MACV 1967-68

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A buddy of mine was a kid from Texas who enlisted in the Army. He was trained as a radio operator and in 67 he was shipped to Vietnam. After he rotated out he went to collage on the GI Bill and became a reporter. He was working for the L.A.Times when he retired. This is one of the stories he wrote and I am posting some photos he sent me.

 

A Fort Bliss soldier's reflection: Vietnam vet relives the ordeal of his boyhood friend

By H.G. Reza \ Special to the Times

Posted:   05/28/2012 12:00:00 AM MDT

 

Its name sounded melodic sliding off an American tongue and embellished the mystery surrounding the place.

But Co Bi Than Tan was no paradise destination for the 2nd Battalion 1st Marines in 1966 and for our Army advisory team a year later.

The Camp Pendleton-based unit landed at Phu Bai, Vietnam, in December 1965. Five months later, it was thrust into Co Bi Than Tan (pronounced Kobi Ton Ton) valley on a search and destroy operation that initially met sporadic contact with the Viet Cong. That changed on the third day, May 29, 1966, the day before Memorial Day.

Two VC snipers succeeded in stopping about half of the battalion for four terrifying hours with deadly, accurate fire accounting for many of the 21 Marines killed and 16 wounded.

Robert A. Corkill, one of the dead from Golf Company, was a boyhood friend, and the first of 12 Vietnam War casualties from our hometown of San Benito, Texas.

"Every time I hear Co Bi Than Tan it sends chills up my back," said Major Ferrell, 65, of Lomita, Calif. "Everything that happened at Co Bi Than Tan was bad."

Ferrell was a rifleman in Echo Company, which was sent to Golf Company's rescue.

Survivors say the enemy snipers were sometimes no more than 30 feet away and behind them, moving from one camouflaged spider hole to another through connecting tunnels. Marines from Robert's platoon -- commanded by Lt. Charles C. Krulak who later became Marine Corps Commandant -- were getting picked off while rushing to help fallen comrades.

John Muir, 65, of Las Cruces, recounted the bloody day in the 1982 Vietnam anthology, "Everything We Had." Muir also wrote "Tigers and Songbirds," a poetry book about the war.

"It was a bad day at the office for Golf. They were calling on the radio for help, but we (Echo) got hung up for three hours," said Muir, a radioman.

There were no tales of gung ho Marines then or now, and no war stories punctuated with bravado for an impressionable reporter or rear area troops; just honest accounts of sacrifice and perseverance to remember on Memorial Day.

I left Fort Bliss and arrived in Vietnam in May 1967, almost one year to the day of Robert's death, but it took 46 years to learn that during my tour, I literally walked in the tracks he laid at Co Bi Than Tan. The surprising revelation -- learned late one night while researching San Benito's KIAs in Vietnam -- added a new character to the ensemble of Vietnam ghosts that occasionally play inside my head.

I served in MACV Advisory Team 3 at Phong Dien, Thua Thien Province with four other U.S. Army and one Australian Army advisers. We lived with, trained and fought with a company of South Vietnamese militia called Popular Forces.

Co Bi Than Tan, a shallow valley owned by a combat hardened enemy, was at the southwest corner of our tactical area and had been a Viet Cong stronghold since the French Indochina War.

In one skirmish, the enemy gained fire superiority and were laughing and shouting at our Vietnamese troops to "shoot the Americans." Artillery and Army gunships from Hue Citadel allowed us to fight another day.

Robert was athletic and leaned slightly to the right when he walked. A lower lip that angled downward and to the right drew attention to a lopsided smile. His body's tendency to favor his right side was balanced by his preference to throw left-handed. He was 17 when he left San Benito High School in 1963 to join the Marine Corps.

"Bobby was so determined to enlist. Dad gave him permission but mom wouldn't. It took her a long time and a lot of praying before she gave in," said his sister, Velma C. Talkington, 70, of Houston. "After he got killed mom was guilt-stricken and never got out of her depression."

Two uniformed Marines accompanied by the police chief and parish priest arrived at Ernesto and Marcelina Corkill's home to deliver the sad news. Robert's father was disbelieving.

"My parents had just gotten a letter from Bobby the day before saying he was fine," said Talkington. "Dad showed the sergeant the letter, telling him it wasn't so, because Bobby said he was fine."

Robert's death was not the only bad news the family received. Across town, the parents of his cousin and also my friend, Ray Guerra, were learning that he had been wounded in a separate incident on the day Robert died. Guerra, who served in the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines, returned to duty but lost his legs two months later in a mine explosion.

Entries in 2/1's S-3 (Operations) Journal for May 29 offer a confusing account of events beginning at 10 a.m. when Golf's 1st platoon reported enemy contact and five U.S. killed and nine wounded. At 10:58 a.m. the figures were corrected to two dead and seven wounded.

Thirteen minutes later the entry reads "now 3 KIA." At 11:45 a.m. "5 more KIA, 9 more WIA. Still under fire." At 1:20 p.m. the platoon advised it could not leave its position because of sniper fire.

At 2:15 p.m., Golf's 2nd platoon, sent to assist the 1st platoon, reported it had suffered five killed and three wounded. At 3:45 p.m. Echo, sent to relieve Golf, reported "we have 8 KIA and 2 WIA by sniper, got sniper."

Enemy casualties were later reported as 10 dead and 2 weapons captured. All 21 U.S. dead came from Golf and Echo.

Like others, Don Hicks is still troubled by the carnage from that day.

"It was an incredible thing that they allowed so many to get hit before they found and killed the snipers," said Hicks, 69, of Cabot, Ark. He was a rifleman in Hotel Company.

As grievous as the Marine losses were, events taking place simultaneously in Hue, less than 10 miles from the battlefield, were also disturbing and somewhat comparable to our experience in Afghanistan. Civilians were demonstrating against the U.S. military and South Vietnamese government.

The Marine convoy carrying troops to Co Bi Than Tan on May 26 had to maneuver around civilian roadblocks. Former Hotel Company commander John Giles, 69, of McLean, Va., recalled "obstacles like furniture they put on the road."

Also on May 26, students torched the U.S. Information Services library as Vietnamese police and soldiers watched, and Americans were evacuated from the city the next day. A Buddhist nun immolated herself in a protest against the U.S. sponsored Saigon government on May 29.

The Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) Command History Chronology also shows that a South Vietnamese Army officer fired on a U.S. helicopter carrying Marine and Vietnamese officers as it left Hue on May 17. Four days later, mortar rounds fired by South Vietnamese "dissidents" wounded four Air Force and 11 USMC personnel in Da Nang, 50 miles south of Hue. U.S. aircraft were temporarily removed from Da Nang Air Base to prevent sabotage.

Giles said the troops were unaffected by the protests.

The battalion will relive Vietnam and honor its fallen at a reunion in November in San Diego. Robert and San Benito's other war dead will be honored today, Memorial Day, with the dedication of a downtown veterans war memorial, and I will be there.

"I don't know anybody who didn't like Robert," said Hicks. "He was one of the better guys. He was a good Marine."

The same can be said of everyone who fell at Co Bi Than Tan. They were all good Marines.

H.G. Reza served in Vietnam from May 1967 to May 1968. He was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle for almost five years and covered law enforcement

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Under Fire

It was 30 years ago that the shots were heard 'round the world. The Tet offensive in Vietnam changed lives, including those of one future newspaper reporter and his 5 team members.

February 06, 1998|H.G. REZA | TIMES STAFF WRITER

The voice, mocking and taunting, came through loud and clear on the field radio: "You die, GI."

The enemy soldier's jeering comment added to the confusion and fear that gripped us that day three decades ago in Vietnam.

Nobody on our six-man team of U.S. Army advisors nor the Vietnamese troops we fought and lived with had a clue about what was going on.

We were under attack. Highway I was cut off, and all communications were severed between our headquarters in Hue and our outpost at Phong Dien, 25 miles north.

We did not learn until later how completely our world had been turned upside down Jan. 31, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year.

Accustomed to being the hunters, we were the hunted, isolated and cornered. It was to be like that for the next four weeks in 100 of South Vietnam's provincial and district capitals, including Saigon, Dalat, Pleiku, Danang, Nha Trang and Hue.

All Americans were threatened by the Vietnam War in some form. For those of us "in country," the Tet offensive was the watershed event of our lives.

When I returned home to San Benito, Texas, in May, I was shocked to learn that Tet, clearly a military victory for us--58,000 Viet Cong were dead, compared with 3,893 American and 4,954 South Vietnamese--was viewed in the United Sates as a political defeat, and public protests against the war grew louder.

Tet turned out to be the first in a string of cataclysmic events in 1968 that altered U.S. history.

In March, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for another term. The following month saw the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., followed by Robert F. Kennedy's murder in June.

In August, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago showed the world the deep fissures that the Vietnam experience had left in American society. It was that bitter division that led to Richard M. Nixon's resurrection. Nixon's "secret plan" in 1968 to end the war took five long years to come together.

The men I fought alongside during Tet were all professional soldiers, members of Team 3, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV):

* Don Rampanelli was a sergeant first class and senior noncommissioned officer. He is now a business consultant in Phoenix.

"I really didn't think that any of us were going to get out alive," recalled "Ramp." "I was scared. I wrote a letter to my family that, fortunately, was never mailed. It was going to be my goodbye to them. I hoped that someone would find it in the rubble and mail it if we got overrun."

* Thomas O. Richardson was a sergeant first class and a member of the Army's elite Ranger forces. "Rich" did a second tour in Vietnam as an advisor to a Vietnamese Ranger battalion. After retiring from the Army, he returned to college and earned a teaching credential. Rich taught fifth-graders for 10 years before retiring a second time and settling in Columbus, Ga.

Rich recalled that "we were hurting them, and they made us pay."

"It seemed like we were getting hit three times a day and three times at night," he said. "An experience like that brings you closer together. We stood together, and that's why we survived."

* Dick Powell was our warrant officer. An Australian Army advisor assigned to our team, he was scheduled to rotate home in February and had been reminding us that he was "short." He is retired and lives in the Australian outback.

Powell, who was anchored in the bunker during the offensive, recalled, "until Tet came along, it hadn't been a bad war." Powell had also fought in the jungles of Malaysia in the 1950s, when the British and Australian armies battled communist guerrillas.

* Nick Goersch, our team leader, joined us a few weeks before Tet. After a rocky start with the team, the low-key captain proved himself in combat and was accepted as our commanding officer. We lost track of him after Vietnam.

* Cornelius Johnson was a sergeant first class and our team medic. Johnson, a San Francisco native, was sent back to the rear days before the offensive began because his tour of duty was almost over. His return trip home was delayed several weeks because he was trapped in Hue. We have also lost track of Johnson.

* I was a junior enlisted man and the team's radioman. At 19, I was also the youngest of the group and not a professional soldier. After the war, I returned to college and began working as a newspaper reporter. I met the woman who was to be my wife exactly one year after the Tet offensive erupted, and we have been married for almost 29 years.

On that first day of Tet, I tried to call our headquarters in Hue to alert them that our outpost was under intense mortar attack. Except for that threat from the enemy radioman, the calls went unanswered.

What we did not know then was that Hue was occupied by North Vietnamese Army troops. Our headquarters in the city, which had been a relatively safe rear area, was hanging on despite repeated ground attacks.

Before ducking into a bunker that afternoon, I watched in disbelief as exploding mortar rounds "walked" through the wire defensive perimeter. The enemy usually attacked at night in such strength, rarely striking in the daytime unless they knew they had the advantage.

A special concern at the time was that if we fell we would go down under South Vietnamese colors. Phong Dien was a Vietnamese camp, under the command of a Vietnamese captain, and the yellow and red South Vietnamese flag flew over our outpost.

"That never would've happened," Rampanelli said. "If it came to that, I would've taken the American flag I kept in my footlocker and draped it over the command bunker where we planned to make our stand. There was no way we were going to go down under South Vietnamese colors."

As scary as the situation was, it became more frightening when we began to question the loyalty of the Vietnamese troops we were fighting with. One day after the offensive began, we learned that five of our troops were missing, including a teenage soldier named Lieu, whom we liked.

Three days later, three of the missing soldiers, including Lieu, were killed when their Viet Cong patrol was ambushed by our troops.

Although we patrolled aggressively and led numerous combat operations, we were never under any illusions about who controlled the countryside around us. Saigon's influence did not extend beyond our camp's defensive perimeter.

A nearby area known as the Street Without Joy was designated a "free fire zone," where anything living was a "target of opportunity." The Street had been a Communist stronghold since the French Indochina War, which ended in 1954.

A week after the offensive began, we picked up a weak radio transmission from our advisory team at Phu Loc, a coastal village about 50 miles south of us. A team of five Americans was at the outpost when it was overrun by the enemy.

The Americans escaped unharmed through a trench that led to a cave on the beach, where they had hidden a boat. They paddled it out into the South China Sea.

At first we were skeptical of their plea for help.

The picture of five U.S. infantrymen adrift in a small boat in the South China Sea seemed too pathetic to be true. The five bobbing grunts symbolized the chaotic and unreal turn of events in America's longest war.

We convinced the 1st Cavalry Division at nearby LZ Evans to launch an ocean rescue, and the seasick Americans were flown by helicopter back to our outpost. Although we were hunkered down, their presence boosted our morale.

By this time, several of our friends had been killed and wounded in Hue, including Frank Doezema, a close friend who was mortally wounded in the first minutes of the offensive.

Doezema, a Michigan farm boy, killed more than two dozen North Vietnamese soldiers before losing his legs in a rocket-propelled grenade explosion. I did not learn of his death until the middle of March. The MACV compound in Hue, which Doezema died defending, was named in his honor.

At our outpost, a young trooper from the 1st Cavalry died in one of the attacks. The Cav had placed a three-man team with a radar at one end of our camp in order to detect the location of the mortar tubes that were hitting us.

Our team was spared any casualties during most of the offensive, but our luck ran out on Feb. 25, in the waning days of the enemy drive. Rampanelli and Goersch were on patrol with two squads of our troops when they were ambushed.

The Vietnamese teenager carrying the radio for Goersch took the brunt of the explosion from a remote-controlled mine. Goersch was unhurt, but Ramp took several pieces of shrapnel in both thighs.

When Ramp was brought back to the outpost, we showed our concern for him by asking the most important question: "Are the family jewels all right?"

They were fine, he assured us.

Ramp refused to be medevaced to the rear and was still recuperating when I rotated home in May.

Despite the constant fear, there were moments of laughter.

We were low on ammunition and food, except for 200 pounds of pinto beans and dozens of cans of asparagus. We ate both for a month, supplemented by rice.

Before the offensive began, Ramp had scrounged up several cans of cherry pie filling and bags of flour. Ever resourceful, he taught Ba, an old woman who weathered the offensive with us and did our cooking, to bake a cherry pie.

We had pie and C-ration fruitcake for breakfast every morning. Thirty years later, I still don't like the taste of cherry pie.

 

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Friendly Fire Is Anything but That to Troops in It

March 05, 1991|H.G. REZA | TIMES STAFF WRITER: Media coverage of the Persian Gulf War has raised public awareness of friendly fire--a battlefield phenomenon that has plagued soldiers in almost every war. The most recent figures released by U.S. military officials showed that of the 28 Army soldiers and Marines killed in ground combat with Iraq, 10 were mistakenly killed by other U.S. servicemen. In addition, of the 13 British deaths reported in the ground war, nine occurred from friendly fire when the victims' fighting vehicles were mistakenly blasted by a U.S. pilot. These incidents jolted the memory of Times reporter H.G. Reza, who fought as an infantryman in Vietnam and experienced the terror of friendly fire

 

SAN DIEGO — Our initial effort to win the hearts and minds of a group of South Vietnamese had not endeared us to them. First, a sick Vietnamese child had died from an allergic reaction to penicillin administered by a Navy corpsman.

A few hours later, angry South Vietnamese troops wanted to turn against their American allies after two squads of U.S. Marines mistakenly ambushed a squad of Vietnamese Popular Forces troops, wounding one soldier in the head.

In the parlance of military speak, the PFs, as they were known to U.S. troops, had encountered friendly fire. They were victims of fratricide, which, as the Persian Gulf War has demonstrated, is not uncommon on the battlefield.

Both incidents occurred in a hamlet along the An Lo River, in northern Thua Thien Province. A company of Marines from nearby Camp Evans and a platoon of our PFs--led by the U.S. Army advisory team I was assigned to--were conducting a two-day sweep in the area, looking for evidence of Viet Cong infiltration.

Although friendly fire casualties are a fact of war, the cause of this particular incident was especially baffling. Before sending out the ambush teams for the night, we had conferred with the Marine company commander and agreed on the ambush sites and the positioning of the Vietnamese and Marine teams.

The PFs were understandably angry; they were ambushed while approaching a site they were supposed to occupy. Instead, the Marines had arrived first, and it was clear to us that the Americans were at the wrong position.

"How could this have happened?" I asked our team's captain. "We sat at their command post and picked out the sites with them."

"Well, nobody ever mistook a U.S. Marine for Albert Einstein," was the captain's reply.

That unhappy experience occurred in September, 1967, when I was a U.S. Army adviser, assigned with three other Army advisers and one Australian military adviser to the Phong Dien District.

Unfortunately, it was not the last.

Our advisory team was to experience or witness four more incidents of friendly fire--including two near the same hamlet by the An Lo River--in the coming months. In each instance, friendly troops fired on each other--sometimes in broad daylight--because of someone's incompetence or a breakdown in communication between units.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe the terror a soldier feels when he is under fire. The cracking sound from an incoming mortar or artillery round seconds before it crashes in a loud explosion, or the whistling sound of a bullet zinging overhead, strike fear every time, no matter how many times you experience it.

But it is more frightening and offensive when these projectiles are fired at you by your own comrades. Friendly fire is a battlefield phenomenon that, like other combat action, begins with fear and confusion. It ends in anger, when the realization sets in that it was your own side that was trying to kill you.

The anger is fed by the possibility of always being able to walk up to and confront the men who almost killed you. You fantasize about exacting revenge, especially if someone close to you was killed or maimed by friendly fire.

Fratricide is personal and never friendly.

There were a few tense moments after the incident mentioned above. Some members of the PF squad ambushed by the Marines wanted to shoot an American in return. Fortunately, the situation was gingerly defused by cooler heads.

Our compound at Phong Dien was an old French fort defended by about 80 PF troops and a South Vietnamese Army artillery unit that manned two 105-millimeter and two 155-millimeter howitzers. The outpost was about four miles west of the Street Without Joy and about 15 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone.

In 1967, the South Vietnamese government's sphere of influence extended only as far as the camp's defensive perimeter. We used to joke about the unknown number of Viet Cong sympathizers among our PF troops. (At the beginning of the 1968 Tet Offensive, we learned that five PFs were actually Viet Cong troops when they disappeared the night before we were attacked.)

But, after subsequent friendly-fire episodes, we joked that the threat came not from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army, or from traitors within our ranks, but from trigger-happy U.S. troops.

Some of the other friendly-fire incidents I experienced were more personal and terrifying.

In early 1968, several Army units were moved to South Vietnam's northern provinces to counter a threat by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), which was massing for the Tet Offensive. The 1st Cavalry Division occupied Camp Evans, which was renamed LZ (Landing Zone) Evans.

One afternoon, our PF troops conducted a joint operation with other PF troops from nearby Quang Dien District. Planning for the one-day sweep was coordinated with a unit from the 1st Cavalry, which provided a forward observer (FO) to coordinate artillery support from Evans.

The plan called for the main unit to sweep east to west, with a smaller unit serving as a blocking force at a western position. Our team's senior noncommissioned officer, who was a veteran of the Korean War, noted that artillery fire would be coming from in front of us, instead of from our rear, as is recommended.

Our forces quickly made contact with a reinforced NVA company, and the FO called for a fire mission. After adjusting fire, the initial salvo of 155-millimeter rounds landed among the enemy troops. But when the FO readjusted fire, he mistakenly called in the map coordinates for our position, and several rounds landed in our midst.

The results were devastating. The radio operator for the advisory team from Quang Dien--a big Chicano kid from California whose name I never knew--had an arm severed by a chunk of shrapnel. Several PFs were killed and wounded.

A few weeks later, LZ Evans--located about a mile south of our outpost--came under an intense nighttime mortar and rocket barrage. The camp asked for fire support from our artillery guns and we reacted immediately.

Minutes later, several 105-millimeter rounds fell inside our compound. One of our NCOs quickly surmised that the rounds were coming from artillery batteries at Evans and angrily asked them to cease fire.

An officer at the other end insisted that the fire was not originating at Evans and said the incoming was probably 122-millimeter NVA rockets.

"Listen, you dumb son of a bitch, I'm telling you that your people are shelling ours!" our NCO shouted into the radio handset. A subsequent investigation showed that he was right.

After calling us for artillery support, the Cavalry's counter-mortar radar picked up the tube flashes from our camp's howitzers and mistook them for enemy mortars. After plotting the map coordinates, the Cavalry's artillery opened up on our position.

Fortunately, our PFs suffered no casualties in this incident, but some bunkers were damaged and a couple of buildings destroyed.

As demonstrated in the Persian Gulf War, friendly fire is some times initiated by confused or zealous pilots and air crews.

While doing a sweep along the An Lo River with a company from the 101st Airborne Division, I saw a Cobra gunship dive toward a squad of paratroopers who were walking single file through a field on a bright, sunny afternoon.

The gunship mistook them for NVA soldiers and fired three 2.75-inch rockets at the troopers, who reacted instantaneously by popping smoke grenades of every conceivable color to identify themselves as U.S. soldiers. Fortunately, all of the rockets overshot their target.

The emotional scars left by friendly fire can last a lifetime. A friend who fought with the 101st Airborne at Hamburger Hill in 1969 still talks about the helicopter gunship that mistakenly strafed his unit on the fifth day of the bloody battle, killing and wounding several troopers.

He is convinced that the helicopter crew is still alive. Although the incident occurred about 23 years ago, the emotional pain the gunship inflicted has not gone away. When we last talked nearly two years ago, my friend still wanted to kill the helicopter's crew, saving the gunner for the last.

 

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For Veterans, Life--Like War--Calls for Courage

FIRST PERSON

November 11, 1993|H.G. REZA | TIMES STAFF WRITER

 

My nephew did not know what to make of the dirty, blond man who approached us in the restaurant parking lot with a spray bottle in one hand and a soiled rag in the other.

The stranger appeared to be my age, in his mid-40s, and his embarrassment was obvious when he asked if he could clean the windshield.

 

Speaking with a soft Southern drawl, he struggled to explain that he had not always been homeless. He said his name was Brian.

"Mister, I'm not a bum," he said with emotion in his eyes. "I'm just a guy who lost his job and whose life fell apart. I used to be nobody special, just a veteran."

"Just a veteran." The remark moved me with both sorrow and pride.

He said he served as a combat infantryman with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam and now had been kicked in the teeth by the economy. This evening he was trying to earn money by cleaning car windows in the parking lot of a popular Orange restaurant.

Judging by the indifference shown to him by people going in and out of the place, he was still nobody special, just an anonymous, homeless veteran.

Today is Veterans Day, and I want you to know about two other Vietnam veterans who are every bit as unknown as Brian but unforgettable to me. Frank Doezema Jr. of Shelbyville, Mich., and Walt Meeley, a Philadelphia attorney, served with me as members of Advisory Team 3, in Thua Thien Province in 1967 and 1968.

Both enlisted in the Army when they were 18.

Borrowing the title of a powerful book about the Vietnam War, the three of us were soldiers once, and young. But Vietnam killed one of my friends and is still killing the other. Vietnam is not just a place from our past, but a place inside our soul as well.

Frank died a hero on Jan. 31, 1968, at the beginning of the Tet Offensive, the most vicious enemy campaign of the war. On the night before he died, he killed about 25 North Vietnamese Army soldiers when the enemy attacked the Army advisers' compound in Hue. Alone in a bunker, he repulsed repeated assaults on his position before he was mortally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade.

The quiet 19-year-old farm boy bled to death before he could be evacuated to a field hospital. You will find Frank's name on panel 36E, line 6 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

The war ended for Walt a few weeks earlier, on Dec. 18, 1967, but Vietnam has been killing him slowly in the 26 years since. His youth vanished on that December afternoon in a bright crimson flow that stained the earth in an area with the rueful name of Street Without Joy.

An AK-47 round slammed into Walt's face, shattering his cheekbone and ripping his nose. Another round tore through his canteen, web belt and flak jacket before slicing into his stomach, where it is still entombed--no longer a pristine, pointed, shiny, copper-jacketed piece of death, but a lumpy lead wad that triggers metal detectors.

This was not Walt's first tragic experience in the Street Without Joy, an area northeast of Hue, near the coast and lined by sand dunes and salt flats. About two months earlier he had been wounded in a mine explosion. Then, I was only a few yards away from him and was able to help him when he went into shock.

But on Dec. 18, 1967, I may as well have been a million miles away. All I could do was listen to a medic's desperate cry for help over a field radio as he struggled frantically to save Walt's life, and curse the feeling of powerlessness that has gnawed at me ever since.

Like the war itself, our job as military advisers was an impossible task. We were assigned to individual units of three or five American soldiers whose mission was to lead about 100 Vietnamese ragtag militia, called Popular Forces, who were dispirited and tired of war.

On occasion, we also led provincial strike teams called Regional Forces, which could be mobilized throughout the province.

We served with these indigenous soldiers in isolated outposts that were often in areas solidly aligned with the Viet Cong. In the district where I served with an Australian and three other American advisers, the South Vietnamese government's influence did not extend beyond our camp's defensive perimeter.

Walt was assigned to Phu Thu, east of Hue, near the South China Sea. However, on the day he was wounded, he was one of three Americans attached to a regional force company.

Frank and I were assigned to Quang Dien and Phong Dien respectively, north of Hue and a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone. Both outposts were old French forts, built before the first Indochina War.

It was dangerous duty. We assumed that some of our Vietnamese troops were Viet Cong sympathizers. It was an uncomfortable assumption, to say the least. In effect, we did not trust the very people we soldiered with and were fighting and dying for.

When the Tet Offensive began, we discovered that five of the Vietnamese troops assigned to our outpost at Phong Dien were missing. A few nights later, we killed three of them when we ambushed a Viet Cong platoon.

Frank lived his brief life as a contradiction. He was gentle, kind--and a warrior.

It is a testament to his humanity that 25 years after his death, a Vietnamese refugee befriended as a young boy by Frank in 1967 tracked down Frank's family to express condolences.

Like Frank, Walt was tall and lanky, but the similarities ended there. Where Frank revered the dairy farm his family owned in rural Michigan, Walt was a street-wise Irish kid from a tough Philadelphia working-class neighborhood. But he was religious and clung to his Catholic faith.

After Vietnam, Walt underwent lengthy and painful rehabilitation, which included reconstructive surgery on his face. While he was in a military hospital recovering from his wounds, he wrote a letter to Gen. William Westmoreland, begging for permission to return to his unit in Vietnam.

But Walt never returned to Vietnam. After his enlistment ended, he married and went to Temple University and earned a law degree, despite never having finished high school. Eventually, he joined a Philadelphia law firm.

Things were going splendidly for him until 1981, when he began exhibiting symptoms of Agent Orange poisoning. Walt began having seizures, which some doctors attributed to Agent Orange, a dioxin used as a defoliant by the U.S. military throughout Southeast Asia. He has been hospitalized 50 times since 1981, and has been given the last rites at least seven times.

Today, he is able to work only three days a week because of the seizures, which occur more frequently now. He receives a small pension from Veterans Affairs and Social Security disability payments.

Over the years, the seizures have led to numerous falls, resulting in fractures in both legs, ankles and hands. Although he uses leg braces to help him walk, Walt spends much of his time in a wheelchair, a nearly incapacitated 46-year-old ex-warrior who was once weighed on the scale and found not to be wanting.

He is understandably bitter at the U.S. government. The VA fought him at every turn when he tried to get the government to recognize that he was a victim of Agent Orange. After years of making his life miserable, the VA finally conceded that Walt has "a disease related to dioxin poisoning" and awarded him $1,024.

Not $1,024 per month, but a grand total of $1,024.

Walt has never expressed any regrets about Vietnam, not even about his final mission, for which he volunteered.

The only time I have ever heard any dismay from him is when he talks about how Vietnam veterans have been treated by the nation, regardless of the arguments over the legitimacy or morality of the war.

Vietnam veterans are the ghosts that continue to haunt the nation's conscience. Forever the outsiders, we are men and women who never seem to fit in your social circle. We make you uncomfortable and embarrass you by our presence.

"We weren't the fortunate sons," Walt said in a recent telephone conversation. "Everyone knows the war was fought by Hispanics, blacks and poor whites. Most people think we're all SOBs anyway."

In Vietnam, there were times when we would go on combat operations for days or weeks at a time without seeing the enemy. We used to call this experience "taking a walk in the sun." However, the cheery phrase mocked the constant terror that one felt from not knowing if the enemy was dug in in the next tree line, waiting to cut you down as you walked across an open field, or if you were going to make contact with an invisible-but-superior enemy force.

Frank and Walt took walks in the sun that lasted longer than the combined duration of our adventures in Grenada and Panama, and the conflict with Iraq. It is important that the American people know this.

Gen. Westmoreland said that "war is fear cloaked in courage." Frank and Walt never denied the one and had no shortage of the other.

 

[gimmie]

Those were some really harrowing tales but most striking to me is Walt's. Several years after the war it takes his health like a ticking time-bomb. I understand it's been over 30 years but I hope he was or has been able to find some peace.