Bloods

by Wallace Terry

  After I got home, I forgot about the voice I heard those two times. I was not the Christian then that I am today. Nowhere near.

  But in ’75 I was sittin’ in a room at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Norfolk. This man opened the door, walked in, and sat down next to me. He was a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. A lieutenant. A white guy. I never saw him before in my life. And he said, “God wants you to get started. God wants you to go to work for Him now.”

  I said, “Did He tell you what He wanted me to do?”

  He said, “No. He just told me to come and tell you that He wanted you to get started.”

  So I went to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Norfolk and one of the ministers asked me, “Would you be interested in working in a youth program?” I wasn’t so sure at first, but we started a Bible study program that was the best the church ever had. It was my first ministry. Then I got transferred, and the program disintegrated.

  I heard the voice again on August 1, 1981, the day I retired from the Navy. I was a chief petty officer by then. I was drivin’ home from Jacksonville, North Carolina, maybe 20 miles from Norfolk.

  I got no physical sound at all. Just the sensation.

  He told me to teach His people.

  So I went to the National Theological Seminary and College out in Baltimore to finish my bachelor of arts in religion. I was licensed as a minister in the Baptist church, and now I am teaching three Bible study classes as one of the ministers at Ebenezer.

  I believe that a man, even a preacher, cannot preach beyond his experience. How can a individual tell you how the Lord helped him to get over the crisis in life if he hasn’t had a certain amount of experience in order to be able to relate to the people he’s preaching to?

  America hurt so many young men by putting them over in Vietnam to be introduced to prostitution, gamblin’, drinkin’, drugs. To fear. To terror. To killin’. To they own death.

  I think God meant for me to overcome those things.

  There is no doubt in my mind that He protected me.

  When you think that a B-40 rocket blows up underneath you and the only thing you suffer is your fillings falling out of your mouth, you know it is true. And the fillings is the only unnatural thing attached to you. And the other individual who was almost back to back to me sustained all kinds of wounds.

  It lets you know what the power of God is really like.

  Specialist 5

  Emmanuel J. Holloman

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Interpreter

  25th Infantry Division

  U.S. Army

  Cu Chi

  June 1966–June 1969

  Long Binh

  January 1971–December 1971

  I expected the Vietnamese to give me hell sometimes. That came with the job. But some of my own people hated me. Guys would call me gook lover. Sometimes worse. They would call me turncoat or traitor. That was the worst part. You never get over that.

  The Army sent me to language school to learn Vietnamese, even though I only finished the eighth grade. Everybody in my class had been to college, but I got my GED by the time I graduated and shipped out to Vietnam.

  I went over with the Three Quarter Cav of the 25th Infantry Division in 1966. I was invited to work with other units, but I never left the Cav. I spent part of the time as an interrogator and part of the time in civic action. When we got into combat, I would drive an APC, or I would fly with the spotter, directing artillery. Or I would go down into a battle in a helicopter. And while the helicopter circled around, I would broadcast in Vietnamese for the enemy to give up their arms and come over to our side. That was the chieu hoi program.

  That’s not what made people mad, though. We had a policy of paying out money if we accidentally killed someone or destroyed their home. The Cav was a fighting unit. That’s where the tanks were. So they were destroying quite a bit of stuff. Without me, they would make payments only once in a while. But I would go out of my way to let Division hear about anything the Cav did. I would tell them we destroyed this or we killed that, so we must pay it. In one month the whole division paid out 200,000 piasters, but 194,000 of that was for what the Cav did. The Cav didn’t like getting that reputation, so the guys blamed me. They thought that all I was doing was helping to build the people right back up.

  But if I didn’t do it, the people wouldn’t get any help for something we did. I passed up promotion three times to stay in the position where I could get those payments. But one time, my commander gave me a promotion anyway. And I extended my tour for six months four times to keep helping those people.

  So some guys took it that I was a VC sympathizer. Every morning somebody would have to ask me, “What are you going to do today? Go out and give them gooks more money?”

  But when I did make the payment, it made us look cheap. For somebody dead, 4,000 piasters. That’s not even $40. If I pushed hard enough, I could get it up to 6,000. If the survivors were real poor, I would push it. But we would get calls down from JAG saying you shouldn’t do that. You should only pay 4,000. You better take it easy.

  We got 1,000 piasters for a house. The people had to fill out claim papers, and maybe it would come through five months later. That’s only about $9. You can’t build a house on that. That’s not half of what the poorest one costs. Then they would have to scrounge for what they could. It got next to me, really.

  Sometimes I would collect food that we didn’t eat to take to an orphanage or give to refugees. When I went to the mess hall to get some one day, this first sergeant, a LURP, jumped down on me. He started yelling, “Give them gooks everything. Make ’em fat. Raise ’em up so my kid will have to grow up and come over here to fight ’em, too.” But the mess sergeant, who was from Alaska, said, “This is my mess hall. I run it. What I don’t eat, I’m giving to him. I take care of this place. You take care of your place.”

  I got real close to the people. I taught English to the orphans. If a house was destroyed someplace, me and my driver and some Vietnamese would rebuild the building. People got hurt, we’d go there and sit and eat and drink with them. If somebody got killed, it would get real tough, though. I would go to the wake or funeral, and they would all be looking at me. And they’re sad, and there’s the body in the casket. I would try to make the payment as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t refuse it. It became their custom. Sometimes they would say “thank you,” but mostly they were very angry.

  One time, one of our tanks made a mistake and fired on this woman and her daughter. The daughter got killed. The woman was running from her village because a stray round from another tank had killed her brother. Later on that night, we fired an illumination round over the village. It didn’t explode like it was suppose to, and it fell through the roof of this hut and killed an old woman. When I heard about everything that happened, I took some money out to the village. When I got there, the relatives of all three of those people that got killed started beating on me and yelling, “American get out.”

  The Americans were amazed, you know, at the way I was able to move around. Like I would go places where you couldn’t take a tank. The whole time I was there I was only ambushed once And I thought it was a mistake. The VC had to know who I was and what I did. So I thought maybe these VC didn’t know who we were. We were going to take some lumber to rebuild some houses. But nobody got hurt. I was sure it was a mistake, because I could go and come as I pleased.

  Not everything we did bad to the people was a mistake. Many times it was on purpose. You see, a lot of GIs felt they shouldn’t be there, so they took it out on the people. Like this APC. Every day for a week, it came in town early in the morning, just at market time. Maybe 2,000 people were shopping. And this GI on the APC took tear-gas grenades and threw them into the crowd. Little children passed out. And this old man passed out. We got the guy who did it that time. Reported him to the commanding general, and he was court-martialed. But that type of thing went on all the time.

  There was
this GI who sat on the bridge from Cu Chi to Phuoc Vinh shooting the people with a slingshot. He used the links that hold .50-caliber rounds together. We also had this MP who sat on that bridge all day and shot the people going to work with his BB gun. I rode behind him once, and he shot at everybody for 5 miles. There was nothing I could do but follow it and watch.

  Sometimes a guy would get tired or bored. Then he would want to do something mischievous. I was on a couple of sweeps, and the guys would be checking wallets for IDs. But they would keep the people’s pictures, for no good reason.

  During the Tet Offensive, they were doing a lot of looting down in Cholon. You could say the ARVNs were looting, too. The Americans were taking TVs. They were taking motorbikes. It was ridiculous. They couldn’t keep them. They would drive them for a few blocks and drop them. Mostly they took whiskey, beer, and money. They should have been more disciplined.

  A lot of times they raped the women in the villages they were suppose to be protecting. That happened quite a bit, and nobody said anything about it. Even the lieutenant who was in charge of a platoon let it happen. He’s about their age, not experienced enough to control them. He goes along with it. He’d be crazy if he went against his own platoon. He doesn’t want to criticize his men; he wants one big happy family. So he’s right in it. He got his first. It was standard operational procedure. And the Vietnamese police couldn’t do anything about it as long as the Americans were there with the women.

  But I had one experience I won’t forget. One day, after medcap, we passed this big crowd. This jeep had come by with three Americans. They saw this boy sitting there on a water buffalo. They just wanted to scare him, so they just fired a ’16 out there. One round ricocheted and hit the boy in the back and came out through his chest. He looked like he was about ten. We did all we could, and the boy died of shock just right there. I’ll never forget that. That was the first time I seen a kid killed for nothin’. And no one could prove anything, because the three Americans would stick together. They were advisers to the Vietnamese. But once they had been drinking and got their heads bad, they would do this sort of thing. It happened everywhere.

  Black people seemed to get along better with the Vietnamese, even though they fought the Communists harder than the white GIs. Two or three of the NVAs I interrogated told me they knew when black soldiers were in action, because they would throw everything they could get their hands on—grenades, tear gas, anything. They feared the black soldier more than the white soldier, because the black soldier fought more fiercely, with more abandonment.

  But I think blacks got along better with the Vietnamese people, because they knew the hardships the Vietnamese went through. The majority of the people who came over there looked down on the Vietnamese. They considered them ragged, poor, stupid. They just didn’t respect them. I could understand poverty. I had five brothers and three sisters. My mother worked, still works, in an old folks’ home. An attendant, changing beds and stuff. My father works in a garage in New York. They are separated, and I had to leave school after the eighth grade to work in North Carolina.

  Anything blacks got from the Vietnamese, they would pay for. You hardly didn’t find a black cursing a Vietnamese. And a black would try to learn some of the words. And try to learn a few of their customs so they wouldn’t hurt them. For instance, when you meet a Vietnamese, you’re not suppose to reach out and shake his hands. You are suppose to clasp your hands together and put them in front of you and bow. And another thing, you are not suppose to talk to a girl. If you want to, you talk to her mother first. And you can’t hold her hand in public. If you see two Vietnamese men holding hands in public, that’s considered friendship. That was their custom. But Americans had a different idea. And you keep your hands off a kid’s head. And when you sit down, you never cross your legs. And if you do, never have the bottoms of your soles pointed towards the person. People could have taken time to learn just a few customs, not all of them. It wouldn’t have hurt. I was very self-conscious around them. I watched myself.

  If nobody talked to them first, a Vietnamese would warm right up to a black person even if he had never seen one. I remember I was in the 94th Evac hospital in Long Binh, and this Montagnard girl, about thirteen, had been shot. Her jaw was broken. She didn’t speak. She started crying. The first person she grabbed was me. She wouldn’t let anybody feed her but me. I sat with her all night holding her hand. Believe me, it surprised me. I took care of her for four days.

  In 1968 I got married to a Vietnamese. Her name is Tran Thi Saly, and her father was an ARVN soldier. It was a Vietnamese ceremony, but I guess it didn’t count. So I wanted to go to Saigon and do the paper work at the American Embassy for an American ceremony so she could come home with me. The officers kept asking me why did I want to get married. A few blacks, but mostly whites, felt that the Vietnamese weren’t equal to us. So they made it real difficult to marry one. I guess, too, the Army didn’t want us marrying them and bringing them back and forgetting about them. So the paper work took a long time. And they knew that if you were in a combat unit, you didn’t have time to go to Saigon and wait in line from here to there forever. When the paper work did get approved, it was too late. I was shipped home.

  A few months after I got back home, our baby was born. A son. I was supposed to be there and give the Vietnamese officials my ID card. And they would have gave him my name. But I wasn’t there, and Saly couldn’t give my name. So she called him Tran Ban Hung. Tran is her family name.

  I would write and send her money. Then, after a while, I didn’t hear from her anymore.

  It took me to January of 1971 to get shipped back. They took me to a transportation outfit at Long Binh. I said I had to find my wife and baby. They told me I could do what I want to. So I went out to Cu Chi and talked to the people. Saly had been put out by her family, because they thought I had skipped out on her. I thought I would come back quick. I found out that she had gone to Vung Tau. And I said I would find her.

  Then this was an accident. I just got to Vung Tau when I met a little girl I had met a long time ago. So I pulled out Saly’s picture. The girl said, “Oh, I know her.” She said, “I’ll go get her.” So she got her. I hugged her and all that. She was working at a hotel. She had the baby with her all the time until he died of pneumonia, just a few weeks before I got back. So I gave her some money and told her to go home. So she came back to Cu Chi, and her parents were happy to see her. She was accepted. I bought her the best things, clothing, TV, furniture. She wanted to learn to type, so I got her a typewriter

  I started the paperwork, to get her out again, but it got stalled. And I had to leave in a rush because my brother got sick.

  The next year I couldn’t get shipped back, because the last Americans were leaving. So I got myself shipped to South Korea so I could take leave to go see her. And just when I got thirty days’ leave, I shattered my leg playing touch football. The leave was cancelled, and I was sent home for treatment.

  I was still sending her money and still hearing from her. By now our second son was born, Tran Noc Tuan. Then, in 1974, when the Communists took over, our communications got cut off completely. I haven’t heard from her since. I didn’t want to send a letter over there because she could end up getting hurt. The last thing they were telling me was that girls her age were being indoctrinated into Communism. And I’m told that they mistreat or maybe killed a lot of kids that, you know, were black. I just hope the baby was able to pass for Cambodian. Then she won’t have a problem.

  I’m married now to a girl I met in Korea. I explained the situation to her. I told her if I could ever get the little boy out, I was going to adopt the baby. And I told her if Saly could come out, I would help her. She said it was all right. We have a daughter of our own now. Her name is Goldie. That’s my mother’s name.

  I had no idea that maybe South Vietnam would fall. I had worked there for such a long time. When we went over, we took over the war. They got in the back of us and did the police
action, and we did the fighting. And then, all of a sudden, everybody decided that we were coming out of there. How are you going to take soldiers working behind you and put them on the front lines with new, modern equipment and no advisers at all? The ARVN were good. They had been fighting for 50 years. They lived with war. It was nothing for them. But I didn’t feel they could hold it alone. If they had had some hope, somebody to push them along, I think they would have held.

  I know we hurt a lot of people over there. But we done good, you know. Look what they got out of it. They got, oh, my gosh, everything. Roads, factories, machinery. They got everything. They never really had advanced this far, you know.

  I’d go back the first chance I got. I would go right now, regardless of the situation, because I feel like I belong there. I would like to work as a missionary. Back in the same areas where I worked before. I know right now it is impossible, but I will always be hoping. I liked to work with the Vietnamese people. That can’t change.

  I guess I’m lucky, when you think about it. I was there more than four years. And half of the 15 guys in my language class were killed there, and the rest got shot.

  I took a little shrapnel in my face. My company was sweeping out this area around Bolo Woods. They didn’t have a Vietnamese interpreter, so they flew me out with the colonel. Bolo Woods is where the VC was. They controlled the whole area. We took one hit in the chopper on the colonel’s side. Then we took another hit. I had my rifle. I was unbuckled. I was used to jumping out of the chopper. As it was coming down, maybe 10 feet off the ground, I jumped. It took another hit just then. I took it in the face. I didn’t know I had some in my eyes until about a week later. My eyes started swelling and pus started coming out. I don’t know whether they got all the pieces out. Even today, when it gets hot, water just runs from my eyes.

  I did contract some type of skin disease, too. I don’t know what it is. My skin just peels off. The doctor says the oil just drained out of my skin. But since I left Vietnam, I get up in the morning and the skin is all around. Everywhere. Just my face. All over my face. I can just get up and pull it off like scales. I got a shoe box full of medication. But my face keeps falling off.