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.
