Green Beret’s RARE Footage & Photos From Vietnam

Green Beret’s RARE Footage & Photos From Vietnam

I went to project Delta’s team house to try to get on Project Delta. Project Delta was a specialized team that went out with Vietnamese in areas that other people did not go including cross the border, but they said that they were full up, so I ended up going to Fourth Core.

So after telling him at Fourth Core that I wanted to go the most active team, I got sent to a camp called Kai Kai. Kai Kai was right on the Cambodian border, it was about maybe a couple thousand yards from Cambodia. We went out on patrols with our Vietnamese troops, usually two Americans with each patrol. Out of the gate you were considered to be an enemy territory, that’s how close the enemy was and they basically surrounded our camp.

The first patrol I went on, there were about three of us on that particular patrol. I was near the rear of a patrol because I was carrying the radio and while I was going along that trail a Vietnamese ran up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Trun she,” and led me back and there he pointed out where there was a mine and my footprint bridged that mine.

So I was lucky that the Viet Cong that had planted it planted it a silly millimeter too deep so that my foot rather than hitting the the plate and making it go off I missed it and that was the only time I ever stepped on a mine, but it was my opener to to the enemy in in Vietnam.

I was out on a patrol at Kai Kai and we were kind of out in the open and the other guy who was on patrol with me said, “He was going to go up to the border to the East and check it out by himself.”

So I was out there with the Vietnamese and we got hit really badly. The Vietnamese ran, I think because later we found out out that our chief interpreter who I always selected because I thought he was the best interpreter we had, he found out he was a Viet Cong sympathizer. So my idea is he might have even told the Vietnamese that I said, “Get out of here.”

I had to stay out there, I had the radio and I needed to find Noes who was the guy who went out by himself. We were getting hit pretty hard with mortars and I think possibly even by that 25 pounder artillery piece and I radioed in for help. Captain Donker went up onto the top of the tower, while he was up there he was hit by a 25 pounder, he was killed instantly.

I found out about it as I was heading back, the whole team was just silent that night and the following week we went to a memorial service for him and he was replaced a couple weeks later by Captain Sinot, so that’s a story about Captain Donker.

While I was at Kai Kai, I got a blood clot in my leg and I was sent to a hospital. I ended up spending a few weeks in that hospital before my blood clot finally went away.

And when I was released, I was told I was going to a new camp because they had a rule that the Americans that went out to Kai Kai would only spend six months there because it was such a dangerous area.

For Christmas season of 1966, we got intelligence that Janton was going to be hit and we knew that it would be overrun if it was hit. There was a two-week period that that was supposed to happen and I was sent down there to make sure that all of the weapons that we had down there were good like the Claymores, made sure that the wires weren’t cut.

I found several of them where the wires were cut. The village next to it, and it was right next to it, was considered to be Viet Cong supporting, so we didn’t dare go on any missions there, we couldn’t go on any patrols because there were only two Americans there and we didn’t dare go out because of that village.

So we had to stay there, so we got that intelligence and Sergeant, oh I forget his name now, but he was a medic, he was down there with me at that time and we decided we had to be awake 24 hours a day so we each took a 12-hour shift on guard and we also got together and made a suicide pact.

Because we figured we would be killed because there was nowhere to go, right across the river was Cambodia, Cambodia was full of Viet Cong, so we didn’t dare go across the river to get out of the outpost. We had nowhere to go, so we figured we were dead meat.

So that’s why we decided to do the suicide pact where one guy, if he was the last one remaining, he would make sure that the other one was dead and then shoot himself. And that was our way of getting out of being overrun there, for the Americans at least, but our camp it never was attacked.

I hated being at that camp and doing that, so I begged to please get sent to an A-team, so with a little over a month to go in country after my extension was over, I had extended for an extra 6 months to do what I thought was get the job done before I went back stateside.

So they sent me to Ba Xo. Ba Xo was in the seven mountains where all the Viet Cong were. I got there and I was busy, one of the things I did was I set up, I was a gunner because I was the only one who knew how to operate a four-deuce mortar there, so I was a gunner.

I found out where or I figured out where the VC would probably come from if they attacked our outpost at the bottom of one of those seven mountains, so I fired off a bunch of ammunition and wrote down the ones that hit exactly where I wanted it to hit.

And it came out good, because it was a little bit later while I was still in the camp that the outpost got hit by the Viet Cong and I forget what the outpost name was, but they got hit.

I immediately ran to the mortar and set it up to fire at that one spot and sure enough I hit it with every round and the outpost called back and said that I had broken up the attack with my four-deuce mortar firing, which made me feel really good.

When it was time for me to finally go home, we did it by, I was going to ride in the jeep, A-team jeep to the B-team and then Smitty and I were going to ride in trucks to the C-team to get an airplane to fly into Da Nang which was headquarters.

I got on the road and lo and behold there was a mine in the road, so rather than take a chance of going around it and another mine being there, we called the B-team and Smitty sent another jeep out to get us to bring us to the B-team.

The C-team, no the B-team, and that worked and then I got to sleep overnight at the B-team and then the next morning we rode in a convoy to the C-team and from the C-team we caught an airplane to go to Saigon, spend another night in Camp Goodman getting drunk.

In fact Smitty and I pretty much stayed drunk the whole trip and we took a flight the next day out to Nha Trang. While we were at Nha Trang, Smitty and I had been drinking at the NCO club all night.

In the early morning hours, the Viet Cong struck a perimeter of the headquarters there in the town. I didn’t have time to get dressed, so I just went out there in my skibbies with my rifle, as did Smitty.

And when it was over, they said, “Okay, half of you people stay out here till morning.”

I was one half of people, so I had to stay in my skibbies out there until the following morning and then we finally found rides home to Tan Son Nhut in Saigon and then back to the States and that’s pretty much my time in Vietnam