Echoes of Vietnam ~ Sam Glass Remembers ~ Part Two By Marie Hughes

“We would carry some equipment up there and drop it off and stay a week, maybe two weeks and we’d stay out in the field with the mobile artillery units. We’d sleep under the trailers or in the truck. They’d put this Concertina wire around us (razor wire) and then the tanks were up on the perimeter; and they’d use 155 and 175, all on tracks. They’d set them up for our fire mission. They’d never sit in one place very long, maybe a day or two and then they’d move, that way Charlie couldn’t keep up with them. Charlie knew when the grunt on the ground called for artillery, they could smoke him and they were good at it too. They had some good gunners, I never would have thought they could be that accurate but they were. About three or four months after I got to Vietnam I was an “Acting Jack” which is someone who is fixing to make his Sergeant’s stripes but his paperwork hasn’t gone through yet, but he’s still doing the job. I was “Acting Jack” when I got to the DMZ. You’d look across the Dong Ha River, which should have been called the Dong Ha Bayou, that’s how narrow it was, and you could see the North Vietnamese flag flying, that’s how close they were. We’d go outside the DMZ on the west side of Khe Sanh, between there and Laos, our guys would be getting fire missions down there and you never knew where they were going to move. I always thought it was weird when they would “button up;” they call it “button up” when they close the hatch.  You don’t know what the dude in there is going to do, you don’t know whether to walk up to him or drive by, or whatever, it’s an eery deal. They would boogie with these tracks, they would run about 30 mph, maybe 35 if they were on good flat ground, every now and then they’d just stop and back them up on the mound and let the next bunch pass. It kept Charlie on his toes because they never knew exactly what they were going to do and that was the object of it, keep moving . . . keep moving! If you had a fire base, they knew where you were at and they could get close enough to shoot those rockets in there. They didn’t need to be good, they knew they were going to hit something, we saw it happen one time. With the mobile stuff, they couldn’t do it. The whole time we were with them there was never anything that was close contact, I guess cause they moved so much, and they had so much fire power. You’d be a fool to mess with them because they were locked and loaded. The only problem was, you’d be out there in the field with them and every night it seemed like, every-every night, you could set your watch by it, about the time you were finally dozing off, they’d get in a fire mission. You could hear them on the radio, they would say ‘loader, load!’ In a tank they’ve got the loader down there and they’ve got the honeycomb (storage design to organize ammunition). They’d tell the big guns maybe ‘four-bag-round.’  Most people think they put this big ole round in there but it means four bags of powder or maybe five-bag-round which is five bags of powder and they use a hydraulic ram to push it up in there. Nobody was going to get any sleep when they got a fire mission; they were fifty feet from us. That would go on sometimes ‘til daylight. You’d hear ‘loader load, cannoneers aim, shot received, step it up, step it down, fire for effect,’ and all hell would break loose. When they got them zeroed in where they wanted them everybody shot that hole. That’s the way it went. I never did see what they were hittin’ cause the 175-howitzer had a maximum range of 27 miles, they call it the 27-mile sniper. An 8-inch-howitzer couldn’t shoot that far but it could blow a big ole hole in the ground.”  

“We’d load the equipment on trucks and take it down to the Dong Ha River and the Navy would bring the YFU’s in there. Several times we’d take them to Huḗ, the Imperial City. We would load the equipment on the YFU’s and the Navy would float us out of the Dong Ha River and we’d float back down to the river ramp on the South China Sea and unload it and put it in the retrograde yard or wherever it was going. At that point and time, they weren’t trying to repair anything, they were trying their best to get out of Vietnam. My whole year I was pulling stuff for us to get out of Vietnam. They had some warehouses between Marble Mountain and Da Nang, metal buildings about a quarter mile long. There was one that was a warehouse for plate that was bigger than any warehouse for plate I had ever seen. On the other side, they called it the South Forty, which was forty acres of nothing but palletized piers and wood. Those big ole three-legged Hercules helicopters, we called them grasshoppers, would come in with cargo nets and pick up the wood and every time they’d fly overhead we’d say, man, I hope that cargo net doesn’t rip. Can you imagine them raining that many two-by-fours down on you! There was always one of them in the air, in fact, they said in Vietnam there was a helicopter taking off or landing every minute of the day. That’s how many helicopters were in the air all the time. I tell everybody there’s two sounds I’ll never forget; one is a Harley Davidson motorcycle and the thump of a Huey Helicopter, you heard it day and night, all the time! And most of the time it was a good thing, unless they were carrying you out there, but when they were coming to get you it was a real good thing,” said Sam with a laugh. 

“The first time we went down the Dong Ha River that was a learning curve. They had crew boats about 30-40 feet long of what I think was mercenaries, and that river is not very big. It’s about like Double Bayou. One would get on one side and one on the other and they had a cable and they’d pull it through there. The first time we went out there I wasn’t real sure what was going on, so I asked one of the Navy boys what they were doing. He said, ‘Oh, they’re pulling for mines because Charlie mined that river all the time. They knew the boats were coming in and out.’ The Navy boys on the YFU’s would throw concussion grenades off the front and the back. There were Vietnamese fishermen everywhere and the Navy guys would chunk them c-rations but every now and then they’d chunk one of these concussion grenades if they got too close. The crew boat would sweep for the mines all the way down the Dong Ha River and it was pretty crooked. I figured it was probably a waste of time, but we went around one of those curves and one of those type boats found one of those mines and it blew him plumb out on the bank. I said, oh-oh, this is the real deal.” 

Internet photo by Réhahn’

“I have to bring this up, because it meant so much to me, one time when we were pulling tanks out of Hue, we went to a staging area on the Perfume River.  We’d pull the trucks in there and we’d have a couple of 10 tons of Dragon Wagons with the heavy stuff on them and we’d have the five tons, we’d have several of them and we’d load them all on the YFU’s and go back to Da Nang. We’d have to wait a lot of times for the Navy to get all their stuff together and come in there to pick us up. Everything had to be just right, they had to clear it, so a lot of times we had some waiting time, maybe spend the night. It was pretty quiet around there at that time. There were these orphan kids, and there was always a bunch of kids around you. If there were kids around you, you weren’t going to get hit. If you didn’t see a kid, you better watch out. There was a little Vietnamese girl there, she was a deaf mute. and she was blue-eyed. You knew she had to be part American, a real pretty little girl, little bitty thing but she was a deaf mute. We had seen her before when we were there, so we’d give her c-rations, money, whatever we had we’d give it to her, she needed it, she was raised on the street there. We’d get her to watch our stuff cause the guys had their personal stuff on the truck and the other kids would steal whatever we had. Brown had a Pentax camera he had bought. There was a little punk bully at the village there, probably 12 or 13 years old, he was a little thug, but he usually steered clear of us. We went down to this little bazaar marketplace in the ville and they has some pretty cool stuff, like wood carvings of elephants and stuff. We stayed down there a couple hours and had a couple of beers and when we got back to the truck this bully had beat the hell out of this little girl, I mean he had done a job on her. The poor little thing was beat bad. The little dude had gone through everything in our trucks and he had Brown’s camera, he got it and a few other things. We carried all our weapons to the ville with us, so he didn’t get any of those. The little girl couldn’t tell us anything but there was a little boy there who could speak a little English and he told us it was the bully from the ville and the little girl tried to stop him from taking our stuff. There were a few younger ones there too who tried to help the little girl. So, here we go to the ville, everyone’s P.O’d, there was six or seven of us and we were looking for him. This one guy told us, ‘there’s his mamma.’ We told his mamma to get junior out there. She was back and forth and we said no, get junior out here and she wasn’t going to do it. Over there they had what we called Midnight Cowboys and they thought they were something but they were just a bunch of corrupt dudes. They rode these little Honda 90s and they had a black cowboy hat on and black pajamas, that’s why we called them Midnight Cowboys. Well, he pulled up and he thought he was the law dog of that ville, he’d take care of all this business. He got off and started walking towards us saying, ‘You Americans, you go on, I’ll take care of this.’ He had just got off that motorcycle and took about four steps, and one guy took an M16 and blew motorcycle all over that ville, I mean he wiped that sucker out. Midnight Cowboy, I don’t know where he went to, he ran, and here comes ole mamma san dragging junior up there by the ear and he had Brown’s camera. Well, everybody wanted to punish him. We carried him back and had a trial back where the trucks were. It was hot and hostile about that time, everybody was trying to figure out what to do with him. I said I don’t know what we’re going to do to him but if we leave him here he’s going to keep beating on that little girl cause he’s the bully of Huḗ. We had cleaned her up and done the best we could and gave her some stuff and helped her out the best we could. On one of the trucks, we were hauling an APC (armored personnel carrier), and I said, put him in that APC and lock him up, it was hot too, so we did. We hauled his little butt back to Da Nang in that APC. We backed up and let that APC off and I remember looking in that rearview mirror and saying get over there and unlatch it. It latched on the inside, but we had something across it on the outside so he couldn’t get out. Somebody gave him a little water but that was about it. I remember he stuck his head up out of there looking around, he didn’t know where in the world he was at, but we had deported him from Huḗ. I thought that was pretty good justice for the little dude, anything worse and we would have been court-martialed,” chuckled Sam. 

“We carried some stuff to the fire base at the end of Khe Sanh Valley, on the Phu Bai side of it. They had a big fire base there . . . huge fire base. The night we were there they got hit. They had the ARVN’s (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) pulling some of the guard duty, they had some Americans there with them too, cause you couldn’t trust them.  There were some of them good and some of them bad. Some of them were there for the take and some of them actually wanted to save their country, but you never knew which one was what. They let the VC get in the first wire and they caught them between the first wire and the second wire, man they butchered them, they lit ‘em up. We slept in the bunker that night and the next morning we were hauling something out of there to go back to Da Nang and they had the bodies stacked out there. When I went to Vietnam, I didn’t want to shoot anybody, I still don’t. I went over there to do a job that I know how to do, but after five months, my opinion had changed. What I thought to start with and what I thought afterwards was totally different. I don’t know if it’s good, bad, or whatever, or how you get over it, but that’s the way it was,” Sam said matter-of-factly.  

“We almost got hit that night and a lot of times when we were pulling Hải Vân Pass, we couldn’t pull it very fast either way, they’d sniper our @$$, there was always a round pinging off of something. They knew those old trucks were slow and we’d be sitting ducks. They could sit up anywhere in the mountain and shoot at us and they did. We’d hook up with a convoy going north, there was an outfit called the Road Runners, we’d run with them a lot, but once we pulled the pass they’d run off and leave us cause we were slower than them, you know. We had a lot bigger trucks and they just had deuce and a halves and gun trucks. The VC never shot at us if we had an empty trailer but if we were hauling something new up there they were always shooting at us. That Hải VânPass was an obstacle, to say the least . . . it was an obstacle,” said Sam, who could laugh about it now. 

“The only time I ever saw an air strike, we were coming out of Da Nang heading up the pass and they were on the side of the mountain just off from us, I don’t know who they were. Then there was these Phantom jets, I guess they came out of Da Nang, I don’t know where they came from. There was a little bit of cloud cover and buddy, it looked like they would just fall straight down. I would have thought they would fly down the side of the mountain and throw their napalms or whatever, but these dudes would fall out of the clouds then they could bend her right back up and those afterburners would kick on and just black smoke going up. That one would leave, and another one would fall in there, I mean they were just boom, boom, boom. I thought, man they’ve got it together. I don’t know who’s up there but he’s catching hell right now.” 

“We’d follow mobile artillery units, if something broke down, we’d go get it and the 88’s would help us pick it up and put it on a trailer. We’d stay with them until we got pretty close to Dong Ha. We’d been following this one group for a ways . . . we’d gone a long ways with them. They had fuel trucks and whatever was needed to keep stuff going. We had LRPR (long range patrol rations) that was the freeze-dried stuff before they came up with MRE’s. All you had to do was add water to it. They had one that was roast beef and the only way you could make it edible was to add some rice to it. I would go over to mamma san’s and barter with her a little bit and get some rice, cook it and add it to it. It wasn’t top chef or anything, but it was edible.” 

“When you were in a convoy you had to keep moving cause if you stopped you were sitting ducks. But every now and then you had to because they’d mine the roads. The engineers would get up in front of us with mine sweepers and sweep it. They also had a tank with a flailing unit on the front, like a roller unit with anchor chains on it. They would slap the ground with it to set the mines off and every now and then they’d find one. The Vietnamese had these Lambretta’s, it was like a three-wheeled Cushman motorcycle. You’d be amazed how much junk they could get on one of them. They’d get impatient when we had to stop and wait and they’d go around us. One time, they found a mine and blew that Lambretta everywhere, a bunch of chickens and whatever they had was just spread everywhere!”  exclaimed Sam.

“My cousin, Bert Griffin, was in Vietnam the same time I was. We were the same age and got drafted at the same time. I went to Germany first and for some reason, he went for extra training, he was in infantry recon and was sent to Fort Polk for jungle training. Just like me, he had a good job as a meter man with Sun Oil on the pipeline before he got drafted. I don’t think he was much on board with it, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He got to Vietnam in the beginning of ’70 just like me. When he got there he went straight to the jungle with the infantry, they were right out there in the boonies on recon. My situation, it wasn’t that bad for what I did but he spent about six months in the bush on recon. He stayed long enough to get his combat infantry badge, he paid his dues. His unit was being sent home, they called it carrying the flag home. They sent him back to Da Nang and he was just a little ways from where I was, I didn’t know he was there. There was a huge . . . huge chopper pad there, coming out of Da Nang going to Marble Mountain, they called it the Marble Mountain Air Base. This First Sergeant said, ‘Griffin, you were pretty smart in civilian life, you’re going to be a helicopter electrician instrument man,’ in other words anything that had to do with electrical. He said he was either going to learn it or his butt was going to some unit in the bush.  He told him he didn’t know anything about being an electrician and the sergeant told him, ‘You see all those books over there, they’ll tell you everything you need to know about being an electrician and in two weeks you better have them all read, if you don’t you’re going back out in the bush.’ Well Bert was pretty smart and he got it done and finished out his time in Vietnam as a helicopter electrician/instrument man. He didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know where he was and we weren’t but three miles apart. In fact, two weeks before I left instead of going back to Marble Mountain when we came out of the field we went right across the street from the helipad. If I’d known, I could have walked across the street and visited him every day,” Sam sighed, wishing he’d known.

Sam with “Acquisitioned” Jeep named for his Texas home, Double Bayou

Photo Restoration by Shaun Jones

“When I got to Vietnam, there were two guys there from Anahuac, they’re both good friends of mine. One was Bobby Lebow, he lives on Lebow Road in Hankamer. The other one was Joe Greak on Hwy 90, he had Greak Well Service. He’s married to A.J. Harmon’s daughter, Betsy, she and I graduated together. Bobby Lebow always wanted to be a veterinarian, and he was in the unit that inspected the meat and produce, or whatever came across the docks to make sure it was good. That was a perfect job for him and if worked out good for us too. Bobby saw everything that came across the docks, especially steaks, that was our cup of tea,” laughed Sam. “We’d get a fifth of Jack Daniels from the PX for a couple of dollars and swap for a case of steaks. All of us Southern boys knew how to grill and ole Woody, the Warrant Sergeant smelled it and said, ‘Glass, I don’t know where you got these, but can you get some more of them?’ I told him, yes, it’s a fifth a case, how many do you want. He said two or three for the officer’s mess. Sure enough, we could produce, he got the whiskey and we’d make the swap. Everybody did a little of that, that’s just the way it was. Joe Greak was an air traffic controller up on Monkey Mountain for the helicopters. If worse came to worse, he’d figure out how to get you a helicopter if you needed a ride. I never had to do it but if I did, he was there,” Sam stated assuredly.  

“The warrant officer at the DMZ was a Masonic brother of our warrant officer, Woody, and one took care of the other. He told me if I was coming back that way, he sure needed some tires for the deuce and a half and five-tons, well all their trucks. I told Woody, my warrant officer, and he agreed the first run we made back there I would take a load of tires. I told Woody that my friend, Bobby Lebow, had a three-day in country R&R and he’d never been out of Da Nang. He had a Pentax camera and he wanted to go up to the DMZ. I told him, ‘We don’t have a run right now but I’ll get a truck and a lowboy and take a load of tires up there if it’s all right with you.’ He said it was alright with him so he gave me a requisition to load down that lowboy with a load of tires. I thought it was a pretty good deal until I started to chain ‘em down; it wasn’t such a good deal, they were loose tires loaded to the top, it wasn’t like they were banded together. I don’t know if anybody’s ever tried it but you just can’t chain down a stack of rubber tires. I worked about half a day and finally got them on there to boom ‘em down. In those days they didn’t have ratchet straps, if they’d had ratchet straps it wouldn’t have been a big deal. I finally got them chained down good enough and the next morning we left. I was coming down Hải Vân Pass and I was pushing that ole five-ton hard cause we left late. I was coming down too fast and I kept choking it off on the trailer brakes not trying to hold it back with the truck too, you know.  I got a tire on fire, they had three sets of axles on the back and one set of duals caught on fire. Down at the bottom of Hải Vân Pass there was a place called broke out flat, and there’s a lagoon there, a beautiful place. It’s real flat and there’s sand back up to it. I had to get the fire out cause I had a truck load of tires and I knew they were going to catch on fire if I didn’t get it out. I just whipped up there and backed down to this lagoon, we’d done it before but there were always other trucks with us. It had a pretty hard bottom, I backed in and put the fire out and started to pull out of there and the truck started going down. So, I locked everything in gear, the posi-trac, every wheel on it was pulling and it was still going down. If the truck had been a ten-ton I would have just unhitched from the trailer and used the wench to pull it out, but the five ton didn’t have a wench on the back, it had one on the front, and there wasn’t anything out there to hook onto. I told Bobby it was going to get pretty serious unless somebody comes along, another GI truck that I can anchor to with the wench. It started getting dark and, of course, we knew the rules, at dark Charlie’s got that pass. Thank God, some Seabees came by, they had a quarry right up from where we were and they were coming out of the quarry in three maybe four three quarter tons that they rode in. Those Seabees were some working dudes, man, they worked hard from daylight to dark. We flagged them down cause we weren’t very far from the road. I said, look man, we’re in a bind here; if you’ll pull those three quarter tons out in front of me I’ll hook onto you and wench this thing out. Sure enough, they did and got us out of there,” he said with relief, recalling how much worse it could have been.

“It was too late to go on up to the DMZ that day, so we went back towards Hải Vân Pass, they had a gun installation there, a Quad 50 (four fifty caliber M2 Browning machine guns) and we pulled inside their wire that night. They had a railroad that ran through the mountain there and about once a day a train came through. It didn’t haul very much and I don’t even know why they ran it but the guys manning the Quad 50 had to pull security duty. There was a really nice bridge there that the Seabees had built where the train came out of the pass, flattened out, and went across the lagoon. The gunnery place was about a hundred yards from where the railroad track came through, running parallel to highway one. Like I said before, they didn’t have technology like we have now like game cameras and stuff like that, the best they had was motion detectors and they had them down the railroad track. They’d go out every morning before the train came and pull patrol, but during the night if they had any motion they would just start shooting it up. They had motion that night, I don’t know what tripped it off or what they shot but we got some really good pictures of the Quad shooting out of all four barrels with tracers that looked like four streams of fire. They had fifty caliber rounds in there and those guns shoot 2,400 rounds a minute, so that will tell you how much lead they were shooting. You get to shooting that much those barrels get hot, so the first thing they’d do is take those mitts with gun oil on them and try and wipe them down. Literally those barrels would flame up so they’d stop the gun for just a minute, take the mitt and change the barrel out and light ‘em up again. That went on for a while. The five-ton truck it (the Quad 50) was in the back of had sideboards about a foot and a half high; It would shoot so much brass so quick, the brass would just overflow (the sideboards) out on the ground. All around that truck was brass out of those guns. They had a couple of orphan boys that hung around those GIs, they had a little place for them over on the side where they slept in there with them, they were little dudes too. They’d let them have the brass and by the next morning they had a couple of bags loaded up with the brass and they’d take them down and sell them to the local junk dealer, I suppose. They’d come back with a six-pack for the GIs, so it worked out for everybody. The next day we ran all the way up and those boys on the DMZ were just about to kiss us for all those tires. They were just about out of tires, so they finally got back rolling again.” 

“After we got hit in Hải Vân Pass, I guess you’d say I got a little paranoid. It was the last month I was there and when you get short, when you’re about to rotate out, you get to where you don’t want to go in the field, but that was my job. I never quit going in the field, our bunch was about the last to rotate out. They had this guy come in who was an E5, a specialist five, and there wasn’t much to do then, we pretty much had all the heavy stuff evacuated, so I got my going home orders. We carried our flag home to Leonard Wood, or they did, I left a little before they did.  I went back to Cam Ranh Bay and they had so many units pulling out at that time, they had a guy on a loudspeaker calling out names. You had to be there to hear your name, and it was over and over and over they would call names. Me being an E5, when I went up there to sign in, they said, ‘Sarge, do you want to carry a DD home?’ That’s some guy who got a dishonorable for some reason. You had to be handcuffed to him and you had to carry his records, I could have just grabbed one of them and latched him to me and gotten on a plane. I said, ‘No, man that’s not what I signed up to do, I just want to go home. I don’t want to carry some squirreled out dude handcuffed to me with his records on the other side.’ They told me, okay, you’ll just have to wait for your name. It was like five days, twenty-four hours a day they’re calling these names. I slept on the top of a bunker of sandbags for those five days and five nights. Most of the time during the day I’d go get in the shade somewhere but at night I’d pile up on there. There’d be four or five of us there and you’d find out everybody’s name and listen for each other when you’d catch a couple of winks or go get some chow, the buddy system. Finally, five days later they called my name. I went out on the tarmac with the rest of them and we got on this big ole plane, it was a military flight. We were just getting ready to blast off, and there was some sort of conflict. These guys came in and started calling names, about ten of them and mine was one of them. I was thinking, what the #3!! Did I do that they’re going to bump me off this flight. We got downstairs and there were five buck sergeants and five DD’s, we got bumped for those damn DD’s, dishonorable discharge’s. Everybody was mad! We told the guy who drove the shuttle and dropped them off, an E4 or something, that we got bumped for DD’s. They had a little ole NCO club at the end of the runway and he asked us if we wanted to go get a drink. We said we might as well, but what do we have to do, go back up to that center and wait another four or five days. He said, ‘No, let me see what I can do, I think I can get you on the next flight,’ and sure enough, he did. After we blasted off we stopped, I think in Kobe, Japan and they had a duty-free store there. They had these five fifths of whiskey in a briefcase which, of course, makes one gallon of whiskey. They had any kind of alcohol you wanted, and it was cheap, really cheap. I knew my brother, Eddie and Daddy liked Wild Turkey, and so I bought a gallon. Everybody did, we boarded and the pilot looked at us and said, ‘You know, you’re still representing the United States military and blah, blah, blah. Everybody on there was armed with plenty of alcohol and they broke it out. I didn’t break out daddy’s cause I didn’t have to. The ole boy next to me handed me a fifth of rum and he had one. They didn’t give us anything to chase it with, so it was water. Everybody was hitting the bathroom and getting a cup of water so you can just imagine what it led to; that was a long flight too. We’d had a little bit of a layover, but not much and from there we flew straight into Fort Lewis, Washington. I got back to the states on December the 7th of 1970, everybody got off the plane and kissed the ground, me included. I said thank God, you let me get back here to the world, that’s what we called the United States. We went in the barracks, and they fitted us for Class A uniforms cause we were going home and they fed us a steak, a nice steak too. We were in our old jungle fatigues, and they were falling off of us too. After we ate our steaks, we went to the barracks and showered and cleaned up and we were looking sharp in our Class A uniforms. Mine had my sergeant stripes, campaign medals, and the braids, we were proud of them. A lot of people said ‘baby killer’ and this and that when you were at the airport, but I never ran across it. Honestly, the way I felt, if they messed with me, shame on ‘em, ain’t no telling what I’d have done to ‘em. Just leave me alone man, I’m going home, that’s all every GI wanted to do, go home and see mamma and daddy and a girlfriend. But I never did encounter that, if I had I’m certain it would have had a bad end to it. We had all gone over there and done our best, what else could we do, we were representing our country,” declared Sam with pride.

“I met this guy, he was going to Deweyville and me and him got to talking it up and I told him I was going to go to Anahuac. They were supposed to fly us into Intercontinental in Houston, and I was still wagging this big ole case of whiskey around. I didn’t think I’d had that much to drink and this ole boy either, but we woke up in the airport, it wasn’t Houston either, it was Reno, Nevada. I looked beside me and there was a big ole slot machine right there beside me and I thought, man this is not Houston, Toto, we’re not in Kansas! It was the fog of war, I guess or alcohol amnesia,” laughed Sam. “They flew us back to Houston and they had a Hertz Rental Car there. I went in there about two o’clock in the morning and I wanted to surprise Mamma and daddy, they knew I was coming in but they didn’t know when. I told the two ladies at the counter I wanted to rent a car, and they asked me for my credit card. I didn’t have a credit card, and I said usually my orders will get me pretty close to where I want to go. I said, ‘Do you have a manager?’ and they went back and got him. He said, ‘Soldier, where’s your orders?’ I handed them to him and he said, ‘Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, you want to go to Anahuac, Texas?’ He told the girls, ‘Give him whatever he wants on the lot.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t tear my car up too bad.’ And laughed and walked off. I got a brand-new Grand Torino and it was nice too! Me and this ole boy got in there and we were living large. I told him to call his mamma and daddy or someone to pick him up and they met us at 563. So, I got in and surprised mamma and daddy and Joe and Ed were at the dear camp. I drove that Grand Torino right down one of those ole muddy roads and got up there to see them, I was spinning around and slinging mud everywhere and we had a large time,” laughed Sam. 

Sam, third from left; Peterson sitting on bumper; Woody on far right.

“The war was over for me, at that particular time I’d been in the Army for eighteen months, I went from E1 to E5 in eighteen months. I was awarded the Army Medal Accommodation and a couple of campaign ribbons on my DD-214. The thing I’m most proud of is for seven maybe eight months I carried this unit outside the wire, most times there’d be 10 to 12 people rotating in and out, and there’s not a one of them whose name is on that wall (Vietnam Memorial Wall), so I think I did my job. I was the oldest one and I wasn’t but twenty-one, and I think I did my job,” Sam said with satisfaction, “nobody got shot, everybody got to go home, and we were sometimes in some pretty tight situations, so that’s what I’m the most proud of. We all got home, by the Grace of God.  I didn’t get my butt shot so I figure Jesus Christ saved me for another day for some reason. I give all the glory to Him,” said Sam humbly.