Assault Helicopter Pilot’s War in Vietnam

Assault Helicopter Pilot’s War in Vietnam

I had this dream that I was going to be a medevac pilot and save lives, do wondrous things, but uh, didn’t happen that way.

They just sent me straight to Vietnam to be in an assault helicopter company, kind of the meat and potatoes of Army Aviation back then.

And um, flying slicks in the 68th Assault Helicopter Company out of Bien Hoa in III Corps, Vietnam, and uh, that was uh, some very challenging flying, a lot of formation stuff, nights, awful weather.

And occasionally we would do uh, medevac where just wounded soldiers—I mean, when a soldier’s wounded on the ground, he’s not waiting around for the one that comes in with the big red cross on the side, he wants the first one that’s going to get him on his way.

And uh, on my earliest such mission, I saw a young soldier just bleeding out in the back of the helicopter, nothing we could do other than get him to a medical facility as quick as possible, and it was probably still about a 15-20 minute run.

And it just really got to me, and I thought, “God, I can’t stand to see somebody like that dying in our helicopter, and maybe I’m not meant to be a medevac pilot.”

So when the opportunity came to switch and start flying gunships, I took advantage of it, and uh, decided, “Yeah, I much, much more prefer to be a hunter rather than hunted,” which I always felt like in the slicks we were in the shooting gallery.

And uh, made a heck of a difference. It was an amazing tour, I was there for the Tet Offensive of ’68, so uh, that was major excitement there.

Uh, on that night of 31st of January, the kickoff for Tet, we were all, you know, asleep.

We’d been told that there was something coming up, but we’d hear that periodically, and I didn’t, you know, most of the time I thought, “Ah, they’re just making stuff up.”

So uh, but at 3:00 in the morning, uh, rockets started coming right in on our base there at uh, Bien Hoa.

In fact, one of our buildings across from us took a direct hit in that building.

So anyway, we came tumbling out of our racks and ran to the bunker. That’s what you do when you’re under attack.

Sirens are going off, and things are really exploding big time, much more so than we’d ever heard before.

And uh, so now we’re in the bunker and we’re peeking out, I can see things burning over on the Air Force side, some of our helicopters had been hit, um, think one of our CONEX containers that was full of I don’t know, inflammable stuff, that was on fire, a fuel tanker was on fire.

Uh, it was kind of exciting. And um, but quickly our battalion made the decision to launch the gunships, “Let’s go after them.”

Oh, and yeah, the important thing was our perimeter had been breached.

So the perimeter on at the Eastern edge of the Bien Hoa Airbase, which was uh, security was maintained by the Air Force, um, and with some assistance from the Army since we were a tenant on that airbase, um, anyway, the perimeter had been breached.

There was hundreds of uh, bad guys, you know, VC, NVA, we weren’t particular about it, coming through there.

And uh, in fact, we had one of our guys, one of our warrant officers who had been assigned as a liaison with the Air Force, and he was out on the perimeter when it all happened, and he was grievously wounded by an RPG round that went through the bunker where they were seeking cover.

The uh, the Air Force officer that he was with was killed, and Mike was wounded, but uh, they were able to get him to safety and medical attention.

Um, at any rate, we got to our helicopters and took off right away.

So it was somewhere between 3:30 and 4:00 in the morning, we’re in the air and right over on our perimeter.

And uh, there was a fire team from the 334th Assault Helicopter Company, or actually they called them the armed helicopter company, uh, and one of my flight school classmates was with them.

I heard him on the radio, and we talked to him, and he said, “Yeah, we’re expended here. They’re all in through the wire here, and uh, we’re leaving.”

And so we rolled in on that, and uh, it was uh, some might say like shooting fish in a barrel.

They were just running all over the place, and we’re firing them up with miniguns and rockets and all the fun things.

So um, then we were diverted to go over to Long Binh to provide similar support.

Um, we were, and oh, and in the air then we could hear radio broadcasts from other places far and wide.

Here it is 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and we realized everybody was under attack.

So it was pretty amazing. I thought, “Wow, this is now, now things are happening.”

In a way, it was kind of exciting for us because instead of having to go hunting for them, they were coming to us, and uh, that was fine, we gave them all we could.

We uh, went down to Tan Son Nhut, which was the main base there in Saigon, the Air Force maintained that, and once again, we put in some strikes there that I think really checked the attack.

And that, coupled with uh, you know, mid-morning, I think the VC, the NVA, realized that the big support they were expecting from the citizenry just didn’t materialize, and suddenly and then we were hitting back hard, I mean, really hard.

And so they uh, they started running for cover, and that whole day we uh, we were refueling, rearming, coming back.

Back to something, seldom did rearm at Bien Hoa because we were always someplace else.

So I think we were starting to run out of, certainly out of rockets.

I remember we had to put together our own rockets, bust open the cases, the rocket motors, put the warheads on them, screw them down, throw them in the helicopter.

Mermites came out with sandwiches for us, and we’re back in the air again doing the same thing.

It was uh, it was pretty intense.

Um, the Long Binh ammo dump blew up um, while we were doing all this on the ground, and I remember seeing this giant mushroom cloud go up because you see it before you hear it, light versus sound.

And it looked like a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.

I thought, “Holy God, we’ve been nuked,” you know, and everybody there on the ramp hit the ground, and then this big blast came over us, you know, rumble, and you could feel it.

And uh, but it wasn’t a nuke, obviously, it was just an ammo dump, a huge ammo dump.

And uh, we got, we continued running around and um, and flying, we flew off through the next night.

And uh, you know, we didn’t get a whole lot of sleep, put a lot of time on the aircraft, but the crews were great, everybody was great.

And we had one or two people who were wounded, um, but nobody was killed in that little period.

Probably overall ran for two to three days, you know, around the clock, and uh, that was about it.

And then went back to, somewhat went back to normal.

I remember, oh yeah, this is funny, kind of have some humor.

While we were rearming there at Bien Hoa, some guys came walking by, regular ground guys that we had, you know, maintenance guys, and they had a guy, a Vietnamese guy in an ARVN uniform, and they had him with his hands over his head like this, and one guy had an M14 rifle right at his back, and another guy was holding an RPG.

And he says, “We got this guy down at the end of the, you know, the end on the perimeter, and he had this with him.”

And you know, some somebody said, “Well, just shoot him, shoot him,” and said, “No, no, take him up to Ops.”

So he was their prisoner.

So later on, a couple hours later, I went by Ops and I saw my friend Tom, the same guy I talked to on the radio out there on the perimeter, and uh, so we’re comparing notes, and then I see this ARVN guy sitting in their office there.

He’s sitting there smoking a cigarette.

I said, “Hey, that’s the guy they caught there with the RPG.”

He says, “He was our observer. We had him on the helicopter, and we brought him in, and he just wandered off like it was an ordinary day. He didn’t think it through, and he was holding onto this RPG that we picked up on the ground, and once the guys saw him, they snatched him.”

And he was a bit shaken, he came really close to getting killed.

Which then reminds me of another story, which is probably a good one um, for people who want to know, you know, “How do you do your business as a gunship pilot?”

And we’d been sent down to support the Australians.

There was an Australian contingent down in the southeast corner of III Corps, in an area called Dat Do.

And uh, we went down there to support them on a rotational basis.

They didn’t have gunships at that time, I think later on they did.

And I remember going in there, and I was the fire team leader, meaning two helicopters, but I’m the guy in charge.

And um, there was an Australian major who briefed us on what they wanted us to do, and it was to kind of patrol their coastal region.

And he said, “If you see any boats in that water, you know, nearby, or that little bit of shoreline that they had responsibility for”—and it may have been two miles long or something, I don’t know—he said, “You can fire them up, do whatever.”

And I said, “Oh, well, that’s kind of good,” but I said, “Our rules of engagement require that we be under positive control. So that means I’ll have to talk to you, I will have to identify what I have. Now, certainly if they’re shooting at me, fine, then all bets are off. But if they’re just out there standing around waving NVA flags or whatever they’re doing, that’s not sufficient. I just can’t shoot them, much as we might like to.”

But um, he said, “Well, I’m telling you right now, you don’t have to do that.”

And I said, “Sir, my rules are still that I have to talk to you, and you can tell me the same thing once I do talk to you, and if you do, then fine, I’ll act accordingly.”

And he just kind of shook his head like, “Oh boy, okay, fine, no problem.”

The issue was that we didn’t have good radio comms for that area on the coast back to his place, so when I did try to call him, uh, I couldn’t get him.

Um, but back to the real story, we got out there, and I mean, truly, once we got out there, right offshore, there was what we would call a motorized sampan, which is probably a boat that might have been 26, 28, maybe 30 feet long, looked like a real boat with all kinds of fishing gear on it.

And uh, maybe four well-muscled young men, what we used to call inland, we would call them young eligible males, so they should be serving in the army.

If they’re not serving in the army, then what the heck are they doing?

These guys are on a boat with fishing gear, and deeply tanned and that stuff.

I mean, these guys to me looking at him, and I’d seen a lot of bad guys, my first thought was, “Yeah, fishing boat.”

And when they saw us, they turned and started heading out to the deep water, and my crew said, “Oh boy, we got him now, this is going to be great.”

And so I said, and we, you know, overflew him instantly, and I said to my door gunner, I said, “Um, put a little door gun in front of the boat there, just at the bow, we’ll get these guys stopped and we’ll get a good look at him.”

So he, you know, I set him up in such a pattern there where he fired into the water there, and they kept going.

I said, “Huh, these guys don’t seem to understand simple English.”

So um, I said, “Do it again.”

And now I set up a real tight pattern, I got in close and did the same thing all around him, and in close, my gunners were phenomenally accurate, and they’re still motoring.

I said, “Okay, one more try here,” and I backed off a little bit and I came around, I fired a rocket right in front of the boat.

Big splash, boat gets splashed with water.

I said, “The next one’s coming right into your little pilot house there, pal,” and they stopped.

So now I just flew around looking, looking, looking, four guys standing there, arms down at their sides, boat’s dead in the water.

And I called my wingman, I said, “Hey Gary, come on down here, take a look at him, I’ll go, I’ll be high for you.” We always like to have high-low ship.

And um, so he dropped down, he flew around, he goes, “Heck, I can’t tell.” Says, “They, yeah, they look like fishermen, but, you know,” said, “We could take them under fire.” “Yeah, okay, good, thank you.”

And back up, looked down a little bit more, and I thought, “No, we’re not shooting these guys,” for a couple of reasons.

And uh, one is I didn’t have that positive control, and secondly, these guys are standing there, I mean, they’re, it’s like the firing squad.

And my guy would, I’d just cut him down in an instance, just all I had to do is say the word, “Kill him.”

And uh, and it dawned on me even after the fact, I thought, “You know, if my guys had done that, they would have that on their, that would be imprinted in their minds for the rest of their lives that they gunned these guys down without other than my command.” Said, “I’m not doing that.”

So I mean, if one guy had just pulled a gun out of his holster there and fired one round at us, could have killed him and sunk the boat and laughed about it afterward.

We didn’t do that, and I never regret it.

I think about it a lot, that those guys, were they really bad guys? Were they sneaking stuff in, doing bad things? Don’t know, but at least we don’t have that on our conscience, I can’t do that.

So that was uh, that was it, and spent the rest of my tour there, and uh, left um, in the end of August of ’68, went on to a short tour in Germany.

Back then, the Army decided that Army aviators shouldn’t be sent anywhere for very long before it was time for them to come back to Vietnam.

So I uh, I was in Germany, it was nice, easygoing, not much going on there, drinking beer, eating bratwurst, enjoying life.

And uh, but I knew I was going to get sent back, so I volunteered for a second tour, figured I’d kind of get ahead of the game, maybe it would give me something that I would prefer, because I don’t think I wanted to go back to flying gunships again.

By this time, I had a second child, newly born son, and uh, so I volunteered, much to my wife’s dismay, to go back to Vietnam, and I tried to explain to her, “Hey, if I can get what I want, it’ll be a whole lot safer, and it’s something that’s going to happen anyway, if I don’t volunteer, they’re going to send me anyway.”

So I requested the Skycrane CH-54 transition and got that.

So back to Fort Rucker for, I think it was maybe six weeks for the course, and then while on my way to Vietnam, I got notified that the Army had seen fit to offer me a direct commission, first lieutenant, from being a W2 warrant officer.

And when I looked at the pay scales, for $150 more a month, I said, “I’ll take that.”

So that’s what happened, and so I then went back to Vietnam, but this time I’m up in I Corps flying a Skycrane, which is terrific mission, terrific aircraft, good people.

Most of our pilots were second-tour guys like me, so we didn’t have any people that wanted to be heroes, we just had people that wanted to do the job and knew how to do it.

So that was a great tour, but it too had a lot of uh, exciting moments, there were some tense ones.

We had missions uh, going in to pick up downed aircraft, downed Chinooks.

People used to ask me if I ever flew a Chinook, and my standard reply is, “No, I never flew one, but I carried a lot of them.”

And uh, we did that, covered other aircraft, Army Mohawks covered that, hauled lots of artillery, lots of other supplies, engineer equipment, and uh, uh, overall just a great assignment, mostly with the 100th, supporting the 101st, but we also supported Vietnamese, we supported the US Marines who were uh, still there at that time.

And uh, then we had some special missions, we flew uh, out across the border that uh, people don’t talk about a whole lot, but it was really quite interesting, flying into some places that you felt like you were in National Geographic magazine, there was no, no other Americans around, or if the few who were there were Air America people, and of course, they had their own business going on, but that was, that was particularly fascinating.

But mostly it was, it was hauling heavy engineer equipment out to places where they wanted to put in some kind of an airstrip.

We also did move artillery pieces in support of uh, the indigenous people there, and uh, of course, ammo.

Um, we also recovered, this was interesting, when one day I was getting ready to wrap up and head back to Thailand to where we were based during those missions, and uh, I was asked if we could pick up a Chinese 122 millimeter howitzer.

And uh, I said, “Gee, I don’t know, I never, I don’t know, what’s it weigh?”

I mean, that’s a standard line that any, you know, heavy lift people and Chinook people, they, they got to know what the weight is, yeah, so I can do my flight planning.

And they said, “Don’t know.”

And I thought, “Well, 122, we call 155s, can’t be a whole lot different.”

So I got an Air America guy to fly us out to where this place was, just did kind of a low pass, looked at it, said, “Yeah, it looks like something we can handle.”

So came back and um, briefed the crew on how we were going to play it, and went in there, and we did a quick snatch of the 122 millimeter howitzer.

There had been two of them that the uh, guys had captured from the NVA, and um, brought that back to the base where the general was, had his headquarters.

He wanted a pair of them out in front of his headquarters, and uh, it was no, it was not a big deal to haul. It was, and I, I’d planned it so I was light fuel, so everything worked well.

Um, and I said, “I’ll get the next one tomorrow when we get back up here.”

And uh, next day went up there and said, “Yeah, we’re ready for the, for the next gun.”

He says, “Well, the NVA came back last night, and they, they took that gun back.”

So, oh, you only get one.

So uh, that was that.

Oh, and then of course, the, the Lam Son 719, which was the big operation that was intended to show that the South Vietnamese Army was capable of operating fully on its own without US military assistance directly with their ground elements.

However, the US Army and Marines to some degree, and the Air Force too, uh, provided air support for them when they crossed from Khe Sanh into Laos, and uh, that operation ultimately was not meant to succeed, and people said that, I’ve stories I’ve heard was that, you know, the North Vietnamese already had information on it and were prepared for it.

So the surprise element just didn’t pan out, and um, but we, we hauled a lot of stuff in there, and we hauled stuff back out when finally decided to clear out of there.

So we took 155s out, we took some of their other heavy equipment out, uh, but that was a fascinating little period of time there, several weeks.

One, one of the things we did, it was I think was pretty darn amazing was uh, picking up a Marine CH-53, which is pretty much like the Skycrane except it has full fuselage on it.

Um, and they had had one that uh, had a bad experience during uh, attempts at rescuing uh, Vietnamese troops, civilians following some heavy flooding that was down south of Marble Mountain.

And in the process, I guess they knocked the tail rotor off the helicopter while they were hovering around, and then the thing started going crazy and it laid down on its side.

I think one Marine was actually killed in that, that accident.

But here it is laying on its side, the water quickly receded, and uh, we were called to see if we could help recover it because the aircraft really didn’t have extensive damage.

Rotor systems were damaged, but uh, everything else seemed to be pretty good.

So uh, we went over, over there and picked it up, stood it on its feet so they could pull the engines off it and, cause I told them, you know, “Get us down to 17,000 pounds, and we’ll take it the distance.”

It was probably 15 miles south of uh, Marble, I think, and um, so they said, “Okay, fine.”

And they called me a little while later that afternoon, went over there, picked it up, and it was still way too heavy.

I mean, we’re pulling, we have on a crane, they have what they call the winch load indicator, which is, you know, like a big fish scale on there, it tells you what it weighs, and this thing was, I hate to say what it weighed, but it was way too much.

And I thought, “Oh gosh, we got the whole Marine Corps out here.”

I mean, they had their gunships overhead and photographers all standing by, and although we never got many pictures from them, I guess they decided, “We don’t want to show an Army helicopter recovering one of our 53s.”

But uh, at any rate, I had to burn down all the, you know, crane pilots, and I imagine the Chinook guys do the same thing, mission plan: this is our minimum fuel, but then the pilot always keeps a little extra fuel he never talks about, you, you build that in for when you make a mistake and you go, “Oh geez, I didn’t think of that,” at least you got your reserve fuel.

So I think I’d saved about 1,000 pounds of extra fuel for myself, or not even 1,000 pounds, how much I don’t know what it was, but so we realized, “Gee, this thing is still not coming off the ground, we’re trying to pull it up and we’ve reached our limits.”

So I said, uh, “We got to do this anyway,” and I looked at uh, the pilot I was with, who was that, John Koo, I think, yeah, and, and I said, “We got to do this.”

So we, I burned off every little bit of spare fuel I had, and then went over and picked it up and flew it into Marble and landed it there.

I mean, we were on the low fuel lights the whole, you know, all the drama was building for us as we, and you can’t go very fast when you’re carrying a big load like that, so that just means you’re burning more fuel.

But uh, we put it down there and landed right next to it, and uh, the, the Marine Air Group Commander, it was MAG-16, u, forget his name now, but he came up to me, he says, “Hey, that was, thank you, nice job.”

And uh, he said, “Any problem?”

I said, “No, then it was a bit heavy.”

He says, “No, it was 17,000 pounds.”

I’m thinking, “Yeah, you’re telling me what it weighed, huh?”

Of course, I’m a first lieutenant, he’s a colonel, I said, “Well sir, it was, it was a bit over.”

“No, I’m telling you it was 17,000 pounds.”

And he had a major with him who was his maintenance guy, and he said, “Wasn’t that right, Charlie? 17,000.”

“Yes sir, that’s what you said they wanted.”

I said, you know, now I’m starting to get a little, “Come on.”

I said, “Let’s go look at it.”

And we went over there and walked around the helicopter, and then I looked in the back, you know, they have a ramp in that thing, and ramp was kind of half up, half open, half closed, and I looked in there, and they had rotor blades in there and all this other junk they had taken off it.

I think maybe that’s where the over 17 came from.

So they probably, and I’m not certain, and Marines will probably kill me for saying this, but um, I think what they did was they calculate, “What do we take off this thing to bring it down to 17?”

And it was, “Okay, good, take all that stuff off.”

Now the guys out in the field go, “What are we going to do with all this junk here?” “I don’t know, put it in the damn helicopter.”

So that was it, but we did it, we got it done, everybody was happy, so that was pretty exciting.

Another one we did that was interesting too, and I somewhere I have pictures of it, there was a German hospital ship called the Helgoland, and there was a big typhoon that rolled in over Da Nang, and uh, any real, and this was one of these things like the Love Boat, except painted white with a cross on the side.

And uh, they said, “We got to get it out to the deep water, you don’t want to have your big draft ships in a narrow Da Nang River.”

So they tried getting out of there, and they ran aground.

So you have a big ship aground, so the Navy calls me and says, “Hey, uh, can you help us with this ship?”

And I said, “What do you want me to do?”

And by this time, the winds are really talking, and uh, they said, “Uh, can you take some what we call beaching gear?”

I’d never heard the term before, but now as a sailor, I understand it a little better, and really, it’s pretty much like an anchor or two that you would from the ship, you would put it out out into the deeper water, and then the ship would, the chains would go back to the ship, and they’d put it on their winches, and they’d try to pull the ship that way.

And normally they would have taken the beaching gear on a little utility boat out to the ship, but the currents were too strong and even their little boats couldn’t fight the current, so they were, they just couldn’t make, make headway to the ship.

So uh, I said, “Yeah, we could probably do that.”

So then, and the weights on this stuff, you know, there’s like a 6,000-pound anchor and then a bunch of chain went with it, it’s probably 5,000 or 6,000 pounds.

I mean, we, we routinely take 10,000, 12,000, 13,000-pound loads with the crane, no problem.

And uh, but what I found out was they, they thought that we would just take the, the anchor and chain and drop it out in front of the ship, and then bring the chain back to the ship.

I said, “No, I don’t think I want to drop an anchor into who knows how deep the water is or anything else while it’s still attached to my helicopter, I can’t release the damn thing. No, no, we’re not doing that.”

So we ended up carrying stuff right out to the ship, and I, I don’t know how they resolved it, but I, I remember telling the crew, I said, “This, if this works out well, those Germans are going to invite us down to the ship and we’ll be drinking beer and eating bratwurst and uh, talking to the pretty nurses, and this is going to be a great deal for us.”

Well, that didn’t happen.

So anyway, I’d like to see the, the logbook for the Helgoland for that period of time, 1970, see what they said about the whole thing, because we were hovering right over the thing, it’s, the winds were nice and strong and I could position the helicopter beautifully, in right into the wind.

So if you have 60-knot winds right on your nose, that’s great, you can sit there and hover all day long.

So um, that was pretty much it of my Vietnam experience.

And when, well, in August of ’71, I came back to the States, and and actually what started flying with another Skycrane company, one that had been in Vietnam but had left earlier the previous year in ’70, the 355th Aviation Company, uh, was um, transferred over to Fort Eustis, and I went there to fly with them for three years.

I had uh, I had no problems, um, and I mean, I think I can address that.

First of, when I came back my first tour, uh, we got into Travis late at night, and uh, my wife had been living with another couple or wife of another Vietnam guy in Santa Maria, California, so I just quickly rented a car and drove down to see her, and probably got there at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

Point being that there were not the protesters, I guess, of course, they, they got to go to bed early because it’s a tough life being a protester.

So I didn’t encounter that, and I, you know, only after the, after that that I hear some of these stories that were, some of them were just plain nasty, what some of these idiots would do.

And I just thought, “Boy, I can’t imagine how I would have reacted back then, especially being a gunship pilot where we, uh, we fixed a lot of bad people, and we did it, I can’t say daily, but it was not uncommon at all.”

And uh, if I ever uh, had to confront one of these idiots, I’m afraid of, I, because I, you know, I was still, still a little crazed from that lifestyle, uh, somebody could have been really hurt, probably ruined my career.

I don’t think I had any guilt things that I had to deal with myself, I know it did affect my life and outlook on things, and uh, um, I think one of my, I think my son made a comment when he was very young, he says, “You never get excited, you never, never let go.”

And I never really thought about it, but you know, I guess you’re right.

I, it’s not like I’m having fun, don’t know how to have fun, that’s not entirely true, yeah, I know I have fun, but for the most part, I think I’m pretty, pretty staid in the way I deal with things, don’t get excited, don’t panic, don’t uh, don’t act like a lot of other people.

And it probably, that the first tour was, you know, pretty profound, it was, you know, I was still young, I was out of college, and I was older than many of the guys that I flew with and certainly than our young soldiers in the back, but uh, that certainly did affect me.

Well, I mean, if you’re going to want me to say, “Oh, it was all a total waste, and it was horrible,” and all this stuff, I mean, certainly any war is a waste.

Um, we went over there with the, I certainly did, all of us went over there with the intentions of helping this beleaguered country, South Vietnam, uh, the invitation of the government of South Vietnam, and um, you know, we, we thought we were just doing what needed to be done.

Uh, we were, I was, and we, because I know my friends, they too had similar reaction, that uh, the South Vietnamese Army didn’t have the same enthusiasm in doing the job, but then some of us made that observation that, yeah, we’re going home in a year, they’re staying here, so whatever it is, they got to live with it.

And uh, and I can remember thinking of myself too, “Maybe these guys need a little communism to tighten them up, because they uh, just don’t seem to have the same drive to protect their own assets.”

And some of that too may come with the fact that, hey, these Americans are willing to do it, fine, kick back, let them do it, they’re willing to sacrifice themselves and deploy their, their resources, their, and their, their people, you know, their soldiers, our American soldiers.

So uh, I think by the time I left my first tour, I thought, “Hmm, enough of these people, they, you know, we, we’ve done the best we can for them, going to have to do it themselves.”

My second tour, I uh, I think we saw some real improvements, um, even with the South Vietnamese, and went into Laos during Lam Son.

But those guys got overwhelmed, I mean, they were just, you know, at some point, you got to kind of cut your losses and run, and which is what they did.

Um, they were pretty enthusiastic at the onset, impressive, they look good, they look, but, you know, the heart of the soldier is still what, what rings true when, when it starts getting ugly.

And I think they, they were, everybody was surprised at the, the resolve of the North Vietnamese to prevent that incursion through, you know, to cut Ho Chi Minh Trail.

So the North Vietnamese had more drive, probably had a little more intelligence, which enabled them to do what they had to do.

I think if we’d had American forces doing it right there, we’d have pushed through it, and that would have been a success.

But the political uh, pressures were such that we couldn’t put Americans on the ground over there, it’s a terrible way to fight a war.

I, I certainly would hate to see, you know, my son, my grandsons being put in a condition like that, you know?

And I think, you know, I was uh, of course, I paid attention to the Desert Storm adventure there, and seemed like we went in there full force, hit him with whatever you got, um, and uh, keep the politicians out of it as much as possible, give us a goal, tell us what to do, we’ll do it, and then take us out, don’t make us hang around here, because things only start going sour when uh, when there’s that indecisive uh, actions.