Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Spelling errors are indicated with [sic]; however, recurring errors in spelling within a single document have been marked the first time and not subsequently.
This interview was transcribed and edited by April Hudson on May 4th, 2005.
... conducted by Tim Sanders, and we're interviewing Dave Phillips who is home in Demotte, Indiana.
That's David Phillips.
What's your birthday, Dave?
August 29th, 1944. 1724 Hickory, Demotte, Indiana.
Where were you born?
Born in Winamac, Indiana.
Winamac.
Pulaski County.
Do you know a guy named Bud Maness (ph)?
I have heard of Manesses. Yeah, I know Bud. Yeah, I've seen Bud. I worked for Bud for six years. My father and him were friends.
Uh-huh. When did you graduate from high school and how did you end up getting involved in the service?
I was -- I graduated from the brand new consolidation of North Gaston, which was Fulton, Indiana --
Uh-huh.
-- in 1962. And I was married immediately. I went to Purdue in 1962. I had aspirations of being an aeronautical engineer. But two children and an idea that engineering wasn't really what I wanted out of life caused me to drop out of that. I went to work as a electrician for Chrysler. The marriage I was involved in ended in 1966 and my draft notice showed up about a month after the divorce was final. And it was interesting, because I was relatively old.
Uh-huh.
24 when I got drafted.
Into the Army?
Yeah.
When were you -- when did you go in?
I went in in January of 1968. And I stayed around until April of 1971. That's longer than the two year commitment.
Right.
Because I went to OCS and that cost me another two years.
All right. Well, you were drafted out of Winamac and where did you go then?
Actually, I was living in Rochester.
Okay.
Fulton County is where I was drafted. I went to Fort Campbell. I went through basic training at Fort Campbell, thinking that because I was a radio operator for ATamp;T at the time that the Army would use some intelligence and make me a radio man. I was a second class radio-telephone operator for ATamp;T at the time. But, in their infinite wisdom because I scored very high on my math test, they made me a mortar man.
They sent me to Fort Pope, Louisiana.
Sure.
To study mortars and run an FDC. So I -- Fort Pope, which was home of tiger land was a -- just really a training center for Vietnam. It was strictly a Vietnam training center. There they invited me to go to -- the Army at the time had an instant NCO program where they would take a few people and volunteer them to go to sergeants' school in Benning.
Okay.
So I left there a corporal and I went to Benning as a -- to NCOC school. They called them shake and bakes, or instant NCO's.
Uh-huh.
Came out of that an E5 twelve weeks later. Which nobody liked us because we had rank way too early.
Sure.
Eight months in the Army and I'm an E5.
Yeah. You got guys not in that program that didn't like it because they --
Yeah, I was -- you know, here I was, I had only been in the Army less than a year and I'm trying to be a sergeant or a supervisor to some kids that --
Uh-huh.
-- been around for four years and they were still Spec 4's. So there was some animosity. But the school was strictly designed to teach kids how to run people in combat.
Uh-huh.
And it was a good training center. I enjoyed NCOC so much that when they asked me if I wanted to go to OCS I said,
"Why not." I'd been in training now for over a year --
Uh-huh.
-- I might as well just go to OCS also. I enjoyed OCS.
Right there at Benning. My wife didn't think much of it at the time. I got remarried right after I went into the Army.
And I'm still married to the same woman. She's one of the few Vietnam wives that's still married to the same guy.
Yeah.
But, I went through OCS at Benning. Came out of Benning. They sent me to Campbell waiting on flight orders, because I had tried to get in a flight school but they lost the orders. So I ended up going back to mortar school,
_______+, and then went to Vietnam Christmas Eve 1969.
Christmas Eve of '69, and you were -- where were you at the time, still at Benning?
No, I was at Campbell.
You were at Campbell.
And they had sent me to Campbell to be a attack officer.
Then I went to training at -- back to Benning for mortars.
Then, in fact, when I went to Benning they had assigned me to the division that I was going to be with at Vietnam.
What was the attitude of your friends from Rochester-Winamac area? I mean, about you being in the service in the late --
It was a joke. It was -- I mean, it was -- they couldn't believe that, one, I had been drafted. I mean, I was one of two guys that were married the last month of my high school class. We never thought about going into the Army or anything else.
Uh-huh.
I mean, it was strictly -- you know, I was stupid enough to have a girlfriend get pregnant. Back then we married them.
Uh-huh.
And I had always growing up through the 50's -- my dad was in World War II, but he never left the states. My stepbrother had been in the Marines right after Korea. And to me military was something to be proud of. And I had grown up studying World War II, playing Army. It was just something that there was some pride in. When I was at Purdue in 1962 ROTC was mandatory. I was an Air Force ROTC. The only thing advantage about that was you got to wear warm clothes in December.
Uh-huh.
But -- and then during the Cuban Missile Crisis I was at Purdue and in ROTC and it was interesting what went on in those classrooms.
Sure.
But then when I left Purdue, military -- I had always wanted to be in the Air Force. I know -- I know every airplane that ever was built between 1941 and -- to me Air Force was just -- it was the glamour world.
Uh-huh.
Infantry was where nobody in their right mind would have wanted to be. I enjoyed Audie Murphy shows, but there was nothing like flying an airplane, so...
Didn't want to do it?
Didn't want to do that. But my draft notice changed my mind. I actually -- I had a lot of leadership ability and it served me well throughout my Army career, I call it, because I did stay in the Reserves for another four years after I got out. I had an A team up in South Bend after I got out.
Uh-huh.
And there were some good memories from that.
Good. Well, you left the south and you probably ended up in San Francisco, I'm guessing, to fly out?
Yeah. We left -- I left Chicago, my wife's mother took me to O'Hare and we flew out of Chicago to San Francisco International. Can't think of the name of that airport right now. And a cab ride over to -- or to Travis Air Force Base.
Uh-huh.
From there Anchorage to Tokyo to Vietnam. Holding pattern because they couldn't land because the Tan Son Nhut was being shelled.
Yeah.
It was an interesting ride. Flying Tiger Airlines.
Yup.
_______+.
You flew into Tan Son Nhut, and is that where you had your staging area, that's where you moved out of?
No. It was actually funny, they have a place called 90th Replacement there at Tan Son Nhut or right outside of it where everybody coming in the country went to that replacement center, and from there you get assigned to units.
Well, I was already assigned to the 25th Infantry Division prior to going to mortar school. So I was already wearing my ?flash? And they just held me there until the company or the division seen fit to send somebody down to get me. In fact, it was probably the scariest time of my life was at 90th Replacement. Having a Vietnamese give me a shave with a razor, I just -- I couldn't believe how scared I was. But I was only there for three, three days. And I went to what -- they have -- every division has a in-country training center, one week of learning what's in your AO, and they teach you about booby traps and what the present techniques were. And I'm a brand new _________+, second lieutenant. Lot of John Wayne in me. Of course, of going through NCOC and OCS it was hard not to have a lot of John Wayne in you, and very optimistic about going. I wanted to go to Vietnam. I think it was very stupid to have that attitude.
Uh-huh.
But I did. I was -- I was definitely anti-hippy at the time.
You were at Tan Son Nhut and then where did the 25th go from there?
It was a Jeep ride out to a place called Cu Chi that was the division headquarters. I was assigned immediately as the third platoon leader of A Company, Second 14th Infantry. And our -- my first mission was to run a road bunker complex that protected the road out to ________+ Base Patton. To me it was really disappointing because it was just sit in a bunker all day and watch the Vietnamese go down the road. Everybody I was with thought it was great duty because it was relatively safe. The platoon I took over had been overrun three weeks before. Eight of the fourteen people in the platoon had been killed. And they had -- the ones that were left had a bad attitude.
Uh-huh.
They were tired of the war, to put it mildly. I had a sergeant by the name of Hogue that was -- from the time the lieutenant was killed day after Christmas until I arrived he was the platoon leader. And Hogue was a shake and bake NCO.
Uh-huh.
But he was -- he was a good man. He knew what was going on. And so it -- Cu Chi was my start. In fact, week after I got there we had the, oh, the Bob Hope show came into Cu Chi.
But I didn't get to be there because I was out on patrol --
Uh-huh.
-- protecting it. But that was interesting. At least I knew he was in the area.
Yeah. You were out on patrol. What was your day like, how did you --
The 25th was a great division to be fighting that war.
The 25th had the most casualties of any unit in Vietnam, including the Marines. But the 25th, we had more helicopters than any other unit in 'Nam. The 82nd and the Makab (ph) get all the publicity of being air mobile, but the 25th had more choppers. And we used our choppers different than, well, like the movie soldiers. Our choppers, they inserted us and they pulled us out, but they also got us hot meals every day.
My day would generally consist -- especially the first three months was you get up in the morning from your ambush site.
You ambush all night. But generally you were on thirty percent alert after midnight. Three guys, three-man position. Two would be sleeping, one awake in our ambush site. And as soon as dawn would get up, we would get up and we would rip all day until noon, choppers would bring us food in and resupply, and that was our day. We stay out for fourteen or fifteen days, but we did not -- we always had touch. We had mail every day. You know, it was just a job.
Uh-huh.
Charlie knew where we were, but in 1970 the war in Southern Vietnam was almost over.
Right.
We had to really work to find Charlie. And we took a lot of casualties, but generally they were booby trap type casualties. The Ho Bo Woods was a notorious place where we worked. And, in fact, this Sergeant Hogue and six others in my platoon on February the 12th, Hogue stepped on a 105 booby trap. And didn't hurt him near as bad as you'd think. It blew the front of his foot off, but it took out eight of my fourteen guys that I had. Same as before. Hogue had been running the platoon up to that time because my first fire fight I tried to be John Wayne and it just didn't work. I had -- we had an insertion south of Patton. There was about ten VC spotted in a hedgerow complex. And we inserted as a company, which was really rare to have a company insertion.
And we got off and hit the dikes, rice paddy dikes, and it was my first fire fight. And Captain Dollfeen (ph) radioed for me to move my platoon into the hedgerow. I jumped over that dike. One of those follow-me things. And next thing I knew I was a rice paddy dike ahead of everybody else. I was out there all by myself. Made me mad. That was the only thing. Embarrassed the hell out of me.
Sure.
So I walked back, I grabbed my machine gun guy and drug him over the dike and we got in -- you know, we got it. But then the next thing I knew was I was walking point and I had sprayed some movement to the front. And my RTO says, "Good shot." I didn't even know I hit the guy. He was standing three feet from me and he was dead and I didn't know I'd even hit him. And then I realized I didn't have a clue of what this war was all about.
Right.
And from that point until February the 12th for about six weeks Hogue ran the platoon. I followed. I was a rifleman. I just wanted to find out how to stay alive. And it served me well. I would say it took me two months to realize the objective in Vietnam was to get home alive.
Right.
And I ran my platoon that way. I had a great record. I only had one guy killed. I had fifty-eight wounded. And I was on line longer than any other lieutenant in the 25th Division, because you were supposed to come off line after three months. My best friend got killed the day I come off line, and I took his platoon and I had it for another three months. So I had line platoon for six months, I had a recon platoon for another month. I was S3 Air for five months.
Which I loved the S3 Air job. I got to fly and do all kinds of nice things. I even had an Arclight mission I got to run.
Wow.
But I had a good tour, I had a good tour. I had some great guys who I have no idea who they are. That's the biggest sorrow I had from Vietnam is nobody used names. I was always 1-6 or 3-6. Hogue, I knew his name because he got wounded so damn quick. And I just made contact with him five months ago.
Uh-huh.
And I been that long trying to find him. But all the other guys that served with me, I have got slides that have their names on them sometimes like a Pile (ph) and Rick Olson or something like that. But I just have no idea who they are other than the picture.
You were there then -- that was your year, you were -- you were there two three-month terms and then you were a month on recon and five months in the air?
Yeah. And S3 Air recon combo.
Were you around Cu Chi the whole time?
No. The first three months we worked an area called the Angel's Wing, which was the Cambodian border, and a sugar mill. Sugar mill was an old sugar plantation down the Bamkidon (ph) river that runs along that separates Cambodia and Vietnam in that area. It was basically elephant grass, which is a tall, weedy type grass with rice paddy dikes and hedgerows. That was our AO. Unlike the Marines up north who were triple canopy. The cab (ph) to the north of us was in triple canopy. We worked -- basically I could -- it was like walking Indiana fields. I felt real comfortable. And I'm a farm kid and I liked to walk point because I could walk through a barn lot without stepping in shit.
Uh-huh.
It was just a talent that you had.
Uh-huh. You practiced it.
And so you have that sixth sense about whether you put your foot down or not. But we worked that AO. Generally ambushing at night, recon in the daytime. We worked --
General Tree (ph) of the Cambodian Army or the ARVN's, the ARVN, the Vietnam Army --
Uh-huh.
-- in April did an invasion into Cambodia. And we -- it was a, a blocking force, my division was, or my regiment. We did a lot of blocking along then. In fact, we had an incident that took place, me and this lieutenant that got killed on April Fool's Day, Fielding, the two platoons went out for an ambush and we had walked into the ambush site late. And Fielding, even though he was a lot younger than I was, he was senior because he'd been in Vietnam three months before I was there, got wounded, got sent back to the states and volunteered to come back to the same unit. And I had his platoon. So he took over the first platoon and he was originally third platoon leader in November when he'd gotten a claymore pellet in the chest and they'd taken him out and then he came back. And a great kid. He was a Mormon, nineteen years old. Didn't have a clue of what was going on in the world.
Uh-huh.
Here I am, I'm twenty-five, I got my fifth kid on the way and been married twice. We were salt and pepper. But he was a good kid. But we walked out of our ambush positions that night and he was trailing, and one of his guys left their rifle in the holding site. And this was about eleven o'clock at night. So we held up. They went back to get the rifle. While we're sitting there I hear people talking in front of me. And we had starlight, which was a real advantage. And here come an NVA company across the border right into me. I got twenty-five guys total in two platoons facing two hundred NVA, or my estimate was two hundred. It probably was more like a hundred. But...
More than you wanted?
We hit them hard because they were coming down the same rice paddy dike we were standing on. I hit them hard and I brought our artillery in right away and they ran. Which was the only thing that saved our bacon. And I get the command from the Colonel to roll over their positions. I said,
"Right." We just stayed put for the rest of the night and I kept artillery hammering about two hundred yards in front of me. The next morning we got five AK's, a bunch of pith helmets. I still got one of the pith helmets. It was a good fight.
Uh-huh.
I'd hurt them and I didn't get anybody touched. But two days later the Division C and C was up to pick me up. I got an Article 15 that night for killing civilians. I also got a bronze _______ for the action, too. But...
Uh-huh.
But it -- it was just the way the war went.
Very strange.
You know, they had to take me down to the sugar mill and they had a thing where they -- with cameras and the Cambodian government had demanded that the people that had killed the farmers -- so I got an Article 15. Now, it gets pulled as soon as I leave the county.
Right.
But that was the kind of war it was.
I know. Very strange thing.
There was a lot of strange things. I had no-fire zones, free-fire zones in places where I couldn't shoot back. And yet I was taking fire. I had places where I could burn out a three-county area if I wanted to. As the slicks would lift off, we'd throw C4 burning back in and start the biggest forest fires you ever seen. But that was just 'Nam. Rules of engagement were hard. And when I watched that show "Blackhawk Down," I really understood what they were talking about rules of engagement because ours were always crazy.
Every time we went on a mission you had to sit there. Okay, where am I? Am I in a free-fire zone? Because that's what you really wanted. I wanted to be able to shoot at anything that moved. Or if you was working around some of the small hamlets then you had -- if you took fire you could return fire. And then we had other places outside of Cu Chi where no-fire zones and I'd taken AK fire from those ________ and couldn't return fire. And that's -- that's hard when you get guys hit and you can't shoot back. But it was the war. It was the way things went.
When you were in the air what was that like, what was your --
I got -- I had four air medals, so I spent some time in the air.
Okay.
We had five hot insertions, which is a high number because usually you get your insertions, but they are not always hot. And you never -- you always leave the slicks expecting to be hit anyway because everybody in the county knows that you are coming.
__________?
It's not -- after a while you can identify what kind of chopper it is by just the rotor blast. And when the Hueys were coming, you know, you got the snakes on the side. You know we're coming, we're serious. Lot of insertions.
Usually one insertion a week. Most of it is just in the elephant grass and you walk away and you walk and there's no _________. Other times if you hear a 52 opening up -- or 51 you get nervous, because that sucker hurts, hurt the slicks.
But generally the enemy I fought was the Viet Cong who was out of supplies.
Uh-huh.
And when I'd engage, he would run. Now, I didn't -- in May we went to Cambodia. Different war, totally different war. We lost two slicks in the first insertion when we went in. And it was -- in fact, the Cambodian war which was totally different than Vietnam, in May when we launched the attack into Cambodia, the 25th staged the largest artillery raid in the world. In fact, larger than anything ever happened in World War II. They had 175's and 155's lined up forever. And they just hammered the heck out of the houndshead and where we inserted. We had all the air power you could dream of, F100-s and F4's. I had a -- my favorite spad on my push all the time. He was always sitting there.
And we, en masse, the 25th went into Cambodia, all the choppers we had lifted off from a place called Men Tone (ph).
Yeah, _______+ place. The cab had been run in that area and it was triple canopy up there. Terrible area. Now, I understood how the cab worked, but it was a bad AO for the way we'd been brought up.
Uh-huh.
They didn't see anything different about it but, boy, my guys coming out of the rice paddies going into the triple canopy was a different world. Cambodia was also a totally different world than we were used. Vietnam was an area of beggars. Everybody in Vietnam begged. Cambodia wasn't that way. The Cambodians had farmers, farmers that respected each other and respected us. They were a barter society. If we gave them something, they had to give us something back. I remember one day we gave C-ration cigarettes to a guy come by on a cart. Two hours later he was back with that cart full of pineapples. And everybody in my platoon had to take two or three pineapples on there rucks --
Uh-huh.
-- just to keep him happy. And at the time I had had Kit Carson scouts and, you know, they were telling me, "We got to take these because you gave them cigarettes."
Yeah.
Different than Vietnam. The buildings were different in Cambodia. Everything was up on stilts. The people, the -- this one town called Fa Bin (ph) that Charlie had been using for a base camp and I had taken the town, took me two days to get Charlie out of it. And about a hundred and three houses.
It was a large town. And every house had a bunker underneath it. Well, at the time I was convinced those were NVA bunkers. Later I was to find out those were bunkers that the civilian population used for air attacks. But in my mind --
Uh-huh.
-- after I fought to take it I wasn't about to let them bunkers _________, so I blew every bunker that was in the town. Everything except -- the school was made out of teak, which was a beautiful building. And the administrative building and a church, a Cao Dai church all made out of teak.
And it was just -- you've seen teak furniture?
Uh-huh.
These buildings were that. I didn't destroy -- those buildings, I left. But everything else went. And then I got a call to stop the fire. That didn't work either.
Uh-huh.
Another Article 15. Just to save grace because they ended up psy-ops (ph) come back in.
Uh-huh.
Paid every civilian they could find a hundred bucks, which was a lifetime wages for them, if they lost anything in that town I took out. But Cambodia was a place where Chuck was here, we were here, and it was almost conventional warfare. It was hard for us to adapt to. My first big fire fight I had in that town was in the morning. I had taken out a gun team. I had another platoon been down. And in Vietnam fire superiority was everything. And I had a great machine gunner by the name of Ford. Me and my platoon sergeant,
Benson, at the time went charging up this road with everything blazing. Well, hell, we just rolled right over that gun position. Then I went back and kicked the lieutenant's tail that was in charge of the platoon that was pinned down. It is his own fault he got in a ditch, couldn't get out of the damn ditch.
Uh-huh.
But after that action you get to walking on water. You know, you're really -- you know, you're "The Man," so to speak. I took my platoon back, we set up for chow, three NVA's jumped out of the bushes and sprayed us with thirty rounds each. And it was a mistake on my part. I was not expecting them to be back. I was expecting them to run. I lost my only casualty in Vietnam in that action. A guy took a ricochet in the face and he'd only been with me three days.
I don't even know his name. That's the bad part about it.
Uh-huh.
Didn't even know his name. But I lost him. Nobody else got hit in my platoon. I mean, I had C-ration cans that had bullet holes in them in my rucksack. It was that kind of, you know --
Yeah.
-- everybody knew they were dead. But as soon as they emptied their clips, they ran rather than reload. They had us dead to rights. But like I said, you have the ups and the downs.
Uh-huh, sure.
You know, there was nothing worse then calling that medevac in to have that body bag pulled out. That was the first time I ever had that done to me and I didn't like that at all. But it was the only one I lost.
What -- how long were you in Cambodia?
We were in Cambodia two weeks. We went in the 15th of May and come out right at the first of June. Moved to a place called Dau Tieng when we came back, where we used to be stationed at a fire support base at Cu Chi. Dau Tieng was more north of Nui Ban Dinh, which was a big mountain you'll see pictures of in Vietnam. And Dau Tieng was an old French plantation area, place that had the Michelin Rubber plantations. I learned to hate Michelin. Michelin Rubber, which was a functioning plantation when we were there, there was two rubber plantations right around Dau Tieng, so every day I would go out and recon those rubber plantations. Well, you got the Vietnam workers and you got other people who are not workers. And it was hard to tell the difference. You could stand in a -- the trees were in corn rows, if you are familiar with the term. You could stand and look two mile down this row, but if you stepped and look the other way you couldn't see past the tree. It was just -- it was a weird place to work. And that -- my regiment worked Dau Tieng for three months. I had a platoon there. We had a lot of all-American fire fights in the Michelin. Because you would have two companies working different areas and they would walk into each other, and you shoot first and ask later. We did some crazy missions around the Dau Tieng area. There was a big river near it. The Navy PBR's would come up and pick us up in the daytime and take us upriver. We would ambush and then they would pick us up and come back. I told them I would never live on a PBR. You know, you are a sitting duck.
Uh-huh.
Everybody in the area knows you are out on the water. I could go into my grass and hide. They didn't want to get off their boats, but I didn't want to be on their boats. It -- but Dau Tieng was a French town. I hated to be in Dau Tieng.
It was a fire support base, it was built up. But I had a lot of people wounded there from mortar attacks. When we were in -- when I was out on my -- out in the woods --
Uh-huh.
-- I didn't get people hurt. When I come back and was sleeping in the metal buildings, the mortar rounds would hurt.
Sure.
We had a lot of success around Dau Tieng. I used to run ambushes outside the bunkers and the sappers would come in and I would catch them as they were coming out. I had a lot of luck with that. It would be a nice rainy -- the monsoon seasons and nobody fights in the night and everybody stays -- tries to stay dry. But we would catch them sappers coming out because they knew they would hit. We knew they were coming, and we would just sit and ambush them. It was good operations. Did a lot of airborne operations around that into places called the razorbacks. They were a ridge line area. But basically after we come back out of Cambodia the war in Southern Vietnam was over. We had -- the war was won.
We knocked their supply routes out. You know, that's why you talk about losing the Vietnam war, and I'm sitting there saying I had it won. I don't know how you lose it.
Uh-huh.
But between '71 and '75 things changed drastically.
You left Cambodia and -- or you left Vietnam would have been around Christmastime?
Actually I got a three week early out. I got home Thanksgiving.
Oh, okay.
I surprised my wife. She wasn't expecting me. I called her -- it was one of those the CO asked me, "Do you want to leave today?" And I said, "In a heartbeat."
So that would have been Thanksgiving of '71?
Yeah -- '70.
'70?
'70.
Okay. And you flew back?
I came back. The plane had to have more gas than that.
We left Tan Son Nhut and landed in Frisco.
Wow.
They said that don't happen very often, but that's the way we came home. Eighteen hours on a damn Convair 880. And as luck would have it, when I got to Tan Son Nhut I was expecting to send a wire home saying I was coming. But the bird was leaving, we had already had our hold baggage because the division was deactivating. It started deactivating in October.
Okay.
They were going to pull the 25th out. A lot of us was hoping to go to Hawaii with the division.
Uh-huh.
But for some reason I got assigned to the _______ special forces in -- in Devons. And one of the mistakes on the green sheet I made in OCS was I wanted to wear that funny hat. So I left Vietnam and I went to Fort Devons. But that ride home was fun. Eighteen hours to Tan Son Nhut, then a taxi cab over to Frisco. Of course, that included the eggs that we got coming out of Tan Son Nhut. Lot of people didn't like us, and I was so darn bullheaded I wore my uniform. A lot of them didn't. I wore it all the way home, the khaki's.
I loved my khaki's.
Uh-huh.
And I was kind of proud. I had a chest full of medals and I'd had a good tour. But I didn't like the eggs. The cab driver didn't like the eggs either. He said, "I hate you SOB's for riding in my cab," you know. He wasn't happy either. But I caught a plane at Frisco to O'Hare half hour after I got there. So I didn't have time to make a phone call. So I'm sitting up at O'Hare. My wife don't even know I'm out of the country yet. So I called Kokomo -- or called Logans -- she was living at Logansport at the time. She didn't believe me. She didn't think it was me. I called her at ten at night. I says, "I'm sleeping at O'Hare tonight, there's a shuttle that Air Wisconsin flies into Kokomo, I'll be on it ten o'clock tomorrow morning." She thought it was a prank call. I did not -- soldiers had no idea what their wives were going through.
Sure.
Every time my name showed up in the paper, my wife who worked the checkout at a grocery store was abused. "Oh, your husband is over killing babies again."
Yeah.
And I never -- the guys never took that into account.
The -- so when I got to Kokomo, no wife. And it wasn't her fault.
Right.
But I blamed her for years. I said, "You can't even get to the airport." But, you know. And it wasn't her fault.
Her mother had her car.
Uh-huh.
When she did find out it was me -- and so I sat there for three hours waiting for somebody to come and get me. It was not, not a good day. But they -- then they signed me -- after I got home they sent me to Devons to be a soldier and I didn't want to be a soldier anymore. I had four months left on my tour or service. Devons wasn't fun, because I gave up hundred degree heat for twenty inches of snow every day.
Uh-huh. Where is Devons?
It's in Massachusetts.
Oh, okay.
It's up in the mountains in Massachusetts. And they wanted me to jump out of airplanes, which I didn't like.
Paid extra money, but I didn't like it. And my job -- I had gotten drafted. I was working for ATamp;T when I was drafted.
So my service had bridged.
Uh-huh.
So I had a five year seniority waiting for me when I got home and I was ready to come home. I left Devons. I was only there three months. I was the S2 intelligence officer for a group and they were just converting to direct action missions. We did some dumb things. Jumped into towns and stuff like that up there. Because they were just converting over where special forces used to be all hearts and minds jobs during Vietnam. In '71 they started changing to direct action where they became more of a ranger-oriented units.
And then when I come home I stayed with the 12th Special Forces out of South Bend. I had an A team up there for four years and my company promoted me and said I had to give up being a soldier. But I had a good crew. I enjoyed my time, great friendships. And my wife survived it.
I see a purple heart license plate on your car.
Yeah. I got _____+. That was -- it was in February after Hogue had got -- and those guys had gotten hit out in Ho Bo's. It was funny, I got me a brand new platoon sergeant and the guy was an E7. Now, you just didn't see E7 platoon sergeants in Vietnam.
Right.
They had more sense. This guy had twelve years in the Army and he'd never been to Vietnam. And I get him as a platoon sergeant. And it was funny, he came from Korea. He had spent two tours in Korea. But he had no idea what Vietnam was about. The first patrol we were -- we had left Cu Chi by the West Gate and we were working elephant grass.
This was the same area that the platoon had been overrun in December. And there was still some people understood what that was all about out there. Well, the grass was about five to six foot high. And I let them out and we'd walked about half a mile. I got movement the front. I panicked and I stopped. I'm watching and I'm watching and I see this movement again and I figure, Oh, boy, we are getting -- another notch is coming up here, this one is mine. Then I see this head stick out of the grass, it just scared the heck -- it's six foot grass and a snake's got his head out of the grass. It did not -- big damn cobra. They run in pairs and I only seen one. Just sweat just boiling. I mean, I was scared. I hate snakes. I mean, I just hate them. We backed out of that area and made a wide sweep of the area. But that was the kind of things you run into. Just when you think you got everything else in hand, then something else sticks its head up and --
Sure.
Biggest cobra I ever seen. And we went out -- we were assigned to set up, all three platoons of my company were going to ambush along this river, basically a big ditch. And we got out there okay and we set up. But, again, it was elephant grass. It just was not a place you wanted to be set up in. And if Charlie was sitting anywhere he knew where you were, he could hear you walking through it. We got set up and I was -- I had twelve guys with me. So we set up in three four-man triangle for the ambush site. I had a trail right in front of me that my two tack units were sitting on it and the CP units in the back of the triangle. And we were inside a small old hedge -- or rice paddy. I had the berms, and I says, "This is good," and we laid our claymores on the outside of the berm and proceeded to sit here and say another boring night of just sitting up waiting for the sun to come up. About one o'clock we took two grenades into our site.
And as soon as they hit everybody blew their claymores. It's just automatic. You know, you got -- it's just an instinct.
You got the claymore clacker right there by your head. You hear an explosion. Well, yours goes off right over the dike.
I'm leaning against this side of the dike, the claymore is on the other side and it cuts me a firing path out. Makes a nice field of fire, cut that grass down. Then we waited about another fifteen minutes, then we took one grenade.
Well, on those kind of patrols I'm carrying -- everybody is carrying about twenty grenades themselves. We use baseball grenades, little bitty round things, M28's. Well, they are using potato mashers and they can only throw them maybe twenty-five yards. We can throw these baseballs fifty. Man, we can really crank them up. So we are sitting there, we are playing we'd throw, they'd throw, we'd throw, they'd throw.
This went on for an hour. I'm running out of grenades. And we're only carrying about two clips a ball and at night you are not going to use ball anyway. And I'm getting really nervous. Then all of a sudden I hear this guy come up on push, you know, everybody from division on down knows I have got a -- I got a two hour fire fight going on. This is just unheard of. We're still in contact after two hours, you know.
Uh-huh.
The other two platoons are upriver from me, but they are not about to try and engage because I'll end up shooting them, too. So here comes this pilot on the radio. "Hey,
1-6, you need my help?" I says, "Yeah." But I says, "I don't trust putting artillery on the ground." He says, "No."
He says, "I just need you to tell me where you are or show me where you are." He says, "I have seen the fire or the explosions." But he says, "I need to know exactly where you are." I says, "What are you alluding to?" He says, "You got a strobe?" I says, "Yes." He says, "Give me a flash."
"No." You know, nobody in their right mind is going to take -- we had these lights.
Yeah.
It looked like a battery pack about yea big and it has a strobe on the top of it. It lights up the world just like that, and it's off. Just like in a bar now where you see the strobe lights?
Uh-huh.
That's what this thing was. That pilot was asking me to turn that strobe on so he could see where I was on the ground. Of course, the problem with that is if I turn it on and he knows where I'm at --
Everybody else knows.
Everybody else in the grass knows where I'm at. I'm sitting there and it took me fifteen minutes to make a decision and I'm sitting there, we are running out of grenades and this is nuts. It's one of them John Wayne things, you just -- but it was one of those things I had to do it. So you put this thing in a helmet and you tell him,
"I'm only going to do this once; you'd better get it right the first time," you know. And he says, "All right. I'm south of you." I say, "I can hear you." He says, "Let me have it," you know. So you stand up because you got to get out of the grass --
Uh-huh.
-- to flash that thing, and it's like a flash bulb going off. I mean, the world lights up, you know, and you know you are dead. You just -- you know you're dead. You know and everybody in my unit knew, you know, because my -- the platoon sergeant says, "You can't do that." He says, "They'll know exactly where we are." I says, "No shit." But this was a Spectre, a C130. And as soon as I did it he says, "I got you down there," he says --
But I caught some shrapnel that night in the hand. But again, it was a good night. You know, I had me and another guy caught a little shrapnel, and nothing -- didn't get a ________ line.
Sounded like you didn't -- you pretty much enjoyed your time in the Army, relatively speaking?
I did. One, I was at a point in time -- I'm an egomaniac and I was having a hard time proving who I was. I had gotten married real early. I hadn't got to go to college like I'd wanted to. Things had not been working out for me.
This give me a chance to find out just who I was. I found out I was a real good leader. I didn't have any problem at all with people following me. It also made me start appreciating some things that I hadn't really appreciated. A lot of Vietnam veterans had a horrible time coming home with their families. Because -- I can't expect my wife to understand. I mean, I had all of the post-Vietnam problems, you know. Backfire would get me on the dirt instantly.
Probably took five years to get rid of the dreams. One of the best things I did was stay in the reserves. I had a vent.
Uh-huh.
One weekend every month I went up with a bunch of other nuts and we would talk war stories. And that's the best -- when I was doing counseling in the 80's, that was the best counseling you can do was talk. Got to talk. Yeah, this don't make any sense, you know. You greased a twelve year old kid who's walking up with a grenade. I mean, it's a fact of life. The first female kill we had, it was hard to handle. And yet, she was an operative that they had been looking for for years. But that's just not -- American boys don't kill kids and women very easily. And we are doing the same thing now with terrorism. But we didn't react well to that. But it did, it taught me a lot. I have always had an attitude about college kids because we had a lot of ring knockers -- which are West Pointers -- come in. And ROTC's,
ROTC officers though generally found better jobs than being a platoon leader. Most platoon leaders were OCS graduates.
Uh-huh.
They just couldn't get out of it. I enjoyed being a platoon leader. I was a good platoon leader. It was better being in S3 Air because there was a lot of Hollywood in that.
I got to ride in an 02 and mark positions for the phantoms and that was -- it got me so sick I just couldn't handle it.
But it was good. After I got back -- running the recon platoon was also fun because all I had was Hollywood missions. They would have three companies working and run people -- they would be running everybody in the Michelin up towards my position, which I knew Chuck was smart enough to know anywhere I was and I never had any problem being recon.
I liked riding the boats because they water skied off the back of the PBR'S in the daytime. And -- but the S3 job, you know, you got -- they got to stick them officers somewhere.
At the time I had a colonel who was a World War II/Korean War -- he had two stars on his CIB, so he was -- but he thought -- when he first came in the country he thought Vietnam was just like Korea. And those kind of leaders got us in real trouble in Vietnam.
Yeah.
It was a different war. There wasn't, They are there and we are here. And it took him a long time -- in fact, we did a lot of -- we did a cordon search one week of the Michelin Rubber and we are talking five hundred acres of trees, and you are throwing three companies or four companies around that trying to trap Chuck. It didn't work. We ended up eighteen KIA, all American fire fights.
Yeah.
A major operations officer by the name of King, never been in the country as a captain or lieutenant so very gung ho, but don't really know what the missions -- we were setting -- we set a lot of booby traps that -- we put our own booby traps out, but then we picked them up. And there's nothing scarier in the world than putting in a booby trap and then two weeks later going back out there and picking it up.
Because you don't know whether Chuck has found it also. I mean, it's just -- it's just -- usually if I had any doubt I would just blow it in place. I didn't want to play with anything. But he was always thinking that was such a piece of cake. Because we had a Loach, light observation helicopter, out to pick them up. No protection at all.
Uh-huh.
I got shot down in Viet -- over the Michelin in a Loach.
Like I said, I had a good tour.
I guess so, you --
We took a .38, what they think of a .38, hit the tail rotor. They don't -- Loach's don't fly without a damn tail rotor.
No.
And this pilot says, "We're going to land down there."
And I says, "You're full of shit." But we did.
_________.
Then he wanted to stay with the chopper and I said, "No, we're going home." And we walked out of the Michelin because I wasn't about to stay with the chopper. I says, "Everybody out here knows we're here. We're leaving." I lost a couple good captains in May that did that. They got shot down with a 51, and they stayed. The pilot ran, which was scary. The pilot said, "I'm E amp; E'd," and the two captains stayed with the chopper and Chuck got them both.
What was your highest rank ________?
I was a lieutenant, first lieutenant.
First lieutenant.
Yeah. Yeah, you made first automatic after twelve months.
Uh-huh. Do you remember what your serial number was?
No. And I was right -- when I became an officer it was my social security number.
Right.
My U.S. 5524 -- and that's it.
Uh-huh.
I only had when I was a draftee. I still have my dog tags. They are in there on the wall. But, yeah.
Appreciate it. Sounds like you've had a good experience --
I did.
-- and came out of it pretty well.
The 70's were rough. But the reserves helped me out immensely. My A team give me a place to vent. Also -- I mean, the A team I had up in South Bend was the only green A team in the Midwest. So we got to do a lot of funny missions out of there. And we jumped into Puerto Rico one night, 600 foot jump by mistake. It was a CARP jump. I don't know if you are familiar with CARP, Commuter Air Release Point.
Okay.
Navigator has control of the lights. Well, the drop zone was on the south side of Puerto Rico, and he used the sea level for indicator altitude. Drop zone was 600 feet, so we got off, hit real quick. Nobody got hurt.
That was lucky.
It was just one of them you step out the door and you hit the ground. We did some crazy things, but they give me a place to vent. A lot of -- in '84 I went to Chicago, to be an engineer in Chicago, and I started the ATamp;T Vietnam Veterans' Committee. And through the mid 80's we had an annual thing. Chicago was doing a lot. They had a great parade in Chicago, '86 I think it was. It was just a great parade. It was unreal how many people. A two hour parade lasted five hours. That shut that town down. And it was just -- it was just great. But it was a lot of -- my committee did a lot of good work where we just -- we talked to people. And most of the guys that were really having trouble just needed somebody to listen. And post-traumatic stress is all about communicating. And I was lucky. I mean, I had a family to come home to. I had a job to come home to.
And it didn't -- I didn't have problems. I had problems with the dreams and I had problems with people's attitudes. I can still remember taking college courses where the professors were bragging about, "Well, I got out of the war because I stayed in school." And that got to me. Or I had -- up at IU Northwest I had a World History class -- Western, Western History, and the guy was from Wabash, same age as I was, and I'm taking his class. They were talking about Lenin. And he was saying, "Well, Lenin's bodyguards were all Special Forces type people." There wasn't a kid besides me in the class that understood what he just said. And I told the professor after the class, "You should have used Delta Force. These kids know what Delta Force is. They haven't a clue what Special Forces is."
Right.
And I says you need to update your -- he gave me an A for that class. But me and him had many days of around and arounds because we had totally different philosophies.
I appreciate it.
Hope I did some good.
Thank you very much. I'm going to get a little bit more information from you here.