A Combat Marine’s War in Vietnam

A Combat Marine’s War in Vietnam

There was a young man named James Dobson, only son of a single mother. He badgered his mom to let him join the Marine Corps at 17 years old. We were up right at the DMZ, and John and I went down this wooden or bamboo trail in dense jungle. We bumped into three North Vietnamese right at the T-section. John’s went that way and mine went that way. I chased him down, but he just disappeared in the brush. We were carrying M4s at that time, and I heard a round go off.

I said, “Damn, that is an AK-47.” It had a distinct, different sound.

I went down there and John was dead, man. I’ll never forget it. I mean, the kid never made it to 18—18 and a half, yeah. John Dobson. I enjoy people, and watching them die is just ridiculous. Why did we have to go down that street? When John got killed, the guys picked him up and put him in by the Command Center, placing a poncho over him. What was amazing was that it was an open patch of jungle, and the sun was shining down directly on John under that poncho.

I said, “You know what? I think he made the big trip to Heaven.”

He was a devout Christian kid too. I still close my eyes to this day and visualize that patch of bareness, him under the poncho, and the sun shining on it. Wow, that kicked my butt, let me tell you. Wow. And the other guys too, man. All you did was grieve a few seconds, then carry on—put a poncho over him, call up the chopper, throw him on the chopper, and they were gone.

Yeah, it’s tough. Anybody tells you they think combat is glorious, they’re full of crap. There ain’t nothing cute about it; it’s a deadly serious business.

Okay, we were in Hot Pursuit with Operation Prairie. The North Vietnamese were right at the border, dropping back rear guard so the main body could get back to the North. All of a sudden, we were told, “All right, we can’t go any further. The border ends here, we can’t go no further.”

I’m thinking, we’ve been in hot pursuit of these guys for the whole day, and we come to something that’s non-existent because there’s a line there. We should have kept going and just kicked their ass. That was my opinion, but no—politics. Politics gets people killed. Sad, sad, sad.

There’s a couple of times that I thought, holy smokes. All of a sudden, everything’s quiet. You’re walking on patrol, and all of a sudden there’s a few people out there shooting at you. That wakes you up real quick, and if you’re not scared, you’re a liar. But otherwise, it was hairy.

I think the biggest one was when Spencer got sick, and like I just told you about Spence, he said, “No, you got the squad—eight guys.”

He said, “You’re going to go down the hill and set up a night ambush.”

I’m going, holy smokes, I got seven people underneath me, and if I screw up, I’m going to get people killed. Anyway, one of the newbies managed to kick a flare because we were going through concertina wire. It was all like this, right? You don’t make a straight trail up or down the hill. He kicked a flare and lit up the whole freaking hill.

I said, “Well, every North Vietnamese out there in Nong Song area knows we’re coming.”

So I made a quick decision. I said, “Well, if I’m going to go to jail for this, I’ll take it.”

I told the guys, “Stay down, take a knee for about five, six, seven minutes so your eyes can adjust back to midnight.”

I turned them around and walked them back up the hill. I said, “No, I’m not going to sacrifice anybody because of somebody’s stupidity.” So I walked them back up the hill, but that terrified me, man alive. Yeah, I was all of what, 19 years old?

Most of the time I was walking point, but this time I was tailing Charlie, and that’s the day Doc Youngman got killed. I was walking tail end, walking through the water up to here, and I had a canteen on my backpack right here. All of a sudden, I felt this hit, and I turned around and said, “Oh man, what was that?”

I’m walking over the water at this time, and the water was about jaw-deep in some parts, deeper in others. I got up on the bank. Doc Youngman was working on one of the guys who got hit pretty good, and it was just me, Doc, and him.

So I yelled at Doc, “Everything okay?”

He said, “Okay.”

I kept going, then I turned around, and he just collapsed. Somebody, a sniper, took him down because all three of us were out in the open. So I hauled ass to the bank over there to get myself covered, but yeah, he died that day. Having a hole put through your canteen… I’ve got it sitting in my gun rack at the house. Oh yeah, I know, whoa, that was a wake-up call. That’s as close as I got to it, but it was close enough.

The battalion was out, and the lead squad took rounds from a house right down Highway 1, which is basically a dirt street like this. So the rest of us, way in the back, just laid on the side of the road, and we could hear the guys busting rounds at this house. There were a couple of North Vietnamese in there, and they were just keeping them suppressed. It was a back-and-forth firefight, and we were all relaxing, shooting the breeze.

“Well, how are the guys doing up there?” We were still hearing rounds coming.

All of a sudden, as we were laying on our backs just soaking up the sun and resting a little bit, this Phantom comes screaming at treetop level, burning all the barrels at this house. You ever hear an expression… well, I’ll put it nicely: ass and elbows? That’s all you saw going for cover, because I mean, we thought we were going to get hit. But it was one of our F4s at treetop level. I mean, you didn’t even hear him until he was 100 feet past you—that’s how fast he was going treetop. But he took that house out, problem solved. I’ve never seen so many Marines scatter in my life, man. I mean, whoa. Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but it’s true.

Sometimes the comical errors that happened… you come back and say, “Whoa, that was stupid.” No, I had to laugh one time. We were at a Montagnard village above Da Nang up there, and we got up to this village to see what’s cooking. This afternoon, Spence and I were resting. Let’s say he’s here and I’m here—oh no, Spence was over here and I was on his left side. There was a bunch of Vietnamese kids on the other side of the street. They’d never seen a 6-foot-2 white guy, let alone a black dude, right?

So Spence and I were talking, and I said, “Spence, I think they’re talking about you.”

“No, I think they’re talking about you.”

Anyway, finally one of the kids was picked to go over to Spence and do the smudge test. We were laying there, and that kid walked up there, took his finger, went on Spencer’s arm like this, looked at his finger, ran back, and said, “It doesn’t come off!”

Spence and I, we just busted out laughing. Some of the humor that we had was sick, but that’s the way it was. That’s the way you kept your sanity, really, really. It was hilarious.

Oh, Spence looks at me and said, “No, white man.” He said, “No, it don’t come off.”

We were running cover for a truck convoy going from Phuoc 6 back to An Hoa. The lead truck came off of the hill, which was L-shaped, and there was a tree line there at the bottom of the L. The truck got the snot shot out of it by a bunch of NVA in the tree line. So we were at the bottom of the L, just guarding the trucks. We jumped off and mowed the grass, and yep, they were gone.

I jumped in the trench line where they had fired from. Spence was there first, and I jumped after him, but I landed wrong. We cleared the area, but man, I landed bad and snapped every ligament in it. I could hear the crack, and I yelled to Spence.

Spence didn’t see me for a second: “Hey, Duty, where are you?”

I said, “Over here, Spence. I think I busted my leg.”

He said, “What?”

I said, “Yeah, I think I just busted my leg.”

So anyway, I got a cast put on that thing. They flew me to Da Nang with some of the wounded, and I spent a couple of days, about a week, in Da Nang so I could walk again. I hopped a ride out of Da Nang back to An Hoa with one of the airplanes dropping equipment. That’s how we got back and forth—you just walked to the Da Nang airstrip and said, “Hey, you going to An Hoa?” or Da Nang or wherever.

And this major says, “Yeah, come on in, Marine.”

So I got on the plane and we flew up there. We got to the end of the airstrip, at the beginning of the landing, and the plane was taking rounds. Somebody at the end of the airstrip put two holes in that airplane.

He yelled at me, “You better hang on because I’m going to come in steep!”

And I mean, it was like this, then sitting down at An Hoa. Yeah, and I was holding on to the back of his seat because he said, “You want to see this? Get up behind my seat.”

I said, “Scared the bejesus out of me, man. I thought I was going to eat the deck over there.”

But anyway, yeah, it came out okay.

When I took the cast off… well, I didn’t realize it, but we were at An Hoa and I was still recouping in the Sick Bay area. About three weeks in, just before I was going to get the cast taken off, we got hit by mortars. All of a sudden, we could hear boom, boom, boom, boom, and it sounded like they were walking right to the medical building.

So anyway, we all screamed, “Incoming!”

Well, those hooches are about two feet off the ground so the monsoonal rains would just run underneath. We all scattered for the door, and there was only one. This other Marine fell down in front of the door.

I said, “I’m not waiting for you, dude.”

So I launched myself over him, and I said to myself, “If I’m going through the air, don’t land on the cast or you’ll re-break your foot.”

So I landed on this other foot and thought nothing of it, although the next day it was slightly sore. They took the cast off, okay, so I walked patrol—nothing, okay. The pain was pretty well gone, but it was still painful for the first couple of weeks.

The VA at La Hoya finally figured out why my ankle was so deformed. What had happened was, I landed on that foot, and where it bends, where it’s got that cup in there, it was all cracked. They did a scan—what are they called, MRI or CT?—they put it in that machine, and it just dissected my foot.

The doctor asked me, “What did you do to that foot? You’ve got nothing but arthritis growing in there.”

I said, “I don’t know.”

So I was thinking that night, and the bell rang. I said, “Ah, I landed on that ankle, and I just walked it into the ground.”

It was so embarrassing for me. I had always believed that when you got a Purple Heart, you had to bleed. Unknown to me, no—I got a Purple Heart for busting that leg in the firefight.

I was standing there during the Purple Heart formation that was being called at An Hoa. All the guys were standing in line, watching—yeah, okay, you got a bullet hole, shrapnel this and that, well-deserved Purple Hearts. Having the last name of Van Luen, you’re last on the list.

All of a sudden, I hear them say, “Van Luen, front and center!”

I was looking around and said, “Is there another Van Luen in here somewhere?”

Spencer comes up to me, slaps me, and says, “Hey, meathead, get over there, it’s yours!”

Mine! Oh, I’d never been so embarrassed in my life, tell you the truth. But you can’t turn it down, so I took it. I took it, yeah.

I came in very late at night, at about 12:00, so there was nobody there at LAX. My parents and all my brothers and sisters were there, and we had no harassment. But I talked to some of the guys who landed in San Francisco, and it was obscene—calling these guys baby killers, this and that.

Personally, I think they should have given them sidearms. To do that to your own troops… you know, you might disagree with them, but to be called baby killers and murderers, that to me is obscene. You did your job, and we have to live with that for the rest of our lives.

Yeah, there’s nothing cute about it. But to be harassed like that, that they didn’t keep an open area to let the guys come in and go home, you know? To get shouted down and called every nasty name in the world, to me, it’s pathetic.

I adapt pretty quick, but you can see I still get emotional when I talk about it because it’s a terrible experience. You go at it like John Wayne, and then all of a sudden you think, this is not like John Wayne. That’s why I’ve always said John Wayne’s a liar. There is nothing cute about young men killing one another.

No, I’m not upset, but one of the guys at the VA said, “Well, Robert, how do you feel about it? You’re a pretty happy-go-lucky person.”

I said, “No, I don’t forget though.” I said, “But you know what?”

Some of the people said, “Well, Robert, you got Agent Orange out of it.”

I said, “Yeah, and a cheap Purple Heart for a snapped ankle during a firefight.”

I said, “But you know what my premise is? I’m living for the guys who have died. That’s all I can say about it. It’s just, I’m alive.”

Yeah, sometimes I think, geez, am I feeling guilty? I said, “No, I don’t feel guilty. I look at it this way: the good Lord decided to keep me around, or those guys were lousy shots.”

But anyway, no, yeah, it’s a heartfelt thing. It really is.