ECHOES OF VIETNAM . . .

“I kind of lucked out; the unit I was in, our drill sergeant had spent two tours of duty in Vietnam. I believe his name was Hayes, he was kind of a short guy but he was tough. He wasn’t like a lot of the drill sergeants that only knew hollering, yelling, and screaming. He point blank told us, ‘The physical training, you’re going to get that, but these weapons I’m going to show you how to use, you better be able to do it blindfolded. I’m not interested in this stateside prim and proper military. You’ve got a choice, you can listen to me and maybe your dumb asses will stay alive over there.’ We all knew what we were getting into. We got through basic training, it wasn’t too bad, then we started getting our orders, there was probably 250 of us. I was in Delta Company. They’d holler out your name and say 11 Bravo, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Well, everybody knew Fort Sill, Oklahoma was radio school infantry. In other words, you were packing a radio on your back, or as we called them, a bullet magnet because that’s what you were going to be. They came to me and my MOS (Military Occupational Specialization) was 62 Fox Trot 20; there were only about two or three of us who got a different MOS than the rest.  When I had filled out the paperwork, they asked what I wanted to do and I wrote down I had been around construction all my life and could run a crane and had been pile driving. Sure enough, my MOS was crane and shovel operator, so while most of the guys went to Fort Sill, OK I was sent to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The PT training at Fort Leonard Wood was tougher to say the least. At Bliss they’d run us a mile in the morning and a mile in the evening, forced marches, rifle range and all that stuff. At Fort Leonard we ran five miles in the morning and five miles in the evening then we’d catch these buses and go out to what I think they called the ‘million dollar hole.’ It had been a quarry, big ole hole in the ground . . . big hole!” repeated Sam for emphasis. “They had ledges as you went down into the hole and all the way around the top they had equipment of some kind, RT (rough terrain) cranes, cable backhoes, crawler machines, draglines, and shovel front machines that scoop up rock and drops it out the bottom. The backhoe we ran was a cable system and that was a squirrely deal and basically a waste of time. Once they went to hydraulics, that was better than sliced bread. I could already run it all, we even drove some piling with a drop hammer. The instructors quickly saw that I knew how to run everything and put me helping the other guys. We would be out there working on the machines then do the written part in the classrooms. The classrooms were built in a circle with an atrium in the middle of it. In the middle of the open area atrium, they had this orange peel bucket we had to walk around every day, most people don’t know what it’s for. I had never run one but I knew what they did, it was just like a clam bucket, and I had run a clam bucket before, it was for picking up rock.  It was a big sucker, probably a 15-yard bucket. When we got ready to take the test I probably could have passed it easily, there were only 100 questions on it, but the instructor said, ‘I’ll give a hundred to anybody who can tell me what that machine is in the atrium. If you write it down and bring it to me and you have the correct answer, I’ll give you a 100 on this test.’ I thought, this is too easy, so I wrote down that it was an orange peel bucket for handling rock, and I was the only one who took the answer up to him. He said, ‘Alright, you made a 100, see you later,’ so I walked on out and left the rest of them in there sweatin’ out a test. The Army wasn’t going to fail anyone anyway. I graduated top of my class just because I knew what a damn bucket was, but that still wasn’t going to get you out of Vietnam,” Sam said emphatically. “When they started calling out our orders, 230 of the men went to Vietnam and two of us were sent to Hanau, Germany. The other guy and I became friends; he was like me and had been raised on equipment and was an excellent dozer operator.  We all went home for two days leave and kissed everybody good-bye, then I went to Fort Dickson, N.J. and flew from there to Frankfurt, Germany. From Frankfurt, I rode the train down to Hanau, 70 km out of Frankfurt, which was a really nice place. I was in what was called a CC&S Company (Collection, Classification & Salvage). That’s a big hat title term for a junk yard. Most of the stuff we had in Germany was junk, much of it from World War II. I was the only crane operator and even my ole man would have culled the equipment I was running. The good stuff they sent to Vietnam, which was fine cause they needed it,” Sam declared unselfishly. 

“Where we stayed in Hanau they had a huge barracks. They said it used to be a prison, but if it was a really nice one. Whoever converted it did a heck of a job on it. There was a four-story barracks, and the mess hall would feed 1,800 men in 45 minutes. What was unbelievable to me was, they had soldiers with so much talent who had painted murals in this mess hall, it was a huge mess hall with tall ceilings and marble floors. We had German cooks, and boy, those women could cook too,” said Sam softly, closing his eyes as he recalled the scents and flavors. “They pulled a little bit of your pay out each month to pay the German staff so you didn’t have to pull KP. You still had to pull guard duty, but not KP. It wasn’t much, maybe $20 a month. Well, someone must have harped about it because they stopped it one time. Sure enough, I caught KP. It was no quick job; the first time I pulled KP I got there about 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and didn’t get out until 10:30 at night.   And the food was terrible; those Army cooks could not cook. They could really butcher it up but those Germans could make it really good. I said, I don’t care what we’re paying the Germans, they can give them all of my #@%! money,” stated Sam. 

Sam spent about 3 months in Germany and during that time he was able to take the train into Frankfurt and enjoy some of the sights with his fellow soldier and friend, Leslie Gillin and family. He particularly enjoyed the Bavarian Gardens in Frankfurt, which had been there since before World War I. “That was the first time I ever had ridden on a train,” continued Sam.  

“In front of the sergeant’s office they had a blackboard where they posted what was going on. On one part of it they posted certain MOS’s that they needed in Vietnam. You could either volunteer or they’d just say, ‘come here boy, and they would volunteer you. One morning, about September 15th, I was passing by and on the blackboard, they had 62 Fox Trot 20 in that section, my MOS. It was only Gillin and I that were construction engineers, Gillin was GI and I was GF, so I figured he would be going before me. September the 24thwas my birthday and they let you off on your birthday and it was kind of like the moon and the stars had lined up. I went to Hanau to a really good pizza place they had and got me a good Italian pizza, they make the best pizzas, and a couple of jugs of that Italian wine with the straw around it. Yep, that was probably a downfall,” he confessed. “I got really gassed up, and the next morning, I was thinking about it and thinking about it that I should take Leslie’s place. It had been weighing heavy on my mind since I saw the posting. I thought, what the hell, my cousin, Bert Griffith and I got drafted the same time and he was going to Vietnam. It was just weighing heavy on me because Bert and I were tight and Leslie had a family.” Sam shared with me the real reason he decided to volunteer was if he was drafted to be in the war he wanted to be in it and get the job done. “So, that morning I went into the first sergeant’s office,” continued Sam, “and told him I was volunteering to go. I was hung over, oh, my God, I was hung over. He went to rippin’ on me, ‘You dumb SOB, you’re going to get your dumb @$$ shot,’ he might as well have shot me right then. He said, ‘If you’re that stupid, go ahead, sign here,’ and I signed. I didn’t have a clue at the time that they sent the papers to mother to let her know where I was going, I wish they hadn’t.  She always felt like I was in a safe haven by going to Germany,” sighed Sam. Sam went home on leave before going to Vietnam. His brother, Eddie had gotten hurt really bad in a construction accident overseas in East Pakistan and he was in a body cast. Sam regretted he didn’t get more time to spend with him before leaving on report. When he arrived at Fort Lewis, Washington to report, the line was so long by the time he got to the front they were going to give him an article 15 for reporting late. When he explained the line was so long that they were sleeping on their duffle bags and getting others to hold their place in line so they could have restroom breaks and eat, they gave him a lesser charge than article 15. They all needed to requalify on the weapons, so they spent two weeks in the cold deep-snow covered mountain on an antique rifle range to qualify. They had them in a kind of holding pattern so they would arrive in Vietnam at the first of the year. “We were miserable in Washington,” said Sam, “the only thing that saved my life was I had a field jacket my sister-in-law had sewn a liner into. The rest of those boys didn’t have nothing, and they didn’t issue anything to them. When we left Fort Lewis they flew us to Anchorage, Alaska, from there I think they flew us to Hawaii, and then to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. The Yankee boys gave us two weeks of hell because we couldn’t handle the cold weather in Seattle. When we stepped off into the heat of Vietnam it just hit you in the face and those Yankee boys started going down. I said, welcome to my world you 6@3!@$#, I got two weeks of your world, you’re going to get a whole year of mine,” laughed Sam. 

“We landed in Cam Ranh Bay the first week of 1970. We got off the plane a bunch of kids scared to death and we didn’t even have a gun. We went to the receptionist’s desk where they were passing out the orders. Cam Ranh Bay has a lot of sand dunes, kind of like being on the beach. This guy opened up with an M-16, he must have had it on full automatic. We all started crawling under the sand like a bunch of ostriches with our head in the sand. We didn’t know what to expect, or what was going on. Come to find out, all he was doing was shooting stray dogs, but he about caused a runaway there,” laughed Sam. “When I got my orders, they were to go to Da Nang to 156 HEM Company, HEM means heavy equipment maintenance. I didn’t know what to expect when they put us on an ole C-130. That was the first time I’d ridden on a C-130, but I had plenty of rides after that. We sat on the plane with our backs to the wall on each side and we couldn’t see out, there were no windows. We made about three or four landings before we got to Da Nang, they call them skips. We took off from Cam Ranh Bay that night and we were in the war real quick, it seemed. They had cargo on aluminum flat plates with rollers under them that would hold quite a few pallets and stuff. When they made a skip, they would land on the runway and as soon as the plane hit it they would open the back and slide the cargo out. I don’t know if they had a parachute on it to help it come to a stop when it was pushed out. We had a pretty good view out the back of the plane when they delivered the cargo and there were always quite a few explosions; all we could see out the back was fireworks. We never knew if we were seeing flares or what because Charlie (U.S. servicemen’s name for the Viet Cong) loved those C-130’s when they were coming in; if he got lucky, he could hit one of them with a rocket.  Of course, we were scared to death,” said Sam honestly. 

“EVAC was not what most people think of when they hear EVAC, we went out into the field and evacuated big heavy equipment. If something broke down we had to go get it; we were basically a king-size wrecker service for the military. We had tanks and howitzers on tracks; anything on tracks we hauled it. We had two RT (rough terrain) cranes in that unit, four ten-ton tractors, and four dragon wagons. We called them dragon wagons because that’s what you could load a 52-ton tank on.  

“I was a new guy so I pulled a lot of guard duty, about the first two weeks, it seemed like I was pulling guard duty every night. About every 100 yards they had a sandbag bunker on the ground and above that they had a tower and each tower had an M-60 on it. When you pulled guard duty you went up into the tower, there were three of you in the tower. In the tower there was a bunk on each side of the gun and ammo all around you. You would pull two hours on the gun and sleep for four. When you were on the gun you put on your boots and uniform but the rest of the time you’d be in your shorts and t-shirt because it was so hot over there. We would set the radio on the frequency they gave us before the start of our duty. There were several towers that ran from Marble Mountain all the way to Da Nang and the first one was about 50 feet from the perimeter at Marble Mountain. On the top of Marble Mountain, the Marines had a recoilless rifle on a truck, they would fly it up there with a helicopter. They were 500-600 feet above us; you could hear them talking on a still night. The Marines were pulling patrol for us because the Da Nang River was about 400 yards from us. We were okay on the South China Sea side because the Special Forces were between us with their concrete bunkers. We also shot illumination rounds for the Marines. They would come in to our NCO Club and pile all their stuff on the side and wait for it to get dark to go to their positions to start pulling patrol; I don’t see how any human being can tote that much stuff. We’d have little Filipino bands for entertainment and girls in mini-skirts and go-go boots. When it got dark, we cut all the lights off on the perimeter and the marines would go out of the wire. I watched them there one night on a moonlit night, one of them went straight, one went left and one of them went to the right and they had a rendezvous point where they would meet back up. That way if Charlie was sitting out there to snipe one of them they were kind of dodging the bullet. There was one of these young boys who had been in the club, they said he wasn’t but seventeen, he stepped out of the wire and they killed him. Those marines went bezerk for about two weeks, I mean it was crazy. We went on alert and went to the control bunker and they captured the Vietnamese, I believe they were Viet Cong. They had a big Lieutenant or Captain, I don’t know but I mean he was a big dude. They brought the Vietnamese into the underground bunker, I think there was four of them, and they squatted down on the floor. The marine could speak Vietnamese as well as they could, I mean he could rattle it off. He started giving them what-for in Vietnamese, but we couldn’t understand any of it. I seen him literally pick one of them up by the throat and slap him up against the bunker and rattled something off to him. That little dude started ratting them out then, I guess, I don’t know, he was telling him something. For the next two weeks we were steadily living in bunkers or in the towers.” 

“One time I was pulling guard duty in the tower and I didn’t know anything about anything. I was just going along with the motion of the other guys. It was my turn on the gun, about two o’clock in the morning; I think I was in tower five. They were always popping flares and command called my unit and said, ‘You’ve got movement.’ He couldn’t actually see anything, they were really high tech,” chuckled Sam, “they had motion detectors on the outside of the perimeter, or human radar as they called it. Anything would set them off and they were hardwired to their console. I never looked so hard for something in the dark in my life. I’m sitting there on the M-60 and I can’t see nothing to shoot at, there’s nothing out there, to tell the truth. The other guys were sleeping on the bunks and I didn’t want to wake them up, and that was my biggest mistake. All I could think about was what if one of those marines out there got hit and he was crawling back in under the wire and set off the motion detector. Command called back down there again and said we had movement. I was staring a hole in the dark by this time and they called again and said, ‘By God, you’ve got movement, you have a free fire zone, shoot, shoot, shoot!’ And buddy, that was the first time I’d pulled the trigger on anything over there, and I pulled the trigger back and it was like I could not let go of it. I think there was 150 rounds in that can going up to that 60. Like I said, my biggest mistake was not waking the two dudes up. When they said, ‘you’ve got movement,’ I should have woke them up and they could have helped me look. When I started pulling the trigger, the one dude on my right was laid up in his drawers and t-shirt and I was putting hot brass all over him. The other one was the loader who was supposed to come put the next box of rounds in. He started loading the ammunition and the other dude was jumping all around cause every time that hot brass hit him it was branding him. They finally called cease fire and I don’t know how many rounds we ended up shooting. Hopefully all we shot up was a bunch of dark, I sure didn’t want to kill anyone, especially one of the marines, but that was my first experience of shooting at anything over there,” confessed Sam. 

“After about two weeks of being there they finally let me go with the guys to recover equipment. Down on the Da Nang River they had a bridge and right beside the bridge they had what they called a river ramp. It was like a king-size boat launch, I mean a big one. They’d bring those LST’s in there and unload ammunition and equipment. One time they did get hit there, they caught a rocket and there was ammo on board and quite a few were killed, I think it was a Filipino crew. They had a retro yard near the water for equipment coming off the boats; they would classify it there for restoration or scrap. We’d load stuff up and carry it around to Marble Mountain which was about five miles away. It was during the time Nixon was pulling the military out and we were giving a bunch of this retro equipment, bunches of equipment to the South Koreans and Filipinos. We would haul it to Monkey Mountain and they would de-contaminate it; jerk the batteries out, pressure wash the radiators, sprinkle some kind of dust on it and say that’s good enough. We didn’t have to do that stuff, we just had to get the stuff over there. When they finished we would haul it back to the river ramp.”

“Monkey Mountain was named after these rock apes, they were patient little dudes. They’d be sitting up there on this ledge; about 150 feet from us, picking fleas off each other and every now and then one of them would pick up a rock and throw it down at us. Well, the GI’s got to picking up the rocks and throwing them back. It was a regular dang war down there. Those suckers were doing a pretty good job on us,” laughed Sam, “they were holding their own, I can tell you that much. After the equipment was washed, we’d back up and haul them back to the ramp and load them up. The Filipinos would have LST’s there and we did a little bit with the Aussies, but we did a whole lot with the South Koreans. I’d get a kick out of the South Koreans, they’re something else. We supported the Tiger Division and the White Horse Division, and the Korean Rock Marines later on in the field. There was a huge PX at China Beach. They had an R&R there and you couldn’t ask for any better, it was on the South China Sea and the water was crystal clear, but we couldn’t go down there, you had to have a reason to go down there. Unless we were pulling trucks down through there we couldn’t go. We loaded so much stuff up for the South Koreans and this ole Colonel was responsible for loading the ships but he also ran the R&R part of it at China Beach. He would take us along with this guy, Peterson. We could go as long as we were riding with him and he really put on the dog for us. He had a bar there, downstairs was a real nice restaurant. They had bulgogi, and I got addicted to that stuff. It had a real good taste to it, or it did to me. Another thing they got me hooked on, and most people can’t stand it, is kimchee. They all had it in their C-rations and we always had cigarettes or something to trade.  I still go to the Korean market in Beaumont to get it.  

“We stayed there in the Da Nang area, loading and unloading for about three months. It was work too; we were steady getting after it every day, daylight to dark and go back to Marble Mountain at night. Then the worm turned. We started going all the way to the DMZ, about a hundred and sixty miles, a grinding day trip. We had to travel over Hải VânPass on Highway 1, which ran between Da Nang and Huḗ. You had to get up in the clouds to get over it and down the other side. We couldn’t haul heavy weight up that mountain or coming back. We hauled little ole Sheridan tanks, they didn’t weigh much, they were aluminum, ammo carriers, all light stuff, but we couldn’t pull heavy artillery. Most of the time we carried Sheridan’s up, light artillery, maybe a Duster and APC’s (armored personnel carriers) but no 155’s (Army armored military cannons), 8-inch howitzers, and tanks. We supported Military Interlocking Fire for a long time. If someone was out there on patrol, each one of their flanks had these mobile artillery units. Most of the mobile artillery units we supported had about four forty-eight tanks (main Army tank with 90 mm M-48 gun) at their perimeter and sometimes a couple of Dusters (M-42 40 mm self-propelled anti-aircraft gun), the Dusters were a lighter track and they were very effective. You see World War II footage, like the Battle of Midway and you see all these guns shooting at aircraft, they were 40 mm, but they bind it on tracks.  A forty-caliber round is a big ole round too!” Sam said emphatically. “Well, tanks break down just like cars do, at least that bunch did, they stayed broke down. The only way they could get heavy equipment in or out of the DMZ was come down the Dong Ha River on YFU’s (yard freight utility). Loaded we could haul two dragon wagons and a ten ton (heavy military cargo truck), because we couldn’t pull the pass, it was just out of the question. You couldn’t pull that much weight and if you did get up there you couldn’t get down because they didn’t have jake brakes on those trucks and if you red-lined one of those Cummings it would just scatter it under the hood, that happened several times. When we first got up there on the hill, we’d been grinding on it all day trying to get up there before dark, because Charlie had it all night long. When we arrived the two guys we were going to relieve came in on two 88 tank retrievers and they looked rough. They had a mess hall there, it wasn’t much but it was better than c-rations. The guys on the 88’s knew we were coming so they pulled up next to us when we were getting ready to go in and eat. They had a 50 on the front and a 60 on the back. Both of them had four guns on them and they were loaded for bear. They were really a good piece of equipment used to pick up disabled equipment to change the engines out in a tank; they have the same design yet today. Each one who got off the 88’s, instead of going in to eat hot chow, they pulled those guns off, stripped them down, washed them out, put them back on there and loaded them with ammo. An ammo carrier would pull up next to them and they were loaded to the hilt. I was the oldest one in our group and I told the others, welcome to the war, these dudes play for real up here, and they did, they knew that gun was going to keep them alive.”