Larry Gordon’s Vietnam Service

“In a hot LZ they’d be shooting at you when you came in. The anxiety in that first landing was quite an experience. I was on the second or third helicopter when we came into the LZ and that night we set up a perimeter. We were kind of relaxing and it just broke loose. Machine guns on the perimeter started opening up and there was a lot of commotion going on and you are absolutely petrified,” stated Larry emphatically. “If anybody tells you they weren’t scared I think they’re fibbing to you. I was absolutely petrified and I actually had doubts in my mind that I could do my job,” he confessed with abject honesty. “If one of the guys got hit, I had to go to him and fix him that was my job. I was laying on a stretcher talking to a Marine Sergeant when it all broke loose and rolled off and laid there with my face almost buried in the ground, keeping my head down. The Sergeant hollered, ‘Doc, get your helmet, get your helmet!’ I worried if someone hollered for a medic . . .  corpsman, could I do my job cause that’s what I signed up for. But after that first night, it’s not that you get used to it, but it’s not as bad. If you’re out on patrol and you get ambushed you can do what you need to do, your military training kicks in; these guys are depending on me to patch them up and that’s what I tried to do to the best of my ability. If I had to patch someone up I’d get them to the driest spot available and bandage them up, administer morphine, apply tourniquets, stop the bleeding, whatever it took to stabilize them. When the choppers came in the Marines carried the wounded to the chopper to be medivaced out, sometimes there was a corpsman on the chopper. I’ve seen chopper pilots abort a landing if the fire was too heavy, but some of the pilots were real gutty and would come in anyway. We always used to laugh at the fighter pilots. When the jets would come off the carriers we’d always watch them. If they nipped the tree tops we’d always judge whether they were married or single,” laughed Larry. “When they’d come in straight on the Mekong they’d fly so low that when they dived down and you’d watch the tree tops. If you saw them break any limbs, like chafe the top of the trees, you’d figure he was a single guy, if he didn’t he was married. That’s not true, but that was always the joke. The fear eases up a bit but later down the road when you get close to going home the anxiety goes back up again ‘cause you certainly don’t want to get hit when you are so close to going home. We called it Short Timer’s Syndrome,” clarified Larry. 

“During the time I was still on patrol they came and got me one night and I went with a Force Recon team because their corpsman had gotten killed. Those Force Recon guys were tough! My buddy and I both volunteered to go but they took me because he was the senior corpsman. I was a 3rd class petty officer and he was a 2nd, so I guess they figured I was expendable,” chuckled Larry. “The Amtrac is a vehicle that can go in the water, it’s like an armored tank and when you’re in it you’re well protected, but once you get out you were a-foot. I went out there with a Marine Lieutenant and five Marines to get their point man, they didn’t know if he was dead or alive. The Amtrac has a red light in it, that’s one thing that stuck in my mind for some reason, and it’s almost like a tank. There was a bench in the middle and I put Ford, the point man there. He had gotten shot through the head and the side of his head was pretty much gone. I put battle dressing on his wounds but there was nothing I could do for him, he was already dead when we got there. I had him covered up so the Marines couldn’t see him and they were saying, ‘Doc, is he going to be alright is Ford going to be alright?’ and I just said, ‘we’ll see,’ I didn’t want to aggravate the situation. I couldn’t save him because he had been hit so bad. We got back to our post where we slept in half shelters; we put two of them together and they make a tent, a small one. I had to put Ford next to me in my half shelter, in a body bag that night, that memory kind of sticks. He was Lance Corporal Victor J. Ford, I know where his name is on the Vietnam Memorial wall.  That was the scariest operation I was on as there were only six of us, seven counting the Lieutenant. It was scary because other than the guy running the Amtrac we were just out there in the middle of the night.” 

“The other thing that bothered me was the kids. I had a young girl the Viet Cong had beaten. They flew her in on a chopper to the med-battalion at Chu Lai. We didn’t have any nurses there, just doctors, surgeons and corpsmen, at least at that med-battalion. I know a lot of them came in later like at Da Nang and the hospitals but out in the field we didn’t have them. The corpsmen were pretty much the nurses or medics and we did pretty much everything an RN would do. We went down with the ambulance to meet the chopper and pick up the wounded and that little girl was pretty much dead. That little girl, even though I’d been there seven months, that really bothered me. The Viet Cong thought her father was a sympathizer with the US forces so they beat her to death. When we brought her up to the med-battalion there was nothing we could do, I tried to perform CPR on her, but she was gone. The doctor looked at me and said, ‘Doc, go to your quarters and take a break,’ because he could tell the effect it had on me, even though I’d been there, seasoned you might say. Stuff like that sticks in your mind forever, you never forget that. At the med-battalion we’d get guys in with legs gone, arms gone, sometimes unrecognizable. It was a very traumatic experience in my life and I think it’s affected me a lot,” he confessed.

“The hardest part of my job was the death and destruction,” noted Larry sadly. “not being able to save everybody, the loss of losing ‘em, but you can only do so much . . . what you’re trained to do. The hardest part afterwards was going to the Vietnam Wall, looking at the names and touching the names of the ones you know, that was hard for me. I’m very proud of my service but then after you learn about how it was done and was it worth it . . . probably not. But you had a job to do, you’re in the military, you took an oath, you do your job. I’m very proud of the fact that I did my job, I’m very proud of the Marines I served with, and I’m very proud of the Navy part of it," said Larry quietly . . . no bravado, just truth..

“I don’t have any personal photos from my time in Vietnam; Hurricane Ike took all I had along with my house. The only photo from Vietnam to survive is a portrait of me in my Marine uniform painted by a Vietnamese guy from a village named Sam Hi in Chu Lai Province. I was going in there to get a haircut and he said he could paint my picture. It got a little damp during Ike but somehow it made it. I have a few Navy pictures from before I went to Vietnam.”

“I’m proud of my service in the military. My family is very military minded. My dad was a World War II vet, I had an uncle who served in Korea, A couple uncles who served in World War II, my son served in the Persian Gulf; he was in the Navy for about eight years, his two sons were Army vets. One of them served two tours in Iraq and the other served one tour in Afghanistan; James, who served the two tours is still in the Army. They had an article about him in Time Magazine. They were on patrol and taking a break and he was a private at the time. The article read Private James Gordon . . . taking a break after a search and destroy mission. They were seeking out insurgents in Iraq. He will retire this year after twenty years of service with the rank of first sergeant, the second highest rank in the Army. We’re very proud of him. You know, when you’re going through that (Vietnam) you hope your kids don’t have to. Luckily, my son was on the Enterprise, so he never went ashore like his two boys did. It was quite an experience,” concluded Larry softly.