When it got dark, we could see a fire maybe half a mile from us. We knew it had to be a VC camp. In the bamboo thicket right up on us we kept hearing this movement, these small noises. We thought if we fired, whoever was out there would attack us. We were so quiet that none of us moved all night. Matter of fact, one of the guy’s hair turned stone gray. Because of the fear. He was just nineteen. He was a blond-headed kid when the sun went down, and when the sunlight came up, his hair was white.
We didn’t find out they were monkeys until that morning.
That was about as crazy as the time we tryin’ to take a shower in a monsoon rain. We had no shower for maybe ten days in the bush. We was standin’ out there in the middle of a rice paddy, soapin’ up. By the time all of us got soaped up, it stopped rainin’. So we had to lay down and roll around in the rice paddy to get the soap off of us. We never did call that a shower.
It seems like a lot of green guys got killed just coming in country by making a mistake. I remember this white guy from Oklahoma. We got to callin’ him Okie. He said that the reason he had volunteered to come over to Vietnam was because he wanted to kill gooks. He was a typical example of a John Wayne complex.
It was a week after he had just gotten there that we got into any action. He was just itching to get into some. We went out and got pinned down by machine guns. They were on our right flank. He saw where the machine-gun net was, and he tried to do the John Wayne thing. He got up, trying to circle around the machine-gun net. Charge the machine gun. And never made it. Whoever was firing saw him move and turned the machine gun on him. We stayed down till we could call in some gunships. Then we moved back.
There was another guy in our unit who had made it known that he was a card-carrying Ku Klux Klan member. That pissed a lot of us off, ’cause we had gotten real tight. We didn’t have racial incidents like what was happening in the rear area, ’cause we had to depend on each other. We were always in the bush.
Well, we got out into a fire fight, and Mr. Ku Klux Klan got his little ass trapped. We were goin’ across the rice paddies, and Charlie just start shootin’. And he jumped in the rice paddy while everybody else kind of backtracked.
So we laid down a base of fire to cover him. But he was just immobile. He froze. And a brother went out there and got him and dragged him back. Later on, he said that action had changed his perception of what black people were about.
But I got to find out that white people weren’t as tough, weren’t the number one race and all them other perceptions that they had tried to ingrain in my head. I found out they got scared like I did. I found out a lot of them were a lot more cowardly than I expected. I found out some of them were more animalistic than any black people I knew. I found out that they really didn’t have their shit together.
At that time we would carry our dog tags on a chain and tie it through the buttonholes of our fatigue jacket. Wearing them around our necks would cause a rash. Also, they would make noise unless you had ’em taped around your neck.
Well, these white guys would sometimes take the dog-tag chain and fill that up with ears. For different reasons. They would take the ear off to make sure the VC was dead. And to confirm that they had a kill. And to put some notches on they guns.
If we were movin’ through the jungle, they’d just put the bloody ear on the chain and stick the ear in their pocket and keep on going. Wouldn’t take time to dry it off. Then when we get back, they would nail ’em up on the walls to our hootch, you know, as a trophy. They was rotten and stinkin’ after a while, and finally we make ’em take ’em down.
These two guys that I can specifically think of had about 12. I thought it was stupid. And spiritually, I was lookin’ at it as damaging a dead body. After a while, I told them, “Hey, man, that’s sick. Don’t be around me with the ears hangin’ on you.”
One time after a fire fight, we went for a body count. We wiped part of them out, and the rest of them took off. There were five known dead. And these two other guys be moanin’. One of them was trying to get to his weapon. One of the guys saw that and popped him. Then another guy went by and popped the other one to make sure that he was dead. Then this guy—one of the white guys—cut off the VC’s dick and stuck it in his mouth as a reminder that the 1st Cavs had been through there. And he left the ace of spades on the body.
That happened all the time.
So did burnin’ villages.
Sometimes we would get to villages, and fires would still be burnin’, food still be cookin’, but nobody was there. The commanding officer, this major, would say if no one is there in the village, then the village must not belong to anybody, so destroy it. But the people had probably ran off because they knew we were comin’.
If we didn’t want people further down the road, like the VC, to know we were comin’, we wouldn’t fire the village. Or if we were movin’ too fast, we wouldn’t. Otherwise, you would strike your lighter. Torch it. All of ’em were thatched huts anyway. I looked at the major’s orders as something he knew more about than I did.
And the villagers caught hell if they were suspect, too.
I remember at this LZ. We could sit on our bunkers and look across the road at the POW compound. The MPs had them surrounded by barbed wire. We would see MPs go in there and get them and take ’em to another bunker. Then we’d hear the Vietnamese hollerin’ and shit. The MPs would take the telephone wires and wrap it around the Vietnamese fingers and crank the phone so the charge would go through the wires. Papa san, mama san, would start talkin’. And then we’d see the MPs carry ’em back into the camp.
One day at the LZ we saw a chopper maybe a mile away, high up in the air. Maybe 300 feet. And we’d see something come out. I didn’t think it was a body until I talked to the other guys. I had thought maybe the chopper had banked and then somebody had rolled out. That was a fear that we always had when we were ridin’ in choppers ’cause there weren’t any seat belts in the choppers at that time.
What happened was they were interrogating somebody. And the interrogation was over with.
Outside An Khe, the 1st Cav built an area for soldiers to go relieve theirselves. Bars, whorehouses. It would open at nine in the morning. We called it Sin City. And it had soul bars. A group of us would walk around to find a joint that would be playin’ some soul music, some Temptations, Supremes, Sam and Dave. I would want to do my drinking somewhere where I’d hear music that I liked rather than hillbilly. But a lot of gray guys who wasn’t racially hung up would also be there.
The women were much more friendly there. We had heard that was because they thought of the black man as bein’ more stronger, more powerful, because Buddha was black. Take a good look at a Buddha. You’ll see that he has thick lips and has a very broad nose and very kinky hair. But I didn’t know that until I got in country.
We would go to a Class 6 store and get two half-gallons of Gilby’s gin for a $1.65 each. We take a bottle to papa san. Buy a girl for $5 or $10. Whatever came by, or whatever I liked. And still have a half a gallon of gin. We would have to leave the area at six o’clock.
Another good thing about the girls in Sin City was that the medical personnel in the camp would always go and check ’em once a week. And if they got disease, they’d get shots and wouldn’t be able to work until they were clear. Nobody used rubbers because all the girls in Sin City were clean.
But the people got abused anyway. Like a lot of guys would have Vietnamese give them haircuts. And after papa san got through cuttin’ the hair, this guy would tell him that he wouldn’t like it and would walk off. He wouldn’t pay papa san. And the haircut cost no more than thirty cents.
And it seemed the Vietnamese were always hung up on menthol cigarettes. Kools and things. And they knew brothers all smoked Kools. And they would always ask us for a cigarette. So a lot of guys would start givin’ ’em loaded cigarettes to stop ’em from always askin’ us. One of the guy’s brothers had mailed him some loads from a trick shop. You take out some of the tobacco, th
en put in a small load of gunpowder. When the Vietnamese smokin’ it, it just blow up in his face, and he wouldn’t go back to that GI and ask him for a cigarette ’cause he was scared he’d get another loaded cigarette.
One night I saw a drunk GI just pull out his .45 and pop papa san. Papa san was irritatin’ him or botherin’ him or something. Right downtown in Sin City. After he fired, the MPs and a lot of soldiers grabbed him. They took him to the camp, and he got put up on some charges.
You could find plenty of women out in the field, too. We would set up our perimeter, and all of a sudden a little Coke girl would show up with Coca-Cola. And also some broads would show. We would set up lean-tos, or we’d put up bunkers. A guy would go outside the wire, take the broad through the wire to the bunker, knock her off, and take her back outside the wire. Normally, those kinds of deals was a C-ration deal. Or a couple of dollars. We would give the girl a C-ration meal. Ham and lima beans, ’cause nobody in the squad would want to eat ham and lima beans. You would never give up spaghetti and meatballs.
One morning, we were sweepin’ a highway near Phu Cat. Four of us in a jeep with two M-60 machine guns mounted on the back. We were coming down the road, and we looked off on to a spur and we saw three black pajama bodies start runnin’ away from us. So one of the two white guys turned his gun on automatic and knocked all three down. The three of them ran over there to see what was happening and found out that two of them were women, maybe eighteen or nineteen, and one of them was a man. I stayed with the Quad 60, just pullin’ guard to make sure there might have been some more VC in the area.
As I was watching, I noticed one of the white guys take his pants down and just start having sex. That kind of freaked me out, ’cause I thought the broad was dead. The brother was just standin’ guard watchin’. It kind of surprised him to see this guy get off. After about 20 minutes, I ended up saying, “Hey, man. Come on. Let’s go.”
When they got back in the jeep, they start tellin’ me what was happenin’. They had told me that they had confirmed three KIA. And the brother asked the dude what was wrong with him, why did he fuck a dead woman. And he said he just wanted to get his rocks off. And that was the end of it.
Today I’m constantly thinking about the war. I walk down streets different. I look at places where individuals could hide. Maybe assault me or rob me or just harass me. I hear things that other people can’t hear. My wife, she had a habit at one time of buying cheap watches and leaving them on top of the dresser. I could hear it ticking, so she would put it in a drawer. I could still hear it ticking. And I dream of helicopters coming over my house, comin’ to pick me up to take me to a fire fight. And when we get to the fire fight, they were dropping napalm on our own men. And I have to shoot our own soldiers to put them out of their misery. After my discharge, I lived off my unemployment until it ran out, which was about 18 months. Then I decided to go back to school. I went two years, and then I got involved in veterans affairs. I was noticing that in my city, which is 95 percent black, that there were a lot of black combat veterans coming back not able to find any employment because of bad discharges, or killing theirselves or dopin’ up. We started the Wasted Men Project at the university, and I have been counseling at veterans centers ever since.
In 1982 I transferred to the Vet Center in Tucson because I wanted to do some research on the Buffalo Soldiers. In ’Nam I didn’t know they were part of the original 9th Cav. These are black boys who had just received their freedom from the United States government, and they had to go to the West and suppress the freedom from another race of people who were the Indians. I think they won 13 or 14 Congressional Medals of Honor. But they were really policing other people, just like we were in Vietnam.
When my son, Ronnie, turned sixteen, I had him sit down and watch all thirteen hours of this film documentary about the Vietnam War so he could have an understanding of what war really was about. He had asked had I did any killing. I told him, “Yes. I had to do it. I had to do it to keep myself alive.”
I wouldn’t want him to go and fight an unpopular war like I did. I wouldn’t want him to go down to El Salvador. And if that means that I would have to pick up me and my family baggage and move somewhere out of the country, then I would do that.
America should have won the war. But they wouldn’t free us to fight. With all the American GIs that were in Vietnam, they could have put us all shoulder to shoulder and had us march from Saigon all the way up to the DMZ. Just make a sweep. We had enough GIs, enough equipment to do that.
When I came to Washington to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I looked through the book and there were about 15 guys from my hometown who were killed. And six of them I knew.
But I looked up the memorial for James Plummer first.
Plummer was a black guy from Cincinnati. We were the same age. Twenty. We were at Camp Alpha together. That’s where they assign you when you first come to ’Nam. I was in C Company, a line company. He was a truck driver, so he was in Headquarters Company, where they had all the heavy equipment.
I liked Plummer’s style. He was just so easygoing. We’d sit down and just rap. Rap about music, the girls, what was happening in the world. Get high. Plummer was a John Coltrane fan. And I’m bein’ a Miles Davis fan, we just automatically fell in with each other.
He was my best friend.
One day we were at the airfield at the LZ. Plummer was out of the truck, over by the ammo dump. And the ammo dump received a mortar round. It blew him up.
It freaked me out. I mean that here I saw him, and five minutes later he’s instantaneously dead.
Me and two other guys ran and grabbed what we could. We pulled on the jungle fatigues, which was full of blood. It looked like maybe a dog after it crossed the street and got hit by a truck. His head was gone, both his legs from about the knee down were both gone. One arm was gone. The other was a stump left. We finally got his trunk together. The rest of it we really couldn’t find, ’cause that one mortar round, it started the ammo dump to steady exploding. It constantly blew up for about an hour.
What we found was probably sent back to the States. They probably had a closed-casket funeral.
I kind of cried. I was sayin’ to myself that this was such a waste because we weren’t really doin’ anything at the time. And him just being such a nice fella, why did he have to go this way? Go in pieces?
Everybody knew that me and him was tight, so a couple of guys took me up over to a bunker and we rapped about him all night. ’Cause we were out in the bush, I really couldn’t get no booze. But when I did get back, I bought me a half gallon of gin, and I knocked it off. And that didn’t make me feel any better.
When I got back, I called his mother. His mother knew me from him writing to her. I told her I was close by when he did get killed. I just told her a ammo dump blew up. I’m pretty sure she didn’t have no idea what that was.
Every year I send her a Christmas card. I just sign my name.
When I saw Plummer on the memorial, I kind of cried again.
I guess deep down in my head now I can’t really believe in God like I did because I can’t really see why God would let something like this happen. Specially like to my friend Plummer. Why He would take such a good individual away from here.
Before I went to Vietnam, I was very active in the church, because of my mother’s influence. She sent me a Bible, and I carried it in my pocket everywhere I went. When I couldn’t find any Playboys or something like that, I would read it. Matter of fact, I read it from cover to cover, starting from Genesis.
I guess I got kind of really unreligious because of my Vietnam experience. Oh, I went to church once in my uniform to please my mother. But I haven’t been back since except for a funeral. I’ve talked to chaplains, talked to preachers about Vietnam. And no one could give me a satisfactory explanation of what happened overseas.
But each year since I’ve been back I have read the Bible from cover to cover. I keep looking for the explanation.
/> I can’t find it. I can’t find it.
Specialist 4
Richard J. Ford III
Washington, D.C.
LURP
25th Infantry Division
U.S. Army
Hill 54
June 1967–July 1968
I should have felt happy I was goin’ home when I got on that plane in Cam Ranh Bay to leave. But I didn’t exactly. I felt—I felt—I felt very insecure ’cause I didn’t have a weapon. I had one of them long knives, like a big hacksaw knife. I had that. And had my cane. And I had a couple of grenades in my bag. They took them from me when I got to Washington, right? And I felt insecure. I just felt real bad.
You know, my parents never had a weapon in the house. Rifle, shotgun, pistol, nothing. Never had one. Never seen my father with one. And I needed a weapon. ’Cause of that insecurity. I never got over it.
It was Saturday evening when we landed. Nineteen sixty-eight. I caught a cab from Dulles and went straight to my church. The Way of the Cross Church. It’s a Pentacostal holiest church. I really wasn’t active in the church before I went overseas. But a lot of people from the church wrote me, saying things like “I’m praying for you.” There was a couple of peoples around there. They had a choir rehearsal. And they said they were glad to see me. But I went to the altar and stayed there from seven o’clock to about eleven-thirty. I just wanted to be by myself and pray. At the altar.
I was glad to be home. Just to be stateside. I was thankful that I made it. But I felt bad because I had to leave some friends over there. I left Davis there. I couldn’t say a prayer for people that was already gone. But I said a prayer for them guys to come back home safely. For Davis. Yeah, for Davis.
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