A taste of hell: One Vietnam veteran’s story of survival August 8, 2009 By MATT CONNOR — For The Express Late on the afternoon of June 4, 1968, we heard the faraway sound of multiple rotors and knew that our moment had come, writes author Jack McLean in his recently-released Vietnam memoir, Loon: A Marine Story. Without a command or a single word, the one hundred boys of Charlie Company rose to their feet. The only sound was that of groaning packs and straps. We readjusted to the standing position. Although choppers had been flying in and out of Camp Carroll all day, they normally came in ones and twos, bringing supplies and mail from the rear and the wounded dead from the front. This was different. McLeans book, a current best seller and potential Pulitzer Prize nominee, takes its title from Landing Zone Loon, located on a remote hill tucked into the border of North Vietnam and Laos and the sight of a particularly bloody, deadly three-day battle in June of 1968. Those lucky enough to return home from that series of grisly firefights, McLean wrote, would never be the same. Article Photos John McCormick Among those who would return from the battles of Landing Zone Loon was John McCormick, a Woolrich resident whose lineage stretches back to the 1750s in Clinton County, and is studded with some of the most well-known family names in the region, including the Quigleys, the Fursts (of Beech Creeks Furst Corner Market), the Hesses and the Flemings (for whom Flemington was named). Like many Vietnam War veterans, McCormick has rarely talked about his experiences, and indeed was openly discouraged from doing so when he finally returned home to Lock Haven after his four-year enlistment was over. Today, McCormick says hes finally ready to tell his story. Thats partly due, he said, to the approach of his 64th birthday. Its also partly due to the liberating experience of corresponding with author McLean prior to the publication of Loon, and subsequently reading McLeans account of a turning point in his own life. I was the first one in my family since the Civil War to serve in combat, McCormick said during a recent interview, clad in his standard denim bib coveralls and T-shirt. My great-grandfather, James A. Quigley, went into the war in the beginning, in the Pennsylvania Volunteers, as a private. He came out as a captain. He was wounded once at Antietem and twice at Spotsylvania. When you mustered out of the war in those days, you were on your own, he continued. He was in Virginia somewhere, I dont know where. But he basically had to hitch a ride home. He came back to Beech Creek and he was something of a hero in Beech Creek, and they dedicated a bell for the Presbyterian Church to him. That bell sits in front of the church today. One hundred years after the close of the War Between the States, the U.S. was involved in another war, this one thousands of miles away in an Asian country most Americans had never heard of before Presidents Kennedy and Johnson began sending young men to their deaths in the jungles of Vietnam. It was the summer of 1965, and 19-year-old McCormick had just been laid off from a job at Piper Aircraft. I wasnt unhappy about that, McCormick said. It was summertime, and I had the summer off now. But my friends and I discussed how the draft was rapidly expanding and most of my friends made an attempt at college. In those days, college attendees were often able to avoid the draft, but wasnt in the cards for McCormick. He was more interested in working full time than pursuing higher education. Nonetheless, a conversation with a Navy recruiter led to a four-year enlistment in the military, where he eventually became medical corpsman. In January of 1967, after spending a 30-day leave in Lock Haven with his family, McCormick was sent to Vietnam. We were approaching Da Nang and the stewardess came through the plane and said, We need everyone to get off the plane as quickly as possible. Da Nang is under fire. I thought, Here we go. He had landed in the South Central Coast of Vietnam just three days before the Tet Offensive, a particularly bloody engagement that turned public opinion against Pres. Johnsons Vietnam strategy. The Tet Offensive had already started up north, where I was, McCormick said. We were already getting a lot of shelling But I needed to get out of Da Nang to hook up with my company, which was in Dong Ha. Eventually he did end up with his company, and went with them to Gio Linh, of Quang Tri Province, in the North Central Coastal region of the country. It was a forward position that was vulnerable to artillery attack from Laos and North Vietnam. We took between 50 and 100 rounds a day, every day, which made things difficult, McCormick said. Eventually, we were on a patrol and we were ambushed, but we kind of walked into the ambush sideways. But all hell broke loose. The roar of battle is unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable, because everybody is firing something: Rocket launchers, grenades, all this stuff. Called into the center of the fighting, he found another medical corpsman working on a severely injured soldier. You take care of this guy, the other corpsman told McCormick. Im going to go up a little farther and take care of another guy. Still green to battle, McCormick looked at his fellow corpsman and pleaded, What should I do? He looked at me very seriously and said, Do what you were trained to do, McCormick said. And I clicked in. I started looking at this guy. He had been shot in the shoulder and the bullet exited his armpit area and had shattered the brachial artery. So he was bleeding very badly. I thought, I cant mess around here and try to reach in that wound and clamp that artery off. The bullet could have hit a bone and destroyed a lot of the artery, so I just started packing his armpit with sterile battle dressing. Pack, pack, pack. And then I took the dressings and wrapped them around his arm so his arm would be tight against his body. It was the only thing I could do. But it was arterial blood, which is bright red. Arterial bleeding, most of the time, is very deadly. So I was convinced the guy probably wouldnt make it. But we called in a chopper and got him in a chopper. A month or so later we got a letter from him. He was in the hospital and he was OK and the doctor told him hed probably get about 80 percent use of his arm back. So I felt pretty good. I thought, This is what Im here to do. He described the section of Vietnam in which he spent most of his enlistment as a lot like central Pennsylvania. It looked just like the Pine Creek Valley. Instead of mountain laurel you had bamboo. But it was woodsy. It was like here. Youd walk around and it was all overgrown and there were dirt roads. The enemy, he said, only really hit us in the daytime with their artillery and rockets and such, because at night you could see the muzzle flashes. We could pinpoint where they were and have jets on them pretty fast. But it was much more difficult in the daytime to detect the muzzle flashes. As a result, it was often in the afternoon hours when McCormick and his buddies would let their guards down somewhat, and sit around on the bunkers and talk and watch bomb runs in the distance. Theres a strange beauty in war. Its very surreal but in some cases its very beautiful in a strange and dark way. One surreal moment came in April of 1968, when he and some of the other men in his company were listening to the radio and the news was broadcast that civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated. It was a shock to all of the men, McCormick said, but it was a particularly painful jolt for the African Americans in the company who had so admired King. They were covering the riots in Watts on the radio, and there we were, sitting in our compound, listening to small arms fire, with firefights going on all around us, and listening to our radio at the same time, and hearing the same small arms fire coming from Watts. I thought, What the hell is going on? Is the whole world disintegrating? More on the Vietnam War service of John McCormick in next weeks Peek at the Past. - - - A sad recognition of the horror of war August 15, 2009 Matt Connor - For The Express Save | Post a comment | It was 1968, a year when the United States seemed to be in a rapid spiral into chaos. It was a year of assassinations and riots and conflict. Woolrich resident John McCormick was in Vietnam that year. A medical corpsman, McCormick found himself in Gio Linh, of the Quang Tri Province, in the North Central Coastal region of the country. It was a forward position that was vulnerable to artillery attack from both Laos and North Vietnam. For the first time since his return to the U.S. after the war, 40 years ago, McCormick talked about his experiences in Vietnam with The Express. 1968 was the strangest year, he begins. It began with the Tet Offensive and the craziness of it, where we said, We won; we killed more people. We didnt win. It changed the mood of America, which is what I think (North Vietnams) General Giap wanted to do. He wanted to show he wasnt going to give up. He was going to fight a war of attrition. He was going to do it until we decided wed had enough and wed leave. He knew he couldnt beat us. There was no way he could beat us, but he could sure wear us down. Thats what they did. McCormick and his company ran some ambushes and patrols out of Gio Linh that year, and at one point sprung an ambush on about ten North Vietnamese soldiers walking through a gap he and his company had set up at dusk. At about 11 or 12 at night they started through, McCormick remembers. We started to fire on them and they didnt really have much of a chance to fire back. We just blasted the hell out of them. After the ambush was over we went down to see how many wounded there were and what kind of condition they were in. The rest of his story is a bit graphic, so sensitive readers may wish to move on to another section of the paper. I remember very distinctly walking along and there was an NVA (North Vietnam Army) soldier. His pack was off and his shirt was open. He had been hit with an M-79 grenade on his left buttock. It blew his leg off, but there was a strip about five inches long of flesh and skin that held his leg. It hit him in the groin and he had his hand down where his private parts were. He was in shock and a Marine came up and shot him right in the chest. It made a little black hole. He flopped over and his groin was exposed, and he had the genitals of a child That was one of those things that I dont know how old this boy was, because the Vietnamese are small people But it stayed with me. I didnt blame the Marine for shooting the guy in cold blood like that because the kid was going to die anyway. He put him out of his misery. But its one of those things that comes to you, slowly, slowly, slowly, that illustrate the cruel nature of war, that things can happen that you would never suspect. Things you would see. Things that would happen. Its was a sad recognition about how horrible war can be. McCormick and the other men picked up the packs belonging to the dead enemy soldiers and brought them back to their compound to be examined. About nine bodies of NVA soldiers were left behind on the battleground. Then we went on patrol the next morning after just a few hours sleep and found there was only one body where the ambush had been, McCormick said. Somebody had taken the other bodies away. One body was left, and one of the Marines wanted to go over and take a closer look at it, but the lieutenant said, Stay away. Its probably booby-trapped. The patrols and ambushes continued, McCormick said, until a new head of the Third Marine Division was installed. Gen. Ray Davis was a Medal of Honor winner in Korea, and his strategy was far different from those that had come before him. The Marine Corps., Gen. Davis said, did not maintain offensive positions. The Marine Corps is an assault force and should be engaging the enemy and killing them, taking away from them the ability to wage war. Then word came down that we were going to be airlifted to a fire base that was constructed near the border of North Vietnam and Laos, McCormick said. Ray Davis had this idea of setting up fire bases along the Ho Chi Min trail, fire on them for a few days, abandon that base, go on to another base, fire on them from that base and keep interdicting along the Ho Chi Min trail, where all their supplies were. So they sent us into Landing Zone Loon, and everybody sensed I dont know how that this not going to be business as usual. This was a big deal. Landing Zone Loon, or, simply, LZ Loon, was located on a remote hill tucked into the border of North Vietnam and Laos and the scene of a particularly bloody, deadly three-day series of battles in June of 1968. Those battles are the centerpiece of a new book called Loon: A Marine Story, by Jack McLean. Since its publication, McCormick has communicated frequently with the author, and their email correspondence has helped McCormick to open up about his own experiences at LZ Loon. As the chopper was bringing us in, we took heavy gunfire, McCormick said of his arrival at LZ Loon. An artillery shell landed right where the chopper pilot was going to go, and a big piece of shrapnel went right through the fuselage of the helicopter. It didnt hurt anybody but it made a lot of noise. The pilot banked to the right of a hillside and I looked out the window and all I saw was the forest floor coming right at me. And I thought, This is it. But he banked down, flew around the hill and came back. They told us they werent going to land but they were going to give us a signal to get off the chopper. They dropped the ramp and they told us to get out as quickly as we could. We ended up in a pile, landing all on top of each other. We were about ten feet in the air and jumped onto each other. McCormick says the reconnaissance team responsible for sending his company to LZ Looon didnt realize what they were putting us into. They sat us down about 180 people altogether in a regiment of the North Vietnamese. These were real soldiers, not Vietcong. And from the hilltop you could actually see them walking between the tree line. We thought, This is not good. You can actually see them down there walking around. They knew they had the upper hand. On June 5, the North Vietnamese began an artillery barrage on McCormicks company. I was in a very shallow hole and I could hear the rest of my platoon near me, he says. From the left hand side I heard these explosions. It was a mortar attack. It was coming from the left and it was coming toward me. I thought, The best that I can do is roll myself in a ball and cover my ears and hope I dont get hit. It came in pretty close. It landed on my left hand side. It was an .82 millimeter mortar, which were very big. It hit and it sucked all the air out of where I was. Then I felt like I had been sand-blasted. I was hit by shrapnel, which tore some of my uniform off, and then the next one I heard hit on the right and I knew I was going to be okay. McCormicks brother had given McCormick a wrist watch just before hed left for Vietman. McCormick isnt sure why his brother made this unusual gesture (He gave me this watch as if I was going off to college or something.) but when the mortar barrage had stopped, McCormick looked down and saw that the watchs crystal had broken. It was frozen on 4:10 on June 5. I stuck the watch in my pack, McCormick said. And I thought, Thats when I was nearly killed. Later that day McCormick was called to a fighting hole where a Marine had been shot. He found the Marine with a bullet hole in the head, on the left side of his forehead, and an exit wound on the back right side. There was some blood splatter, but he had stopped bleeding, McCormick said. I knew when he had stopped bleeding that his brain was swelling. My assumption was that he was going to die pretty soon. I stayed there in the hole with this young man and thought, Im just going to stay here. He told me the typical things, Tell my mom I love her. Tell my girlfriend I love her. I said, Youre going to tell them yourself. I didnt think he was, but thats what I told him. Slowly the young man began to go into convulsions, and McCormick decided to remain with the wounded man and his foxhole buddy so neither man would have endure this agonizing experience alone. But the boy didnt die, and his buddy continued to question McCormick about what he planned to do for his injured friend. Then I got very conflicted and thought, What am I gonna do? So I decided, Ive gotta get him out of the hole. McCormick called four other Marines over to carry the injured man out of the foxhole. Still he clung to life. Now I had four Marines, a platoon sergeant, a radio man and a couple of other guys standing around looking at me wondering What are you going to do? At that point McCormick had to make a decision. He realized that it would be impossible at that moment to try to explain to the injured soldiers colleagues that the concept of battlefield triage required him to assist the injured as best he could but to leave alone those most likely to die. I was reluctant to call a medevac because a helicopters already been shot down, McCormick said. And I was the only one who could order an emergency medical evacuation. I thought, well, I gotta do it. So I called an emergency medevac, but he died a few hours later. It was a source of pain for me, and I never knew for years if he lived or died, until I went to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. in 1984 or 1985. I looked him up and sure enough his name was there and he died June 6, the following day. That process of having to put other lives in danger did something to me, McCormick says. I was very disturbed about it. The daylight hours of June 5 finally came to an end, but a long night still lay ahead. A staff sergeant approached McCormick and told him the enemy, was going to come. Theyre going to hit us hard. Youve gotta be ready. Of course I was scared, McCormick said. All I had was a .45. I had this feeling of helplessness that when they came, a lot of them were going to come at one time and a .45 was not going to be much help. He got into a hole and I waited. And then all hell broke loose. Bullets were flying everywhere, over my head, all around me, McCormick said. People screaming. Guns going off. Pretty soon jets started to fly in and drop napalm on the side of the hill. Artillery started coming in on us. We got overrun. They came right through the lines. They were inside our wire, inside our division. The captain got on the radio and ordered airburst artillery right where we were, and said, Do it now. All of the sudden our own artillery was blowing up everything all around us. When the attack was finally over, the captain of the other company at LZ Loon, Delta Company, was dead. Three medical corpsmen were dead. That left one captain in charge of what was left of both troops. I could hear the banter back and forth on the captains radio, McCormick said. He was told to hold the hill at all costs. He started to explain that he couldnt hold the hill at all costs because there was hardly anyone left. Then all of the sudden I heard him say, If youre going to wait until tomorrow, dont bother. Well all be dead. Thats not something you want to hear. The aforementioned Gen. Davis, however, countermanded the officer who had insisted the hill at LZ Loon be held at all costs. Davis said to get somebody in there and get those people out, McCormick said. At about 4:30 that afternoon, the choppers started coming to evacuate McCormicks company. I and one other Marine were able to get on the first chopper, he said. The second chopper got shot down with 16 men on it. They were all killed. Of 180 men at LZ Loon, McCormick said, only about 60 got off that hill on the border of North Vietnam and Laos. We left almost 30 dead Marines behind, he said. McCormick was taken to another landing zone, LZ Robin, and thats where he heard about the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy, which took place shortly after midnight on June 5 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was like somebody sucked the life out of me, he said. All this dying. All this awful stuff happening to people. In 1968 so many people were so conflicted. There was rioting everywhere, there was so much bad (expletive deleted) going on then. It felt like it wouldnt have mattered if Id been in Vietnam or Chicago. Shortly after that he was sent to work in a hospital where he remained for the duration of his war service. That was painful, he said of his hospital work. A lot of people came in who were dying. But it wasnt the same as trying to find someone who was traumatically hurt in the field. You did what you could according to medicine. Finally he was sent back home to the States, and his family home in Lock Haven. But he was discouraged from talking about his military service, and was even thrown out of a local veterans hall for his outspokenness about the war. He slipped into silence. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress, which still affects him today. But as his 64th birthday approaches, John McCormick now says he wants the world to know about his Vietnam experience. And perhaps the world so different today than it was in 1968 is finally ready to listen. -
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 17:05:35 +0000
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