True War Stories From a Vietnam Machine Gunner

When I was 16, I got thrown out of the house and I was on my own. I worked, didn’t have a mailing address, lived out of my car, slept down at the beach, took showers, and went to work. I did that for the whole summer, and things got kind of screwed up and life was spiraling out of control. That’s when I decided to join the Marine Corps, and that was in ’68. I was going to work and I thought, “Well, I needed to put the brakes on and join the Marine Corps.” Well, I joined the Marine Corps because, for one, it was said to be the hardest branch of service, so if it was the hardest, that’s the one I wanted.

There were five of us that went through boot camp together, and I told them my goal was to go all the way through the 13 months with no Purple Hearts. I kind of made it that way, and for some of the things I did, I was surprised that I made it that way. I carried gun ammo all the time, and I got so tired of it that eventually I went to the weapons officer, turned to him, and told him, “I want to get transferred to guns,” which I did.

Going back a little bit, when I reported to Nhu Vu, when I arrived there, there was a fellow there whose name was Maris, and he had immersion foot. Immersion foot is when you don’t change your socks and your feet are always wet. When he came to the bush finally, his thing was that when he became squad leader, he was going to have me walk point. I told him, “It’ll never happen.” Afterwards, I got transferred to guns, and I was in guns for quite a while. When he made squad leader, he came up and he says, “Well, we’re going out on an ambush, you’re going to walk point.” And I says, “Nope, I’m in weapons from now on, you can’t mess with me.” And that’s how it was from then on, so I stayed in weapons.

Some of the things that I did… I crawled in the bunkers because Westmoreland’s thing was body counts, so I was one of the guys that crawled in the bunkers and pulled all the bodies out after a firefight or whatever. I started out in Taylor Common. I was in the mountains twice, came back down, and then went back up again. After that, we came back down, went to the Arizona Territory, and I spent almost the rest of my time in the Arizona Territory or Go Noi Island.

Maybe two weeks in or whatever it was, I got hit. We were on ambush, and they were prepping the top of the hill when there was an explosion. I was on watch, and I saw this black object coming toward me. I had just enough time to turn my arm a little bit. It hit me flat, knocked me down, and knocked all the blood out of my arm. They called the corpsman up, and he came up and checked it. By then, the blood was rushing back into the arm, but it did not break the skin at all, no blood loss whatsoever. That was the first time I got hit, and I never got hit again after that.

I was in the rear for some reason. Anyway, we got hit that night, and the next day we had to walk the perimeter. The procedure was that the point man would get across the water or whatever it was, and then everybody else would go after him while he provided security. Eventually, it came my turn. When the first man went across the river, I became the point man for the first time only. When I went into the water and was about halfway through the paddy dike, I stepped down and heard the click. The only thing I said was, “Oh, everybody get out of here!”

Then we called the engineers. I stood there until the engineers walked through the wire, and then they took it out. It turned out to be a box mine. The guy who was going to pull the lever to set it off—the string was still there—was in the paddies maybe 50 yards away, dead. So, I was living on borrowed time.

I can’t… I don’t know the guys’ names anymore, but we were going through an area and ran into the enemy. Parsons and another fellow were right at the paddy dike, and on the other side of the paddy dike was the enemy. Parsons would stand up and try to shoot the enemy, and then he’d go down. The enemy would stand up and try to shoot him. This Mexican guy just happened to stand up at the same time the enemy did. The enemy fired, and we saw him fall back. We thought for sure he bought the farm. It turned out that the round went between his flak jacket and his body—it went right through, and all it did was put a little nick on each side of his chest. Unfortunately, though, when we were back in the Arizona Territory—I can’t, don’t remember what part of it—he went out on an ambush and wound up being killed, but that was maybe a month or two months later.

It was okay. We went up a lot of different mountains. In the Marine Corps, there are no mountains, they’re just hills. We went up this one that was 990 meters. When we got to the top of that one, after we cleared the LZ, we could look down from there and see the whole thing, almost all the way to Da Nang. When we got ready to leave the hill, all the helicopter did was lift its wheels off and go straight down. It had taken us almost two days to get up that hill.

When I went on patrol, I wore a T-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt, a flak vest, and a towel around my neck. I was the A-gunner at the time, and when I became a gunner, I wore the same equipment because every once in a while we would get stuck out there, and I didn’t want to freeze because it got cold at night. The long-sleeve shirt also kept me from getting cuts from the elephant grass, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

In the beginning, I had the regular Marine Corps rucksack or pack, which was a little tiny thing. Eventually, I finagled a rucksack that was a huge sack, and I carried everything in there—from an air mattress and plenty of socks to all the food I wanted, and I forget what the hell else. As time went on, I wanted to get rid of it, so eventually I got an Army pack with a metal frame that made it easier to carry on your back. But as I told John McKay and Larry Bowman, I also carried a coffee pot. Whenever I ran out of ground coffee, I would always go up to one of them and have them order coffee for me when we got resupplied, and I’d give them fresh coffee in the morning in return.

I carried an air mattress and a hammock. When we settled down, if we were in the rice paddies, I’d blow up the air mattress and sleep on it. If we were in a wooded area, I’d hang the hammock and sleep in the hammock. The other thing was, when we went on patrol, I didn’t care where the patrol was, I had a C4 pouch or whatever they call it, and I’d fill it up with tins of crackers with cheese, jelly, or peanut butter in them. I’d go on patrol with that so if we ever got volunteered to go support somebody else, I always had food with me. Because of my coffee thing, every once in a while they’d screw up the supplies, and Armstrong and I wouldn’t just get coffee—we’d get tins of vegetables, and we would make a stew.

There were two fellows I remember from the company, both in mortars. One’s nickname was Bubblegum, and the other was Antoine. Antoine and I rotated at the same time. When we left San Francisco to catch our flights, we were both going to Chicago, but he had a connecting flight to wherever he was going. When we got into the San Francisco airport, everybody kind of moved out of the way. When we got into Chicago, everybody parted as we were walking down the center of the concourse, and that was it. Nobody talked about it.

In ’85, when they came out with the movie Platoon, I went to see it. It was as if I walked in, sat down, and walked out, because I got so engrossed in the movie that it was like reliving everything all over again. It was an interesting experience.

My reason for going in was that my life was spiraling downhill and I needed to put the brakes on. I did that, and when I got back to the States, what I found out was that I had skills I didn’t know I had—one of those skills being able to manage people. When I finally got hired, because in the beginning it was hard getting a job, I was working for this company and one of the fellows who was a plant manager came over and asked me what I wanted. I looked straight at him and told him, “I want your job.” Within a year and a half of working for the company, I got into management, and I’ve been in management for my whole working career after that