October 4, 2014 Greetings from the land between the rivers. This comes to you from the 2nd floor studio high overhead the Anoka High School football field. The field is dark now, as is the city, state and country. It’s all dark ‘cause it’s 9 o’clock at night. (With logic like that, sometimes I just amaze myself.) Note the date. Earlier today on Facebook my daughter wrote about how she met her husband some 15 years around this time. I’m very happy for her and Cory but her comments brought to mind several incidents in which I was involved on this date. Let me tell you a story or two. In 1968 I was a Recon platoon medic serving in foreign fields. We would walk and walk and then helicopters would pick us up and take us to a landing zone (LZ) someplace else where we would walk some more, only this day, when we got to the new LZ, we didn’t walk anywhere. One of the bad things about inserting into an LZ is that it might be a hot LZ, in other words, someone might be shooting at you. This particular day they were. There is something disconcerting about seeing pieces of the chopper in which you’re riding go flying off on their own. These pieces are attached to the helicopter for very good reasons, only one of which I will mention here. They help to keep the aircraft flying in a safe manner. By the time we landed and got the heck off, lots of that helicopter had flown out the doors on their own. So many holes were appearing in the floor and ceiling that I thought surely my feet might take a bullet, and then realized it wasn’t my feet I should be worried about. (That’s when I sat on my helmet.) On landing we got out of the chopper and took cover. It didn’t take any incentive to do so because the enemy fire was hot and heavy and staying down seemed like a good idea to me. No one got hit, which I thought a miracle, and we were getting ready to maneuver when word was passed along that we had been inserted into the wrong LZ! Not only that but the flight of helicopters was coming back and we would have to reboard and fly off to the right LZ! Now bear in mind that I was but a little-bitty PFC and didn’t know much about military, tactics, strategy, and all that, but I knew that the main idea of all that was to try to kill the guy who is trying to kill you, and at that moment there was a lot of guys out there trying to kill me and all my friends. Why go elsewhere when we had bad guys right here that needed killing? No one asked me, of course, so here came the Hueys on their approach. As we clambered aboard I felt as though we were hearing the second verse of the same song the Viet Cong had played as we came in to the LZ just a short while ago. I plopped on the seat and waited for liftoff, but we weren’t moving. A radioman, Elmo Lopez, was still not on board but instead had frozen in position just a foot or two from where the helicopter was hovering. Nine months before a grenade had landed on his radio and exploded, scaring him beyond belief. He was in the field now because the battalion was short of men, and he was a replacement, now a frozen replacement. Pieces were flying off this aircraft too, and more so than the inbound Huey, because now we were a sitting target due to Lopez’s immobility. The pilot was shouting at him. I leaned out the door as far as I could trying to reach him, but nothing woke Lopez up, until the pilot lifted the Huey two feet, moved two feet to the left and thumped Lopez in the back, knocking him face forward into the water. Lopez had to breathe and he came up spluttering, and awake. As he climbed in, I grabbed him to speed up the process and we took off, We didn’t climb high enough to get out of small arms fire range, just flew half a mile or so and we started in. Having just left a very hot LZ we were ready for another, but this time it was a walk in the paddy, until we started getting mortared. There are some things in life I just don’t like; three of them are snipers, mortars, and mines. I have had encounters with all three and none of them are fun. This time Recon was passing through A Company when we started taking rounds. Sometimes you could hear the thump as the round left the tube, the scream as the round approached, a silence just before the splash and then the explosion. Occasionally there was a dud but not often. I was crouched down near Stewart Butters of A Company. We were talking, whispering, though why whispering I don’t know. The bad guys already knew where we were so what was the point, but we were. Then the process started again but this time the scream seemed particularly loud, the silence deafening, and the splash, when it came, was right between Stewart and me. The water soaked both our faces and we stopped talking to look down at the water in disbelief, waiting for the inevitable explosion, which never came. After what seemed like an eternity we looked at each other and started talking once more, still whispering. Eventually the mortaring stopped and Recon moved out, and we had survived another encounter of the worst kind. Fast forward thirty years to this same date. I lived and worked in Fort Worth, Texas. I had three wonderful kids and this day I was helping my son pick up a pickup truck a friend was selling him, using my Ford F150 pickup to do so. I had one of those small, front-wheel trailers on which we strapped on the gift truck’s front tires. We were headed down a hill, big drop-offs on either side when the straps on one tire came off and the gift truck went wild, causing my truck to do the same. We were doing about 40 mph when the strap went and it was close. I remember thinking, I almost got killed on this day in Vietnam and make it, but a trap snaps and that’s it. Yes, this date is a big one for me, just as it is for Sian, and I’m glad mine was successful so Sian could have hers. Your lot. Take care and God bless, Mac
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 02:38:44 +0000
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