Tommy Mulvihill – Gun Crew Chief – Part One
Tommy Mulvihill
Gun Crew Chief
PART ONE
Tommy still lives in Hicksville, Long Island where he grew up. It is just a four hour drive from Boston, so on a crisp spring morning I head south. The last long leg of the trip hugs the industrial coast of New York, thick with semis and potholes. It thankfully skirts Manhattan, then crosses Long Island Sound across a magnificent bridge at Throggs Neck, and finally swings east through the center of the island. I pick my way through a neat Hicksville neighborhood looking for house number 131. Then I see something that makes the house number unnecessary. On the rear window of a black pickup I see University of Vietnam, School of Warfare. Classic Tommy.
Tommy hasn’t changed much from the Irish kid at LZ Sherry. He still don’t take shit from nobody.
June 1968
When I graduated from Hicksville high school my cousin got me into General Electric Credit Corporation. I was basically a bill collector. Then I got a job at Castro convertibles, a large New York furniture company, to train to be an assistant credit manager. For a kid right out of high school, that was a big deal. But soon as I passed my physical for the draft, they fired me. They would have to hold my job, and they could not afford to do that. So I walked into the draft board the next town over and said, “I know I’m going so I want to go now.”
I got fired in May, and June I was gone. It was the day after Father’s Day. I’ll never forget that because my father took me down to Whitehall Street in New York to catch the bus. I went to Fort Hamilton and got sworn in there. Then we got on the plane and went down to South Carolina for basic at Fort Jackson. We were all from New York. We get down there 11 or 12 o’clock at night, stand in front of the barracks and they’re yelling, “Alright all you mother fuckers, we want the guns, we want the knives, we want the switchblades. We want everything.” And sure enough, I could hardly believe it, guys started throwing all this stuff out onto the pavement.
Trainee 241
Early in basic they give you all these tests and have you fill out a ton of forms. We all had a number in basic. I was 240 and the guy sitting next to me as we’re doing all this paperwork is number 241. He’s married with two kids, was drafted and wants to get out in the worse way. He tells me he’s going to put on his form that he’s queer, that he’s a homo. I tell him please don’t do that. I begged him, DO NOT DO THAT. Well he does it anyway, and soon the sergeants are making life miserable for him. Every time they shouted out his number I thought they were after me – “two forty …” until they added the “… one.”
I overhear four black guys say they’re going to give him a blanket party that night. Beat the crap out of him without leaving any marks. Before bed I go outside and find a big stick and go to him and say, “We’re switching bunks tonight.” I get good and hidden under the covers and when these guys come around I jump up on the bunk and say, “You guys need to know something.” I tell them about his wife and his kids and why he let out he was queer. From then on I had this guy’s back, and so did these four black guys.
After a week of processing, loosing our hair, getting fatigues and filling out forms, we get assigned to our regular training companies. They call us all into formation; there must be 300 of us. This sergeant then goes down the list alphabetically. This guy’s name starts with a W, and when the sergeant gets that far he says, “Werth – Number 241. Company D.” And then this sergeant says out loud to the whole formation, “He’s a queer.”
After that I don’t know what happened to Werth. One thing for sure, the sergeants made life hell for him.
Howie
When we got assigned to training units, me and Moore and Pyle got sent to the same basic training company because our names are close in the alphabet. We were all in the same barracks and we all kind of hit it off, more so between me and Howie. Then we all went to AIT together at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and the three of us did an extra two weeks of training on self-propelled (howitzers mounted on what looks like a tank).
Howie and I were both New Yorkers and became instant friends from the minute we met. He went to college for a year and was a year older than me roughly. He liked to smoke pot and I did not like to smoke pot, not even in high school, nothing. It was drilled into me by my parents not to. He would always try to get me to smoke with him. I would say, “ I’m doing fine. I’m good with my beer.”
Howie and I did a lot of things together, we were practically joined at the hip. We used to go down to Jackson to the beer joints together, the strip joints, have fun. At Fort sill we’d go down to Lawton and just have fun and get into fights down there with the locals, the hippies that were antiwar people. We both did not take any shit from anybody. And I’m still the same way today.
The Long Wrong Way to Sherry
Howie, Jimmy Moore and I all went to Vietnam together on the same plane. We landed at Cam Ranh Bay at night. When we got off the plane – the stink, I’ll never forget the stink. To this day I don’t like fish. From there we went to Phan Rang and that’s when they gave us our M16s and they told us where we were going. Howie and I were going to B battery out at LZ Sherry.
They put all three of us on a helicopter and instead take us out to LZ Sandy, the wrong firebase. That night they put us on perimeter guard duty. Me and Howie and Jimmy alone in a guard bunker our first night in the field. We were cherry boys shitting bricks. Early in the morning I see this guy walking right in front of our bunker and he looked like a gook. He did not have the ARVN uniform on. He was wearing sandals and black pants just like a VC. I was about to shoot him, but Howie stopped me. Thank God I did not shoot him. It’s funny now when you look back at it, but not at the time. Scared, man we were scared. Dark! Oh my God was it dark.
Later that morning they found out that we were in the wrong place and shipped us all off the LZ Sherry. What happened to me and Howie and Jimmy was very rare, going through training together and then ending up at the same little firebase in Vietnam. At Sherry I was assigned to Gun 4. I think it was called BEWITCHED. I started as an ammo humper like everybody else and worked my way up. Howie and Jimmy went to Gun 3, BENEVOLENCE, which was base piece. (the gun in the center of the cluster of six guns. Firing data was computed from its location, making it the most accurate of the guns.)
When you first get to Sherry you put your fingers in your ears when a gun goes off. But once you get assigned to a gun you really can’t. And if you had ear plugs in you couldn’t hear the settings for the fire mission and you couldn’t hear commands to the guns. If you’re the gunner, assistant gunner, or even the guys cutting the fuses and the radio operator, if you had ear plugs in you couldn’t hear what you were supposed to set the deflection at and the quadrant at.
Newbie Tommy
Courtesy Rik Groves
Brothers
When Howie made corporal, I made corporal, and both of us became crew chiefs on our guns. He was a good leader just like me, and that’s why we were promoted.
We’d bullshit, play cards, talk about what we were going to do when we got home. We were going to try to move close together, maybe start a business together. In what we really did not know. We talked about going cross country when we got home. He loved life. He did. Of course we used to call him Gomer.
Howie and I became so close that his parents would write me and send me care packages. Howie always wanted to fix me up with his sister. He would only talk about his sister, I did not even know that he had two brothers. He showed me pictures of her. She was hot. I think maybe it would have worked.
Whenever we had downtime, when you weren’t shooting a fire mission or working or on guard duty, we were together. We talked to each other like brothers, real brothers. We even looked like brothers. If you look at that picture of us together you could see a similarity.
Tommy and Howie (Gomer) Pyle
