I thought, my God, if I stay here, I’m going to get us all wiped out.
In front of us was a reinforced platoon and two artillery pieces all dug into about 30 real serious bunkers. And we were in trouble in the rear, because a squad of snipers had slipped in between us and the rest of Charlie Company. My flanks were open. All the NVA needed to finish us off was to set up mortars on either side.
Someone told me the snipers had just got Joe. He was my platoon sergeant.
That did it. I passed the word to call in napalm at Danger Close, 50 meters off our position. Then I turned to go after the snipers. And I heard this loud crash. I was thrown to the ground. This grenade had exploded, and the shrapnel had torn into my left arm.
The Phantoms were doing a number. It felt like an earthquake was coming. The ground was just a-rumbling. Smoke was everywhere, and then the grass caught fire. The napalm explosions had knocked two of my men down who were at the point, but the NVA were running everywhere. The flames were up around my waist. That’s when I yelled, “Charge. Kill the gooks. Kill the motherfuckers.”
We kept shooting until everything was empty. Then we picked up the guns they dropped and fired them. I brought three down with my .45. In a matter of minutes, the ridge was ours. We had the bunkers, an earth mover, bunches of documents, tons of food supplies. We counted 70 dead NVA. And those big guns, two of them. Russian-made. Like our 122, they had a range of 12 to 15 miles. They were the first ones captured in South Vietnam.
Well, I ordered a perimeter drawn. And since I never ask my men to do something I don’t do, I joined the perimeter. Then this sniper got me. Another RPG. I got it in the back. I could barely raise myself up on one elbow. I felt like shit, but I was trying to give a command. The guys just circled around me like they were waiting for me to tell them something. I got to my knees. And it was funny. They had their guns pointed at the sky.
I yelled out, “I can walk. I can walk.”
Somebody said, “No, sir. You will not walk.”
I slumped back. And two guys got on my right side. Two guys got on my left side. One held me under the head. One more lifted my feet. Then they held me high above their shoulders, like I was a Viking or some kind of hero. They formed a perimeter around me. They told me feet would never touch ground there again. And they held me high up in the air until the chopper came.
I really don’t know what I was put in for. I was told maybe the Navy Cross. Maybe the Medal of Honor. It came down to the Silver Star. One of those guns is at Quantico in the Marine Aviation Museum. And the other is at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. And they look just as horrible today as they did when we attacked them.
Rome lost his leg. From what I’m told, they gave him a puppy sired by Hobo. So Hobo survived Dewey Canyon. They wanted to destroy him at first, but he got back to the kennel. If anybody would’ve destroyed that dog, it would have been me.
But Hobo didn’t get back to the States. Those dogs that were used in Vietnam were not brought back. The Air Force destroyed all those dogs. They were afraid of what they might do here.
If I had Hobo right now, he wouldn’t have to worry about nothing the rest of his life. He was a hell of a dog. He could sense right and wrong. I would have trusted Hobo with my own children. If somebody got wrong or was an enemy of my family, Hobo would have brought his ass to me. There ain’t no doubt about it. Yet he was a nice dog. He would give me a kiss on the jaw. I loved that dog.
But the thing that really hurt me more than anything in the world was when I came back to the States and black people considered me as a part of the establishment. Because I am an officer. Here I was a veteran that just came back from a big conflict. And most of the blacks wouldn’t associate with me. You see, blacks are not supposed to be officers. Blacks are supposed to be those guys that take orders, and not necessarily those that give them. If you give orders, it means you had to kiss some body’s rear end to get into that position.
One day I wore my uniform over to Howard University in Washington to help recruit officer candidates. Howard is a black school, like the one I went to in Texas, Jarvis Christian College. I thought I would feel at home. The guys poked fun at me, calling me Uncle Sam’s flunky. They would say the Marine Corps sucks. The Army sucks. They would say their brother or uncle got killed, so why was I still in. They would see the Purple Heart and ask me what was I trying to prove. The women wouldn’t talk to you either.
I felt bad. I felt cold. I felt like I was completely out of it.
Specialist 4
Stephen A. Howard
Washington, D.C.
Combat Photographer
145th Aviation Battalion
U.S. Army
Bien Hoa
January 1968–August 1969
I was going on nineteen when I got drafted. I had graduated from high school the year before, and I was working as a engineering assistant in this drafting firm. My mother went to the bus station with me to see me off to Fort Bragg for basic training, and she said, “You’ll be back a man.”
I didn’t feel anything about Vietnam one way or the other. When you are black and you grow up in urban America in a low-income family, you don’t get to experience a lot—if your parents protect you well. My mother did. My mother raised all four of us. She was a hospital maid, then she went to G. C. Murphy’s company. And now she’s director of security for the stores in Washington D.C.
Mom is not college educated, so all she knows is what the propaganda situation is. She programmed us to be devoted to duty, to God, state, and country. She said you got to do all these good things—like military service—to be a citizen here in America. “You’re not white,” she would say, “so you’re not as good as they are, but you got to work hard to strive to be as good as they are.” And that’s what you’re brought up to believe.
I guess I knew that Martin Luther King was against the war. But I couldn’t relate to what he was doing about it or even about discrimination because I wasn’t old enough. Nor was my mother in a position to explain to me what that whole power struggle was all about.
I was just brought up to believe that when the opportunity presents itself to you to stretch yourself out, you do it. Subconsciously or consciously you’re trying to satisfy your mother’s dreams even before you even deal with what you even want to do.
Mom wanted us to be better, to be middle class. She was looking forward to me being something. To going to Vietnam. To being a man.
The first white friend I had, I had in Vietnam. We were really very different, but we thought each other had something going for him that made us special.
I think Rosey was from Georgia. A redneck. That’s why we called him Rosey. He was 6 foot 2. I was somewhat shorter, shall I say, and from the city. It was like I will show you what rednecks are like, then I’ll show you what niggers are about.
We living next door to each other at the Bien Hoa helicopter base, but we ended up in each other’s room every night. See, when the rednecks got together and started to stomp and holler, you either had to go over there and pour beer on the floor and do your little jumpin’ up and down, or you stay out of it. That was their thing, and we had our thing. It was good to do it together, ’cause we were all in the war together.
Rosey and me talked a lot about our personal lives. Having a girl friend that you really were serious about marrying. Wanting to have a son one day. What our families was all about. What it was like for him living in Georgia being a sharecropper’s son. Not having some of the basic things that I knew deep down inside that I had. He starts talking about being hungry. Mom always had food on the table. I mean it was constant peanut butter and jelly ’til Mama came home. Then we ate a lot of roast. Mom was there.
Rosey, he and I had a very tight personal relationship.
Rosey was a pathfinder. By himself he would jump into a hot LZ. His job was to direct the helicopter assault, get the ships on the ground, get the troops right on the ships, get them out of there. Being a photographer, my job wa
s to photograph the landing operation, how they got ’em out. And I got on the last ship. Sometimes when a chopper go down and we lose the people, I had to document the situation. Photograph the remains and do the necessary things to act like we still a civilized race of people, even though we not ’cause we’re engaged in war.
Serious war.
Sampan Valley was serious. It was supposed to have been a simple mission. It turned out to be a major operation, ’cause they knew we were comin’. I mean they’re not crazy. I mean they weren’t a bunch of yahoos out there trying to wage war. They knew we lift at eleven, because they see us in the mess hall. They smell us taking a shower. They can smell our soap. They smell our cologne. They smell us gettin’ dressed. And we get prepped up like we gettin’ ready to go to a serious party. You comb your hair. I mean you’re at war combing your hair.
We lost a lot of good people that night. Good people. Because the hierarchy decided that this is what we going to do. And the Viet Cong know it.
We lost four ships that night, and heavy damage to Puff the Magic Dragon. And when you lose two Cobras, the colonel has to explain, ’cause you don’t lose Cobras. And they lost two that night. Two.
The Cobra. When they call in the deadly Cobras, they were awesome. If a call goes in that they need close support, they’ll bring in three of ’em. All of a sudden, just out of nowhere, this guy is hovering over you. Once he tips the tail up and drops the nose, you know he’s got four seconds. Then in four seconds an unbelievable arsenal of destruction is brought forth. Firing these 2.75-millimeter rockets. After he drops 52 of them, he brings those 40 mike-mikes in. And he’s still running two mini-guns. And they can roll. Roll in on the target. Come in at completely 90 degrees. At 200 miles an hour. Anytime you need them, they are five minutes away. I mean, they better than the transit system.
The commander of the Cobranet team, he got shot down that night. He got killed. We lost Bobby and Kenny, too. Eric lost his leg. Two warrant officers that was flying Slicks got killed. They were two really rowdy guys, too. I mean they like to drink good liquor. They were the only cognac drinkers in the hootch.
It was so dark. I mean dark. I didn’t think we knew where we were going or what we were doing half the time. For the first time, I started thinking what is this all about? I’m tired of this. This is enough.
Then we lost a helicopter in the rain one night. The pilot got lost. He knows I am out here flying in the middle of nowhere. Anybody in any tree can shoot me down. He panicked. He happened to have been about 80 feet off the ground, and he pulled a 180-degree turn. Slammed into the bushes. Took us two weeks to find him. All four of ’em were dead.
I had to photograph finding the remains. And the stink, the stench of death, was—was unbelievable. I had never smelled death before. Not after two weeks. And you just smell ’em from a 100 yards. You know you’re walking into the smell of death. They—they—they smell like—if you ever smell it again, you’ll know.
And you reach down, and you pick up the flack vest, and there’s only a carcass, the shell of a carcass. And maybe the head is gone. I mean when you hit the ground at a 100 miles an hour, I don’t care what kind of seat belt you got, it’s tearin’ your limbs off. You don’t have no limbs. And these are people that you know, people that you fly with. Not only dead, but you can’t bury all of them. You’ll never have all of them again. They will never be whole. Or what we know whole is. Not only dead, but torn apart. And whenever we took fire, I always visualized myself being in that position. And I forgot about all the things that ever mattered, except I want to be a whole body if I go out of here.
Long Binh was adjacent to Bien Hoa. Long Binh was a supply depot. The biggest supply depot in the world. From a paper clip to a jet, you could get it at Long Binh. All you had to do was have the right requisitioning papers. You could find it at Long Binh.
So they decided to blow up Long Binh’s ammo dump. January 31, 1968. And when the ammo dump went up, it was like somebody’s introduced nuclear weapons into Vietnam.
We gave them the opportunity. See, in our society we will move on any opportunity that will provide us to have servants. We take advantage of it. And the Army did a good job. It allowed us the fact that we could have a hootch maid. Somebody come in to polish our boots, wash our clothes. Well, they could walk in every day and bring a little plastic explosive in at a time. A little bit. See, they would spend a year working on a project and pull it off. That’s something that we never had. Patience.
When the ammo dump went up, we went to war. Cooks, mechanics, detail men, everybody. And we had people in Bien Hoa that never shot a weapon out of basic training. This was the first time they ever witnessed somebody’s gonna kill them. And they think I don’t believe this shit. I really don’t believe that I’m at war. This is not what I was programmed for. I was programmed to move pots and pans, and now I got a M-60 in my hand. And all through Tet there was this fear for them for the first time. I might get killed. I have done everything that I was supposed to do to be in the situation that I wasn’t gonna get killed. And now I’m in the situation. Everything has failed. And this is where your buddies came in. The fliers. They knew what it was like to be a perfect target.
The 199th Light Infantry Brigade was suppose to be protecting Long Binh and Bien Hoa. But no one knew where they were at.
Well, the Viet Cong came in. They came in through the main gate of the base dressed as ARVNs. A couple of truckloads. They put a Quad 50 on top of that big water tower. It meant they could shot straight down the flight line. So you can’t get a chopper or anything off the ground.
And they were coming across the barbed wire with AK-47s, with old French rifles, crudely made grenades, pitchforks—anything they could use to kill, maim, or wound.
Anything had a slant in their eyes out on the barbed wire that night was in trouble. They were the enemy. They was suppose to be dead.
They left about 400 people on the barbed wire that night. When we pulled the bodies out, there was three people that worked in the kitchen in battalion headquarters. They served the food to the officers. One of the cooks from our mess hall was there. Some of the people that owned the little shops that was just outside the base. Some of the boom-dee-boom girls. Some of the owners of the boom-dee-boom clubs. Some of the guys that you see in the clubs that just seem to come in and just be sitting there. And the people that worked in the barbershop. Two of them. And the girls who polished our shoes and washed our clothes.
In other places the Tet fighting went on for a month. I got stuck in An Khe. You couldn’t get out, you couldn’t get in. It was a matter of life and death every day. So what you learn is go look for somebody that’s gonna be secure. You learn that in 15 minutes. The guy that was like battle-worn.
You say, who here is the most nastiest, the raunchiest. Somebody who is going to go for it. And if you got any sense, you do what he says.
It’s like having Fred Biletnikoff, knowing that it’s the last play of the game and you need a touchdown. If you watch the Oakland Raiders play for years, when Kenny Stabler threw the ball up, sometimes he might not know where it was going, but Biletnikoff ended up with the ball. And he didn’t drop the ball. You looked for somebody that was going to be right there.
He would be a grunt. The officers, you try to stay away from them, ’cause they’re dangerous. They’ll get you killed. ’Cause they don’t know.
He would probably be a redneck. White boy. Probably small, but he just had everything he needed to cover his behind. He would have an M-79 grenade launcher strapped on the bottom of an M-16. He knows what it’s all about to tie your clips together. Because he’s not gon’ be diving to the ground with the clips flyin’ around. He knows to take care of his weapon, ’cause that’s the only thing that’s gonna mean that he’s goin’ to survive.
And you find somebody that don’t have no stripes on their shoulders. Why do I have to advertise who I am? It’s like certain companies that don’t have to advertise. J. Walter Th
ompson, you don’t hear them advertising. But everybody knows who to go to.
And whether or not you black or white, he will treat you like, Hey, you nothing but a punk here. It’s like going to jail. Don’t accept no favors from nobody. Don’t become friendly with anybody. But by the same token, somebody’s gon’ have to teach you the ropes or else you will never learn the ropes.
That’s what you looked for in a situation where you might die. And there’s a difference between I might get hurt and I’m gonna die here. On a little piece of land that’s not worth a plug nickel to me.
I found the guy quick. White boy. From North Carolina, Georgia, somewhere down South. He had obedient black guys around him that had been in the bush with him. I don’t mean they just worship him as a white boy. They worshipped him because of the fact that he stayed alive. I figure anybody do two tours in the bush there is something wrong with him or he enjoy what he did. And he could smell ’em, just like they could smell us.
We smoked a lot. We talked a lot. He said the service was gon’ be his life, because there ain’t nothing else for him. He said, “You know, I could give a damn about a nigger. But givin’ a damn about a nigger doesn’t change any situation here, ’cause y’all are gonna be here as long as I’m here.”
When I got back to Bien Hoa, I tell this bunch of cooks, radio operators, “Hey, I just walked out of An Khe. And you’re still back here.” Somebody said, “You know what’s gon’ be on TV tonight?”
“No, man. I don’t know what’s gon’ be on TV.”
I got shot down three times. It always got worse, because their firepower kept gettin’ better.
The first time, the ship got hit outside An Khe. The pilot was good enough to understand autorotation. But it is not a lifesaver. If you can get the ship down, you use your trees. You use everything that keep you from hittin’ hard. Because you still got 2,000 pounds of fuel. That’s the first thing you gotta worry about. How do you get rid of this fuel. They don’t put plugs in, you can’t jettison any fuel. So you gotta make sure that you don’t have a collision with anything that is immobile, like earth. Biggest object in the world to run into is mother earth. And you get friction. Friction generates a spark. The spark will ignite. Your tanks has always got fumes in it. And you don’t ignite the fuel, you ignite the fumes.
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