Wherever he went thereafter, Vinson was on the lookout for surplus material. Flying a colonel to a briefing in Danang one day, he saw a large stack of two-by-fours piled next to the landing pad. “That lumber could help put 50 kids in a school,” he told a supply sergeant. The colonel was flown back to camp with lumber crammed in with him. Vinson scrounged bags of rain-damaged cement, tin and lumber from ammunition boxes. Other helicopter crewmen joined in to help, and every effort they made was matched by the people of Huongdien. After Vinson’s 158th Aviation Battalion donated $1000 for an addition to the high school, the South Vietnamese district chief searched for funds for a second building.
What has it all meant to Huongdien? Five dispensaries have been constructed and stocked with medical supplies. Six new schools have been built, while the nine others have been repaired. The high school now has eight rooms—and a library. The day before Vinson left Vietnam last January, village and hamlet chiefs honored him in a simple ceremony. The district chief said, “We can never thank you enough.”
• • •
All over South Vietnam our soldiers are engaged in similar humanitarian missions. An artilleryman from New Jersey spends a free afternoon stacking sandbags at an orphanage outside Pleiku so the children will be protected from communist mortar attacks. An Army engineer from California distributes toys he bought in Hong Kong to the Longbinh orphans his unit adopted. A Marine rifleman from Texas, on his way in from an all-night patrol near Danang, stops to treat huge sores on the back of an old Vietnamese man. The list of individual acts of mercy is unending. In fact, as one senior military officer told me, “My hardest task is keeping track of the incurable humanitarianism of our troops.”
Last year U.S. Army volunteers helped construct 1253 schools and 597 hospitals and dispensaries, contributing $300,000 from their own pockets. Personnel of the Third Marine Amphibious Force helped build 268 classrooms, 75 dispensaries and hospitals, and 78 churches, temples and pagodas. The $40,000 contributed by Marines to a scholarship fund ensured an education for 935 children. Air Force men gave personal and financial assistance to 1218 schools, medical facilities and orphanages. Air Force doctors, dentists and medics treated 390,000 Vietnamese in volunteer programs.
One shining example is the 120-bed Hoakhanh children’s hospital, dedicated early in 1969, and one of the most modern of its kind in the Far East. Financed with money raised by combat Marines, it is an outgrowth of smaller, crowded hospitals and roadside dispensaries, where Marines and Navy corpsmen had volunteered their help to sick and injured children. There are two operating rooms, isolation facilities and a maternity ward equipped with incubators; 25 Vietnamese nurses are being trained to work in the new facilities. Last year, 16,000 children were treated at the hospital, many of whom would otherwise have died.
As I walked through the main ward earlier this year, I saw a wiry boy of 11 playing games with a group of visiting Marines. Seven months before, he had been caught in a fire and brought in with burns over 75 percent of his body. He told my interpreter: “All my life I will never forget this place and these healing people. Some way I will repay them.”
Meet some of the countless other “healing people” involved in helping the South Vietnamese:
The “new parents” of the Americal Division. When Capt. Charles Adams, a 27-year-old Protestant chaplain from Springfield, Missouri, visited Binhson Catholic Orphanage in Quangngai Province in May 1969, 60 children were subsisting on one or two bowls of rice a day and sleeping on the floors of a school. The chaplain told a group of men in the Americal Division’s Fifth Battalion, 46th Infantry, about the situation, and they eagerly agreed to help. “Don’t worry, chaplain,” said one veteran sergeant. “Those kids have just got themselves some new parents.”
Combat troops began sacking food from captured enemy caches—sometimes as much as 500 pounds a week—and shipping it back on returning helicopters. Mess sergeants at battalion headquarters set aside surplus food. Soldiers found 40 Army cots in a salvage dump, repaired them, and for the first time the orphans slept in beds. On payday, troops in the field passed cups for contributions. Ten percent of poker winnings was earmarked for the Binhson orphans. By the end of the year an eight-room, cinder-block structure had been built to house them.
The battalion’s 800 men continue to give $400 a month. They want the orphanage—just one of the 350 helped by our servicemen—to be self-sufficient by the time our troops leave Vietnam. The first small step toward this goal: 15 pigs and 22 ducks purchased for Binhson.
Servicemen who become friends of outcasts. Air Force pilots visiting a relocated (because of Vietcong harassment) leper colony on the shores of Danang Bay last year were shocked by what they saw. Some 240 lepers and their children were living in primitive huts and tents. Masses of flies swarmed around helpless lepers in a makeshift hospital. “I’m coming back to help these people,” said Lt. William Kruger, 25, an Air Force Academy graduate. His companions felt the same way.
Soon there were more weekend volunteers—Air Force, Army and Marines—than could be transported to the isolated beach, which was without a dock. Improvised building materials—lumber, sheet metal—were thrown overboard 50 yards from shore and guided in by GIs standing shoulder-deep in water. By the time monsoon rains began last fall, the men had 40 houses built for the lepers.
Quartermaster First Class Sam Lopiccolo—village builder. Soon after the U.S. Navy moved into the lower Camau Peninsula, a longtime communist stronghold, a group of refugees wanted to settle nearby for protection. Lopiccolo, 27, of Waterloo, New York, salvaged material to help them build a village. In three weeks 500 families had settled along the once-barren banks of the Cualon River.
All this did not go unnoticed by the Vietcong: a dozen villagers were soon kidnapped, while two others were shot when they refused to pay V.C. tax collectors. Booby traps were set around the perimeter of the village, and the Vietcong put a price on Sam Lopiccolo’s head. Undiscouraged, he and the villagers began constructing a school. After guerrillas slipped into the village early one morning and blew up the partially completed structure, Lopiccolo and the people doggedly rebuilt it.
Sam Lopiccolo now is helping the people of a newer village downstream build a school for their children. He has twice extended his tours of duty in Vietnam and is now in his third year. “This job can’t be done in one year or two,” he explains. “That’s why I stay.”
Chief Warrant Officer George Railey—orphanage counselor. Working night after night while finishing his third tour in Vietnam, this Special Forces veteran built a merry-go-round for the children of an orphanage near Pleiku. (The carrousel turns on the discarded axle of a 2 1/2-ton truck. The horses are made from salvage metal. Its centerpiece is a gaily painted gasoline tank.) During the dry season the orphanage’s sole source of water was a 1200-gallon tank truck Railey drove. He used a chain saw to cut firewood for cooking during his lunch hour. Each day he picked up three teenage orphans and took them to his shop, where he and his men trained them to be mechanics.
Railey methodically visited eight remote Montagnard villages twice each month, distributing gifts and surplus food to the often-hungry hill tribesmen of the Central Highlands. When I traveled to these villages with Railey last January, he was awaiting confirmation of a fourth year’s extension of duty in Vietnam. He told me he had found new meaning in life, working with the suffering victims of war. That work tragically ended three months later. He was killed in an accident while taking presents to Montagnard refugees at Letrung.
Sgt. Richard Pellerin—medic to the Montagnards. Pellerin, 27, who joined the Army after dropping out of the University of Michigan Medical School, is one of two medics who alternate duties at Pleidjereng, one of many Special Forces camps located at strategic hot spots along the Cambodian border. One medic is always out on patrol. The other operates the camp dispensary and goes down to the primitive Montagnard village of Pleidoch three times a week to help the sick.
I watched Pellerin treat
a young woman, badly burned when she had rolled into a fire a few nights before; her leprosy-deadened senses had not alerted her to the pain. A small boy waited to lead us to his sick father. Seeing the child lifted the spirit of the intense young medic. “When I got here, nearly every kid in this village had trachoma, an eye infection,” Pellerin said. “Now we would have to go looking for a case to treat.”
Sgt. First Class Lonnie Johnson—jack-of-all-help. When the 36-year-old Green Beret learned that a mother in the remote mountain village of Dongbathin was having difficulty in childbirth, he made his way to her home, carried her to a truck and raced to Camranh, where a Navy doctor successfully delivered the baby. After a Vietcong rocket killed eight Nhatrang civilians last September, Johnson found tin and wood to build the survivors a new home. Last Christmas he gave 1500 orphans toothpaste, soap, candy and nuts collected from fellow servicemen.
As Johnson and I sat on our bunks at a Special Forces camp at Pleiku, I asked him why he has done so much for the Vietnamese. “I was raised by my grandparents, who were sharecroppers on a farm in Alabama,” he said. “We were very poor. I got one pair of overalls to last a year. My shirts were made from fertilizer sacks. When I got to Vietnam and saw these people and their children, I remembered what it was like. I made up my mind I was going to do everything I could for them.”
Everywhere I traveled in Vietnam, I saw men like these. Yet their amazing humanitarian accomplishments are nearly always overlooked amid daily battle reports and domestic conflict over the war itself.
“The number of our GIs who devote their free time, energy and money to aid the Vietnamese would surprise you,” declared Bob Hope at the end of his latest Christmas tour of U.S. bases there. “But maybe it wouldn’t,” he added. “I guess you know what kind of guys your sons and brothers and the kids next door are.”
A Hero Comes Home
BY KENNETH O. GILMORE
This is a story of one brave soldier who has come home from Vietnam. His name: Christopher J. O’Sullivan. He was born and brought up in the outskirts of New York City but he could have been from anywhere across our land.
Chris was ten when the family moved to a third-floor walk-up in Astoria near LaGuardia Airport, in 1946. “We’ll be living above a candy store,” his father, William O’Sullivan, announced grandly to Chris and his three-year-old sister, Hanora. Actually, it was a soda fountain and newsstand, but everyone called it the “candy store.”
The family’s piano was hoisted up outside the building, and into the small front parlor. Bill O’Sullivan and his wife Anna both loved music, and over the years they had many a session around the piano, the whole family singing. In Ireland, Bill had learned a hundred ditties, including “An Irish Soldier Boy” with its woeful words: “Goodby, God bless you, Mother dear, I hope your heart won’t pain, but pray to God your soldier boy, your son, you’ll see again.”
Chris loved the lore of Ireland, but what fascinated him most was a snapshot in the family album of a 12-year-old boy standing, rifle in hand. It was Bill O’Sullivan, who during the First World War ran away from home to join the Royal Munster Fusiliers.
“I was big for my age,” Bill explained. “I wore my father’s pants.”
“Gee, that must have been something,” Chris said.
“What was something, lad,” his father replied, “was coming to America when I was just 14.”
He meant it. Bill had an unblushing love affair with the U.S.A. “What a fantastic heritage this country has given us,” he said. “What a responsibility to live up to it.”
• • •
In the New York Police Department, Bill O’Sullivan worked up from rookie to detective. He helped a young prosecutor named Thomas Dewey convict some of the nation’s worst racketeers. But more than anything he yearned to show a son that “heritage” he spoke about. With World War II over and no more gas rationing, he grabbed every free moment for “our weekend rides”—to Albany, to Gettysburg’s battlefields, to Valley Forge, and time and again to Williamsburg, the restored capital of the Virginia colony. “This is the most valuable investment we can make,” Bill told Anna.
That investment earned one of its countless dividends the winter night when Chris emerged from his room and recited some verses he had written: “Long years ago our forefathers fought. Let not their gallant battles go for naught. They left a heritage, a land that was free. Remember and preserve that liberty.”
Chris went to Xavier High, a military school run by the Jesuits. There, between athletics and lifting bar bells at night, he grew into lean muscular manhood. At graduation in 1954 he earned not only a silver medal for class excellence but also the American Legion award for the best essay on Americanism.
“Why is it,” he wrote, “that some citizens do not seem to realize that one of the greatest goals in life is the fight for the safety of our democracy and free way of life?”
• • •
He believed it so deeply that he passed up a four-year scholarship elsewhere to enroll at Fordham University; its ROTC program offered him an opportunity to become a U.S. Army officer. After graduation he went through a grueling special-service course to become an airborne ranger—Bill O’Sullivan eagerly read the reports his son sent back from Fort Benning, Georgia. Then it was off to Hawaii for Chris, where he was commissioned a second lieutenant. There too he was joined by a bride, petite blue-eyed Eleanor Scott, who had grown up three blocks from the candy store.
En route back to Fort Dix, New Jersey, after six months’ service in Thailand, Chris in 1962 took a 30-day observation tour in Vietnam. He was staggered by the communist terrorism he saw and kept insisting that he be allowed to go back. Finally he got his way. Now the father of two boys—Michael, three, and Stevie, two—Chris drew Bill aside at the airport when he left for Vietnam in September 1964. “Please take over for me,” he said. “The boys need a father, and I may be away a long time. And if you can, take them for those weekend rides.”
• • •
And so, as before, but now with Eleanor and the grandchildren, Bill and Anna went to the places Chris had loved. Meanwhile, above the candy store, Anna O’Sullivan’s ear became keenly attuned for the rattle of the front door whenever the postman dropped a letter into the box.
Dearest Mom and Dad: . . . Snipers fire a thousand and one shots a day. At night the Vietcong control Vietnam, and soldiers and advisers alike pray for the dawn.
Yesterday a mortar round landed ten feet from my jeep. Bullets, mortars, mines, booby-traps and strafing planes are all as accepted as the sound of the BMT subway. I am an adviser to the Vietnamese 39th Ranger Battalion. We are now encamped in a small village. If you have a map . . .
They already had bought the map, a large one, just to keep track. Bill would spread it out on the dining-room table and try to imagine what was happening at a pinpoint called Duc Pho.
If Eleanor had received a letter, she would bring it when she came every day with the boys, to visit.
Dearest Eleanor: This morning a mother approached us carrying a scalded baby. But the Vietcong had controlled this village so long that their tales of American advisers eating children were totally believed. The mother screamed and ran away from me. . . .
On the newspaper rack outside the candy store, headlines told of a worsening war—the bloody ambushes; the wholesale slaughter of the South Vietnamese; the mounting toll of Americans slain; Washington’s painful efforts for a negotiated peace. Late in November an airmail envelope came to Bill O’Sullivan at work. It contained an insurance policy and a message which tightened his stomach:
I’m sending this additional insurance coverage to you because I don’t want either Eleanor or Mother to know unless the need arises. The Vietcong now outnumber as well as outgun us. We are surrounded here. The Vietcong ambushed me once, killing my driver. I sleep in uniform and socks.
At the candy store, neighbors asked Bill O’Sullivan about Chris. “He’s doing just fine.” His voice rang with pride. But whenever the
postman rattled the front door, his heartbeat quickened. Once a tape came. Bill put the recording machine on the dining-room table. They listened to a familiar deep voice while jungle birds squawked in the background.
• • •
Bill O’Sullivan tried to make it a merry Christmas. He and the boys decorated a tree at the apartment. And in Vietnam Captain O’Sullivan with an armed escort drove 20 miles from Duc Pho to attend Mass and to post a letter.
My dear Sons: Tonight is Christmas Eve, and the lonesomeness may be eased if I talk to you. Through your short lives you have brought your mother and me wonderful moments of love and happiness, moments not measured in hours but in heartbeats. I cannot protect you from all the hurts of the world, but I can try to protect you from one of its major dangers. And that is why tonight we are thousands of miles apart.
Bill O’Sullivan suffered a heart attack in January. “I don’t want Chris to be told,” he said. “He has enough on his mind.” At Columbus Hospital, Anna tried to control her voice as she read to her husband:
Over here a good fighting unit is used until its soldiers become battle-weary and exhausted. It is a tragedy that has only one ending. This battalion will someday be bled dry.
Bled dry . . . Bill’s hand reached out and met Anna’s.
In March Chris wrote to Eleanor:
Here away from the phony atmosphere of the hotel heroes there is little sham. I’ve been afraid many times, but I can think, advise and command in spite of it. But I now have fear as a constant companion. As my time with the battalion is closing, I’m afraid of being afraid. There’s an axiom here that the first and last months are the most dangerous for a field adviser.
Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Page 11
