due to make Warrant Officer on 1 December, however, in order for you to get it you have to accept assignment to the 509th Group. Do you know where that is?’”
Frampton laughed. “I assured him I sure didn’t. He asked ‘Do you still want your promotion?’ I said yes. So he said, ‘In order to get your Warrant you’ve got to be in country by the 20th of January.’ That’s how I got to Vietnam.
“That wasn’t my first time there. I’d been there in May of 1961 as part of a team that travelled all over the pacific installing electronic gear in our operational buildings. And one of our assignments was to go to Saigon in 1961 and set up this equipment. The had us travel in civilian clothes, and our medical records had a note in them that said if anything happened to us, it was to be reported as a training accident in the Philippines. What did we know? All we knew was we were going to get $300 to buy civilian clothes, and we couldn’t buy anything even semi-military, like black shoes. We felt kind of special, in the military but traveling in civilian clothes.
“When I got to Vietnam for my tour of duty in 1967, I was assigned to the 156th Aviation Company (RR) in Can Tho. I had never previously been assigned to an aviation unit of any sort, so that was all brand new to me. When I went to in-process at the supply shop, I got the usual type of stuff, but I didn’t see any firearms. So I asked the captain ‘What about a weapon?’ He said, ‘You’re going to have to wait until someone goes home because we don’t have enough to go around.’”
“I thought that was crazy. It was nothing like what I expected. You grow up watching a lot of World War II movies, Korean War movies, and you get a different picture from the movies about what war is like versus reality. I thought I’d get the traditional steel pot and a weapon, and instead I had to wait until someone went home. And then it was a .45 (pistol). Eventually I got a rifle, M-14, but it was just strange. Looking back on it I laugh. I supposed in reality, at the time, it wasn’t a laughing matter.”
Duties
“After that I got my orientation on the aircraft. I was an electronics equipment repair officer. My job was to take care of what we called the mission equipment on the aircraft, which is different from the electronics for navigation and communication. We had 12 RU-6A Beaver aircraft and three RU-8 Beechcraft aircraft. They were very good aircraft, solid, good aircraft.
Frampton is straightforward about having a relatively safe assignment. “The whole year over there I know for a fact I never shot at anyone. And if anyone ever shot at me, evidently they missed.
“I think the airfield was attacked once during my year. Some sappers came in and walked down the flight line tossing satchel charges in the aircraft, then went back out the gate. They didn’t hit the airfield heavier than that until Tet. And for some reason, nobody knows why, they never touched our aircraft. We had 15 of them sitting there, they never touched them. I often wonder why. Possible because they figured we weren’t of any harm to them, ‘cause we never shot at them.
“We only ever took one round through an aircraft. The only person who got killed in our company was a captain who went to the Philippines for jungle warfare training. A truck overturned and he was killed.”
But the whole time he knew he was in a war zone.
“The enemy was everywhere. In the Second World War, it was won by taking ground and keeping it. Vietnam wasn’t that way. You took it today and turned it loose tomorrow. Which, I guess, I know I wondered ‘What’s going on? Why? Why do you get all those people killed then turn around and walk off it.’ Hamburger Hill was an example of that.”
He could see the war from his quarters. “At night we could go on top of the roof and look across the river and see Spooky come in and turn their miniguns loose on an area. So it was that close. We were constantly aware if we came down somewhere we had to be ready to be combat troops.”
One of the highlights from Frampton’s tour involved the Military Auxiliary Radio System. MARS is civilian staffed by amateur radio operators who assist the military. They had the ability to interface their radios with the phone system.
“I was between assignments and didn’t have a mailing address, but my wife was pregnant and I wanted to know if the baby had come yet. So my roommate took me over to the MARS station. The operator asked for the phone number for our apartment, and got through, but there was no answer. We tried my mother, and got through, but she couldn’t get the hand of saying ‘over.’ But she finally understood, and she said ‘Oh, Fay’s in the hospital.’
“The operator got the number, called the hospital, and explained to the nurse that he had a soldier on the line from Vietnam calling about his wife. She’d had the baby and was sleeping, and the operator said ‘Go wake her up!’ So the nurse went to my wife and said, ‘Wake up, you got a call from Vietnam.’ I reckon that not that many wives get a call like that. I get very sentimental about family, because in reality it’s all any of us really have.”
Frampton had a smooth homecoming. “I never had any interactions with war protesters. I never had anything to do with anybody protesting. It’s a shame that they protested the G.I.s. The G.I.s (are) not the one who started the war; he’s not the one that said, ‘Go to war.’”
His opinion on war and the military is straightforward. “Nothing’s ever solved by war, you know that? Just a lot of people die.”
“All in all my Vietnam tour was positive memories. I have absolutely no regrets that I went, and if the circumstances were exactly the same I would do it again. I admit in later years, when I got to ponder the whole situation, I had some guilt feelings. And I know I shouldn’t, because it’s not my choosing that I got assigned where I was and that it was a relatively safe area.
“I think the military is a good experience. Sometimes I think it wouldn’t hurt if every one of our young people had to go for two years. Some of them, it seems like they have no direction.”
Frampton retired from the Army in 1975 and lives in the Carlisle area.
Robert Anderson was not afraid of combat. In fact, he welcomed it. It was this trait that led to him voluntarily join the Marines during the Vietnam War in 1965.
Anderson, a Chicago native and current Boiling Springs resident, had just arrived at a base in El Toro after finishing Marine boot camp and ordinance school.
“I got to the base and signed in and, interestingly enough, the guy at desk asked if there was any particular outfit I wanted to go into,” Anderson said. “I said, ‘What’s the next outfit going over to Vietnam?’ He told me that they deployed in about two months. I said, ‘Put me in that outfit.’ There was a war going on and Marines fight wars. It seemed logical to me.”
It was the glory of being a Marine that had initially sparked Anderson’s interest when he was in high school.
“When I was young, my mom and dad divorced,” Anderson said. “It is hard to figure out what a guy is supposed to act like when you don’t have a male role model to guide you. In high school, I would go over and talk to the Marine (recruiter) and he’d show me info about the Marines. I thought it looked manly and cool – the typical stuff for a young high school guy who doesn’t really think of all the patriotism and hardship and just thinks ‘Wow that looks like cool stuff and I could get a lot of girls.’”
Anderson joined the Marines through a delayed enlistment after he graduated, traveling to San Diego for training.
“As soon as you get off the bus in the middle of the night, you realize that life as you know it is over in a big way,” Anderson said. “They spent the next three or four months hammering me around and turning a piece of iron into piece of steel, with much the impurity beaten out of it.”
Prior to entering Vietnam, Anderson spent six months at an ordinance school in Jacksonville, Florida, where he learned to build bombs and rockets and take care of electrical systems.
His deployment came in mid-September 1965.
“We took off from San Francisco and went to Okinawa for prep to go in country,” Anderson said. “Then we flew to Da Nang, and the one thing I remember more than anything is when I stepped off ramp, it was like being hit in the face with a wet blow torch. There was 99 percent humidity. The air was so thick you could cut it with a knife. They made us drink a pint of water just off of the plane.”
Anderson’s first tour mainly entailed the maintenance and re-arming of weapons coming in and out of combat.
“We were working seven days a week (and) 18 hours a day, and you sometimes had to go by the light of flares being dropped from the sky,” Anderson said. “It was really tough.”
But by the end of this tour, Anderson was generally disappointed by his lack of combat involvement.
“I didn’t really get into any heavy combat – a few mortars but nothing really serious,” Anderson said. “There was all the back breaking and the lack of sleep, but that is not that terrible in the scheme of things. At end of the first tour I said, ‘Look, I went through all this training to be a Marine and get into combat, and I haven’t seen any combat and, as stupid as it sounds, that’s why I volunteered for Vietnam.
“They said they needed a door gunner and I said, ‘I’m down,’” he added. “I talked to the first sergeant and he got me in to see the commanding officer. I said I would be up for a second tour if I could come over into (their) area and be a door gunner. He said OK and said their guy was due to rotate out in a few months.”
Anderson worked at an interim position hauling bombs before finally taking to the skies as a gunner. This position quickly proved to be much more harrowing.
“Once when I was flying, we were doing infantry support and strafing a village,” Anderson said. “We realized one of the exterior guns was jammed on my side. The pilot asked me to fix it so we could get back in the fight, so I said ‘give me a shot.’ I crawled outside the helicopter on the skid at 2,500 feet.
“After two tries I finally (fixed) it and suddenly I heard this bang-bang-bang,” he added. “I thought we were taking fire and I’m here outside the helicopter. Low and behold the banging sound was my gunner’s belt. When I was getting out, my latch tripped on the belt and I didn’t put the locking pin in, so I was hanging out there on the breeze with nothing to keep me on but my hands. I never forgot that again. It was the little things like that. Things you didn’t expect.”
Anderson said he had several near-death experiences during this tour.
“We got hit once and I remember looking between the helicopter commander and co-pilot and seeing all kinds of red and orange lights when they were supposed to be green,” Anderson said. “We were in the middle of a heavy jungle canopy at night, in enemy territory, if we went down. Thank God we didn’t.”
But Anderson made it through the tour, returning to the United States in June 1967. He finished his military career working as a lifeguard at a pool in Arizona.
“I think they took pity on me for doing two tours back-to-back in Vietnam,” Anderson said.
He said he turned to meditation to cope with lingering effects of the war.
“(The war) really did change the direction of my life,” Anderson said. “When I got out, I was working a full-time job plus going to school and I was really ragged. A dear friend of mine’s mom was a teacher of transcendental meditation. She saw how much of a mess I was and she said ‘Come here, sit down, shut up and don’t say anything until we are finished.’ She taught me how to meditate.”
Since then, Anderson has continued to use meditation techniques and philosophies to approach life. He eventually authored the book, “Warrior’s Song: The Journey Home,” which explores the psychological and philosophical aspects of military involvement.
“I work as an engineer and a consultant now, and when I need to (get) an answer to a question or I’m facing problem, I simply stop worrying about it,” Anderson said. “I know what the question is and then I let go of it (and) 100 percent of time, in a very short period of time, the answer materializes. Then you apply it to the outside world.”
Anderson has lived in Boiling Springs for around 25 years. He said he is preparing to retire.
“Tough situations can either crush you or strengthen you – it’s your attitude,” Anderson said. The takeaway is to never ever be a victim. Victims always fail. Know that if you want solutions and are passionate about that solution, it will happen through aligning yourself with your potential. When we do that, the universe comes knocking to help us.”
The light show of war had a strange air of beauty for Boiling Springs native Jim Baker.
“It would look like rain almost ... like fireworks at night,” the Air Force veteran recalled. “We put out a lot of lead.”
The rate of fire was so rapid from each of the four mini-guns that the tracer rounds made the hail of bullets appear like a solid mass washing over the enemy.
Forty-five years ago, Baker was a navigation and communications officer flying close support missions in an AC-119 Shadow gunship in the skies over Vietnam.
Most times Baker was seated in the cockpit with the pilots where he maintained a radio link with Marines or Army soldiers on the ground. His job was to help direct the fire from the quartet of Gatling-style guns mounted on the left side of the plane.
The position of the weapons required the pilots to tilt the aircraft and to fly it in circles around patches of ground where enemy soldiers were concentrated and engaged in firefights with friendly forces.
This low and slow flight path made the Shadow vulnerable to ground fire, so all of his 150 missions were flown at night where the cover of darkness added protection to the aircraft painted black.
“We only flew at 2,500 feet,” recalled Baker, who served in Southeast Asia from January 1971 to February 1972. “Anytime there were troops in contact, we supported them.”
The typical day began around supper time when Baker rolled out of bed. From there, it was off to the flight line and a briefing on the location of trouble spots for that night.
The Shadow would then take flight and loiter over a region of territory until called to action by a Marine or Army unit engaged in battle with the enemy.
“Once we got in the area, they would talk us through it,” Baker said. “They would direct us from the ground. We would zoom in, unload, go back, refuel and rearm.” There were many nights when he went out on two missions.
“The VC would attack our fire bases,” Baker said referring to Viet Cong guerillas. “We would keep them from being overrun.”
Seated behind Baker, in the main fuselage, was a second navigator tasked with monitoring the situation on the ground with night vision equipment. There was another crewman toward the back of the plane whose job was to release flares on cue.
Each flare would descend slowly on a parachute, turning day into night. It was on such occasions that Baker saw the enemy soldiers clearly, often on the run from the incoming mini-gun fire.
Other times friendly troops would mark the target for the Shadow with a well-placed round of “Willie Pete” or white phosphorus. Every so often, enemy soldiers would fire on his plane and put bullet holes through its fuselage. Baker could not recall any casualties. “We had no Purple Hearts on that plane.”
Most of this ground fire came from rifles, but there was at least one occasion when the enemy opened up with anti-aircraft artillery. “It would be a bright flash of light like a blossom,” Baker said. “We never got close to being hit.”
He recalled one mission where his Shadow was called in to provide close air support for 15 to 20 US Army soldiers separated from their unit and surrounded by hostile forces.
His plane was one in a sequence of aircraft that attacked the enemy who were trying to destroy this small pocket of American infantry. “They had several wounded and were traveling,” Baker recalled. “I don’t think they would have gotten out without our assistance.”
There were also missions that took his Shadow over the famed Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main supply route of the enemy. With the night vision equipment, the air crew could easily spot trucks and other vehicles on the move.
Off-duty time was often spent listening to audio tapes from his family. An Air Force captain, Baker had a wife and two small children living in an apartment in south Texas during his tour of duty in Vietnam.
“It was a scary thing,” Baker said of their time apart. “It was tough for the kids.” But the recordings also kept his spirit up.
There were married men in his unit who had lived in south Texas prior to their deployment overseas. Their wives got together to form a Waiting Wives Club to provide mutual support.
A 1954 graduate of Boiling Springs High School, Baker graduated from Shippensburg University where he earned a teaching degree in English prior to enlisting in the Air Force in 1962. For eight years starting in high school, Baker was in the Navy Reserve.
Prior to Vietnam, Baker served in an air/sea rescue stationed in North Africa. After Vietnam, he served in California as a flight school instructor before transferring to Alaska where his third child was born.
He retired from the Air Force as a major in 1981 – the same year he returned to Boiling Springs. He then taught English full-time at Big Spring High School until 1999.
Keith Marston is quiet about his service in Vietnam. For a long time he would not even tell people he had served there.
“My friends knew, but for those that didn’t, I didn’t even bring up that I’d been in Vietnam until the mid-’80s.”
Keith joined the Army in September 1967. His military experience started with a miscommunication. “I was at one of my hangouts in Mechanicsburg and my mother called and said, ‘You’re supposed to be leaving today.’ I didn’t know that, so I left the next day. That’s how my Army experience started.”
Keith was assigned to a training unit at Sand Hill, one of the two major training areas at Fort Benning. A major training post, Fort Benning is the home of the infantry, and known for red clay, pine woods, fire ants, cacti, and high heat and humidity. “That was late September, early October in Georgia. You’d get up in the morning and it was freezing, and by afternoon you couldn’t stand it because it was so hot.
“It wasn’t anything I had been used to. We’d run in the morning, three or four laps around the mess hall area, a lot of physical stuff. Marching, shooting. Shooting the M-14 was the fun part. I’d hunted before I went in the Army, so I was pretty good at it.”
Keith described how the drill sergeants could always find a reason to punish soldiers as part of their training. “I come back from the rifle range one day, they said, ‘Clean your rifle. For every speck of dirt we find you’ll do 10 push-ups.’ So I turned in my rifle, they inspected it, and said ‘40 push-ups!’ I said ‘What are you talking about?’ But I had four pockets unbuttoned on my uniform; I got 10 push-ups for each unbuttoned pocket.”
Keith was assigned to Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, then Fort Hood in Texas before being sent to Vietnam in March 1969.
“My first impression was ‘What did I get myself into?’ You’re busy getting issued stuff and you really kind of overwhelmed because you don’t know where you are going or anything. I came in at Tan Son Nhat. From there I went to Red Beach, 263rd Maintenance Company, which at the time was called Avel, just a little bit north of Da Nang.”
Avel is short for aviation electronics. Keith was assigned to the critical task of repairing communications equipment on aircraft. “We repaired anything to do with the radio from the antenna to the frequency selector. At one point I went to Vung Tau for a couple of weeks for some training, I don’t remember what it was, and while I was there I actually walked past one of the radar sets I went to Fort Monmouth to train on. That was the only time I ever saw one. I didn’t do the job I trained for the whole time I was in Vietnam.
“Whatever came in the door, we fixed. We saw some pretty beat up aircraft. We had a Chinook we were just pulling parts off of. We’d get radios in that had holes in them, things like that.”
Daily life
The living conditions were typical. “We lived in what we called hooches, six of us to each one. Plywood about 4 feet up the sides, then screens, a door at each end, and a tin roof. Surrounding them were piles and piles of sandbags. Between every other hooch was half of a corrugated steel pipe, and that was where you went if there was a mortar attack or that kind of thing. We had a mess hall I’d put up against anybody. It was really good. The only time we had anything other than that ... was when we had guard duty, we had c-rations. Some of them weren’t as bad as what a lot of people think.”
Though he was tasked with repairing communications equipment, guard duty was inevitable.
“We’d go out on the perimeter. We had a guard tower with sandbags around it. There was a lower level with a bunk. There’d be two of you on guard, one would go down and rest and the other would stay on guard. You had a Starlight (night vision) scope you could see with, it made everything look green. I didn’t do guard duty a lot, a few nights. On the south side there was a Seabee battalion, so we only had a three external perimeter sides. Of course when the helicopters would come in at night and land, they had big spotlights so that just destroyed your night vision.
“I was alright (in the towers). They weren’t that far apart, so if the guys in the towers on either side of you were paying attention, you’d be okay. I wrote my mother about one time the lieutenant was up in my tower and he saw something in the perimeter and got all excited about it. I told him not to worry about it, it was just a dog. You pay attention. You don’t know what’s going to happen.“
Another duty soldiers had in Vietnam was human waste disposal. Most soldiers remember it, few talk about it.
“We’d had 55 gallon drums that were cut a little short of half and had handholds cut into them. And we had outhouses, we built them up and had Avel spelled out in tile in ours. I don’t recall if it was a two or a three holer, but at the back there was a door that lifted up and gave access to the drums. We had a local who helped us, and him and the guy who had the duty would load them on a truck and take them to the far corner of the compound. You’d get some diesel fuel, saturate them and light them up. When you were done burning, you had some ash left to dump, then you’d take them back where you got them.
“Not everyone had to sit down. So you had a little area that was maybe 3 feet wide, almost like the bottom half of a phone booth on three sides. They had a galvanized piece of pipe stuck in the ground at an angle with a piece of cloth over it, and that’s where you went. It was right along the road that came down between our compound and the runway, so you couldn’t be bashful.”
Keith recalls an accident that happened during his deployment.
“In April, after I got there, there was an ammo dump a couple of miles down the road, and the story is that a local was burning brush or trash or something and it got away and into the ammo dump. We could watch the thing burn and watch the explosions. And in the smoke in the air you could see the shock wave coming in the smoke in the air. We got on the roof of the hooch and when a shockwave got overhead the front of the hooch would bow in, and the back would bow out from the concussion. They were building new barracks near the dump, they were destroyed, the main PX, it was destroyed. I wrote home about it, and my mother said there was a little article in the paper about it.”
Keith says he felt “reasonably secure,” but remembers always being somewhat on edge.
“We were always aware of the general situation. Where we were, there was a beach and an inlet that was almost circular, and where it went out to the South China Sea there were pretty good sized hills. One hill was ours, one hill wasn’t. On occasion we’d watch the fire back and forth, we’d watch the gunships where every few rounds is tracer and you could see the red lines of fire. You could hear, on occasion, not very often, you could hear the B-52s. When they dropped the bombs you wouldn’t hear the airplanes, but you’d hear the whump when the bombs went off. You were always aware of where you were.”
Most of his time was spent working.
“We had regular hours with two shifts. You came in at seven in the evening work until six in the morning. Get off, go get breakfast, get some sleep. At 6 at night you’d get up, go get supper, and at 7 o’clock you’d go to work.”
Coming home
“I was in Vietnam for 13 months. I came home through Fort Lewis, Washington. I never saw any of the trouble that some people had. In Mechanicsburg you’re not going to get that type of thing. You’ve got the Navy base, New Cumberland, the War College, Letterkenny, all of this around, it’s a military area. There was never any name calling or any of that that I heard.
“If you came home with less than five months you got an early out. That’s why I was there 13 months, I extended for a month. I didn’t have reserve duties, so that was the end of my military involvement. Thirty-one months of service. I did not consider staying in. I think because of the public attitude at the time, that was probably consciously or subconsciously that was my motivation to get out.”
His homecoming included a special welcome.
“While I was still over there my parents wrote me a letter and said ‘There’s a girl here who wants to write you, is that okay?’ Sure, fine. And the girl’s sister went to her and said ‘Hey, he wants you to write him, is that OK, do you want to write him?’ She said ‘Yeah.’ So when they came to Middletown to pick me up at the airport she was along. This last November we celebrated 42 years of marriage. That kind of sticks out a little bit.”
Reflecting on the war, Keith’s opinions are familiar to many veterans.
“I think they ought to let the military fight the wars and let the politicians do whatever they do. I understand the purpose of it, it’s the same way now and it was the same way in World War II: if you don’t stop them someplace, where are you going to stop them? Or are you going to stop them?”
Asked if he would recommend military service to young people today, Keith does not hesitate to give his opinion.
“Military service is what you make of it. I would recommend it to anyone. I have thought it should be mandatory, but I know that’s not going to happen. The experience I had, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Like many of his fellow Vietnam War servicemen, Roger Rule came from a family with a rich military tradition.
“I guess you could say (I joined the military) because our family has a background in the service,” Rule said. “My dad and my two uncles were all in the service. One of my uncles was part of Merrill’s Marauders in India. They sent several thousand into India and only 143 came back. He was one of them. My other uncle was injured badly in the Pacific and wore those wounds for a long time.”
Rule began to learn about the Navy at a young age through a scouts-like program.
“One of the things that (led to me joining the military) was being a scout,” Rule said. “My dad had gotten me into a Navy league-type thing and I went with him to that. It was like Cub Scouts but you learned about the Navy.”
Rule, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, later became licensed to teach standard and advanced first aid courses with the American Red Cross during high school.
He decided to join the Navy in 1967, becoming a hospital corpsman.
“A chief caught wind of (what I was doing) and said ‘You have to come in (to the Navy) and become a corpsman.’ Long story short, that’s exactly what happened. I became corpsman. They sent me down to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for survival training.”
Rule was eventually sent into Vietnam in June 1968 with the 22nd Seabees out of Gulfport, Mississippi.
“You got a real introduction into being (in Vietnam) because we got off of the airplane at 8 at night and it was like going into a fish bowl,” Rule said. “It was so humid and hot when we got there.”
Tour
Rule spent much of his tour traveling between several different locations in Vietnam.
“We landed in Da Nang, and I was there for about a week and then I was moved up north with a smaller unit, and we went to a camp called Phu Bia,” Rule said. “We were there for a while and then we went to Hue, and we were there for a pretty good bit. Then we moved all the way to Dong Ha at the DMZ. That was interesting.
“When I was at these places, one of the things they wanted us to do was develop a rapport with the South Vietnamese people,” Rule added. “I went on a number of (medical assignments) where I’d go to local villages and do things like deliver babies and give shots of penicillin.”
Though Rule’s responsibilities were not commonly set amidst the main fighting of the war, they proved at times to be just as horrifying.
“On one hand it was sort of fulfilling to help people, but on the other hand it was (the) most ungodly thing I had ever seen,” Rule said. “You got to see what war really does to people. It was not good.”
Occasionally, however, the violence of the war crossed Rule’s path directly.
“Some of the corpsman and medics over there were in extremely bad situations,” Rule said. “There were some bad firefights, and I was fortunate that I was not in a lot of those, but were there firefights? Yes. We probably had the worst firefight at the DMZ, shortly after (President Lyndon B. Johnson) announced a bombing halt of North Vietnam. We thought they wouldn’t come across. It was terrible.”
During his medical assignments, Rule said he occasionally developed a strong connection to the people he was aiding.
“When I was in Hue, I got to meet some nuns that had an orphanage there, and there was a little boy (and) I got attached to him,” Rule said. “I wanted to bring him home but there was no way that could happen. I can’t even put that into words. It was different in each area.”
Education
In December 1968, Rule was one of 12 soldiers of various skillsets, who were recruited to join an education initiative in Saigon – the brainchild of Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. At the time, Rule had been serving a dual role as both corpsman and radio operator.
“My CO told me, ‘You should go, it is a great opportunity,’” Rule said. “So they put me on a helicopter and I got down to Da Nang and then got on a jet and flew down to Saigon. What they did is they recruited around 12 of us and each person did something different.”
Rule was tasked with teaching English and hospital corpsman fundamentals to the South Vietnamese.
“I explained to them what to do if someone got hurt (or) if someone got shot,” Rule said. “I showed them how to do CPR. I basically taught basic first aid.”
It wasn’t until later that Rule learned of a chilling detail surrounding him joining Zumwalt’s program.
“The sergeant of arms in Saigon said to me one day over some drinks, ‘Do you know why the old man up (at the DMZ) was so eager to get rid of you?’ I said, ‘No. I thought I was doing a pretty good job.’ He said back, ‘You were doing a great job; that was the problem. There was a bounty out on your head because you were a corpsman and a radioman.’
“That wasn’t totally unusual,” Rule added. “They always wanted to take radiomen out more than corpsman, but they somehow found out I was doing both.”
Rule returned from Vietnam in March 1969. He said he struggled at first with re-acclimating to normal life.
“I smoking three packs of cigarettes a day,” Rule said. “My nerves were shot.”
But he credited his family with helping him get back on track.
“My mom and I took a trip to California by car and as we were pulling out the driveway, she told me to get rid of my cigarettes because I was going to quit smoking,” Rule said. “It was a very interesting trip, let me tell you. I did wind up quitting.”
Rule went on to hold a sales management position with a wholesale district for 26 years.
Today, he resides in Enola, where he works part-time with Capital Automotive Refinishing.
“I would say that all the experiences I have had, both in Vietnam and when I came back (have) made me a well-rounded individual,” Rule said. “As you get older and you look back, you can’t say woulda-shoulda-coulda. For the most part, I can say that I have had a good life.”
As we continue to commemorate the service of local Vietnam Veterans we should pause on or about Memorial Day to remember those who served and died as a direct result of the conflict.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial bears the names of 58,272 American service men and women who died, went missing in Vietnam, or who have since died of wounds they received during the Vietnam War. This past weekend, the Moving Wall, a scale-recreation of the memorial, came to Carlisle to be part of Army Heritage Days at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center. Over 5,000 visitors came to see the memorial. The actual memorial is on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
The following list, compiled from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial website, includes the names of 49 servicemen with a home of record in or known connection to Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. The list includes their name, age at the time of death, and home of record.
Their voices have fallen silent, kept alive only in memory and in deeds done in memoriam. As we remember their passing, the words of Lincoln ring true:
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
2nd Lt. Robert Lee Adams, U.S. Army
Age: 23
Carlisle
2nd Lt. Drew James Barrett, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 24
Carlisle
Pfc. Harold Eugene Barrick, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Newville
Lt. Col. Glen Dean Belnap, U.S. Army
Age: 44
Red Bluff, California
Maj. Richard Klemm Boyd, U.S. Army
Age: 29
Carlisle
Lance Cpl. John Leroy Carey, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 21
Carlisle
Staff Sgt. David Warrington Casey, U.S. Army
Age: 21
Carlisle
Warrant Officer 1 John Stephen Chrin, U.S. Army
Age: 22
New Cumberland
Sgt. James Wallace Cramer, U.S. Army
Age: 21
Camp Hill
Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Jay David, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 19
Camp Hill
1st Lt. Stephen Winfield Davis, U.S. Army
Age: 23
Turners Falls, Massachusetts
Sgt. Kenneth Lee Devor, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Walnut Bottom
Pfc. Dana Edward Diehl, U.S. Army
Age: 21
Shippensburg
Staff Sgt. Emmett L Dressler, U.S. Army
Age: 27
Carlisle
Pfc. Paul Earl Fought, U.S. Army
Age: 19
Mechanicsburg
Staff Sgt. John Bernard Gingery, U.S. Army
Age: 26
Carlisle
Spc. 4 William Allen Gleixner, U.S. Army
Age: 21
Mechanicsburg
Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Ralph David Hale, U.S. Navy
Age: 22
New Cumberland
Maj. Courtney Price Hollar, U.S. Army
Age: 44
Shippensburg
Spc. 4 Jerry Ray Langley, U.S. Army
Age: 19
Mechanicsburg
Staff Sgt. Carl Robert Leed, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 33
West Fairview
Cpl. Dennis Ray Lehman, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Newville
Pfc. Gary Lee Lininger, U.S. Army
Age: 19
Shippensburg
Spc. 4 Charles Elbert Long, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Harrisburg
Maj. Neal Wallace Lovsnes, U.S. Army
Age: 30
Carlisle
Pvt. Carl Frederick Lybrand, U.S. Army
Age: 19
Gardners
Spc. 6 John Ernest Marpo, U.S. Army
Age: 30
Boiling Springs
Sgt. Richard Scott McFarland, U.S. Army
Age: 21
Carlisle Barracks
Lance Cpl. Paul Vincent McHenry, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 21
Camp Hill
Pfc. Joseph John Meyer, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 20
Mechanicsburg
Spc. 4 Wayne Eugene Monismith, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Carlisle
Capt. William Henry Morris, U.S. Army
Age: 24
Mechanicsburg
Sgt. Ronald Eugene Newell, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Shippensburg
Pfc. Ricky Lee Null, U.S. Army
Age: 19
Lemoyne
Warrant Officer James Birch Petteys, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Shippensburg
Warrant Officer 1 Myron McClelland Pfoutz, U.S. Army
Age: 33
New Cumberland
Lance Cpl. Gary Lee Ream, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 20
Carlisle
Lance Cpl. Larry Gordon Sandnes, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 20
New Cumberland
Sgt. James Ralph Snyder, U.S. Army
Age: 27
New Cumberland
Spc. 4 Thomas Thoma Sprinkle, U.S. Army
Age: 21
Mechanicsburg
Sgt. First Class Richard Hause Sweger, U.S. Army
Age: 41
Lemoyne
Fireman Erik Niles Rudziak, U.S. Navy
Age: 19
Carlisle
Lance Cpl. Edward Jay Rykoskey, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 20
Carlisle
Pfc. George Henry Stahl, U.S. Army
Age: 19
West Fairview
Sgt. Derwood D. Steigleman, U.S. Army
Age: 23
Carlisle
Pfc. Donald Leroy Thomas, U.S. Marine Corps
Age: 19
Shippensburg
Sgt. Gregory Brian Whitmore, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Camp Hill
Sgt. First Class Merlin Howard Vroman, U.S. Army
Age: 34
Titusville
Cpl. Wayne Leroy Yinger, U.S. Army
Age: 20
Mechanicsburg
When Les Morris was 19, the exciting part of flight operations was landing a plane on an aircraft carrier.
“It was more fun than it was dangerous,” the Carlisle native said, recalling the missions he flew off the USS Hornet in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War.
Today, the 67-year-old Boiling Springs man has a better appreciation for the hazards of bringing a multi-ton aircraft to a sudden halt within a short stretch of flight deck.
“When you think about it, it is dangerous trying to hit a cable just a couple inches around,” Morris said. “It’s a hell of a landing in the middle of the sea with the ship pitching and yawing. It’s not a steady platform.”
But when Morris was 19, he felt invincible and lived for the moment while admiring the men at the controls of the aircraft. “The pilots who landed those planes, they were very well taught,” Morris said. “They had some expertise.”
But even skill could not save the crew of one C-2 Greyhound – a plane designed to carry supplies, equipment and critical personnel between carriers and shore bases in the warzone.
Morris remembered one day on the Hornet when a generator broke free from its moorings in the cargo bay of a Greyhound shortly after take-off from the catapult.
The loose generator flew back into the rear of the aircraft causing it to stall in midair just as it was trying to gain altitude. There was no time for the pilot to recover and the Greyhound crashed into the water.
“At that speed, the plane just disintegrated,” Morris said. “The four guys on board all died instantly.”
Crewman
Morris was a crewman onboard an S-2 Tracker, a sub hunter and patrol aircraft. His job was to operate the radar along with the magnetic anomaly detector used to pinpoint the location of submarines. On an attack run, it was Morris who released the anti-submarine warfare ordnance.
He would fly six-hour missions day or night scouting the ocean around the carrier task force looking out for any sign of hostile submarines. Most times Morris felt he was not in any kind of jeopardy.
One mission became deadly serious when a Russian-made MIG achieved a fire control lock-on on their Tracker. That meant the fighter plane was getting ready to shoot an air-to-air missile at Morris and his crew.
“The only thing you can do is get down close to the water where there was too much sea return for their radar to work,” he said. The ploy worked and Tracker escaped unharmed.
The MIG was the only hostile Morris remembered. The majority of the missions were routine. U.S. submarines did not operate in the Gulf of Tonkin at the time of his deployment in mid-summer 1967 to late 1969.
There was an exception. One time the crew participated in a training exercise where a Navy boat pretended to be the enemy with the goal of eluding the planes and ships of the task force.
Morris and his crew were not only able to locate the boat, but also score a victory on it in a simulated attack run. “We killed a submarine and the four of us received a bottle of liquor ... How good was that?” Morris said.
Missions
On a typical mission, Morris sat behind the pilot and just focused on doing his job, which also involved operating electronic support measures that detect, record and identify enemy radar emissions.
In late January 1970, Morris was transferred to Japan and assigned to VRC-50, a fleet transport squadron that flew C-2 Greyhounds. There he served in the aircraft maintenance department and was tasked with keeping updated records on plane parts.
His job was important because air-time and wear and tear determined when a part was removed from an aircraft for repair, replacement or a rebuild. Since Morris had experience in how to launch and land aircraft, he also drew duty shifts helping pilots check the flaps and ailerons prior to take-off and taxi aircraft to a parking place on the apron.
For a period of several months in 1970, Morris was assigned to a detachment of VRC-50 that became part of the 3rd Marine Air Wing at Da Nang.
Though fairly routine, the duty had one perk – a bar on the second story of one of the barracks. “It was a place to go to relax and have a few beers,” Morris said. “It was a place to unwind. It was a social club.
“We had ration cards that allowed us to buy booze,” he added. The men of his detachment pooled their resources behind one guy who was in charge of setting up the club barroom on the second floor of one of the barracks.
The club manager used ration cards to pay some Navy Seabees to construct the barroom. Once the club was open, the detachment had access to cold beer at 15 cents per can in military scrip.
Even with the temptation, the men exercised moderation. They had no choice. The club operated with the permission of their commanding officer. One misstep or case of drunken revelry would shut down this morale boost.
“I don’t’ recall guys staggering out of the place,” said Morris, who left the service in late February 1971. He was an E3 airman during his time in the Navy.
Dennis Sheppard wondered about the timing of his draft notice.
“I lived in Lancaster and had a good job with ALCOA I wanted to make sure I could keep, so I called up and asked the Selective Service board where I was in the draft. They said don’t worry about it. Two months later I got the draft notice,” he laughs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have made the phone call.
“I went to New Cumberland for in-processing. A sailor came in and said ‘We need volunteers.’ A bunch of people raise their hands and got picked for the Navy. Air Force came in, same thing. A Marine came in, stocky guy, and in a grunty voice says, ‘I need three Marines.’ Nobody raised their hand. I was up front line and he said ‘You three.’ I stepped forward and he says, ‘Not you, you skinny runt, the guy next to you.’ So that’s how I ended up in the Army.”
Sheppard left for Vietnam on Christmas 1969, landing at Tan Son Nhat airbase in Vietnam. He recalls being warm in his winter uniform and smelling something like sewage. He also took note of the first men he saw.
“... There was the walkway where short brick wall separated us from the people going home. I looked at those guys and smiled and nodded and said ‘How you doing?’ But they didn’t even recognize me. They didn’t smile, didn’t nod, weren’t talking among each other. They just stared like zombies. These kids were 18, 19, but they looked 40, 50 and 60 to me. I didn’t understand that until later.
“After in-processing, they gave us paper and an envelope and said ‘Write a letter as if you were dead, and put the name of the person you want it sent to on this envelope.’ You write the letter and you’re supposed to keep it with you, so if something happens they’ll send it. I’d been married for a couple of weeks. What do you say? ‘Dear loved one, if you get this letter I’m dead it was nice knowing you’? Years later my wife threw it away, she didn’t want to open it.
“I spent two weeks in Long Binh picking up cigarette butts, K.P., etc. And they had us help fill body bags. I walked into the warehouse and saw 200, 300, 400 bodies lying there on the ground. That was eye opening. You realized that now you’re in a war. And they wanted that impact to make you realize that this isn’t a game, this isn’t training.”
Duties
Sheppard worked as a pay clerk for six units, taking care of Special Forces teams, aviation units and transportation units. He spent time mostly in the office unless he was on guard duty, on a convoy or into the field to handle pay issues from Special Forces who couldn’t come back to base.
“Out there if the enemy is planning to attack, they aren’t going to say ‘The finance clerk is coming out today, so we might as well stay home,’” he said. “If you’re out there you’re going to face the music like everyone else. Same with convoys. A cook riding shotgun for some transportation unit when they get ambushed is facing combat. He’s a cook. He’s not going to get recognized for that little bit of sacrifice he made because no one cares except him. Those are some of the things I experienced.
“I’m not an Infantryman, I don’t talk about battles. That’s in the history books. I talk about what happens when they come back. In the base camp they don’t have to worry about ambushes anymore, they don’t have to worry about firefights. We’d still get mortared and attacked sometimes, but it wasn’t the same as being out there.”
What do soldiers do in the rear? Some drink. Some used drugs. Some visited prostitutes. Others played games and gambled. The down time causes problems. Sheppard said it was dangerous with 20-year-olds who carried weapons and got into fights. Handling them was different than a fistfight back home.
“I had trouble once on guard duty. There’d be four people on guard: two stay awake, two sleep in shifts. I got stuck with three guys that used drugs, and they fell asleep. I couldn’t wake them up. I had to stay up or all four of us would end up court martialed.
“Three a.m. and I’m fighting to stay awake, staring at a dark jungle, seeing things and trying to decipher what’s real and what’s a hallucination. Suddenly I saw two eyes staring at me. I thought was I was dead. I started spraying the area with my M16, then everyone opened up. The three guys on drugs woke up and started shooting, but they were behind me and almost shot me.
“It was a cobra. It came up in front of me and opened its hood, and I thought the black dots were eyes, so I opened up. I got the snake, but everyone likes to embellish, so they wrote home that we were attacked by NVA.”
Tension
“I saw a lot of racial tension. Imagine an African-American from Chicago sent to Vietnam. He’s in a unit with guys from the South, and they’re flying the Confederate flag. How do you handle that? You’re 20 years old; you’re going to be on edge. You’re going to hear the ‘N’ Word, no doubt about it. And you’re going to see stuff that’s anti-you. So how are you going to handle that? You’ve got a grenade, you’ve got a gun, you’ve got a knife. Are you going to lose it and cause serious trouble? Are you going to try to learn to be diplomatic when you’re twenty?
“Not everyone handled it that well, some people couldn’t handle it and they would frag someone or shoot them. You had 20-year-old guys drinking and they had loaded weapons, so life wasn’t easy on the base. That doesn’t get in the history books.
“That’s why I think some of the guys looked 40 years old when they were heading home, because of the stress. It was 24/7. It wasn’t just when you were in the field. You worry about the enemy; you also worry about the people on the base.”
Though what he saw on and off base and experienced in ambushes is difficult to live with now, Sheppard said he would do it again.
“I’m proud of my military service and I would do it again if I had to. I had to fight for my benefits and for recognition for some of the things I did, but I would do it again because I was born with that ‘Apple Pie, Chevrolet, U.S.A. all the way’ thing. I read books about war heroes, Audie Murphy, so that was in my blood. And it did change me. When I went over, I was a soft-hearted guy. I would try to avoid fights. When I got back, I would go to the roughest section of town because I missed that adrenaline rush. I would look for fights. I still had a kind heart, but I put myself out there when I shouldn’t have to get that rush.
“I do have physical problems from Agent Orange exposure and PTSD. I have nightmares. I see the face of the guy that killed himself in front of me and the bodies that lay around after a mortar attack. You pay a price as a soldier. You lose something of yourself and you can never get it back.”
Rich Creason may not have been on the front line with a rifle during his involvement in Vietnam, but that’s not to say each day was not just as potentially harrowing.
Creason, a former Harrisburg native and current New Cumberland resident, served as an Air Force translator during air missions out of Korea – spending upward of 10 to 20 hours at a time in the air as translators were flown around the area, listening for chatter. He was primarily stationed in Japan.
“I would fly on an airplane listening to Chinese traffic from ground control to airplanes or plane-to-plane, and I would transcribe it to English,” Creason said.
But Creason said this responsibility proved to be far from tedious. Possible encounters with enemy aircraft posed a consistent threat for those on board.
“Sometimes we had Russian (planes) come up on us and fly around us and do rolls, and it was no big deal,” he said. “But if North Koreans or Chinese came up on us, we were supposed to leave the area immediately. We had a shoot-down of a plane by North Koreans and that kind of prompted that. It makes things kind of thrilling for just a mundane position to a radio for 10 hours.”
Creason said his decision to join the military was spurred by a sudden push for more U.S. soldiers following the Tet Offensive campaign in South Vietnam.
“I think the Tet Offensive in ‘68 is what inspired it,” he said. “It was an inspiration to not get killed. People were being drafted left and right, and they needed a lot more people in the military suddenly. This was before the lottery system, so they were taking everyone and anyone. I thought, ‘What are my options if I’m going to be drafted?’”
Creason said his education gave him an upper hand in the difficult process of making it into the Air Force.
“It was hard to get into the Air Force because everyone was looking for another option than the Army or the Marines,” he said. “When I told them I had three years of college, they said they’d find a place for me. Suddenly they were interested.”
After completing basic training, he received training in Chinese at a language school in Monterey, California.
“Chinese was luck of draw because when you finish basic training, that’s when they start handing out languages,” he said. “If I had finished training the day before I did, all those guys got Vietnamese and were sent to Vietnam after that. The day after me was Korean, but the day I got out it was Chinese. A lot of the same guys I went to school with stayed with me after that. Chinese and Korean (translators) flew together.”
Creason remained involved in Vietnam until 1972, when he was forced to return home due to military job downsizing.
“There was a big financial cutback to the military in early ‘72,” he said. “If you had more than a year or less (of involvement) you were sent to Korea on permanent duty, but if you had less than that you were let go early. I got out in June of ‘72, about eight or nine months early.”
After returning to the United States, Creason earned his master’s degree in teaching English as a foreign language from the University of Hawaii. He then returned to Japan to teach English.
“The training I got in Chinese kind of directed me back to Asia,” he said. “That set the stage for what I wanted to do after that.”
Creason taught in Japan and later Hawaii before eventually returning to the Harrisburg area in 1985, and later retiring as a post office clerk.
“I met wife in Japan while teaching and we moved back to Hawaii at first,” he said. “Before I returned (to Harrisburg), most of my time was spent on the West Coast or in Hawaii or Japan.”
Reflecting on his time in Vietnam, Creason emphasized the fact that many different types of positions had a hand in influencing the events of the war – both directly and indirectly.
“The whole point is that there are a lot of jobs outside of just being in Vietnam – there were people who also had support duties that weren’t tied directly to it,” he said. “There were a lot of people in other places that actually had jobs that were somehow indirectly connected to Vietnam, but weren’t in the real fighting.”
From an early age John “Jack” Kranchick had a “love-hate relationship with the Army.”
He loved the Army and his father was military, and he wanted to join with two friends. He didn’t, however, like where he ended up.
“They stuck me in the Signal Corps. Apparently the three of us were some of the only high school graduates with good grades, and they must have had a quota, so they sent us to be radio teletype operators. We fought like heck to get out of there and basically were told ‘Hey kid, shut up. Nobody asked you what you wanted to do.’ We couldn’t get out of it.
“So I was a 72-B Radio Teletype Operator stuck in a truck. Graduated from that, went to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia, then went to Fort Riley, Kansas where they put together a platoon of us. The 173rd Airborne only had a platoon of Signal Corp for the whole brigade, so we were going to make up the 173rd Signal Company.
“We got over to Vietnam and there were 72-Bravos all over the place, there were 72-Bravos stepping on top of each other. They didn’t know what to do with us.
“They came up with this: the brigade would send out four battalions, and the battalions would send out their companies, but information wasn’t getting back to brigade. So rather than have us sit somewhere, they came up with a Jeep with an AM radio on a secure net. The companies would get their information to somebody who brought it to me, then I would send the information back to the brigade headquarters telling them what was going on with my battalion. Basically we used FM radios from company to company or platoon to platoon, but AM radios, which had a much longer range, to talk further distances. So I was happy again: I was out in the field with the Infantry, and everything was going good.”
Jack ultimately spent 22 months in Vietnam. “So I was over there about a year, and nothing really eventful happened. Then in 1968 I got sent to Dak To.”
Battle
There he learned about the first Battle of Dak To. “They told us about how in June of ’67 a company went out, and 76 were killed and 23 wounded, 99 guys out of a company. That was one of the first times that I realized that this war was really serious. We took a pounding.
“What we called the Battle of Dak To 2 started in early November ’67. I was on the runway and a 122mm rocket went through the tail of the plane I was unloading, but it didn’t go off until it hit the runway. Fortunately for me I was able to dive out of the plane and run to a bunker. So I’m sitting in this bunker, it’s about 7 feet deep, and bombs are going off, mortars and rockets are coming in. I’m sitting on the runway as the biggest battle of the war is starting, and I’m stuck, and all this shrapnel is flying around, bullets are flying around, rockets are coming in. There was an Air Force captain sitting with me, and he looked at his sergeant, and he said ‘Sergeant, we’re getting our plane out of here.’ I watched this guy run across the whole runway, sit there and grind all four props. He started his plane, taxied and took off. You talk about guts, mortars are falling in, everything’s falling in, and this guys sitting up there cranking the plane. You could see the exhaust coming out and I’m like ‘Wow.’
“Eventually all the shelling stopped, and Hill 875 started, which was the biggest battle of the war as far as American casualties. First and 2nd battalion lost 318 guys. Major Watters, he was our chaplain, he was tending to the wounded and got blown up and received the Medal of Honor. I wasn’t on Hill 875, but I could sit in my bunker, which was at one end of the runway, the hill was at the other, and watch Spooky firing, the helicopters. I watched the bombers make their runs, and just knew our guys were catching hell, until the 4th Battalion ... finally took the hill on Thanksgiving Day.”
“We moved from Dak To to Tuy Hoa in time for the Tet Offensive. We didn’t even know the Tet Offensive occurred because there wasn’t that much happening, it was just another night of firefights for our guys. They were getting hit, and mortars were coming in, but we never realized there was an offensive anywhere, it was just another night of getting hit.”
Extended stay
Jack continued his commo work, and decided to extend his stay for 90 days after his year came up.
“December 30, 1968, I was out at a fire support base setting our Claymore mines. I just said to the sergeant, ‘Let’s set our Claymores up there’ when the first round landed 10 feet away. The guy next to me, Martinez, took all the shrapnel. Ripped open his stomach, all his guts were probably hanging out, I didn’t look too close. But you could tell he was bleeding bad and in a lot of pain. I got hit in my arm and my head. I moved him back to my bunker, then I ran through the mortar barrage and I got a medic and led him back to Martinez.
“Then I went to the bunker I was in charge of and made sure everything was okay there. We didn’t get a ground attack but we took a heavy mortar attack. I have the after action report that says we took 35-40 mortar rounds in 10 minutes. I got medevacked to Ahn Khe Hospital, was there 6 or 8 hours, and they determined I was OK and sent me back to the field. I never saw or heard about Martinez again.”
As time went on, Jack started seeing changes in the Army.
“When I got there in ’67, most of the people were service guys who had been in the Army 5-10 years. So they were dedicated guys. Now in ’67-’68 it was guys my age who thought we were going over there for the betterment of the world. Late ’68-’69, we started drafting all the people off college campuses, and then things started turning for the worse. People who didn’t want to be there started looking at us and saying, ‘Wait a minute, you guys volunteered to come over here, you didn’t win. What am I doing here? I don’t want to be here.’”
As his tour of duty drew to an end, it turned out Vietnam still had a few surprises for him.
“The Army had a thing where you couldn’t go back (to the States) if you had less than 150 days remaining (in your enlistment), so some stayed right to the end. We’ll wouldn’t you know it: March 12 or something like that, I was carrying my radio rig and a sniper shot at me. He was a bad shot because he only grazed my back. But the bullet went into the radio, and all the shrapnel went into my back. So I got two Purple Hearts in 89 days. After that nobody would come near me because I was such bad luck. So I did out the rest of my time with that.”
Medals
“Then I started to hate the Army. The medic who followed me back running through the mortar attack immediately got a Bronze Star with V device for valor. I was put in for the Silver Star since I ran twice as far, risked my life while wounded, and saved a life, but the paperwork was missing. I was also put in for the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, which you have to be Infantry to get, but they were going to put me in for a secondary MOS because I was out with the Infantry so much, but that must have been with the Sliver Star paperwork.”
The issue with his medals lasted until the day he left Vietnam. “I actually sat in An Khe waiting for my Silver Star and my CIB, and I was going to re-enlist when they gave it to me. They said ‘We don’t know where it is, it’s time for you to leave. Go to Cam Ranh Bay they’ll have the ceremony there.’ I go to Cam Ranh Bay, no ceremony. They couldn’t find anything out. They said ‘Look, go to Fort Lewis, they’ll have it there. Right up to the last moment I was sitting on my bunk waiting to reenlist and I said ‘If they can’t keep track of one piece of paper, forget it.’ So I got out of the Army. But until then I had every intention of reenlisting.”
Jack received an honorable discharge from the Army and went on to a career as a Pennsylvania State Trooper. Ten years after his discharge, he finally received a Bronze Star with V device for valor in recognition of his actions.
Jack left the Army on a sour note because of the issue with his medals, but years later reconciled. “I started going to (173rd Airborne) reunions and met some of the sharpest Infantry company commanders, and realized then what kind of guys were leading us. While I was out there, all I was around were enlisted men, I rarely ever saw an officer out there. Not that they weren’t there, they just weren’t anywhere near me. But I got to realize just how sharp these guys were, they were looking out for us, they knew to a T what was going on. So I started liking the Army again. So I started off loving the Army, ended up loving it, but in the middle...”
Looking back on the experience, Jack has few regrets. “I’ve never hid the fact that I was in Vietnam. I don’t shout it from the rooftops, but I was someone who tried his best. And it’s pretty rare to say you did your best at something, and then to find out it was all for naught. Although, in all honesty, I really did believe we stopped the Communist from taking over further, which showed that we were willing to take a stand.”
Ultimately Jack had this to say about the experience. “(Defense Secretary Robert) McNamarra wrote a book saying Vietnam was one of his bigger mistakes and I’m like ‘Well that’s great; 58,000 Americans died and untold thousands of others, and you figured out it was a mistake.’ But at the juncture we were at in Vietnam, the time we were living in, with the people we were around before, it wasn’t a mistake. It was absolutely the thing to do. We proved it in World War II it was right to get involved, we proved it in Korea, and we were going to prove it in Vietnam. And if it was my generation that was going to prove it, so be it, I was going to be there.”
It was the longest 15 minutes of David Bennett’s life.
As he waited to be rescued, the Marine Corps pilot stared out into the pitch blackness that surrounded the downed CH-46 helicopter.
There was no movement amid the shadows of the landscape around the rice paddy. The crew manned a defensive perimeter supported by two machine guns pulled from the mounts along the fuselage.
“It was very quiet ... I don’t recall being scared,” the Carlisle man said. Yet Bennett remembered how his flight gloves were soaked through with sweat from that eventful night in South Vietnam.
The date was April 13, 1970, and he was just three weeks shy of leaving active duty in Southeast Asia for civilian life stateside in the Marine Corps Reserve. Bennett was looking forward to attending college.
Crash
A Marine captain, he was finishing up his second tour of duty in Vietnam. Bennett first arrived in country in November 1967 as a lieutenant who had earned his commission after graduating from an aviation cadet program. That first tour lasted until December 1968.
Bennett returned to Vietnam in April 1969 and stayed until April 1970 – the same month as the friendly fire incident. He flew hundreds of missions over the northernmost region of South Vietnam that was under Marine Corps jurisdiction.
The mission that night was the emergency evacuation of a Marine seriously wounded while fighting off an enemy attack on an American base. As with any battle, there was confusion and the potential for friendly fire.
Bennett was the pilot of the lead helicopter flying with all its lights turned off. A second CH-46 flew in support as the wingman, slightly ahead of the lead ship to draw attention away from its approach to the landing zone. Two helicopter gunships hovered nearby as escorts.
There was a shudder and a thud as Bennett moved into position. He was told by the crew chief that something had hit the helicopter punching a hole in its rear pylon causing significant damage.
He learned later the object was a flare dropped from an airplane flying overhead. Bennett believes the flare was not deployed to illuminate the landing zone, but to help Marines on the ground see the attacking enemy.
“It went through the rotor blades without touching them,” Bennett said. Though the flare proved to be a dud, the impact was enough to cripple the helicopter. It knocked out a generator and an engine and caused a pump to leak hydraulic fluid.
There was no way he could keep it airborne. Bennett had to think fast.
All of his flight time made Bennett familiar with the landscape. He knew that just southeast of his position was terrain flat enough for him to safely land the crippled helicopter.
“I could not go much further away,” Bennett said. “I was lucky.” No one was injured and the back-up CH-46 had arrived within 15 minutes to pick up the stranded crew.
Bennett flew out again that night in a different helicopter to retrieve the wounded man. By then, the firefight had injured two other Marines who were picked up and transported to the nearest medical facility. He never heard what happened to them.
Tours
“I never had a passenger or crew member injured or killed in two years of flying,” Bennett said. He did have helicopters return to base with bullet holes from ground fire. Bennett flew out of the Marble Mountain Air Facility near Da Nang or Quang Tri further south.
His first tour of duty started just after the Viet Cong launched the TET Offensive – a coordinated assault on all the major towns and cities of South Vietnam. Many of his early missions involved the transport of Marines and allied troops sent to retake the areas occupied by Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army fighters.
It was during this time that Bennett flew four to five missions into Khe Sanh, a Marine firebase that was under siege by enemy forces. One trip was to bring in journalists who were covering the war and were eager to interview members of the beleaguered garrison.
Fortunately Bennett arrived during a lull in the fighting, but noticed how the terrain around Khe Sanh resembled a moonscape pocked with craters from artillery shells, air-to-ground weapons from attack planes and payloads dropped from B-52 bombers. Scattered around the devastation were the remnants of parachutes from air supply drops blown off course by wind currents or by the heat of battle.
Bennett never lingered over a landing zone longer than it took to load or unload cargo or personnel. To do so would court attention and invite enemy ground fire. “We had to go in and move out,” he said. “All of us got to learn little tricks on how to do it as soon as possible.”
As a pilot he was too busy to interact with the journalists. “It didn’t matter who they were,” said Bennett adding there was a national debate underway on the merits of the war.
Bennett decided early on he was not fighting for God or country or to rid the world of the threat of Communism. “The flying that we did and the risks that we took were all in support of our fellow Marines. They depended on us.”
Many of his missions involved the resupply of Marines on the ground with food, water, ammunition, medical supplies and reinforcements. He also flew reconnaissance missions.
After the war
After Vietnam, Bennett went to college and graduate school before joining the diplomatic corps of the U.S. State Department. He first arrived in Carlisle in 1989 as a student at the U.S. Army War College. He later returned to teach on its faculty in 1995 and again in 1998. In between, Bennett served as a diplomat in Africa. He has since retired from the federal government.
Last year Bennett toured the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum annex at the Dulles airport. He knew the aircraft on display included a CH-46 helicopter similar to what he flew in Vietnam.
In reviewing photographs of that helicopter, he was surprised to learn that its tail number of 153369 matched a machine that he flew during the war. Each helicopter in Marine Corps service was assigned its own unique tail number.
Bennett flew that particular aircraft seven times during the waning months of his second tour of duty while he was serving as an aide to a general assigned to the First Marine Aircraft Wing based in Da Nang. One of those missions took place on April 14, 1970 – the day after friendly fire from a dud flare took down the other helicopter.
Since Vietnam, 153369 had been upgraded with new avionics. It was shiny and polished while on display. The sight of that helicopter brought back fond memories of the affection pilots had for the CH-46 as a durable machine that served its country well.
“As a helicopter, it proved itself valuable to the mission,” Bennett said. “I’m grateful I had the opportunity to fly one for those years. It carried me through the war. It has been very forgiving. It has been my friend.”
Pilots in Vietnam called the CH-46 “The Phrog” and were known as “Phrog Phlyers.” The last active Marine squadron to fly the CH-46 was the same squadron Bennett flew with during the final months of his second tour of duty.
Rod Keckler is straightforward about why he enlisted in the Army.
“I was one of those ‘trouble youths,’” he said. “Judge Shughart set me up with recruiter because I told him I couldn’t stop fighting because I wasn’t going to get whooped. So I signed my name, and on Sept. 6, 1967 I found myself in the Army, on a plane for the first time, on my way to Fort Benning for basic training.
“It was hard to adjust to the Army. I’d been on my own living on the streets since I was 14. That’s kind of hard. I had no idea what I was supposed to do in the Army, I have no phone number to call home, no address to write to, I was on my own. But it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me at the time in my life because I started to understand what it meant to work as part of a team, to trust somebody else and depend on them to have my back. It was the best thing that happened to me because I was headed down the wrong way.
“I took advanced training at Fort Leonard Wood to be a carpenter. When I finished they told me I was going to Vietnam. Again I didn’t know what I was in for. I landed at Cam Rahm Bay. They gave me gear but no weapons, and handed me a piece of paper and told me to find my way from there to Engineer Hill.”
Getting to his post was an adventure in itself.
“I’m jumpy as can be because I’m walking the streets, all these Vietnamese people around, I had no weapon, and I didn’t know if these people were friendly or not. I don’t know what the hell was going on. I get over to Engineer Hill and they give me paperwork to go right back and catch a flight to get to a place called Da Lat in the Central Highlands. It turned out to be a little place with an airstrip. As we flew in I could see a little plane like a Piper Cub sitting in a tree all shot to hell and I thought ‘What am I in for?’ I got to HQ, said I was looking for Charlie Company, 87th Engineers. They sent me down the airstrip, and I found the company right where that airplane was sitting in the tree. And that was my introduction to Vietnam.”
It wasn’t long before Rod would see battle.
“I arrived in time for the Tet Offensive, so about the second or third week I was there, we got hit pretty bad. Our unit was split, we took 45 percent casualties that night we got hit. No officers, no NCO’s, they were dead or hit. For five days they had airdrops coming in, nobody could land. They (the Viet Cong) pounded the hell out of us with mortars. If the VC knew how bad they had us they’d have come on in and took care of us.
“We lost most of our clothes when the Cobra’s and the gunships fired right overhead. The brass from the miniguns came down hot and burned through the tents and burned up our clothes, they were that low. If it hit you, it burned you. I was really impressed with the F-4’s. They’d come in right over you, dropping napalm. And when they hit, the ground would lift up about 15 feet, then drop into a crater, then the fire would shoot out. The heat was tremendous, but we loved it, it was saving our hides.
“We were told ‘Hold no matter what.’ You couldn’t land a plane so we were going nowhere. I spent five days talking to my dead. Cover them up during the daytime, uncover them at night and talk to them. What else are you going to do? We finally got them out. We spent about 30 days in the bunkers because it took that long to get control of the area.
“That was my initiation in Vietnam, and that answered my question: if I could do what I had to do.”
“After that it was hunting season as far as I was concerned, and I got very proficient at what I did.”
Ordnance disposal
“Afterwards we started cleaning up, digging up bombs and rockets that hadn’t gone off. I’d worked at a stone quarry as a demolition assistant, I had one hour of training in the Army, they looked at that and said ‘Well, you’re EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), you’ve got knowledge, nobody else here does.”
Rod learned to clear mines and ordnance in time honored Army tradition: by doing it. “I learned from what I found and I learned from what I saw others do. I got pretty good at it. I liked it, it was like Christmas because I never knew what I was going to find.”
Part of Rod’s job included clearing the roads of mines. He worked with vehicles called “Gun Trucks,” five-ton trucks with armor and heavy weapons designed to provide security for convoys and work parties.
“Gun trucks are strictly volunteer,” he explained. “We built these trucks out of what we could ‘acquire.’ Being an engineer, I had access to special equipment. Special Forces, they like nice bunkers. They don’t like digging. I’d show up with a bulldozer and a few other guys, we’d make the hole and make the bunker, in turn they’d give us weaponry and ammunition. We had guns we weren’t supposed to have. Anything that went bang, we had.”
During the night, the enemy would use the cover of darkness to plant mines and explosives along the roads. “We’d go out in the morning to do minesweeping, to open up the road, the truck went with us. I’d be using a minesweeper, which didn’t pick up squat. Ninety percent of what we found we found with our eyes, looking for a disturbance of the soil, and indentation.”
Rod and his fellow Soldiers hid their loses from the enemy. “Every time they blew up a truck we’d get a new truck, put the same numbers on it, the same name, make it better and go out. The trucks went everywhere we went. We came in the truck would be repaired, cleaned, refueled, anything it needed, before we showered or ate or anything.”
Rod’s job was critical to the safety of the troops, and he understood the price of failure.
“If I didn’t do my job right, somebody died. I had to live with that. And believe me, we didn’t find them all. I did the best I could do. We cleared the road, came back in, and brought the company out to work. We provided cover for them (with the gun trucks) while they put culverts in, build bridges.”
Sometimes he used the enemies own devices against them. “I would find their box mines, full of plastic explosives. I would bring them in and put them in our perimeter as booby traps for them to find.”
When asked what it was like to be in a tight unit, Rod said, “We had no hesitation. The red, white, and blue, yeah. But once you get in a combat zone, the minute you get your first taste, the first shot fired, the first bomb goes off, the red, white, and blue goes out the window. The only thing I care about is you, him, those with me. I care about them, seeing that they get out of there, and I don’t think about anything else. I have no hesitation, I go right in and do what I know works. And I don’t worry about what’s behind me because I know this guy’s got my back, ‘cause I got this guys back here. And that’s just the way it is.”
Rod also talked about the things he brought back with him from the war. “I liked the adrenaline rush. Being that scared, it’s strange to say but the crazier it got, the calmer I got, the more relaxed I was. But you put me in a room with 30 people, I can’t sit there, I get paranoid. But if they were fighting, I’d be comfortable.”
Looking back on his service, Rod expressed no regrets.
“I got some of my medals now, and the only reason I got them is because my wife wanted them. I don’t really care. I don’t care what you put on a uniform, that doesn’t make a soldier. You can respect the uniform for what it stands for, but what’s in it makes the uniform. I got to serve with some truly great men, some really great men. I had the honor to serve with them, I had the honor to call them brother, and I knew them by name. I was just an average soldier, nothing special, never was, never will be. But I get to tell their stories.”
Earl Schorpp is the only member of his family to have served in Vietnam, but military involvement runs deep in his family tree.
“My family, going back to the Revolutionary War, has served in the military,” Schorpp said. “Somehow we missed the Korean War, but I have had (members of my family) in the War of 1812, The Revolutionary War, World War I and World War II.”
Schorpp drew on this tradition as inspiration for his own military career when he joined the U.S. Army after graduating from Dickinson College’s ROTC program in June 1968.
“The draft was also in effect, so once your college days were over, you were more than likely to be drafted—either that or you enlisted,” Schorpp said.
Schorpp became involved in Vietnam in October 1969—serving as a lieutenant with A Troop, 12th Cavalry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division.
“I was assigned subsequently to a tank battalion,” Schorpp said. “I had three platoon commands while I was over there.”
Schorpp’s first platoon assignment was with a mortar platoon located at the border of North and South Vietnam. Here, he helped to provide mortar fire for base defense.
“Our targets were located by observation and by ground sensors in sort of what was known then as the McNamara Line, which was the brainchild of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense,” Schorpp said. “It was an electronic monitored barrier similar to what you would find in South Korea’s DMZ area. They wanted to do that in Vietnam, but it didn’t work.”
Schorpp’s second assignment was with a reconnaissance platoon responsible for locating and evaluating enemy forces.
“We were successful in finding enemy forces, developing situations and either taking care of it ourselves or waiting for reinforcements to come in,” Schorpp said. “We would sometimes be out there for several weeks at a time and we would be supplied by air. There were no villages or civilians; it was what we called a free fire zone. We also did night ambushes.”
Several of these responsibilities carried over to Schorpp’s third assignment: an armored cavalry platoon. Except this time, Schorpp had armored assault vehicles and a mortar carrier at his disposal.
“We were a very lethal, self-contained unit,” Schorpp said. “We were supplied by air and mainly did area recon and sweeps. We could be called to move into an area and reinforce troops that were in a firefight. We did night ambushes too.”
Schorpp said night ambush missions were an especially harrowing part of his third assignment.
“I was probably the most apprehensive on (night ambushes),” Schorpp said. “Basically, you take four guys out and lay beside a trail—or where you suspect there may be enemy activity—and you wait all night. You never know if they will come from left or right, or if they will come at all. Sometimes you let one or two guys go by because they may be the lead of a larger unit. But there was one thing you knew for sure: there were just four of us.”
Additionally, Schorpp’s unit had to keep alert for landmines and other traps placed by the Viet Cong—all while enduring a variety of environmental challenges ranging from extreme humidity to monsoon conditions.
“Many of the causalities we encountered were from mines and booby traps,” Schorpp said. “Just about every one of my vehicles got hit by a mine at some point. Most times (the damage) was repairable. The crew would end up with busted ear drums and aggravating injuries. Sometimes limbs were lost. But Medevac pilots were good about coming in to help my unit.
“The monsoons would come in mid to late November and go through February,” Schorpp added. “It would be constant rain and drizzle for literally days at a time. You were constantly wet. One time we went 20 days and never saw the sun. Then when monsoon season was over, it was hot and humid. Sometimes it would be over 100 degrees in the daytime. There were lots of bugs. And the mud—I will never forget the mud; we would live in it.”
Schorpp remained involved with Vietnam until 1970. A few months after returning home, he joined with a Pennsylvania National Guard unit in Carlisle. He would go on to retire in the area while continuing to do volunteer work at the Army Heritage Center Foundation.
But Schorpp still recalls the strong chemistry within his troops that was instrumental in overcoming the obstacles and hardships of war.
“The troops I served with were outstanding,” Schorpp said. “I did not experience any drug problems with my various platoons or race problems. You had to rely on the other guy and he on you. We were all we had. We were a unit basically by ourselves, so you had to count on each other.”
John Roderick was born and raised in Harrisburg, and graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School in 1967, but upon facing another year at college or the draft, he decided to enlist in the Army.
Eventually he was asked to consider the Army Security Agency (ASA) in crytographic communications, for which he would be trained. He would not arrive at Vietnam until late 1968 after a 24-hour plane ride.
“I stepped on the tarmac midday in khakis like everyone else, and the temperature and the heat and humidity, when it hit me it was so forceful it almost made me sick to my stomach. You went right from the air conditioned plane to literally within minutes sweating all over your body. It was a rude awakening, a real transition to heat and humidity I’d never experienced coming from central PA.”
John’s experience upon arrival was typical in many ways. “I didn’t know anybody. I can’t remember the timeframe, how long it took me to get to where I was stationed in Bien Hoa. I remember the drive; I remember the smells in Nam that never go away.”
Not long after arriving, John met and formed a connection with another soldier.
“I met a guy named Jim Stokley from Missouri the first month, and we realized we were born exactly nine days apart, and here we are in the Army doing the same thing. We thought it was fate. And to this day he’s still my best friend. We’ve been friends for 48 years now. He actually served two tours, and had been there for almost a year when I got there. He was really helpful, and helped me realize what was going on and how to deal with it.”
Guard duty
In Vietnam it was common for all Soldiers to take a turn on guard duty, whether they were trained for a combat specialty or not.
“I was scared. Because I was in communications, my training had very little to do with combat, but the situation we were in, the places we were, we got combat pay, everyone did. My experience was, you’re on guard, you started to get a little less anxious as it went on longer, but there was always a degree of anxiety the whole time I was there.
“I had guard duty every three weeks or so. It was very dark, very hot. You had to wear your flak jacket, you had to wear your helmet, it was hot. You drank a lot of water. The shift was long; you went from dusk until dawn. We usually manned an M-60 .30 caliber machine gun, two guys in a bunker. You didn’t fall asleep, if the sergeant came around and you were sleeping you be in trouble.
“We had some times when they’d come and try to get through the fences, times when we’d have incoming, but most of time it was boring. And you were tired, you had to go to work the next day, and you were expected to operate to a high degree.
“One experience, it happened to Jim and it happened to me at different times: when you’d be on guard duty at night inside the bunker it was very, very hot, even at night. Sometimes we’d go out in the open air and just sit to try and get some fresh air. And both of us at different times, several months apart, were sitting, and something told us ‘You better go back inside.’ And within a matter of 30 seconds where we were sitting was hit by a mortar.”
But John’s day-to-day experience had a few perks. “The communications center where I worked a lot, that was probably the best place to work because the equipment was sensitive it always had to be air conditioned.”
John worries that some people may not understand the depth of the sacrifices his fellow soldiers made in Vietnam.
“Every night before I go to bed I say my prayers, one of the first things I pray for are the 58,000 that died. Each and every one of them is the real hero. They were all heroes. In World War II the average age of the soldiers that died was 26. In Vietnam the average age that served was 21, the average age of the ones that died was 19 or below. Think about that. How many people that have never served, when they are walking down the street and see a 17- or 18-year-old kid thinks that he, or she these days, could serve in combat and give their life for their country? Young people fought that war and I pray for them every day. 58,000 didn’t come back. I was fortunate to come back and be able to have a great life. I’ve always felt very very proud to have the opportunity, as a teenager, to serve my country. It’s something I have never regretted.”
After ‘Nam
After getting out of the Army, John had an encounter most Vets never had. “When I got out I went to HACC, and Jane Fonda came and spoke there. In fact the tree she spoke under is still there right outside the student center. And I just walked right up to her after and started talking to her. We literally stood under that tree and talked for 45 minutes. She asked me for my experience, and I talked to her about what I thought about her involvement. It was a real adult conversation. I was surprised at how open she was to my experiences, and non-judgmental, though of course she stuck to her convictions, but I don’t begrudge anyone their convictions. It was an interesting conversation. Why I did it? She was standing by herself, and I just walked up and said ‘Hi, I’m John.’”
Asked how he got through his experience, John said, “We did a heck of a lot of praying. Some of us didn’t want to admit it. I prayed a lot. Whether it had anything to do with everything that’s happened in my life I’ll never know. It made you feel good and gave you someone to talk to. Prayer helped me out a lot.”
John didn’t hesitate to answer when asked about whether he feels the country has learned the lessons from Vietnam.
“No, not at all. To some degree the awareness by the country in general is even less than it was in Vietnam, primarily because back then there was the draft, so more people knew the burden of war than they do now. With the volunteer Army, there’s such a small percentage of the people who have direct experience with the outcome of war. The country just goes about the day. They get up, go to work, spend time with the kids, watch TV, and very seldom are they thinking that there’s some 18 or 19 year old that’s probably going to die today because of a decision that we, that our leaders, felt was necessary.
“I think we as a country would possibly make different decisions, or the people we elect would make different decisions if the draft were still in place. Not necessarily that everyone should go in the military, because some people can’t for various reasons, but even to have a year or two of service for every kid. It builds character, it teaches all kinds of things that you use later in life: the ability to get along with other people, the ability to think on your own, the ability to make tough decisions. It’s never going to happen, the draft, but there are a lot of decisions made by extensibly good people without that personal experience to draw on. Kennedy served and I think the decisions he would have made had he lived would have necessitated probably thousands less people dying in Vietnam.
“George Bush Sr. was the last president who served in combat. He chose not to go to Baghdad, which I think saved a lot of lives. We may never see that again because there’s no reason for most politicians, who usually come from the legal class or the business class, to go spend three or four years in the military. They have other things to do, other things they want to accomplish.”
Ultimately, however, John has no complaints about his service.
“I feel very honored to have been able to serve my country when I was a teenager. The fact that I was able to come home, that I was able to develop a life-long friendship ... the Army had a great deal to do with making me the person I am today, for good and for bad. It was a great experience. For me at the time it was the best thing I could have done.”
The Intruder pilot didn’t want to leave at first with “Big Mother” hovering overhead.
The Navy lieutenant was an emotional wreck over the death of his crewman killed when their attack aircraft crash-landed into the jungle of Vietnam.
“He didn’t want to leave the co-pilot,” recalled Terry L. Naugle, 64, of Lower Frankford Township. “He refused to climb the ladder. There was no other way to get him out.”
Forty-plus years ago, Naugle was a Marine Corps lance corporal assigned to man a rear gun position on a helicopter dispatched to rescue the crew of an A-6 combat jet lost over Southeast Asia.
Nicknamed “Big Mothers,” CH-53 Sea Stallions were used to retrieve downed aircraft and extract crewmen from hostile territory. The helicopter Naugle was on flew off the deck of the carrier Saratoga where he was deployed as part of the Marine security detachment.
The Marines were put on a rotation where every so often Naugle and a sergeant were paired with a Navy helicopter crew tasked with a rescue. The most memorable involved the A-6 Intruder pilot whose friendship with the co-pilot ran so deep he could not abandon his friend to the jungle.
Tense moments went by as the crew kept “Big Mother” level over the treetops while the two Marines manned a machine gun and mini-gun position toward the rear of the helicopter. Attempts by radio to coax the pilot up the rope ladder failed, prompting the sergeant to take action.
“He finally got him to come up,” Naugle said. “Army troops went in and got the body of the co-pilot.” He added pilots operated under certain protocols when they are brought down over enemy territory.
“If there are insurgents and they are able to get around, they are told to evade if they can,” Naugle said. “But if there is no VC or NVA, they like for them to stay in that area to pick them up.”
Rescues
When dispatched to save a crew, a “Big Mother” was only given a location. “We never got any of the details on why a plane went down,” Naugle said. “We had a mission. We were supposed to do the best with could with it.”
The Marines were tasked with using the gun mounts on the helicopter to suppress any ground fire long enough for the stranded crewmen to climb the ladder and for the “Big Mother” to leave the scene.
Unless someone was hit, it was difficult at times to tell whether the “Big Mother” was taking ground fire. Engine noise combined with radio equipment in the helmet made it hard to hear to bullets coming up from below. Enemy troops only used tracer rounds at night, so during the day ground fire was harder to spot.
At times the helicopter pilot or co-pilot was able to guess where the enemy was hiding. They would radio this to Naugle and the sergeant who would open fire on the general location. “I don’t know if I ever hit anything,” he said. “I just feel I tried to keep it safe for someone to get out.”
There were limits to what the Marine gunners could do. The helicopter carried no spare barrels, so a sustained rate of fire from the machine gun could overheat the weapon and cause the metal to warp, increasing the risk of a misfire. There were only so many bullets before the ammunition belt ran out.
Upon return to the Saratoga, the helicopter crew and Marines would inspect the entire fuselage for any holes made by enemy bullets. Sometimes the repair job involved a piece of duct tape and a dab of black paint.
Security
On the carrier, the duty rotation had Marines taking turns guarding prisoners in the brig. Most were sailors caught smoking marijuana. A chief petty officer with more than 17 years of experience was locked away for dealing in drugs and was busted down to seaman. “He spent a lot of time moaning and crying about it,” Naugle said.
Other times the Marine detachment was tasked with guarding nuclear warheads stored deep within the bowels of the Saratoga. Crewmen assigned to handle those weapons were issued special security badges and had to pass through two gated checkpoints to access the storage area.
Every so often Naugle was assigned to a security detail that ringed aircraft on the flight deck whenever authorized crewmen conducted a training exercise to mount and arm the nuclear warheads on strike planes.
There were times when the Saratoga was put on General Quarters, requiring Naugle and the other Marines to rush topside carrying machine guns and ammunition to their designated battle stations. Usually, this was just a training exercise, but there was one occasion where enemy aircraft were on an approach vector.
The air wing of the Saratoga had racked up such an impressive track record of airstrikes that the North Vietnamese had put on a bounty on the carrier, Naugle said. The enemy had dispatched two MiGs to attack the warship but both were intercepted by U.S. Navy fighters. While one plane was shot down over the ocean, the other was chased back inland before it could attack.
Naugle served on the Saratoga from 1971 to 1973. He returned stateside to serve with a Marine sensor control and management platoon before leaving the service in September 1974. Since then, he held down several jobs including a position with the Naval Support Activity in Hampden Township where he retired after 27 years.
A Harrisburg native, Naugle is married with a son, a daughter and two grandchildren.
Thomas Neidigh graduated from Big Spring High School in 1965 and joined the Army to help out his family.
“There was a lot of talk about activating the National Guard and Reserve units. My brother had been in the Reserves for two years, had just gotten married and bought a house. At that time as long as there was one son from a family on active duty the other one couldn’t be called up. So I volunteered.”
On the train to basic training, Neidigh met other recruits. “I went to Harrisburg where I got on a train to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for basic training. It was a passenger train but it was mostly full of draftees from the area. We stopped on the way and picked up more along the way. You could see a lot of concern, there was a lot of nervousness, but there were some guys like me that didn’t worry, it was just a thing we had to do.”
Neidigh adjusted well to infantry training. “I was young and it didn’t bother me. I was an outdoor type. I hunted, a rifle was no problem. To me it all went pretty smooth. Others, they had a hard time. We had a couple who really went over the wall, they went AWOL. They just weren’t mentally cut out for it. I had my mind made up before I left. I really had no fear about what I was about to face, but that was just me. There were a lot of guys that had a hard time.”
Early on in his military career, Neidigh got some advice from an officer who had been to Vietnam.
“He said: ‘Try not to make any close friends.’ He said: ‘The reason I’m telling this is that either you or one of your friends is probably going to get shot and maybe killed. And the reaction that one or the other of you has to that could ruin you the rest of your life.’ I had friends but I didn’t really pursue the closeness ... but I would have done anything, if it came down to it, to help them or get them out of trouble if I could.”
War
After arriving in Vietnam, Neidigh was assigned to the Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile).
“Every place we went we flew in. I was in country eight days when we were sent to a village where there was supposed to be a North Vietnamese regiment. We took the whole battalion; there were probably 60 to 70 helicopters in the air at one time, plus gunships. We were supposed to land on the outskirts of the village and fight our way in, but that didn’t happen. We landed right in the middle. That was my first taste of combat, and it was my worst.
“We had choppers shot down. My squad leader got killed. There were 11 of us in the squad, one was killed, four were wounded. We spent the night in a rice paddy, lying in the water; all we had for cover was the dike. The next morning we did an assault, but the enemy had slipped out in the night and gone into the mountains. We were picking up dead and wounded lying around from the initial assault. We called for medevac, but we were constantly under fire.
“We resupplied and started preparing to assault up the mountain. Before we started they brought in a B-52 strike. That was a first for me. I was amazed and awed; they were just blowing that thing to smithereens up there. After the strike was over we advanced on the ridge, and they must have caught them pretty good up there because there were just pieces of bodies all over the place.”
Picked up from that operation, the battalion was flown straight to another area for more action. “We were out in the field for 90 days at a time before we got back to base camp, and we were normally only in there to change clothes.”
Eventually, the unit fell into a routine. “We were out on some patrols. We found a few Viet Cong and we killed them. Then everything turned to night operations. Every two or three days we were going to a different village. We’d fly into an area, stabilize and set up about 5000 meters from the village we were going to check into. We would go in at night. Just before daylight, artillery would fire illumination rounds, and anything that came out of the village we shot. And we had body counts, 30, 40, at times because we had every route in or out completely covered.”
Neidigh developed coping mechanisms for dealing with the stress of war. “I never really let it get to me, even at that point. It’s probably going to sound odd, but I treated everything, as far as bodies goes, more or less like an inanimate object. A piece of wood, timber, cinderblock, something that didn’t get to me. But it wasn’t fun. There was nothing fun about it.”
Breaks
Christmas provided one Neidigh’s brighter memories. The day began as usual: “Rain, rain, rain.”
“That Christmas morning they flew us up onto a mountain. We cleared an LZ, had foxholes dug all the way around the perimeter, they were three quarters full of water. The thing that I’ll never forget, it was short of a miracle, I’ll put it that way, that’s the only way I can see it: It had rained probably ten or fifteen days straight. They said the Chaplin was inbound, the food was inbound, and the sky opened up. The sun came out, and it just was a beautiful as could be. That lasted for about four hours. As soon as the Chaplin was back on the helicopters and they loaded the empty containers on the other aircraft, the skies closed up and it started raining. That part there ... I’m no religious man, but someone was looking over us right there. That stays as clear in my mind as the day that it happened. It was just unbelievable.
“After that we went and set up on the Ho Chi Minh trail for Tet. We got orders: Don’t let anything through. We weren’t supposed to break the Tet (ceasefire), but we got orders: don’t let anything through. The first night was calm. The second night, here comes a train. I say train; there were elephants, water buffalo, Viet Cong, North Vietnamese regulars coming down the trail. We had all of our firepower set up in a horseshoe. We had claymores set up, trip flares behind us in case anyone got through we could see ‘em when they hit the wires. Claymores back of that so if they started running they’d hit that. We had 123 bodies that night, seven elephants, nine water buffalo, plus all the ammunition and supplies they carried. We didn’t lose a person or have one wounded, and we figured we saved a lot of lives. Then you hear ‘They broke the Tet, we broke the Tet”, but there was never a Tet to start with. You did what you had to do to preserve life. And if that meant taking lives to help someone stay alive, that’s what you did.”
As time went on, the pace of operations slowed, but only a little. “By that time it was starting to be spring, things started changing, we got a little more relax time. We were running patrols on the coast. One day I was preparing to take my squad on patrol. There again someone was looking out for me, I was told to stand down, we were going on another operation. Second squad took our place. We had reports of seeing Viet Cong in a little valley, so I took my squad and we went to that valley.
“Well, second squad, they all got killed. I got back and learned of the situation. They were on their patrol, and as near as we could figure, there was probably a Viet Cong sitting back in the bushes. He had buried a 155 howitzer round, they walked over it, he had a small battery, he touched two wires together, and blew them up. It took us two and a half days to cut trees down and find body parts. So that was the first time that I had really felt like I was really saved, because we would have probably walked through the same thing. After we cleared everything out we flew back to base camp and we were there for three days drinking, raising Cain. It got crazy because everyone just let everything out.”
Towards the end of his tour of duty, Neidigh took some shrapnel wounds and spent six weeks in a hospital. But the Army still needed him. “They wanted me to extend (my tour), and they guaranteed me Staff Sergeant, but that didn’t mean crap to me. I wanted to get the heck out of there, I’d had enough.”
Asked what homecoming was like Neidigh said, “Rough. No respect, no nothing. I hated it. It almost felt like you were a foreigner coming into a foreign country. Just in that years’ time ... some of the friends you thought you had when you left ... they were hell-bent and determined on the war, period. They didn’t really want to associate with you.”
Neidigh admits the war is still with him today, and that he is guarded around other people. “It’s always been in the back of my mind, and it’s always going to be there: you make friends with someone and something bad is going to happen, and it’s going to terrorize your life. It something from that war over there that’s been with me, and it never left, and it never will.”
Bob Read’s decision to join the military was inspired by the accomplishments of his father.
“My late father served in World War II,” Read said. “He took a discharge, but stayed in the California National Guard. I have pleasant memories of him from my early youth. I was so proud of my dad for serving. That was a primary motivator for me; I really thought I wanted a military career through most of my youth.”
Read, a Monroe Township resident, saw his dream through by enrolling in and eventually graduating from Oregon State’s ROTC program after high school, thus beginning a 28-year career with the Army.
“I didn’t enlist; my parents wanted me to go to college,” Read said. “ROTC seemed like the obvious choice; I planned it that way. I was (at Oregon State) for four years.”
Read had been on active duty for a little less than a year when he was deployed to Vietnam for the first of two tours in the country.
“I was deployed with an air trooper battalion from Kentucky,” Read said. “We went there as a unit. I was very fortunate; if you have to go to war, it’s good to go with well-trained soldiers as a unit. “
Read served as an infantry platoon leader with the 173rd Airborne Brigade for nine months before extending his tour and transferring to a Special Forces unit. The tour lasted 18 months in total.
“Basically a platoon consisted of 48 soldiers,” Read said. “It was basically small unit leadership. I was mostly responsible for executing all the missions we had and making sure the soldiers were cared for, which was something I took very seriously. I was working closely with non-commissioned officers who were my subordinate leaders. I learned a lot from them at that stage in my career.”
Read’s first tour lasted until January 1968. Then, nearly two and a half years later, he returned to Vietnam for a second tour lasting until 1971. This time, he served as an adviser to the Vietnamese army.
“For the first six months, I was with the rangers,” he said. “That was all duty in the southern part of Vietnam. It was very unusual land, very flat and wet. I worked directly and lived with the Vietnamese in that capacity.”
When Read returned from Vietnam, he stayed in the Army, serving in a number of staff and command jobs including a company commander position at the Infantry Training Center and an ROTC instructor position at his alma mater of Oregon State. Later in his career, he served for close to eight years on joint assignments with members of other military branches.
“I was working with members of the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps in the (position of) operations officer,” Read said.
Read finished up his Army career working at the Carlisle Barracks from 1989 to 1993. After his retirement, he worked with Astrazeneca Pharmaceuticals for four years. Today, he can be found channeling his passion for micro brewing into a part-time tour guide position at Tröegs Brewing Company.
He said he remains in contact with those he served with at the beginning of his Army career.
“I am also very active with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Association—the first unit I served with,” Read said. “I am still very close with those guys that I served with on that first tour.”
As a student at HACC in 1967, Larry Foote was well aware of the looming possibility of the draft.
“A lot of friends were getting drafted or losing their deferments. There was a recruiting station right next to campus, and a lot of my friends were enlisting for the Navy reserves. I stayed in school, but it just wasn’t as much fun with my buddies gone. And I thought ‘We’ll, it’s just a matter of time before I get drafted,’ so on March 14, 1967 I enlisted in the Army for three years.”
After Basic Training at Fort Benning, Georgia, Larry was trained for communications equipment operations and repair. His first assignment was with the 8th Infantry Division in Germany. “I liked the Army. I went to the NCO Academy and jump school (parachute training) in Germany.”
After about a year in Germany Larry received orders for Vietnam. He was able to spend Christmas at home with his parents before shipping out. “I came home for Christmas every year the three years I was in the Army, oddly enough. It just worked out that way with my assignments that I was able to be home on leave. I was pretty fortunate.
“There was always the thought that maybe you wouldn’t come back alive,” he said about how he felt going to Vietnam. “But I always felt that if you were going to spend three years in the Army, and I asked for it, I enlisted, that I probably wouldn’t have felt right if I hadn’t gone. At the time I felt it was my duty as a soldier. That’s what we trained for. It really didn’t bother me as much as it did my mother. I didn’t tell her I was going to Vietnam until the night before I left, she thought I was going back to Germany. I didn’t want to mess up her Christmas. I told my father as soon as I got home. But he was a World War II infantryman, so he understood, but my mother was a different story.”
Larry arrived in Vietnam in early January and was sent to Dong Ba Thin. He soon learned that Vietnam was different from Germany.
“I flew in to Long Bihn. We could hear mortar rounds out on the perimeter, but Long Bihn was such a big post they had Infantry guys out there, so you didn’t have to worry about it if you were in the interior. It was pretty well fortified. I went by C-123 (cargo plane) to Cam Rahn Bay, then to my base camp by helicopter. The dropped me off by this engineering unit, outside the wire from my compound. They said a Jeep or truck would be around to pick me up. And I don’t have a weapon yet, just my duffle back, out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s starting to get dark, and I’m starting to get nervous. I could hear mortar rounds and small arms fire in the distance, and the darker it gets the more nervous I get. Finally I saw headlights coming and that was a relief.”
On the job
“My main job was working in a communications center,” Larry said. “That was our link with the outside world: a bunker surrounded by sandbags because we were getting mortared all the time. We were a helicopter unit so the VC was always trying to destroy the helicopters. Mortar rounds most of the time, sometimes rockets, and a few ground attacks that were pretty easy to fend off. The bunker could take a direct hit from a mortar. We could see where the rounds hit on the packed dirt roads and you’d really only see a dimple. The area around was sprayed with shrapnel though. Those sandbags on the bunker roof could take a beating. The only problem was you couldn’t see what was going on outside, so you opened the door and you didn’t know what you would find.”
One difference from Germany was in his duties.
“When I was in Germany I had a job and that was it. In Vietnam you filled in wherever you needed to fill in, and it could be something completely different from what you were used to doing. If there was a shortage of door-gunners, well you would do that. And of course when we’d get hit, everyone is an infantryman all of a sudden. You’d go out to the perimeter. You waited until the mortars stopped, then you put on your flak jacket, steel pot, grab your weapon and get out there because then the ground attack would follow.
“I was a sergeant, so I’d get assigned as Sergeant of the Guard. I’d have to supervise to test fire the machine guns and make sure the claymore mines were set up properly and have everything ready to go because once the sun went down ... between midnight and 2 o’clock is when you’re going to get hit. The idea was to try keep them from coming through the wire once the mortar rounds stopped. Most of the time they wanted to get our helicopters, but sometimes they were after personnel. You could tell which from where the mortar rounds were landing.
“A typical day was in the bunker sending and receiving communications. We got mortared a lot so we’d lose guys, so I’d be working 12 hours on, 12 off. I didn’t get much sleep while I was there.”
Sometimes his assignments took him outside the perimeter. “There was a Pathfinder unit nearby, they’d go out and set up landing zones, and sometimes they’d need a radio operator. So I’d go out with them.”
In the field, Larry had the opportunity to observe the effect of the war on the local population. He saw first-hand how hard it was to tell who was who.
“A lot of Vietnamese, it wasn’t their fault. The VC would go into a village and either the people would cooperate or they’d just start cutting hands off. If they found out the people were giving information to the Americans they’d come back the next day and kill everyone in the village. They didn’t think anything of it. Those poor villagers, they either had to give them rice or let them hide their weapons in the village or they’d get killed. It wasn’t their fault. Some of them were VC, but we didn’t know who was who. I didn’t trust anybody.”
Fragging
Sometimes the danger came from within.
“We had a fragging incident. There were some drugs. We called them heads, the guys who smoked. This guy by the name of Willie Sutton had been busted, so he set two claymores up, trying to kill the company commander and the first sergeant. He set one off in the wrong place and killed a warrant officer who had a wife and two kids. The other mine missed the first sergeant because he had moved where he kept his bunk, but hit the sergeant major in the legs and wounded him pretty badly. They grabbed Sutton right away. He got a court martial for murder and went to Fort Leveanworth. I recently found out he was the last Vietnam fragger released from prison.
“I have a complete transcript of the trial. That dummy used me as a character witness. I have no idea why. I thought he was a crook and a thief.”
The trial almost kept Larry in Vietnam past the scheduled end of his tour.
“I was getting out of the Army and his court martial was coming up and they said ‘We’re going to have to extend you here in Vietnam.’ I said I’m not just going home I’m getting out of the Army. So they said maybe we can just do a deposition. I thought that was great. So I went to Nah Trang to the deposition, and right from the start I said ‘I couldn’t really care less if you take this guy out back and shoot him right now, ‘cause he’s just a worthless piece of crap.’ That’s when the prosecutor said to the defense attorney ‘If you don’t want to use him I will.’”
Sutton was convicted, sent to Leavenworth, and released in 1999 after having done additional time for a parole violation.
Larry returned to the United States and got out of the Army. The first thing he did was sleep.
“I didn’t get a good night sleep until the night I got home. I hadn’t slept for a year and didn’t know it. I thought I was sleeping, but when I got home I slept like a baby because I hadn’t slept for a whole year, just a kind of half sleep.”
Larry describes what it is like for someone with his experience to observe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “When I was over there I was thinking ‘Man these people there are sitting back in their easy chair, they’re watching the news saying ‘That’s terrible’ when they had no idea. Now I’m one of those guys watching Iraq and Afghanistan from my easy chair. It sort of makes you feel guilty, knowing what those guys are going through, and I’m the guy in the easy chair.”
Even today, Larry carries the weight of the things he saw and the friends he lost. “That’s why so many of us came back with issues: you just can’t get it out of your mind. It just seems like last week. But that’s the price you pay.”
Every Marine was trained for combat, even if they weren’t necessarily intended to handle it in Vietnam.
Chuck Swisher spent his time during the Vietnam War doing administrative duties, but remembers a time shortly after he arrived for his first tour a moment where it was all hands on deck as the airfield was bombed by the Viet Cong.
Every Marine was being equipped with artillery—even the musicians who were placed on perimeter guard when not playing music.
“It just goes to show—every Marine is basically a rifleman,” he said.
Though the colonel at the air field would eventually stop the musicians from getting the ammunition before each Marine was armed at Da Nang in that moment in May 1965, it was an example of how even non-combat positions were at risk during the war.
“I was doing the same thing in two tours of Vietnam that I was doing for 30 years, just in a very uncomfortable way where hot showers were not only a luxury but unheard of,” the Carlisle resident said. “I was praising the Lord everyday.”
Both non-combat and combat Marines would face dangers even outside of a firefight.
During the first part of Swisher’s second tour in Vietnam in 1968-69, he was with the 1st Amphibian Tractor Battalion in the northern-most part of South Vietnam where American forces fought. The battalion did not see much combat because there were not a lot of landing battles, Swisher explained, and the battalion was relegated to transportation.
Traveling from headquarters farther south an hour up to where the battalion was stationed off the river near Dong Ha, however, proved harrowing for the Marines.
“We lost more men in the water than in actual combat,” Swisher said.
Swisher explained that they would sweep for mines, but after the boat passed, the Viet Cong would re-mine the river, causing explosions to river boats. He said his unit would have people missing that they didn’t even know about because of the lack of paper trail between the headquarters and transportation up the river. Some of the replacement Marines would be killed before the unit knew they were sent to them.
Even taking a break was dangerous. Swisher said he never opted to go on any of the trips that were offered for R&R, whether that be Australia, Hawaii, or the popular destination—Hong Kong. Swisher said Hong Kong was a difficult city to navigate for a landing plane, and the KC-130 aircrafts that refueled other planes, were large and carried cargo and men. One such aircraft crashed in Hong Kong and killed almost everyone on board.
But he knew he had it better than many of the men during that war. “As I reflect back on it, I don’t think there was ever a time where I worried about what was going to happen to me.”
Joining the Marines
Swisher’s placement in administration is something he credits with what appeared to be at the time as a series of inconsequential events.
Education had not been a priority—or pushed as hard back then—though he did end up being the first man in his family to graduate high school from his hometown in Lewistown. He joked it was the idea of being surrounded by women that led him to typing and stenography, and there he gained the skills that would be attractive to administration in the military.
He re-enlisted in the Marines with his new skill and was prepared to head to La Roda, Spain, but his orders were changed without his consent to send him to Washington D.C. to work.
“I thought at the time it was unfair. When you look back ... you don’t see it as a blessing.”
But Swisher in Washington D.C. wound up in the Marine commandant’s office as a young corporal—a position he would return to later in his career as the direct assistant to the commandant. He would serve in that final position until he retired as a lieutenant colonel in June 1987.
But before that would happen, the position would take him across the country and to Iwakuni, Japan. It was there that he and his unit got the news that they were going to Vietnam, and he would spend the rest of his five-month tour that year in Vietnam.
Unlike others, however, Swisher’s next tour in Vietnam didn’t come up until much later, mostly because of what he opted for while back in the states. Along with a few other members of the armed forces, Swisher decided to attend a language school in Monterey, California, to learn Vietnamese. It ended up extending his time stateside before he would return to Vietnam for his second and last tour in December 1968.
“I never used it professionally,” Swisher said of his study of Vietnamese. “In ‘69 when I was back in country, I did use it to help our commanding officer. He was one of the men intolerant of anything Vietnamese. I would be the interpreter, tell him we’ve been invited by the chiefs and we have to go.”
Though the amphibian unit would be sent to Okinawa in the last part of the war while Swisher was stationed “in country” closer to headquarters, he continued with the hardest part of his job—writing the casualty reports.
“It’s mostly fill-in-the-blank, but they were all different,” he said. “You have to keep in mind you are writing this to the guy’s wife or parents.”
That duty was offset, however, by telling families what bravery some of the men performed in battle through the award notices. “The bright side was writing how someone displayed extraordinary heroism. I had the pleasure of writing those awards, too.”
The sound of impact inside the barracks often accompanied the siren warning of a rocket or mortar attack on the Bien Hoa airbase in South Vietnam.
“The top guys were jumping out of their bunks,” recalled Dennis Harmon, an Air Force veteran living in North Middleton Township. “You heard one big thump when everybody hit the floor at one time. Then the mad dash to the stairs at the end of the barracks.”
Timing was crucial. Airmen on the unprotected second floor had to race out the entrance on the first floor to seek the shelter of plywood and sandbag bunkers that shielded the barracks on two sides.
Harmon was one of those men desperate for an escape. He was on duty in Vietnam the day shrapnel from a rocket came up through the second floor of a nearby barracks killing two men and injuring several others.
The base was attacked 26 times in the 52 weeks Harmon was in country from January 1969 to January 1970. The enemy soldiers were poor shots at best who often set the rockets to launch on a timer in an attempt to hit the aircraft parked on the runways, taxi aprons and ramps of the installation.
Every so often a cheaply made rocket would damage a building or destroy a multi-million dollar attack plane, fighter jet or utility helicopter. An electronics repair specialist, Harmon was on the ground crew that worked on the aircraft directly. Other men were busy in the base repair shop.
Six months of his tour was spent working shifts of 12 hours on, 12 hours off, seven days a week troubleshooting and repairing radios and communications equipment.
“All you did was work and sleep. It made the time go fast,” said Harmon who was a 21-year-old sergeant assigned mostly to the night shift when the majority of the attacks took place.
“There were bunkers spread out around the flight line. You hoped you were near one,” Harmon said. In a pitch, he could duck inside a revetment – a concrete capped enclosure designed to shelter U.S. and South Vietnamese aircraft. Each rocket left behind a decent sized crater while mortar shells took away chunks of airfield.
Once the enemy launched a daylight ground assault on the airbase that was stopped a quarter of a mile away by formations of planes dropping bombs and napalm. Harmon saw the airstrikes from the safety of the base compound. If an attack warning came in while he was off-duty, Harmon was among the airmen tasked with perimeter defense as a “Minuteman.”
That assignment required him to be trained in the use of various machine guns. During one alert, Harmon spent the whole night loading clips for the M-16 assault rifle in case the enemy somehow made it through.
Airbase
Bien Hoa was a major airbase located about 18 miles north of Saigon, capital of South Vietnam. It was a frequent destination of “Freedom Birds” from the United States – commercial airliners carrying Army troops in and out of the country. Soldiers being deployed often stopped at Long Binh, an important staging area for ground forces about four to five miles away.
“The year I was there Bien Hoa was the busiest airport in the world as far as take-offs and landings,” Harmon said. “We supported all the in-country troops. I worked on a little bit of everything.”
The work included fine-tuning speakers and stereo equipment mounted on helicopters assigned to psychological warfare. Harmon managed one time to fly on a mission to drop propaganda leaflets on the enemy while blaring out funeral music over a sound system that could be heard out to a five-mile radius. Expecting to see hostiles, Harmon was disappointed that his only view from the air was of bomb craters partially filled with water.
“One plane I worked on is in the Air Force Museum,” Harmon said. Nicknamed “Patches,” the C-123 Provider was among the aircraft tasked with spraying the defoliant Agent Orange on the jungle growth of Vietnam.
Because they flew low, slow and level, these planes were vulnerable to ground fire. “Patches” got its name because its fuselage was hit and repaired hundreds of times over the course of its service in Southeast Asia.
Many times Harmon had to repair battle damage in an aircraft’s communication system by splicing together damaged wires cut by bullets coming through the airframe.
Bien Hoa was home to a contingent of AC-47s that were transport planes converted to heavily armed gunships designed to provide close air support to friendly troops.
One day an enemy mortar shell hit a gunship in midair tearing out a 3-foot diameter hole in one wing and sending red hot shrapnel into the fuselage. The plane made it back to base and landed at night. The next day Harmon took a peek inside and saw sunlight filtering in from the many holes caused by the explosion.
The base also had a formation of A-37 light attack aircraft that were developed from trainers. Called Tweety Birds, this aircraft sat so low to the ground Harmon could feel the engine intake sucking in his pants legs.
To access the communications system, Harmon had to lie down on a mechanic’s creeper to slide under the fuselage, open a compartment and let the radio drop on his chest.
Bien Hoa also played host to what may have been the fastest vehicle in South Vietnam – a Chevrolet El Camino tasked with chasing U-2 spy planes down the runway as they were landing.
The wings of this aircraft were so thin they could not support landing gear separate from the central fuselage. The purpose of the chase vehicle was to transport airmen to the U-2 so they could prop temporary wheels under each wing. Otherwise the wings would scrap the ground as the plane was being taxied from the runway to the flight line.
Life at Bien Hoa included an almost daily visit by Mama-san, an elderly Vietnamese woman hired by Harmon and his bunkmates to do laundry polish shoes and sweep the floor of the barracks.
“She was always very nice,” Harmon said. “She knew the routine.”
Frank Gall Jr. was not expecting to return to Vietnam after having already served two tours. But after two years in Germany, his tour there was cut short.
“I was told I would be there four years, but after two years I was curtailed and got orders to go back to Vietnam,” he said. “I wasn’t happy because I wasn’t given an assignment, but was going pipeline again. This was the time of the major drawdowns in Vietnam. I’d ask where I was going, and things were in such flux that they might mention one unit, then a few days later it turned out the unit wasn’t there anymore.”
Frank’s third tour brought him full circle: he ended up in the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion, the lineal descendant of the 45th Transportation Group, a unit Frank served with on his first tour. He also wound up working with many of the same people.
“I was with two guys, Dick Peterson and Dan Bauer, that I had served with on my two previous tours. We had a lot of experience. We lived in a world where a man’s word was his bond, and you couldn’t live with rumor or innuendo. We could trust each other, and so the system worked. There we were with the same guys, three generations down the road. What a crew! I never worked with better people.”
Gall had written a complaint about his assignment process, and the letter followed him to Vietnam.
“When I got to Tuy Hoa, they said ‘We heard about you. The boss wants to see you right now.’ The boss, Col. (later General) Merryman, talked to me, saying he’d heard about me, knew I wasn’t happy about being there. It gave me an opportunity to tell him my side. I said ‘Yes, I’m unhappy, but it’s got nothing to do with your unit.’ He said, ‘Well I hope the tour works out for you.’ So a long story short he made me the assistant G3, which was my specialty, operations, and then they gave me a command, which I held through the Spring Offensive. And it turned out to be the best tour ever. It capped off the other two, it really turned out well.”
But the tour wasn’t free of problems. “I heard the commander of my unit had been fragged three times. I went down to look at his quarters, and sure enough there were holes all over the place. He was OK, but as a result, he clamped down and the MPs came down on the troops really hard, I mean really hard. I would watch as they’d stop a bunch of guys, have them up against the wall with their feet spread, just to check them out and see if they had any drugs.”
“That all changed when an infantry unit came in. These guys came right in out of the field, and they had nothing. They had what they were carrying on their backs. So they went into the MPs area and took everything. The MPs went back in to get it, and in so many words they were told ‘You don’t know how bad it can get for you if you step one foot into our AO (area of operations).’ I heard about that at a staff meeting when the MPs asked ‘How are we going to deal with this?’ and were told ‘Stay out of their area.’”
During his three tours, Gall amassed a lot of flight time, and a safety record that amazes even him. “People can’t believe it, but I have about 3,000 hours of flight time, and easily 1,500 of that is combat time, but I never took a round. Ever. I consider myself extremely lucky, and one of the rarities. People say ‘How does that happen?’ and I don’t know.”
Gall explained how dangerous flying was. “A pilot from our unit sent out a mayday call. I was flying and called in and asked for his itinerary for the day. The operations officer was really on his toes and he said, ‘If everything went right he should be about here.’ So I started going there and I saw black smoke coming up. He’d been shot down.”
As the word went out, other pilots from other units offered to help. “A Cav guy called in said he was closer than I was and said ‘I’m going to get him.’ I told him he didn’t know the area and that I would do it. But he said his (crew) knew it was super critical to get in there as fast as possible. We got there at just about the same time. He went in and I came in behind him to give him cover. I saw people running around, and the guy said ‘They’re not friendlies, they’re enemy. I’ll take a closer look, we can get this guy out.’ And the next thing I knew right in front of me his helicopter started shaking and peeled off. His co-pilot called and said ‘My pilot’s just been shot, I think he’s dead, I’m taking him to the hospital, he’s hit in the chest.’ He’d been hit with a .50 cal and didn’t make it.”
The crew from the downed helicopter was rescued, although their pilot was also killed.
Asked to relate his most harrowing incident in his entire time in Vietnam, Gall related this story.
“I was going on an assault with another unit. They took my aircraft, split up my crew, and gave me a ‘hangar queen’ (a grounded aircraft that is kept in the hangar and used as a source of parts for other aircraft). At 0400 I set out ... and the weather was bad, but you have to try. The thunderstorms were so bad our radio and navigation went out. We were at 10,000 feet and couldn’t get over the clouds or get through the thunderstorm. I said ‘I don’t care what kind of grief we’re going to get, we can’t get through.’ So we turned around.”
That was when the old hangar queen let them down.
“I heard a tremendous explosion, and the co-pilot yelled ‘engine failure.’ Flames were everywhere, reflecting off the clouds. I couldnt’ figure out what was happening, and it turned out I had vertigo. The co-pilot yelled ‘Artificial indicator, artificial indicator!’ I looked at my artificial horizon and it was sideways, and we were dropping 6,000 feet a minute. But once I leveled out it was like popping a parachute.
“We got lower and saw a village. We were yelling because communications were out. I decided to try to land in the street, because you can’t land in rice paddies in the dark. So the only thing we have to worry about it hitting (is) a telephone pole or wire over the street. Just as we were getting low enough we both yelled out ‘River’ as this black strip appeared under the aircraft. We both knew immediately that it was water. I did a low level 180, rolled the aircraft over, remembered my training (I attribute all my success in Vietnam, if you call it that, to great training), leveled the aircraft out and did a tree landing.
“The way to do a tree landing is to come down as straight as possible, and when you see the top of the trees come level with the windshield you pull pitch. So I did , and we chopped our way through these pine trees. The aircraft broke in half and came down on a canal full of punji sticks that came up through the aircraft. I’m amazed we didn’t get skewered. I banged my helmet on the rocket sight, punched my head through the overhead window and fractured my neck, knocked the door off, my helmet flew across the cockpit, broke the window on that side, then dead silence.
“We got out, the first thing you do is get out of the aircraft. We were covered in jet fuel. I vividly remember the pain in my back. It was pitch black, and I went back, got some stuff, came out and realized the crew chief was missing. I went back for him, then the co-pilot yelled ‘Rotor blades!’ The rotor was still turning, and I had walked through it four times. If it had hit me I would have been literally decapitated.
“We stayed there until the rotor stopped and we heard Vietnamese coming. We tried to get across the canal and couldn’t, so we got our guns off and ready. I said ‘I don’t know what to do,’ so we talked real fast: ‘We can’t get away, so we’ll just set up an ambush.’ So we did, and I said ‘Do not fire until I fire.’ We hear all this yelling in Vietnamese and I’m yelling ‘Dung lai, dung lai,’ which is ‘halt’ in Vietnamese. My gunner and crew chief were on either side of the aircraft, with me and the co-pilot, they had their machine guns. I yell ‘halt’ and I hear ‘Hello!’ I yell ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.’ It was a Special Forces guy who’d heard us and saw the big ball of flame coming down. We almost landed on top of him. So he took care of us and called a medevac.”
Gall was checked out in the hospital, and given some strong pain pills, and three days later was back to work. But the rumor mill reported that he had been killed in action, and as recently as two years ago he found out that some of the people who knew him still believed he had died in Vietnam.
Gall knew the war was winding down, and not in a good way. “There was a feeling of ‘What’s going to happen?’ Things are kind of rough, there’s no one coming in to help out. One time we were told to prepare to evacuate. Nurses were evacuated, non-essentials were evacuated.”
Gall’s tour ended, and he went on to complete a successful career, retiring from the Army as a colonel. Years later, when South Vietnam fell, Gall was not surprised. “You could see it coming right from the start.”
Reflecting on his service, Gall remembers the good people he served with, noting that he found many good people even in an Army full of draftees who did not want to be there. “There’s always going to be good people, and if you can get them all together in one spot, that’s really something.”
Most Vietnam veterans served one year-long tour of duty “in country.” Career officers usually served two tours. Col. (Retired) Frank Gall Jr. served three tours in Vietnam, making him one of the more experienced officers of the war.
Because of his unusually long service in country, this article will cover his first two tours of duty; his third tour will be covered in next week’s article.
Gall went to college at The Citadel, one of the oldest military colleges in the country. Upon graduating in 1962, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant and assigned to the Signal Corps. Before long, however, he volunteered for Aviation, attracted by the prospects of adventure and better pay.
His orders to report for helicopter flight school were accompanied by orders to report to Vietnam when his training was done. He arrived in Vietnam in April 1964 at a time when the armed helicopter concept was still in its infancy.
“At that time there were no major units there,” he said. “I arrived through the pipeline and was assigned to the 45th Transportation Battalion. I had no idea what that was. It turned out to be a kind of holding cell for building up a helicopter unit.”
Invented in the 1930s, helicopters were used in the Korean War for observation and to evacuate wounded troops. Vietnam was the proving ground for the armed helicopter concept.
“Helicopters were really just coming into their own at that time, so almost everyone coming in there was in the pipeline to somewhere else. It wasn’t until I was getting ready to leave, the major units first started arriving. I stayed in the pipeline; I never rotated with a unit.”
Gall described the helicopters of the day. “They had A model Hueys, which weren’t that efficient, but got the job done, and were being replaced by B models. They armed everything. If you could come up with an idea somebody would give it a try. Someone would say, ‘Let’s see if we can put a machine gun in the doorway of this cargo helicopter,’ and they’d do it.
“When I got my first armed helicopter, we sat there, me, my crew chief, and the co-pilot, with the instruction manual to get this thing to work. We were given a manual and told, ‘Here you are, the electronics are all set up, get your guns and your rockets on there.’ And when we got to a certain point we called in the civilian tech rep to come in and fix the rest of it up.”
Gall spent six months or so with the 45th at Tahn Son Nhut airfield near Saigon, “going everywhere and doing everything,” before volunteering to fly gunships—Huey helicopters specially equipped and adapted for combat air support—and moved to Phan Thiet.
“When I arrived at Phan Thiet, I met with the provincial adviser as leader of a heavy fire team of three gunships. And he says, ‘This is your AO (area of operations), and this is a free kill zone. You kill anything you see moving.’ And that was my mission. And naturally you didn’t. You see an ox and a farmer plowing a field, I don’t care, you’re not going to do it. I’m not.”
His team took on all sorts of missions. “Gunships were rare in those days. There were just not enough, so if your area was cold you went somewhere that was hot. I was on patrol most of the time, and most of the time the patrols were just going out and looking for changes, but every now and then you ran into something. In that area we supported Vietnamese forces, there were no American forces there, only advisers.
“Were in the middle of nowhere. We were well supplied, we never ran short of ammo or rockets, but we were on our own. If you needed a doctor, that was an hour’s flight. If you got in trouble, help was an hour-and-a-half away.”
Being out in the middle of nowhere, however, did not stop them from flying wherever missions were needed. “We went everywhere in II, III and IV Corps. We did VIP transport, assaults, medevac, we did resupply, everything.”
Many veterans have lots of photos of combat and the aftermath, but not Gall. “I always carried a Minolta with me. I took almost zero pictures of combat because it just didn’t feel right.”
At the end of his first tour, Gall rotated back to the United States, where he was assigned as a tactical flight instructor and helped develop manuals about helicopter combat. Being home from the war, however, did not mean he was out of danger.
“Training was very dangerous. We had a number of people killed during training. It was especially dangerous at that time because everybody who came to Fort Rucker tried to make an impression. It came to the point where the instructors thought the pilots were thinking, ‘Let’s see if the instructors can do this maneuver.’”
Second tour
By spring 1967, Gall’s number came up, and he was on his way back to Vietnam for his second tour. “My second tour was a piece of cake for me. The only thing exciting there was Tet. Tet was pretty interesting.”
Stationed in Nha Trang, he had just come in from flying a mission. By the time he and his crew got their aircraft squared away, it was dark and everyone else had gone.
“I didn’t feel like going to the club, so I went downtown to get a bowl of soup. I was coming back and things just didn’t feel right. The streets were deserted. I had a Jeep and was living on the economy in rented rooms, and when I got there no one was there, it was all dark. So I sat down and started doing whatever I was doing.”
But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had other plans for the evening. “I guess around 10 o’clock I started hearing gunfire. And I thought, ‘Well, this is close!’ And the gunfire kept up, and it got closer and closer and into the alley where my room was. They were fighting and screaming in Vietnamese. I really got scared, so I piled furniture up against the door and sat in the corner all night with my .45 and my rifle while the fighting went on right outside the door. Thankfully they didn’t know I was there and were busy fighting someone else.
“I sat there until morning, about 9 or 9:30 when I didn’t hear anything anymore. I pulled the furniture away from the door and jumped into my Jeep and drove to the base. I was ticked that I’d been let off post and nobody told me anything. Everyone else had a warning. They probably thought I’d got the word, but I didn’t.”
It did not take long for Gall to realize that something big was going on. “I got back and got word there was a unit with a couple of guys I knew in trouble up in Kon Tum. They needed to be extracted. I figured I could just fly in and pick them up, and we’d leave. But by the time I got there I was low on fuel, there were aircraft everywhere, and it was very confusing. There was smoke everywhere, and explosions and fighting going on everywhere.
“I got on the radio and asked: ‘Where’s the refueling point?’ Someone said, ‘It’s on the west end of the airfield, but watch it.’ I was really hurting for fuel so I went in. As I started to hover to set down I see a bunch of people come running towards me, and gunships come in right behind me and take them out. A guy calls on the radio and says ‘That end of the field belongs to the NVA, so you better get out of there.’ So I turned the aircraft and hovered back down to where I knew our troops were and set down.
“I told my gunner to see if he could get someone’s attention, then I looked down and saw that my skid was lying right across a foxhole. And there’s a guy there shooting out of that foxhole. He looks up and sees me. So I say: ‘I’m looking for the signal unit that’s supposed to be here, where is it?’ He told me they were on the other side of a nearby tree line.”
Gall took stock of the situation. “I’m worried about my fuel, I was on my warning light, there was shooting all around me, but I’m fine, no problems so far. Gunships are everywhere, and at least I’m not at that refueling point anymore. So I hop over the tree line, and I get these guys on the radio and I say ‘Come on, get on board, I’m really low on fuel.’ They were in a bunker nearby and they said, ‘We’re under fire, we can’t get out.’”
“So I say, ‘You gotta to make up your mind. You’re either coming now or I’ll have to come back later and get you. You’re the ones who called for the rescue.’ So this buddy of mine says, ‘We’ll try to make it.’ And just then either mortars or artillery started coming in on us, explosions right at the top of the trees. I’m thinking I’m not going to stay here another minute. Then I see these guys bail out of the bunker and they are running across to me, and it was like a John Wayne movie. They’re running and behind them the bullets are kicking up dirt. I tell my crew chief and co-pilot ‘As soon as they get on board grab them so they don’t fall out, as soon as they touch this aircraft I’m pulling up.’
“So they jumped into the aircraft, and these bullets tracking them go right underneath the aircraft. I thought I’d been shot. And I sat there just long enough to say to my co-pilot ‘Are you okay?’ and he said ‘I don’t know, are you okay?’ I said ‘I don’t know,’ and we pulled pitch as the crew chief is still pulling them in and we’re already taking off.”
After Tet, Gall said the rest of his second tour was “a piece of cake.” What he did not know at that time was that he would be back for a third tour.
Though a “million dollar wound” gave his time in Vietnam an early end, Capt. Ronald Hoover stands as one of the most accomplished Marines to have been involved in the war.
Hoover, 79, of Carlisle, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1954. He said his decision to enlist was inspired by several of his friends who had enlisted before him.
“I had some friends from high school that went in (to the Marines) during the Korean time,” Hoover said. “They came back and we were talking, and I said that the Marines was the place I wanted to go. I thought the Marine Corps was the best outfit. I made a lot of good friends there and decided I would stay and make 20 years out of it.”
During his career, Hoover served two tours at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina as a drill instructor and he also served on the Inspector Instructor staff of the 78th Rifle Company in Williamsport. He achieved the title of Master of Fitness, which had only been accomplished by 22 Marines ever at the time of his retirement.
Hoover served in two tours during Vietnam. His first tour was spent with Alpha Company, Third Reconnaissance Battalion from 1966 to 1967.
“One of the big problems we had was when we would get in a situation out there, we would sometimes run up against 30 to 40 guys and we would need some kind of support,” Hoover said. “We were responsible for each other and (for) making sure that all the people we had were coming home safe and sound; that was the primary thing in my mind.”
After coming back to the United States for three months, Hoover returned to Vietnam for a second tour from 1968 to 1969 – this time as Company Commander of India Company, Third Battalion, 26th Marines.
“The situation I was in as a commander was similar to that movie ‘We Were Soldiers,’” Hoover said. “We walked into three machine guns one night and we lost 157 marines in about two hours. We stayed there the whole night and we actually had hand-to-hand combat for about two hours. My company sergeant, from PA, got the medal of honor posthumously.”
It was during this tour that Hoover suffered injuries significant enough to end his involvement in the war.
“A mortar round came in and blew me away and left me off the ground,” Hoover said. “I had wounds in my back, arms and legs. I got my ‘million dollar wound,’ as they say; I did not go back into (Vietnam) again.”
Hoover spent nine months at a hospital in Guam before he was finally transported back to the United States.
“I stayed (in Guam) for nine months and got put back together,” Hoover said. “From there, I went to Okinawa and got back on my feet and came home.”
Hoover was awarded the Silver Star – just one of a list of accumulated personal awards that includes a Bronze Star with combat valor, a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with combat valor, a Purple Heart, a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, a Vietnam Service Medal, a Vietnam Cross of Gallantry Star and a Vietnam Campaign Ribbon.
After officially retiring from the Marine Corps in 1974, Hoover remained involved with public service as a law enforcement official.
“I was a people person,” Hoover said, “so I ended up going into law enforcement.”
Hoover served as a deputy sheriff for 10 years with the Reno Nevada Sheriff’s Department and served another 12 years with the California Department of Corrections before retiring again in 1994.
Hoover currently resides in Carlisle.
“I’m 79 years old and there is not too much I can do,” Hoover said. “I’m kind of slowed down a bit, but I do what I can.”
Hoover said that Vietnam, as a whole, should stand as a lesson to modern America.
“The government needs to adhere to the lessons we learned in Vietnam,” Hoover said. “We won the battles over there, but we did not win the wars.”
In 1967, Phyllis Cogan was a student at Indiana University, Indiana, when she decided to join the Army Nurse Corps to help pay for college.
“They had something called the Army Student Nurse Program, through which you could have your last year or two paid for,” she explained. “You would enlist in the Women’s Army Corps at that time. You enlisted as a Private First Class. You got an ID card and you could use the PX, and it sounded like a great deal. I think I went to that PX twice the whole time because it wasn’t really convenient, but it was nice to have.
“But what was really important was that you got a stipend,” she added. “It was under $100, but it seemed like a fortune. Six months before I graduated I was honorably discharged from the Women’s Army Corps, and the next day I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, and they paid for my last year of school. It was wonderful.”
Though her primary motivation was financial, she says there were other reasons for joining the Army.
“My father had been a Marine in World War II,” she said. “This was a man who could not see the American flag without breaking into tears. He did think America could do no wrong, but he had great pride in what he had done. My mother was a little concerned that military nurses could get the wrong kind of reputation. My father replied: ‘Well, if they know her they’ll know better, and if they don’t know her what do you care?’ I always knew that my father was proud of my service.”
After graduation, she went through basic training, took a little leave to visit her family, and spent about six months at Fort Bragg before heading off to Vietnam. She arrived on April 19, 1969, her brother’s birthday, and departed one year later on April 19, 1970.
“I thought it was kind of exciting, actually,” she said her of arrival in Vietnam. “We flew in in the middle of the night and slept briefly on cots, and were sent out the next night. I was sent to Chu Lai and assigned to the 27th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. I was 22 years old and would call myself fairly naive. I hadn’t seen anything horrible happen yet, but I knew bad things did. At that point it was an adventure, but I had no idea what to expect.
“When I got to the hospital, that was an adjustment. They showed us out hootches. They were semi-permanent wooden buildings. Of course it was hot, but they had a separate room for the nurses and doctors who worked the night shift that had air conditioning, because you couldn’t have it for each room. And it was so hot you couldn’t sleep. But that broke down about halfway through and never got replaced. But we all survived it. The joke was that the pilots had air conditioning, but they said ‘Well you don’t want a sleepy pilot.’ I thought you might not want a sleepy nurse either!
“The hootches weren’t bad. They were small, and you had a few shelves, your footlocker, a small cabinet, and a little closet for hanging clothes. The Mama-San’s did our laundry. We ate in the mess-hall. The food was for young men, so it wasn’t exactly dietary heaven for a young woman who wanted to watch her weight. But the food was solid, I don’t remember disliking it.”
Phyllis and the other nurses enjoyed a few perks of being the only American women.
“There was a civilian engineering outfit nearby, and they would invite the American nurses over to their compound fairly often. And they had steaks, and shrimp, and all the good stuff. And the wine. So it was nice. I don’t think the male nurses got invited very often.”
Nursing
Phyllis soon discovered the old Army tradition of learning by doing.
“When I got there they said, ‘Have you ever started an IV,’ and I said ‘Yeah.’ I’d been on a ward at Fort Bragg and learned how to do IV’s with an 18 gauge needle. So they said ‘Oh good, we’ll put you in the ER.’ I said I didn’t have any ER experience, I’m just out of school and my school didn’t have an ER. I got down there and discovered that the IV they wanted me to use was even bigger. I said ‘I couldn’t get that in a calf’ and they said ‘Before long you’ll be getting it in children.’ Which turned out to be true.”
Her patients in the ER were mostly injured. She saw a lot of injured limbs, shrapnel wounds that were “not too deep,” and some head wounds.
“We lost some patients. They came in with severe injuries that we couldn’t treat,” she said. “One of those memories I would almost like to forget and can’t was a young man, still alert, saying ‘Please, please don’t let me die.’ He was bleeding out right in front of us, and we couldn’t stop it. That’s one of those memories that sticks out and doesn’t want to go away.
“One day they brought some body bags in, and the sergeants wouldn’t let me go back to deal with them. An officer had to go back but they would not let us go back. They said, ‘These bodies have been in the water for several days and you don’t need to see this.’ I don’t think it was a lack of respect for our abilities, but a desire to protect us.”
From the ER, Phyllis transferred first to the intensive care unit, then the medical ward, finally ending up on the Vietnamese ward. She especially liked that ward, where she worked with a lot of children and local women. Many of them were injured in the war, some from what we refer to today as “collateral damage,” but she didn’t dwell on that.
“I didn’t even, at that point, ask how they got those injuries, they just came to us for help and we helped them.”
“I didn’t think about it,” she said of the security. “Whenever the alarms went off we had to run down into the bunkers and sit there in the sucking heat until the bells cleared. The funny thing was that we were at the edge of a compound, and if the mortar landed 500 feet away but off the compound we didn’t go to the bunkers. But if it landed 3 miles away but on the compound we went to the bunkers. We sat there one time watching the mortars hit off the compound.
“But I wasn’t conscious of being at risk,” she added. “Now one of our doctors came in from six months out in the field, every time hear it he’d hit that wall and be down. And we kind of laughed at first but he said ‘That was incoming.’ We asked him how he could tell and he said ‘You can tell.’ Well we couldn’t, the nurses couldn’t.”
Phyllis says she was issued a soldier’s full kit, except for a weapon.
“I had everything but the actual .45, which was what they were giving nurses at the time. That’s another story because in Basic they had us fire the .45. Of course the .45 has a pretty good kickback. So I fire it and the sergeant says ‘Okay, you’re done’ and I said ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t hit anything. What is this for?’ He said: ‘Familiarization, so you know what it is.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but that won’t do me any good.’ And he said, ‘Lieutenant, if the enemy gets close enough to you to fire that thing, throw it.’”
Phyllis also reflected on how she avoided PTSD.
“I never felt threatened, but I’m the kind of person I take my life one day at a time and really don’t often dwell too much on what might happen down the road. I think that might have something to do with how I came out of Vietnam. Also my very strong belief that in spite of everything we do to each other there is a God. Yes, he allows horrible things to happen, but I still believe He’s there.
Phyllis knows first-hand that not all veterans are so lucky.
“My younger brother served as a Navy helicopter crew chief in Vietnam. He was shot down a couple of times and came back with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One nurse was in the ER when her fiancé was brought in nearly dead. My own daughter got engaged in Afghanistan, and her fiancé’s helicopter had a hard landing and he was hospitalized with a concussion. Something like that is life changing and very traumatic. I didn’t have those kinds of things. I have memories that hurt, people that didn’t make it, children who didn’t make it. But I don’t have nightmares.”
Phyllis stayed in the Army and served until retiring as a lieutenant colonel in the late 1980s.
“I don’t regret going,” she said, reflecting on her time in Vietnam. “I would have gone again if we’d been there long enough. That’s what I was, I was an Army Nurse.”
Growing up in Pittsburgh, Jim McNally graduated from high school with an interest in art. He received a scholarship to art school and set off to follow in the footsteps of his childhood hero, Norman Rockwell.
But shortly after graduating from art school in 1968 he received word from the draft board that his number was up.
“I remember going down to the Federal Building and going up to that department. And there was a lady there with a great big giant book,” he said. “Everything was done by hand in those days. She opened up the giant ledger, and everybody was handwritten in there with their birthdate and information. And she looked at my name and said: ‘Oh, it looks like they’ll be calling you in about 90 days.’”
Jim went home and talked it over with his father. His father suggested he consider signing up for a specific job.
“I went and I talked with a recruiter and he said, ‘You know we have an excellent program where you can sign up to be an Army photographer. You’d go to basic training and then you would go to school to learn the skills of an Army photographer.’”
So in November 1968, Jim packed up and left for basic training at Fort Jackson. Right away he started to make his mark in the Army.
“I wound up being senior field leader of the company through an incident,” he said. “You’d train all day then you’d get in the chow line and wait an hour to eat. And invariably there was always a half-a-dozen hooligans who would run up jump in the front of the line. That happened to me, I was just ready to go in and eat and there were six tough guys or so who decided to push their way in. And I guess I snapped at that time, and I picked up an Army tray and beat all six of them up with that tray.
“The next day, I thought I was going to go to jail for sure, but the First Sergeant called me and says, ‘You’re our senior field leader for our company’ because I showed some kind of a spunk.”
“You got to realize,” he explained, “that Fort Jackson in ’68 was filled with thousands of recruits. It was organized mayhem. They were kind of glad to have someone who could bring a little order. I was never proud of it, but one thing leads to another.”
The need for manpower at Fort Jackson was so great that Jim ended up staying over after basic training for a few months, guiding newer soldiers through grenade and hand-to-hand combat before his slot opened up at photographer’s school.
After finishing photographer’s school he went home on leave, where he asked his art school sweetheart to marry him. “Everyone else told us to wait but we were in love.” They went to religious classes to prepare for marriage.
“I remember we were in the first class and Father Feldmeier said there would be another class the next week and for the next three weeks. And I said ‘Father Feldmeier, I leave for Vietnam in four days.’ And he said ‘Well, you’ll get married tomorrow.’ So that’s what we did, we got married, and off I went to Vietnam.”
Vietnam
Jim flew in to Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon. “We were held up in Japan because the airbase was on red alert. We went in the dark and you could see everything all lit up, flares and helicopters and searchlights on. It really looked like well, here we are, we’re in the war zone. We got off the plane and had to do a zig-zaggy run to the hangar, which was just sandbags and a quonset hut with a lightbulb in it. We spent the night in there. In the pre-dawn hours we loaded on buses wrapped in wire (to prevent anyone from throwing grenades in the window) and drove to the 90th Replacement Battalion.”
With no place to stay there, Jim and a group of about 16 soldiers lay their duffle bags in a ring, “circled the wagons” as Jim put it, and bedded down on the tarmac.
“We hadn’t eaten in a long time, and I remembered my mother had given me a bag of chocolate chip cookies just in case. I forgot about them. And I remember breaking those cookies out and passing them around. I’ll never forget the guy next to me says ‘Boy, talk about a way to go: eat a chocolate chip cookie and die.’ Because the whole place was lit up with incoming rounds. We thought that would be it for us right there and then, only to realize that was business as usual. No one at the 90th was upset.”
After three days Jim was assigned to the 53rd Signal Battalion at II Field Force in III Corps at a place called “Plantation,” the home base for the photographic corps. From there, photographers went throughout the III Corps area to provide photographic support for all Army operations. The work included aerial photography, combat photography, covering special stories and documenting the day in and day out activities of the Army.
“This was the summer of 1969,” he said. “A lot of the major operations, if I recall correctly, were no longer happening. I think the NVA and Viet Cong had all pulled back because the Paris peace talks were going on. Of course we thought that any day the war would be over, and did not realize it would drag on for quite a bit longer.
“A lot of our operations were trying to find enemy supplies, and every now and then rounds would come at us and there were ambushes and things like that. We did a lot of work up in the rubber plantations, but no major battles anymore. Most of the Viet Cong and the enemy, if we saw them at all, were shadowy figures. Or you found them when they were left behind and KIA’d.
“I remember tragedy and death could come at any time. I had a real good friend, Bill from West Virginia. He had finished his tour of duty and was going to go home, and I told him ‘Best of luck’. He said ‘I’ll be back’. I said ‘Don’t come back, go home, go home.’ He said ‘No, these are the best friends I’ve ever had in my life.’ And Bill came back a month later, and I don’t think he was back more than a week when he was killed in an accident in our motor pool. A deuce-and-a-half (truck) was stuck in the mud, and we had this great big gravel the size of grapefruits, and the wheels were turning and he jumped out to get a look and a rock came up and hit him in the head and the truck ran over him. It was that kind of a place. You didn’t have to be on patrol in the field to find the Angel of Death.”
Nearing the end
As more and more units pulled back, Jim’s unit ended up with responsibility for patrolling their own area and guarding their own perimeter. One night Jim volunteered to take charge of the guard so a friend could go on R&R.
“That night was uneventful, but in the pre-dawn the captain came around and said to be careful because none of the Vietnamese who worked on the base were coming in to work. That was usually a sign that there was going to be some kind of activity. The captain said ‘Jim, make sure you keep all the boys in the bunkers.’ Because what happens is that after a long night on bunker duty you’re stinky from all the mosquito repellent, you’re tired because you can’t sleep, and you want to get back in and get cleaned up. The captain said ‘Make sure they boys stay in the bunkers’ because as soon as dawn would break they’d get out of the bunker and sit on top of it and have a smoke.
“So I’m walking down the bunker line just at the crack of dawn, and I’m sort of double timing it, and I’m telling the boys ‘Get back in your bunker, we expect to get hit.’ And of course a lot of the guys, their response was ‘You lifer!’ or they’d give you the salute with their middle finger, pretty much disgruntled. But I made them get back in, and as soon as I turned to go back to the lead bunker everything opened up.
“All the rounds started coming in and I can still see them exploding purple. Anybody in their right mind would have hit the dirt and stayed there, but something told me I had to get back to the head bunker. So I ran that football field as the rounds were coming in and got back to the bunker without a scratch. I always felt so good that there were 24 guys that never got hurt that day. And you know what, all those guys that called me those names, very quietly afterwards I’d see them and they’d say ‘Thanks, Jim’ very quietly.”
But Jim rejects any notion that he is a hero. “There were acts of courage every day, we were just doing our duty, not looking for awards, we just wanted to win the war, save lives, and go home.”
When his time was up, Jim’s commanding officer wanted him to stay. But one afternoon a friend came flying up in a jeep. He had stolen Jim’s transfer orders, the papers he needed to board a plane, from the orderly room. They jumped into the jeep and drove off.
“All the way back to Tahn Son Nhut I expected to see MP’s behind me. I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until that plane was up in the air. And the neatest thing was, I got home the day before I left because of the international Date Line.”
Jim returned to the United States and met his 4-month-old son for the first time. He finished his enlistment working as a photographer at Carlisle Barracks. Jim still lives in the Carlisle area today, where he works as the Art Curator at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center.
Donald Bruce wanted to be a pilot at a young age.
“When I was growing up, my brother would build model airplanes,” said Bruce, a Western Pennsylvania native. “I would always go out and try to fly them and crash them. He wasn’t too happy about that.”
Bruce, a Vietnam War veteran and former Air Force instructor at the U.S. Army War College, followed his passion for flight by getting into ROTC at Penn State University and later going into the Air Force to become a pilot. He graduated in 1961 and received pilot training at the Moody Air Force Base in Georgia from 1962 to 1963.
“I had to wait until April of ‘62 to go into active duty because they were selecting people to go on a quarterly basis and I got the fourth,” Bruce said. “There was a post office that I worked at until then.”
Bruce saw his dream through, becoming a co-pilot of a KC135, a refueling aircraft that aided fighters and bombers entering and exiting Vietnam. Bruce’s aircraft was mainly responsible for providing planes with fuel as they exited Vietnam.
“I was never actually in Vietnam,” Bruce said. “I flew over it many times, but I was never actually stationed in the country. We would refuel the fighters and bombers on the way out (of Vietnam).”
Bruce said the refueling assignments would usually be done in two- to three-month periods, during which he would be stationed at either Takhli or Don Mueang in Thailand. Otherwise, he would typically be stationed in Guam or Okinawa.
Bruce said the aerial refueling process required extensive training and, occasionally, a necessary disregard for the rules.
“There is a lot of training that goes into flying planes in formation at 20,000 feet,” Bruce said. “We had rules of engagement that said you could only fly so far north to pick up planes flying out of Vietnam. You could only go so low to avoid damage to your plane from ground fire. We regularly violated those rules because some planes coming out were practically out of fuel. We sometimes had to go low to pick them up, and sometimes we went more north than we were supposed to. It was always a question of whether or not the people on the ground were going to take a shot at us.
“Another problem was when we were coming back, we sometimes had to go to (higher altitudes) in order to pick our way through thunderstorms on the way home,” Bruce added. “So we would go in low and come out high.”
After Vietnam, Bruce stayed with the KC135 business, becoming an instructor pilot. He was primarily responsible for training pilots transitioning from fighter planes into four engine tanker aircrafts.
“Many of (the pilots) were unhappy because they were basically fighter pilots,” Bruce said. “I had one (pilot) who was very unhappy in a multiengine airplane; he wanted to be in a single. I got tired of it, so one day I got him in a flight simulator and put him in a situation with single engine and I told him to fly it. He was sweating. I came back about a half hour later and he was still trying to fly it. I never heard another word.”
The remaining years of Bruce’s career saw Bruce moving between several different bases and positions. He spent time as an ROTC instructor in Maryland.
In the late 1980s, Bruce became one of three team chiefs involved with the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACAP), or “doomsday plane,” an aircraft intended to serve as a survivable platform on which to conduct military operations in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. The aircraft followed the president as a precautionary measure.
"I was the team chief of the battle staff on the 'doomsday plane,'" Bruce said. "I had about 20 people working for me - experts in their fields. We followed the president around and stayed in close proximity with him. If there was a nuclear attack, the president would come on board. We had to go everywhere he went; if he went to Europe, we went to Europe. We had different locations in the (United States) just to stay close to him. It was very interesting."
Bruce rounded out his involvement with the Air Force by returning to his home state and becoming an Air Force instructor at the U.S. Army War College in 1989. He retired in 1992.
“The war college was the last job I had," he said. "I lobbied to get that job because the only way to get back to PA was to get an army position because there is no Air Force base in PA. So I came back to retire here that way.
“I stay busy,” Bruce added. “It seems like I had more free time when I was working than I do now. I feel myself slowing down here and there, but I keep very busy.”
Christmas could be a lonely time for a soldier deployed in Vietnam.
For many, this holiday would be the first time that they were away from their families. Deployed to a strange country, and in the middle of a war zone, the holiday period could bring tears to the eyes of the most hardened of troops as they remembered their families’ celebrations back home.
The music on the Army Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN) often did not help. As the holiday approached, their radio stations across the country and on ships in the area would play a variety of Christmas music. According to some, Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” and Nat King Cole’s “A Christmas Song” were often on the playlist. However, while others remember hearing Bing Crosby or Johnny Mathis’ versions of “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” in some areas and on some stations, the song was banned as bad for morale.
The services – Army, Navy, Air Force and the Marines – all attempted to make the day special. Their most visible effort focused on the Christmas Day meal that unit mess or dining halls prepared. For those back in “the rear” or onboard ships, the meal could be outstanding. Highlights on the menu included shrimp cocktail, roast turkey with gravy, cornbread stuffing, rolls, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and a multitude of cakes and candies.
For those in the field, the meal often lacked the glamour of those served in the mess halls. If lucky, those in the field received their Christmas meal that was transported in insulated mermite containers. One local Field Artillery Soldier remembers receiving his Christmas meal on his firebase served on paper plates. Ammunition crates served as his dinner table. He appreciated his “feast” for he knew that many of the infantry troops outside his firebase, the least fortunate, consumed cold C-Rations, if their food could not be flown to their location.
The public back home also helped those deployed to Vietnam enjoy the season. Families would often send “care packages” that included cassette recordings of Christmas music, small artificial Christmas trees and tins of homemade cookies. The American Red Cross, schools and other civic organizations, public and private, would send notes, cards, letters and packages to those assigned in Vietnam. These small packages, often shared with others in the units and with Vietnamese orphanages that units’ sponsored, enhanced the morale of the troops at least for a few days.
While many USO shows traveled to Vietnam, the most notable and well-known program of the holiday was the Bob Hope Christmas Tour. A tradition that he started during World War II, Bob Hope visited Vietnam each Christmas season from 1964 to 1972. Soldiers in combat units and forward positions often received preference for the shows, and an opportunity to attend was always high on everyone’s wish list. His annual trip brought some of the more notable stars of their day to perform.
Hope would open his show with a monologue that often poked fun at the unit’s leadership. Then he would bring forward his female stars that brought smiles to those in the audience and often, by today’s standards, inappropriate cat calls. Celebrities such as Joey Heatherton, Raquel Welch, Ann Margaret, Connie Stevens, Jill Saint John and Nancy Sinatra would join Bob Hope in song and dance routines. Miss American or Ms. Universe would also frequently visit, and with Les Brown’s Orchestra providing the music and Dean Martin’s Gold Diggers’ dance routines, the event was memorable for all.
Each year, from 1965 until the withdrawal of combat troops in 1972; the United States, South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese government announced a Christmas truce. These truces lasted 24 to 48 hours, and for U.S. forces, only defensive actions or artillery fires to defend American troops were permitted. The war, however, was never far away even during these Christmas holiday truces and for those service members in combat units that remained in the field or forward firebases, the Christmas holiday could be surreal.
Carlisle resident, Don Bender, a retired special-forces sergeant, said his most enduring memory of the Vietnam War is a gruesome one. While waiting for the truce to begin “two of my people (were) killed on Christmas Eve.” Another veteran recalled his Christmas in Vietnam and how suddenly when the truce began the constant background noise of gunfire stopped at midnight. He remembers that it was so quiet that people actually woke up from the silence. In the distant valley, he could hear children singing.
Today our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines can pick up the phone, call home, or FaceTime or Skype home, and join in the families’ celebration. Those who served in Vietnam were not as lucky. We should appreciate our Vietnam Veteran’s sacrifices and service and, at the same time, remember all the men and women of our Armed Forces who are far away from home this holiday season.
His first hint of the scope of the humanitarian crisis was the long lines of South Vietnamese refugees waiting to board transport planes bound for relative safety on Guam.
Air Force Capt. Richard Mullery had noticed the desperate men, women and children on May 5, 1975 after his crew landed at the Cubi Point Naval Air Station on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
The South Middleton Township man was a navigator onboard an HC-130 of the 31st Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron assigned to Clark Air Force Base in the northern part of the island.
Intelligence reports mentioned how atrocities were being committed on prisoners-of-war by the North Vietnamese Army as it overran the South. The rapid advance of the enemy was causing widespread panic.
“They would shoot down soldiers in the streets whether they were surrendering or not,” recalled Mullery, a retired colonel. “They would put prisoners in a group and toss hand grenades in the middle of them.”
Soldiers and civilians alike were in jeopardy. A mass exodus was underway. As Saigon fell, helicopters flew out of the capital carrying survivors to U.S. Navy carriers stationed off the coast.
But Mullery was on a different kind of mission. His crew flew from Clark to Cubi to pick up a cargo of emergency medical supplies to air-drop into the South China Sea in close proximity to the USS Kirk.
The Navy escort was tasked with shepherding a flotilla of refugee ships from the coast of South Vietnam to Subic Bay, Philippines, through a 1,000-mile expanse of the Pacific Ocean known for its stormy weather.
“We knew they were bailing out on anything that floated,” Mullery said of the refugees. The flotilla included old and worn-out freighters, fishing vessels and pleasure boats, along with what remained of the South Vietnamese Navy.
The formation could only sail as fast as its slowest ship, which meant a slow crawl of about five knots. The Kirk had an engineering team assigned to handle any mechanical problems and to keep the ships running as long as possible.
There was only one medical professional available for a flotilla carrying 30,000 refugees. That person was a Navy corpsman on the Kirk who visited each ship to assess the condition of the survivors.
What the corpsman found was a wide range of medical issues including several women who were far along in their pregnancies. There were so many expectant mothers, the crew of the Kirk converted an entire section of the ship into a maternity ward.
The flotilla had set sail on April 28, 1975. By May 4, the situation had reached a crisis point where medical supplies were running out. The ship asked for help along a chain of command that ended with Mullery and his crew getting the assignment to air-drop supplies.
They loaded their plane with two 55-gallon drums packed to the brim with 600 pounds of medical supplies – everything from vaccines to bandages to diapers. The Kirk and the flotilla were about 300 miles out when the HC-130 took flight on its relief mission.
Mullery manned the airborne radar that picked up the formation at a range of 30 miles. “We came down from 25,000 feet,” he recalled. “The lower we got, the more I saw how the vessels were spread out. They were scattered for miles and miles. The decks were just crammed full of people literally shoulder to shoulder.”
The air drop went off without a hitch, and the Kirk sent out a motor boat to pick up the supplies. But there was another problem for the refugee flotilla. The Filipino leader Marcos had refused to allow the South Vietnamese warships to enter the territorial waters of the Philippines because the North Vietnamese had claimed ownership over the naval vessels.
Diplomacy kicked in and it was determined the warships were originally U.S. Navy vessels on loan to the government of South Vietnam. The solution was to reflag the ships American so they could enter Filipino waters.
Many years later, Mullery had the opportunity to meet the captain of the USS Kirk after a book was written and a documentary was made detailing the journey across the South China Sea. Fortunately for the refugees, the weather was calm and only one ship was lost on the trip. That ship was sunk by gunfire after its engines failed, and all of its passengers were evacuated to other vessels.
“It was the Navy guys that were doing the heavy lifting,” Mullery said. “We helped the Navy. The real story is the USS Kirk. I can’t say enough about those guys. I’ve never seen anything of that magnitude.”
A native of Yonkers, New York, Mullery entered the Air Force in 1970 and trained as a navigator. He had one assignment stateside before transferring to the 31st squadron in early 1973.
His deployment started shortly after the Treaty of Paris was signed ending U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Many of the POWs in the custody of North Vietnam were returned and the U.S. military was transitioning from the war in Vietnam back to the Cold War.
“We were in the process of pulling troops and equipment out,” said Mullery, adding that while he flew over Vietnam, he never landed in the country. “I was more involved in the draw down and the after-effects.”
Though his unit operated mostly out of Clark Air Force Base, occasionally it was staged out of Korat, Thailand, in support of a sister aerospace rescue and recovery squadron. Mullery flew on about two dozen combat support missions in which his plane was assigned to fly an orbit around a section of ocean in the outgoing flight path of U.S. fighters redeploying out of Vietnam.
Called “duck butt” missions, the objective of these flights was to track the fighters on radar, rescue downed pilots if necessary and to help coordinate command and control with bases on land. One time, an Air Force fighter plane developed a fuel leak that prompted its pilot to radio for help. Mullery and his crew provided the pilot with navigational vectors to shorten his flight path to the Philippines.
“He landed safely but he was sucking fumes,” Mullery said.
Joe Boslet chose an unusual method of avoiding the draft: he enlisted in the Army.
“No one in my family has ever been drafted,” he explains. “All the way back to the Civil War, every war, all volunteers. I wasn’t going to be the first.”
A college graduate with a degree in engineering, Joe hoped that by enlisting he could get into military intelligence. Willing to serve, he hoped he could avoid going to Vietnam.
The Army sent Joe for 16 weeks of counter-intelligence training, but when they sent him to the Defense Language Institute to learn Vietnamese, he knew the game was up. They also promoted him to Sergeant and offered him the chance to attend Officers Candidate School. He declined.
“I’d rather be a smart sergeant than a dumb lieutenant,” he says. “I didn’t know enough to be an officer in the Infantry, which is where I would have ended up. I didn’t want to be responsible for other people’s lives in a place where bad decisions could get someone killed.”
Joe flew into Saigon in October 1970. “We arrived about 30 minutes after a rocket attack and saw all this smoke and confusion, and I thought ‘Holy cow, what am I doing here?’”
Joe was sent to a tiny base near Cambodia and several outlets of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “I was assigned to MACV, Advisory Team 67 in Phuoc Long Province, Bo Duc District in III Corps, about a 100 miles north of Saigon. We worked with Special Forces out of Bu Dop. We briefed ‘black pajama Delta’ and LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols) who moved through our area into Cambodia (and would never be seen again by us). But this was not our primary mission objective, which was to get information on what the ‘bad’ guys were up to in our area.”
Joe also did some work for the Phoenix Program. “We weren’t conducting assassinations. Maybe that stuff was going on elsewhere, but not where we were.”
Joe describes his work as straightforward counter insurgency work. “When the VC (Viet Cong) and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) came through an area, they would set up a shadow government to operate in the area to control it and undermine the legitimate government. My job was to gather intelligence and conduct operations to neutralize that government. As part of that, I ran a network of informants all the way up into Cambodia.
“People gave us information because we paid them in food and other goods,” he adds. “But they wanted us there. They hated the Russians and Chinese and were afraid of the NVA. We treated them OK and gave them stuff. They could engage in commerce because of us. Without us, the NVA would come through on recruiting drives and take their kids, 15-year-old kids. They feared that, they feared the area becoming a combat zone, and they feared a return to the feudal system that existed before we got there, that we discouraged.”
Joe rated the reliability of the informant from A to E, and the quality of the information from 1 to 5. “1A info was really good stuff you could act on. 5E was junk. The C3 info is tricky, and you have to look for corroboration.”
Sometimes Joe had trouble convincing his superiors to trust his information. “One officer didn’t believe me until I told him ‘If I give you bad information I die first.’ He replied, ‘That’s a hell of a good answer.’”
Joe trusted the abilities and intentions of his commanders in Vietnam, especially Gen. Creighton Abrams, the overall commander in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. But he worried about elected leaders back home who were making decisions based on politics, not sound military strategy. “I wasn’t afraid to die,” he said. “I was afraid of dying stupid.”
Because he spoke the language and respected local customs, Joe got on well with the local population. “I had a good Christian upbringing, so I tried to treat everyone with respect. The folks there appreciated that. I was friends with the district chief, and I even got invited to some Buddhist ceremonies. No other Americans got that.”
Joe work out of a field base with six U.S. Special Forces operative and Vietnamese troops. He lived in a bunker 8 feet underground, a necessity because the base was shelled 8-10 times a month. The Vietnamese troops fell into two categories: Regional Forces/Popular Forces, which he refers to as “Rough Puffs” and Provincial Recon Units, or PRU’s.
“I didn’t think much (of) Rough Puffs,” says Joe. “They were like a local militia. I could go to downtown Carlisle and pick 50 random people and get better soldiers than these guys.”
The PRU’s were a different story. “They were pretty good; I could use them for serious ops. In any other circumstances, though, I wouldn’t advise you to turn your backs on them.”
A “typical” day for Joe began around 4 a.m. “You got up early because the enemy liked to attack early.”
Joe and another NCO, Sergeant First Class Yearman, first saw to the generators and radios, critical gear for the small force given that the nearest U.S. forces were 25 miles away through unsecured territory. They would conduct the morning radio check and sort through the latest intelligence reports.
Then they made breakfast for the troops. “We had C and K rations, but we had some #10 cans of other food, and we traded for local food because the Army rations were pretty bad. I still love Vietnamese food to this day.”
After breakfast, the team would meet to plan the day. Joe was in high demand on field operations because of his ability to speak Vietnamese. The Green Berets did not fully trust their local translators. In fact, when Joe first arrived, he was told not to let them know he spoke Vietnamese so he could listen without their knowing to see if their translations were accurate. “They weren’t always,” Joe says, “and after that they wanted me along a lot to keep tabs on the translation.”
“I saw a fair amount of combat,” he adds. “My CO, Capt. Brian Roberts, taught me what to do, which was first get down; second, say a prayer, but not too long because then you had to get up and do the third thing, which was shoot back.” Joe left Vietnam with two bronze stars, one for valor in combat.
After lunch the team would head out to work on local infrastructure projects. “The business about hearts and minds wasn’t a joke,” he says, “it was real. It felt good to be part of an Army that tried to make people’s lives better. And it was a good way to get their cooperation.” He estimates they spent about 30 percent of their time on operations and 70 percent of their time helping people.
At night, Joe would sometimes go out on operations for the Phoenix Program.
“We didn’t do assassinations, we did raids. We’d go to the village around 2-3 a.m. and roust the guy out of bed and bring him in. I’d sit him down, give him a cigarette and a Coke and talk to him. We wouldn’t hit him, thought the Vietnamese would, but I got my information just talking to them. I could learn a lot from the questions they wouldn’t answer. After a while we sent them up to higher headquarters.”
Joe saw a side of the war that few people saw. “Once a month a yellow airplane would land at the airfield and a guy in business clothes would get out with a briefcase. He was bringing money to bribe the VC to leave the rubber plantations alone.”
Another time, while out doing a damage assessment for an artillery barrage, Joe discovered a bag of white powder in a dead North Vietnamese’s backpack. “It was 99 percent pure pharmaceutical grade cocaine, manufactured in China, sent south for sale to U.S. troops. Anything to undermine our efforts.”
The shadow government operated much like a legitimate government. “We found logs for the timber industry that had Viet Cong tax stamps on them. The VC levied taxes to fund their government just like any other.”
After a year, Joe’s tour of duty came to an end and when he returned to the U.S. Landing in San Francisco, he had his first encounter with anti-war protests. “Things were said to us. We had to be in class A uniform to buy our tickets, but we changed out of uniform as soon as we could.”
Joe got out of the Army. He got job offers from the CIA and DIA, but decided to return to the private sector. Looking back he says, “I’ll never forget how noisy combat is, and the feeling of being angry at the people for shooting at me. It took me about six months to readjust to civilian life. It was easier for me than some guys. I think it helped that I was older than most guys, and that I was deployed with experienced guys who really helped me cope.”
“I had a good term of service,” Joe says. “I worked hard and did my best and got appropriate recognition for my efforts. I loved the guys I was with and still stay in touch with some of them. I drew on my experience throughout my life, and I still do. Sometimes I say, ‘This isn’t bad. Imagine if someone was shooting at you and you hadn’t eaten in two days. That’s bad.’”
Jeff Rudolph knew he was destined to become a part of the Vietnam War—military involvement was in his family.
“I knew I would probably end up in Vietnam eventually,” Rudolph said. “My father was in World War II. He was an engineer in a B17 bomber in the Air Force.”
Rudolph, a Boiling Springs native who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, enlisted in the Air Force himself in 1968. He completed basic training in San Antonio en route to becoming a military police officer.
“I wanted to become a military police officer in the Air Force,” Rudolph said. “That was what I wanted to do.”
Rudolph’s first duty as a Security Forces Specialist was an assignment at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, located just outside of Detroit, Michigan. However, it was on Dec. 3, 1969 that a much larger call of duty presented itself. Rudolph was sent into Vietnam, where he was stationed at a marine base in Da Nang, the largest city on the southcentral coast of Vietnam.
“When I left here to go over (to Vietnam), it was the first part of December and it was pretty cold, and when I finally landed, it was so hot and humid,” Rudolph said. “It was a big difference because it had been snowing when we left. Then I had to catch a C130 to Da Nang, and when we got there it was monsoon season and there was torrential rain. It was definitely a big reality check.”
Rudolph and his fellow Security Forces officers acted as part of a special responsibilities unit and held the duty of keeping the base secure. They were responsible to defend one side while the Marines oversaw the other side.
“We secured the base,” Rudolph said. “Most of the time it was during the night or early morning hours. Our main job was to keep the perimeter secure and to defend several gates leading into the base from the outside. Halfway through the tour, we joined with the Marines in some of the duties. We basically responded to enemy intrusion and things like rocket mortar attacks and the aftermath.”
Rudolph spent just over a year at Da Nang. He began his trip home on Dec. 6, 1970.
After being discharged from the Air Force in 1972, Rudolph continued to serve as a police officer — this time by becoming involved with local law enforcement in Cumberland County.
“Before I was discharged, I was offered a pretty lucrative position (with the Air Force), but my goal was to come back to my roots,” Rudolph said. “I was married by then and had a child, so we wanted to come back and see what life meant back home.”
Rudolph spent a year with the Sheriff’s Department, five years with the Carlisle Police and 32 years with the North Middleton Township Police, the last of which he retired from as chief in 2011. He said that while the experience in Vietnam had its own unique learning curve, his time in the military helped prepare him for certain aspects of the civilian job.
“It’s always a learning experience no matter what you did before,” Rudolph said. “There are always new experiences. Things change and you have to adapt to those changes, so I think my experience did make it somewhat easier because I did have four years of military service compared to someone who never did. It certainly made me grow up really quick.”
Rudolph said his time at Da Nang yielded a variety of experiences and memories.
“There are quite a few (memories),” Rudolph said. “You don’t forget certain things. I do keep in touch with some of my buddies that were stationed at the same base with me. A lot of them ended up doing the same thing that I did—they went into the law enforcement after they were discharged.”
Rudolph said he remains in contact with old friends and fellow officers through a Facebook group.
“I was just asking (the other people in the group) about what they had eaten for Christmas when we (were in Vietnam),” Rudolph said. “I also asked them about when Bob Hope came to Da Nang towards the end of (the tour); I was on post, but I remember I was in earshot and could hear the applause. Certain things I see on TV or hear during times of the year bring me back to it all.”
Today, Rudolph said he enjoys spending time with his family. He is a member and former commander of Boiling Springs VFW Post 8851 and a member of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 542.
“I enjoy my family,” Rudolph said. “I’m married and have three children, seven grandchildren and two golden retrievers that certainly keep me active. I do what I can.
“Sometimes I think that maybe I should have stayed (with the Air Force) and retired sooner, but it all worked out,” he added. “I have no regrets.”
Robert W. Black was born in June 1929 in Carlisle, and he grew up on a farm outside of the town.
His father worked as the chief engineer for the C.H. Masland plant in Carlisle. Growing up in the country, Black learned to love the outdoors; but claims that in his one room schoolhouse, his family’s background and his father’s employment made him a “city slicker.” He often suffered name calling from his peers and learned to fight to prove his toughness. He also learned how to take a blow and that sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
These lessons would serve him well in his Army career.
Black enlisted in the Army in 1949 and volunteered for the infantry and for Airborne School. When the Korean War broke out, he was serving with the 82nd Airborne Division. Black did not want to sit out the war. “I knew the Korean War and I were made for each other” he wrote, so he volunteered for one of the Army’s newly formed Ranger companies.
The Korean War shaped his attitudes about Soldiers and combat. The 100-man Ranger Company in which he served provided the U.S. Army division it supported with important capabilities. Rangers specialize in patrolling, the art, as Black puts it of “small groups of men moving by stealth on a reconnaissance or combat mission.”
That meant Black would see plenty of action in Korea. In his unit, the 8th Ranger Company, Black carried a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) for his squad.
In 1954, Black received a direct commission as a 2nd Lieutenant of Infantry, and he served in various stateside and overseas assignments. These assignments prepared him for conventional war against the Soviets.
When he arrived in Vietnam in November 1967, he found he was unprepared for many of the tasks he faced in a counterinsurgency. He would need to learn a new form of warfare.
Maj. Black was assigned to the Military Assistance Command (MACV) when he arrived and served as a district adviser based in the town of Rack Kein. His job was to facilitate support to the Vietnamese district administrator who controlled an area similar in size to Cumberland County.
Black was required to help coordinate economic development assistance and assist his Vietnamese counterpart prepare the local militia units that would secure the local villages. He had no direct control of American or Republic of Vietnam combat units and had to plead for their support and assistance. He also could not direct his Vietnamese district counterpart to take any action.
His initial assessment was the district adviser faced challenges supporting the American or the South Vietnamese governments’ efforts to build loyalty within the villages and their inhabitants. The Viet Cong owned the region at night, and the American and South Vietnamese regular army units seldom stayed long enough to gain the trust of the local inhabitants.
Coordination among these regular army units and the local popular force militia and regional force companies often did not occur. Inefficiencies and corruption harm the civic and economic development programs. Complicating his situation, the U.S. Army had not placed any emphasis on soldiers learning to speak Vietnamese, so Black had little ability to communicate with his Vietnamese counterpart.
Black’s Ranger mentality took over. His first priority was to secure and protect his own military staff and then build the capabilities of his Vietnamese counterpart. Before he arrived, his town had never been attacked. Yet, he demanded his soldiers build bunkers and coordinate their defense with the nearby American infantry battalion and artillery company.
Some of his soldiers questioned the need. However, when the first accurate mortar attack hit his headquarters weeks later; his troops thanked him for pushing their efforts beyond what they thought was necessary.
Black’s ability to support his Vietnamese counterpart was more difficult to correct. Some issues were the result of cultural differences. Some were based on time – Black was there for a year, the counterpart was there forever.
Additionally, inefficiencies and lack of coordination in the American and Vietnamese supply system made obtaining support and supplies harder. Black admitted that he and his fellow advisers lived in a “middle world.” They “were not privileged to enjoy the many benefits of the American supply system” and had difficulty understanding the Vietnamese culture. They often referred to U.S. officials as “the Americans” as if they had lost all ties with their own country.
To get his job done, Black and his staff reverted to an old-time soldier practice of scrounging and bartering. This process became the source of the supplies and materials that supported his efforts. He bartered “war trophies” such as Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Regular Forces’ helmets, weapons and flags to soldiers and defense contractors that lived in the secure areas near Saigon. They traded these items for fuel, generators, lumber, radios, ammunition and weapons.
Through this process, he developed a civics works program. He improved medical support in the district and helped build a larger market in the central town of Rack Kein. At the same time, the better weapons and training of his local militia forces served his district well during TET Offense during the Vietnamese New Year in late January 1968 and throughout his tenure in the district.
Black departed Vietnam in fall 1968. He was initially assigned to an ROTC program at the University of Miami and subsequently served on the United States Pacific Command Staff in Hawaii. His final assignment returned him home to Carlisle, and he retired from the service in 1978.
Today Col. Black continues to distinguish himself as the foremost historian of the American Ranger. He is the author of “Rangers in Korea” and “Rangers in World War II.” He founded the Ranger Research Collection at the U.S. Military History Institute, which includes the largest collection of Ranger photographs in existence. Col. Black was the founding president of the Association of the Ranger Infantry Companies (Airborne) of the Korean War.
As he looks back on his life, he comments that “Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II had a profound impact on me. It was my privilege to fight two hot wars and one cold war for my country.”
