Mike Jordan – Duster Platoon Leader – Part Two
The Wives Always Know
I graduated from Officer Candidate School at Ft. Sill and got my commission in January of 1968. Just before Christmas – we hadn’t gotten our assignment orders yet – our training battery commander said to us, “Wherever you are when I get your assignment orders I will come and tell you.” So we’re sitting in class one day with this major up front trying to teach us about engineering tactics, how to build bridges and clear mine fields and that kind of stuff, when our battery commander came into the back of the room. The room started to buzz and the major said, “Captain, obviously you have something these candidates are more interested in than what I am trying to teach them about engineering tactics, so why don’t you take over.”
They had told us all along, You will not go directly to Vietnam, you will get an assignment here in Ft. Sill, or Europe, or CONUS (Continental United States), but you will not go directly to Vietnam. Well the wives had a wives club in conjunction with the officers’ wives. Mary Beth came home after one of their luncheons and said, “Your class is going to send guys directly to Vietnam.”
I said, “No, no, no, no. That ain’t gonna happen.”
Well our battery commander gets up there in the front of the class and the first thing he says is, “There are seventeen of you going directly to Vietnam.” The wives knew more than we did. He read those seventeen names first, and then he started reading the rest of them. There was one other guy and me went to St. Louis to the Nike Hercules battalion.
Safe In Grafton
The Nike Hercules missile site was above Grafton, Illinois at Pere Marquette State Park (across the Mississippi River from St. Louis). At that time there were four Nike Hercules missile sites protecting the city of St. Louis. Throughout the nation at that time we built these missile sites around all the big cities as a carryover from the tactics of WWII assuming that the Russians were going to do the same things to us that we did in Germany. We sat there waiting for huge flights of Russian bombers to come over the North Pole to shoot them down, which needless to say they never came. Thank goodness.
When I first got there it was funny. The captain and all the lieutenants and warrant officers said, Oh man, you’re lucky being here in the Nike system, it’s the best thing that ever happened because we don’t have any Nikes in Vietnam. We got some HAWKS, but no Nikes, so you’re safe. Ten months later in the Fall of 1968 I got orders to go to Nam because they were closing the Nike site. There were two other cities that deactivated their sites in ’68: Kansas City and Dallas/Ft. Worth. These sites were the deepest into the interior of the U.S. and they felt that if we ever had to shoot at Russian bombers coming over, by the time they got to these cities it was too damn late. Over the next several years they proceeded to close all of the Nike Hercules sites down.
Vietnam
But before Vietnam I went to Ft. Bliss in Texas for six weeks of Duster school, after which I picked up a new MOS of 1174 (Light Air Defense Artillery Unit Commander).
The First Kind of Promotion
In those days you could go from 2nd lieutenant to 1st lieutenant in one year, and then to captain in another year. I made 1st lieutenant two days after I arrived in Long Binh, Vietnam. I did not yet have my promotion orders, but they told me to go ahead and just sew the 1st lieutenant bars on my uniforms. It was three or four months later that I finally got my orders, along with a pretty significant chunk of back pay.
The Second Kind – A Blood Promotion
I arrived at LZ Betty in January of 1969 assigned to the 1st Duster platoon, Alpha Battery, 4/60 Air Defense Artillery battalion. I was initially the assistant platoon leader under another 1st lieutenant, Frank Hewitt, who had won a Silver Star and was on a six-month extension in Vietnam. One day he left for Nha Trang to see one of our troops who was in the hospital, and that was the last I saw of him. He was loading his jeep into a Chinook helicopter in Nha Trang, and instead of using an enlisted driver, as called for by policy, he drove it himself and proceeded to roll it over. Frank was injured severely with a major head injury. He was driving with the windshield down, and even if it had been up I don’t know that it would have done much to protect him. They evacuated him to Japan, and subsequently to the Army hospital in Denver next to Stapleton Airport. He was from Colorado Springs, so that’s where they took him to be close to his family. I never saw or heard from him again.
It was February when he had the accident, and I got a letter late in the Spring from his parents wanting to know why we had not sent his property back home to him. “Dear Mr. Hewitt,” I wrote, “I’m sorry Frank’s property has not arrived, but they left here.” There were guys who sorted through packages and certainly if there was any kind of war trophy in there, that stuff would always disappear.
TET 69
I took over as platoon leader from Frank, and assumed the unofficial commander’s radio call sign of “Duster 6.” Shortly after I took over the platoon the Second TET hit. The last night of the declared truce LZ Betty came under mortar and sapper attacks – the morning of February 22, 1969. We were sitting right next to the infantry’s four-deuce (4.2 inch diameter) mortar company. A sapper crawled through the wire and threw a satchel charge into the ammo bunker at the four-deuce mortar position. It started a fire and then caused a massive explosion. I don’t know how many hundreds of those four-deuce mortar rounds cooked off simultaneously. The blast wave and the shock wave just leveled everything in my platoon area.
At the time of the initial attack, before the ammo bunker explosion, I evacuated my platoon area and was doing a retrograde movement back toward the airfield one building, one structure, and one anything-to-hide-behind at a time. I was on my hands and knees behind the latrine when the blast went off. The back wall of the latrine blew out and landed on top of me. Thankfully I was not injured. I now have a shadowbox that I made upon retirement for all my awards and decorations, and I am very proud of the fact that there is no Purple Heart up there.
Engineers had just built for us four or five SEA huts (South East Asia huts), corrugated roofs, screened-in windows in the upper half, and solid walls behind sandbags on the lower half, all on a slab of concrete. They were prominent throughout Vietnam at base camp type places. The concussion from the secondary explosion was so bad that it just leveled those SEA huts.
Dave Fitchpatrick, Gun 5 section chief at Sherry, said he could feel the heat flashes five miles away.
Betty the morning after
Picture courtesy Dave Fitchpatrick
My primary means of communication with my battery headquarters up in Tuy Hoa (two hundred miles north) was an AN/GRC-106 radio. It worked off of a doublet antenna, a long wire strung between two poles. You had to put it up 90 degrees to the direction you wanted to transmit to. Well, the two poles that held my antenna got blown down that night. So first thing in the morning I can’t even call the battery commander to tell him that we were hit, that we suffered damages, that we had a couple injuries, but not bad enough to be Medevac’d. I didn’t have any communications. So I am wandering around all over Betty that morning trying to find anybody that’s got a 106 AM radio. I ended up at the MARS station and a guy over there said, “Why I can make you an antenna. Just give me some WD-1 wire.
While I was at the MARS station I put in a call to my wife.
The Military Affiliate Radio Service used phone-patch connections over shortwave radios to place personal calls to the States.
I said, “You’re probably going to hear about this, that we were attacked last night, but I’m Okay.” Of course she had not yet heard about it. Here she gets this MARS call where you had to do the OVER nonsense and me telling her that I’m Okay.
She said, “Well I really didn’t have any reason to think you weren’t Okay, till you called.”
We finally strung up an antenna and late in the afternoon I called Tuy Hoa. “Guess what, guys. We kind of got blown away last night.”
