Tmat's thread for WWII stories reminding me of my favorite story my dad told from his time in Vietnam.

My dad was the operations officer, US Army, for the 2/94th Field Artillery attached to the USMC at Camp JJ Carroll in northern south Vietnam. He was there from late 1966 to 1967.

He told me about a young USMC artillery/naval gunfire spotter flying a Cessna O-1 Bird Dog someplace north of Camp Carroll. The pilot called in and stated he was taking heavy machine gun fire and could see the gun emplacement.

Dad set up a fire mission with the Camp's 175mm guns. He said he told the pilot that they almost never hit a target like that right off the first time. So they would fire and the pilot would have to tell them where the rounded landed and where to adjust.

The gun crew fired a single round. Seconds of silence.

Next screams over the radio.

Dad asked, "where'd the round land?" Young Marine pilot yelled back, "Right in his fucking lap!"

Dad tells me, that never happens. LOL.

My older brother rarely speaks of hit time in Vietnam.

He mentioned it one time and it was nothing more than "his buddies got shot up over there".

I work with many Vietnamese who went through the fall of Saigon.

My fellow manager and best friend told me one night as we were drinking heavily and shooting rats that he watched the VC murder his father in front of the village because he owned a farm and tractor.

They then took him to reeducation and sent him to fight the Americans. He deserted immediately, he and some others stole a boat with very little fuel and made their way toward Cambodia.

They ran out of fuel and drifted for days. When he was finally picked up by and American patrol boat, he was the only one left alive.

That is what Vietnam was like.

I had a fellow LEO that survived Nam; his armored unit was hit and several people including him got shot up pretty bad. The unit withdrew under heavy fire and my buddy got left behind- he was observed being shot with an AK and catching some RPG shrapnel to boot and unconscious.

When he came to, he saw the enemy calmly walking among the fallen with a pistol applying coup de grace shots. The guy noticed my buddy and aimed at him. He put his hands in front of him and the shot hit his wrist, shattering both radial and ulnar bones. He played dead and the guy moved on.

My buddy came home and spent the next several months recuperating at Walter Reed. His wrist was permanently fused and stainless steel cables were installed in his abdomen for the muscles to heal around. He went on to a career in law enforcement rather than take the 100% disability he could have. He finally retired about 5 years ago at the age of @72. A bona fide hero.

My neighbor shared with me a notebook that he put together about his time in Vietnam. He did this as therapy for PTSD that was diagnosed like thirty five years later.

He was a door gunner on a Huey at about 19 years old. He flew out of the Cu Chi base in 1967. Northwest of Saigon. Missions in the Iron Triangle and around the Michelin rubber plantation. This was some hairy shit and do not envy what these guys were tasked with.

The stories that he related are not really mine to share but one thing I thought was interesting is that they would strap an extra flak jacket to their seat to keep from getting shot in the ass. He actually took a round in the shoulder that ended his time in country about 7 or 8 months in.

Dad told me about Marine spotters reporting seeing "pink elephants" on some NVA trails. They shelled the area and Marines moved in to see what they hit and reported several dead pink elephants. It turns out, the elephants would roll around in the red mud and when it dried it turned pink. And the NVA were using them to haul equipment along the trails. Killing a pink elephant was about the same as knocking out an NVA truck. The USMC spotters weren't drunk, afterall.

about 25 years ago I had a buddy. He and I and his wife were on the way to some friends for dinner. Driving on a rural single lane road a young guy driving a vehicle coming at us at probably 60mph veered into our lane. My buddy swerved and the guy side swiped us. My buddy slammed on the brakes and litterly jumped out the drivers side door before the vehicle came to a full rest. Hurried over to the other vehicle. I could tell he was instantly somewhere else. I tried to get to him before he got to the fella still in his drivers seat. I did not make. The driver had his window down. When my buddy got there in reached through the window and grabbed the guy by the throat and was well on the way of dragging the young guy out the window by his throat. When I got there I calmly tried to get his attention. After a few attempts he came back to the here and now. Had I not been able to get to him I have no doubt I would of severely beat the guy, maybe worse. When you you see someone in that state you can begin to understand the type of trauma they have been part of. It was something I will never forget.

When I was on active duty in the Army in the 80s, many of the senior NCOs were Vietnam vets. When I first got to the 25th Division at Schofield Barracks, my unit's First Sergeant was a soldier who had been in a special forces unit in Vietnam. As a junior enlisted soldier, I did not have the opportunity to ask him many questions about his experiences. However, he had numerous scars and obvious bullet wounds on his torso, and he was missing the tip of his right index finger. He would sometimes roam the hallways of the company area, and it was apparent that he wasn't all there. It was known to stay out of his way when he was "on patrol."

Later, we had a different First Sergeant who had been in the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam. In 1986, we deployed to Thailand for Cobra Gold '86. As the company NBC NCO, I was made the commander's RTO, so I interacted more with this commander and First Sergeant. Anyway, we were bivouacked in a rubber plantation, and as darkness started to fall, the First Sergeant started getting antsy. The commander said: "Top, what the fuck is wrong with you?". The First Sergeant related a story of setting up in a rubber plantation in Cambodia with some ARVN soldiers. The ARVNs strapped claymore mines in the rubber trees. When they were hit by the enemy one night, the ARVNs started blowing the claymores, which caused the trees to fall and injure/kill more soldiers than the enemy attack did.

My late father-in-law was a door gunner on a Huey during Vietnam but rarely spoke about it.

Over the last several days I’ve been listening to a few of Jocko Willink’s podcast interviews with John Stryker Meyer and Dick Thompson. Both told multiple harrowing stories of missions they had in MACKV-SOG. Haven’t made it through all of the interviews (about 8 hours of interviews with each of them) - hard to believe either of them made it back.

Michael

My friend Tom Copeland just got his book published, My War And Welcome To It, about his time in Vietnam and its affect on him.

Tom is a mighty fine American patriot who served with honor and has continued to be a fine person. I’m proud of him and am privileged to know him.

Please consider reading his book. I’ve copied and pasted this, I hope it comes through



MY WAR AND WELCOME TO IT

Now available in Paperback and E-Book
With the cancellation of most sports programs on TV, and the stay at home restrictions in place across the country, now is a wonderful time to sit at home and read a good book.

Special price reductions on paperback copies, for a limited time only.
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While supply lasts, signed copies are $17.00, which includes shipping, a 15% discount'
and can be ordered from:

Tom Copeland
504 NW 160th St
Edmond, OK 73013

ttcb47@gmail.com

See what other people are saying about this book.
REVIEWS ON AMAZON

Marilyn Whitaker
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing read!!
I knew Tom and his family when we were just kids growing up in Monument ,New Mexico. Tom grew up ,and became the amazing man he is today ,and I am proud to be his friend. His story is so well written. I think this book should be required reading for all 8th grade students!

R. Trice
5.0 out of 5 stars
A HEALING JOURNEY THAT TOOK A LIFETIME!
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020
Format: Paperback
Many a soldier was denied their well deserved "welcome home" immediately following their experiences endured before and after the American Vietnam War. I would be so bold to say that the nation still grapples with how to help its veterans of many conflicts efficiently cope with their nightmares and find their new normals. What Mr. Copeland has done here to set apart his memoir from the countless others that are now out there is to show how a life can, and probably should, eventually come full circle for a man to find maybe a few of those answers himself. Copeland shares his childhood memories and those common things that shaped a lot of us growing up (especially in the southwest U.S.) during those times, and continues through the various anecdotal chuckles and shakes of the head gleaned during his military boot training days, and of course the often horrific and numbing tales of combat in the jungles of Southeast Asia, all with a narrative flair that puts you smack dab into smells and emotions of the moment, like any good story teller. But what grabbed me by the throat and the heart were the journal entries of his return trip to modern Vietnam in 2013, to once again walk the ground of the birthplace of so many of his nightmares, to look the beast in the eyes one more time, and finally but the knife in its heart and bury it. I am sure Mr. Copeland would be the first to say that the beast occasionally still opens one red eye at times, but it seems to me that on that fateful and enlightening trip back to Nam, he found the a way to put most of the genie back into the bottle. Thanks, Sir, for opening up your heart and memories to walk us all down that dark path . . . and safely back again. Oh--and Welcome Home!


REVIEW BY VIETNAM VETERANS OF AMERICA

"My War & Welcome to It"
by Tom Copeland
Posted on March 20, 2020

Like most teenagers of the time, Tom Copeland had no burning desire to fight in the Vietnam War. But he was drafted into the Army and served for a year in Vietnam with the 1st First Infantry Division. His tour of duty in the war is the centerpiece of My War and Welcome To It (Sunbury Press, 191 pp. $$19.95, paper; $9.99, Kindle), which is written in a voice ranging from youthful humor and wonderment to one of great fear of being killed. He prefaces this autobiography by saying: “I was aged beyond my years. I became an old man before my time.”
Copeland describes his life growing up in Southeastern New Mexico, mostly outdoors; getting drafted in August 1966; going through infantry AIT; operating from Lai Khe with a ground surveillance team with the Big Red One’s 2nd Battalion/2nd Regiment in 1967-68; and returning home and working his way up a corporate ladder. The last part was the most difficult.

He describes military life largely by concentrating on the good and bad behavior of men of all ranks. Copeland highlights individualists such as a trainee who got away with impersonating the boot camp commander and drill sergeants, even in their presence.
He saw plenty of action, including fighting Viet Cong forces at Prek Loc II and Phu Loi, in the Ong Dong Jungle during Operation Paul Bunyan, and at Ong Thanh. Copeland writes in detail about the wounded and dead-and-maimed bodies in only one of those operations, Ong Thanh. That battle, he says, “marked a change in the way I saw the war and the value of human life.”
After the war, Copeland suffered decades of emotional stress involving his family, work, and schools without recognizing that he had post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2003, his nephew displayed PTSD symptoms following three deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Copeland forced the young man to seek medical help. That’s when he realized he had the same emotional problems and went to the VA for treatment.

Tom Copeland in country
In 2013, Tom Copeland went back to Vietnam to try to ameliorate the negative effects of combat that lingered within him. He and other Vietnam War veterans placed commemorative plaques and flowers at battle sites where friends had been killed.
The book’s concluding chapter is a deeply insightful distillation of the trauma serving in the Vietnam War inflicted on him. He closes that section—and the book—by letting us know that the war is still with him.
“Don’t think for a minute I have forgotten those things that took place years ago,” he writes, “They have just become easier to live with.”
—Henry Zeybel



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Had a neighbor, Mr F. when I was growing up that was a Former Marine in Vietnam, got out in '70 and came on Chicago Police.

I didn't know he was the Police for a long, long time. But that's a totally different story.

Nicest guy you ever met, but out of his mind!

Found out Mr F. was a Reconnaissance Marine as well. He only told me 2 stories about being over there. One was about a grown man being scared to death. I'm not repeating that one.

The other- I guess his unit had a new guy, and as custom goes, the new guy gets messed with.
They were out in the field, and the new guy was sleeping. One of the other guys found a python. Mr F (in great detail) explained how the python got tied to the new Marines leg... And how the Marine that was extremely scary of snakes took off running through the jungle with a big old snake tied to him.

I got out of the Navy 1982. Couldn’t find a job. Ended up in a job program for veterans mostly Vietnam vets working at the San Francisco Mint making / inspecting coin collector sets.

There was about 50 of us in a room making sets one afternoon. Usually, there were conversations happening between people next to each other. But it was all quiet. Then a voice came from someone in the room, everybody looked at him, his head was up not looking down at his work but neither was he looking anywhere. He said in a loud matter of fact voice, “Have you ever seen your best friend killed in a helicopter crash?”

No one answered. He lowered his look back down to his work and everybody else did likewise.

VN war story through the eyes of an eight year-old kid.

Tet - It was very early morning of the new year. I was awakened by my mother telling me something. Didn't know what she said because I was still half asleep, so I went to pee and went right back to bed. She woke me up again and now, I can tell what she was saying to me, "Go hide under the stairs". All my brothers and sisters were already there. Then, I found out, war has hit home. Dad, who was an army major, already drove his jeep to "work", and at the time, we didn't know if he had made it in. All day long, we hid under the stairs, listening to the machine gunfire right outside our doors and the sound of Skyraiders overhead, not knowing when our house was going be turned into rubble. Yes, the fighting was right outside, as we lived right across the street from the Army headquarters, which the VCs were attacking.

Evening came, mother decided that we should evacuate away from the fighting zone. As we left the house and made our way through the neighborhood, I saw a bunch of dead bodies and a bunch of VCs just sitting there taking a break from the fighting, their AKs beside them. I was scared they were going to grab and kill us. But, they just sat there, looking exhausted. We eventually arrived at my aunt's house, which was away from the main fighting zone, and stayed there a few days until everything died down. It was a scary time. Nothing was ever the same again.

The end - I was now 15. Approaching the end of April 1975, my dad, who was now retired from the Army, was working for some American company. They sponsored our family to get the hell out of Dodge early. As we were waiting at the national airport Tan Son Nhut to board the US cargo plane, gunfire and explosions can be heard in the near distance, as the VCs were advancing toward Sai Gon. This is the first time I ever stepped on an airplane. As it took off and we all were packed like sardines on the belly of the plane, the door was still opened, and I saw Skyraiders escorting us out of there. Everything was a blur after that, until we arrived in the Philippines for refuel, then to Guam and new freedom.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:

The end

I have no words!Thanks for sharing.

Worked with a programmer in the very early 80's when I was just out of HS. He went down twice in Helicopters in Vietnam and survived. Also had the quote 'There is nothing like hunting another man also armed with a rifle.' He also had some funny stories on his time in Germany as an officer. One story I still recall and it involves; A few GI's, a jeep, a red light intersection and a remote traffic camera and a German Police or Bundeswehr officer.

He died of cancer a short time later - I suspect Agent Orange.

Growing up, my next door neighbor's Dad was a Marine during the war. He was pretty messed up and told me some stories I won't repeat here but pretty much in line with the crazy shit you see in movies.

During my time in the AF, our Chief came into our day room one night (I was on middies) and started talking about his time in Vietnam.

Funniest story was a time he was in a bunker at the end of a runway with another soldier and a couple of, um, service providers.

The VC attacked (attacked is a heavy use of the word here) the air base and he was telling us about trying to light up the area with his machine gun with his... while mostly undressed and the service providers providing their services.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:

we arrived in the Philippines for refuel, then to Guam and new freedom.

We who were born here, have a better country, with contributions made by people with stories like yours. Thank you.

Actually, my story is not that different, although it was two generations back, for me. My grandparents barely made it out of Russia before being imprisoned or killed for the crime of being Jews. Their new American last name (my name, now), as assigned by an immigration clerk at Ellis Island, is a French spelling of the Russian name.

A few years ago I was doing some work for a client and the subject of that work was a former Marine who had a PTSD award for his Vietnam service and there were issues from his service that were germane to what I was doing.

I managed to find out two troubling things about his time that were part of his PTSD.

The first was his first day-night-day at his base for his first deployment. Everyone talks about the Tet offensive but these were an annual event. He was there for Tet III.


I talked to him about it and he said that once night fell all hell broke loss. Bombs, gunfire and everything else. When the sun came up he said there were body parts, people, things that were once people everywhere. Caught in barbed wire, around the base, inside the wire and he the smell was horrendous with blood everywhere. His job was to collect the body parts and this was his first ever night at a base.

The second came during a second tour when one night one of the men under him (he was a squad leader by then) was in an underground dug out bunker and said, "I just can't take this shit anymore.". He pulled out a grenade pin and committed suicide in front of this guy and injuring others, including one who was a pending death. Before he died, the pending asked the subject of my investigation to promise that if he didn't make it that he'd look after his girl back in San Francisco. He said he would.

I did some digging and found the daily unit logs which confirmed what he told me.

Lastly, when my subject came back to the US he tracked down the girl and married her. He told me that was his way of ultimately protecting her like he promised.

He was clearly still traumatized by things decades after they happened.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
VN war story through the eyes of an eight year-old kid.

The end - I was now 15.

Q, over the years I've heard a few other stories from refugees of the war, all both moving and inspirational.

I've sometimes wondered what your own story was, as well as Dave Truong's.

I think stories like yours are important for those of us born in the U.S. to read, and serve to remind some of us not just what is so often taken for granted, but also reminds us that many in the world experience suffering and fear to such a level that they desperately work to come here, to become good productive Americans, and value what they now have.

Thank you for sharing a bit of your story...I'd be interested in hearing more if the spirit ever moves you to share more.

i was academically suspended in early '69 & the us army was the only place i could fly without a degree.

i lost the 2s deferment, enlisted, after flight school, appointed a wo as an army huey helicopter pilot, in rvn '70-'71 with a cav unit assigned to the 25 inf div.

i parlayed it into 36 years of commercial flying all over the world.

as scary as it was at the time, looking back it was the best thing that could've happened.

I was trained as a combat medic during the Vietnam era, was a reservist, never activated, spent my reserve duty as a corpsman in hospitals. All my training cadre in Basic and AIT had been in the front lines in Vietnam, had some quite nerve wracking stories about reality in jungle combat. I have never been there myself, but am quite humbled by those who were there.

In medic training we had a handful of "conscientious objectors" who were drafted. One was sincere, a very honorable and admirable person. The others were bogus, thought claiming CO status would get them a desk job in the states. I still remember the horror on their faces when the medic sgt detailed the weapons he carried in combat as the "Vietcong shoot the medics first".

I was helping a neighbor clean his garage, threw away hordes of magazines. But he kept one, a Time mag with the front cover of MIA's. He pointed to one pic, "he was mine". My friend was an electronics specialist on a carrier, worked radio equip for fighters. "He was a fighter pilot, I was the one on the radio when he called in, 'I am hit, going down" . Still MIA.

A neighbor and I were doing volunteer work for a community fundraiser, took a break. The Director came over to scold us for some infraction, then sternly "your problem is you have never had to perform under pressure". He and I smiled, he had just finished telling me of his being a chopper pilot in Vietnam, shot down twice, rescued twice just as the enemy was closing in. So, never had to perform under pressure????