Ed Gaydos's Blog, page 20

Ernie Dublisky – The Father of Battery B – Part One

The Boys of Battery B

Ernie Dublisky

A wall in his family room is covered with combat and campaign medals earned over a 22-year Army career. Among them are three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

To celebrate his 80th birthday just a year earlier he went up nearly three miles in a light airplane, jumped from the door, and stayed in free fall for two miles before deploying his chute. “I was airborne in the military and had already made 22 jumps, but nothing was as thrilling as this.” Ernie has to get a hip replaced in a few weeks and says, “Then I’m gonna do it again.”

B battery had been in Vietnam only eight months when Captain Ernie Dublisky took over. He found men who were poorly trained, and worse, were demoralized over a firing mishap that killed a U.S. soldier and resulted in dismissal of their battery commander. Within months Ernie made the battery, in the eyes of General Linton Boatwright, commander of artillery forces for nearly half of Vietnam, the best battery in all of corps artillery.

It stayed the best throughout its six years in Vietnam, always going by the name that Ernie had given it early in his command – The Bulls. After Ernie’s departure the battery became a showplace for visiting dignitaries. It was not always well led, but it kept its reputation as the best battery in the battalion, proof that a military tradition of excellence has a momentum that can survive a few lousy leaders.

By any definition Captain Ernie Dublisky is the father of B battery.

 

I showed up in June of ’66. At the time I had a troubled tour in Korea as a captain. I got into a big harangue with the assistant artillery commander. He and I went round and round and he gave it to me good in my efficiency report. So I got passed over for promotion. I said to myself, Well the only way I’m going to get a promotion – I was a career officer even though I was reserve – is to go to Vietnam and get in command of a battery and do well. That was my purpose. I volunteered.

I was in Germany and every night a twit would come in from the Department of the Army and pick officers out of the division and send them to a training base in the states mostly, and some to Vietnam. I said to myself, Hey I’m not going to any training base in the states. I want to get to Vietnam, so I volunteered. I said, “How long do you think I’ll have between the time I volunteer and the time they send me to Vietnam?”

They said, “Oh, you’ll have a few months.”

I had my family in Germany, so I was looking for a little time. One month after I volunteered I was in Saigon. Not long at all. They didn’t tell me that.

So I show up in Saigon and said, “I want to get to a field artillery battalion.” I just kept moving north and finally I ended up at the 27th. I  was plunked down on the beach at Tuy Hoa, which was the base camp. The battalion commander’s name was Jack Hoffmann. He was a pretty boy, a West Pointer, all his creases were in order. I don’t think he ever left the base camp. He was a typical West Point Lt. Colonel who was in Vietnam to get promoted. There was a lot of that going on in Vietnam then. He really didn’t care much about the battalion, or the batteries, or the troops. He cared a lot about himself. He was a very handsome guy, resplendent in his uniform, and about one inch deep. But I can’t say anything bad about him. He treated me well. I had my interview and I just told him frankly, “I’m here to take command of a battery. That’s what I came for.”

It just so happened there had been a firing accident and the battery commander had been relieved. When I got there he was gone, and the battery had a terrible reputation. They were lolling around, rotting away in the base camp. They didn’t even send them out in the field on operations. They had a terrible reputation.

I guess Hoffmann didn’t think he was doing me any favors, but he gave me the battery. He said, “I’m giving you the battery, and you’re going out on an operation today. I want you to go over to the S3 Operations tent. They’re going to give you your goose egg (landing site), then we’re going to take you down to your battery and introduce you to the battery, and you’re going to take the battery out on an operation.” That was operation Nathan Hale which began the next day. I went and met the S3, got my goose egg, got into a jeep, went down to the battery, met the 1st Sergeant.

I was lucky. I was a little older. I was commissioned in ’55, so I’d been around for 10 years. I had four years in Germany in the 3rd Armored Division. I had a lot of battery level experience. All of that training just flooded back through my mind, and I knew exactly what to say to the 1st Sergeant. “First Sergeant, I’m gonna be back in 20 minutes. I want you to have the advance party ready. We’re going to go out on an operation.”

I went and put my stuff away, went back to the battery and when I got there they had an advance party ready to go. Took the advance party and we went to a place called The Cross Roads. Again, everything that I did, it was like doing an exercise in Grafenberg – just like doing it all over again. Except that things that I did were kind of by-the-book. It was hurry up, get ready and go.

This floored the battalion commander and the XO and the S3 because nobody was doing these things. Doing it like it was supposed to be done. Like filling sand bags and making the battery safe for the troops, filling empty ammo boxes with sand and putting them up around the tubes. We did all those things the way I knew it should be done.

It turned out that this suddenly converted the battery. They found themselves. They recognized what they should be doing, and they began to do it. The bad reputation they had quickly disappeared.

It was an operation at The Cross Road (west of Tuy Hoa) in support of the 502nd of the 101st Airborne. They were being overrun and from the FO we got the danger close alert (firing close in to U.S. troops). I remember walking between the guns telling these guys what danger close was all about. The battery was not well trained and these were guys who were down in the mouth a week before. Well, we stopped the attack just by the accuracy of our fire. The battalion commander – Wasco was the guy’s name – mace a special trip to visit us and say, “You saved our ass.”

We were out in that position for about a week when the S3 came to me and said, “Hey, do you know anything about air assault operations?”

Just luckily my previous assignment had been with the 18th Airborne corps, and I had been an umpire and an observer on air assault exercises. I had been through many, many helicopter lift operations.

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “You’re gonna reinforce the 19th Artillery of the 1st Cavalry division. You’re going to air assault into a position for Nathan Hale. Be ready to go in two days.”

This battery had never been in a helicopter air assault operation. But two days later we rigged up all our equipment, lifted out, and air assaulted into our position. It went like clock work, it was just perfect. That was the beginning of B battery’s reputation as the best battery in the battalion. They began to become proud of themselves.

The operation was so successful that the brigade commander made a special trip over to tell us thanks. He was General Hal Moore who later became famous. He wrote a book about his fight up in the Asau Valley the year before and which they made into a movie with Mel Gibson playing Moore. We Were Soldiers was the name of it. General Moore was so pleased with the support we gave reinforcing the 19th Artillery that he made a special trip.

Early on I designated B battery The Bulls. I thought, Hey, it’s a great morale thing. I don’t know where I found them, but I found this set of horns. I thought, We’re The Bulls, and I’m gonna mount these horns on the commander’s jeep. So we mounted these horns on the jeep. I didn’t find out until years later that what I’d mounted on the jeep were goat horns. Had I only known!

I’ll bet those goat horns on the jeep were still there (during your time).

No, the horns were gone. But The Bravo Bulls stuck as the name of the battery. We were proud of that.

For the six months that I commanded the battery the most wonderful time I had, the most wonderful operation besides that first air assault, was an operation west of Tuy Hoa about 15 or 20 kilometers out in the boonies. That was December of ’66, when monsoon season had just ended. I went out there in a helicopter to do my recon. From the helicopter looking down on the ground, all I could see was greenery. I picked out a position for the battery to go in.

When we arrived there by road, it turned out that it was submerged. I mean it was just full of water. You couldn’t see that from the air, all you saw was grass. This was really terrific. I said, “OK guys if we drive our vehicles into this area we’re gonna be livin’ like dogs for the whole time we’re there. We’re gonna carry the battery in. We’re not gonna get off the road, but we’re gonna carry all of our equipment in.”

We had PSP planks (10 foot pierced steel planks used for portable runways). I said, “We’re gonna use the PSP like a tank tread. We’re gonna lay the PSP down. We’re gonna drive the prime mover (truck used to tow howitzers) up on the PSP, pick up the piece that we drove over and put it down in front, and keep moving forward.”

So that’s what we did with the prime movers and got all the howitzers moved in. We put the guns on the PSP. Everywhere we could we built up PSP platforms. And then we carried all the section equipment in: every piece of equipment, every round of ammunition was hand carried into the position. It took us all night to get into that position. No vehicles were permitted to come into the position.

The whole area was rice paddies, so there was no elevated ground. There were two or three other batteries out there, and we were the only battery that made the effort to stay dry. As a result General Boatwright, who was the II Corps artillery commander, made a visit one day and when he left he said to me, “This is the best battery I’ve seen.” And boy the troops really ate that up. By the way, that really pissed off all the other batteries, but who cares. (laughs)

That was my last operation with B battery.

General Linton S. Boatwright was not the type to say what he didn’t mean. He had served in WWII under General Patton in the sweep across Europe: at the Battle of the Bulge, across the Rhine River and into Austria. During the early phases of the Korean War he had participated in the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, the link-up with MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon, the drive north toward the Yalu River and the retreat from North Korea when the Chinese entered the war, eventually driving the Chinese and North Korean forces out of South Korea. He then coordinated artillery fire support in the successful assault upon Heartbreak Ridge, one of the toughest campaigns of the Korean War. Later he would be the presiding officer at President Eisenhower’s funeral.

Ernie Dublisky – The Father of Battery B

The Boys of Battery B

Ernie Dublisky

Part One

A wall in his family room is covered with combat and campaign medals earned over a 22-year Army career. Among them are three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

To celebrate his 80th birthday just a year earlier he went up nearly three miles in a light airplane, jumped from the door, and stayed in free fall for two miles before deploying his chute. “I was airborne in the military and had already made 22 jumps, but nothing was as thrilling as this.” Ernie has to get a hip replaced in a few weeks and says, “Then I’m gonna do it again.”

B battery had been in Vietnam only six months when Captain Ernie Dublisky took over. He found men who were poorly trained, and worse, were demoralized over a firing mishap that killed a U.S. soldier and resulted in dismissal of their battery commander. Within months Ernie made the battery, in the eyes of General Linton Boatwright, commander of artillery forces for nearly half of Vietnam, the best battery in all of corps artillery.

It stayed the best throughout its six years in Vietnam, always going by the name that Ernie had given it early in his command – The Bulls. After Ernie’s departure the battery became a showplace for visiting dignitaries. It was not always well led, but it kept its reputation as the best battery in the battalion, proof that a military tradition of excellence has a momentum that can survive a few lousy leaders.

By any definition Captain Ernie Dublisky is the father of B battery.

 

I showed up in June of ’66. At the time I had a troubled tour in Korea as a captain. I got into a big harangue with the assistant artillery commander. He and I went round and round and he gave it to me good in my efficiency report. So I got passed over for promotion. I said to myself, Well the only way I’m going to get a promotion – I was a career officer even though I was reserve – is to go to Vietnam and get in command of a battery and do well. That was my purpose. I volunteered.

I was in Germany and every night a twit would come in from the Department of the Army and pick officers out of the division and send them to a training base in the states mostly, and some to Vietnam. I said to myself, Hey I’m not going to any training base in the states. I want to get to Vietnam, so I volunteered. I said, “How long do you think I’ll have between the time I volunteer and the time they send me to Vietnam?”

They said, “Oh, you’ll have a few months.”

I had my family in Germany, so I was looking for a little time. One month after I volunteered I was in Saigon. Not long at all. They didn’t tell me that.

So I show up in Saigon and said, “I want to get to a field artillery battalion.” I just kept moving north and finally I ended up at the 27th. I  was plunked down on the beach at Tuy Hoa, which was the base camp. The battalion commander’s name was Jack Hoffmann. He was a pretty boy, a West Pointer, all his creases were in order. I don’t think he ever left the base camp. I can’t say anything bad about him. He treated me well. I had my interview and I just told him frankly, “I’m here to take command of a battery. That’s what I came for.”

It just so happened there had been a firing accident and the battery commander had been relieved. When I got there he was gone, and the battery had a terrible reputation. They were lolling around, rotting away in the base camp. They didn’t even send them out in the field on operations. They had a terrible reputation.

I guess Hoffmann didn’t think he was doing me any favors, but he gave me the battery. He said, “I’m giving you the battery, and you’re going out on an operation today. I want you to go over to the S3 Operations tent. They’re going to give you your goose egg (landing site), then we’re going to take you down to your battery and introduce you to the battery, and you’re going to take the battery out on an operation.” That was operation Nathan Hale which began the next day. I went and met the S3, got my goose egg, got into a jeep, went down to the battery, met the 1st Sergeant.

Now this is really I think a neat thing. To me this whole piece was exactly like all the exercises I’d been through in Germany. All of that training just flooded back through my mind, and I knew exactly what to say to the 1st Sergeant. “First Sergeant, I’m gonna be back in 20 minutes. I want you to have the advance party ready. We’re going to go out on an operation.”

I went and put my stuff away, went back to the battery and when I got there they had an advance party ready to go. Took the advance party and we went to a place called The Cross Roads. Again, everything that I did, it was like doing an exercise in Grafenberg – just like doing it all over again. Except that things that I did were kind of by-the-book. It was hurry up, get ready and go.

This floored the battalion commander and the XO and the S3 because nobody was doing these things. Doing it like it was supposed to be done. Like filling sand bags and making the battery safe for the troops, filling empty ammo boxes with sand and putting them up around the tubes. We did all those things the way I knew it should be done.

It turned out that this suddenly converted the battery. They found themselves. They recognized what they should be doing, and they began to do it. The bad reputation they had quickly disappeared.

It was an operation at The Cross Road (west of Tuy Hoa) in support of the 502nd of the 101st Airborne. They were being overrun and from the FO we got the danger close alert (firing close in to U.S. troops). I remember walking between the guns telling these guys what danger close was all about. The battery was not well trained and these were guys who were down in the mouth a week before. Well, we stopped the attack just by the accuracy of our fire. The battalion commander – Wasco was the guy’s name – mace a special trip to visit us and say, “You saved our ass.”

We were out in that position for about a week when the S3 came to me and said, “Hey, do you know anything about air assault operations?”

Just luckily my previous assignment had been with the 18th Airborne corps, and I had been an umpire and an observer on air assault exercises. I had been through many, many helicopter lift operations.

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “You’re gonna reinforce the 19th Artillery of the 1st Cavalry division. You’re going to air assault into a position for Nathan Hale. Be ready to go in two days.”

This battery had never been in a helicopter air assault operation. But two days later we rigged up all our equipment, lifted out, and air assaulted into our position. It went like clock work, it was just perfect. That was the beginning of B battery’s reputation as the best battery in the battalion. They began to become proud of themselves.

The operation was so successful that the brigade commander made a special trip over to tell us thanks. He was General Hal Moore who later became famous. He wrote a book about his fight up in the Asau Valley the year before and which they made into a move with Mel Gibson playing General Moore. We Were Soldiers was the name of it. General Moore was so pleased with the support we gave reinforcing the 19th Artillery that he made a special trip.

Early on I designated B battery The Bulls. I thought, Hey, it’s a great morale thing. I don’t know where I found them, but I found this set of horns. I thought, We’re The Bulls, and I’m gonna mount these horns on the commander’s jeep. So we mounted these horns on the jeep. I didn’t find out until years later that what I’d mounted on the jeep were goat horns. Had I only known!

I’ll bet those goat horns on the jeep were still there (during your time).

No, the horns were gone. But The Bravo Bulls stuck as the name of the battery. We were proud of that.

For the six months that I commanded the battery the most wonderful time I had, the most wonderful operation besides that first air assault, was an operation west of Tuy Hoa about 15 or 20 kilometers out in the boonies. That was December of ’66, when monsoon season had just ended. I went out there in a helicopter to do my recon. From the helicopter looking down on the ground, all I could see was greenery. I picked out a position for the battery to go in.

When we arrived there by road, it turned out that it was submerged. I mean it was just full of water. You couldn’t see that from the air, all you saw was grass. This was really terrific. I said, “OK guys if we drive our vehicles into this area we’re gonna be livin’ like dogs for the whole time we’re there. We’re gonna carry the battery in. We’re not gonna get off the road, but we’re gonna carry all of our equipment in.”

We had PSP planks (10 foot pierced steel planks used for portable runways). I said, “We’re gonna use the PSP like a tank tread. We’re gonna lay the PSP down. We’re gonna drive the prime mover (truck used to tow howitzers) up on the PSP, pick up the piece that we drove over and put it down in front, and keep moving forward.”

So that’s what we did with the prime movers and got all the howitzers moved in. We put the guns on the PSP. Everywhere we could we built up PSP platforms. And then we carried all the section equipment in: every piece of equipment, every round of ammunition was hand carried into the position. It took us all night to get into that position. No vehicles were permitted to come into the position.

The whole area was rice paddies, so there was no elevated ground. There were two or three other batteries out there, and we were the only battery that made the effort to stay dry. As a result General Boatwright, who was the II Corps artillery commander, made a visit one day and when he left he said to me, “This is the best battery I’ve seen.” And boy the troops really ate that up. By the way, that really pissed off all the other batteries, but who cares. (laughs)

That was my last operation with B battery.

General Linton S. Boatwright was not the type to say what he didn’t mean. He had served in WWII under General Patton in the sweep across Europe: at the Battle of the Bulge, across the Rhine River and into Austria. During the early phases of the Korean War he had participated in the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, the link-up with MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon, the drive north toward the Yalu River and the retreat from North Korea when the Chinese entered the war, eventually driving the Chinese and North Korean forces out of South Korea. He then coordinated artillery fire support in the successful assault upon Heartbreak Ridge, one of the toughest campaigns of the Korean War. Later he would be the presiding officer at President Eisenhower’s funeral.

Jim Vipond – Gun Crew, Forward Observer, Ammo Section

The Boys of Battery B

 Jim Vipond

 

Jim was at LZ Sherry on a gun crew for four months with Mike Lauricella showed up in September of 1969. They have remained friends ever since.

I sit with the two of them at Mike’s place, in his motorcycle shop, now quiet and empty, no longer alive with the clank of wrenches, the walls covered with silent motorcycle memorabilia.  Mike is the talkative one.  Jim is content to listen while Mike talks through his slides. An hour goes by and I begin to worry that I will miss Jim’s stories, so when there is a break in the action I turn in Jim’s direction and say, “Jim, tell me about your time at Sherry.”

The day that I got to Sherry (in May of 1969), it was like 4 o’clock in the afternoon, I was down at the chopper pad and just got off the chopper when this big explosion goes off. I did not jump because I was so new I did not know what was happening. Come to find out it was a big rocket.  I was not even smart enough to be scared at that point. I thought maybe it was a gunshot, one of ours. It hit outside the wire and didn’t do any damage. But it was a hell of a big rocket, the biggest they had ever seen, and we never took in another one the whole time I was there. The big rockets were not very accurate.

We got mortared all the time, and I was on the gun right next to base piece when it got hit. Pyle died and everybody else in the pit got wounded. And a guy on Gun 2 also died. There’s nothing in the day reports about that incident at all. It was August 12. I was on Gun 6 I think, so I know what happened. That night, I won’t get into it, but that is part of my trauma. One of them anyway.

I say, “You told me on the phone that you volunteered to go out on an FO team with the infantry. I have a selfish reason for asking. I did the same thing and wonder what was on your mind.

Right after base piece got hit I volunteered because I was so sick of sitting at LZ Sherry and getting mortared and so many guys wounded. I was in country about three months. I got to be friends with the RTOs who would come down through Sherry. So I would ask them, ‘What do you do?” And I though I would like to get out of there. So I put in for it, but my orders never came down until later and I am not good on dates.

I say, “Same with me. I hung out with the FOs when the infantry set up on our perimeter and figured I’d like to do that.”

My mind is so bad during that time I had to find out from Mike that I went out with the 1/50th and we were out in the Central Highlands somewhere. It was worse than Sherry. I saw a lot of guys hurt. The Medevac chopper would come in but not get anywhere near the ground. So we tied the wounded to slings, under their armpits, and they hung beneath the chopper and got shot at some more as they swung in the air.

My memory of the 1/50th and the guys that were in the group that I went out with, I remember none of them. I know it was a young infantry squad they had put together. After I got to know people, I would ask them how long they had been in country and they would say, “I’ve only been in country about three months.”

They would ask me and I would say, “I been in country about 10 months.”

And they would say, “What in the hell are you doing out here? Are you crazy? You ain’t supposed to be out here.”

So then I got to thinking about it and about that time I come down with malaria. I went into Cam Rahn Bay to the hospital there.

I was getting better and out on a walk when I saw a bulletin board where they would post all of the early outs. By God my name was on it. I was supposed to be going home early, and it was only a day off. This was on a Sunday. I go back in and I told the nurse, “I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out of here today. I got to get down to Phan Rang.”

So they got a doctor and checked me out and I got down to Phan Rang. They said, “You missed it. It’s gone. You gotta wait till your regular date now.”

I’m not even supposed to be out of the hospital and I’m still not fully recuperated, but they say, “You have to go back out to Sherry for the rest of the time you’re here.”

So I went back to Sherry, and they want to put me on a gun again and I refused. I said I wasn’t going to stand out in the open anymore with mortars coming in. So they put me in ammo and that’s where I stayed for the rest of my time there.

That’s why I was at LZ Sherry on May 3 when Betty got overrun and we took all that incoming. I wasn’t supposed to be there, I was supposed to be home. I thought I was going to die that night. I was probably hiding in a corner someplace, being that short, and having been out with the infantry. I was scared shitless.

I say, “That was my second night at Sherry, and I was scared shitless because I was so new.”

I left for home just a little after that.

A picture appears on the screen of a group of young Vietnamese children. They belong to the ARVN force that is stationed at Sherry. Jim gets up from his seat and walks up to the screen. He points to the kids and says,

This one over there I think is Captain Parker’s. This one here belongs to Mike.

Mike says, “Smartass!”

I say, “The ARVNs left right after I got to Sherry. We were glad to see them go.”

All they did was tell the VC where their mortars hit. That’s what we believed. We could tell that they were communicating with people day to day, and out on patrol. 

Mike interrupts. He says, “There is a story behind that that will never get told.”

I say, “Well, can you tell me?”

Mike says, “I’ll put it this way. There was an ARVN that was shot on the compound. He was shot pacing off Gun 1. I don’t know how many people would tell you about that. There was a guy on a Duster squad that we called Hawkeye. He and a couple other Duster guys and some guys from the battery were watching this ARVN pacing off, and somebody from the battery shot him. They found a map of our compound on him. In the end nothing was ever said. That was when I was on Sherry. In fact I have a picture of him laying face down on the ground.”

Jim is paging through a book I had given him, a memoir of my time in the military which had just been published. He says,

I opened the book and went right to a section on Sergeant Davis. I knew him. I says here, “On April 16 at LZ Sherry gun crewman Jeffrey Lynn Davis dies instantly from massive head injuries incurred in a mortar attack.” That was Sgt. Davis. He was a friend of mine. He went to Hawaii for R&R to see his wife, he went back to the states for a while, was a little bit AWOL, got busted and sent back to Sherry, and two days later he got killed. He was a Shake ‘n’ Bake just out of school when he got sent to Vietnam. But he did not have it in his heart to be a sergeant.

I say, “When I got to Sherry two weeks after he died they told me he went home, discovered his girlfriend had dumped him, and then reenlisted to come back to Sherry. And just two weeks back is killed.”

Oh, maybe that’s why he went all the way home because he was supposed to meet her in Hawaii. He was a three year man, and the way I understood it at the time he extended so that this time around he was done with the Army. I don’t think he went home and reenlisted, I think he extended in Vietnam. After he extended he took an R&R. Then for some reason he went all the way back to the states and went AWOL.

Do you know what gun he was on when that happened? It seems to me that it was Gun 2. I was there the night that he got killed.

I say, “I don’t know the gun, but he was in the doorway of the ammo bunker when the mortar found him.”

Yeah, I think that’s right.

We are standing in the driveway saying our good-byes. Jim tells me of his battles with the VA to get treatment for dealing with the emotions still raw from Vietnam. Mike talks about the commitment he made to his recently deceased wife to keep doing the things that put his life on the right path. Jim and Mike do not see each other but a couple of times a year, but the sight of them standing together now tells me they lean on one another. Still buddies.

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Mike Lauricella – Gun Crew – Part Two

The Boys of Battery B

Mike Lauricella

Part Two

One night we were on duty, I don’t remember what the date was, I only know it was terrible. We heard it coming, we heard the mortar tubes go off –phump, phump – and somebody yelled incoming right away. They always targeted Gun 1 because it was the illumination gun and it was easy to target with the barrel way up in the air and the muzzle flash so high. And then they could walk the mortar rounds in on us.

They called for illumination on the telephone. The telephone was just inside the ammo bunker at the gun pit. We grabbed a couple rounds. I was the loader and pulled off a couple of rounds, when a mortar hit at 5 o’clock behind the gun pit. And then a second mortar hit right on the wall that surrounded the gun pit, right about 4 o’clock. You could hear the shrapnel splatter on the gun. And I never got a scratch.

But I was so scared that when they called for cease-fire I would not stop. I just kept firing illumination.  I’m not giving up because I want to see what’s coming. Lieutenant Clarke came down from the tower and grabbed me and told me to stop. The next morning I found the tail fin sticking into the top of the sandbag wall and the other one was just outside the gun pit at 5 o’clock sticking in the ground. No offense but I wet my pants I was so scared. That was the closest I ever came to getting hurt.

That was the same night that the guy on Gun 1 took off running for his hooch right across the road. He was a tall thin guy, and he dove behind the wall outside his hooch and he hit his head on one of those steel posts and got a cut right on his forehead. Honest to God, they gave him a Purple Heart. I thought, you son of a bitch, where was you when the shrapnel was hitting the damn gun. You got a damn Purple Heart for cutting your damn head on the post. But it was combat, and it had been a while since anybody in the battery got a Purple Heart, so they did it.

We had just gotten a starlight scope and they had it in that tower by the gate. The guys who were on guard duty that night in the tower called in and said they saw movement in the wire. So Sgt. Durant the next morning got up a squad and we made a sweep around the perimeter. We did not normally do that, but every once in a while Durant would get crazy about certain things. We found a 50-gallon barrel at a spot if you are looking out the gate about a 45° angle off to the right. It was full of CS gas, or phu gas, or whatever you want to call it. The gooks had rolled it up and got it almost to the wire, and that’s where they left it.

The first sergeant said, “We’re going to blow it.” So we went back and told the firebase to get your gas masks. Everybody had a gas mask. Some of the guys were like, “Screw this.” So they set a time to put gas masks on, and the barrel exploded and the gas came blowing over the battery. The guys who thought it was a joke did not think it was a joke in two or three minutes.

I say, “Sometimes the Vietcong would blow gas as the start of a ground attack.”

Well that’s what we thought they were setting up to do. But we seen it with the starlight scope. They did not see the barrel but they seen movement. The gooks rolled that barrel – you could see where the grass was laying down – all the way from them damn woods up to just outside the wire. So we ruined their ground attack idea if there was one.

I was half way through my tour when I got sent to LZ Betty at Phan Thiet to process supplies and people out to Sherry. Understand I did not want to go to Betty. I did not volunteer. How I got there is kind of a story.

They gave us this detail to spray the wire with herbicides. There were two 50-gallon drums that were black and had a red X on them. It did not say Agent Orange on them, it just said herbicide. And on top of the drum it said to dilute 1 to 10. And they gave us all these little one-gallon hand sprayers. Either Sgt. Durant or Smoke said just put it in the sprayers and spray it without diluting it.

So we are out there for a half a day, and it is miserable. And we are out there hand spraying, and we have to watch because we’ve got our own trip flares and Claymore mines in the wire and we are walking around there between the wire. I like, “This is bull shit.” So I say to First Sergeant Durant, “You don’t got no damn farmers on this base. Why don’t we just make a spray rig and spray the damn wire?

He says, “What do you mean, make a spray rig?”

I say, “We’ll take one of them 50 gallon barrels, because we are not going to dilute it, and we will make a spray rig out of it.” I didn’t know that he did not know anything about farming or anything.

He says, “Well what do you have to do?”

I say, “With a couple of pieces of pipe and the air compressor on the deuce-and-a-half truck. The top of the barrel says not to exceed 5 pounds of pressure so I’ll need an air regulator. Then some fittings and we can make a spray rig.”

He says, “You’re going to Phan Thiet and steal whatever you need.”

I say, “Steal it? I don’t know anything about LZ Betty. How am I going to steal this shit?

And he says, “Go to the engineering section on the south side of the Betty.”

So I went back to Betty on the ration helicopter. I went around the whole base, and I had never been there except when I got in country. I found the engineering area and scrounged up everything I needed. I did not have to steal it. I requisitioned it.

He smiles.

Well we built the spray rig, and we put the 50 gallon barrel on the back of a deuce and a half truck. We ran an air hose from the air compressor on the truck back to the barrel. But you had to watch the air regulator. I put a little guy we called Projo in charge of watching it.

So we are on the truck, and it’s bumpy out there, and we’re joking and laughing because now we are not hand pumping. We’re driving this big deuce-and-a half truck between the wire and we are using the sprayer back and forth. The hose that came off of one of those little 1 gallon sprayers was not that long, so you had to stand close to the barrel. Well Projo was not watching the gauge and the barrel got more and more pressure on it and I heard the barrel starting to make noises. We hit a bump and the rubber hose that was connected to the barrel blew off. It did not blow the barrel, it just blew the bunghole open and it sprayed that herbicide all over us.

So we pulled back in and said, “This isn’t gonna work.”

We were covered in the stuff, so we took showers first off. Then we took a smaller truck, a ¾ ton jeep, and we got the compressor from the mess hall and put that compressor in the back of the jeep with the barrel of herbicide, hooked it all up and we sprayed the whole rest of the perimeter in two days.

The spray rig was so successful that not long after that First Sergeant Durant says to me, “We need a bigger generator.”

We had a little bitty generator and (only enough electricity to light hooches) for only one hour a day. So I went back to LZ Betty and got a big generator. It was not huge, but it was a bigger generator than we had. I conned them out of it.

We had it for awhile, and then they were going to do an IG inspection on LZ Sherry. For an IG inspection your logbooks better be up-to-date on all your trucks and all your vehicles and all your equipment, and you better only have what you are supposed to have. The next thing I know we had this generator and we had to hide it. I don’t know if we ever had the inspection, but there was a big commotion about making sure everything was up to date. We were even talking about burying it.

I guess that’s what all led to them sending me to Betty permanent. I was at Betty the night it got overrun. The day before that happened I got into a lot of trouble. I was in deep shit. I don’t remember the base commander’s name, but he was a drunken son-of-a-bitch. The order had come down that we were expending too much ammunition and being too aggressive. We were there for support, and we were not to fire unless fired upon. And we would not carry our weapons locked and loaded. The commander at Betty took it to heart. He put out an order that everyone would turn in their M-16s and their weapons, except for those that were on guard duty. He even took the ammunition to the ammo dump.

When they told me I had to lockup my M-16, I told them to go get fucked. I said, “You’re out of your mind, there’s no way.” One of my jobs was to take the laundry that came in on the helicopter from Sherry and take it downtown. And I was not going downtown without a weapon. I told them I’m not giving it up. And we had to pull guard duty when they brought the cargo ships in and dropped supplies on the beach. Well I was not going to give up my M-16. Then this officer came down said he was going to give me an Article 15. And that was on May 2. I said, “I don’t really care what you do to me, but we’re not giving them up. And that night is when we got hit and overrun.

Our designated position was below the 101st Quonset huts on the ocean side, which was opposite from where the gooks came in. It was Roger Ramey, Paul Ryan and myself. Everything was happening behind us, so we left our position. The three of us were pretty tight and we stayed together. We came around the CONEX buildings, and we took a position right on the side of the runway. And it was pretty bad. It was not good … it was not good.

Anybody that tells you that from the minute the shit happens he can remember everything that happened, he’s got a hell of a lot better memory than I got. All I can remember is that it got pretty up close and personal that night. It was just a chaos. My memory is not all that great, but I will tell you it was sheer panic. I was a sergeant and you had to stay cold and calculated and you had to be in control, but I’ll tell you what, it don’t work so good. Apparently I did a pretty good job, but I don’t know.

The next morning I was in a daze. I had shot my M-16 so much it shot the rifling right out of the barrel. They reissued me another M-16. I had 12 magazines and in ammo pouch and another ammo belt, and when I got done I had one magazine left with ammo in it.

I went back and got my camera. I took pictures of the grenade that did not go off, with the circle drawn around it on the ground in front of the 1/50th huts. The fire department putting the fires out on the tents of the 101st. The helicopters melted to the ground on the runway. The three-quarter ton truck that got blown up and the guy got killed. It went down to get ammo during the attack. The first trip it had the black lights on, but the second trip the regular headlights were on and it got hit with an RPG (rocket propelled grenade).

I find out our four guys from Sherry who are two FO teams all got wounded. They were with two companies of the 1/50th Infantry. There was a command switch going on, one company coming in and one going out. Lieutenant Osborne was coming in from the field and he was going home the next day. He turned in his M-16 but not his .45 because he was an officer. Big Willey was a radio operator and got shot up pretty bad. They pulled him up against the side of a sandbag wall and the gooks ran right past him. The other lieutenant was Pierce and I can’t remember the name of the other radio operator, but I want to say Johnson.

After that my memory is bad. The next thing that I can remember about Vietnam is I woke up in Cam Rahn Bay in the hospital.  This was in July. I did not know where I was and I had IVs stuck in my arm. I will never forget this, I woke up and there was a nurse about this wide, about this tall, with a butch haircut.

She said, “Oh, you finally woke up.” And she says, “Do you feel like talking?”

I said, “Where in the hell am I?”

She said, “You’re in the hospital in Cam Rahn Bay.”

I said, “OK, what’s going on?”

She said, “Do you feel like talking?”

I said, “Yes, I guess so. Why?”

She said, “You need to call home right away.” And they brought a landline telephone into the room.

I said, “Why do I got to call home?”

She said, “Because your parents have been notified that you are missing in action.”

Before I made the call a lieutenant came in and said, “You have specific instructions on this phone call. You are not to tell them where you are in the hospital or where you have been. You just tell them that there was a misunderstanding and that you are fine.”

So I called home, and my mom answered the phone, and I talked to her for a few minutes. She said it was 11:00 at night when they came up to the door and told them I was missing. I told her I was fine. Whatever the lieutenant told me to say, I said. And then I hung up.

I don’t know how many more days I was there, but I have the orders that take me out of the hospital and send me back to Betty, and that was 12 July.

At Betty they had packed up all of my stuff in a box and sent it home, so I had nothing. Lieutenant Meeks comes along, he was my lieutenant from headquarters company, and he and I did not get along. He was a jerk.

He said to me, “We’re putting you in for a metal.”

I turned around and I was pissed off and I looked at him and I said, “You can keep your mother fuckin’ medal, because all I want to do is go home in one piece and I am not relying on you.” I don’t know why, but I was hot. I really climbed his ass, and walked away. You don’t talk to an officer like that, but he didn’t say nothin’.

I say, “Were you wounded? Is that why you were in the hospital?”

No, I was never wounded in Vietnam. I don’t remember why I was there. Everything between May 3, when I was fine because I remember taking all those pictures, and when I woke up in the hospital is a blank. They told me I had some sort of food poisoning. And I don’t remember much after the hospital. I didn’t write any more letters home. I carried a camera most of the time when I could, but after that my picture taking stopped. I came home four months later with 600 slides, all from before the hospital.

But it gets more complicated than that.

Indeed it does. Mike takes us out of his workshop over to the house, where he pulls out the contents of the box sent home to his parents. He shows me official orders, picture albums, patches and service ribbons.

Most of this stuff I don’t remember and I don’t know what half of it means. I have orders somewhere in here taking me to a Vietnamese riding school. Now why would they do that? In the hospital they said I could not talk about where I had been, but when I asked them where I had been they wouldn’t tell me.

He retrieves a large patch that is not a standard military uniform patch. He does not remember it or how he came to possess it. It has a raised fist on the upper edge, and in the body of the patch is a sword and horseshoe. The Latin slogan is grossly misspelled, suggesting the patch was created by a Vietnamese. Loosely, very loosely, translated it means: it is not good for man to live solely for himself.

I showed this patch around and nobody knows what it is. It’s not U.S. military, that’s for sure.

We walk back over to the workshop. On a folding table are three photo albums from the box sent home to his folks. He pages through them and points out the people he cannot remember. Also on the table are all of his slides. Half are in carousels and the other half in bundles with rubber bands around them. Written neatly on the edge of each slide are the names of the people in the picture and the location. Mike insists on giving all of them to me and says,

Maybe you can figure out the gaps.

Capital Offense – Web Serial by Kurt Stevens

Columbus Press, publisher of Seven in a Jeep, has released a first-of-its-kind serial novel on the web.  Capital Offense by Kurt Stevens hit the web with its first installment yesterday, September 2, 2013 at www.CapitalOffenseBook.com.

Kurt Stevens was the executioner for the state of Ohio Department of Corrections.  When his wife is murdered, he’s fingered as the suspect.  He must find the killer before the police catch him.

The full book will be released online, completely free of charge, in daily installments through January 31, 2014.  Once the web release is complete, the book will be distributed through normal channels and be available as a print book and e-book from all major retailers.

Don’t miss a beat of the action.  Head over to CapitalOffensebook.com today!

P.S. Seven in a Jeep is still a Top-100 Kindle Book about Vietnam.  Find it on Amazon.com here.

Mike Lauricella – Gun Crew – Part One

The Boys of Battery B

Mike Lauricella

Part One

The driveway into Mike Lauricella’s property outside Niles, Michigan is easy to find because there is an old motorcycle wheel mounted above his mailbox. Mike closed down his cycle business several years ago but still has the workshop.

Jim Vipond, a Vietnam buddy, had made the long drive down from Kalkaska to meet me at Mike’s place, and they both walk out of the shop as I drive up. The three of us go inside and sit on folding chairs in the middle of the motorcycle workshop, where Mike has set up the slide projector he bought in Vietnam.

Mike is quick to tell me that there are certain things they will not talk about. Jim nods in agreement.

The projector rattles and complains like a typical old veteran. Once it topples over, but returns to duty as if it were built to be kicked around. Mike narrates the pictures of cannon crews, heliborne operations with the infantry, tanks operating around LZ Sherry, and shots of the firebase taken from helicopters showing hooches and gun emplacements. The pictures seem to transport him back to LZ Sherry.

When I got in country, I got there in September of 1969, everybody talked about the death moon, and I did not know what that was. It’s a full moon. That was the night that was most dreaded. And sure enough when the full moon was out we were in trouble. It seemed like we were always getting hit on a full moon. I do not know why the gooks liked full moons, but it just seemed like every full moon we got hit. I’m not sure, but it might have had something to do with the Buddhist religion.

I am at LZ Sherry less than 30 days when this bulldozer gets stuck that the engineers brought out to rebuild our berm. The berm was too low along the road that came into the battery out by the helipad. The guy running it was a young guy just like us. He got through the top layer of dirt, more like sand, and the dozer started to sink. It kept sinking and sinking and sinking. It sunk halfway into the ground.

He finds the slide of a bulldozer, its track sunk four feet below the surface, and guys standing around with their hands on their hips.

We had two tanks on our perimeter, and we hooked both of them to the bulldozer with a chain. The two of them side by side tried to pull the dozer up and it pulled the clevis right off the back of the tank. So they gave up – for that day. It was getting late and the tank was outside the wire, so First Sergeant Durant says we’ve got to pull guard duty on the bulldozer.

Paul Dunne and I got the guard duty on that thing. We sat on it all night taking four hour shifts. The guys on guard duty in the towers watched us to make sure nothing happened. Well we are outside the wire, outside the berm, and I am scared shitless. It’s pitch black and Paul is saying, “Do you see anything?” It was pitch black; you couldn’t see anything. We sat on that stupid thing all night. That was my first experience of not liking what I was doing. That is also how Paul Dunne and I became very good friends – for that short period of time.

Mike puts a slide on the screen showing a demolished jeep.

That’s the jeep Paul got killed in. There’s a bad story about that. What happened was, they picked people for detail to go on a convoy to Phan Thiet. Paul was not supposed to be on the convoy that day, I was.

Paul came over and said, “Mike, you are scheduled to go on the convoy, but I want to go and call my mom at the MARS station” (Military Auxiliary Radio System).

I said, “No, because I’m scheduled to go on the convoy, I will get anything you want from the PX, just let me know, I’ll get it.”

He said, “I want to go on the convoy and call my mom at the MARS station.”

I still said no, so he left and came back with an E-6 sergeant – I don’t remember his name and don’t want to remember it – and the sergeant said, “Paul really wants to call his mom. Let him take your place on the convoy.” And he talked me into it. Three hours later they hit the mine.  So he was never even supposed to be on that convoy.

Paul got killed on November 19 and there were no convoys after that until just before Christmas. We were out of beer and someone decided we had to do a convoy.

When the time for the convoy came, First Sergeant Durant, the Chief of Smoke and I went and swept the road. I volunteered to mine sweep the road because Paul got killed.

It was kind of funny because I had never swept for road mines before. We came out with no shirt, nothing metal, and there was a box on your hip, it was a battery box, and the wire came up from it to a set of headphones, and another wire came out from the headphones down to the sweeper handle. But you did not walk regular. You walked stiff legged. You walk like this.

Mike gets up from his chair and demonstrates a kind of Frankenstein lurch.You work that minesweeper back and forth. You better step where you’ve already swept. You sweep it and then you step. You did not carry a firearm, you did not wear your steel pot. The earphones were big and bulky, and they were hot, and you broke out in a sweat, at least I did.

I am sweeping and the Jeep is behind me and there are three guys out on each side of the road. Then I keep seeing dust pop up on the road, and I think it’s these little sand bugs. I pull the earphones off and it’s small arms fire. Our guys were already firing back and yelling at me, but I can’t hear them I’ve got these ear phones on, and I’m going down the road thinking the sand bugs are popping up in front of me.

We call the gunships, and then go on with the convoy. I didn’t do the whole road, I just did a little section. We did find a mine in the road and we blew it. I laugh about it now, but I was scared to death.

I don’t remember if I ever went out on another mine sweep. All I know was somebody had lost their life, and on that day if anybody was going to get blown up was going to be me. It all stemmed from the fact that Paul and I swapped places and Paul never should’ve been on that convoy. I should never have let that sergeant talk me into making the switch. But he was an E-6, and what was I going to do?

Jim says, “We swept the road for mines, and we tried several different things. There was a point in time where we just took the vehicle and drove like hell. Hopefully if it set anything off we would be on past it before it blew up. And that did work! That’s how they mine-swept the road rather than sending somebody out there to lose their life as a minesweeper.

 

Mike Lauricella – Gun Crew

The Boys of Battery B

Mike Lauricella

Part One

The driveway into Mike Lauricella’s property outside Niles, Michigan is easy to find because there is an old motorcycle wheel mounted above his mailbox. Mike closed down his cycle business several years ago but still has the workshop.

Jim Vipond, a Vietnam buddy, had made the long drive down from Kalkaska to meet me at Mike’s place, and they both walk out of the shop as I drive up. The three of us go inside and sit on folding chairs in the middle of the motorcycle workshop, where Mike has set up the slide projector he bought in Vietnam.

Mike is quick to tell me that there are certain things they will not talk about. Jim nods in agreement.

The projector rattles and complains like a typical old veteran. Once it topples over, but returns to duty as if it were built to be kicked around. Mike narrates the pictures of cannon crews, heliborne operations with the infantry, tanks operating around LZ Sherry, and shots of the firebase taken from helicopters showing hooches and gun emplacements. The pictures seem to transport him back to LZ Sherry.

When I got in country, I got there in September of 1969, everybody talked about the death moon, and I did not know what that was. It’s a full moon. That was the night that was most dreaded. And sure enough when the full moon was out we were in trouble. It seemed like we were always getting hit on a full moon. I do not know why the gooks liked full moons, but it just seemed like every full moon we got hit. I’m not sure, but it might have had something to do with the Buddhist religion.

I am at LZ Sherry less than 30 days when this bulldozer gets stuck that the engineers brought out to rebuild our berm. The berm was too low along the road that came into the battery out by the helipad. The guy running it was a young guy just like us. He got through the top layer of dirt, more like sand, and the dozer started to sink. It kept sinking and sinking and sinking. It sunk halfway into the ground.

He finds the slide of a bulldozer, its track sunk four feet below the surface, and guys standing around with their hands on their hips.

We had two tanks on our perimeter, and we hooked both of them to the bulldozer with a chain. The two of them side by side tried to pull the dozer up and it pulled the clevis right off the back of the tank. So they gave up – for that day. It was getting late and the tank was outside the wire, so First Sergeant Durant says we’ve got to pull guard duty on the bulldozer.

Paul Dunne and I got the guard duty on that thing. We sat on it all night taking four hour shifts. The guys on guard duty in the towers watched us to make sure nothing happened. Well we are outside the wire, outside the berm, and I am scared shitless. It’s pitch black and Paul is saying, “Do you see anything?” It was pitch black; you couldn’t see anything. We sat on that stupid thing all night. That was my first experience of not liking what I was doing. That is also how Paul Dunne and I became very good friends – for that short period of time.

Mike puts a slide on the screen showing a demolished jeep.

That’s the jeep Paul got killed in. There’s a bad story about that. What happened was, they picked people for detail to go on a convoy to Phan Thiet. Paul was not supposed to be on the convoy that day, I was.

Paul came over and said, “Mike, you are scheduled to go on the convoy, but I want to go and call my mom at the MARS station” (Military Auxiliary Radio System).

I said, “No, because I’m scheduled to go on the convoy, I will get anything you want from the PX, just let me know, I’ll get it.”

He said, “I want to go on the convoy and call my mom at the MARS station.”

I still said no, so he left and came back with an E-6 sergeant – I don’t remember his name and don’t want to remember it – and the sergeant said, “Paul really wants to call his mom. Let him take your place on the convoy.” And he talked me into it. Three hours later they hit the mine.  So he was never even supposed to be on that convoy.

Paul got killed on November 19 and there were no convoys after that until just before Christmas. We were out of beer and someone decided we had to do a convoy.

When the time for the convoy came, First Sergeant Durant, the Chief of Smoke and I went and swept the road. I volunteered to mine sweep the road because Paul got killed.

It was kind of funny because I had never swept for road mines before. We came out with no shirt, nothing metal, and there was a box on your hip, it was a battery box, and the wire came up from it to a set of headphones, and another wire came out from the headphones down to the sweeper handle. But you did not walk regular. You walked stiff legged. You walk like this.

Mike gets up from his chair and demonstrates a kind of Frankenstein lurch.You work that minesweeper back and forth. You better step where you’ve already swept. You sweep it and then you step. You did not carry a firearm, you did not wear your steel pot. The earphones were big and bulky, and they were hot, and you broke out in a sweat, at least I did.

I am sweeping and the Jeep is behind me and there are three guys out on each side of the road. Then I keep seeing dust pop up on the road, and I think it’s these little sand bugs. I pull the earphones off and it’s small arms fire. Our guys were already firing back and yelling at me, but I can’t hear them I’ve got these ear phones on, and I’m going down the road thinking the sand bugs are popping up in front of me.

We call the gunships, and then go on with the convoy. I didn’t do the whole road, I just did a little section. We did find a mine in the road and we blew it. I laugh about it now, but I was scared to death.

I don’t remember if I ever went out on another mine sweep. All I know was somebody had lost their life, and on that day if anybody was going to get blown up was going to be me. It all stemmed from the fact that Paul and I swapped places and Paul never should’ve been on that convoy. I should never have let that sergeant talk me into making the switch. But he was an E-6, and what was I going to do?

Jim says, “We swept the road for mines, and we tried several different things. There was a point in time where we just took the vehicle and drove like hell. Hopefully if it set anything off we would be on past it before it blew up. And that did work! That’s how they mine-swept the road rather than sending somebody out there to lose their life as a minesweeper.

 

Have You Read Surplus? Leave Us a Review

Have you read Ed Gaydos’s companion to Seven in a Jeep, Surplus: The Long Arm of Vietnam?

Will you leave us an honest review?

Find the book on GoodReads.com here, or on Amazon.com here and leave a review for the readers there.

No need to stress out about what to say, just be an honest.  Keep it brief and mention what you liked, point out what you didn’t.

Thanks for helping other readers make good choices!

Tom Townley – Medic

This is the first in a series of interviews with men who served with my artillery battery in Vietnam. Most were just teenagers, many away from home for the first time. Their stories will appear in the upcoming book:

 

The Boys of Battery B

Tom Townley

 The front door is open, and by the time I reach the porch he is waiting for me behind the storm door. The pictures of him in Vietnam show a sliver of a boy, but he now carries another 80 pounds or so and walks bent over with a high-tech cane. Three back surgeries have put him in his easy chair for most of the day, where he grieves for his wife of 46 years, recently taken by a stroke. He needs morphine and oxycodone every few hours for the back pain. Exposure to Agent Orange added diabetes and early Parkinson’s to his daily physical concerns. We talk for over an hour, his voice soft, somewhere out of the south, with a gentle humor baked into it.

I was the only medic at LZ Sherry. It was my job to burn the shit. The 1st sergeant a lot of times sent me people to do it who he was pissed that. It was something bad for them to do, but it was okay for me. It was my job to make sure that the latrines were dug and not overused and that the two toilets were taken care of and everything buried properly and burned properly. None of it ever got burned properly, because you did not want to stand out there all day watching it burn.

Another job I had was giving out malaria pills at the lunch meal, every day. There was one for one type of mosquito, and one for another type of mosquito. The ones we give out was the big orange ones. Guys did not want to take them. They were big and hard to swallow, and they gave some guys diarrhea. I made them swallow them right there in front of me. Otherwise some guys would go and throw them away. But you took them every day. I think it was every day.

Did you know LZ Sherry was built on a cemetery? The battery was built on the cemetery because it was the highest point in the area, even though it was only a few feet. Part of the cemetery was still there when I got to Sherry in October of 1968. Two or three of those little houses that they put the bodies in were still there. They were not there very long because when the Viet Cong came up we could not fire our guns in certain places because of those houses were in the way. They had already leveled a lot of them and they got rid of the rest just after I got there. That’s one of the reasons why the people in that area didn’t care for us too much, because we leveled their cemetery.

There were some trees and bushes that they also had to get out of there. Somebody got an old 20 mm gun and they used it to blow down trees. It worked! I don’t know if you ever tried to cut one of them teak trees, but it is just like sawing into cement.

I was one of the first ones out there to get a Purple Heart. We were taking incoming and my hooch was about three quarters of the way sunk into the ground, you had to go up and out. It was all sandbagged in and everything but that mortar came right down through and got me in the leg. But I can’t remember which leg it was now. It wasn’t nothing big, it was just a little bitty cut, but it bled like hell. I did not go to the rear and get it fixed up, it was not that bad. The 1st sergeant and the captain got their heads together and decided that it was going to get me a Purple Heart. But I knew nothing about it, absolutely nothing about it. We had a parade ceremony back in Phan Rang where they took us all out and had us stand at parade. They called my name out and I thought, Oh crap, what did I do? I got up there and he gives me the Purple Heart, and I could not remember even being hit. It was that minor. They give me the Purple Heart, and then they give me the Army Commendation Medal.

When I first got to Sherry I kept hearing bumblebees going around in the area. The first time I heard one of those I said to the 1st sergeant, “What is that noise I keep hearing?”

He says, “What noise?”

And I says, “Zzzzzzzzzz ……..zzzzzzzzzzzzz. But I don’t see anything.”

And he says, “They are shooting at you, you dumb ass.”

We got shot at all the time. The VC would sit on that tree line out there which was a good thousand meters out, or they would sneak up and down those ditches out there, and they shoot at us. Throw bullets at us, hoping to hit something. To the best of my knowledge nobody ever got hit by one.

I say, “Where you out at Sherry during the January ground attack?”

There’s a whole story to that. When things were quiet I was supposed to be in the Fire Direction Center, in case we took rounds and somebody got hurt. So they decided that if Doc was going to be in there, that Doc was going to help. I did weather charts because they found out that I could do it fast enough.

“Putting meteorological data into the firing charts was the worse job in FDC,” I say. Nobody wanted to do it.”

I know and I learned to stay away from FDC because of that. I would go visit with the tank guys. We had three or four tanks on the perimeter. They brought them in because one of them had a bad pack in it. The pack was the whole engine compartment, in a package. They pulled the pack out, and the tank was down for two weeks I think. They put that new engine in, and we got hit by a sapper team that night right on top of that tank. Right on top. I was in there playing poker with them when the two guys that were on duty at the time saw the gooks in the wire. They called over to FDC that we had gooks in the wire. Right away I got my ass back to FDC where I belonged. It was not too far from that tank and my hooch was just the other side. By the time I did that it was all over. The tank fired and killed all the sappers. That was the first time we got hit by sappers that I know of.

I pull out pictures taken the next morning of the dead sappers, which I got from Andy Kach. The bodies have been pulled from the wire and are lined up on the ground. A part of a body, later known as head-and-shoulders, is still in the wire. There are also pictures of the rifles and rockets they carried. I say, “I do not show these to people.”

No, me neither. I have seen the body pictures but not the weapons. I had to be out there at the wire the next morning where the bodies were; it was part of my job.

He pauses, longer than usual.

Yeah, it brings back a lot of memories.

They give those guys all Bronze Stars on the tank. I did not get one and I was pissed. I said so too.

Why not you?

Probably because I wasn’t even supposed to be out there. This was a tank and they had their own medic.

“I have heard stories of 1st Sergeant Farrell. You must have some of your own.”

Farrell probably saved my life. It was when the road crew got hit when they were sweeping the road. They were probably about a mile out from LZ Sherry, maybe a little bit more. I was burning shit at the time, when I heard an explosion and looked up and could see the smoke over the tree line. And I knew something had happened but I didn’t know what. And then all of a sudden I saw a Jeep come flying up the track towards the firebase screaming and yelling, “Doc, Doc, get over here.”

Well I ran and grabbed my bag. And jumped on the jeep and they took me out there. I got out of the jeep and was walking along the side of the road. The 1st sergeant said, “Doc! Stop! Watch where you’re walking.”

And I stopped.

He said, “You can’t walk over there. Walk on the hardpan.”

I came close to stepping on one of those bombs that when you step on it all the little bombs pop up in the air. I almost stepped on it. The Viet Cong picked up artillery rounds and bombs that never exploded and buried them as mines. There was enough explosives in this one it would have blown my leg off.

But I had to take care of Gulley. He was blown away from here down.

Tom places his hand at his rib cage.

There was nothing there. Nothing. It was gone. His one arm was gone. And he was still alive. Well I wrapped his arm for him, because he saw it. Told him he was going to be all right, that was all I could tell him, you know. I still have dreams about that. But there was nothing I could do, absolutely nothing I could do. There was nothing there to do anything with. You know what I mean? But he hung in there for a good 20 minutes. It took that much time, and he was still alive.

He is silent for a long moment.

The way …. the way … he was blown, it must have constricted the blood flow, enough to keep him alive. He had enough blood in him to keep him alive apparently. Sherlock was already dead. He was gone. There was nothing we could do for him.

They were not the only ones I saw when I was there. I saw a couple of Vietnamese that they brought in and wanted me to fix up. They were already dead.

Judson and another guy they took right down to the helipad at Sherry because they had a helicopter coming in. I did not treat either one of them. I didn’t talk to them or anything. They just sent them right on through because they were mostly superficial wounds.

I say, “Were you the only medic there?”

I was the only medic, but when they say you’re the only medic it means the only one trained to be a medic. But you had people like 1st Sergeant Farrell and there was an E7 sergeant there. They had enough experience that they were just as good a medic as I was. So I really wasn’t alone. You were never alone over there. Everybody had your back. Farrell was a little different, but I’ll tell you what, he was all business when he was business. He was 100% business. He was a good 1st sergeant.

Farrell slept in the same hooch with the XO, 1st Lieutenant Monaghan. It was the beginning of the wet season, the rainy season, so it must have been around June or July. I remember because that’s about the time I went to the rear. The rain came at 5 o’clock every day, you could count on it. And it rained so hard you could not see. One night Monaghan – a big guy – went in his hooch to crawl in bed. We all had mosquito netting, especially during the wet season. He crawls into bed and pulls the mosquito netting around him and feels this movement. He did not know what it was. He pulls back his sheet and there is a six-foot cobra in bed with him. My hooch was next to his, and all I heard was a .45 pistol going off. Boom. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Farrell was there and had to stop him. I don’t think Monaghan ever did kill the snake. I don’t remember seeing the snake afterward, so I don’t think he ever did kill the snake. But he sure put a lot of holes in his bunk.

B battery guys always stuck together. I don’t know if you ever heard of Inge are not, we called him Ing. He was a big old farm boy from Nebraska or some place like that. He and I went to Phan Rang for training on how to build slit trenches for latrines. It was a three day pass is what it was. You went to school for a couple hours, then you was on your own for the rest of the day. We went up to the Air Force NCO club, which you needed to be an E4 to get in there, and we were both E4s. We got in there just before happy hour. We were drinking doubles, Canadian Club, and we were drinking them as fast as we could because they were only a dime. We got so smashed that I don’t remember the end of it. But I woke up in the morning with my eye all black and blue, and my nose bent all over the place, and I looked over to the bunk next to me where Ing was and he had this big old popper on one side, and half a popper on the other side. I said, “What in the hell happened to you?”

He said, “Me? You ought to see yourself.”

And then a couple of guys who were there told us what happened. We picked a fight. We did it to ourselves. We picked this fight, but we was so drunk we could not fight no how. These guys cleaned our clock I guess.

You know I helped deliver a baby at Sherry. South Vietnamese troops were stationed all the way around us. There was more than a company of them. They had their wives and families right there with them. One of the women got ready to have her baby, and she was having a little bit of trouble. The Vietnamese doctor was there, but they did not trust him so they called me. I knew that much about delivering babies.

He holds his thumb and forefinger together letting through just a little light.

We had a short course in it, and that was about it. Well I went over there, but the Vietnamese doctor delivered it. I just stood behind him giving a little suggestion here and there. “Why don’t you move that hand” or “Pull back that leg,” stuff like that. It went fast. Hell, she already had six kids. Mama-san, she was my friend the rest of the time I was out there.

Like I said, the South Vietnamese infantry was all around us on the berm. The went from where the road come into the battery all the way around to the ammo bunker. They decided they were going to put a sweep on one day. They mustered out by the old helicopter pad and then started across the rice field going towards Phan Thiet. They got about a third of the way across that field and the Viet Cong opened up from that tree line. You never saw such a bookin’ in your life. The sons-of-bitches bailed their asses out of there and they come right back into the battery. My opinion is they worked for both teams, most of them, depending upon what was going on at the time.

“How did you get to be a medic?”

It’s funny. When I was in the process of being drafted I was married. I got married young, I was 18. I told them my wife was pregnant. A friend of mine told me to tell them that. They didn’t take me that time, but eight weeks later they called up and said they were going to take me. So I volunteered and went in as RA, Regular Army. I had my choice of MPs or Medics and I thought, Well oh hell, medics are in the hospital.

He laughs.

I didn’t know there were field medics.

Before that I was going to go into the Navy as a chemical analysis specialist. But I got a reckless driving ticket and it takes about a year to clear your records, and they could not take me for that school because it needed a Top Secret clearance. I ended up with a Top Secret anyway because I filled out the paperwork and was going to go as a helicopter pilot. But my wife talked me out of it because a friend said pilots get killed and she talked me out of it at the last minute. But in the in-between time I got my Top Secret clearance. And I used it several times in the service, three or four times at Sherry. When the 1st sergeant and the captain were both on convoy to Phan Thiet, the first lieutenant in charge at the time, Monaghan, had a Secret clearance but not a Top Secret clearance. So he had to come and get me and I had to translate the Top Secret messages. He was not allowed to get into that book.

Not long after Gulley and Sherlock I got sent back to the rear, to the battalion aid station in Phan Rang. I didn’t know jack about anything. But when important things came up that had to be done, the first sergeant helped me out a lot. I was lucky I didn’t have to do too much.  We were still in that grey area where we didn’t keep good records; everybody was free to get along as long as they did what they were supposed to do. I was not like it was here in the states, that’s for sure. We lived a different story back then.

Things were not done the proper way. A lot of the medical records were out on the firebases. Instead of being brought to the battalion aid station in Phan Rang and having them there, they were out on the firebases. And even the ones that we did have were not kept up. They did not have any information in them. We treated guys every day but we were not writing down who we were treating and what we were treating them for. Nobody did it. When I got there I started doing it because I found out that we were supposed to. But before that nobody did it. There was never an IG inspection the whole time the battery was in Vietnam. There was nobody to be accountable to. Everything got lax. Sloppy.

Right before I went home, the secretary for the headquarters battery said that I was put in for the Bronze Star. You know they give all E6s and above Bronze Stars back then. But they declined it because I was only an E5.

It didn’t make me any difference anyway. All I wanted was a trip home. I had a six month old daughter that I never seen. She was born while I was over there. She was almost seven months old when I went home. And the first time she saw me, she didn’t want nothin’ to do with me. You know what I mean. But by the end of that day she was in my lap and did not want to have anything to do with her mom.

He laughs.

I ask about Agent Orange around LZ Sherry.

 They did not spray it actually on top of us but they sprayed around us. They would come in from Titty Mountain area and then go from Phan Thiet towards the jungle. I think they were just trying to take down that tree line out there. All I know is I remember them spraying it. And then it blew across the battery. Just like when we got gassed a couple of times, it blew right across the battery. The Agent Orange got sprayed once or twice. They sprayed that stuff in a lot of places in that country that they did not want to admit, because they did not want to pay for the crops. I got Parkinson’s and I have diabetes both, and both they say were caused by Agent Orange. Just about anybody that was in country was exposed to it. That stuff had a half-life. Just because they sprayed it here today, does not mean it is gone tomorrow. You stop and think how much of that stuff they sprayed around, it got in the dust even. I’m pretty sour about all that.

I say, “You feel like some lunch?”

Sure, OK. I hardly go out in public at all anymore. I need this wheelchair with a motor to go anywhere, and for short distances I still need the cane. You like Mexican?

We ride in his van, with a wheelchair lift on the back. We are lucky enough to find a spot in front of the restaurant, allowing Tom to navigate with just the cane. It’s a friendly little place with the best tortilla chips I have ever had in my life. The walls are filled with beer posters, everyone of them a product of Anheuser-Busch, my old employer of 21 years. Wherever I go I cannot help noticing what brewers have their feet in the account and it looks like A-B owns this one. I have a Budweiser. We talk about the usual stuff: kids, trips we’ve taken, the families we can see through the window crowding downtown Paulding for the annual fair.

Pulling into Tom’s driveway back at his house I comment on a sign hanging on his garage. It says Paw Paw’s Workshop. He tells me the name came from his grandson. Then he tells me he has not been inside in years, because of his back.

I gave away my tools because I cried whenever I looked at them.

The patio behind the house is full of wooden planters and benches that came from his workshop. I comment on the rose bushes and planted areas in the yard.

Yes, my wife and I did all the landscaping, but I can’t do that anymore either. That’s why it’s kind of a mess. Come on in the house if you have time, I want to show you some things.

He takes me from room to room, pointing out the furniture he has built over the years: a highboy, a woman’s dresser, a gun case – all with perfect joints and detailed carvings from the hand of a craftsman. He sits on his bed and points to the bottom shelf of a bookcase.

I can’t bend down that far anymore. See if you can pull out that pile of DVDs. I’m looking for something I want to give you.

I find what he is looking for.

This is a program about a great tank battle in Vietnam. Most people don’t know that the North Vietnam had tanks, good Russian ones. But they did and there was one huge battle. I thought you would find it interesting.

I leave through the front door and he follows me out. He stands on the porch watching me load into my car. As I drive away he is still on the porch, waving.