He had this sense of history about Vietnam when it happened that it was the biggest event of his generation.
He was really smart and I was a fuckup. I mean, school for me was a big pain in the ass, and I was more interested in chicks and sports and eventually drugs and everything else. But Johnnie became very politicized during the war. He was in his teens. We’d go to these meetings in church basements in Bay Ridge. I remember going to one where there was a guy from the Green Berets speaking to all the pink-faced men in Bay Ridge and Johnnie stood up in the middle of them all and told them what [he] thought about it, the war. He stood up in this room full of guys and he was booed down and the people were telling him he was a pacifist and a punk and all that kind of stuff. I remember that very clearly.
John recalled the same incident:
I said, you know, “I don’t think this is such a great idea.” I didn’t think that we had the justification yet, you know. It was “Show me.” Weeks later, John joined the military, thinking he might as well see for himself. And there were other influences as well.
You want to run away from home when you’re seventeen, you know. That’s part of it. And it is a rite of passage in America, isn’t it? I mean, in Brooklyn to, you know, join the military.
I was a sophomore in high school the day Kennedy got killed, and four years later, to the day, I was in Vietnam. So, you know, after Kennedy and when that started, I said, “This is going to be the defining moment. There’s no question about it.” This country’s never going to be the same, the world’s never going to be the same, and it’s like missing the last boat; you know, in a way I thought it was, you know, our generation’s event. I didn’t feel such an obligation so much as I felt a sense of wanting ownership of the facts of it, you know, to be able to say, “I know what this is about. I don’t speculate about it. I don’t have opinions. I have experiences.”
For Denis, John’s choice was enormously painful:
I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I wept because it was the end of our childhood. I mean, it was, we were just getting into marijuana and the Beatles and, you know, and Donovan and Dylan and all of that and the ’60s were here and we were having a great time and he was going to Kingsborough [Community College]. And boom, he dropped out of school and went into a recruitment station and joined the Army and then went Airborne.
The Hamill family actively tried to dissuade John from reporting for his swearing in. John recalls:
May 8, which is my brother Brian’s birthday, of 1967 was the day I was officially inducted into the Army at Fort Hamilton in New York. Had been a big party the night before, where my older brother took out three grand in cash and says, “Here, take this and go somewhere, but don’t go in the Army.” Well [laughs] … [it was the] first of several decisions I still question, but at any rate …
I wanted to do it.
2
PROFESSIONALISM: RICHARD EGGERS
Richard Eggers was wounded in battle in early 1966. When I sent him a photograph I had taken of the First Cavalry Division, his former unit, holding the flag during a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., he replied: “Good memories.” Indeed, the military suited him; he considered making it his career. Eggers’s story is that of the professional American soldier who fought in Vietnam because he believed in his country and its mission and saw a place for himself in both. Although his future did not work out as he might have hoped and he left the Army after Vietnam, he maintains the values he associates with his life as a soldier.
Eggers was born while his father served in the Army during World War II, and he was raised in Westchester County, just north of New York City. He recalls: In Larchmont, the men worked, and the women were at the clubs and they raised all of their children and they volunteered.
Eggers’s father was wounded on Guadalcanal. While Eggers recalls his father’s imposing six-foot-five-inch stature, he doesn’t remember the elder Eggers speaking much about his wartime experience. At one point, Eggers’s dad told him that he received the Purple Heart because he “didn’t duck quite fast enough.” Perhaps, jokes Eggers, his dad was too big to fit into a foxhole.
Eggers’s grandfather Otto Eggers was a longtime associate of the well-known architect John Russell Pope. In 1939, after Pope died, Otto and his partner completed the construction of Pope’s design of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. Eggers and his partner would go on to run one of the most respected architecture firms in the country, Eggers & Higgins.
Eggers recalls a childhood in which he and his siblings did not want for anything, as the family was relatively well-off. Nevertheless, by the time he reached high school, he recalls, he was a bit of a troublemaker.
In addition to architecture, the Eggers family had a tradition of serving in the military. His father was a graduate of the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson and felt that a military school would be good for his son. Even so, the young Eggers ended up attending a military college more by chance than by choice. He recalls that his grades were good but that in 1960 that wasn’t so rare. When the Pennsylvania Military College accepted him, he decided to go. As it turned out, it was wonderful. It was a marvelous experience; I loved every single moment of it.
There was one area where Eggers would break with the family tradition. He had grown up in a family of staunch Republicans, but he registered as a Democrat in 1959 so that he could vote for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 primary, a decision that irritated his father. It was an assumption not only in my house but in my family in general that you were a Republican.
In the end, he received a solid education at the military college, graduating with a major in economics and a minor in English in 1964. He also belonged to ROTC, and by the time he left that organization, he was a commissioned second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve. At that point in his life it appeared to him as though the military would be his career. About this, at least, his father was very proud. Eggers liked the Army, too. He says, I liked the life; I liked the structure.
After graduation, Eggers postponed entering the service until January 1965. Knowing that he could not commit to a regular job, he looked into working at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens. Through family connections, Eggers got a job bartending at the Schaefer Beer Garden. It was a fateful choice, as he met his wife-to-be on the way there. Barbara Williams, from Douglaston, Queens, worked at the New York State Pavilion and attended American University in Washington, D.C. They fell in love and married on November 28, 1964. As it turned out, his new father-in-law was also a veteran, which had a significant effect on Eggers.
He landed at D-day. In fact, there’s one piece of film that I’ve seen. He was in a boat, in this landing craft, you know, with his tank, and the boat had been hit and was sinking. And there’s a shot of it, and he’s out there waving.
In January 1965, Eggers was assigned to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, for training, just as the war in Vietnam began to escalate. By June 1965, the United States had placed 82,000 combat troops in South Vietnam, and General William Westmoreland, commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), was asking for more. By 1968, 525,000 U.S. troops were stationed in South Vietnam. As part of this buildup of U.S. forces, on July 28 the president announced he would send the revamped First Cavalry Division (Airmobile) to Vietnam. The unit left for Vietnam in August 1965.
While the First Cav headed for Vietnam, Eggers remained in the United States, continuing his training. In retrospect, he does not believe that the men conducting the training had an adequate sense of the kind of combat Americans would confront in Southeast Asia.
I don’t think that they had any clue as to the tactics that were necessary to fight in Vietnam, because Vietnam was completely different than any other war we had ever fought … there were no lines; there was no place that you could say this is your own. The only place that was your own is where you were at that particular moment. Outside of that, everything else was up for grabs.
As a result, the image of warfare that Eggers and others took to Vietnam was similar to what they saw in the movies. It would have little to do with what they would actually experience.
You gotta remember, war, in my mind, was almost a game, because when you were in training, there was no live ammunition except in this evasion course where they were firing over your head. You knew that you weren’t going to be hurt or killed.
In November 1965, the First Cavalry Division met the troops of the North Vietnamese Army, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), and beat them in battle. Depicted in the 2002 Mel Gibson film We Were Soldiers, the Ia Drang Valley battles took the lives of over three hundred Americans, including Eggers’s good friend from college, the platoon leader John “Jack” Geoghegan. When Geoghegan was killed in the Ia Drang Valley, Eggers says, I was just absolutely stunned.
War, which had been a game, an imaginary experience invented for him through Hollywood movies, became intensely real. The reality of Geoghegan’s death was brought back when he saw We Were Soldiers, in which the actor Chris Klein plays Geoghegan.
I saw it at my college with a lot of the guys who were with Jack, and Bravo and Charlie Company … in the Ia Drang Valley. I was actually ducking, because the surround sound in that movie was close to realistic combat; it brought back a flood of memories.
As the Ia Drang battles were taking place, Eggers’s life changed.
I was in class, and we had a break, and I went down to the men’s room and was standing in front of the urinal, and this captain walks in and says, “Lieutenant Eggers?” I said, “Yes, sir.” “Saddle up, dude, you just got orders to go across the pond.” That was the phrase, “going across the pond,” over there. Promptly at which every bit of blood drained right out of my body, and I peed on my shoe as I was standing there. That’s actually what happened.
I immediately called my wife on the phone and told her. She started to cry; I said, “Yeah, I know, but I’ll be back.” And I packed up my bags—they cut orders for me right there—went right straight back to Fort Knox. We had Thanksgiving, and it’s funny. Our final meal at Fort Knox, Kentucky, the end of the month on a second lieutenant’s salary, you’re broke. And we had hot dogs and baked beans—that was our Thanksgiving dinner.
Eggers and his wife drove from Kentucky back home to Larchmont, New York, and stayed with his parents while his orders came through. While in town, Eggers recalls eating at the famous ‘21’ Club and seeing The Sound of Music on Broadway, enjoying his time at home as much as possible before saying goodbye. On December 30, 1965, the Eggers family drove him to JFK, and his wife’s family was there as well; the two World War II veterans both came to see him off.
We got out there to the airport, and my father-in-law said goodbye and shook my hand and all this kind of stuff, and my father wasn’t looking at me. He couldn’t look at me, he said, later on, so he just put out his hand and said, “Take care of yourself”—turned around and walked away, because he was crying. But he didn’t want me to see that he was crying. My wife was crying; I was crying; we gave a big hug and a kiss, then I got on the plane and swoosh! Off we went.
By the time he arrived in Vietnam, he knew that Jack Geoghegan had been killed. In an assignment area at Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base, he was asked what he wanted to do, where he wanted to go. He was offered a post in a rear area, but refused. Instead, Eggers asked to be assigned to Geoghegan’s old battalion. That position was filled, so they offered him a spot as a platoon leader in B Company, First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry Regiment, and that’s where he ended up. By that same afternoon he was boarding a C-130 aircraft on its way to Anh Khe in the Central Highlands. He landed at a sprawling base in the mountains surrounded by jungle.
Eggers met Sergeant Montgomery, a noncommissioned officer and grizzled veteran of the Korean War whose job it would be to assist him. Eggers immediately acknowledged Montgomery’s greater experience and knowledge. He knew he would have to rely on Montgomery’s help.
I came to respect the guys who knew. They just knew what to do. They didn’t get frazzled; they didn’t get excited no matter what was going on. They told me straight out front, and this guy had been in the Ia Drang Valley, so hell, this guy’s a pro.
Life in the Central Highlands was not like anything Eggers had ever experienced. The soldiers took salt pills, gamma globulin shots, and quinine pills and used water-purification tablets. Eggers shares a story of his first night out in the field. During a search-and-destroy operation, his unit came upon a village, but the homes were eerily empty. He spent the night in one of them and describes finding a way to spice up his unappetizing C rations.
I hadn’t eaten anything at all for breakfast. So it was quiet, and I crack open a can of C rations, some ungodly concoction, and sitting over on a shelf in this guy’s hooch was this French champagne bottle filled with these lovely multicolored orange/yellow/green/red peppers. They were about this big and long, about an inch long. And so, you know, one of the guys says, “Hey, Lieutenant, why don’t you use, why don’t you add some spice to your life and put some of that?” What do I know? The thing is filled with vinegar, homemade vinegar, so I pour some of that in there, and I shake out some of the little peppers and I take out my knife and cut the peppers up, and I knew they were going to be hot. I mixed it up in the thing like this, and we stick it in the fire that we had going there, so it just got warm. It wasn’t hot; it just got warm. And I remember taking one spoonful of that stuff, and I thought, “Mother of God,” I thought I’d died. The only thing that put it out was peanut butter with crackers.
Even nearly forty-five years later, his time in the field remains vivid. He recalls eating vintage World War II C rations. While they didn’t taste that good, they were filling and had the carbohydrates and proteins the body needs to keep going. Sleep was elusive, and when you could grab it, your auditory senses were primed to the specific sounds that indicate threat. His sense of hearing became so acute he could hear the sound of a single round being chambered or a safety being turned off on a rifle.
Whenever that happened, and you could be asleep and hear that, I swear to God, your eyes would open up.
Anxiety was always running high. One night while the unit was on perimeter guard duty, they heard rustling out beyond the barbed wire. They shouted commands for whoever it was to stop moving. It didn’t, so they opened up. It got quiet again.
[We thought, we’ll] get it in the morning, whatever it was. Whoever it was is out there, and they’re not going anywhere. [It turns out] we’d killed a cow.
The next morning they took what is called an “army mule,” a little flatbed cart, and loaded the cow in the back. That night the men barbecued the cow.
Not long after, Eggers and his unit were transferred out of the Central Highlands to the seacoast to participate in what was called Operation White Wing/Masher. His unit was placed on an outpost beyond the “golf course” at An Khe, where it served as an early warning unit for the base.
Following the detection of enemy soldiers nearby, his unit conducted a helicopter assault into an embattled landing zone in January 1966. He remembers being under fire, with his RTO [radiotelephone operator] Stanley Semler nearby:
I mean, they were shooting at us. It’s the damnedest feeling—and anybody else that you talk to, I’m sure, will say the same thing. You’re flying along in a helicopter, okay? And I’m sitting there in the door with my feet hanging out on the rails, and I’m holding a baseplate,1 my hands are over here on the side; Semler is over here beside me or right behind me, and you’re looking down and you can see rounds coming up at you. The only thing that you can see are the tracer rounds—all these things were loaded, four rounds of ball, one round the tracer. And you’re seeing the tracer rounds going up and over. These are .50-calibers.
Now, I’ve seen what .50-calibers do to people. You don’t want to know, it’s terrible—absolutely terrible. And you’re wondering to yourself, “Why aren’t we being hit?” And they’re goin
g over the helicopter and under the helicopter. I’m wondering where the other three rounds are. I can see the tracers.
So we fly in and we fly in fast … You could hear over the pilot’s radios that it was way too hot; this was bad news. I mean, we’re getting hit—bing, chung, bing, like that. I have the baseplate in my hands, and I felt this foot in my back go boom, like this.
He was kicked out of the chopper, landing in a rice paddy. As soon as he hit the ground, Eggers was off and running as fast as he could, carrying the baseplate for the mortars.
You don’t think; there is no thought to this process. It’s you or him, I guess. He’s shooting at you when you’re shooting back at him, and you just do what you have got to do. It was your job, you know. You take as many of them down as you possibly can.
This was his first real firefight, and it lasted only about five minutes. It was the first time he could ever remember firing in someone’s direction and watching him fall down. His unit did not lose any soldiers that morning.
At those times you don’t think of yourself as a commander; you think of yourself as a soldier with command responsibility. And thank God for Sergeant Montgomery, God bless him.
It’s likely they were being fired upon by the Vietcong—South Vietnamese Communist guerrilla units—although there may have been PAVN—North Vietnamese regular soldiers—operating in the area. The unit spent the night in a village, Eggers and Semler sleeping in a house with a bed made out of a slab of mahogany. He used his backpack for a pillow and slept heavily. I slept just like a bear. I hibernated that night. It was my first real, honest-to-goodness shooting.
The following morning they went out on patrol in an area with tall brush. As they moved down a path, they heard the sound of automatic weapons fire. Then they saw a line of ten uniformed North Vietnamese soldiers moving quickly along a tree line to the north, where the weapons fire had come from.
And all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose; that line of guys that I saw going in there, it turns out later, was an automatic weapons company of NVA regulars. These are professional soldiers, just like us. And they opened up. They had dug in; they had moved very quickly into this little dike area. They opened up on us and, Mother of God, there were bullets flying everywhere. I reach for my radio … [Claps.] I got hit.
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