With the outbreak of war the Army suddenly needed lots of infantrymen, “Eleven Bravos,” which meant the end of my chances to make NCO any time soon; along with everyone else who went to Basic with me, I landed in the newly created 23rd Division. To show just what naive fools we were, every last one of us agreed to have our enlistment’s extended for an extra year; there was a big bonus that came with it, money we could use when we got back to civilian life. It was my duty to be part of a fire team in the 11th Brigade. If we thought we’d see combat soon, we were sorely disappointed, they sent us to temporary quarters at Fort Hood, Texas for the summer, where we trained and marched and drilled some more, while a Marine Company, an Armored Brigade and the 101st Airborne got over there ahead of us. Of course I realize now the buildup of ground forces had to take place at a deliberate pace because the airfields and port facilities in South Vietnam had to be expanded and you can’t get a hundred thousand new recruits trained and ready overnight. It’s hell when you’ve got a tough job staring you in the face and all you can do is sit and wait for it to happen.…just waiting, that was awful. Most of us were just green kids who’d never been anywhere before this. The worst thing the Army did was not allowing any of us to go home on leave after Basic, they claimed we had to be ready to move out on a moment’s notice, but it was obvious we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon and if we did go into Vietnam then some of us weren’t going to come back; so the decent thing would’ve been to let us see our families one last time before we went over there. Instead, we spent one endless day after another, practicing target shooting under that boiling Texas sun and playing stud poker until September, when the Army started to get down to business; we got our inoculations, made out our wills and received a bunch of lectures on what to expect when we got to South Vietnam-which contained a lot of information that proved to be utterly useless once we got in country.
We flew over to Vietnam on a big TWA 707 that had been pressed into service when the buildup began. On the way over they gave us the choice of hot dogs or grilled cheese sandwiches; we were quite disappointed that they didn’t find better food for a group of soon to be heroes like us. Other than bitching about the food, nobody had much to say while we in the air. There was a stopover in Guam, but it was 3:00 A.M. and we didn’t see much. The 707 touched down on the airfield at Da Nang on the morning of Sept. 28, 1965, it had been just over a year since that family conference in the kitchen way back home in Biloxi.
Just how far from home I had come hit me the second I walked out of that clean air conditioned jet air liner into the tropical air of South Vietnam. I don’t know what assaulted my senses the worst, the heat or the smell. I had spent 18 summers in Mississippi, but I had never felt anything like this, the humidity was a physical presence, kind of like an invisible force field. As bad as the weather was, the smell of a tropical country of over a million people with no indoor plumbing cannot be described. Two of my brothers were farmers and I had spent a lot of time when I was growing up with them, feeding the hogs and cleaning out stalls in the barns, so I know what shit smells like, but on that first day in Nam the whole world smelled like shit. Within two hours after we’d landed, every guy in my squad was sick on his stomach. Some heroes we were.
For the first ten days in country, my squad was shunted off to temporary housing at the big base in Da Nang, which consisted of nothing more than a large tent with cots, just a dozen guys sitting around trying to stay dry since it was the middle of the rainy season. Everything was so strange and different, we were glad to have nothing to do; the high point of the day was when somebody went out to get beer. Also once a day, Captain Elston, the Company commander, would come by and assure us that this was only a momentary situation, because of the rapid troop buildup there was a backlog in getting the new units onto the line, but to be ready to move out since orders could come any day. I grew to hate the boredom of sitting in that tent and watching the rain turn the earth to mud, but I was to learn that there were far worse things than sitting on your ass.
Finally the orders came down for our battalion to move out to a base camp about a hundred miles south of Da Nang, down in Binh Dinh province. For green troops, we got what we thought was pretty easy duty: patrolling a section of Highway 19 and making sure it stayed open so supply convoys could keep moving. This was about the same time we were launching a counteroffensive to retake the Central Highlands and there were big battles going on around Pleiku and Kontum, there was a steady stream of transports full of causalities coming back down the 19; we pretended not to see the ones full of black body bags. The squad that I was a member of would go out in a jeep and scout ahead of the convoys, because, despite the fact that most of Binh Dinh had been pacified, Viet Cong sapper teams and snipers were constantly causing trouble, not to mention the constant refugees that turned up. I think every civilian man, woman and child in South Vietnam got on that road at one time or another, pulling their carts and dragging their livestock with them. One day, about ten days into our escort duty, we were taking a battery of Howitzers up 19 when we ran head on into about 50 refugees making their way to An Khe. We gave them the right of way and were taking a break by the side of the road when some Cong, situated in a clump of trees about 100 yards away, opened up on us with an AK-47 burst. Whoever the shooter was, he was a lousy shot, all of the bullets went wide, but every last one of us went into the ditch by the road and hugged the earth for all it was worth-the only exception was Sgt. O'Mara, one of the tough lifers who ran the outfit, he remained on his feet the whole time and screamed at the rest of us to get back on our feet and return fire, but it did no good. All of us were pissing in our pants; I had this image of a bullet piercing my eyeball the minute I raised my head and no matter what I couldn’t get that image out of my mind. O'Mara’s curses finally got us back on our feet, which made us feel ashamed and we begged him not to report us, “The next time you yellow bellies are ordered to get on your feet, you move your asses, don’t matter who’s shooting at you!” was all he said and we readily agreed. The Sergeant cut us some slack and never mentioned the incident again, and we swore never to eat dirt like that again. That was my first time under fire.
I did get the chance to redeem myself on that stretch of road a month later when I was helping escort another convoy up to Pleiku during one of the endless battles that went on around there. Because there was a fire fight up ahead and another mob of “refugees” were passing by, we were ordered to pull over and wait. The hours drifted by and the shadows started to get long. We had learned that one of trucks about a half click down the road was loaded up with about a million cases of Blue Ribbon, so Sgt. Stone, from Alpha Company, and I decided to liberate a case or two, since we were risking our asses to deliver it, we felt we deserved something for our trouble. We had to walk down one empty tract of road and came right up on a three man VC sapper team, about 25 feet away in the process of planting a mine. Amazingly we saw them before they saw us, Stone gave me a couple of quick hand singles: he would take out all three of them, while I provided cover. He got two of them with clean quick shots to the head, but his third shot just missed the last Charlie, who in a split second was racing for the bush. Without thinking, I dropped to one knee and took aim and put a round through the back of his leg. It was an unspoken rule out in the boonies that unless ordered otherwise, we took no prisoners, so Stone walked over and prepared to finish the VC off. We were interrupted at that moment by a jeep carrying a camera crew from NBC News, who stopped and got the whole scene on film. They saved that VC bastard’s life, because while we were being filmed and interviewed a Captain from Special Operations came by and claimed him. Patch him up and interrogate him-big waste of time-but it gave the spooks something to do. The Sergeant and I got to look like big heroes on the Huntly-Brinkly show, thanks to that news crew. That was the first time I saw somebody killed up close, I won’t say that it didn’t bother me, but by then I had been in Nam long enough to have seen a lot of bad things. The real sad part of it was the fact that Stone and I never did get any of that beer.