Tommy Mulvihill – Gun Crew Chief – Part Three

Tommy Mulvihill

PART THREE

March, 1969 -  1st Time Wounded

What really sticks in my mind is the first time I got wounded. It was during a mortar attack. Shrapnel went underneath my steel pot, knocked my steel pot off and knocked me out but I was semi-conscious so I could hear but I could not talk. I heard “Mulvihill, Mulvihill, he’s dead, he’s dead.” I had a head wound and there was blood all over the place. I could hear them and I’m trying to say no I’m not. I’m still here. Then somebody came over to check on me, and they carried me into my hooch. Then they took me up to the medic and check me out, bandage me up, but they did not medevac me out.

The next day people from the rear had to come out to give shots and pay people. Whoever was in charge looked at me and I still had the bandage around my head. He knew we had a mortar attack the night before and that was when the captain got his ass reamed out. And Top got his ass reamed out for not medevac’ing me out. The officer, whoever he was, took me back on his helicopter to the hospital at Phan Rang. They checked to make sure there was no shrapnel still in my head and they sewed me all up. I was back there may be six or seven days and then I was back out in the field again.

I remember my mom getting a letter from the Red Cross that I was wounded before I could write to my folks. My mom got the letter on her birthday. They were nervous wrecks. 

April -  Young and Stupid

 I did a lot of minesweeping. They promised me an extra $65 a month. That’s what you got for hazardous duty pay when you went to Vietnam, an extra $65 a month. Well they said that minesweeping was extra hazardous, so I got an extra $65. I said, “I’ll take it.” I’m fucking young and stupid, nothing is going to hurt me. Sure I’ll do it. Whenever a convoy went out, I did the mine sweep.

You had headphones and a battery pack on your waist in addition to the sweeper that you held in your hands. You didn’t carry an M-16 because you couldn’t. A guy 10 to 15 feet behind you carried your weapon and walked in your footprints.

The first time I found a mine, I pretty near shit in my pants. You’re taught to freeze, lay the sweeper right there on the ground to mark it, and then backtrack in your own footprints. A sergeant or lieutenant who was way back there in the jeep would come up and figure out how they were going to disarm it. This officer came up and it  was like a WWII movie. He’s on his hands and knees with a bayonet going into the ground trying to find the mine. I thought, OK, better you than me.

Another incident while I was out mine sweeping, I got shot at. The bullets are hitting right in front of me. I turned, ran back to the guy with my weapon, aimed it and shot back. When we got back to the battery, this sergeant or lieutenant, whoever was in charge of the convoy, wanted to give me an Article 15. I did not have permission. You needed permission to shoot in the daylight. I said, “Are you out of your mind? You’re going to give me an Article 15 for defending myself?” When this guy told Top and the captain what he wanted to do, they looked at him and said, “Good-bye. There’s no way he’s getting an Article 15.”

At a certain point, I had been doing it for so long, I said to Top, “I don’t want to go today.” He said, that’s fine, so they got somebody else. And don’t you know it, it wasn’t 15 minutes later and I heard KABOOM. I jumped in a jeep and drove out there. I talked to a guy there who said when the mine went off the guy who was mine sweeping his body was up on top of a pink cloud. Another guy got killed too. I felt guilty about that, because that should have been me. But then again I could have found it. (This was the incident in which Percy Gulley and Stephen Sherlock were killed.)

 Another time I mine swept we went in, swept the whole road, got our ammo and supplies and were coming back. We did not mine sweep on the way back because the VC set their mines at night. Well this time they had re-mined the road and one of our deuce and a half trucks hit a mine. It was the tankers’ truck, and it was the only one that didn’t have anything in it. It blew the tires off and the bed of the truck looked like when you put your hand through a piece of tinfoil. Thank god nobody got hurt. 

May -  Wounded Again

Two guns from B Battery are on a mobile operation at a place called Outpost Nora. One of the guns is Gun 2, BAD NEWS. While shooting a fire mission in support of the infantry, a round with a bad fuse explodes coming out of the barrel of BAD NEWS. It kills Lloyd Handsumaker and James Johnson on the other gun, and wounds three on Gun 2.

I was still on Gun 4 at the time, and went up to Nora to relieve the crew on Gun 2, BAD NEWS. I remember it was almost dark. Bombers had just finished an airstrike, or maybe it was a mortar attack, on the mountain side where we had to land and the tree trunks were still smoldering. The helicopter that took us either wouldn’t or couldn’t land and we had to jump out and then walk up the hillside to the firebase.

We were shooting a fire mission. I think it was a battery of three (both guns shoot a succession of three rounds). And then the next thing you know, BOOM. I got thrown back 30 feet. Me and Tony Bongi and Leroy Leggett – the three of us were hit. Leggett got hit in the stomach and he went down. Bongi got hit in the hip. I got it in the leg. And two guys on the other gun got killed. We all got medevac’d out, except Bongi. He wasn’t bad enough and they needed everybody they could get.

Outpost Nora Before Mishap
(From Left) Tony Bongi, Tommy, Leroy Leggett

That time when I got hit my folks got the letter from the Red Cross on their anniversary, and like the other time I didn’t have a chance to write them yet. 

After I got wounded a second time Howie used to say, “Stay away from Mulvihill because he attracts metal.”

Three or fours years back from Vietnam I was in the shower washing and I felt something like a pimple, but I couldn’t see it. So I had my wife look and she said it’s black. I never gave it any more thought, until years later the VA took x-rays for my legs and that’s when they saw the shrapnel that’s still there. Only it had traveled from my thigh down to my calf and was pinching a nerve. They got the shrapnel out but it had already done its damage. The doc said the inside of my leg had the look of a 90 year old man. 

June -  Don’t Mess With Tommy

 I was a corporal and crew chief on Gun 4, when they brought in a shake ‘n’ bake sergeant over me. He and I did not hit it off and I was not there very long. He came in like gang busters. He did not know what he was doing, but he thought he did. He did not know how we ran the gun. As much as I tried to tell him certain things, he just did not want to hear it.. He ordered me around like I was a piece of shit. Constantly telling me to do this and do that when they had privates there that should have been doing it and not me as a corporal. The guys still came to me, and I’m sure that rubbed him the wrong way, and he was on me even more because he had an extra stripe. It was little shit that just built up.

Then one day he accused me of being asleep on guard duty. There was no way. I told him, “Are you out of your mind? After being hit two times? You’re accusing me up falling asleep  on guard duty.”

I freaked. I went up to my hooch, grabbed my M16, locked and loaded it, and pointed it at his fucking head. I told him, ” You ever, EVER fucking accuse me of falling asleep on guard duty again, you will not see the sunset.” And then I put a bullet in the dirt between his legs. He stood there in total shock. After that they shipped me off to Gun 2.

I could have gone to LBJ (Long Binh Jail) for firing on an NCO. I got along with the brass because they respected me. I did a lot of mine sweeping. I did things that I was told. I was the crazy Irishman and they took care of me.

We are in Tommy’s study sifting through pictures. The sergeant occasionally appears, at which Tommy says, “There’s that fat fuck again.”