Bloods (27 page)

During the spring and summer of ’68, the Viet Cong were just shelling Saigon indiscriminately. I remember one night I was in bed and all of a sudden this tremendous explosion went off. My whole life passed before my eyes. I grabbed a helmet, flak vest, and my weapon. I went up to the roof, and this three-story building that stood next door was nothing but total rubble. There were several Vietnamese casualties, and one baby fatality.

One of our guys ran out the front of our villa and was shot in the leg by someone. Then the Army MPs showed up. This second lieutenant jumped out of his jeep and left it unattended with a M-60 machine gun and all the ammunition in the world on it. So he yells, “Go get my jeep. Go get my jeep.” By that time, some Vietnamese or Viet Cong is standing by the jeep, just about ready to take off with it. They fired a couple of shots and he disappeared into the woodwork. Now everything is really tense.

Then this dumb-ass second lieutenant felt that the area wasn’t lit up enough. He fires off a hand flare that sounds like an incoming round. Everybody just dives into the street or tries to grab something to pull over them. The second lieutenant is standing there looking dumb.

Needless to say, we wanted to kick the second lieutenant in the rear.

Then everything calmed down, and we took care of the wounded.

When I heard that Martin Luther King was assassinated, my first inclination was to run out and punch the first white guy I saw. I was very hurt. All I wanted to do was to go home. I even wrote Lyndon Johnson a letter. I said that I didn’t understand how I could be trying to protect foreigners in their country with the possibility of losing my life wherein in my own country people who are my hero, like Martin Luther King, can’t even walk the streets in a safe manner. I didn’t get an answer from the President, but I got an answer from the White House. It was a wonderful letter, wonderful in terms of the way it looked. It wanted to assure me that the President was doing everything in his power to bring about racial equality, especially in the armed forces. A typical bureaucratic answer.

A few days after the assassination, some of the white guys got a little sick and tired of seeing Dr. King’s picture on the TV screen. Like a memorial. It really got to one guy. He said, “I wish they’d take that nigger’s picture off.” He was a fool to begin with, because there were three black guys sitting in the living room when he said it. And we commenced to give him a lesson in when to use that word and when you should not use that word. A physical lesson.

With the world focused on the King assassination and the riots that followed in the United States, the North Vietnamese, being politically astute, schooled the Viet Cong to go on a campaign of psychological warfare against the American forces.

At the time, more blacks were dying in combat than whites, proportionately, mainly because more blacks were in combat-oriented units, proportionately, than whites. To play on the sympathy of the black soldier, the Viet Cong would shoot at a white guy, then let the black guy behind him go through, then shoot at the next white guy.

It didn’t take long for that kind of word to get out. And the reaction in some companies was to arrange your personnel where you had an all-black or nearly all-black unit to send out.

Over the next months some of us in the contingency were sent on secret operations in the Delta similar to the Phoenix Program. We would get the word that certain
people were no longer necessary or needed to be removed. Our group never got a high-ranking VC. It was always a local person in the village who was coerced by the VC into being a leader, to get the community to rise up in arms against the allied forces. ARVN troops engaged in everything we did, but when it came to the interrogation or the torture, we were specifically instructed not to do that. The ARVN troops did that.

I remember this one ARVN sergeant took one of these old guys into this hut and strung him up from his ankles. The guy wouldn’t talk. So the sergeant built a fire underneath him. When his hair caught on fire, he started talking. Then they stopped the fire.

When we passed through those villages, we really had to watch out for the kids. They would pick up arms and shoot at you. And we had to fire right back.

When we were going out from an operation not very far from Vung Tau, we went through a hamlet we were told was friendly. Quite naturally, you see the women and the children. Never see the men. The men are out conducting the war.

We had hooked up with some Army guys, so it was about a company of us. As soon as we got about a half mile out down the road, we got hit from the rear. Automatic gunfire. It’s the women and the children. They just opened up. And a couple of our guys got wasted.

The captain who was in charge of this so-called expeditionary group just took one squad back to the village. And they just melted the whole village. If women and children got in the way, then they got in the way.

In another village we sent an advance party to recon the place. It was fairly empty. But when we got there, this kid come running out of a hut. Looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old. He was told to halt. And he didn’t. He ran into another hut, and gunfire started coming from the hut. So two GIs took defensive measures. Dropped to the ground and fired into the hut. We went inside. And here’s the kid with the gun. Dead. And then mama san comes out of the other hut boohooing and all.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of those grenades that were thrown in the back of Army jeeps were done by kids. The
very kids the GIs befriended with candy or whatever.

When it was time for me to leave, my staff had a dinner in my honor at one of the restaurants. My secretary, my interpreter, and the clerk were there. And the Vietnamese who helped with the training. And they put me at the head of the table.

On the menu was pigeon soup. And each bowl had a pigeon head in it with the eye open and the beak. I ate the soup. I didn’t eat the pigeon head.

And as custom goes, I had to toast each person at the table with what was like rice whiskey syrup. I made it to nine of the twenty sitting there. That was Saturday. I didn’t gain full control of my senses until Tuesday.

And just before I left, one of our maids tried to sell me her baby boy for about the equivalent of $200. She wanted me to bring him back to the United States and raise him.

She had difficulty with English so I couldn’t philosophize with her. I just told her that in American society we just don’t buy children like that.

When the North Vietnamese started taking over South Vietnam in 1974 without too many shots being fired, I felt let down. But I never had any faith in the ARVN. As long as they knew that the American platoon was 2 feet behind them, they would fight like cats and dogs. But if they knew that they didn’t have American support real close—like right behind them—they would not fight.

When I watched on TV the cowardly, shameful way we left Saigon and left the Embassy, I felt hurt. I felt betrayed. I didn’t feel very proud to be an American.

We destroyed what we couldn’t carry with us. We ducked our tails and ran.

Why wait ten years and thousands upon thousands of lives later to just turn it over to the Communists? We could have done that at the very beginning.

Late that year I got accepted to officers’ candidate school, after failing six times. General David Jones, whom I worked for in race relations in West Germany when he commanded the Air Force in Europe, wrote a beautiful letter to make that appointment happen.

I’ve made captain and will retire at that rank. And I
still sing when I can. Swing stuff. I don’t do much disco. You could call it a cross between Lou Rawls and Johnny Mathis. When I was stationed in Nevada, I worked as a replacement in the lounges at the Sahara, the Dunes, the Landmark. That was great. That’s the top of the line.

When I think back, there were a lot of things we did in that special contingency unit in Vietnam that we didn’t get credit for. We couldn’t talk about it. Or put in for commendations. In fact, we were even under oath not to talk about what we did for five years.

But we really wanted some kind of commendation for what we did at the Embassy during Tet. Some of the Marines and Army guys got medals. But that was out of the question for us. You weren’t supposed to report our activities. They were secret.

All we got was the Vietnam campaign medal. Everybody got that. If you flew into the country and stayed overnight during the war, you were eligible for that.

So at the famous battle of the American Embassy, officially, we were not there.

“Burns! Burns!”

I’m calling out to tell him that I’m hit.

“Burns, I’m hit. Oh, God. I’m hit.”

But Burns, he’s getting into the bunker.

Burns and I built this bunker together. Burns and I were good friends. He was a brother from Texas. He’d been through Tet and in the field a lot. He was gonna go home in like two months, so they had taken him out of the field and put him in supply. Apparently he had been a good troop.

On this particular night, Sergeant O’Hanlon said to us, “Sleep inside of your bunkers, because of the incoming mortars.”

Prior to that we hadn’t had a hell of a lot of incoming. And it’s hot as heck over there, so nobody likes to sleep in those bunkers. We slept just lying right outside the bunker. Burns was lying next to me. We were maybe 10 feet from the bunker.

I guess it was three in the morning, December 23. The round came in, messed me up, and Burns didn’t get a scratch.

I looked. My right hand was stinging. This piece of white bone was sticking up where my little finger was. There is just a splinter where my ring finger is.

I heard some rounds going off again. I think they were outgoing. I could see Burns crawling to go into the bunker.

I tried to sit up, and all I could see was just blood, blood everywhere. I looked at my right leg, and it was just blood. I turned on my stomach to push to go into the bunker. When I pushed with my left foot, that’s when all hell broke loose. Oh, it was just a tremendous amount of pain. But I managed somehow to crawl on over to the bunker.

The firing didn’t last long, and immediately the guys came over.

People were hollering, “Medic. Medic. Medic.”

They had to take the top off the bunker to get me out, because I went in head first.

Burns is standing there, and Burns turned to walk away.

I’m calling, “Burns. Oh, Burns.”

I’m just hollering as loud as I can, but it’s like no sound is coming out of my mouth.

I don’t know whether Burns didn’t want to talk to me because he had seen too many people get hurt. Or he didn’t hear me. But I could tell he was crying before he turned away, and I never had seen Burns cry before.

They took me over to the battalion aid station, and the medic asked me if I was in pain and did I want any morphine. I told him yeah. So he gave me a shot, and the pain began to subside.

Then I saw the captain, a brother. He’d only been there three weeks. He was kneeling by me and said, “You’re doing everything you can to go home, aren’t you?” I had gotten wounded a few weeks earlier, but just slightly.

The morphine is taking effect. I’ve seen my fingers, but still I don’t know how bad I’m wounded. I wish I had looked at my foot.

They medevaced me to Dau Tieng. But when I got there, they said I would have to go to Cu Chi to have surgery. I said okay. When I got there, I wanted some
water. But they said, “You can’t have water. You’re going to surgery.”

Then I hear them say, “What’s your mother’s name?”

But I’m going deeper and deeper into this sleep.

And I hear the word “amputate.” Amputate.

They might be explaining something to me, but I can only remember that word.

When I woke up the next morning, my foot was strapped in this big ball of Ace bandage. They had my hand all in a cast. I knew it was hurting.

So there was a sergeant walking through, medic, white guy. I said, “Why do they have my foot in there?”

I was thinking maybe they tilted it down like this and just had it bandaged up.

He said, “Didn’t the doctor tell you?”

“No.”

“You sure the doctor didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

He said, “Well, you don’t have one there.”

I said, “Damn.”

I was thinking, What’s my mother gonna say when she hears this? I got my foot cut off.

And immediately, a urologist comes in. He’s saying, “How are you doing?” Blah, blah, blah.

He pulls back the sheet, and he commenced to looking down there. And I looked down and see all this shit. Oh, my goodness.

I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with my right thigh. There is a gash down to my knee. There is a 4-inch gash in my penis. They’ve taken three fragments out of one testicle, and it is all mushy. There is a catheter in me. Never even seen or heard of a catheter before. And my left foot is gone.

The doctor could probably see through my face that I’m most concerned. He said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Everything is all right. Everything is fine.”