Captain Hank Parker – Battery Commander – Part Three
Captain Hank Parker
Part Three
A Long Day
Three days after the Zippo incident I go out on an amphibious landing to rescue American POWs. The operation is out of LZ Betty with the 3/506 Currahees. The guys running the operation have tight crew cuts, khaki shirts, no name tags, and aviator glasses – intel types. They give us the maps and the coordinates and other information, and away we go … but without the crew cut types. In the early morning dark we depart on LARCs (boats on wheels used to shuffle cargo from ship to shore, today used for Boston Duck Tours). A guy by the name of Grimaldo took 8 mm film of us getting ready to deploy. I see me from the back and I see Captain Maupin standing there. We go north toward Song Mao. When we arrive at the designated location the first LARC hits the shore, drops its grate and everybody charges out. When my LARC arrives it stops well short of the shore. I come charging out and immediately sink. It’s still dark and I think I’m going to drown. Nobody had told me that on a rucksack there is an emergency release. Somebody grabs me and pulls me out. I’ll tell you salt water in short order makes your M-16 useless. It rusts almost immediately and is inoperable. We force march for most of the day, and we find a campfire that is still smoldering, and it’s got a set of shackles. We continue on and set up our night NDP and an in-place ambush on the trail. In the course of the night there’s this large explosion. Again I smell the blood mixed with cordite and I know we killed somebody. A new guy, who I guess was nervous, blew the ambush too soon. The guy he killed is an interrogator and interpreter. He is in a brand-new uniform. On his waist he has a Soviet pistol with the red star on the handle. He has a spiral-bound notebook with signed confessions from POWs. The notebook has profiles of US soldiers from private to four-star general and newspaper articles of the Detroit riots to be used for propaganda. He has currencies from four different countries and some stamps. This guy is not a fighter. His pistol still has cosmoline in the barrel (a rust inhibitor used to store and ship weapons). It’s a shame we didn’t capture him. We could have gotten the information on the POWs probably without much trouble. In fact I think he may have been coming in to do that, the way he was walking down the trail. What ensues after that is an argument on who gets the weapon. I have to mediate and I say it should be the guy who killed him. Even if it’s a blown ambush he gets the gun. At 1725 hours we are extracted. By the end of the mission I am exhausted. In later years I had a heck of a time finding just a few sketchy facts about this mission in daily logs. My guess is this was a top-secret operation that is still classified.
Alive is Better Than Dead
One of the things Captain Wrazen does, and it scares the crap out of me, after a fire fight he asks me to call in illumination. I say, “What do you want illumination for?” “We’re gonna crawl out and drag the bodies in.” “Why? Let’s wait until daylight.” “No, for the intel. Some of them might be alive. We can interrogate them and get intel.” So I call in illumination and I go out with him and we pull bodies back in. He says, “Hank, let me tell you what. Anytime you can capture somebody, that’s worth more than a hundred kills because of the intelligence you can get off them. If you can take somebody alive, you do it. You don’t risk your life, but if you can capture somebody, do it.” Further he doesn’t count a body until he has the body and the weapon. He doesn’t doctor his count. And I take all that to heart.
Captain Gerald Wrazen
A Voice of Reason
I’ve never told anyone this story. It occurs during the really heavy engagements between January 9 and Feb 22, when we’ve got three infantry companies out in the bush fighting several battalions of NVA. I’m out with just a squad of guys on a clover leaf and separated from our main platoon. We walk into a well planned L-shaped ambush which we manage to pull out of without taking any casualties. I know at this point that we are in the middle of a heavy concentration of NVA who are packed into tunnel complexes. As we are pulling back to our platoon I occasion upon an NVA soldier. He’s maybe 100 yards from me. I see him and he sees me. He is a high ranking officer and unarmed. We establish eye contact. I put my M16 on him and am getting ready to shoot him. A voice stops me, Henry you don’t have to kill this guy. He’s not a rabbit; he’s not a squirrel; there’s no purpose in killing him right now. The impression of a voice is so strong I turn my head to see who said this to me, thinking it’s my RTO, and there’s nobody there. Of course I’ve still got my rifle on the NVA officer and he’s looking at me with a puzzled look as if he’s wondering, What are you going to do? I put my rifle down, turn around and walk away. And he disappears into the tunnel complex. It’s always puzzled me what happened there. It was an outside voice; I heard it. As I reflect on it now had I killed him, his troops probably would have finished us off, because we were definitely outnumbered, even with the good support that we had. It would have been difficult to bring in a precise artillery strike because of the closeness of our support elements. We were basically at the tail end of the operation and we had other elements of our battalion being extracted. I think it was a logical and almost instantaneous thought process for me, that there’s nothing to be gained here. He is not a threat to me, not a threat to the platoon. So maybe the voice was mine, putting thoughts into words. As I’m walking away I have this tremendous feeling of relief, because it had been a pretty heavy battle and we’re walking away without casualties. By this time I’ve seen a lot of action and I’ve got instincts, in this case the right one.
Reason Wins Again … Eventually
On the same operation we’re going through the jungle. We find supply paths, and when we find another tunnel complex I get interested. I’ve never been in a tunnel and figure I’ll take a peek. I start down into this tunnel and I see this wire and I think, This isn’t my job. I back out and tell the platoon sergeant there’s a tripwire in that tunnel, let’s not mess with it. Another time on that operation we find unexploded ordnance, a 150 pound bomb. This thing was eventually going to be used against us if we didn’t destroy it. Probably end up as a road mine. I wrap C4 plastic explosive around the nose of this thing, set blasting caps and get back. We blow the C4 and FUMP – the bomb moves two feet. That’s it. Then I think about it. Hell, if we’d exploded that shell it might have taken us all out. I have seen the craters these things make and by God we would have been in the crater if it blew. This isn’t my job either. But at that time you couldn’t get EOD to come out (Explosive Ordnance Disposal). We flag it and eventually get somebody to come and get it out of there. We should never have tried blowing it on our own.
