The visit during this past week of the mobile Vietnam Memorial Wall has really been a big help in "healing" a lot of our wounds that have haunted us since leaving Vietnam in 1968.
I want to thank all of the people who brought "The Wall" to Franklin and provided the logistical support while it was here. My wife and I both are Vietnam Veterans. We met there in December of 1967 and married seven years later in 1974. I was a Communications Officer and later the Signal Company Commander in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. My wife was an Air Force nurse assigned to the Air Force Hospital in Cam Rahn Bay. I don't know if a lot of people realize how much pain our nurses and other medical personnel went through and continue to live through.
We, in the field in Vietnam saw only occasional horror. Someone described it perfectly when they said it was " days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror". Our medical personnel saw the horror of war everyday. All of us owe them our gratitude. Many of us owe them our lives. We both have many, many friends on that wall, and we were really reluctant to volunteer to work there. Working there, for me, meant I had to actually look at it, walk up to it. Something I just never have been able to do.
My wife took our grand children and visited "The Wall" in Washington several years ago. I couldn't do it. But this time, here in Franklin, I was going to force myself to pay the respect all those guys deserve and volunteer to work there on Tuesday and Wednesday morning.. I secretly, without telling my wife, checked several places on the computer and wrote down areas that I was going to avoid going near ... my "bad zones": Panel 20 East. 22nd of May 1967. A very close friend Captain Robert Ray Boyd. A Battery Commander with the 3/319 Artillery, 173rd Airborne Brigade.
Bob and I were in a little piece of no-where near Swan Loc in Mid May 1967. I was the commander of the 2/503 element there, his battery was providing supporting artillery fire. Late on the 16th we found out we were
being lifted out by helicopter the next day. Back to our Base camp in Bien Hoa. Back to showers, hot meals, a beer!
The morning of the 17th all was going well and the Chinooks, the large heavy lift helicopters had taken out most of our equipment, men and Bob's artillery. By noon there were only a few 105's left and a handful of our remaining men. All of the defensive positions and bunkers had been filled in. A Chinook was hovering almost on top of us picking up one of the remaining artillery pieces. The noise and dust from the chopper was used as perfect cover for a nearby Viet Cong unit to fire mortars, rockets and machine guns into our midst as we stood there in all that noise and dust wondering "why all these guys are falling down?" The chopper pilot, seeing what was happening, dropped the load and flew off. I later found out the helicopter was riddled with hundreds of holes and almost everyone aboard was wounded.
After the chopper flew away the rockets and machine gun fire continued for a few minutes. We called in helicopter gun ships and F-104s and decimated the area the fire was coming from .and then called for our "dust offs", the brave young men in the Medevac helicopters, to remove the many wounded. More than half of those remaining to be picked up had been wounded, many seriously. My Platoon Sergeant reported that, miraculously, we had only one killed. I had been hit in the left arm and shoulder but not bad enough to need immediate attention.
After all my wounded were safely on the way to the field hospital, I handed my M-16 to my Platoon Sergeant, and boarded the last Medevac chopper with one of my wounded NCOs and the body of the one that was killed. As the chopper took off the poncho covering the body blew from the face of this fallen comrade and there on the floor lay the body of my friend Bob Boyd. In the corners of my mind, during quite periods, I still see Boyd lying there. I always will. I'm glad I shared this final flight with him and had a chance to say goodbye.
Panel 22 East more than forty members of A Company, 2/503rd, 173rd Airborne Brigade. I asked a friend that was visiting "The Wall" on Monday to please photograph panel 22 East. She asked which name. I replied all of them. Much of Panel 22E resulted from an ambush just after daylight on the 22d of June, 1967 near Dak To in the Central highlands at the junction of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. I spent several weeks in the hospital as a result of my being wounded back in April and then had to stay in the rear area for several more weeks until my stitches had been removed. What a great time this was. Good food, hot showers even visited the Club at the Bien Hoa Air force Base.
Back in the base camp I was bunking with three new guys that were attending Jungle Orientation School. ERVIN L. BURNS, DONALD R. JUDD, RICHARD E. HOOD JR. I remember the day I returned from the hospital and there in my tent were these three "newbies" (yes, we really called them "FNGs" but I'm not going to touch that!). All three of them had returned from jungle school that day with several hundred rounds of ammo and twelve hand grenades. The M-16 ammo didn't bother me but those live grenades lying on their cots DID. We had all heard tales of "fragging" and picking up a pillow or blanket to find one with the pin pulled lying under the covers. Rear areas weren't safe either.
We had hundreds of "locals" working in those base camps as cooks, KPs, barbers, tailors and other jobs. Many of them held a second job as a member of the infamous VC. I had some words with my young tent mates about the grenades but after a few days we were friends and about the same time they finished jungle school my stitches came out and we were all ordered north to the Central Highlands to join the rest of the Brigade. Company "A" 2/503rd was short three of it's four platoon leaders so Rudd, Burns and Hood were all assigned to Company "A."
Three days later our entire Battalion was relocated to a Special Forces outpost near the village of Dak To and started performing search and destroy missions in the hills west of there on the Laotian border. On the morning of the 22d of May "A" Company was late leaving their overnight position and in their haste to get to where they should be took off down a well-worn trail through the jungle. The North Vietnamese Army had prepared an ambush on the trail in front of them with massive firepower both in front of them and on one side. This well trained enemy force of several hundred waited for the unsuspecting men of "A" Company to get right in the middle, only a few feet away, and all of them opened fire at once. "A" Company didn't have a chance.
My Platoon Sergeant and I were down by the airstrip below them listening on the radio as this ambush occurred. We were on both the Battalion frequency and the "A" Company frequency. As we listened, the radios of Judd, Sexton, Burns and Hood went dead one by one over the next hour. Their pleas for help were unanswered. We were unable to get "B" and "C" Company up there until late that evening and the following morning. With them died more then seventy fine young men most within a few minutes. The next day we learned that those who were not killed in the initial ambush had been executed, as they lay wounded. Panel 22 East was not high on my list of places to stand Monday. Panel 30 East and part of Panel 31 East The Battle of Hill 875.
Dak To November 19-24th 1967. By the time November had rolled around I was on the downhill leg of my tour with the Brigade. We left Dak To and went to a beautiful little place called Tuy Hua. Right on the shoreline of the South China Sea. For several months we worked with some of the Korean units in Vietnam trying to make that area safe for the hundreds of small villages up and down the coastline. The brigade really needed this slow period to train all the replacements and to bring all of our equipment back to a high level of maintenance. We thought we were through with that damnable Dak To and the mountains of the central highlands. Wrong! About the 15th of November we were told that the Fourth Division, now operating in the Dak To area, was running into large concentrations of well trained North Vietnamese regular army units and that we were going back to support them. All of those still in the 173rd that had been there at the time of the massacre in June just had a gut feeling that this was a very bad omen. This place, this Dak To, was cursed. We left on C-130s for Dak To around the 15th of November.
Even the trip by air back up there was not without tragedy. One C-130 hit a bulldozer on the side of the runway. One was hit by mortar and rocket fire and exploded and burned on the runway. Night and day fire fights broke out all around the base camp area. Something big was coming. The VC were not doing their usual hit and run, they were hitting but they weren't running. One of the first missions given to my old Battalion, the 2/503rd Airborne, was to secure a hill to the north and west of the base camp. The hill was named for its height above sea level, "875". The battle to take "875" turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles of this long war. Several books have been written about it. The History Channel, with Jack Smith, just did a special on it a few months ago. Of the many I knew that died on that God forsaken Hill just before Thanksgiving day 1967 I want to mention just one.
Chaplain Charles Watters. He and I had spent the last nine months in and out of each other's company. We bunked together back in the Base Camp at Bein Hoa. He had helped me get through the pain of our losses back in June and the loss of my friend Boyd back in May. Chaplain Watters was always a light in the storm. Someone we all depended on and regardless of how bad it got he was always there. As the companies of our Battalion took a break in the rear area Chaplain Watters always went with the company in the forward area. He never took a break. He was out "humping" with the units on search and destroy duty. He was with "his boys" during the assault on 875. For three days he pulled in the wounded and the dying. He helped with their wounds. He ministered to their spiritual needs. He was told repeatedly to stay down and stop going beyond our perimeter. When he heard the pleas of the wounded he repeatedly went forward anyway, ignoring the danger. He was himself wounded multiple times and finally joined "his boys" and fell, mortally wounded. Chaplain Charles Watters was awarded the Medal of Honor. I am so proud and honored to have known him. I photographed Panel 30 East. I also made a rubbing of his name. He was there.. With "his boys".
There are many other names on the "Wall" between panels 19 East and 32 East of young men that I served with. There are others I grew up with or served with at other times during my military career that are on other portions of the "Wall". I pray this will be the last generation of young Americans that are taken so far from home to die on foreign soil. I can't imagine seeing one of my grandsons on anyone's wall. This last "reflection" of my two mornings at the wall seems to put it all in perspective, at least for me. If there was any part of this that helped me through my personal Hell it was my two minutes with this wonderful lady.
