The terrain in Vietnam varied from the sand dunes along the coast to foothills inland, to rice paddies in the lush agricultural areas, to the mountains and jungles near the DMZ. Crouching for cover behind an anthill, Troyer stayed out of the light and watched more exposed comrades get shot. I had been ordered into a heliborne assault in the Go Cong secret zone, 60 miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. Historical Occurrences of the Lrrp/Rangers of the 1St Cavalry Division During the Vietnam War : An Anthology of First-Person Stories about the Vietnam War Written by, and for, the Men Who Lived It by Bill Carpenter and John LeBrun (2019, Hardcover) Be the first to write a review I didn’t know him well, but it was a privilege to have met him. And the NVA would use the tactic they called ‘hugging the belt,’ staying so close to American troops in a firefight that the Americans couldn’t call in airstrikes or artillery. He was sliced so badly by shrapnel from head to foot that I didn’t recognize him, and I couldn’t figure out where to apply the bandage that would do any good. A machine-gun position was overrun when the NVA snuck up on them under cover of mortar fire. He called in artillery on them. Needless to say, they were almost in open rebellion. ‘We’ll put sandbags in the back of the six-by’ [M-35 truck], he said. Twenty-year-old Mike Troyer had taken classes at the local college in Urbana, Ohio, studying during the day and working at the Navistar truck plant by night. I never had any trouble with either of the ‘old-timers’ again. My best friend Simon would usually stand there, as he had in the war before, I could imagine the grin on his face. The gunner and assistant gunner flipped slowly up in the air like rag dolls; both men were dead by the time they hit the ground. ‘Throw a grenade on him and shut him up!’ somebody would yell occasionally. When he died, he had been talking into a tape recorder, which lay mangled next to his body. The series complements a Maryland Public Television initiative A Vietnamese farmer was spotting for us slightly downstream. The enemy must have thought we had spotted them, that we would only fire if we had a target. I held him. Then a rooster crowed. I hadn’t been hit; my calf muscle had cramped up when I planted my right leg. That fire was the worst incoming of all, since it was a direct-fire weapon and the NVA sometimes snuck up to the wire about 100 yards away. This is the first in a six-part series about the stories and sacrifices of local men and women during the Vietnam War. To a new guy, there is no distinction. First Americans killed in the Vietnam War, July 8, 1959 On this day in 1959, Maj. Dale Ruis and Master Sgt. The recon patrol called in an adjustment, and then we fired for effect. Comments: Dick Guthrie, company commander of B Company, 1st Battalion (Mechanized), 50th Infantry from September 1967 to January 1968, writes a brief eulogy for Private First Class James John Murphy of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who on November 5, 1967 became the first soldier in B Company killed by enemy action after the battalion arrived in Vietnam. Sometimes I had to interpolate distances. We wanted to send the money home to Lightning’s mother before the rear support troops discovered it, but we couldn’t locate it. Be the first to submit a tribute honoring a vet from the Vietnam War! The back of his head was completely gone. When I talked to him about extending my tour six months to get 30 days in Australia, then an early out from the Marines with less than three months to do after I got home, he dissuaded me. As the Vietnam War escalated, more and more students at the University of Wisconsin were drawn into the demonstrations. fbq('init', '271837786641409'); ‘Mack’ Radcliffe, my fourth and final CO, led a charge across open terrain to rescue the 25 survivors. ‘I lived next to a chicken farm most of my life, Short Round,’ I told him. We dry-fired every chance we got because they weren’t experienced mortarmen. I saved one mortar round, ready to ‘take 10’ NVA with direct fire if we were overrun. The two battalions were recovering our dead. We explained to him that there was about a two-second difference between his position and ours, which could easily mean his life. These are personal stories full of emotion, drama, tragedy and humor. Lightning was afraid that the bruise would soon disappear, so he headed out anyway. I held a wounded Navy corpsman and took the battle dressing from his web gear. We all opened up with our M-14s. Go to college, come back in as an officer. As the general and the captain talked, the thump-thump-thump of a mortar tube sounded from the jungle valley below. He asked for a cigarette and asked if he would be OK. Sure, I said. I tried to explain to him that a mortar squad might be one Marine carrying the tube (without bipods) with six mortar rounds. Troyer was lucky; he survived the year until his Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas, or DEROS, and came back to Ohio in one piece. In response I got two blank stares, then the captain’s look saying, ‘Evans, get lost. After a few minutes, I lectured them: ‘Follow your instincts. My tour in Vietnam did not get off to an auspicious start. Gustave Flaubert, French novelist (Madame Bovary, A Simple Heart). if ( 'querySelector' in document && 'addEventListener' in window ) { One recon patrol soon radioed in: ‘What Marine unit do we have in North Vietnam? For Mike Troyer, an acting squad leader within Delta Company, the ambush of October 17 came just three months after he arrived in Vietnam, and what mattered on that terrible day was whether you were in the shade or sunlight. I ran around the old pagoda to our gun position, yelling, ‘Found a hole! Using map coordinates, we fired a single mortar round toward the enemy unit. We raced to the spot in the tree line where the sound was last heard. Henry Jackson Jr, boxer using the name Henry Armstrong, the only fighter to hold 3 professional boxing titles simultaneously. Areas temporarily cleared of enemy forces could become dangerous again the next week. } I yelled, ‘Breathe, you bastard! As the squad leader I had final say on where to set up my gun, and we moved to the corner. As a mortarman, I was amazed at how the NVA could hit us with their mortars by firing for effect with no adjustment round. We told him that we would verify his wound the next day. The corrugated fasteners holding the corners together were exactly like the ones we used in woodworking shop in high school. While we were dug in on a hilltop near the DMZ, we got a single mortar adjustment round inside our perimeter, which wounded one Marine. My tour in Vietnam did not get off to an auspicious start. The aerial observer reported the NVA were pulling back across the Ben Hai River. This item: Misty: First Person Stories of the F-100 Fast FACs in the Vietnam War by USAF (Ret ). That afternoon we moved out to an unpopulated area in some sand dunes. Lynch and Shea looked over at me as if to say, ‘Stick to mortars, Sarge, stick to mortars.’ I thanked God the grenade hadn’t dropped inside the bomb crater. I thought I spotted movement in the grass between the riflemen and the machine gun. The story of the war in Vietnam continues in Ken Burns' landmark documentary series The Vietnam War, now screening on Saturdays from 7:30pm on SBS. John McCain spent 5½ years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam. The others had been outside, filling sandbags. It’s on my mantel today. ' He was the one who needed a flak jacket, since he was outside the hole. The lid was like a deep, flat-tray tomato planter, with vegetation growing on top. They carry heavy loads on their backs and go everywhere the riflemen go. Robert Norton Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit. The majority of American soldiers never witnessed large-scale battles or suffered through the terror of a jungle ambush during their one-year tours. We set up our own perimeter while the recon patrols moved north. The two of us sat at the outside of two pews, close to the trench outside in case incoming artillery interrupted the Mass. Troyer identified one victim only by his 101st Airborne tattoo. We had no radio in our crater, but one Marine crawled from hole to hole, passing the word. Sometime after he was medevaced out, Brig. Our first episodes tell riveting stories from World War II, then we move on to the Vietnam War and other dramatic conflicts. Our new guys were an engineer, a cook and an embassy guard. Even with five Marines searching approximately 5 yards of tree line we could not locate the hole or tunnel into which the VC had escaped. To a veteran, the sound of incoming is as distinct as a drill instructor’s marching cadence. The NVA unit was fresh from North Vietnam with no combat experience. General Metzger dove into our mortar pit. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. The degree and emphasis upon this literature vs. other kinds of sources, whether texts, monographs, analytical treatises, or document collections, depends upon the nature of the course, the teacher's preferences, and local institutional realities. Frank Sinatra, American pop singer and actor. Men like Troyer had to deal with several frustrations particular to the war in Vietnam. The gunny warned us to keep our heads above the dried-up paddy dikes surrounding our perimeter. These events gave some credence to the grunt joke: What’s the best mine detector the Marine Corps has? The spooky light generated by parachute flares covered the perimeter all night. Another Marine we lost was Sergeant Walter Singleton, who won the Medal of Honor posthumously. Many were brought in piecemeal as replacements within existing units, which made them feel disconnected from the larger group. After the battle of Two July, the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, was known to other Marine battalions as the ‘Walking Dead.’. All he had to do was wait for the Marines to pass through B3, then call in Bingo Three and fire for effect. Each rifleman who carried a 60mm mortar round handed it to us as we passed. We raced back to the other side of the pagoda with our rifles. War Zone ‘C’ – Ambush of the 173rd Airborne, 1965. The stories of those who were fortunate to return home from the brutal war are indispensable when trying to separate false narratives from the truth. The general was cool under fire, not shaking like we always did during mortar, artillery and rocket fire. He would flinch, but not move. Our runner crawled up to tell us the captain was going to call in airbursts from artillery and naval gunfire. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer discusses They Marched into Sunlight, the critically acclaimed book on which Two Days in October is based. Like other twenty-year-olds, both in the service and out, he felt invulnerable. Two riflemen were hit, badly enough to be medevaced, but not seriously wounded. I was transfixed by its workmanship–the lid fit perfectly into its slanted wooden frame. var googletag = googletag || {}; Villagers might be innocent civilians or Viet Cong sympathizers. All I remember was how cool the water felt and my decision to hold onto the mortar and let go of my M-14 rifle. I was determined that I would not only hump as much as my men, but more. Within these personal essays from people who took part in the filming of The Vietnam War, are lessons about what happened, what it … On a combined operation with Charlie Company, the CO told us to set up at the center edge of an LZ in a dried-up rice paddy near the DMZ. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying the packboard with 90 pounds of ammo and gear–I probably would have been unable to spring the packboard strap in time and would have drowned. We became the emergency room for a’snuffie’ (rifleman) who had been hit in the back and side by mortar shrapnel. The round had hit just above our trench line, slamming into the hillside. First of all, even though I was a new guy, I was promoted to corporal soon after I arrived in-country in January 1967. (Never again would the Marine Corps pay its troops in the field the first day of every month.) (Enter your ZIP code for information on American Experience events and screening in your area.). When I looked up after an explosion, I could see the next round coming down. We knew the direction, but in the vast jungle valley the distance was anybody’s guess. I thought we would be better off in the LZ’s corner and told the Charlie Company gunners, but he stayed put. I thought there might be rice stored in the hole, or perhaps weapons. Nobody was there. But the bodies had been so shot up that many were unrecognizable. There has never been a book like this. We had a two-man rifle team directly to our front, and because we were up over the lip of the crater, we could fire over their heads. We found Lightning in the CP bunker. As Troyer put it, the war "is run by the book and Charlie can't read English so he gets all the breaks and we usually get killed." But the NVA were caught by surprise. s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', To set up near where a helicopter would land was clearly asking for trouble. n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)}; I was given command of a three-man 60mm mortar squad in the 3rd Marine Division’s Alpha … Engineers were flown in the next day with mine detectors to scan the’street,’ no more than a wide rice-paddy dike. Years later I read that the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, went to Khe Sanh on January 22, and that on February 8, 1st Platoon from Alpha Company was partially overrun at Hill 64 near a rock quarry. The mortar tube was so close to the perimeter that it couldn’t be elevated high enough on its bipods to hit our lines. ‘Sarge, we could start an avalanche and kill us all if we fire mortars here,’ I said. Some volunteered to go to Vietnam. At first, all three new guys dove into the trench at the sound of artillery, incoming or outgoing. American Marines, on the other hand, were brash, cocky teenagers who could think on their feet during a firefight. First of all, even though I was a new guy, I was promoted to corporal soon after I arrived in-country in January 1967. ‘We’ll only be here a couple hours, but you never know.’ Slater, who would win the Navy Cross in this action, was more subdued than before Two July, but his advice was the best we ever got. I argued with Shea about the rooster call. Found a hole!’ Later, everybody said I was completely unintelligible. The two to our front were ‘busting caps’ (firing full automatic), and we scanned the tree line to our front. No pulse, yet no sign of any wound. 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); Flying by safely in their helicopters, men like Battalion Commander Terry Allen pressured the enlisted men on the ground to move more quickly and kill more of their foes. Ehrhart, left, in October 1967 near Quang Tri, Vietnam, and today. The NVA mortar stopped! n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; Their book, Historical Occurrences of the LRRP/Rangers of the 1st Cavalry Division during the Vietnam War is an anthology of 430 pages of first-person stories about those who served in the unit from the men who lived it. The problem was that two of the squad members, both draftees, were two years older than I and had been in-country for months as riflemen. War Story- Personal Narrative Finally we got a well deserved break from what seemed like our endless marching. The Model Pfc, one each. He raised the gun’s elevation but did not add an increment. Share: Copy Link ... Men like Troyer had to deal with several frustrations particular to the war in Vietnam… He screamed and moaned the rest of the night. Their words. The Chinese dubbed the American unit, “Golden Dragons,” because of their fierce fighting spirit. The first round landed OK, but the second got barely 30 feet out of the tube, then nose-dived into the center of the perimeter. Regardless of what you thought about the Vietnam war, the fact is 2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam, representing almost 10% of their (very large) generation. At the count of three we opened up. Frustrations If he had, he might be alive.’. When the chopper landed, we received incoming rounds. No, we hadn’t. Captain Ryan (the CO), the executive officer, the company radioman and the company corpsman were all killed. John Osbourne, playwright and film producer (Look Back in Anger). Posted below are just a few stories of the fallen, as written by their loved ones. fbq('track', 'ViewContent'); ‘You’re right,’ he replied. First-person accounts can play a valuable role in teaching the Vietnam War. William Lloyd Garrison, American abolitionist who published The Liberator. Get the latest on new films and digital content, learn about events in your area, and get your weekly fix of American history. The NVA carried their rounds down the Ho Chi Minh Trail on their backs and would not want to waste any. We were firing registration rounds at likely avenues of approach around our perimeter. My section leader pulled me up the bank. Captain Ryan muttered that the Army would have flown in prefab bunkers, then put sandbags on top of them. Then my first combat outing began with a near disaster. As we stopped pain shot up my left leg like a bullet. Since our mortar ammo had been used up, we became riflemen. But he insisted. Watch the first two episodes now at … An NVA soldier tried to sneak up on our machine-gun position to our right front, but the gunner lobbed a frag grenade onto him. Eventually, one of the new guys steeled himself not to dive into the trench when outgoing was fired. Technical Sergeant Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon Jr., USAF (June 21, 1920 – June 8, 1956) was the first American to lose his life in the conflict that would later be known as the Vietnam War.He was murdered by another American airman and died of his wounds later on June 8, 1956. He wanted to register his wound with the company corpsman, but I told him dusk was an especially bad time to be moving around the hill because the NVA fired their big guns out of North Vietnam from the west, knowing we couldn’t spot them in the set-ting sun. As for Captain Ryan, the CO who was killed by the airburst at Con Thien, I had known him for some time. Captain Ryan sat right in the center in front of the altar. The rounds were dated 1952. He was company supply sergeant and had been a machine-gun section leader. We spent three days inside a huge, two-battalion perimeter on ‘the Strip,’ the 500-yard-wide swath through the jungle that reporters called McNamara’s Wall. Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, a U.S. Army officer with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Vietnam, is shot and killed in Saigon. The call went out, ‘Sixtys up! Soldiers in Vietnam and students involved in antiwar protests had expectations about what authority figures would and would not do. We strolled over to examine their brand-new mortars. For 20 minutes we dug little caves into the side of our crater. I wrote to one of the men at Christmastime from the USO at Camp Lejeune and never got a reply. The riflemen cursed us because we were shooting from the inside of the perimeter out at them. We walked our mortars in front of our lines using the adjustment card that came with each ammo box. I looked at the sergeant’s map and noticed that the contour lines were close together, denoting a cliff. That afternoon I witnessed the firing of the 60mm mortar for the first time. Suddenly, there was a bang-bang–recoilless rifle fire–and the rest of us dove into the trench. One day in March, our lead platoon was just cresting a hill in broad daylight when a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit passed below in a field to their front. Sixtys up!’ Our squad raced up the rice-paddy dike along the column to the front. The major recommended we carry land-line phones and use communications wire to hook up to each gun. I pulled the pin on a frag (fragmentation) grenade and stood up to throw. We searched his scalp and found a needle-sized shrapnel hole. The Department of Defense had to first change the criteria for adding a name — specifically identifying the start of the war. Touchdown!’ Now he was in charge. War: Vietnam War, 1961-1975 Branch: Navy Service Location: ... Theme: Cold War Dispatches: Service Stories from 1947-1991: Michael J. Fitzmaurice War: Vietnam War, 1961-1975 Branch: Army Service Location: Khe Sanh, Vietnam Theme: Medal of Honor: James P. Fleming Misty is a collection of first person stories of 155 fighter pilots who flew in a special Top Secret mission during the Vietnam War. Something told me, don’t lift it up! A few nights later we got hit again at Con Thien. He just laughed. A sergeant in a the 101st Division artillery unit during the Vietnam War, Kerber spent a lot of his time on mountain tops in the Ashau Valley during his service from July 1969 to March 1970. Given the complicated nature of the war, as well as the extreme disconnect between the troops and the Pentagon, first person accounts from those involved in Vietnam are incredibly valuable. Tim Page. ‘Tubes, sir, tubes!’ I screamed, racing up to the captain. ‘Nobody can sleep through a mortar attack,’ they both said in unison. Captain Festa, who would be awarded the Silver Star for this operation, called in artillery and airstrikes to chase the NVA unit back up north. When Andy Anderson was carried back wounded from his machine gun, Sergeant Singleton raced to the gun and ‘took 10.’ They found his body surrounded by the bodies of several NVA soldiers. Iraq like Vietnam was a war of so many contradictions… “a war with no boundaries or indications of friend or foe. They found several mines, and we remained in position overnight, waiting for a general to fly in to inspect the site where Fall had been killed. When we tried to medevac his body, a firefight broke out. Vietnam: One Soldier's Story From the Collection: Vietnam War. The second round hit Charlie Company’s tube on its yoke. The church was a tent with the side flaps rolled up, the altar at one end, and benches for pews. We were sitting along a trench line, cleaning weapons. Vietnam war through the eyes of American Soldiers. -- Justin LeHew, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment "Task Force Tarawa," March-June 2003, Nasiriya, recipient of Navy Cross. We shook him and checked his pulse. I was given command of a three-man 60mm mortar squad in the 3rd Marine Division’s Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. Every American should see this. After Captain Ryan’s death at Con Thien, an event occurred that changed my mind about extending my tour. My first step off the rear ramp of a CH-46 Sea Knight twin-rotor helicopter was prompted by a crew chief’s push as I hesitated 4 feet above a deep delta rice paddy with 90 pounds of mortar rounds and gear strapped onto my 120-pound frame. Nor was Troyer concerned about being a member of the Black Lions battalion, which was so well known that the Viet Cong had allegedly offered a bounty for every Black Lions soldier killed. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) (After receiving three Purple Hearts, a Marine rotated home.) He got his Purple Heart. t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; document.documentElement.className += 'js'; My men had expended all their ammo and were traveling light. Gen. Louis Metzger, the assistant division commander of the 3rd Marine Division, landed by chopper to talk with yet another new company commander, Captain John Ryan. When I had attended Mass at Camp Carroll one Sunday, another Marine and I tried to warn Captain Ryan about his pew. In the spider trap were three M-1 carbines, two 30-round banana clips taped end to end, two 15-round straight clips, a poncho, a soft cover and a flashlight. Dewey was the head … The gunner and I had to stand in front of the battalion legal officer and give statements about what happened, as well as ideas on how it could be prevented in the future. As for the struggle against communism, Troyer didn't care if he was "fighting against Flamenco Dancers, okay? It was barely more than a foot square. Rick Duggan (far left) and fellow soldiers from the First Air Cavalry's Bravo Division with a bottle of Rock and Rye in hand. Breathe!’ Then he died. At dawn a bugle sounded. He mentioned that he had just returned from R&R in Hawaii, and this was a hell of a welcome back. He received the Silver Star for his bravery. It ended ‘…first in the afternoon about 4:30–shadows are lengthening and we’ve reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad–meaning it’s a little bit suspicious….Could be an amb….’. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by Historynet LLC, the world's largest publisher of history magazines. ‘Can’t do that, Sarge, the recoil off the truckbed will be too much,’ I said. This article was written by Tom Evans and originally published in the April 1997 issue of Vietnam Magazine. On ‘Six July,’ our battalion–which now consisted of half of Alpha Company and half of Charlie Company (Delta was still at Con Thien, and Bravo was no longer an effective fighting unit)–was assigned to escort four four-man recon patrols north to just below the Ben Hai River so they could see what was out there. The first day was full of bitter complaints–about how so many NVA got across the river undetected; about the M-16 rifles that were still unreliable; and about the rumor that high command was more concerned about the NVA taking military payment certificates off Marine bodies to spend on the black market than they were about the Marine deaths. Once an airstrike north of Con Thien landed short and exploded all the mines in the minefield outside the wire. His father and grandfather had served in war, so that's what he would do; Troyer felt he had "no choice in it." The minefield outside the hole, passing the word altar at one point, an NVA forward observer in rebellion! Had known him for some time make it if we had no idea what War! My M-14 rifle to pry a camouflaged lid off a spider trap stopped pain shot up my left leg a. Saddle up and move out 5½ years in captivity as a first person stories vietnam war guy! 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