Oral History

Gary Lee Perry: Vietnam War 

 

Interviewed by Carol Mikel Blochowiak

Interview date: May 5, 2002

 

 

Q:        All right. I’m here with Gary Perry and my name is Mikel Blochowiak and I’m going to be interviewing him over the Vietnam War and the duty that he served.  First of all, is it OK that I give this interview? Will you agree to all the information?

 

A:        Sure, it’s fine with me.

 

Q:        OK, let’s start out with were you married at the time you were drafted?

 

A:        Actually, we had set our wedding up for August 18th, and I got my draft notice to report on the 1st of August, so we set our wedding up for the 25th of July, and got married five days before I went into the military. 

 

Q:        OK, so there were no kids at that point?

 

A:        None yet.

 

Q:        So exactly what year, month, and date did you arrive?

 

A:        I reported to Ft. Polk, Louisiana on August 2, 1967. Ah, I was there, actually from August to December the 22nd, I believe, I left – I did basic training in Bravo, 1st Battalion, Second Training Group in Ft. Polk. I went over to, ah, Delta Company in Tigerland – at that time Tigerland was the infantry training course. It was supposed to be the toughest training course in the United States. We took our advanced infantry training there. You automatically – when you got through there – you – it was an automatic Vietnam. Everybody that went through Tigerland went to Vietnam. I got a little break – I was supposed to went to NCO school in Ft. Benning, Georgia. There was nine of us that was going to go to NCO school and at the time it was full. So they sent us home for Christmas without orders. I had a month – actually ended up with 22 days at home. They – while we was home they shipped our orders to us. At that time my wife worked at Ft. Sill at the transportation office and she looked up the APO number, which turned out to be Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. We went to Schofield Barracks and trained – we took intensive jungle training in Schofield Barracks and actually formed up the old 11th Infantry Brigade. They had pulled the colors in World War II and never had reinstated it until Vietnam. We took the colors back over with 11th Infantry Brigade – we took the colors back over to Vietnam with us. We went over as a brigade, which, unlike most people – most people got sent to Vietnam individually. We got sent as a complete unit. We shipped over as – we went over as companies. We was about a week apart on our arrival in country. 

 

Q:        OK. What was the exact date that you actually arrived in Vietnam?

 

A:        We left Schofield Barracks on the 11th of April, 1968, and arrived in Vietnam on the 11th.

 

Q:        And what were the conditions like when you arrived?

 

A:        Well we had just left Hawaii where it was nice and beautiful and cool and everything smelled nice. And the first thing we did when we landed at Chu Lai which is in I-Corps, which is the northern part of Vietnam south of Da Nang about 60 miles. When we landed it was hot, humid. You stepped off the airplane and the heat just hit you in the face like a blast. The air smelled because they – the only way to dispose of human waste over there was to burn it. All the outhouses has 55-gallon drums cut in half and they would drag them out the back and pour diesel in them and burn them. So the whole countryside around big base camps smelled. That was the first thing that hit you in the face was the humid heat and the smell of burning waste.  So the conditions right off the bat wasn’t real favorable. They kind of – kind of turned your stomach the first thing.

 

Q:        And was it a lot different than you expected?

 

A:        Actually, it probably was, because you landed at large base camps. The first place you seen was a large base camp and it was more or less like stateside except for the heat and the smell. Most of the large base camps were – a lot of them like Cam Ranh Bay had indoor plumbing – but places I was always at there wasn’t none of them had indoor plumbing. But it was so large that you couldn’t hardly walk across it. Ah, it was absolutely chaotic if you didn’t know what was going on because there was planes coming in , planes going out, helicopters, ah, tanks, tracks, people, everything you seen from that point was troop moving, cargo moving – it was just amazing at all the activity that was going on. I don’t know if you really could get ready in your mind for something like that. 

 

Q:        And how often were you actually in battle?

 

A:        We – for the first two weeks, we actually didn’t do anything but fill sandbags till we kind of got acclimated to the country. Ah, later on, when we kind of got broke into the country and got involved in the country and got to making sweeps, it – it really varied. Sometimes you would go two or three days without anybody shooting at you. Sometimes it was everyday that somebody would shoot at you. They didn’t necessarily hit you. They were just shooting at you. A lot of the people that actually shot at you – guerillas – they wasn’t really trained that well. It was harassment and they were real lucky if they did hit you. Our main concern – our big concern was mines and booby traps. A mine could take you out – you wouldn’t even have an inkling that you was about to get blowed away. We lost several people to mines and bobby traps. They had all sorts of bobby traps.

 

Q:        Do you mind explaining in detail?

 

A:        Well, they – they actually had – some of the mines they used was – we called them bouncing betty – an antipersonnel mine. You would be walking along a trail, you would step on it. When you stepped on it, you would press down on it and it would arm it. When you stepped off of it, it would pop up out of the ground about three feet and go off. When it detonated, it would absolutely cut you in half at the waste. It was just high enough that it would come up and get – in reality if you didn’t have your spacing right on your troop movement, it would get the man in front and the man behind. Because you would step off of it and it would wait about a second before it popped up and it would let you get about two or three feet in front of it before it went off. If you had any kind of explosive on your back, you was absolutely gone. We lost a machine gunner one time that we just found small pieces because he had the large bag of hand grenades on his back and it detonated everything. 

 

            Ah, I lost a good friend to a tunnel that was bobby trapped with sulphur. He got to probing around with a bayonet and he – he ended up suffocating because we couldn’t get him out. Just all sorts of – anything you could think of – any way to maim a man or kill him they used. The big thing would actually be to wound a man in a capacity that it took two men to take care of him – that way you took three men out of combat. Or if they could use a mine that would kill three or four people, that was even better. We lost a lieutenant and a point man one day – they didn’t get killed, but they got wounded – to a 105 round buried in the ground. The point man tripped it and the lieutenant got most of the shrapnel off of it. Ah, they even buried one 75 round – they may take a whole bomb and bury it in the ground – put some kind of a detonating device on it and, ah, somebody walk over it. They would use a 105 round to blow up one individual. 

 

            I was sitting bunker guard one night and, ah, about sundown, watching a patrol come in. The point man stepped on a Willie Peter grenade, which is white phosphorus. He stepped on a Willie Peter grenade. The whole thing I remember about that explosion that is was the pretty explosion I had ever seen because white phosphorus glows when it explodes and it was right at sundown. You could barely see the men moving – it was right at sundown and it was a brilliant – looked like a Christmas tree out there. And a man lost his life, but the only thing I can remember is the explosion – it was so brilliant and so beautiful, but a man actually died when it went off. 

 

            And we were the same way. We used, ah, in the bunker lines on the – on the wire, we set up all kind of explosive devices to keep the VC and the NVA out of the fences. We used foo gas, Willie Peter grenades sitting on top of them, so when you detonated it, it would be a wall of flame. Any kind of a trip flare, claymore mines, we was the same way. In defensive positions, we used – we used all sorts of devices to kill people. That was the name of the game was – was, ah – that’s how you win. You kill more than they kill.

 

Q:        OK, and you mentioned the tunnel and your friend being a tunnel rat. What was your exact position?

 

A:        When I first went over, I was a grenadier. I carried an M-79 grenade launcher. At that time, the M-79 was a one-round, ah, shot a 40mm grenade and when you shot it, you broke it down like an old-fashioned shotgun, pulled the empty out and stuck another one in, clicked it back on, pushed it off safety and fired again. Ah, I got pretty proficient at hitting things with this grenade launcher. 

           

            The first time we got in an ambush, though, I realized it didn’t have nearly enough rounds coming out and, ah, we – I opted for an M-16 after that. At that time, I was spc. 4th class because I was a grenadier, and you had to be a spc. 4th  class to be a grenadier. I carried that rank till toward the end of the year when I made, ah, sergeant E-5, which is – they called it “buck” sergeant. Ah, from that point on, I carried an M-16 the whole time. This friend that got killed and I did do, oh, when we would find tunnels, rather than call tunnel rats, we actually went into the tunnels ourselves and checked out – we checked out a lot of tunnels until he got killed. He was – he was a short man – small man. We would check out tunnels together. I was a lot taller than him and he would go in real low and I would go in a little higher and we found some interesting stuff in tunnels. We found caches – we actually found a hospital one time. 

 

Q:        Were there people down there or was it deserted?

 

A:        We never run into an individual in a tunnel, thank goodness! Usually they knew we were coming and they vacated as quick as they could, because on a stand-up fight unless they was really ready, they was going to lose. They usually fought a rear-guard action where when you run into them, the main body would move out because they couldn’t stand toe-to-toe – they couldn’t stand toe-to-toe and fight with us because we had air superiority and we had artillery. And they didn’t have any of that kind of back-up. When we actually got into – into fighting them, it was usually they – the only time they would fight was when they really were ready to fight, such as the Tet Offensive, and in picked battles that they knew they had an opportunity to do a lot of damage. Otherwise, it was basically whittle you down day by day with mines, booby traps, and like I say, knock off a man here and a man there, and, ah, the more you could wound and maim, the more people it took to take care of them. So, it was individually, day-by-day.

 

Q:        OK, you already mentioned a couple of friends being killed. Did you have any more?

 

A:        We had an operation off of Duc Pho, which was – the LZ was called Montezuma, which was an old French fire base back in – when the French were there. The land mines that was on this – it was a mountain – come sticking up out of the middle of the rice paddies – the land mines that the French put there back in their tenure were still there. After it come a big rain you could see them. It’d wash them out every once in a while. And every once in a while one would just go off by itself up on the side of Montezuma. But we had an operation off of Montezuma, which we was out a long time – it was out in the mountains. This is thick jungle. We come through a clearing early one morning. Benny Lewis from Atoka, he was a bull rider, big guy, kind of ruddy complexion – wonderful friend – wonderful individual. Ah, he was walking point for a friend of his that morning. Just happened to walk into what we called an L-shaped ambush. There were two men in front and one to the side. When he walked into the trail opening coming out of a clearing, he walked through a trail opening hidden back into the jungle. They ambushed him. They shot him three times in the chest and four times in the head. Ah, he died two or three hours later. 

 

            But we pushed on – after we got through that we pushed on and found a division-size NVA base camp, which they had built in – they had built latrines. They had built a cooking shack. They had barracks. And this was all invisible from the air. The cooking shacks had French ovens built in the ground with little tunnels going out covered in leaves and branches to filter the smoke out and when it got to the end, you couldn’t even see any smoke coming off the ground. This held a division of men, and actually you’d – nobody ever knew they were there. Ah, we, ah, secured it – ended up burning it, tearing it down, put an ambush in it for a couple of nights, and wasn’t productive because when they left, they left completely. We burned it to the ground and destroyed everything was could destroy. Blew up their bunkers. And just moved to another area. 

 

            We, ah, and at a later date, I lost some people – lost some good friends at Tam Ky – that was a – it was on up north when we was working up toward Da Nang. In our – in our tenure in Vietnam we were a roving battalion. Anytime anybody would get into some trouble, they’d come out to the field where we was at and pick us up and haul us to wherever there was some action at. We didn’t get a lot of credit for a lot of things because we was always just attached. We would be shipped here and do a job for several days and then we’d go back to our old home area of operations. And then we’d be shipped here and – actually, the first move we made, ah, me and seven other guys caught up with the company because we’d been wounded down by LZ Thunder. And, ah, on one of the first moves they made we – we had to catch up with them because they had got shipped out to another LZ. That was kind of – that kind of started our moving around. 

 

            Ah, and, I started to tell about Tam Ky. We got – we had a division that couldn’t get out of their base camp, so they come and hauled us down to this base camp. Loaded us up with ammunition and put us out the front gate. We started getting fire as soon as we walked out the front gate. We finally, after about, oh, three hours, got pinned completely down. Ah, lost another – a platoon of our company lost two men almost instantly. We cloverleafed out of the base camp, ah, they had two men working a machine gun nest. We tried for two days to get them out and finally we covered one of them, which, he was still alive, but the other one had walked out. He’d come out of the machine gun nest. Physically stripped them. One – both of them were still alive. One of them fought and the other one didn’t. The one that fought they just killed him. The other one, he played dead and they took his watch and his boots and his fatigue jacket, and, ah, ah, left him for dead. He was probably 50 feet from the machine gun. He laid there in the sun and the, ah, fire for two days – them shooting over him and us shooting over him and jets coming in on air strikes and he said the worst thing of the whole thing was the ants getting in his wounds and chewing on the dried blood. Ah, he, ah, he went home. He got to go – got to go right on home. He had some pretty bad wounds in the legs, so, ah, he automatically got to go home. 

 

            But, ah, then, ah, a little later after we finally cleared that out, we went probably two miles down the road and run into a division of NVA, which they promptly left and left an anti-tank company, which took us two days to flush them out. We ended up with six casualties on the second day. Six people got killed. They done a pretty good job on us, ah. The first day we went in and lost a lot of people. The second day we went in lost a couple more. Ah, but eventually it ended up like it always ends up – we had superior fire power so we won the day. 

 

Q:        Were any of your friends taken prisoner of war?

 

A:        Actually, I didn’t have any of my personal friends taken, ah, they were some men in Charlie Company that, ah, about the time we got over there, they was doing a sweep through a village, and he was pulling drag, which, you always had a point man which walked, oh, maybe 50, 100 feet in front of the unit – whatever you was walking – you may be walking as a company – you may be walking as a platoon – you could be walking as a squad. A company consisted of, oh, around 200 men. A platoon was around 35 men. A squad was around 7 men. So you always had a point man and you had a drag man. The drag man actually walked a little ways behind and made sure nobody snuck up behind the unit that was moving through an area. He kind of walked looking over his shoulder. This man – they was walking through a village and when they got through the village, the man was gone. So, he got taken. And his name I don’t know. He wasn’t a friend, but that was the only person I actually know that was taken. 

 

Q:        And what conditions did they endure?

 

A:        Well, they didn’t find him for probably – as I remember, about three days. He had, ah, when they found him he was nailed down in the middle of Highway One, which was a dirt road that went from north – the northern end of Vietnam to the southern end. He was nailed down with large bridge spikes through his hands and his feet to the road. He had been burned – just mutilated in all sorts of ways. He was actually a lower ranking individual. Infantrymen and anything below officers – they didn’t take prisoners. They would torture them and kill them. If you wasn’t an officer, you didn’t stand much of a chance being taken prisoner. If, ah, when they brought the POWs back, there was very few NCOs that came back because there was very few NCOs taken prisoners. They just didn’t take them prisoner. It was kind of a death sentence if you got caught, ah, you was automatically killed. 

 

Q:        OK, and were you ever wounded?

 

A:        I was wounded, ah, the day that the lieutenant and the point man got wounded by a booby trap, we set up in a village the rest of that day because we was going back to the actual ambush site to set up an ambush that night. We, ah, on the way out of the village we got ambushed ourselves. The whole squad was wounded, ah, we – I heard the hand grenade hit. It was right in front of the man that was in front of me. We got, ah, actually, the first hand grenade wounded 7 men, ah, it actually got our whole squad. Then they dropped some M-79 rounds in on us, which was our own rounds that they had captured off of dead GIs. 

 

            The first time I got wounded was, ah, I got shrapnel in my left foot, which I still carry today. I got shrapnel in my left leg. I got shrapnel in my chest, ah, and, ah, the second round come in, I got shrapnel in my shoulder, some little pieces across my mouth. I still got some in my chest today from the second round coming in. 

 

            Ah, then, later on in the year, ah, at a place called Tam Ky that I mentioned before, we, ah, on that second day the fighting was pretty heavy when we got into the – got into the bunker line, and, ah, I got shrapnel off an exploding APC, which is an armored personnel carrier. They got, ah, they used RPG grenades on the line of tanks and tracks. We just happened to be working with the First Cavalry unit. We usually worked by ourselves just as infantry, but we teamed up with this mechanized unit and went through these rice paddies over to these little islands, firing as we went. For some reason, when we got out in the middle of this island, we got a lull in firing and when we did they popped up from everywhere with RPGs, which is rocket-powered grenade. They are highly effective. They are Russian-made and they’re a beautifully accurate weapon. Ah, they knocked out – I was the third track from the end. They blew up three tracks on our end. They got two in the middle and they got a tank down on the other end and they got an engineer track which had a 1000 pounds of TNT and C4 in it. It burned for a few minutes and then it exploded, which completely annihilated the whole track – there was nothing left but the running gear and the engine was setting on the ground. Ah, they, ah, killed 6 of our guys during that battle. I don’t know how many of the track people died. But, ah, I seen several people in extremely bad shape. My wounds were nothing to be shipped out of the field for. It was shrapnel that I picked up in the legs and some in just extremities – it wasn’t life threatening, so we didn’t even go in. The medic treated them in the field, and, ah, pulled the shrapnel out and we went on about our business because we had other things to do. 

 

            The, ah, third time I got wounded we was, ah, out at a place called LZ Baldy, which was right south of Da Nang. Oh, we was probably 20 miles south of Da Nang. We had a – we pulled a road sweep – we was in the field for three weeks. We’d come in out of the field and we’d get a week to rest – we was actually on bunker guard for a week, and we went out on road sweeps everyday. We provided security for the engineers. The engineers would sweep the – sweep the roads with – sweep the roads with mine sweepers to find, ah, booby traps in the road. So we provided security for them. We would walk along behind them after they cleared the roads and make sure they didn’t get sniper fire or harassed in any way. Ah, they was – the roads went three directions out of LZ Baldy. Highway One went north and south, and then there was a road that went to a little old fire base that was back in the mountains. We, ah, we’d go half-way to that fire base everyday with the engineers and then we’d turn around and have to walk back to, ah, Baldy, which ended up being about a seven mile walk. Ah, on this particular day they needed two men to stay. We would set up observation posts along the way to keep the Vietnamese from coming in behind – behind the road sweepers and setting up mines again. That way we could look both ways down the road and keep it clear. So that day this friend of mine and I happened to be the ones that got picked to be on the observation posts and, ah, it was starting to rain so we was setting up our ponchos to get out of the rain, and they walked up behind us probably 50-60 feet away. For some reason the opened up on automatic instead of taking two shots and killing both of us. Ah, lucky me, I got shot twice. Didn’t – wasn’t nothing life threatening. I got shot through the foot, got grazed across the back. Took several weeks to heal up, but it didn’t hurt in the sense that it maimed me for the rest of my life. 

 

Q:        OK. What branch of military were you in?

 

A:        I was originally drafted into the army. Ah, basically trained as a – everyone trains as a army infantryman, ah, but, ah, then I went on to infantry training. That was the Tigerland part. To give you an example, we had – at Tam Ky the First Cav unit we was working with had got so depleted of personnel that a man that had went through basic training, ah, and wherever he went – it could have been in California – it could have been in Missouri, or Louisiana – but he went through basic training. They got so depleted on armored personnel carrier drivers that they was pulling the clerks out of the offices and making them drivers. So he was actually trained as a clerk, yet he was in the field driving an APC, fighting as an infantryman. He, ah, made the statement when – the first day we went into Tam Ky in the battle that if his track ever got hit he was going to be the first one to leave. It was very difficult to climb in and out of a track. You have a small hatch. You have a seat that pops up. You have a helmet on with commo wires leading out of it so you can talk to the track commander. Ah, you have two levers that you’ve got to get cleared of – it’s just extremely difficult to get out of this track. 

 

            When this track blew up – we was on the outside of it. It knocked us out for a second – the explosion. We jumped up, ah, there was three of us – we jumped up and grabbed the guy that was in the middle. He took the brunt of the blast. We grabbed him and drug him back to a hole back behind where the track was at, probably 50 – 60 feet. The TC driver was already back there – I mean, the track driver was already back there. He, ah, still had his commo helmet on dangling wires. He just ripped the wires out of the radio, come out of there, probably skinned his shins and everything else, but he didn’t stay in that track when he got hit. He was gone! You can’t even crawl out of a track hurriedly unless you do hurt yourself. I don’t know how in the world the man got out and got back there. But he – in reality he was a clerk – he shouldn’t have even been in the field. But that – we were – everybody was initially trained as an infantryman. You took – you just went your separate ways later on. 

 

Q:        And what was the most scariest moment while in Vietnam?

 

A:        Probably the scariest thing was when you went to bed at night – because you didn’t actually – well, ‘went to bed’ – I use that term loosely. When you went to sleep at night – because you didn’t actually know if you was going to wake up the next morning, ah, when you closed your eyes and when you opened them – when you closed your eyes, you didn’t know if you were going to get up – when you opened them you didn’t know what you was going to be looking at when you opened them. Ah, you learned to wake up – for several years after I got back, ah, my wife couldn’t even walk up and shake me because, you know, you was liable to get hit. I was real jumpy. I was wired. When you sleep on your back on the ground for – or in the jungle with things crawling on you all night, you – you learn that your reaction time is real quick. Of course, there was all times – I think basically if a man said he wasn’t scared, he’s either lying or crazy. Because it was like walking on egg shells. You didn’t ever know when you was going to break one, and if you broke it, you were liable to get broke running away. You could always hear stories about walking around looking for toe-poppers. That’s what we always refereed to a small mine that would just actually put a hole in your foot or wound you to the sense that you got out of the field for a few days. You, ah, a lot of the guys wouldn’t take malaria pills, ah, for the simple fact that they wanted a chance to be out of that field for seven or eight days, and if you caught malaria, they’d send you to Cam Ranh Bay to rest and recuperate for a little while. So, it was a whole different – kind of a whole different ball game than, ah, the way you lived was the hard part. The fighting wasn’t as bad as the living. The living you had to do everyday. The fighting you did on – when somebody actually attacked you, you could fight back and get rid of your pent-up emotions. It was a release, but, ah, the day-to-day living. Living in the mud –  rained down every night – it’s hard to imagine just laying down on the ground every night and going to sleep. Leaning back against your pack, digging a hole in the ground, whatever position you was in. If we was in the mountains, ah, you was laying with, you know what. If you was out toward the beach, you was laying in sand, which absolutely got into everything. It was kind of like white silica sand. It, ah, would eat your feet. It would eat your weapon. You had it in your food. If the wind blew, it blew. If it didn’t blow, it reflected the sunshine, so it didn’t really make any different which way you went, it – it would get you. It was a day-to-day thing, and it wasn’t – it wasn’t a good thing. The country scared you, the people scared you, the – everything you had to endure, you know, scared you. You just – but you just didn’t really think about it.

 

Q:        Did you ever think you wouldn’t return home?

 

A:        I don’t think you really thought about not returning home. Ah, I think there was a thing that you actually went – I think you think – I think you actually went day to day on that. Ah, I didn’t think about home that much. I didn’t worry about home that much. I would liked to have been there, but my big concern was just getting through that day. Ah, and when I got through that day, my big concern was getting through that night. I learned early on do it day by day, ah, which helped me a lot. I had a little bit better grasp on things – I was a little older than some of the others that went over. Ah, I was a little bit more mature, maybe, in the sense that I’d been raised on a farm, ah, I knew things in life wasn’t that easy, so it – it worked out pretty easy for me. Ah, I just took it as it came, little at a time. 

 

Q:        And what was the weather like while you were there?

 

A:        It started out – we got there in April – it was hot, and it just got hotter. Ah, along toward, um, seemed like the fall of the year, we got into monsoon seasons, ah, it rained when we was up at LZ Baldy and started raining, oh, it rained for 14 days and nights straight. We was working out in the – between Highway 1 and the South China Sea, which was the kind of silica-like sand that I was talking about earlier – it was real fine. Jungle boots had two small holes in the in-steps on jungle boots to let your feet breath. Over there everything stayed wet. The humidity was bad, everything stayed wet, and people would literally rot in their boots. Your socks would rot. So, they had these little holes that had little perforated brass filters on them that the air could breathe in. Well, they were small enough that that silica-sand could come in and on that 14 days and nights that it rained – it rained steady, if you can imagine raining as hard as you’ve ever seen it rain for 14 days and nights straight. And we was out in it. We were walking in it. You’d get to the point where you would have to find something solid to get your hand on so you could figure out if you were standing up or if you was upside down because it was – everything was water. You were standing in water, the – everything you could see was rain. If you wasn’t by a tree, it was hard to – it – it was a weird feeling because there was just so much water. 

 

            Ah, we were standing at church one night and the preacher that was up there asked me, he said, “What did you all do on nights like this it was pouring down rain?” He said, “What did you all do on nights like this?” I said, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, where do you go?” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, where did you sleep?” And I said, “We just sat down in the water and went to sleep.” He couldn’t imagine that somebody could just sit down in a mud hole of water and go to sleep, but you get to the point where you’re so tired and so exhausted that you can sit down anywhere, even if it’s in water. Ah, we, ah, we would just sit down or lay down or whatever you could do – lean up against something and go to sleep. 

 

            We actually, during that time, the whole platoon – we was working as a platoon – the whole platoon got down with bad fever. The sand – got so much sand in our boots that – and walking so much, that it was like little tiny razor blades. It just shredded your feet after a while, and your feet was wet all this time. So we actually, after 14 days of this – and nights – we got, ah, finally got back to the rear and we got to spend a week recuperating to get our feet dried out. You just can’t imagine being wet and staying wet. If you can imagine shriveling up because you stayed too long in the bathtub. Can you imagine staying 14 days and nights in the bathtub? And carrying an 80 pound pack on your back and trying to keep your rifle dry, and, ah. . .

 

            Of course, there was one good thing about it – Charlie wasn’t interested in doing nothing, either. He was trying just like you was. He was trying to exist during that time. He was trying to stay dry. Trying to stay where he could keep hisself from getting sick. 

 

            We, ah, and then on toward the later part of the year it cooled down. It got down, oh, it was probably the 70s, but when you’re running 90 everyday and it cools down in the 70s, it’s cold. About this time was after the last time I had got shot, and I was working in the rear, but the battalion had moved out in the mountains, which was a lot higher and it was a lot colder. But the weather – the weather most of the year was beautiful. You’d have a rain storm, a slight rain storm during the day, ah, usually didn’t last long, just enough to get you wet. Then it would clear off and the sun would shine. Beautiful weather. If a person had to fight, that’s the only place to fight – in that tropical climate, and that’s what it was most of the time. 

 

Q:        Alright. Was it ever difficult to tell the difference between a North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, or a South Vietnamese, for that matter?

 

A:        The Viet Cong was the hardest to tell. Both Vietnamese – most of the time you could tell North Vietnamese. They were a little more – I don’t know – it was just a feeling you got after you’d been there for a while. A North Vietnamese soldier was a little different than the regular Vietnamese peasant. The Vietnamese peasant, they were, ah, their hands were physically rougher, their legs were tougher from – from working in the rice paddies. Then you take an ARVN soldier – a South Vietnamese soldier – they were softer because they didn’t do that much physical labor. You take an NVA soldier, they just had a little – little bit more of a look about them. The ones that was really hard to tell was the VC because most of the VC were made up of peasants. They were the small – the lower class of individuals over there. They were harder to tell because they were just like the people that was in the fields.

 

Q:        So, I’m just going to jump in here real quick. Would you say that maybe during the day they were working the fields and at night they would be Viet Cong?

 

A:        Exactly. Some of them did, ah, they – that’s what made them so effective. You may – you may be, ah, working right along side one of them, protecting them in the day, and at night he may be a VC, and you would never know from one minute to the next if you was sitting there talking to one or taking rice from one or if he was going to be the one that was going to come back that night and blow you up. It was – it was really hard. They did have ID checks. You could ask them for an ID card. The South Vietnamese were supposed to have ID cards. Ah, so you could ask them for an ID card, ah, we had several of those. Several ID checks. But it didn’t always go, because a lot of the peasants didn’t – regular, ah, South Vietnamese people – it was such a backward country that they actually didn’t go do that. They didn’t go in to get their ID cards and it was, ah, it was just really backwards. And it was extremely hard. Actually it was extremely hard to distinguish between the two – the VC and the regular peasant. NVA troops kind of stood out as a different type of individual – they were a little straighter, a little maybe less calloused, they had a different look about them. But the VC and the South Vietnamese were hard to tell apart. We, ah, it brought up – you brought up a fact about telling the difference on them – we stopped – had an ID check one day – an individual named Gary Schroeder, who was a big, big name. He stopped an old Vietnamese peasant woman that was carrying hay on a stick – she had a big bundle of hay on each end of a stick. And he stopped her for an ID check and she put here bundle down, and he told her, said, “Don’t worry about it mama-san.” He said, “I’ll hold it.” And he grabbed hold of it and it liked to put him to his knees because it was heavy. And he was a big man. He couldn’t imagine that little bitty woman packing that much weight. They – they had a way about them that – that they could carry more weight than we thought about carrying – that was one way you could tell an NVA from the regular South Vietnamese, because the South Vietnamese’s legs – they were small people – they didn’t come up to our chest, but they were very muscled. You could tell, the ones that had done all the actual work – was doing the work and the ones who were just walking – you could tell by the muscles in the legs how much work they was doing. So, there was just different ways, and it’s hard to explain. You just kind of learned after you was there for a while what to look for. 

 

Q:        Alright. We mentioned the rice paddies already. Tell me a little bit more about that and what else the land was like?

 

A:        The rice paddies was pretty unique. They, ah, the United States government at one point give them tractors and equipment and most of the time the country was so backward that they couldn’t use it anyway. You might see a tractor parked on the side of the – an old tractor parked on the side of a rice paddy and them out there using water buffalos to farm with because they only farmed small areas and they would flood it and plant it by hand. They planted the rice by hand. They would get out there and flood it and work it up with their feet. It was, ah, fertilized with human waste or animal waste – whatever they could use to fertilize it with – and then they’d get out there and you could see them all day long planting little rice plants. They walked along and had their pajamas rolled up and walked along a stuck them in the ground. They may be from knee-deep to ankle-deep to waist-deep. You can – we walked in – and you’d walk in the mud – the mud was usually – it was the consistency of clay. Ah, it would try to suck the sole off your boot when you’d walk through it. You can imagine just the exhaustion of walking through rice paddies. But about three-fourths of the time they wouldn’t let us walk on the dikes because half the time they were booby trapped, so we’d have to walk through the rice paddies. 

 

            Ah, the land actually consisted of the South China Sea – Vietnam was bordered on the east by the South China Sea. Where we was at – we was in – from the southern border of I-Corps, which is the north end of Vietnam, the land was bordered on the – by the South China Sea – consisted of sand for three to four miles inland, then it was rice paddies, and then it turned into the mountains. 

 

            You could get into different areas in the mountains, ah, some mountains were up in the clouds. You, ah, we had one LZ that worked that – LZ Rider – that was actually – at night the clouds would come in and you couldn’t see anything because you was down in the clouds. And, ah, and it would get cool at night because it was so high up. We got into some areas that – out by the Cambodian border that was triple canopy jungle – in other words they could fire an artillery round in them and it never hit ground because it would go off up in the trees. We got in there and in the area in the late afternoon and it’s like twilight inside that jungle. We moved on till dark. By dark when we stopped – when the sun sets over there if you’re in that triple canopy, it gets dark instantly, and, ah, all we did at that point was just make a circle, but your hand on the man in front of you – on his pack – the lead man just turned around and made a circle and everybody sat down right where they was at. Because you absolutely cannot see anything. It was black. It, ah, and we wasn’t there very long so we didn’t have to work in that atmosphere very long, ah, we actually moved back out that next day and got back out into where it was a little thinner. 

 

            We hacked one – everybody used trails. You just had to be careful when you was using a trail. They didn’t – tended not to mine or booby trap the trails extensively because they had to use them, too. They had identifications that they could just walk down a trail and know if there was mine or a booby trap there, but at the same time they had to move rapidly through those trails so they couldn’t afford to mine and booby trap all of them. 

 

            You would get into those areas, ah, and it was, ah, I don’t know, it was beautiful. The mountains over there were absolutely out of this world. The country was beautiful. You could see some of the prettiest sights that you ever seen. Looking at pictures of Vietnam – I would love to go back to see the country when it wasn’t in a wartime. It, ah, the old French plantations that were there – of course, when I was there they was bombed out, but you could look at them, and – absolutely beautiful country. 

 

Q:        Alright. What other problems did you have to deal with besides the actual fighting?

 

A:        Well, like I said earlier, it was the day to day – it was a day to day battle just to exist. The actual fighting at points was kind of a relief. Ah, one of the things we had to deal with was snakes. We had what we called a bamboo viper, or, well, actually they called it a two-step, which it would bite you and you took two-steps and you was dead. It was a highly venomous snake that, ah, would kill you pretty quick. They also had all kinds of insects – centipedes, ah, just – you would see spiders that you’d never seen before – all kind of bugs that you never seen before. 

 

            The mosquitoes were absolutely horrendous at times. They, ah, there was always a story about fueling up on helipads because they thought they was helicopters. They was absolutely huge and, ah, they were without mercy at night. They would just eat you up. We had mosquito repellant which stunk to high heavens and didn’t work all that great. Ah, you done what you could do. Most of the time in the daytimes we wore t-shirts with sleeves cut out, but at night everybody had a fatigue jacket that they put on and they tried to cover up as much as they could to keep from getting eat completely up with mosquitoes. 

 

            We had an operation – we had never run into anything but just normal bugs until we had an operation up north of Baldy back off the highway. We had to make a cloverleaf sweep back out into the mountains and, ah, we was up in there about three days. We come up on this beautiful valley – probably the pretties valley that I’ve ever seen. We went down in it and, ah, we even found two human skeletons laying up against a rock outcropping. But we went on down in this valley, and, ah, it was beautiful. A little mist hanging over the rice paddies. They was old rice paddies – nobody lived down in there. There was a hooch in there. We made a sweep through there. We come back out and one of the guys noticed his britches leg was covered with blood. So he pulled his britches leg up and he had leeches all over his legs. So we all got to looking. At that point I took 18 leeches off my legs. 

 

            We, ah, that was the first time we had encountered leeches. That a little further up north. We run into them several times after that. Ah, they would even be on the trees on the leaves as you’d walk along – they’d – they would fall off, get on your face. The little ones you could feel them. They would kind of sting when they – when they bit you. The big ones were so smooth, they’d just crawl up your britches leg and you’d never know they was there until they fell off and they had an anti-coagulant in them that would let you bleed after they fell off. That’s how you knew they were on there, because they would get full of blood and then they would fall off and your leg would continue to bleed and get your britches leg wet and then you’d know that you’d beet bit by a leech. 

 

            And you’d also get them going through water. Water would, ah, water was full of them. You had to be careful when you filled your canteens up in streams that you didn’t get a leech in your canteen. You had to watch real close. That’s the reason you always put iodine tablets in your – in your water. Ah, which was really good because it made the water – made the water taste like iodine. It’d turn it red and looked just like iodine and tasted like iodine, but it killed all the bacteria, and which there was lots of bacteria. A lot of times we couldn’t get re-supplied with water, so we had to fill up out of streams, but there was everything – everything over there tried to kill you. 

 

            We seen – on – on LZ Rider through binoculars we seen elephants one time down in a valley. We called in an air strike on them, which was very unusual to see elephants over there. But, ah, they actually used elephants at some time back in the mountains to move equipment, so we called in a air strike. Don’t know if it done any good or not. We just seen them for a few minutes across a clearing. We seen a black bear in a tree. Ah, lots of people seen tigers. We never run into a tiger, but the leeches and the mosquitoes were our biggest – biggest enemy. 

 

            We also had some operations where we ran into elephant grass, which we tried to avoid elephant grass like the plague because everybody that – everybody that – always the point man was the worst that got cut up, but everybody that walked through elephant grass got cut. It was like a razor blade, it would cut you like – make little bitty slits in you. Ah, the Vietnamese were real efficient in elephant grass. They could – they could walk in a real small area. They could stoop over and move extremely fast through elephant grass because they would make a little tunnel about waist high, and at some points they would set machine gun nests up in these tunnels and they could fire down this tunnel and a GI would never know that there was a tunnel in that elephant grass, because he’s usually not looking down at his waist. He’s looking straight ahead to try to get through this grass using a machete to cut with. Ah, we tried – a few times we had operations in those areas, but we tried extremely hard to go around them if there was any way possible. It just took absolutely too long to go through them. 

 

            We had to pack so much stuff on our back. We had – we always carried ammo for the machine gun. Ah, each man had a Claymore mine to set up for ambushes at night. Each man carried so many hand grenades. You were issued so many. If you wanted to carry more than that you could. Each man had a poncho and had a trenching tool, and then basically all your C-rations, which we had – at one point I seen some C-rations which was left over from ’52 (garbled) – we didn’t use stuff that was that old, but, trust me, it was there. At that time, now they had MRI or MREs – meals ready to eat – which are lightweight, extremely nutritious. We had the old Cs, which weighed a lot. They were all in metal cans. You had to open them up. Ah, they weighed a lot. They were unhandy. They were bulky. Each meal consisted of, usually, three cans. And then cigarettes or chewing tobacco or whatever you really wanted. Each – each carton had a pack of cigarettes, toilet paper, salt and pepper, coffee, matches, and napkins, a little roll of toilet tissue. So, all in all, when you got them, they were extremely heavy to carry. Plus on top of all that, each man had to carry their own personal gear and whatever they wanted. 

 

            You needed at least two pair of socks. The best way to wash your socks was just to hang them on the back of your pack and let the sun purify them. We had a sergeant, a platoon sergeant, that every time we stopped during the day, it didn’t make any difference if we stopped 10 times, he pulled his shoes off, and changed his socks, put on a dry pair or a sun-bleached pair, and hung his others on the back of his pack. A lot of others of us done that at the same time because it was highly efficient way to keep from getting your feet eat up. You had enough problems as it was with jungle rot and athlete’s foot. You get, ah, you used foot powder extensively. You couldn’t keep your feet dry. You couldn’t keep anything dry. 

 

            Your arms were actually covered in jungle rot, ah, everything you got would get infected. Every time you got a bite it would get infected. It was hard to treat wounds over there because everything – seemed like everything was infectious. They tried not to sew you up. They let it heal from the inside out so it wouldn’t, ah, wouldn’t get infected on the inside. Everything was against you as far as just living. People that were born over there made it fine, but people that, ah, Caucasians that moved over there and GIs didn’t fair so good. It’s even been known after Vietnam’s been over that some of the people that stayed over there, they didn’t fair extremely well because it’s hard for a person who hadn’t been born over there to adapt to that.

 

Q:        Alright. And what was the date you got home and how did Vietnam affect you and your life?

 

A:        I got home on February 14, on Valentine’s Day, in 1969. It was, ah, foggy, extremely foggy. I landed in Washington and flew to Tulsa and got shut down at the airport and couldn’t get off the ground. And, ah, actually had to spend three hours in the Tulsa airport before I got to come on home. When I got home in February, I was extremely dark – had a real dark suntan and had sun-bleached hair. I looked different than everybody else because everybody else – it was in the middle of winter.

 

            Today, I still have problems with the way we were treated. Ah, I watched the aircraft carrier land here a few weeks ago with the troops that had bands and news people from all over the United States. I don’t mean to take it away from the troops – they do their job, but, ah, they had spent six months at sea. They got a nation-wide welcome. We spent a year in the jungle. When we got back, our welcome home speech was “when you walk out on the street. . . “ This was the speech we got when we walked in the – the base in Ft. Lewis, Washington – that “when you walk out on the street, people will call you names. People will spit on you, and you are to take no action, because you have been in the jungle for X amount of days and you will be held accountable if you harm these people.” This was the welcome we got back to the United States. I actually never got spit on. I had some friends that got spit on and got called names. Ah, I come back, luckily for me, the airport was basically deserted when I come through. Ah, but that’s the welcome I got when I got back. Ah, everybody since then has been welcomed back as – as extreme heroes. We done a dirty job. We done it extremely well. We never lost a battle. We actually never lost the war. The politicians lost the war. It’s hard to understand how you can lost – how you can win all the battles, yet lose the war. Ah, it’s affected me today. It’s affected me in my whole life, I think. Probably getting worse as I get older in the sense that it bothers me more now than it did back then. I was young back then and didn’t really catch on. The older I get, seems like the more aggravated I get. The federal government does pay me now for delayed stress syndrome. Ah, they pay me for wounds received in Vietnam. They can’t pay me for all the mental strife I went through all these years. Ah, I don’t know exactly how much mental strife I have went through all these years. My wife probably went through more than I’ve went through just putting up with me. 

 

            But, ah, Vietnam was an extreme testing ground as all wars is – are. But, ah, it was extreme in the sense that it was in a – in a vastly different area. We was coming from a conventional type war plan into a guerilla type war plan. The United States military machine had no idea how to fight a guerilla type war. Everything that we learned, we had to learn while we were there. It was on-the-job training, basically. Ah, and I’ve talked to a lot of people since I’ve been back. Basically, none of them done it exactly the way we done it. We very seldom seen a rear area. We may go three weeks that we didn’t take a bath. Every once in a while – maybe once a week we might get a hot meal sent to the field. Usually, it wasn’t that good. You just stuck with your C-rations. I went from 185 pounds when I went over there to – I weighed 145 when I come out of Vietnam. I had a 36” waist when I went over there. I was a 27 when I come back. You could count every rib on my body when I come back. 

 

            Ah, there’s some people today that’s got records out that are extremely – I’m not an emotional person, but they make me emotional, ah, I just heard one yesterday by a man named Montgomery, I believe, that is extremely well – extremely good. George Jones brought one out about fifty-thousand names. That, to me, was probably the best thing that I have ever done, was went to see the wall. I got to see my friends’ names on the wall. I’m not an emotional person, but that was an emotional experience for me. Ah, watching the movie “Saving Private Ryan” was probably the best war movie ever made. I can sympathize with those people because I know what they went through. It’s hard – it’s hard for people that haven’t been there to get the feel for it. Some of the things you experience in your daily life, sometimes are extremely hard. Losing a friend, ah, seeing a man killed that, ah, that you was just talking to a few minutes ago. Lighting a man’s cigarette that has the back of his head blowed off. Yet he’s still sitting there talking to you. You know he’s going to die, but he’s wanting you to light a cigarette for him. Seeing men with their – with their foot shot off and still doing his job. It – it’s a wonder that people come back from wars with any kind of a mind at all. People don’t realize actually what veterans go through and what veterans have went through, because most people don’t want to know, thus they don’t ask questions.

 

            I had a young man, oh, about three weeks ago, ask me what it was like to kill somebody, and his daddy got after him. Well, how is kids going to know if they don’t ask questions? That’s a tough question. Killing people is not an easy thing for anybody. Most of the time in a war type environment, people were killed you don’t – it’s not personal. It’s killing – it’s not killing individuals – it’s killing – very seldom is it personal. I only killed one man that I actually seen him face to face. I don’t remember his face today. But it was personal. That was personal. It was him or me. Ah, I have no qualms about it. People called us baby killers. Were babies killed? Sure, babies were killed. Kids were killed. They used kids to kill GIs. A preacher brought up today the fact that at certain time in ancient history they put up kids out in front of, ah, their troops because the other troops wouldn’t kill kids. I don’t what they did in that situation, but in Vietnam they used kids to deliver hand grenades. They would hand a little kid a hand grenade and tell him to hold it and walk up to a GI and hand it to him. Ah, at that – at the point that he handed it to him, when he turned it lose it would blow him and the GI up. So what are you going to do? Are you just going to stand there and getting blowed up or are you going to kill a kid? Self-preservation has to take over because you have to come back. If that calls you a baby killer, I guess you would be a baby killer because you have to preserve yourself. And, ah, maybe we were baby killers, I don’t know, but most of the people that called us that in the same situation would have done exactly the same thing.

 

            It was a dirty, ugly war. Ah, it was a war that we should never have been in. Today when I talk to people, if I find out they was in the infantry, I either shake their hand or I hug them whether I know them or not. I shake their hand and hug their neck and tell them “welcome back.” You know, “you done a good job.” I have never met the – I met a man the other day I never met before in my life and he – we got to talking and I found out he was a combat engineer. I shook the man’s hand and hugged his neck and welcomed him back home because he should be welcomed back home. He done a – he done an excellent job – no matter what he done, he done an excellent job. He spent his time. He spent his time in hell. And, ah, he’s been in hell ever since he’s been back because the people of the United States treated him like that.