Program Transcript
Utah Vietnam War Stories Part One: Escalation
Female Voice Over
Utah Vietnam War Stories: Escalation is made possible in part by the Katherine
W. Dumke and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Foundation, and the contributing members
of KUED. Thank you.
[sound of helicopter]
Larry Strait
Vietnam. We hadn't even heard of Vietnam.
[music]
James Valdez
Yeah, we were just kids. Kids with guns.
Thomas Davis
Vietnam was about a generation of Americans who truly lost their innocence.
Larry Strait
From the gung-ho, to the "what the hell are we doing here?"
Gary Campbell
Actually some people when they come back were ashamed they'd been there,
unfortunately. I wasn't. I looked for opportunities to tell what it was really about
and to tell about my brothers.
Stu Shipley
I made it. So many didn't.
[sound of helicopter]
[music]
Narrator
Their country asked them to serve and they answered the call. But when the
men and women of Utah went to fight in southeast Asia, they had no idea that
the Vietnam War would be part of them for the rest of their lives.
[music]
Narrator
The world remembers the Vietnam War with mixed feelings. Some regard it as a
necessary step in confronting communism; others feel it was an enormous
mistake. The war started in controversy, was fought in controversy, and ended in
controversy. Too often those clouds obscure the service and sacrifice of millions
of Americans during the Vietnam conflict. Almost 60,000 gave their lives,
including nearly 400 from Utah. Those who served came from every corner of
American society and from every big city and most small towns in our state.
They served as chopper pilots who placed their lives on the line to save others;
foot soldiers and tunnel rats; pilots; swift boat sailors and medics. They served
and they died in distant locations that became familiar names in the 1960s: The
Central Highlands, Da Nang, the Mekong Delta. Many more came home with
physical wounds and countless others came home with mental scars that would
haunt them decades after their service. There were few welcome home parades
as a nation argued over the war and often ignored the warrior. It is time to
remember those who served, to hear their voices and embrace their sacrifice.
I'm Rick Randle. KUED is proud to present Utahn's Serving in Vietnam, the first
of a three-part series told by those who were there.
[music]
Steve Cantonwine
I was very much in support of the war. I was very much in support of my
government. I was raised to believe that if my government asked me to do
something, right or wrong, it's my government. Thankfully I've grown up.
Bryan Bulloch
There was little odds and ends in the paper but back then you were just kids and
you didn't really pay much attention to that, other than that when the draft came
round, you started paying attention to it. You had to go register for the draft.
Rick Mayes
We, in our area, knew that we were gonna get drafted. We went right into high
school knowing that the senior classes were all going to war. So we went
through high school knowing that when you graduate you're going.
Clark Clements
And I grew up right after Korea and World War II. And so you still had a lot of
those movies to some extent, that kind of romanticized war.
Rick Mayes
And it was on Huntley and Brinkley news every night. And we'd watch that and
there they were showing all of that film. And it upset my dad, he was a World
War II vet of New Guinea and he reacted very negatively. "We have no business
over there." And so on and so forth. And that was kind of the reaction
throughout our family.
W. Andrew Wilson
I mean I cared a lot about the Vietnam War, I did a lot of reading about the
Vietnam War. And I thought that it was a huge mistake in American foreign
policy and that it was just a big wealth transfer from the middle class to the
richest two percent.
David O. Chung
When you're young you want to be part of what's popular. So being against the
war was popular. Supporting the war wasn't.
David L. Barber
When it came my turn, I just went ahead and said okay, I'll do it, you know? Not
thinking anything about the political aspect or should we be there or should we
not be there. It was a call to duty and I just went and served.
Scott Maddox
But we didn't know what was gonna happen, we just thinking we were gonna be
activated and we never did, so that's I volunteered to go. I'd spent 20 years
training to do it, why not go. I knew it was a mission that we needed to perform.
Jerald Cannon
It was just exactly what I thought it was gonna be. I'd been flying practice
missions if you will for ten years, twelve years and so I was ready to go.
Rod Decker
When I was at the University of Utah and was young and foolish, I understood
that everybody had to go. It turned out not to be true but everybody had to go so
I thought – it was recommended that we become ROTC cadets and then we
could go as officers, which is what I did.
Steve Cantonwine
I love my country. I don't always agree with what it does, with what the people
lead it do, but I love my country. And I would die defending it, I very firmly
believe that.
[music]
TV Announcer
Pandemonium paid a visit to the U.S.A. Four shaggy minstrels, The Beatles.
[GI Joe Song]
GI Joe…GI Joe, fighting man from head to toe…on the land… on the sea…in the
air.
President Johnson
Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas and the
Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United
States to take action in reply.
[music]
James Valdez
The thing about Vietnam, what was striking, it was so beautiful. It was really, you
know, like a paradise on earth, at least the countryside was.
Jim Slade
Well we were up in the Highlands, in the mountains. Mountains almost like the
Wasatch Front here. They were high mountains. And they had the clear
streams, running streams, stuff like that.
Dave Magee
Saigon itself, you go out around, you know, it's a very beautiful city. I mean it's,
quote, it was the pearl of the orient before the Vietnam War really got started. I
seen a lot of the temples, the Buddhist temples and it was very interesting.
[music]
Male Voice Over
Saigon was a very, very busy city.
Russell Elder
I think every corporal in the Vietnamese Army had a moped, or bigger. If they
were a sergeant they had a jeep. And they'd be loaded, absolutely loaded.
You'd see a guy with his wife, two kids and their pet hamster on a moped. Do
you understand how big a moped is? It's smaller than a scooter. Sometimes
they'd come in with huge crates of produce on the back and the front to go to the
market. Now that's fun. I mean it's fun to do that.
Rod Decker
And we'd take these – we'd call them grenade scoops – they were a motorcycle
with a seat on the front and we'd sit and then the guy back there would drive you
around. Cost you a buck and a half.
Marc C. Reynolds
You'd see these bunkers along the main streets of town, people in the bunkers
with weapons. And often when we'd come back from dinner when we'd do that,
we'd drive by these things and it would've been very, very easy for somebody to
pick us off. We did that often enough to where I became pretty comfortable,
security wise, in the city of Saigon.
[music]
Rod Decker
We had dinner, we went as we pleased around town. Saw people, went to
parties. It was a peaceful city.
Jeffrey Harris
Vietnam has the most beautiful beaches anyplace in the world.
[music]
Russell Elder
China Beach was a great beach, you know? And everybody went to China
Beach, including Viet Cong – that was their beach too. And the Army would
come in there on R&R and the Marines, and they'd stay there for maybe a week,
you know? And just swim and have fun on the beach. It was a great beach.
W. Andrew Wilson
I remember before I went to the beach, the first sergeant saying, "If you get a
sunburn, I'm gonna give you an Article 15." And I said, "Oh, man, I'm not gonna
get a sunburn, I've been to the beach before." And I was at the beach for about
an hour and a half and my legs got so sunburned right here that the skin just
peeled off. But I wasn't gonna tell anybody 'cause I didn't want that Article 15.
Gary "Frog" Justesen
I saw some really gorgeous places. I mean some places that would just take
your breath away, beautiful. The jungle. Absolutely beautiful. When it got to
monsoon season? Miserable.
[music]
Sterling Poulson
It's hundreds of inches of rain in some of the mountainous areas, you know, 60-,
70 inches of rain, over a hundred inches in some places in the mountains.
Jim Slade
Rainy season was awful. I mean you could be out there and it would start raining
and you could be knee deep in water in an hour. This one kid, his girlfriend felt
sorry for him having to sleep on the ground all the time, so she sent him an air
mattress. (laughs) And so because his girlfriend sent it, he thought he had to
use it. But he didn't want to put it out on the jungle floor because of sticks and
stuff like that, it would poke holes in it. So this one night, he gets it, he lays it out
on this little trail where there was just dirt. Well, it rains in the night and it really
rained. Well he was lying in this trail. We got up the next morning and couldn't
find him. And this team leader says, "I told him not to get out there, he probably
went to sleep and the patrol came down there, saw him, and he's probably
dead." And so we started moving out, we reported him as missing. We get down
into this little lake, or this little bottom area where there was nothing the day
before, but there's this lake. (laughs) And here he is still floating out on his air
mattress out in this lake. It just run him right down the trail and out onto the lake.
(laughs)
Sterling Poulson
I think the real problem wasn't necessarily the rain, it was the humidity, and the
high humidity. We're talking about dew point temperatures of 80 to 85 degrees.
That's, you know, incredible amount of water in the atmosphere.
Stu Shipley
In the jungle, it's atrocious. And not to mention the hundred degree weather
during the summertime. So you never wore a T-shirt, you never wore socks.
Most of us never wore skivvies or underwear. It would chafe ya so bad you'd get
rashes within weeks.
Danny Greathouse
But the most beautiful country you'd ever want to be in… except when they were
shooting at ya.
Dan Hudson
Well, when I got there in November of '64, both the tactical and strategic situation
was pretty grim.
Narrator
Some of the earliest U.S. military advisors sent to Vietnam were the elite Green
Berets, created by President Kennedy as a rapid deployment special force. They
were part of the early strategy to train nearly 40,000 tribal mountain people to
serve as interpreters, scouts, and soldiers. Many believed the toughest and most
tenacious fighters trained were found in the Central Highland villages of the
Montagnards.
Male Voice Over
They're not Vietnamese; they're a mountain Indian, mountain people.
Montagnard means "mountain people." And even when I was there they lived
pretty much like the American Indians used to live.
Dan Hudson
Montagnards were discriminated against by the Vietnamese, mistreated; the
Vietnamese had utter contempt for them, considered them almost subhuman.
Chris Wangsgard
The South Vietnamese government essentially was not very interested in what
we were doing. They understood that the Montagnard people were… they had
their own goals and they were rarely aligned with the South Vietnamese. The
Montagnards responded to us and liked us. But even we always knew that we
couldn't really count on the loyalty of the people in our camps.
Dan Hudson
I was always two languages removed from the people we were training. So I
would have to say something in English, my Vietnamese interpreter would repeat
what he thought I said in Vietnamese and then one of the Montagnard
interpreters would repeat what he thought the Vietnamese translator had said.
Neil H. Olsen
The one patrol that we did go out on, it was sort of a compass raiding patrol and
we're stamping through the jungle. We go through this place and I go, "Wait a
minute, we've been here. We came this way. So now we're going this way.
Okay, what's going on?" And then the troops started kind of like laughing a little
bit. And then the third time we went through the same clearing I realized what
had happened, we're just out on a lark and they're leading us all around the
place.
Dan Hudson
The Viet Cong would come to these villages and tax them, demand rice and so
forth and these people were living a very impoverished subsistence. So they
didn't have any difficulty distinguishing who the good guys were and who the bad
guys were. Winning people's minds is a little bit more difficult. If you can't
provide security for these isolated villages, then the villagers know that the Viet
Cong can come in at any time and demand whatever and terrorize them.
Scott Maddox
We're out on a maneuver in a canyon way out in the jungle in the mountains and
this scout comes back and he says, "There's somebody coming down the trails."
And we looked out and there was just a loan figure in a black sheath dress
coming down, a little girl. And this girl was a Katu Montagnard. And this one
Vietnamese soldier could speak a little Katu. Got her age, found out she was
seven years old, that her village had been completely wiped out by the Viet Cong
three days before. Her mother had hid her in the jungle and her mother went
back to the village. And the Viet Cong came in to take their food which they did
periodically, there was none left. So they slaughtered, they killed everybody in
the village, man, woman, and child.
[music]
Neil H. Olsen
What happens is we realized that while we were training these people; we had
the radio, we had communications. But as soon as we would leave then they
would be vulnerable and the VC could attack them. So that was scary. You just
realized you're out there and you know, if something happens that's it. You
know? But that's part of the job and that's what you're doing.
TV Announcer
Many remembered and paused in tribute as Sir Winston Churchill went to his
rest. Generations alive today will never see his like again. President Johnson
signed the Medicare Bill at the Truman Library in Missouri.
[music – Beach Boys "Barbara Ann"]
TV Announcer
The draft call was increased. Our forces in Vietnam reached more than 175,000.
[music]
Cheryl German-Chung
Then I got on a big plane and it was commercial as opposed to my husband.
And we flew to Vietnam. I was the only woman on the plane.
Russell Elder
And that was a 14-hour flight (laughs) from Travis Air Force Base to Tan Son
Nhut which was in Saigon.
Gary "Frog" Justesen
The trip from Edwards Air Force Base to Tokyo was pretty fun. We partied up
pretty good. And they loved us. Nobody cared whether you were 21 or not. The
whole plane load was going to Vietnam so we had quite a bit of fun on that leg of
the trip. We stopped in Tokyo and we were there for, I don't know, a few hours.
And then we got back on the same plane with a different flight crew. And I
remember going up the step and going to the stewardess and saying – you
know, I was kind of like the life of the party on the last leg and she says, "Yeah,
we won't be doing any of that now." (laughs) And then we took off for Vietnam
and you could hear a pin drop in the plane as we were headed to Da Nang.
Cheryl German-Chung
But there was no conversation, people were not moving around a lot. It was…
we were all terrified.
Bryan Bulloch
We flew from here to Hawaii, refueled from Hawaii, crash landed in the
Philippines. Then they took and flew us out of there and out over the ocean we
ran into a typhoon and it was close to the international dateline and the pilot
came on and he told us, he says, "We do not have enough fuel to go back, we do
not have enough fuel to go around, we're going to go through."
Steve Cantonwine
As the ramp went down with our sea bags on it, there was a guy, I thought he
was an idiot. You can't hear a thing, and he was running behind the plane yelling
something and pointing. And we landed in the middle of a rocket attack at Da
Nang. The rockets started coming in as we landed. So everybody was just
grabbing a sea bag and running for shelter.
Russell Elder
Of course every time you got there, why the crew that was already there, the
main effort was to try and scare the hell of you. So they came roaring up in their
van with M-16s and submachine guns sticking out of every crevice, (laughs).
"Get in, get in, hurry, hurry!" (laughs) We're all going, "Oh, god."
Cheryl German-Chung
All I remember is that when you walked to the door of that aircraft there was this
– people were fortuitous – this wall of heat and humidity. And I didn't find out
until many years later that the smell that went with it was not normal. The smell
that came with that heat and humidity was pesticides, herbicides, jet fuel, well
maybe one or two other things. But I didn't know that, I just thought well, this is
the way Vietnam smells.
Kenneth A. Sabo
I was blown away. I mean the smell and it was just… I wondered what the heck I
got myself in for. The heat was unbearable and you're instantly soaking wet from
the sweat and don't know what's going on, don't know anything. They put us on
a bus and it had screens on all the windows and I'm going this is not a good
thing, you know? As we're driving down the road women are squatting and going
to the bathroom off the bridges into the river and I'm just going, wow. I mean I
was just totally overwhelmed.
[music]
Stevan Duke
And I asked somebody, I said, "Well what's the bars for?" And they says, "Well,
we gotta drive downtown to get back to the other part of the base. And that's to
keep people from throwing hand grenades in the window." And I thought, "Oops.
This is not good, you know?" (laughs) And so it just kind of went from there.
Russell Elder
So that was our introduction to Vietnam. (laughs) And from that point on it
became, as somebody once put it, "Days of abject boredom punctuated by
seconds of stark terror."
[music]
Pete Koense
It was the place that we lived in. You were huddled in. It was your safe haven.
You made sure it was safe when you built it.
Male Voice Over
We had what you called hooches. You had a cement pad and you'd have walls
of plywood, four-foot plywood.
Benjamin Bowthorpe
And it had a tin roof and screen sides. God, in a hail storm on a tin roof you can
look at each other and see each other move his lip but that's all, you couldn't
hear a thing.
Dion Laney
I had a bunk bed. And it was dry every night.
Benjamin Bowthorpe
Of course you had to sleep with a mosquito net and lay with your arms in or you'd
get drilled up the arm with mosquitoes.
James Scott
Well, I took this tent liner and put it on the back of our hooch. We had all kinds of
cable spools around, so we took an old blanket and we made a card table out of
that. And I had bought a hammock and I put the hammock off of an engineering
stake and kind of laid back during our off time.
Robert Littlehale
I had a dartboard in my hooch that had a picture of Ho Chi Minh on it. (laughs)
Daniel Maynard
When you're on a fire base your meals is all C-ration. You don't get any hot
meals. The only hot meal you have is you have to cook your C-rations.
Dion Laney
You had what they called heating tabs and you'd light them and you'd heat up
your can with C-rations and so it was hot. And if you ran out of heat tabs you'd
tear into your C-4 and burn it. (laughs)
Daniel Maynard
The thing that everybody cherished over there was the can openers which we
called John Wayne's. And when you had one you never loaned it out because
the only way you could eat is being able to open that C-ration with that John
Wayne.
Steve Cantonwine
We were in our hooch playing cards and we all decided we were hungry. So
Deuce and I snuck over to the supply depot and… we didn't have to cut the
wires, they'd already been cut. (laughs) So we just reached in and grabbed
about three or four cases of C-rations and started running and sentry's yelling,
"Halt! Halt! Halt!" He can't shoot us. And what were they gonna do, send us to
Vietnam? (laughs)
James Scott
You know, after four o'clock in the afternoon, unless you were on duty or you're
on guard duty or something like that – [music] you had plenty enough beer that
you could go by.
Jeffrey Harris
Charlie shot down a C-130 with our beer supply on it and we had to drink this
rotten beer from – I forget the name of it – oh, it was terrible beer. And warm, it
was even worse.
Larry Strait
You used to get two beers when you got back and it was hot beer usually, it was
Schlitz. So we'd take a straw and drink the beer that way. That you'd get the
biggest quickest buzz in the sun.
James Valdez
They always had outdoor movies for ya at the camp. But the rear echelon
people didn't really like it when we came in because we came in all rugged and
all, you know, all ready to, you know, I guess it was sort of like cattle drivers
coming into town, that's what it would remind me of.
[music]
Russell Elder
We had two maids. Loved those two maids. They were just great people. I don't
know whose side they were on, but they were great women. They'd come in with
their babies, if their babies were upset they'd take a little teaspoon, put hot wax in
it, rub it over their tummy to chase away the evil spirits.
[music]
Stevan Duke
The Vietnamese people, they never had a lot of money. And we paid, if my
memory serves me right, we had a mama-san that done our laundry, made our
beds, shined our shoes, washed our clothes and everything, and I think it run us
ten to fifteen dollars a month. And she would work for five to six, seven GI's a
month.
James Scott
There was a mama-san that would do our laundry and she would take it and
travel almost 15 miles with it. And one day I saw her out when I was out off the
base and she had a trailer full of wood. And it had a hitch on the back but she
was using it like a rickshaw and her kids were pushing the back of it and she was
up front pulling it. And I stopped and asked her if I could help her and she waved
me off and told me to ditty. And when I talked to her later she said that I
endangered her, not to ever do that again. She was afraid that the VC or the
NVA would see her fraternizing with me or me helping her and then they would
attack her.
[music]
Bryant Jake
For me, I feel really sad, bad, about the kids, the little kids as they growing. I
started feeding 'em. I used to give them a case of C-rations just to help those
kids.
Ton Cong Phan
When the American troops came into any village, the villager love them very,
very much, especially for the kids. You know, the kids come up to the American
soldier, and they ask them something because usually the American soldier give
them some food, cookie, candy, something like that, you know?
Bryan Bulloch
The Vietnamese people, the ones I seen, well you never knew because Charlie
was all around ya and they were the people. They'd be nice to ya in daylight and
blow ya apart at night. You know, one of the yards we had, why we had a mortar
round attack one night that about wiped our place right out, and the reason was
was we had a bunch of little kids that were out there playing. And the next day
when we got out investigating, these kids had stuck little sticks up in the ground
and they pointed out everything in the compound. And of course that night when
they came in to leave mortars on us, they had their range and distance and
whatever else.
Danny Greathouse
We were talking back to our barracks one night after flying all day and there was
an old papa-san between the barracks and we thought he was sick so we
reached down to pick him up and he was drawing a map of our compound. So
we took him, we arrested him and took him up to the office and turned him in. He
was gonna give us a rocket attack that night.
Ton Cong Phan
They don't know who's the civilian and who's the Viet Cong, you see? With us,
we can recognize about 80 percent. You know, when I look at you I can
recognize you're the civilian, the farmer, or you're guerillas. I must say, I can
recognize very easy. But the American people who don't.
Stu Shipley
So it was very difficult to decipher who was the Viet Cong and who was not. It
was a difficult choice. And some of the choices that were made over there were
horrible you know, as far as men and women go and kids. But it was what it was.
It was war.
[music]
Jerald Cannon
Early on I felt like I was over there trying to help somebody retain their freedom
so I thought it was the thing to do. And I still think it was the thing to do. I think a
lot of things got really screwed up.
[music]
Jerald Cannon
We went on a mission one time in the south and we get in touch with the FAC.
And you know, he says, "We got the area in sight." And so I said, "Okay, well I'll
mark it." And so he rolls in, puts a Willie Pete in there and he says, "Okay,
there's the target, that's the village and that's what we want you to hit." And the
new flight leader that was number one – I was number three, kind of checking
him out – and so he rolls in and drops a pretty poor bomb, it didn't even hit the
village per se. And so I'm the second guy that's coming in and as I'm coming up
basically up a road, the FAC says, "They're coming out the road to the south.
You got 'em out in the open." So, I come around, and as I come down this road I
just didn't have a good feeling about it. As I'm looking I can see people, if you
will, coming out of the village down the road and it just – I had this feeling that
there was something wrong. I just went over 'em and rolled up and looked down
at 'em. And people think if you're going 450 miles an hour you can't see the
ground or what's on the ground, but you can see really well, you know? And so I
just, instead of dropping Napalm on 'em, I just flew past 'em and rolled up and
looked down. And it was a bunch of women and children and you know, the
families coming out the south because they knew that village was gonna get
bombed because they had seen the Willie Pete and the first bomb had hit up
there. And I said, "Hey, don't anybody drop anything else. That's not a good
target." And then I told the FAC and I said, "Go check the coordinates on this
thing." Because that can happen, you can get coordinates mixed up and hit the
wrong place. So, he goes back, checks the coordinates, comes back and he
says, "No, that's the coordinates, that's a good target." And I said, "Well, we're
not gonna take it. Get us another target. We're not gonna bomb that target."
And they didn't have anything else. So we had to take all of our ordnance back
home. Boy, did I catch the devil over that, you know, because 7th Air Force, they
said that was the target and that's what you're supposed to be bombing. I said,
"Well, too late now," because I would not bomb that target. Then they found out
later that the Vietnamese guy who was a political guy who was over that area
was not getting his – it was like protection money to pay the mafia, you know? If
you don't pay the guy the protection money, this guy had the power to put this
village on the list of being struck if they weren't paying him. And so that's what it
turned out to be and I was forever happy knowing that I didn't kill 20 or 30 people,
women and kids, when it was a graft kind of thing that got them put on the target
in the first place.
[music]
Hanoi Hannah
How are you, GI Joe? It seems to me that most of you are poorly informed about
the going of the war. To say nothing about a correct explanation of your
presence over here. Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to
die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on. Isn't it
clear that the war makers are gambling with your lives while pocketing huge
profits?
Scott T. Lyman
There's a woman that broadcast in Hanoi called Hanoi Hannah. Same kind of
an idea as Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.
Bryan Bulloch
And they would broadcast the radio station all through that country.
[music]
Bryan Bulloch
And they used to play American music. So we used to listen to her, you know?
They knew the troops were listening to her, you know?
Scott T. Lyman
She would broadcast to the people that Captain Lyman and his Blue Diamond
Devils would be in the area that day and that people who picked me up would be
rewarded for doing so. And she put a price on my head of 500,000 piastre, I
think it was. Because we had done some damage to their people. We kind of
laughed at her.
Bryan Bulloch
She took the 540 Supply Company, named everybody in the company, told them
where they were from in the United States, how many people were in their
families, who their mom's and dad's were, and they were coming to get us. And
normally when they did that, you'd better be ready for a tremendous firefight
because they were coming. You just never knew when but they were coming.
Well, they happened to come just after I left. And like I say, we had 223 guys in
my unit, or company. There was only 37 actually out of the 540 that come out of
there.
[music]
Narrator
The foot soldier in Vietnam endured grueling patrol missions day and night. They
often were called to sweep villages that could harbor Viet Cong guerillas. That
could mean hours of demanding hikes through rice paddies and jungle paths,
knowing that any step may be their last.
[music]
Stu Shipley
They told us to expect heavy resistance, and so they helicopter'd our whole
company of 200 guys.
[sound of helicopter]
Stu Shipley
I remember, you know, setting down in a rice paddy and jumping out. [music]
We jump out in them rice paddies and just sink clear up to your thighs or your
waist, you're just in mud. And there you are in the middle of a rice paddy, you
know, bare open and bare ground just waiting to get fired upon. And you're
scrambling trying to reach some cover. We're sweeping along, we're walking
along a rice paddy trail. We haven't received any fire yet and we've been walking
for 30, 40 minutes and very slow sweeping through the village so the left flank
and the right flank had to kind of wait for the interior two squads to sweep
through the village because they're searching everything. So we took about a
ten minute break and sat down. They told us to grab a can of C-rations and wolf
it down real quick because we probably wouldn't get much more food. So I broke
open my 1941 C-ration box. They'd sent us C-rations from the Second World
War. So I shared my beefsteak potatoes and gravy with a buddy of mine who
was sitting next to me on the rice paddy, he was my ammo carrier, he was
carrying ammo, and his rifle. And we got up and as soon as we got up we got hit
with incoming fire. And it was very extremely heavy. You can hear bullets flying
by ya and the dirt was kicking up all around us where they'd missed. And I heard
screaming from inside the village, we had some guys getting hit. And there was
a hedgerow about 50 yards in front of us, a very thick hedgerow, there's a lot of
those in Vietnam. So the fire was coming from the hedgerow but you couldn't
see anyone. So we all hit the dirt and then tried to find some cover so we hit the
ground and the firing was really intense, very loud. And it probably went on for
two or three minutes which seemed to me like two days. And guys were getting
hit, you could hear 'em scream. So we were ordered to stand up and jump into
the rice paddy to get down into the mud to get more cover because we had quite
a few men getting hit. I stood up and my buddy stood up behind me and there
was eight or nine more guys behind me. And we scrambled off to the side of the
rice paddy trail and I felt somebody, I felt someone touch my shoulder and I
turned around and my partner had been shot through the heart. And he touched
my shoulder and I turned around and he looked in my eyes and said, "My god,
I'm dead." And he fell dead at my feet. And I drug him off the rice paddy trail
and held him and kept returning fire. It lasted another 20 or 30 minutes and then
the fire stopped. And we lost about 30 men in that hour.
[music]
Stu Shipley
And then the helicopters came in, the medevac helicopters. And we took the
bodies and they put them in body bags and hauled the wounded out and we
continued on. So we sent three men to go through the hedgerow and they went
through very close and together. And they had set a booby trap and… I
remember body parts falling into the rice paddy and it made little splashes, the
chunks of their body from the water in the rice paddy. And then we all charged
and went through and found nothing. All we found was spent rounds, brass
casing. No blood, no bodies, no nothing. We lost 33 men in an hour that day.
[music]
Stu Shipley
It makes you realize that life is so dang precious, you know? And I was just a
baby. And I was thinking to myself it could be me out there, or parts of me. And
you don't know how to… you don't know what to say after all this takes place
within an hour. And you don't know what to say to the comrades you have left
that are still standing. And it's almost, you almost feel guilty because they're
gone and you're still okay.
TV Announcer
Major Aldrin proved conclusively that man can work well in space. He spent five
and a half hours outside of Gemini and performed duties that will be necessary
when a future moon vehicle links up with an Apollo mother ship.
Walt Disney
We're all one big happy family here. Whatever you can say to me, you can say
in front of him.
TV Announcer
United States aircraft has resumed action in north Vietnam.
[music]
Marc C. Reynolds
We were there to try and stop not the military interdiction of the south, but to
source of supplies, war supplies getting into the south. Our job was to find out
where they were, take pictures and get fighters there as fast as you could.
[music]
Benjamin Bowthorpe
Normally all the training that I'd ever heard, the best thing you want to do is stop
the supply of arms and whatever. And that would be Hanoi, in Hai Phong
Harbor. And even in '65 there were ships from China and Russia lined up to go
into Hai Phong Harbor to unload this stuff and we couldn't go anywhere near Hai
Phong or Hanoi.
Marc C. Reynolds
So, you know, we couldn't bomb that airfield outside of Hanoi. We'd bring back
side-looking radar pictures of MiGs sitting down there, and they're just sitting
there. You'd see 'em taxi out and take off and then you'd lose sight of 'em,
hopefully they were going someplace else, but…
Jerald Cannon
Just across the border in Cambodia, you could see it over there all the time but
they'd say, you know, you can't bomb over there. So they'd bring stuff down, put
it in Cambodia and it would just sit there like a storehouse for 'em. There was
some nutty ground rules, you know, it was very, very frustrating sometimes at
how – and I don't know, maybe I'm not supposed to – but anyway, you know, it
was crazy that you couldn't bomb where you knew things were in Cambodia.
Male Voice Over
They were just giving us stupid targets, you know, bridges or a train if we could
find one. But we couldn't bomb any airfields.
[music]
Richard Carter
I could see the enemy on one side of a road, I could see the friendlies on the
other side of the road, and I could not go attach the enemy. That they're coming
together because I had no clearance. You had to get on the radio, call
headquarters in Saigon. They would call an airborne airplane, he would come
over there and say, "Oh, my gosh, there are some bad guys here, there's some
good guys here." Then I could go in and hit 'em. By that time they're mixing it up.
But that's the problem we had; no control.
Marc C. Reynolds
You just do what you have to do and every once in a while the thought crosses
your mind, this is a very interesting way to take this war on but it wasn't my
decision to make, so.
TV Announcer
At one time or another throughout the area of…
Gary Campbell
In most firefights, like on a hill or in a streambed you're usually shooting at a
hedgerow or a tree line. As terrible as the battle is when the fighting's over, you
don't really know who killed who.
[music]
Gary Campbell
I went through one incidence where that wasn't the case. It was operation Napa
and two enemy soldiers come up the trail. We'd set in for the night. I was in a
hole with a guy named Leonard. He was asleep in the hole and I was on watch.
All of a sudden, I could hear some whispering out in front of me. Confused me
because nobody had told me about any patrols we had coming in or any listening
posts out in front of us. And as I listened, it got louder, I could tell it was
Vietnamese. I reached up and I grabbed Leonard's leg to pull him down into the
hole. All of a sudden, as I grabbed him to pull him in the hole, two faces was in
the brush in front of me shining off their faces. Just as clear as day I can still see
their faces. At the same time, grenades went off, bullets started kicking up. I had
my M-14, and I emptied my M-14 to where I could see the faces. And all of a
sudden I heard scattering and running and yelling. Everybody around me had
nothing going on, and I hollered, "They're out there. They're out there. Be alert."
Something like that, I can't remember exactly what I said. And nobody could
hear anything. They said, "What's going on with Campbell? He's lost his noodle
or what?" Didn't know it when I'd opened fire, shot one guy in the forehead, the
other one in the stomach. The one in the stomach run down the trail. The one
that was shot in the head died immediately, and he had a 9-millimeter submachine gun on him. These are Viet Cong. They hate to lose a weapon of that
magnitude. All night they was trying to get back up to that weapon, I'd hear 'em,
we'd exchange fire, and it was a long night. First light it got quiet, and I turned to
Leonard and I said, "I'm gonna see if anything's down there." I stood up on the
pear pit of the foxhole. They had thrown a grenade, and it had landed on the pear
pit, hadn't went off. I sunk to my knees shaking and called DOD over and they
blew it up. When they got looking at it, the pin was still just barely in it. If
somebody had blown on it, it could have probably set the grenade off. After I
gained my exposure, I walked down the trail, and I still see him to this day. He
looked so young. So young. He had pictures in his wallet of his family and his
kids and his wife. I couldn't look at it. I couldn't. Some of the guys were taking
pictures of him, I didn't want a picture. And they told me about the other one
down the trail. It becomes so personal. So much different than shooting at a
tree line or a hedge or anything else.
[music]
Narrator
Military compounds and base camps were often menaced by enemy attack.
Beyond the relative safety of guard towers, sandbags and concertina wire lay the
kill zone.
Bryan Bulloch
We had what we called free fire. And every night, not any given time, they'd lock
and load two or three hundred rounds and dump it into the kill zone. Some of the
units we went to up there when you was pulling guard duty on some of the other
military units, they'd have platoons that were out in the jungle, you know, doing
things. And if they came in after dark they had these little clickers like you'd see
in these dolls today. And they had a certain percent of clicker. You know, they'd
click twice, you'd click at 'em, and you'd hear 'em or something and they'd click
before they crossed the fire zones or whatever to come back in the companies.
And one particular night I was with some and this kid with me said, "We've
changed your click for tonight. We've got some platoons out there and they'll be
coming in after dark and the click is not three clicks anymore, it's only a click.
One click." Why, we came in and they did the three clicks. And this kid got on
the phone and he called back and he said, "Charlie's comin' in." So they gave
him three clicks back. And of course they approached then and then they come
into the kill zone and then they throw the flairs and light 'er up and unload.
[explosion sounds]
Bryan Bulloch
You'd wake up the next morning, everything is settled down, quiet down, it would
just get quiet as could be, you could hear a pin drop. The next morning you'd
wake up and there wouldn't be a body out there. They'd remove 'em all. And the
reason they did that was they didn't want you to know how many you were
actually killing. Our unit, we figured out that for every one of them, for every
Vietnamese or Viet Cong that killed one of our guys we killed ten of theirs. So it
was a ten-to-one ratio and that's what we kind of figured out.
Dennis Stevens
I think the first think that you kind of come to realize, at least I did, is that there's
so many ways that you can get hurt that really, you accept the reality that if it's
your time to go it's your time to go and there's not a heck of a lot you can do
about it.
Larry Strait
You'd always try to emphasize on the troops, "Don't walk on the beaten path."
There's a reason there's a path there and it's to attract you. Because it's the
fastest route to your point but it doesn't mean it's necessarily the safest route.
And that's where most of the guys got it.
Stu Shipley
They were a pretty ingenious people setting up booby traps. A lot of bear traps
and what they called swinging pineapples. It's a log stuck with bamboo spikes;
you trip wire and it swings down off a tree and shish kebabs three or four of ya.
They were very ingenious Viet Cong were. Because they didn't have a lot of
weaponry so they used everything in the jungle they possibly could to take us out
and they did a good job of it.
Don Hudson
You probably heard of punji stakes. And these were sharpened bamboo stakes
that were just simply planted in the ground inside of the trail and they're
extremely sharp and if you walked into them in the underbrush it would go
through your boot right away.
Stu Shipley
Punji pit is a hole in the ground and they sharpen up bamboo stakes and they
drive it in the ground and defecate on the stakes and urinate on the stakes and
you fall through and it goes up through your foot and gets infected pretty quick.
And they were from ten to twelve inches and they even had pits that were, you
know, eight-to-ten feet wide, ten feet long where five or six guys would fall in and
just impale 'em.
Roger Clawson
Rice paddies were very extensive and here again, you were channeled, you had
to go along the dikes, you couldn't wade through those rice paddies and the Viet
Cong knew that and they set up mines and booby traps on these dikes and we
had a lot of casualties.
[music]
Gary Campbell
They used to make little trail signs we called it but they'd like stack three rocks
and they'd be just little rocks off the side of the trail. And that meant that there
was a booby trap coming up… or something. All of them had different
designations but they would put three rocks high and one to the left and that
meant that's the way you gotta go because the explosive is in the right, you gotta
go to the left. Different things like that that we got to where yeah, we could read
their signs.
Dennis Stevens
There's things you can do. You never pick up anything. One guy picked up a
rice knife for example, and it was booby trapped, for a souvenir. You know,
those kinds of things. So you learn not to pick things up, you learn not to get
around certain things. You're very cautious because your life really does depend
on it.
Steve Cantonwine
And I remember we patrolled, pulled a patrol out towards the beaches. And I
remember a booby trap going off and I remember the company commander
being pretty upset. And there wasn't much left of the Marine that stepped on the
booby trap. Company commander took that death pretty hard. That he carried
him all the way back rather than call a medevac in for him.
[music]
TV Announcer
If you discover a mine or booby trapped area, send for the experts, don't try to do
this job yourself. It's one for trained demolition personnel who know how to work
with explosives.
[explosion sound]
Larry Strait
Grunt unit would call us out and say, "Hey, you know, we've got this booby trap,
we want you to take it out." We'd trace the wire out to the connection point and
you'd go back to find the grenade. And usually you stuck them in a bamboo
shoot and then when you come along and you'd trip and pull it out and pull the
pin and that would set it off. [explosion sound] So I disarmed it. And usually I'd
turn around after I disarmed it and gave it to the guy who wanted it. And it
usually was some lieutenant and see him shaking it. But you had to learn to
check for secondaries. So when you set off the booby trap it set off a 1-55. So
you had a secondary explosion that would wipe out a lot more [explosion sound]
than just you and your teammate. [explosion sound] You know, a lot of times
we just blew things in place, we just did it, primed a quarter block of C-4 and put
a 30 second to a minute fuse on it and took off and blow it in place. [explosion
sound] It was no different, I enjoyed it. You know, blowing things up was – I still
would do it today. My squirrels have a hell of a time at my place.
[music]
Narrator
Man-made dangers in the jungle were lethal, but the natural hazards were also
part of every waking and sleeping moment.
[music]
Jim Slade
You're psychologically in tune to all of that stuff. Even though you're asleep your
brain is saying, "Ooh, something touched ya." And if you don't get it off of ya
quick it's probably gonna bite ya or sting ya.
Doug Hunt
But we'd go through these jungles and one of our worst enemies is the big red
ants. The big red ants, they'd build a nest in the jungle and they'd build them out
of the leaves of the jungle, and it's a huge nest. And I don't know how many ants
were in there but there's more ants than I would ever want to imagine. But when
you'd hit one of those, which was usually ours because we were the first one in
there, that nest would fall down and as soon as it hit the ground they'd start
eating us.
Neil H. Olsen
The guys in front of us, the patrol started doing all kinds of things, and itching and
screaming and pulling their clothes off and we're going, "What?" And it turns out
they'd run into a huge nest of these red fire ants and it got to all of us. I mean,
and they raise these welts, they're horrible.
Doug Hunt
So we always had to have spray cans of stuff when we'd go through the jungle to
kill the ants and they bite really hard.
Jim Slade
Everything's big. All of the snakes, big snakes. Big snakes.
Daniel Maynard
Okay, that that I feel behind me, is it a snake? And for every poisonous snake
that they had over there, they had a non-poisonous that looked like it. So you
couldn't take any chances.
Neil H. Olsen
All of the sudden this big huge thing drops out of the tree out of the sky and he
screams. And turns out it's a python. You know, it's this great big python about
ten feet long and it fell on him. It was either asleep or thought it was food. So a
couple of the guys, you know, caught it and put a little stick in its mouth and
wrapped him up and took him back and they skinned him and ate him. And they
said it tasted like chicken. (laughs) You know, they had some barbecue sauce.
Jim Slade
And then they have monkeys and they have big monkeys. We got monkeys that
were throwing rocks at us one time. Yeah, they were stoning us. We got close
to their home there and they started throwing rocks at us.
Bryant Jake
Mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, I just couldn't stand it anymore. And to hear just
buzzing all the way into your brains.
Jim Slade Voice Over
Spiders. They have a certain type of – it's almost like a tarantula. It's big.
Doug Hunt
It was getting kind of evening and the rubber trees over there are spaced just
about big enough for the APC's to go through without knocking 'em over. And
the rubber trees were part of the rubber plantation from the French when they
were there. And we was going through probably five, ten miles an hour and then
all of the sudden – pwwhh! And I felt this thing went over my face and wrapped
around my head. And I didn't know what it was, and I yanked it off and it was a
huge spider. That spider was that big around, it had legs about thought long. I'm
not lying. But the leg was only about that thick. But it had these little spiny things
that made it look bigger. And it wrapped around my face. And it just – I ripped it
off, and you know, threw it and stuff like that. But I find out that the Vietnamese
people break the legs off and eat the spiders. But I've been afraid of spiders ever
since. (laughs)
[music]
TV Announcer
Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Although
mostly peaceful, shouted confrontations were frequent and fiery during the
course of the march.
TV Announcer
Thurgood Marshall, the first negro to serve on the United States Supreme Court
puts on his robes with the assistance of his wife.
TV Announcer
In Los Angeles the first Super Bowl game puts the Packers against the Chiefs.
[singing – Arthur Conley? singing "Do you like Good Music"]
David Estrovitz
By instilling fear into the local population, in terms that if they cooperate with the
invaders, they're gonna be in trouble. We volunteered to escort a chaplain out to
a local village that he was visiting primarily for some support for the orphanage
there in the way of medical supplies and some clothing and some things like that.
As we got into the village, we were hit with a rocket attack by the local VC. We
didn't see them. We didn't know where they were. But we were hit. Fortunately,
none of our crew were hurt. But there was some casualties with the local
population. What started out as a humanitarian mission turned out to be a
rescue mission. Where we were picking up the wounded, mostly children, and
evacuating them to our hospital board base. As far as I know none of them died,
they all recovered but they received some serious wounds all because we were
visiting. And that's the way things went in Vietnam and that's the way things go
when you're faced with guerilla warfare.
[music]
Narrator
The very nature of the landscape and political uncertainty of Vietnam contributed
to one of the most unique and dangerous aspects of the fighting. A complex
network of underground tunnels existed to move and hide enemy soldiers and
supplies, allowing the enemy to launch surprise attacks and then avoid detection.
The nearly invisible shafts were a threat to American soldiers. The tunnels had
to be taken one at a time, putting a handful of Americans into some of the most
eminent and deadly work of the war.
[music]
Doug Hunt
We found tunnels over there. So some of us that was little at the time – I couldn't
get in one now but – got told, you know, go through the tunnels.
Bryant Jake
I was a skinny person. And you know, and I can go through holes. So I
volunteered. And they said, "Well, go in and see what you can find." So I used
to take a flashlight and a pistol and that's it. And crawl through there and gosh, I
never seen so much spiders and then snakes. I just hated snakes too.
Doug Hunt
I was crawling through the tunnel and it was a place where they actually had a
POW camp. It was a big hole in the ground and they had a lot of rocks and they
were down inside there, but they had tunnels going through different places. And
somebody in one of the other tunnels dropped a hand grenade down in that
tunnel. [explosion sound] And when it explodes it sucks all of the gas out of the
other tunnels, all the air out. So we were in there, just barely enough room to
move and it sucked all the air out of that tunnel. You know, it was only for a
second or two but when you don't have any air to breathe in or breathe out, you
get scared. It was horrible. You know, I thought we was gonna die right there,
but as soon as we got the air back, it was horrible smelling, horrible tasting, but
at least we could breathe, you know? But we couldn't back out. We had to crawl
clear through until we found a way to either get back and when we come out we
was underneath the pit where they had the prisoner of war at.
[music]
Bryant Jake
Weapons are all just piled up in there. Looked like somebody, the people were
cooking there too. They had a little fire going there. But I couldn't find nobody.
And I guess they took off and went to other tunnels.
Steve Cantonwine
Second worst part of my tour, the first time was the intelligence gathering
because we would go into these areas where the bunkers had all been bombed.
We could tell when we were getting close to a bunker complex because of the
stench. The smell just putrid. The smell of death was just overwhelming. We'd
go in and we'd look for maps, papers, anything that could give us any information
on units we were facing. Quite often, I'd say more often than not, when you'd go
into a bunker, it was almost like a fight with the rats. You'd see a North
Vietnamese sitting up, not a mark on him. Just the stench. But as you'd start
moving in, he'd start moving. The uniform would move and a rat would come out.
That's what made it bad. The rats were horrendous and they… the rats were
bad.
Marc C. Reynolds
For every ten missions you had over in North Vietnam you got a month off your
tour and that was because that was a nasty place to fly up there. They had the
SAMs, the surface-to-air-missiles. And we had equipment in our airplanes to
know when the radar that directed those SAMs had focused on us. We'd get a
little light in the cockpit. Now if you were able to visually pick up the SAM, you
could turn into it and you could turn sharper than the SAM could turn. So if the
SAM is coming up at you, you turn into it and cause the SAM to try and turn and
it would basically tumble. That was nice if all of the electronics worked. And you
know, it didn't always work so we lost a lot of airplanes in the north due to SAMs.
Narrator
Since the earliest days of aviation in war, pilots have known the dangers of being
far behind enemy lines on their missions. Vietnam was no different. Whether
flying a high-altitude bombing run in a B-52 [explosion sounds] or flying close
ground support above the jungle canopy, pilots in Vietnam faced countless
dangers deep in North Vietnam. More than 1,500 American planes were shot
down during the war.
Jay C. Hess
I say I got 33 and a half missions. Unfortunately, I didn't keep the number of
landings equal to the number of take offs. I released my bombs and then
immediately was hit. It was kind of like going down the road in your car at 60
miles an hour and going through the guardrail. You know, it was bang and
slowed me down and the airplane tumbled and rolled. Then came out and I was
pretty much still right in formation. My reaction was, "Well, I've been hit and I
ought to get away from here as fast as I can." And so I lit the afterburner. And I
shouldn't have done that. I should've treated that airplane really gentle. What
that did was cause the whole thing to catch on fire. And I didn't know that, all I
knew was all of the sudden the cockpit is filled with fire. And then the airplane,
instead of being in this pull-out maneuver, it's now suddenly like it's on the top of
a rollercoaster and starting down and doing an outside loop. And I quickly
realized that I either got to get out of this or I'll hit the ground pretty quick. And so
I pulled up the ejection handle and about that time I heard on the radio, "Shark
4's torching." And I never made a reply. My head's up against the canopy, I'm
off the seat because of the negative Gs. I ejected and it's not the right position
so it knocked me unconscious. I notice that I'm on a trail, I'm lying down on my
face. And there's a young boy crawling down the trail towards me. So my
reaction at that point is I take out my pistol and point it at him. And then I look.
Man, he's just a kid. So I put that away and looking for my parachute for that
beacon and then I notice that there are a lot of people around me. And as soon
as I pointed the gun at that boy, he was pretty smart, he started to yell real loud.
I never got up but everybody was on top of me and I was captured. In the
process of getting off my G-suit I changed my position from hands up – because
they were taking off my G-suit with a machete which meant they were chopping
at my leg and not cutting the G-suit off. So I reached down to unzip it myself and
they didn't know what I was doing… but they shot me. And I think it was with my
gun. Anyway, I was really lucky because I was bent over and they just grazed
my neck and head and knocked me out again and just made a lot of blood.
There were a lot of people on that railroad and many more trucks moving
supplies and they'd round up the crowd and have a pep rally since they had the
enemy captured there. I didn't walk like most guys did, I flew by helicopter to
Hanoi, and driven by jeep to the gates of the Hanoi Hilton. And I was taken
inside. I was put into a room that was maybe 15-, 20 feet by square.
Jay C. Hess
Gentleman came in and he read me the camp regulations and in the camp
regulations it says: "American criminals captured in the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam, although the blackest criminals will be treated humanely but they will
answer all questions." And it went on. They won't make any noise. They won't
talk. You'll bow.
Jay C. Hess
And then he started asking questions like what's your name, rank, serial number,
date of birth. And where you were stationed and, "I can't answer that question."
"What kind of airplane are you flying?" "I can't answer that question." After most
of the day has gone by, the interrogator comes in with a couple of assistants.
And he explained to me, "You're very foolish because everybody answers all the
questions." And I know everybody doesn't answer all the questions. But after
these guys knocked me to the floor, tied my hands behind my back, and then
rotate them up over my head and tie them to my feet in front, I say, "Okay, I can
tell you what kind of airplane I was flying." But they didn't even stick around.
They just all left. And left me in that room. And I sweat this big pile of sweat. I
mean it was like water came out of every place and it was kind of like a circuit
breaker popped on the pain because it reached a point where it just didn't hurt
anymore. I should say "worse." And I don't know how long that lasted. It
could've been 30 minutes, it could've been three hours. But when they untied me
and let me back up, my hands were paralyzed. And for months afterwards guys
that would come out of this torture session, their arms were at a 90 degree angle
like this and their hands hung down like this and they couldn't move their fingers.
So it was some nerve damage that that did. So anyway, that's a torture that I
didn't want to go through again and so I started… answer some of their
questions. And that torture lasted couple weeks. And then I was a couple of
months in solitary confinement. And then I got a roommate, another Air Force
pilot and a couple of days later two more roommates. And so there were four of
us together. We left the Hanoi Hilton and went to the Annex on the outskirts of
Hanoi, and spent the next two years in a room together and never contacted
anybody else. So that was the start of five and a half years. That's 2,029 days
before release came.
[music]
Russell Elder
(inaudible 01:20:02) patrols. PBRs, Patrol Boat River.
Narrator
River patrol boats navigated through the waters in the Mekong Delta. Their
mission was to patrol day and night, denying the Viet Cong the use of the
waterways for men and supply. It was on one of those patrols that Navy combat
photographer Russell Elder came under fire for the first time.
Russell Elder
The crew is just, they were just good people. They were very friendly, accepting.
But in my estimation they were nuts. (laughs) I told one guy on the back of the
boat, I says, "You see this flag sitting up here in the tree, a Viet Cong flag and
there's a sign under it. It says, 'You Americans are chicken to come up here and
take down this flag.' And you idiots go through these little channels and these
palm fronds hanging over the edge of the boat, and you go up there and you take
this stupid sign and flag down. That's nuts! You know they're waiting…
sometimes." And he looked at me and he says, "I've got an M-60 in my hand,
what have you got?" He says, "You've got two Nikons. I'm crazy?" I said, "My
friend, if I need that M-60 I figure there will be one available." (laughs) And he
shut up. He didn't say anymore. (laughs) And we were running PSYOPs, which
is Psychological Operations, which means we go out through all these little
channels. And this ensign was with us and he's playing his records of
Vietnamese yelling, "Chieu hoi, chieu hoi, come in. We treat you very nice. We
give you food," you know. We're very, very, inconspicuous. (laughs) So we got
through all that and we got with it and we get a call on the radio, they wanted us
to go back out into the river. They thought they had a floating bomb. One of the
things the Viet Cong did was they'd take Styrofoam from the things that came
into the PX… (laughs) and they'd pack bombs in 'em and float 'em down the
river and explode 'em when they thought they would do the most damage. And
so they wanted us to go out and check out this thing to see if it was a bomb.
Well there's a thrill for ya, if it makes your day, you know? So we went out, we're
in the river, and we come up on this thing and we skirt it about 50 yards or so to
begin with. And doesn't look like it's anything but just a half a piece of Styrofoam,
doesn't look like there's anything in it. So the guy takes a boat hook and nothing.
Then all at once the boat captain, for some reason, reaches over and two blocks
the throttle. Two block, for those of you who are civilian oriented means he
jammed that thing all the way forward. And the whole back end of the boat went
– nnhhh. You know? Dropped. And about that time something came through
the muffler. And it was an RPG, rocket propelled grenade. And it exploded in
the muffler which is the only thing that saved any of us. So it just sprayed all of
us with little tiny pieces. And the machine gun gunners start shooting, I'm
standing in the door to go down and this ensign takes me with him. He was
going through that door no matter who was in his way. (laughs) And so I'm lying
underneath him saying, "What are you doing here? It's a fiberglass boat, it don't
stop bullets." Okay? So I got up, got upstairs and started shooting pictures
which is what I was supposed to do. And I discovered something that's been an
oddity all this time and that is once I got the camera up, and I'm taking pictures,
it's happening out there, not here. I'm not there. I'm removed.
[music]
Russell Elder
I got pictures of the boat getting pumped full of water because that's what
happened, it ruptured something down there and we were taking on water. So
everybody thought we were gonna sink. Not a pleasant idea in hostile territory.
So anyway, one of the guys is down there in the back of the boat. They had
ruptured one of the main water lines to one of the jet water streams. So they got
that crimped off and they decided they were gonna have to beach the boat.
There's no way that it could run all the way back to the base… you know, without
sinking us. So in order to raise the back end of the boat up we all start – me
included – started moving boxes of ammunition up to the forward end of the boat.
Somewhere in the process I got burned on the arm up in here. We got that done
and we beached the boat. And it's a funny thing, war is hell, as they've said.
And my brother had told me once that I was wrong when I told him I could never
shoot a woman or a child. He says, "You'll find that out." So I'm standing on the
forward part of this boat while they beach and I've got my .45 which is the only
thing we carry. And I jacked around in that chamber and I swear to god if it had
crawled out of those bushes in diapers I would've shot it. That's a revelation.
[music]
Russell Elder
But another boat came in, took us in tow and pulled us back into port. We went
back to the base and a corpsman took me in and he dressed it and bandaged my
burn. And so we went in and we had a cold beer. (laughs) And, the guys on the
boat bought me a beer because it was my first firefight. (laughs) And the
corpsman came in then and he says, "So how does it feel to have your first
Purple Heart?" And I says, "You gotta be kidding?" He says, "The ensign
scratched his finger and he's getting one." I said, "I'll take it." (laughs) That's
two points on ranking exams, you know? That was two more points I could get
next time I went up for rank. (laughs)
W. Andrew Wilson
I was deaf in my left ear. And so I thought I was like Jimmy Stewart in "It's a
Wonderful Life," you know, immune from military service. I'd always been told
that I was immune from military service and so it was no big deal for me to not to
be in college or not to be in some form of drafty format because I thought I
couldn't be taken. And I got my draft notice and it was you know, really quite a
surprise. I called the draft board and I said, "I'm deaf in my left ear, how can you
induct me?" And they said, "Well, they've changed the rules, you're in."
[music]
Narrator
The draft was on the mind of virtually every young American in the late 1960s.
Draft cards were in every 18-year-old man's wallet. College students had
deferments while other young men considered enlistment options to pursue a
preferred course. As always, there were deferments for specific health problems
that might limit service. And Andrew Wilson thought he would be on that list.
[music]
W. Andrew Wilson
My report date was the 5th of July of 1967. And I was transported to Richmond,
Virginia where we did the induction physical.
[music]
W. Andrew Wilson
And again, I was telling everybody who would listen, "Hey, I'm deaf. I'm not
supposed to be here." (laughs) You know, "Step forward and raise your arm to
the square, you're now a soldier." And I went through basic training in a place
called Sand Hill. And it's kind of ironic to me, looking back, that at the same time
I was on Sand Hill getting my basic training, John Wayne was on the other side
of Fort Benning shooting the movie "The Green Berets." And you can imagine
that being the kind of kid that I was that I was gonna be in trouble all the time and
I was. So I spent a lot of time in the kitchen working with Sergeant Ramirez, and
Sergeant Ramirez was a wonderful guy because he could've killed me at Fort
Benning in July; it's in the hundreds anyhow, and then the kitchen with the ovens
going, cooking for 200 guys, it gets really pretty hot. Yeah, Sergeant Ramirez
could've killed me but he kept me alive to wash more dishes and that was good.
And after I'd been on KP five or six times he says, "You know, Wilson, when you
go to Vietnam – and you surely are gonna go to Vietnam, everybody here is
going to Vietnam –" he said, "Go to the non-commissioned officer in charge and
tell him that you want to go to Nha Trang." And he said, "Oh, it's the most
beautiful little French beach resort you've ever seen. It's got about a hundred
thousand people and it's half way between Saigon and the DMZ, and the North
Vietnamese Army uses it as an R&R center, and since Dien Bien Phu in 1954,
it's never been hit. Nha Trang has never been hit." And I thought oh, my god,
I'm going to the beach! And so went to Vietnam and I took a guitar because I
thought I was going to the beach and I asked the NCOIC to go to Nha Trang, and
man, he sent me to Nha Trang. So I became a helicopter repair parts specialist,
and the only opening that there was in all of South Vietnam at that moment for
my job was flying for a company called the 281st Assault Helicopter Company.
But in reality, it belonged lock, stock, and barreled to the 5th Special Forces.
And so I went from Fort Benning where they were making a movie about Special
Forces. You know, the most gung-ho fighting soldiers from the sky, and fearless
men who jump and die. You know, the top three percent of everybody in the
Army – Special Forces – and boom, there I am, this hippy, weirdo freak right in
the middle of the Special Forces and it was quite a culture shock. When I had
been in my company for about two weeks – [music] it was January 30th, 1968. I
was lying there in bed, or I was asleep and I woke up and I heard this sound...
[explosion sounds] And it went like…"Whrr, crunch." And I went, "I've never
heard that sound before. That doesn't sound anything like a mortar." "Whrr,
crunch." And I thought, "You know, I bet that's an incoming rocket." And then I
heard a whole bunch more of these noises, and I thought, "Nah, it can't be
rockets. If it was rockets, the sirens would be going off and they'd be calling an
alert. And besides that, Nha Trang's never been hit." Well, the Viet Cong in Nha
Trang got over-excited, and they launched the Tet Offensive in Nha Trang a day
early. It was supposed to be a three-day truce for Buddha's birthday, the
Chinese New Year. But three o'clock in the morning, we got hit and we got hit in
a major way. So that was probably… you know, I've done a lot of therapy for
PTSD over the years, and I recently had a therapist who helped me identify that
Tet Offensive as the worst day of my life.
[music]
Narrator
It was January 1968. Andrew Wilson was one of half a million Americans serving
in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive catapulted the conflict forward as a television war
with battles, casualties, and protests a nightly presence in the nation's living
rooms. President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to sustain American
confidence in an escalating war and soberly viewed an election only ten months
away. On the ground in Vietnam, in the halls of power, and in the hearts, and
minds of Americans, 1968 loomed as a turning point for our nation and the war in
Vietnam.
[music]
[credits]