Examining the Myths of the
Vietnam War
SESSION 6 (TRANSCRIPT)
War Stories I -- The View
From the Field
Steve Sherman:
I was hoping to take the morning off over here, but that is
not to be. You are stuck with me again. This morning, we have got
two topics in sequence that we cant cover in about two
years of conferencing. So what we are going to do is to go over
things extremely quickly by some anecdotal presentations. The
first topic that we have titled as the view from the field and
what we are going to do is ask specific people we have sequenced
here to come up and talk for a few minutes, probably 5 to 7
minutes about their summer vacation in Southeast Asia. Now,
again, bear with me these next two sessions. There is no way we
can encapsulate the physical aspects of the war and the
strategic aspects of the war, the tactical and strategic aspects
of the war in two sessions over here. What we are going to do is
try and hit the high points and we have got some people here who
had some pretty interesting high points during their tours. At
some point, one of our guests will finally show up after he was
sabotaged last night by one of our other guests and at that
point, I will depart and watch this from the other room so I can
try to catch up on all the phone calls I missed yesterday because
I had no reception in this building. Fred, we want you to start
it off over here. You can use that mike.
Fred Rice:
I guess the reason that Steve asked me to start off was that I
was probably deployed as early, maybe earlier than most folks
were and I told Steve I would help him out by telling it. The way
I am going to do this is I am not going to tell war stories. If
everybody comes up here and does this, in this sequence, tell war
stories, we are going to be here for the next three weeks. I am
going to try and keep it to objective things that we did. Here is
what we did, here is how we did it, here is where we did it and
so forth and not I remember one time when Joe went over; I am not
going to get into that stuff because that is going to get us so
distracted, so the rest of you that come up here and do this,
please do the same; let us keep it to what you did, what your
unit did, where you were and so forth and keep it to operation,
so we can get some value out of the history of this thing and I
think that is what Steves intent is, that we go with the
history. So, I deployed with an A team, as an A team exec
[Special Forces A Detachment Executive Officer] in
January 1963. There were two rotations of teams that went in
there or there were several rotations, I believe four that Steve
has documented in his books, but I was on the, this was probably
the second rotation, second or third rotation, I am not sure.
There were six months rotations at the time, 12 man A-teams
and we went into an area in Long Khanh Province. We flew into
Saigon, went up to the MAAG headquarters, the MAAG detachment up
there and we spent about two or three-four days with them getting
a little bit of briefing, some orientation, then went out looking
for camp sites. We were up farther in, about 80 clicks northeast
of Saigon along the main highway up there. We ended up in a
village called Tuc Trung, just outside of it. We were adjacent to
a French rubber plantation. We were on the southeast edge of War
Zone D and our job was to recruit and train CIDG forces and then
take them out on reconnaissance and, if necessary, combat patrols
to keep track of the traffic in and out of War Zone D because it
was a real safe zone and then, if necessary, interdict any of
that traffic that came along. So it was pretty interesting doing
it. It was extremely rustic; it was extremely rudimentary. There
were about 8000 Americans in the country at the time and during
the time that we were there, there was actually a move, we were
making success, we were going to start pulling people out and I
remember distinctly that they pulled a 125 MPs that were in the
greater Saigon area, but at that time, there were maybe a total
of 50 Special Forces Teams, about 600 people.
Audience:
What time, when did this _____.
Fred Rice:
January to June of 1963, and so we went in, we searched for areas
to put in the camp. We finally found one. We went to the French
plantation owner; there was a French family there that had lived
there all their lives. We pulled in one day to meet with them and
found out that they spoke only French. Fortunately, I spoke
French, so I became the interpreter for our team. They lent us
bulldozers; water trailers, some tools and so forth, but they
told us that they could not provide us with any intel information
because if they did the VC would burn them out. They knew that,
and so they said, we will do everything we can, but we cannot
collaborate with you and provide you information about the VC, we
have to protect ourselves, and we understood that. We were about
20 kilometers north of Xuan Loc and the Xuan Loc plantation was
down there and it had this huge beautiful complex of dormitories
and multiple story buildings, stucco buildings. I think there
were villas that the plantation owners owned. There was a big
pavilion with a swimming pool out there and they told us that
from 54 to 57, when the French were out and before
the VC started, it was the absolute highlight of the time in Vietnam.
Nothing had touched it in time and there sere beautiful,
beautiful grounds. We lived up near a smaller branch of this
plantation and it wasnt quite as elaborate, but was still a
pretty damn nice villa. When we got there we were provided with,
once we selected the site we built a pentagon shaped facility
like most people did with the block house of each one, because
you could protect each other in both directions and then we
received a kit, a camp kit. This is the funniest damn thing in
the world. It had three World War II Timken dump trucks; that is
what we got for our vehicles and one jeep, the jeep so that we
could carry radios on and so forth. We have to cannibalize one
dump truck to make the other two work. We early on found that we
had to sandbag the bottom and everything, because we had to
travel from where we were back down to Xuan Loc to their airstrip
twice a week to catch the milk run, a Caribou that came
in and supplied the MAAG compound and we would take different
roads every single day, we would take different times, different
people, everything we could to vary it. Basic lessons that they
are saying, gee, we need to change the route; we are going from Baghdad
to such and such now. Well, that is nothing new; that is just a
basic tactic. We go down there and pick up the mail or whatever
and two of us would get a chance to go Tuesday to Saigon, come
back on Thursday or, if we were really lucky, we would get on the
one that will go down Thursday and come back the following
Tuesday, then you get a weekend in Saigon and that wasnt
bad, and we each got three or four rotations like that for a
couple of days off. We would go down to the B team in Saigon, the
Provisional Headquarters, and we would carry all the reports,
this, that and the other, and get the information coming back
out. We would also receive once a month a cold pack. It was a
palette, it was wrapped in big insulated blankets with dry ice,
we get fresh meat, a lot of steak and stuff like that came from
the Navy commissary, because that was the only commissary set up
in the country at that time and when we ran out of that, we had
to go native, but we solved the problem. We told the Province
Chief we needed a cook, some kind of a cook. How much are you
willing to pay? 1,500 piastres a month. He went down to the
Caravel Hotel and got the head cook from the Caravel, best French
restaurant in town, who was making a 1000 piastres a month and he
said, sure Ill go up there for another 500 and when we ran
out from steak from the Navy commissary, he would go into the
village and get water buffalo and the way he prepared it was
French cooking and everything else, it was as good as the other
stuff, so we never noticed. We had a kerosene refrigerator, which
was marginal for keeping stuff cool, but it worked. We recruited
the troops; they were pretty much recruited for us. We taught
them how to fire weapons, how to march a little bit, just for the
discipline of it, how to do squad tactics, we didnt not
take them anything above a platoon; we taught them how to fire
fairly accurately, how to move quietly, how to do a little bit of
hand and arm signal, because we had two interpreters, but we had
a language barrier between us. Some of them spoke a little bit of
French and that helped a little bit and we took them out on to
patrols and so forth. We get hit in the camp, probably a couple
of weeks after we finished construction; thank God, they let us
do that. We got hit several times in the camp. Our biggest
problem early on was getting the troops that we had just
recruited to stop firing. One round from outside the camp and
everybody starting firing and they shot up all the ammo they had,
so we had to discipline them when to stop firing more than
anything else. So it was an early discipline problem, I think a
lot of the camps had that same problem. We finally started taking
them out on the patrols. We went locally, took them out into
recon patrols along the Dong Nai River, yes, there was a lot of
traffic that came down to Dong Nai River. It was in little rafts
and scows and stuff like that and you get two or three
people with a big something in the middle of the boat and a
little lantern, so they could kind of see where they were going.
We never took them on because that wasnt our job at that
time. We wanted to count and see what was going. There was only
one bridge into War Zone D and it had been blown up by the Viet
Minh and there was one span had dropped into the water. We tried
to go into War Zone D one time and had an armed patrol going in
there and we were cut short. [Map displayed] There it is, this is
the camp right here, we originally look at the camp up here, it
had been mined so we couldnt use it, but we used to go into
here. Right here was a bridge somewhere over this river, right
here, the Dong Nai River and our camp sat right here, the
plantation was right here. We tried to go in over here. We found
that this was all War Zone D up in this area, up in here.
Everything northwest of the river was all War Zone D. It is a
good thing we didnt get in there because we found out later
that there were two NVA divisions had been in there for several
years and they were actually the base that came out and did a lot
of the other damage down in throughout the central III Corps area
through that. This highway right here, it is the highway all the
way up to Da Lat up here, the main one right here. Our camp had a
unique name. Our team leader was Captain John Anderson, so we
named the camp Andersonville. That is how I first met
Steve. He called me one day, and I said, who in the hell
are you? And he says, well, you were there in 63 and
you were in a camp called Andersonville and I thought, anybody
that can find out that little bit of trivia, I will give him
whatever extra information he wants, so I gave him all the info
on the rest of my team members and so forth, but we were there
for the six months. The camp was closed out and moved by the team
that followed us. So we had six months, we had another six months
after that and they moved the camp, I dont recall where it
was. But during that time, there was a team exchange that was
taking place some place else in the country. There were five
people riding in a jeep, three from the incoming, two from the
outgoing team. They hit a mine and three guys were killed and the
other two very seriously wounded. That was in 1963. I go down to
the Wall in Washington and I look, and the guys that I knew
during that tour including the guy that lived across the hall
from me at West Point, was a helicopter pilot who went down, Clay
Fannin, his name was on the first panel about ten rows down.
Everybody else was looking at the rest of the stuff, way the hell
over here and toward the end and I look at the top ten rows here
and I can't believe that Im that damned old, but that was
where that period was. It was very, very, very early on up there.
The headquarters in Saigon was Provisional. One time when I went
down there, I was at the headquarters, two blocks away from when
one of the first Buddhist monk set himself on fire. I was two
blocks away from that. Interesting time to be there.
Steve Sherman:
I dont think that is the right place for the camp.
Fred Rice: Say again?
Steve Sherman:
I dont think that circle is the right place for the
camp; I think it was over here.
Fred Rice:
The camp was down here, it was in this
Steve Sherman:
Did you put that airfield there?
Fred Rice: No, that must have been
much much later. That doesnt even look like, because there
was no corner like this or anything out in through here that I
recall.
Steve Sherman:
These are 65 and 68 maps.
Fred Rice: Yeah, there could be.
There was an airstrip in the middle. That is a pretty big village
right there. There was a village, the whole village was on the
right side of the road and I would have said that the airstrip
was some place up in here. But anyway
it is probably changed
a lot because there was a lot of activity later. We were in
nowhere. We had a little rifle range out there to teach them how
to fire. Our weapons, lets see we had the three trucks, we
had a 5 kw generator, all of our communications with the
headquarters was with hand crank generator and Morse code and our
call sign was UU2 and we had a guy from Jamaica who was our
number 2 commo guy and UU2 as you know is tatada, tatada, tatada dat
dat dat and he played the Lone Ranger tune every time he called
in. So he was very recognizable and he was able to get in, so we
did a lot of communication traffic back and forth. Basic weapons
were M14s that we went over with. We saw an armalite AR15 when we
were over there. We saw a Huey and thought that was a great
machine. We usually carried one of the automatic weapons. We
carried a carbine with strapped banana clips on it. Everybody
carried a personal side arm. I carried a .38. Most people carried
a .38, some were .45, but nobody carried the heavy weapons except
for the heavy weapons guy would have a machine gun with him, but
that was about it. I dont know what else on it, but if you
have questions about that period in time.
Steve Sherman: We will have the
questions later. Let us move along here on the next one.
Fred Rice: Okay, but that was it
during the first round in 63. Steve tells me to skip my
next tour. I will just say I served with the 25th
Division in 66; it was a totally different perspective,
totally different aspect. Go on. Whos next?
Steve Sherman: Jack Spey. Actually McLeroy
is not here, so I dont know what we planned last night. I
am winging this one.
Jack Spey: We are winging.
Jack Spey: My name is Jack Spey.
Without going into what I am going to cover this afternoon, I
joined Operation Ranch Hand when the unit was first formed at
Pope Air Force Base in the summer of 1961. We were the
first of Air Force C-123 to fly across the Pacific. The first
airplanes in the Ranch arrived in Saigon in 1961 in December of
that year after the flight across the Pacific. I was a young
lieutenant at the time -- brown bar. I am proud to be able to say
that every promotion I received, I was in Southeast Asia during
that period of time. The Ranch flew for nine years, Operation
Ranch Hand, and I was with it for three and a half years. I got
to Saigon in January of 1962 and left in May of 1966. During the
early period of Operation Ranch Hand, it was largely growth, of
course, an entirely new mission. If you wanted to drop a nuclear
weapon, there is all sorts of books that you could read about how
to drop a nuclear weapon or if you wanted to fire an artillery
piece, why there are all sorts of people to give you instruction
on how to do that. There wasnt anybody available, there
were no source material available to learn how to be combat crop
dusters; we had to learn that on our own. The United States Air
Force didnt have any crop dusting pilots. It had a small
cadre of about 6 people that had experience in flat land mosquito
spraying and a little bit of granular dispersion in later years
and that was a cadre upon which those of us who had C-123
experience joined that particular unit. We had to learn by
mistakes, we had to go out and make mistakes, none of which at
that time were life-threatening, and learn from them and pass
that information along to those of us who followed, and we
didnt have time to write anything down either at that time.
The unit was manned for the first three years by rotational TDY
people from the Special Aerial Spray Flight at Pope Air Force
Base, where I originally went to after graduation from pilot
training. In 1964, the units evaluation period was all
complete; we had already gone into crop destruction targets,
enemy crops in the An Lao valley. I spoke to one gentleman who
knows a little bit about the An Lao Valley. I know a little bit
about the An Lao Valley as well. We started crop destruction work
and the demand from the field through the Provincial Chiefs and
our military advisors to them, we started picking up more and
more aircraft and it exceeded the ability of the Special Aerial
Spray Flight to continue to man the organization on a TDY basis
and the Air Force came in and cranked in a year tour for the
pilots. The pilots were all volunteers, all the aircrew were
volunteers that flew the Ranch mission, because as you can
imagine during the nine-year period, we sustained over 6,000 hits
from the ground and lost seven airplanes and 26 men. So, there
was some risk involved. As the mission grew, of course,
organizationally, the unit finally became a squadron in October
of 1966 and moved from Saigon to Bien Hoa, the first of that
year, the first of 1967. It was a very unique mission as you
might imagine. We started having reunions in 1967 when those of
us that had been there originally came back to the States to
become instructor pilots to those who were going to go over and
replace ourselves in that unit and weve had reunions every
since for the past 35 years and the next one would be this
October. We dont talk much about Herbicide Orange. We talk
a lot of war stories and they get less truthful as the years go
on. Our mean average age now is about 65 years old and basically,
that is it sir.
Steve Sherman: Thank you. I have
heard brief records of your second career over there in Laos.
Jack Spey: Oh, well, after Vietnam,
I went to Hurlbert Field and I was an instructor pilot there
instructing pilots to go to Vietnam in Operation Ranch Hand. I
flew the C-123 for about 11 years. Some people say I have more
time in that particular airplane than anyone else in the Air
Force. I can honestly say that everything had happened to me in
that airplane except to die in that airplane. I finally got into
the T-28 program and then as a result the T-28 of course was one
of the early aircraft in Vietnam in Farm Gate back in 1961 and 62
at Bien Hoa, but it was also given to the Royal Thai Air Force
and the Royal Lao Air Force. In 1971, I went into the T-28
program and then started going TDY into Laos on Project 404. I
was the AOC Commander at Pakse, down in the southern panhandle of
Laos, on the Mekong side. On the west side of the Continental
Divide and the Annamite Range which would with the Lao. I
spent about three years in Laos. Married an American girl that
was a secretary for CIA and we married there and some of you may
know we were married by an Air America pilot of all
people. Yes, it was, actually. It was blessed by the church and
my wife was a Mormon and she wanted a Mormon ceremony. And worked
with the Lao up until May of 1975 and when the ceasefire was
obviously going to hold because all the sides had been told to
relieve and they retired, we retired, blah, blah, blah,
why we left from there. And I spent my last tour with the Royal
Thai Air Force detachment in Tachikawa, Japan before retiring in
1977. So it was quite an interesting career. Southeast Asia. I
love particularly Vietnam, as most of you, well, all of you know
it is a very beautiful country and so is Laos except we were so
busy in Laos, we didnt have a chance to enjoy it that much
really. I will talk to you later.
Steve Sherman: Logan?
Logan Fitch: I am Logan Fitch. I
spent about two and a half tours in Vietnam, all three of them
very very different. My first tour I was enlisted, I was 25 and I
was a clerk. I was assigned in 1965 to MACV Headquarters and I
happened to have top-secret clearance, so I was the Documents
Control Officer for the J-6, the Communications Electronic
Director. Well, it wasnt much of a war at that time
although it had starting to heat up. I think the 173rd had just
come, the Cav was coming maybe a little bit later, but it was
just starting to get an influx of American troops. I remember the
Marines coming up in the northern part of the county. My life was
exclusively in Saigon. I learnt to water ski on the Saigon River.
I was not issued a weapon. Sometimes you could hear artillery and
stuff going off in the far distance, but for me it was not a war.
I wore khakis; that was the uniform, I didnt have any
fatigues, and I didnt have a weapon issued. I think the
greatest danger I faced was a bar fight or getting some sexually
transmitted disease from some gal in one of the bars. But
an interesting thing as a TS control officer for the J-6
directorate, I kept reading all these code words about; I
remember the names now, and of course I know about them now,
didnt then, Shining Brass, Rolling Thunder, and those kinds
of things, which of course were some of the cross border missions
and the bombings and so on into Laos and so on. So for me, it was
not a war at all. It was a pretty neat adventure. I seldom saw a
combat soldier. Later on would begin, late in my tour, in mid 66
or so we began to see some of the people from the Big Red One,
the First Infantry Division coming in Saigon on R&R but we
tried to keep all those trash outside the city and it was not a
bad war, not a bad war at all. I left there, went to Officer
Candidate School, I was commissioned later in 1966 as an infantry
officer, went to Europe, spent a couple of years of Special
Forces, went back to Vietnam, assigned once again to MACV and my
assignment was the, I think I was the, assistant headquarters
company commander at Da Nang for the Corps up there. I went to
there screamed and hollered, I am a combat soldier, I am an
infantry officer, I got to get out there and so on and so
on and once MACV got its hands on you, they pretty well kept you.
I did finally convince a crusty old warrant officer to send me
out to an RF/PF as advisor, that was the Regional Force/ Popular
Force; it was an advisory position and our headquarters was in Xuan
Loc. And we were familiar with that area, spent a lot of
time up there, so I advised; the Regional were basically
villagers that were militia more or less. I spent several months
with that, the Province S-3 [Advisor] left, I took his place.
There was a parallel structure there. They had the Vietnamese
civilian government and they had a Vietnamese military
organization and I was the advisor to the operations officer on
the military side. We had a big COORDS influence, we were not too
far from Bien Hoa, we used to drive back and forth from Bien Hoa
quite often. My impressions of that time was everybody was in
sort of a holding pattern maybe. The Vietnamese were
. I beg
your pardon?
Audience: When was the second tour?
Logan Fitch: This was in 1968-69.
The Vietnamese certainly were not anxious to get out there and
tangle. We did have in incursions from time to time from the Viet
Cong and certainly time to time from the NVA. There was also an
ARVN Division there, I think it was the 40th Division
[18th], I am not sure, so we had all kinds of people.
We had AID and COORDS there, we had our team which was the
Provincial Advisory Team and then we had Advisory teams which
were advising the regular South Vietnamese division and by the
way, just south of there was headquarters of the 11th
Armored Cavalry Regiment and we conducted joint operations for
them from time to time. Tet of 69, I didnt make Tet of 68
and I am not sorry, but Tet of 69 came along and it was pretty
interesting. We did get incursions from, I believe, the 33rd
NVA Division. We really beat them up pretty bad with the help of
American artillery and air and so on, so it got interesting from
time to time. I still wanted to get with an American unit and so
I extended my tour essentially, conditional on getting assigned
to either the 101st, 5th Special Forces Group or 173rd.
I was fortunate enough to go to the 173rd. So I am
Commander, B company, Second Battalion, 503rd in I
think August or so of 1969. At that time, once again, I think the
attitude across the senior leadership in the country was mostly
sort of to hunker down and wait things out. This fine combat
battalion, fine combat brigade with a lot of history and a lot of
glory was running a pacification mission. What did that mean? I
had a company headquarters in a small village, I had a platoon in
another village, and a platoon in this village and a platoon with
me I guess. So for several months there, it was just horrible. We
seldom saw any enemy, but the booby traps were eating us alive. I
had to travel from one platoon to another and so on, and either
go through the rice paddies or on the paddy dikes and the booby
traps just ate us alive. The morale was awful. We didnt
have a lot of drug use out there in the field, but if you get
back to the Battalion headquarters or Brigade headquarters, At LZ
English at Bong Son, there was an awful lot of drug use back
there and lot of insubordination. It was a pretty nasty
situation. Not too long after that, our battalion deployed up
into the An Lao Valley, which was Indian country and things
cleaned up pretty good there. We spent most of the time up in
that area, some also a little bit south of there; we go into some
pretty heavy stuff from time to time and the troops were great
out there, but I tell you, you get that same great troop back in
the rear and you have problem and one of the biggest problems I
had as a company commander was keeping troops in the field. There
were times when I dealt with 60 people in a company, in a
company, which should have had 130-140-150 people. All my people
were still airborne qualified at that time. I think a lot of
senior officers, and to me a senior officer was a Battalion
Commander, a Lieutenant Colonel or above, were mainly trying to
play the CYA game, for example, we would be out in the An Lao
Valley, been up there for weeks at a time, eating C-rations, and
once every four or five days they would bring in some hot chow
and in mermites. Troops got nasty, as we all did, lot of disease,
skin disease, leeches and so on, and it is a beautiful place, the
An Lao Valley. it is and there are a lot of creeks and rivers
through there and so, but we could not be seen. If my Battalion
Commander flew over in an helicopter and saw me, I was in
trouble, and how the hell the VC or the NVA in the area up
in a helicopter looking at us from above, but I could not let my
guys take a bath in the river. I did it, of course, but when I
got caught, I was in trouble.
Steve Sherman: Thats
the An Lao Valley here. [Map Display]
Logan Fitch: Yeah, the An Lao
Valley is right here, Steve is pointing out the An Lao Valley. I
was there in 1969 and 70, it was a pretty bad place earlier on.
The 1st Cav went in there and just got the shit kicked out of it
and I remember we would go into combat assault, that area, right
up there, we called the Crows Foot. You can see those
three things and I think thats the I CTZ border
right in there and that was the one time I personally ever got
into I Corps. We did a combat assault up in this area and came
south. You could fly over that area and you would see where Jack
had been and killed all the vegetation and everything with his
Ranch Hand Operation, you could see a lot of burned out tank
hulls and APC hulls from when the 1st Cav had been in there and
it was a bad place and pretty much after that, the An Lao Valley
flows down and goes through Bong Son which is north of Qui Nhon which
may be a more familiar landmark for some of you, flows into the
South China Sea over there. We later conducted some operations
south of Bong Son and for some reason, this was in early 1970, it
got pretty hot and heavy, not only in that isolated area up in
the An Lao Valley, but also closer to the coast and closer to the
population centers. We encountered an awful lot of NVA regulars
and did a good job, we did a good job when we did encounter them,
but again, I think my impression again is sort of that some of
the senior officers and maybe the whole mandate was just to sort
of keep a low profile and lets just serve our time and get
out and for someone who was all full of piss and vinegar and
wanted to get out and mix it up because it was all frustrating at
times. Later on, of course, I got a little more of that mixing up
than I really wanted or needed, but that pretty much is my story
in Vietnam, Steve.
Steve Sherman: All right.
Lets get a short word from the Navy over here and see what
is going on out at South China Sea.
Tom Hudner: I guess my closest
contact with the war out there was in a carrier. I finished at
the Air War College in June of 1963, got orders out to San Diego
at Miramar to transition into jets, FA-8 Crusaders that did quite
a bit of flying over there. The Navy Crusaders and the Phantoms,
the F-4s, that did most of the fighter work and the A-4s and the
A-6s did the bombing work.
My eyes got bad
before I could even deploy [with a squadron] and I stayed home
for about a year and then got orders out to [USS] Kitty Hawk,
one of the big carriers, and picked her up in Tonkin Gulf on
station in April of 1966. I was first the ships navigator
and then executive officer.
Ships were deployed
[from the States] for about six months, The time on the line then
was about 30 days at a time and wed usually go into Cubi
Point in the Philippines at Subic Bay.
The general thing
was for about two or three of us carriers, (the first carriers we
had out there were Essex class carriers, which were late World
War II ships and later the newer big carriers of which Kitty
Hawk was one. Kitty Hawk, Constellation, and Independence)
would fly 12 hours a day and staggered our operations so we would
have 24-hour coverage (over the target areas, as required).
Normally we [each carrier] would launch about 80 aircraft
throughout the day. We could easily surge up to 100 if we had to.
The ordinance they carry was anywhere from 2000 (bombs) to 500
pounds. We had a lot of missile work for the fighters and
conventional weapons for the attack aircraft.
We operated probably
anywhere between about 40 or 50 miles out at sea, to 125 to 150
miles. We had as many ten aircraft go off at a time. Every hour
and a half we had to recycle, that is, every hour and half we
turned into the wind to launch a new flight of aircraft and
recover those that were already in the air.
Every three or four
days, we pulled off the line for the better part of the day to
replenish forces to get ammo and fuel. The fuel we got,
incidentally, was also conventional fuel for the destroyers that
we had with us.
We had just finished
up a tour on the line of just about 30 days at the end of January
[1968]. Within a day of the time when we would go back to the Philippines
, Tet broke out. We stayed out there for a couple of days longer,
then had to go back home, that is, go back into port for a couple
of days. We rushed back to the Philippines then sent our A-6s
[back] out [to Vietnam]. A-6s were [sent back out because they
were] a very capable aircraft for the ordnance they carried with
the electronics equipment they had. Probably one of the most
significant things the A-6s did for the other aircraft was they
were great radar busters, and they had pretty long-range
missiles, so that once they heard that a missile was warming up
to be fired, A-6s would fire at them which sort of sanitized the
area for awhile.
A ship would be out
for about a years cycle: deploy [to WestPac] from either
San Diego or Whidbey Island, which is not too far from Seattle,
Washington, and stay there for six months, then come back home.
For the five months remaining in the year, we did a lot of work
on the ship, got new aircraft, trained the pilots coming in, and
then start the same thing over again six months later -- deploy
to WestPac.
I left in April of
1968. I went from there to the Joint Staff [in the Pentagon] and
was in Air Operations for Southeast Asia and was in on a lot of
the planning. One of [the operations] was for destroying the
anti-air sites up on North Vietnam which were firing at our
aircraft directly in contradiction of some agreements we had, and
we spent weeks planning on dropping those anti-air sites. At the
same time the operation went off, we heard about a lot of
activity going on -- helicopter activity. We found out that the
Son Tay operation was being planned exactly the same time as ours
was. We didnt even know what the other was doing, and ours
was a complete failure in that the weather
was too bad to see the targets. As everybody knows about Son Tay,
the only good thing about it was it was a tremendous morale
booster to the people who were in prison. But, thats about
it I think.
Steve Sherman: All right. Mike Benge?
Michael Benge:
Well, unlike all of you here, I went to Vietnam as a civilian
after doing tour in the Marine Corps as an aviation metalsmith
and I went to Vietnam with an organization called International
Voluntary Services that was a forerunner of the Peace Corps. The
letter of acceptance that I received from them said, You
are going to build up a great nest egg for your future. We
were getting $77.10 month. I spent most of my time in the Central
Highlands working with the Montagnards, ethnic minority groups of
Malayo-Polynesian and Mon Khmer descent, akin to the Native
Americans here in the US. I was an education and agricultural
advisor and we were building elementary schools in villages
throughout the province. I was assigned to Darlac Province in
a place called Ban Me Thuot. Those of you who will know where
Pleiku was a little more, oh there we go. [Map Display]
For
those of you know where Pleiku is, Ban Me Thuot is just to the
south and Darlac province borders Cambodian on the west. I
covered the whole province, all the way over to the Cambodian
border, north up to the border of Pleiku province, south to Quan
Duc and east to Khanh Hoa province. I even got over into Cheo Reo
on a flood relief operation.
Probably
one of my better qualifications was that of a cumshaw artist;
I was very good at it. I used to go down to Saigon, and found out
that USOM (United States Overseas Mission, now called the United
States Agency for International Development) had a lot of
warehouses full of all kinds of goodies, and Ilicanos from
the Philippines ran all the warehouses. I spoke a little Ilicano
and I would go up to the warehouse guy and say to him, Mnong,
casino ti biag? which basically translates out to,
Hello, older brother, how are you? Hell, after that,
they would let me have anything in the warehouse.
I
provided civic action support to Special Forces camps, materials
to a technical vocational school for ethnic minorities and to an
agricultural extension team, and to anyone else who might make
use of all kinds of good things in the warehouses that
didnt seem to get out into field. After my raid on the
warehouses, Id then go to Catholic Relief Services; they
were always good for a soft touch, and I would ask them,
Hey, you have anything that you need to go to Ban Me
Thuot? They might answer, Oh, yeah, we have got a
couple of caskets of altar wine that we can't get up, because the
roads are closed. And I said, Good, You can assign
them to Mike, Ban Me Thuot, and label them as liquid
soap. Id then say, Oh, by the way, I
dont have a truck or any laborers to get these and some
other items I picked up out to the airport; can you guys do
me? And they would answer, Yeah., and so they
would give me a truck and laborers. Then I would call Air America,
I had the operations number for the CIA aircraft, and say,
Hi, this is Mike from Ban Me Thuot, I have got about 8000
pounds to go, can you do me? And they would say,
Yeah, be out on runway so and so Tuesday morning at 6
oclock so we can load the airplane. Wed load
the plane and fly to Ban Me Thuot and offload the supplies, and I
would just sign the manifest as Mike from Ban Me
Thuot. It was as easy as that.
Well,
this went on for much of my two years with IVS and just about at
the end of my tour, I was wondering what I was going to do next.
I was down in Saigon one day and went over to USOM. They had a
special Rural Affairs unit that was pretty darn innovative, and
was doing some great civic action and pacification work out in
provinces. General Ed Lansdale, who many of you may have known
was with the CIA, had worked with President Magsaysay in the Philippines
and had put down the Huk Communist revolution. Another guy
working in Rural Affairs was Colonel Sam Wilson, who
was later promoted to General and became the head of DIA. He
headed the pacification program in the big province right below Saigon.
Anyway,
I walked into USOM Rural Affairs office and this guy hollers at
me and said, Hey, Mike, come in here, we have got a
problem. I walked in and the guy says, Mike, we got a
call from CIA the other day. It seems like you have been stealing
their aircraft for the last year and a half. And I said,
I dont know what you are talking about.
Whoever told that is a big liar. Oh, I may have
borrowed a few, but I always gave them back. The guy then
said, Well, looks like there are three options. And I
said, What are they? He replied, Well, number
one is, the CIA could prosecute you but that might be a little
embarrassing for them. Number two is, the CIA thinks
that you are pretty innovative and probably wants to hire
you. Number three is, we think you are pretty damn
innovative and we would like to hire you. And I said,
I will take number three option, where is the
contract? He hollers to the guy across the hall to bring
over the contract. I signed on with USOM.
I
went back to the U.S. for a short time and returned in March of
65 and was assigned as the Prov. Rep. up in Kontum Province.
After turning over to the Vietnamese about 5 kg of opium that we
had scared up from an airdrop it disappeared into the system. No
too long after that, I reported a big rice scandal that was
happening in the Province. All at once, I was replaced by a
ex-CIA guy that USOM had hired. The CIA had actually kicked him
out for he was a little whacked out. We had a few differences so
it was either I would end up punching him out or I would be
transferred, so I asked for a transfer. I was then assigned to Phu
Yen Province for a short period of time and was the
assistant Prov Rep working for a Filipino-American, who had
actually carried the message from the Philippines down to
McArthur in to Australia informing him that the resistance was
organized in the Philippines. I worked in Phu Yen for a while and
ended up flying a couple of missions with Ranch Hand while there.
I
took a break and went to Saigon for a little R&R and I popped
into a bar for a beer. It was dark in the bar and after sitting
down at the bar and ordering a beer, I heard a voice that I
thought I recognized. I looked over and the guy sitting on the
other side of the bar turned out to be a guy I went to high
school with. The high school was in a very small town and had
only 45 kids total, both guys and girls. I played right guard on
the football team and he was right end. I hollered at him and
said, Jesus, this is unbelievable. He was flying
C-123s for Mule Train, one of the first Air Force cargo units in Vietnam.
I ended up flying around with him for a week.
I
had a bad habit of getting shot at on my birthdays and dont
ask me why. While in Phu Yen on my birthday, we had a mission to
air drop USIA Chieu Hoi [crossover] leaflets, and a
plane load of dignitaries had come up from Saigon to witness the
drop. We went up in a C-47 and this fool, this Air America pilot
was doing slow circles over this area that had been under
VC/Communist control since Ho Chi Minh was a kid. There we were,
a great big target flying in slow circles and everybody cut loose
firing at us. There were flack jackets on board and I hollered,
Everybody put on their flack jackets. Everybody was
putting on the flack jackets and I took mine and wrapped it
around the family jewels and sat back down. Everybody on the
airplane was looking at me like, what in hell am I doing, and all
the time I was making gestures with my hand pointing up. All at
once they realized that rounds were coming up, and they hurriedly
took off their flack jackets and sat on them. We took 27 hits
before I told the pilot, lets get of here and
we did.
I
was then transferred to Ban Me Thuot because I was known to the
Montagnards and I had lived with them and learned their language.
I became the Provincial Representative there. I was the advisor
to the Province Chief. I advised him on everything except CIA (intel)
and military matters. I had an agreement with the Province Chief
that there would be no free fire zones, and we both had to first
clear all bombings in the province. I got a lot of air time, and
flew a lot in L-19s to check out reports of things that had been
sighted but the military didnt know what it was. Again,
being a cumshaw artist, I developed a very good
relationship with the folks at the two companies of 155 Aviation
Helicopters. They knew that I had a warehouse full of cement and
roofing, so they asked me if I could give them some to build an
officers club. Although USOM wasnt supposed to support the
American military, I told them Id make them a trade. I had
a bunch of Montagnard refugees who werent doing anything,
so I would set up a manual skills training program to build the
club, but they would have to hire a Vietnamese carpenter and
brick mason to train the refugees, and pay everyone. It worked
and we built both an officers and an EM club and some other
projects, and I got their reserve helicopter when ever I needed
one. We all made out.
So
I had my experiences and USOM that became part of a larger CORDS
(Combined Operations Rural Development Support)
multi-agency/military organization and I became the senior
civilian CORDS representative. As such, I had responsibility for
the District Military Advisors; a MILPHAP unit (military medical
assistance program) with 35 Army guys; a military civic action
unit; eight civilian nurses who taught at a training school for
Montagnard nurses and they also worked at the hospital; and a
number of people working in other disciplines such as education
and agriculture. All total, I was responsible for 75 Americans,
and a staff of about 120 locals, mainly Montagnards but some
Vietnamese.
In
Tet of 1968, the town got overrun from three different areas. The
next morning, our landline was still open to Province
headquarters. I called up and talked to the American Senior MACV
Advisor, the advisor to the Province chief. He was supposed to be
over me, but because he was only in town for about six months,
the Province Chief had him reporting to me in order to get an
appointment to see the Province Chief. I asked him, What in
the hells happening? He gave me a brief on the
security situation and I said, Lets see evacuate all
the civilians out of here. He replied, Well, I
dont know where my man is, so I said, OK, I am
going to order an evacuation and call Nha Trang for an aircraft
to come in for the pickup. I then began going around,
rounding everybody up sending them to my house. We were still
taking a few heavy rounds and some small arms fire. I got hold of
the Army guys and told them, You guys are back in the army,
go to the MACV compound and draw weapons. and then
continued going around rounding everybody up. I then went down
into the middle of a North Vietnamese battalion and tried to
rescue four young IVS kids who were living in a house down in a
village on the outskirts of town. I got all the way down in the
village and there were NVA running around shooting going on. I
got to the house, met their housekeeper and she said, Oh,
they left two days ago. I said, Oh shit, thanks for
telling me, so I E&Ed back out and got up to my
rig. There was a missionary compound up on the hill behind me. I
didnt want to drive around and try to get up into it
because I would have trapped myself, so I got up on my rig, for I
was at hollering distant, I yelled, Hey you guys, come on
up to my house by noon. I got an aircraft coming in for
evacuation. They were all going like this (waving me on) at
me and I thought, Well, these independent guys, they
didnt want to be evacuated; to hell with them. I got
down off my rig, and found out that they were watching 13 NVA
come up a ditch toward me. I was only carrying a five shot police
positive in a shoulder holster. These guys all at once popped up
pointing guns at me. I was always very good in mathematics, 5
into 13 just aint cutting it and especially since they had
to a B40 rocket launcher pointed at my vehicle I was in. They
said, Surrender, huruemane and renient treatment. I
happened to get captured by the NVA Psywar squad. They actually
believed that I was going to get humane and lenient treatment,
but it was so surrealistic because the squad leader had this
Vietnamese hair cut at a 45 degree angle that was hanging down in
his eyes and he had a little Hitler mustache. I said, Shit,
this guy is Hitler, where and the hell am I?
Thus,
I, like John Steinbeck, I too had my travels with Charlie. I
think I am the one with the real dog -- Victor Charlie that is.
There were two missionaries captured after me. I was captured by
the North Vietnamese. When I first got captured they began
talking to me and tried to convince me that they were VC. I said,
Why are you wearing North Vietnamese uniforms? And
they said, Well, you know, we are really provincial
people. and I replied, Then why do you speak North
Vietnamese? Then they said, No, no, Vietnamese is all
one language. And I said, Bullshit., you are speaking
North Vietnamese. I then threw some South Vietnamese terms
at them and they couldnt answer, replying in North
Vietnamese, and I said, Yeah, lets play this
game.
Thats
the way it went over the next 12 months, I was down in South
Vietnam, and moved about once a month. We were being moved after
the first month and walking along this ridge, saw North
Vietnamese troops funneling down in this valley into a field of
tall elephant grass. It looked like one of those
cartoons, where all the ants are pouring down into it. All at
once, there was an L-19 that popped over the ridge, he lays the
plane over and looks right at me. I am looking right into the
guys face. He wags his wings at us, turns around and went
back. All at once comes in the fast-movers and they drop napalm
in the valley, and I will tell you what, that was one giant
barbeque. I dont know how many NVA that they barbecued, but
they set that field of grass on fire and I will tell you what,
that was really some cooking going on there.
I
was captured on the 28th of January 1968. Supposedly I
was the first prisoner of war captured during the TET offensive.
In July, this one missionary died. He contacted pneumonia because
they left us all out in the cold rain while they were in a nice
warm cave. They chained to poles and gave us only a small piece
of plastic for shelter. The NVA brought a medical team in and
examined and they said, yeah, He has got pneumonia all
right. The camp cadre asked them, Well, what
prescription are you going to give him? And they replied,
Let him die. And that is what happened; they ended up
letting the guy die.
In
November of that year, the lady ran out of juice and we told our
prison chasers that we werent going any further. Actually,
their orders were that we were we going to Hanoi. They said,
You know, we will kill you. and I replied, No,
you can't kill us because you are under orders, and your ass will
be grass with Uncle Ho because you are a bunch of
bureaucrats. They were locking and loading and had their
AKs up to our heads, and she said, It isnt up
to you to decide when we die, it is up to God and you have no
power over this. These guards looked at us, Dinky Dau!
(you are crazy as hell), but they did back off until the next
day. We hadnt had anything to eat, we were about five
weeks, been traveling on a ball of rice with little salt. She was
just totally wore out, so I told them that she had to have some
food so she get enough strength to go. Well, they cooked up a
very sumptuous meal the very next day for us, but a good part of
it was bamboo shoots, which you have to boil them twice to get
rid of the prussic acid. We were in deteriorated condition and
that was just like poison. They knew what they were doing, they
had been eating bamboo all their lives and they poisoned us. She
died, took her three days to die and they would not let me feed
or wash her or anything. They just said, She has to
go. I later found out that the rules were, according to
them, that they could kill you if you tried to escape, or if you
died of natural causes it was OK. And that was a natural cause
when they poisoned her and she died.
They
moved me over into a camp in Cambodia, Ratanakiri Province. That
was way before the US ever went into Cambodia. I was there for
one year in a cage along with 12 other POWs. They then moved me
up through Laos and I was in Laos in a hospital camp there for
about three weeks. They then moved me all the way up to Hanoi,
going through a Pass where we were getting bombed by jets that
were coming out of Udorn. We were riding in the back of one of
these big Russian Euclid trucks that they were using to repair
the road. The driver was bombed, totally bombed, on marijuana;
about every 15 minutes he would pull off side the road and toke
up and off we would go again. We were bouncing off the walls in
the back of the truck. They unloaded us into some anti-aircraft
caves when the jets came in and the whole anti-aircraft crews
were bombed out of their minds. You know, they didnt want
to really get killed either, which was interesting. They finally
offloaded in the Hanoi, put me in an ambulance with a red cross
on it that had been given to them by the Europeans and took me to
a camp 35 klicks southwest of Hanoi. I spent one year in what I
call a black box; a room that was about 7 feet long and about 4
feet wide with walls painted black. The only air hole in it was a
little slot just big to let the rats in to come and just chew on
me at nighttime. A couple of times a week they would let me out
to empty my defecation bucket and that was it. I spent one year
there, one year in a cage down in Cambodia, and a total of 27
months in solitary confinement.
After
the Son Tay raid, they moved us out of this camp up in to the
main part of Hanoi, and I spent one year there. I wrote an
article called The Christmas Lights in the Hanoi when
the B52s came in, they knew exactly where our camps were. We used
to have a recce do a fly by about once a week; he came right up
the railroad tracks, pop his afterburner, and let us know they
knew where we were. They leveled three sides of our camp. We were
in this long room where they had moved us after the first
bombing. We had to dig a trench down the middle of it to get in
it during the air raids, and I will tell you this room
wasnt that long, I forget how many paces it was, but that
trench would zigzag during the bombing. That is how close that
they were; once killing a bird right in front of my room. The
guards were scared shitless. They were nowhere to be found and we
were in there, cheering like hell.
There
were a lot of myths about what happened that I wont get
into, but the North Vietnamese had signed the Geneva conventions
on the treatment of POWs. We were all tortured, but the guys from
the South werent tortured as much as the pilots shot down
in the North, but we had our own hell. A couple of the SF guys
got it real bad; Dennis Thompson did; he was captured at Long Vei,
I think. The Cubans had 20 Americans that they tortured, and I
mean it was brutal torture, some of the worse torture in Vietnam.
It was called the Cuban Program. Since then, I
identified one of them, the leader of the torture who is now the
Minister of Education in Cuba.
Recently,
I saw Senator Biden on television and he said, Oh, you
know, the only thing that keeps our prisoners from being tortured
is that we signed the Geneva Convention and we have to follow
it. I say, Horse pucky. But anyway, we were
moved after the Christmas bombing, put in the infamous Hanoi
Hilton. We were kept separate of the pilots. We were in a
different part of the compound there and although I did hear
about the signing of the Paris agreements over the Vietnamese
radio, they didnt inform us like they were supposed to.
Col. Ted Guy, an Air Force pilot, supposedly captured in Laos but
he wasnt, was my camp commander. He and I cut off all our
hair right at the last. It very much upset the Vietnamese because
that is a sign that we were being punished or had lice, or were
crazy, and of course, we never had any of that. The Colonel and I
got locked up in solitary confinement. I was the one that
instigated after I found out that the Vietnamese gave a couple of
the other guys hell for getting high and tight
haircuts. Guy and I spent the last week at Hanoi strapped down to
a concrete bed. Guy was in a cell over on the other side of the
isle and he yelled, Benge, you son of a bitch, we will
never get out of here. I told him, Dont worry
Ted, I told them that Nixon was going to come back and bomb them
back into the Stone Age; they are going to let us out.
Everybody else was gone out of the prison, deadly silent and Guy
is over there. Are you sure? Benge, you son of a
bitch. They finally came in and unstrapped us, threw us in
a dark room gave us some clothes and out we went.
I
was released in March of 1973, went back to the US for a short
period of time, and I was asked by the Minister of Ethnic
Minorities in Vietnam to go back over and help him. I paid my
way, went back over to Vietnam, and I was in and out of there
until the fall of Vietnam to the Communists in 1975. I was in the
Philippines at the time and I was actually trying to catch a
flight back in on what I didnt know was the last aircraft
that was going into Ton Son Nhut. I was trying to get on the
plane a General said, No freaking way you are getting on
this aircraft. I then said, I need to go back to
evacuate some of my friends. and he replied, No, you
are not. If I saw him today, I would kiss him, because I
wouldnt be here today if it werent for him, for I
wouldnt have never come back out. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Steve Sherman: [Im turning it
over to] Jim McLeroy. Do we have Joe Parnar here?
Joe Parnar: Yeah, I didnt
know I was supposed to do.
Jim McLeroy: Well, thats
great, but we had you down there.
Joe Parnar: Right. I was only in
the military for two years and eight months. Went through the
Special Forces training after Airborne AIT when they tested us
and graduated as a medic in early December of 1967. Out of my
class of 45 medics, all of us volunteered for Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam,
I Corps, II Corps, III Corps, or any combination thereof and not
one of us got assigned to Vietnam. I was assigned to the 7th
[Special Forces Group] with a bunch of other people and I bided
my time there. Thanks to the blessings of Mrs. Alexander, I was
able to get to Vietnam in April of 68 and when I got to Vietnam,
I found out that my security clearance for Secret, at least an
Interim Secret, was lagging. So I spent about four weeks in Nha Trang,
working in the transient billets in the arms room, taking
everybodys weapons, so they wouldnt shoot up the
compound and it was about the middle of May, the 10th
of May I think it was, we went to Da Nang, we were briefed down.
I was assigned to CCC in Kontum. Basically as a medic at CCC, my
job consisted of one day working in the dispensary and maybe
doing sick call, doing malaria work in the lab, the next day I
would fly Chase Medic. The Chase Medics job was basically
to ride on one of the insertion or extraction ships that was
designated the Chase Ship and we carried a backup PRC-25 radio in
case a team had a radio go bad, we could swap with them. We also
used that initially, back in May of 68 when we would get to
Dak To where we launched from, we had no permanent facilities
there. We would go up on a daily basis. We would launch the teams
and then go back to Kontum in the evening; that changed later on.
And one of the things a medic would do would be monitor the radio
because when the helicopters would shut down, so would their
radios, so the Covey pilot would call into the medic at that time
and tell you to launch the assets and then we would go and launch
or extract our teams. I dont know, do they have a map at
all of out in Laos? Probably not, I guess it would be steep,
where we were launching ammunitions into was the tri-border area
where Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam join up. We were going in, if I
had to say, The farthest I ever saw us going with a recon
mission, it was about 20 miles. There was a river out there
called, I think it was the Dak Xou.
Steve Sherman: It all depends on
what the name was.
Joe Parnar: Yeah, I think they had
a different name for river in Laos and they did, so when you look
at todays map it does not say Dak, it says another word or
something; I never was good in languages over there, but anyway I
was able to fly Chase for about a month and my initial
impressions were that nothing happened. I would fly one day,
somebody else would fly the next day and they would come back
saying, oh, our ship got shot up.
[Map Display]
Okay, there is Kontum where our home base was. Daily we would fly
up to Dak To here and then launch our missions out along this
area. Is it possible to get further west on this? I can kind of
show you where we were. Theres is Dak To, Ben Het should be
maybe a little bit up north here and along this river here is
where we were launching a lot of our missions. There were two
branches of the Ho Chi Minh trail that came down through the
Highway 96 and Highway 110.
Michael Benge: Right in that area,
the road right up there, we were held in the camp right there.
Joe Parnar: Is that right?
Michael Benge: Yeah, right in that
little tri-border area you know.
Joe Parnar: Where are we? We have
to get back in this area. Yeah. That was a good one, right there.
Okay.
Steve Sherman: right over there,
you see that hump where Cambodia is?
Joe Parnar: Where in this area?
Unidentified Audience Member:: Down
below the board, down, get a little further to the left now.
Right down in that area.
Joe Parnar: Are we in this area
here?
Unidentified Audience Member:Yeah,
they have the _____.
Joe Parnar: Oh, okay, but anyway
our missions went, the farthest I ever saw us do a mission was,
boy, I am not familiar with the map that much, but we never got
out to Attapou here. We were generally restricted right
along in this area here as far as we went, and then we would go
up north as far as landmark called Dollar Lake and there was an
open area called the Golf Course.
Unidentified Audience Member: _____
Joe Parnar: Did you? And south we
went down into Cambodia ways. Initially when I first got to Vietnam
at CCC in May 1968, Command and Control Central. We were part of
Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observations
Group and it started out as Special Operations Group, but some
genius decides it is special operations, may be they will figure
they are doing something special, so, by changing it to
studies, we became bookworms I guess. But Chase was
basically riding on a helicopter as a chase medic and if a team
member was wounded on the ground, there was a good chance your
ship was going to go in and make the extraction and then we would
give first aid on the way back to generally the medical facility
run by the 4th division at Dak To and on rare
occasions, some of the medics would go to Pleiku. I personally
never went to Pleiku. I wanted to get anybody wounded to the
nearest doctor I could. Unlike a lot of the Special Forces
medics, I never felt like I was really a doctor. So, to me,
getting them to a real doctors hands, keep them alive, that
was kind of my philosophy was to make sure no sure nobody died on
me. That was my biggest fear in Vietnam -- not getting shot -- it
was that I was going to have one of my patients die and feel
responsible for it.
I spent three
months on a recon team. I begged, pleaded, didnt do
anything nasty or make any offers to do anything like today the
men marry men, I didnt offer to do that to anybody to get
on recon, but I did get on recon. I felt that I would be nothing,
but more than like a cook or something like that, support people
being a medic. I wanted on recon. I got on for three months. That
was a waste of the Armys time really, because I got
trained; I was green, I got trained on walkout practice missions,
we did do one mission out in the Plei Trap valley, which is out
near Cambodia. That was a good mission, we found an enemy bivouac
area, but I really wasted time because I got trained and I had
flip flopped with another medic that was on recon. He wanted off,
they said you can go on for three months, but it was a waste
because I got trained, was ready to go across the border and I
had to go back to being a medic again. But I will tell you the
glamour of recon had left, after three to five practice missions.
I only weighed about 160 pounds back then and carrying 85 pounds
on my back, I used to feel like my sternum was going to separate.
So I did get my recon experience.
About the end of
September of 68, I got transferred back to the dispensary, and as
a medic we got to go out on some, what we called, SLAM
operations. They were company size operations in Laos. When a
recon team would find a suitable target or they would find
anti-aircraft guns, they had put in a company; it was about 110
people maybe they had put in.
Unidentified Audience Member: _____
Joe Parnar: Well, they are usually
each squad. They were Montagnards mostly when I was there. Each
squad had an American squad leader and the company commander;
each platoon had an American in command of the squad. So there
was maybe 12 to 15 Americans on one of these.
Unidentified Audience Member: Yeah,
I know a friend of mine _____.
Joe Parnar: Yeah, a lot of the SLAM
companies did not have a medic assigned to them. So as a medic in
the dispensary, when a SLAM would come up, one of us medics would
go out with the SLAM company. You never really knew many of the
people there, so you just went along. But I will tell you the
Americans, I swear that mostly the Americans would rather they
got shot than the medic, and I really got that feeling; you know
you would go out to get a wounded person and they were watching
you like you were their pet canary or something like that. They
did not want you to die, maybe they felt that you could keep them
alive if they got shot, but I really got that impression that
they really watched out for us medics out there. There were some
tremendous people. Also, we would get to go out with smaller
units. They called them Hatchet platoons, about 30-35 men and
many times they didnt have a medic on those either, so we
would get assigned to go out with those. So those were our field
operations, but most of that was either working in the
dispensary; we got a lot of diseases, to contend with like
malaria was one of the big things, and we learnt how to do blood
smears and look for malaria, and so it was quite an experience
and I will tell you, I wish I had appreciated the people I served
with better when I was in. I didnt realize, but those were
the best friends that I was ever going to have. They werent
the type of people who would stab you in the back, like many
times in civilian life happens. But that was pretty much what it
was like being a medic, a support person, but after getting my
experience on recon I realized that support people can be very
important too. So thats about what my experience was like
with CCC.
[APPLAUSE]
James McLeroy:
OK, Ill make mine short. My name is Jim McLeroy. I went to
I Corps in 1967 and was assigned to a Special Forces A-team,
A-104, at Ha Thanh in Quang Ngai Province. I was the executive
and civil action officer, and the team leader was a tall, young
captain named Hugh Shelton, who later became the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In 1968 I
volunteered for SOG and was assigned to CCN FOB 4 at Marble Mountain
outside Danang as the assistant S-3 launch officer. It was a new
FOB, and no one there knew how to do that complex job, so they
sent me down to FOB 2 at CCC outside Kontum to learn it. Kontum
was the big FOB where most of the action was happening then. FOB
1 at Phu Bai near Hue was a relatively small operation, and FOB 3
at Khe Sanh was no longer functioning as a cross-border launch
base, so I spent a couple of months down at Kontum working with
the S-3, Major Terry Ryan, and his assistant S-3 launch officer,
Ken Etheredge, who was a good friend of mine from Basic, AIT, OCS,
and Ranger school. They trained me by letting me observe their
operations in detail. I attended their team and pilot briefings
and observed their inserts and extractions from the back seat of
another FAC plane that flew along with them, while I studied the
maps and monitored the ground and airborne radios. After I
learned how to do it, we set up the FOB 4 launch site at a remote
Special Forces camp on the Laotian border of I Corps named Kham
Duc. It had been SOGs first launch site in 1965, but they
moved it to Phu Bai the next year, because the weather was so
unpredictable and bad for visual flying. It was constantly socked
in there and was about the worst place for a SOG launch site. We
ran a few missions out of there until May of 68, when it was
attacked by two reinforced regiments of the 2nd NVA Division for
three days and two nights. If the weather had not miraculously
cleared up during those days, which is very uncharacteristic
there at that time of year, we would not have been able to get
out of there, but we just barely did in the biggest air
evacuation of the war. One of the pilots got the Medal of Honor
there, but in a nutshell, it was a very, very big and risky
operation.
Pardon?
Unidentified
Audience Member: Bernie Fisher?
James McLeroy:
No, that was at the A Shau Special Forces camp in 1966. This was
a C-123 pilot named Joe Jackson. But there were many, many
stories of incredible heroism, as well as blunders and other
things that I could go into, but I dont want to take up
other peoples time, so just suffice it to say that we
barely got out of there by the skin of our teeth on the afternoon
of Mothers Day, 1968 on the last C-130. The very last
aircraft out was a CH-47 with LTC Schungel and his command group
that came out about ten minutes after we left. One of the bad
things about it is that there were more US MIAs from that
battle than from any other battle of the entire American Phase of
the Second Indochina War. An Americal battalion was sent out
there to reinforce us, and the Battalion Commander was
incompetent. He put little squads on the hilltop outposts
surrounding us, and of course they were just overrun by the NVA
and captured or killed. Only one of those who were captured
survived, a private named Julius Long, and he was a POW from 68
to 73. Did you know about him?
Mike Benge:
Yeah.
James McLeroy:
He was in Laos for several years as a POW before they sent him up
to Hanoi, and he nearly died several times. I interviewed him; he
lives in the mountains of western Virginia now. I went back to
Kham Duc in 1998 with a casualty recovery team of the US Joint
Task Force for Full Accounting to try to assist in locating the
remains of the MIAs there. The NVA attacked Ngok Tavak at
the same time they attacked us, and there were some US MIAs
left behind there, too. I dont know if it shows up on this
map or not, but Ngok Tavak was about five miles south of Kham
Duc. It was a little, abandoned French outpost right about there.
I could go on and on about what happened there, but I dont
want to take up too much time, so maybe we can talk more about it
later, if anyone wants to ask any questions. It was quite a
story, but I think in the interest of fairness, Ill just
summarize with that. John, would you like to come up? Youre
next, and your story is quite a bit more interesting than mine.
John Cavaiani: I am John Cavaiani,
and I was a medic when I went to Vietnam. I have been right up in
_____ as well. I got there and Sergeant Major Adrian Rodriguez
grabs hold of me and, come in, we are going to talk about
your assignment. I walk in and I am looking at him and my
aspirations _____ came and I end up becoming the agricultural
advisor and veterinarian for I Corp.
Delivered about
16 children, a lot more pigs, chicken, cows and the other kind of
stuff. I basically worked the CA side of the house. I worked a
lot with the Montagnards, lived up with the Montagnards, had an
adopted son and he was one of the Sergeant Majors, a
Vietnamese Sergeant Major that I operated with up in I Corp and
outside in Nong Son, I cannot remember, and I started an
orphanage up down below Nong Sun. Had seven monks, they
had about 37 kids plus my adopted son and I was apparently very
successful in my area running all the stuff and Charlie decided I
shouldnt be there any more, so they killed six of my monks,
18 of the kids and then chopped my son up in pieces and said,
Tell, Bac Si John to stay out of the area. So I kind
of changed my opinion on North Vietnamese, whoever was just
passing me by and I was perfectly happy with it, I loved what I
did and so I did a couple of operations on my own. When I would
go out into the areas, I would get an arm band and I had see
North Vietnamese that walked by in Minet but I was treating as
many are there, water buffalo for rinderpest, because they were
South Vietnamese sympathizers. So they decided, well, we are
thinking of sending John back to States and Colonel Hayes, says,
no, I think you ought to send him down the road to a place
called CCN. So I went to Command and Control North, went
down to 1-0 School, came back, ran Anaconda with Keith Kincaid.
Our primary mission was interdictions of Routes 922 and 9222,
interdiction of different trials coming down the Ho Chi Minh
Trail complex and the biggest problem in the areas was that the
Air Force should come in and seed the given area with either Mark
5s or other types of ordinance with delay in acoustics and all
these different metallic detonation characteristics, and so we
were getting ready to go into an area and I went in on my first
mission; I had a couple of guys who I was attempting to carry a
Montagnard, never saw him, but they would shoot up, but come back
in, and one of the Sergeant Majors, can't _____ I did not
exactly, I never fired my weapon, therefore I didnt do
something right. And I saved both my Montagnards lives, got
them back to the hospital. I was only one praying to go back on
the ground, and did you find 922?
Steve Sherman: No.
John Cavaiani: X-Ray Delta, a
little bit up there in X-Ray Delta. It was a complex trail that
came down and what would happen after they would go into all
these different Mark type bombs with the devices, Charlie would
have to re-route. So I picked up through some aerial image and
area there at that time was specifically a cart trail and barely
even a cart trail, that had actually gone in and did a circle.
When I started looking at the pictures, the problems were that I
saw a Russian helicopter, I saw a lot of things that your imagery
people just did not have the time to look for when you are
talking large mapping areas and I said, this is where they
are going to come through and sure as hell we get there,
they built an all weather road. I am talking timbers
underneath and then building a surface on top of it, lots of rock
baskets so when the Air Force comes in and blows up the road,
they go filled it with rocks and dirt on top of them, it is
filled in 45 minutes. I operated there and finally there was this
guy who was going to be taking over Anaconda that I personally
didnt want to operate with, that was just me, and that was
a choice that we had. I went down starting plotting all the
bombing raids that were coming in in the TOC and the old man
tried to get me in my commission, got me in my commission to
Captain, I turned it down because the only thing permanent in
Special Forces were non commissioned officers; nobody else
goes back to their basic branch. The old man was kind of pissed.
He said, Well, then, you are taking over command of Hickory
anyway. So I went up there, I had Captain Belarski, had a
number of other guys up on the hill with me and we got hit by a
reinforced regiment. I had one young man, a very atypical big
kid, heavy, coke bottle glasses, rather slovenly looking and that
and I put him in for the Medal of Honor. Kid had had a set of cojones
you couldnt have carried in a wheel barrow. Finally got
overran. Got most all of my people out. I had 17 people. Here
comes the problem in a war that you have a little black square in
a general officers AO. My citation reads due to
inclement weather and blah, blah, blah, no more
helicopters. Commander of the 101st, General
Barry, decides he didnt like that little black square and
he was going to make an attempt. He went back channels when Heavy
Hook launched CH-46 to come in and get us, he got to the border
and the pilot got told to put his aircraft on the ground, or he
would never fly again. Spent two years in North Vietnam because
of that. Unfortunately, thats the way it went. Petty
jealousies at SOG, CCN, never used the 101st again and
that was the primary reason why. I got back, I never confronted
him, I have seen General Barry, but I have never confronted him.
What I hated most about Vietnam was the fact the situation with
the Montagnards. I think it was disgraceful, what our nation did
and not accepting more and getting more of our Montagnards to
support their guys. Vietnamese govt. still considers them moi
which basically means savage. Donohue has done a lot
of great work, going in and medical supplies. Not now, he has
reached the point where the Vietnamese government wont let
him in any more, still able will go back in, get medical
supplies, dig wells, provide water buffalo and got him to where
they were able to have started in the coffee production.
Unfortunately the Vietnamese government does not allow them to
sell to anybody except themselves. It is needless to say the
Montagnards arent even going to make any money of coffee
either. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Steve Sherman:
I think what we will do is take a short break now, but we really
havent done nearly justice to this topic in any way. Since
we didnt get our token Marine in here, I am going to give
him five minutes to fly
[Audio/Video
Break]
R. J Del Vecchio:
Overall the Marine Corp lost, I am trying to think, 6, 8, or 9
photographers [note: turns out the total is 12, all
photographers] and correspondents in Vietnam including one of the
guys in one of these pictures, who was my best friend. In fact,
Gus Hasford, who wrote the book that was the background for
Full Metal Jacket, was a correspondent and, if you
ever see the movie, the main character, Joker, is the guy Gus Hasford
thinks he was. Not quite, and Gus is dead now, unfortunately. He
drank himself under all the way, did a great job. If you have
seen that movie, at the very end of the movie, the Joker is saved
from the Vietnamese [Communist] woman sniper by the little
character who hung around him during the trip, the photographer.
That photographer in real life was a guy named Charles
Pennington, who was a good friend of mine. After I was wounded,
he went out on assignment to Khe Sanh without me and didnt
come back, unfortunately, and he is in one of these pictures
here.
Anyhow, what we
would do is, when we went out to the field, wed get a call,
somebody, actually the OIC of the photo unit would get a call
saying, hey, the 7th Marines are having some kind of a slugfest
at such and such a place and then we would get issued a Nikon F
and a bunch of rolls of films and we were told, get down there
and work with the guys. We had these permanent travel orders at
the Division Photolab that let us go anywhere in I Corps. That
little dot is a grenade in the sky that he is throwing into a
tree line. The NVA broke and ran and these guys are following up
on them and this whole sequence here; some of these are in the
National Archives, and youll see them in some books on Vietnam.
These guys are following up. I am running up behind them. It was
kind of a damp day. That was September 68. At the end, they
just stood at the edge of field, the fog came in and the sniper
and the machine gun were picking off the last couple of NVA they
could get.
Thats me at China
Beach on a good day. Thats just thrown in there because the
Marines have to have a flag and a couple of guys in procession
somewhere. (That is actually downtown Raleigh where we have a
ceremony every month.) This thing here real quick, there was an arclight
in the area. You could see that there are craters in the back, we
were crawled in there, that is John Charles Pennington, the guy
who died later. And somebody tripped a booby trap and they sent
in this chopper to get him. They couldnt come over the
mountain, it was apparently too high up. So this guy brought this
CH-46 down this long narrow valley, it was like 6 feet of
clearance on either side of the rotor blades, stopped, picked
this guy up, did this very slow careful turn, and went back down
and it is one of my interesting shots in that I didnt
usually get to take pictures of the helicopter looking down, as I
did in the beginning of this one.
But anyhow, we
worked with the units and I worked with a variety of Marine
units, starting in, the first combat was in February 68,
went up to Hue towards the end of that battle, was involved with
some other operations in the summer. I was wounded in May. The
black and white combat sheet, the ones that you saw; I finished
that black and white roll film and this one right here and
proceeded to put a color roll of film in and a lot of other stuff
happened and it got very, very messy at one point. First, I got
slowed down because, and it took our side to do it. A tank ran
over my foot, okay, and then I couldnt run anywhere near as
fast after that. So I got up on one elbow, to take a picture
because there were gooks in the tree line and, you never saw a
gook, you seldom actually saw a gook. And so as soon as they said
gooks in the trees, I got up on one elbow to take a
picture and the bullet came in from the other side of the
crossfire smacking into my hand, smacking into the camera and
sent it flying and I said something like, oh shit.
Actually the funny
part, a quick historical note, two years ago, I was invited to a
Marine Corps Reunion which happened to be outside of DC. I had
been looking for my pictures and what happened after, in the
summer of 80 is that, somebody in the national government
said, we have got Marine Corps Archives, the Air Force Archives,
we have the Army Archives; we are not to have any more; we are
going to have National Archives, all the Services have to turn
all their pictures in and the ones that College Park Maryland
hadnt accepted are out there some place. So I said, okay,
and I was in DC and I went to look for them and I went and filled
out about 15 tons of paperwork that qualifies research and I went
up and spent four hours going through probably 4,000-5,000 images
and I found a bunch of mine and I am rolling along. When the
camera was hit, the bullet went through the side of the camera
that the film is on, not the side where the film spools up when
you take it. I had taken seven or eight pictures and I hung on to
the camera and when I got back to the first aid station hospital,
I gave to one of the other photographers that came up and said
take it back because there is enough rolled up on that roll that
maybe the stuff inside isnt exposed yet. When I came out of
the hospital, they said no, it is in DC [Marine Headquarters]. It
is all gone, too bad. I said, damn, those were nice pictures on
that. There I am in DC, in Maryland , going through these files
and I come across a picture and it is R. J. Del Vecchio, 7
May 1968 and I look down and it is in color. It is one of
the pictures off the roll that for 34 years I did not know
existed. And I just sat there and looked at it for five minutes
like, you know, you got to be kidding me, and it is a picture of,
I dont show it because it is messy etc. In one of the
sequences here you see machine guns that are firing along the
side of the tank on the 7th of May, it is the same guy. After
that part of the action, we were running across an open area and
we finally got hit by machinegun fire. The open air was actually
the field of fire for the NVA and as one of the cute little
things like the movies, where the sand goes poof all
around you and this guy took one to the leg and thigh and went
down. The assistant gunner ran back took the machine gun and kept
on going which is what you are supposed to do and I took a
picture of this guy lying there bleeding and other people behind
him fighting, they are throwing grenades, and I am behind this
tree hiding and the guy looks up and says something in the order
of, you have an unnaturally close relationship with your
mother, I really think you should come out here and help me
in. And I replied gently as I could, are you sure,
sir, there is no one else you would prefer to have come and aid
you? He made further comments about my personal habits,
ultimate destination and things like that and the Marine Corps
used to train you to go out there bravely and grab the guy and
pick him up and put him in a fireman carry and walk back out of
the field of fire bravely, and I said, enough of that shit. I
went out and I grabbed him by one wrist and dragged him back
screaming because his shattered legs were hurting him but I was
in kind of a hurry at that time and I got him back and he never
thanked me. Unfortunately, he went into heat shock and we wound
up in a bomb crater, a 500 pound bomb crater, actually that is
where the tank ran over because as most of you might know the
tanks field of view is about 15 feet. Well, if a 500 pound
bomb crater is 15 feet across, and we are in the crater
sheltering from machine gun fire and we hear this tank coming, we
are feeling good like, there is a tank coming, we will be better
off. The tank is coming closer, and closer and really close and
you look up and bow of the tank is coming over the lip of the
crater, and as you know, the way the tank goes through the crater
is up and then boomf; the boomf part is bad, you dont want
to be there for the boomf part, so that is when I pushed this
wounded guy up from the side, there were two other guys in there
and as I was pushing this one guy up, my foot went back just as
the tank went over it. The only thing that really saved the foot
is that there was soft sand at the bottom of the crater, and I
heard somebody really screaming and then I realized it was me,
and I must have screamed loud enough because they heard me in the
tank which was a bad thing because the tank was three-quarters of
the way off, they heard me screaming, so they stopped and backed
up. It just was not a good day, any way you looked at it okay,
but at least the camera is still working.
Anyhow, so we did a
bunch of stuff and some of them was very routine in the back area
and some of them was very hairy messy stuff and I came back and I
didnt bring a lot of the pictures with me. I look back now
and if I had a time machine, I would go back and kick myself in
the butt so goddamn hard, it wouldnt even be funny because
I left stuff behind. I wasnt thinking of it back then. And
like most of us, I came back, I had one real episode of feeling
really upset when I was half drunk in grad school and then I took
the war and I put it behind the wall, put a big barrier across
the door and didnt think about it for about 30 years okay.
Now I do more talking, thinking about it because of being
involved in educational programs and I think it is really
valuable to talk to kids about it and try to get them to
understand things, and especially things about the Myths of
Vietnam because to me, the Myths of Vietnam have become larger
than reality and they are hurting us and thats why I think
this is a great conference. Thats my short story, I was
supposed to keep it short and that is as short as I can make it
and if anybody has a question they can ask be later because I
promised to turn the microphone over very quickly to the next
speaker. Yes?
Unidentified
Audience Member: Do you find out who the helicopter pilot
was?
R. J Del Vecchio:
No, and I sent these pictures in. There is a Helicopter Pilots
Association, and they have a calendar thing, and they wanted
these things and they built a calendar on a couple of these
things and I said, you guys can see the aircraft marking, which
they can, they are pretty clear, and they said, we still
can't get back to who that pilot was. We can tell what squadron
it was, and I said, I can tell you when it was
roughly in date, and they said, if you could tell us
the exact day, we can may be find the guy but I can only
give them the markings, and they are like, too bad, we
can't find the guy. Great flying though. And thats
it.
Audience: You
ever find the tank driver?
R. J Del Vecchio:
No, I did want to thank him for his, you know, skill.
[Further remarks
were made without microphone and are unintelligible.]