Jim Blaydes – Gun Crew – Part Two
LZ Sherry
When I was infused out of Firebase Tomahawk they put me on a chopper and sent me to Phan Thiet. I had never heard of the 5th battalion or the 27th artillery or LZ Sherry. I took my time and spent a couple days on the beach. When I finally got to LZ Sherry it was supper time. I ate and then they gave me a hooch and as soon as it got dark, my first night there … poomph … poomph … poomph … the mortars started coming in, and this happened two or three times a week. I was not used to this at all. At Tomahawk the gooks pretty much left us alone, except for that one night.
I had been a gunner on the 155 howitzer for eight months, setting the direction and quadrants, so the sergeant put me on Gun 1, which was named Bullwinkle just like my gun at Tomahawk, and made me a gunner again looking through the scope and setting the direction of the howitzer.
Blaydes and Bullwinkle
I am at Sherry just two weeks on a guard shift. Me and this 18 year old kid are sitting out in front of the powder bunker and it’s around one o’clock in the morning. He had got married right before he shipped out for Vietnam. He showed me a picture of his wife and everything. He’d been there six months or so and he says, “I’m going on R&R in a day or so to meet my wife in Hawaii. There’s no way they’re going to get me tonight.” Well the mortars stared coming in, six or eight, and one hit twenty feet in front of us on the sandbag wall. It got him pretty bad in the leg, mangled it good. Shrapnel hit me in the back, but my flak vest took most of it, putting small pieces of shrapnel along my right arm. That flak jacket probably saved my life.
More mortars hit, this time three or four inside the gun pit. I am laying on the ground, there’s dust everywhere, and I hear this damn hissing. I thought the powder was on fire. In basic training they teach you how to low crawl. Well I low flew about 50 yards out to another gun pit. Then I come back and saw that both tires were flat. Flat tires don’t mean the gun won’t shoot, so we turned the howitzer around and fired it toward where the mortars were coming from.
A couple weeks later they called a special formation. They called me and four or five other guys up there and presented us with Purple Hearts, pinned them on our shirts.
After that night I thought, Man this is not a good place to be standing out fooling with a scope. I was used to being inside my 155 howitzer track, not out in the open with mortars coming down. And that gun was not sandbagged right. Every time it fired it would slide around in the sand, but we just kept shooting. I told the buck sergeant, We need to re-lay this gun. He said, We never done that before. I said, I’ll tell you what, you get somebody else because I don’t want to be killing people, there’s too much discrepancy. It might not be much, but it was way more than I was used to.
I refused to shoot a gun I thought was dangerous and instead became a powder monkey; I humped ammo, set fuses and cut powder charges. When we got mortared I went on the M-60 machine gun out on the wire (in a small perimeter fighting bunker). That’s where I was on August 12.
Two mortar attacks on August 12 kill Theodus Stanley and Howie Pyle and wound seven others.
UFOs
For a period of about two weeks, the last part of July, we saw a UFO every night. It appeared back toward the coastline about a quarter mile from us at an elevation of about 500 feet. It came on just like a light bulb in the sky, made no noise whatsoever. It set motionless, or moved just a little bit. Might stay on a minute or two, might stay on half an hour or so. When it got ready to leave it shot across the sky usually east, again making no noise whatsoever.
When we first saw it the first couple of nights we couldn’t wait to see it again. After a week or so we didn’t pay any attention to it. A lot of guys on the gun crews saw it. You might think I’m crazy, but I did not smoke marijuana, I did not take drugs, and I drank very little beer. It turned into entertainment. We didn’t think much of it because in our situation we were thinking of blood and guts. It was the same sort of lights you see on TV programs about UFOs. The thing is when they move they move way faster than any aircraft and they don’t make any propulsion sounds. They went from directly south to directly west in an instant.
Similar sightings were common in Vietnam, often referred to as “enemy helicopters,” even though the enemy had no helicopters during this period and no aircraft could move with such speed and agility. In perhaps the most notorious incident in June of 1968 Air Force Phantom jets pursued a cluster of lights believed to be enemy helicopters near the DMZ. As the lights moved out to sea with the Phantoms in hot pursuit things began to go wrong. The Phantom radar systems activated a cut off mechanism to prevent large objects from flooding the radar scope, which made it impossible for the pilots to distinguish a ship from a slow moving object. Believing they were engaging the enemy the Phantoms fired air to surface missiles at a US swift boat killing five of the seven crew members, and later attacked the Australian warship HOBART killing two and wounding seven. Three other friendly vessels came under attack but without casualties. The pilots involved in the operation, classified as friendly fire, were relieved of duty and grounded. The next night the lights returned, still with no explanation, and continued to appear on multiple nights. US command ordered the Air Force and artillery not to fire on the lights, fearing a repeat of the attacks on friendly forces. No wreckage of enemy aircraft was ever found.
No one doubts the existence of mysterious lights in the sky, viewed by thousands of ground soldiers in multiple locations and described in similar terms. And no credible explanation for them has ever been put forward.
When You Turn Into A Real Soldier
After the August 12 attacks I was waiting for my early-out orders to go home and go back to college. I was a real short timer and so darn scared I didn’t want to be in the open. On guard rotation in the middle of the night I’m sitting there wanting a cup of coffee, and afraid to walk to the pot 30 paces away.
But our Chief of Smoke, a Hispanic guy (Sgt. Cerda), with the mortars falling everywhere would walk straight down the middle of that the battery with his chest stuck out cussing you to get out on your gun. I mean that sucker had no fear of dying. I was amazed at him. I learned something from him: if it’s gonna get you it’s gonna get you. When the mortars are falling you hit the ground, but when a break comes you get up on the gun, load the gun, shoot the gun. I guess when you figure you’re probably gonna die you turn into a real soldier.
Saved By A Bad Tooth
Hank Parker sent me back to Phan Thiet to get a tooth fixed. After they fix my tooth I hung around for as long as I could, around two days, because I do not want to go back. I am laying on my bunk, it’s about two o’clock in the afternoon and this little Specialist 4 walks in and says, “Your name Blaydes?” I say, Yea. He says, “You’re out of the Army. I’ve had your early out orders here for two weeks.”
I ‘bout choked that SOB right there.
He says, “You get any medals?”
“I got a Purple Heart.”
“How’d you get it?”
“I took some shrapnel in my arm, the doc pulled ‘em out, and they gave it to me.”
He says, “Oh, I’m not going to worry about that. Get on the chopper back to Sherry, get your stuff and I’ll process you out tomorrow.”
There is nothing in my footlocker at Sherry I want. I had in there my Purple Heart, a case knife, some money and other stuff. I don’t care, I just want out. I say, “No, you get your pencil right now,” and we go to his office and process me out right then and there. He has my DD 214 (discharge papers) all screwed up, none of my medals are on there. I fly to Cam Ranh Bay and the next morning I am on a plane to Ft. Lewis, Washington.
I’m home back in Kentucky almost a year after a semester of college, and here comes that footlocker from Vietnam. My money and case knife are gone. My Purple Heart is still in it, but no award documentation, and it’s not listed on my DD 214. So officially in the eyes of the Army I don’t have a Purple Heart. I guess I could have stayed around in Vietnam to get my paperwork straightened out, but at the time all I wanted was out, nothing else mattered.
I wouldn’t want to go back to it again, but I wouldn’t take anything for the memories.
