Chuck Heindrichs – Battery Commander – Part Seven
Hi Ho Silver, Away!
In the middle of the day we heard this huge explosion to our east probably two hundred yards beyond the creek that crossed the access road. It was obvious somebody was putting a mine into the road, which happened a lot, and it went off. So we called Phan Thiet and immediately they sent out one of these cowboys in a little Loach observation helicopter.
Loach OH-6
The Loach was often part of a high-low team. A heavily armed Huey helicopter would be high, and the little Loach would fly low to draw fire and in would come the Huey. So here comes this guy in a Loch, but all by himself with no other helicopter. He drops onto the pad and says, “Where in the hell are the bastards?”
I get into the Loach and we fly in the direction of the explosion, and we could see this hole where mine went off and three bodies laying there. We also saw two or three other guys run toward that creek line. The pilot pulls out his .45, I pull out my .45, and he flies the Loach right up to the wood line and cruises along it ten feet above the ground. We flew up and down the wood line, and up and down the creek bed, and the whole time I’m thinking, We’re sitting in a glass bubble with a blade on top. If there’s a guy below us with a machine gun our .45s aren’t going to help much, we’re gone. What is wrong with this picture?
Navy Duds
Sometime in June 1970 a U.S. Navy destroyer off the coast of Phan Thiet invited us to come out to the ship and observe what they were doing. Unfortunately on the scheduled day there was a terrible storm and fog and the visit never happened.
In any case, they were doing experimental firing with a JATO round (Jet Assisted Take Off ) and wanted LZ Sherry to observe the impact of the rounds. JATO was a round that had a sort of rocket assisted take off mechanism. It was supposed extend the shell’s range by some five miles or so. We mutually picked a time, about two o’clock in the morning, and established a communications protocol between us and the ship. The concept was that they would tell us when a round was fired and we would listen for the explosion and perhaps even see the impact burst and be able to confirm some level of accuracy. The rounds were targeted some one to three miles from LZ Sherry.
On the first round we heard a thud when the thing hit the ground, indicating it had not exploded. The same thing on the next two rounds; all we heard were thuds. We suggested to the Navy that we would probably see these rounds on our roadway in the form of land mines. Experiment over.
Over one hundred and thirty Navy destroyers saw action in Vietnam, many of them equipped with guided missiles, and no doubt experimental weaponry of all kinds.
A Minor Mistake
At two o’clock in the morning an eight inch howitzer round from LZ Sandy exploded in an airburst right over the firebase. I came out of my bunker with my flashlight and saw the most eerie looking thing. From the ground up there was a three foot dust cloud everywhere I looked. It was like you walked out into a fog rising from the ground. I remember getting on the command net and yelling CEASE FIRE for anybody and everybody to hear, because I had no idea where the round came from.
Nobody got hurt, and no one realized until maybe midday when they looked at their trucks that something had happened. My jeep had a huge hole where a piece of shrapnel went through the passenger seat and right on through the bed of the vehicle. All of our vehicles were in sandbag revetments so there was not a great deal of damage.
I never learned what happened because I never made anything of it. I did not want to see a guy get fired. Sandy was probably firing Harassment and Interdiction and somebody fired out. If I had made something of it there would have been a full bore investigation, and I did not want to see somebody’s career destroyed because somebody on a gun or in FDC may have made an error.
Bones
There was one incident that gave me some little insight into the Buddhist religion. The engineers at Whiskey Mountain had agreed to fly in a little bulldozer to reconfigure the berm because we had some water pooling during the rainy season. The bulldozer was pushing sand around and all of a sudden it turns up a skull and some bones. Mama-san and the two young boys were out working in front of the mess hall and saw what happened. The kids got frightened and ran back to their hooch they shared with Mama-san. I learned from our interpreter that in the Buddhist religion once you bury someone if you open the grave up the spirit is released and makes trouble for the living. We ended up flying Mama-san and the kids off base for four days until we finished pushing dirt around.
In May of 1968 the battery built LZ Sherry on top of a cemetery due to its slight elevation over the surrounding rice paddies. The above ground devotional structures typical of Vietnamese cemeteries were eventually cleared away for security reasons. By the time Chuck arrived at Sherry all vestiges of the cemetery had passed away, along with the knowledge it ever existed.
Vietnamese cemetery outside Phan Thiet
Photographed from a low flying helicopter
Every month we sent money to a monk for the boys’ education. Of all the questions I have about Vietnam, Were those kids in the aftermath of the war ever able to use that money, did they ever become successful?
Following the defeat of South Vietnamese forces civilian casualties were horrific, so extensive that the best estimates are rounded to the nearest ten thousand.
100,000 died fleeing he advancing North Vietnamese Army
170,000 died in re-education camps
150,000 perished in forced labor camps
200,000 were simply executed as collaborators
From R.J. Rommel, Vietnamese Democide: Estimates, Sources, and Calculations, 1997
In the wake of these numbers the odds for Mama-san, the two boys Slick and Wan, and the several other Vietnamese civilians who worked at the firebase … were not good.
