Tommy Mulvihill

PART FOUR

The Retirement Plan

I hooched with a guy from California, a big guy we called Jolly Green Giant. He was shipping home heroin in coffee cans, which I did not know. Somebody must have turned him in because the top sergeant searched our hooch and found it. I swore to Top I knew nothing about it. I swore on my parents’ grave.

Jolly Green even said, “Tommy didn’t know anything about this.”

Top said to me, “But you’re involved.”

He put both of us on shit duty. Burning shit. It was better than going to jail. Back then in the field they handled stuff like this in-house.

Jolly Green told me afterwards, “I could’ve made enough money on the streets in California to set me up for life. This was my retirement.”

August 12 – Howie Dies

Two deadly mortar attacks occurred on this day. The first was in the early morning hours on Gun 2, killing Theodus Stanley and wounding Rik Groves. The second was late at night on Gun 3, base piece, killing Howie Pyle and wounding the entire crew. Each boy who was there that day has his own special story. This is Tommy’s.

Early in the morning I was on Gun 2 in the ammo bunker cutting fuses when Groves got hit and Stanley got killed. Sgt. Groves was medevac’d out and Stanley was gone so I was now in charge.

Late that same night we’re shooting illumination. I’m sitting on the trail of the howitzer when the mortars start coming in and I got hit again. The only way I can describe it is like someone taking a handful of glass or pebbles and throwing it at you. I had my steel pot on, and I had it on backwards, and I didn’t have my flack jacket on, so I just got peppered. But I just kept on going, and the next thing I know I hear a real BOOM, when base piece got hit. That’s when I stopped, I got off and said to somebody on our gun, “You guys take over. You know what you got to do. I’m going over to base piece.” Because I knew it was Howie’s gun. When I got there I saw bodies all over and Howie was on the ground gasping, gasping, gasping. I got Howie in my arms and I tried to bring him back, but he had a gut wound and he was gone.

That was a rough night. Later when things quieted down I went back to my gun and saw our XO, Lt. Hank Parker, sitting over at my gun in the parapet. He was sitting in a little chair with a case of beer next to him, and he didn’t want nobody to come near him. I was like this with Parker (holds two fingers together), and I went up to him. He said to me, “Mulvihill, you’re the only one with balls enough to come up to me because I didn’t want to be bothered with nobody and I was going to be hitting people.” Then we sat and talked. He had gotten to know Howie and me, Howie a little more for some reason.

The day after Howie got killed they had a ceremony in the mess hall. When the chaplain got done, I raised my hand and asked if I could say something. And of course he said absolutely. I got up there with tears rolling down my face, and basically said remember Howie and how he lived, and not how he died. After I said that I walked out of the mess hall and back to the hooch. Doc Townley followed me out of the mess hall back to my hooch and we just sat and talked. He consoled me.

Howie was always trying to get me to smoke pot and I never did but the day after he died I smoked it – for him. After that I did not smoke anymore in Nam. After that I didn’t want to be bothered with nobody. I really didn’t. I dissociated myself, I didn’t want to get too close to nobody else no more. Maybe I was afraid. I didn’t want to lose nobody else. Enough. I’d lost enough.

Two days after Howie died I got a Dear John letter from my fiancée. She mailed my ring back to my mom and dad. In the letter she said she met someone else. My heart was broken. You know what, it’s your first love, she was my high school sweetheart. And I lost that too. That’s when I went a little nuts. I was going to be Audie Murphy. I took two M-16s and grenades, walked off the parapet and outside the wire and emptied the guns. I think it was 1^st Sergeant. Durant followed me, and when I was done I turned around and he just looked at me. That’s when they called the chopper and he sent me back to Phan Rang for and in-country R&R for a couple or three days.

Back in Phan Rang I asked if I could escort Howie’s body back home. I stood with the chaplain in front of this panel of officers sitting behind a table. I said to them, “I promise you I’ll come back. I’ll do extra time. I just want to bring his body home.” That’s when they said, No. He did not sign a paper that said if I die I want Mulvihill to take me home. I kind of really lost it. I was screaming at the top of my lungs at these guys: majors, colonels, whoever the hell they were up there, all officers.

The chaplain pulled me back and said, “Come on, you gotta go, you gotta go. They made up their minds, you’re not going.”

Plus the battery was short of people. I could not see it then, but I can see their point now. They needed every swinging dick that they could have.

They sent me back to Sherry, and that’s when I didn’t want to take any more orders. And I didn’t want to hooch with nobody, and they respected that. I built my own hooch. It was really big, but I was the only one in it.

And see that window in the side? I used the part of the ammo box with the lid still on, so you could lift it up and get some air circulating. I was the first one to do that.

After Howie died I could not get close to people like I would like to. Now I didn’t care and volunteered for more mine sweeping.

It took me a while to write Howie’s parents. After he died they wrote a letter to the battery commander asking how I was doing. I still have the letter. I had never met them but they adopted me as another son. I wrote home about him, and he wrote home about me. I finally wrote to them and it was a hard letter to write.

6 October 1969

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pyle,

I’m sorry for the delay in this letter but as you know it his very hard for me to write this. As you know I’ve known Howie ever since basic training and I’ve grown very close to him. Howie and I were just like brothers, there wasn’t anything that we didn’t do together.

I should be coming home around November 18 and if it is alright with you I would like to stop and see you. Howie always spoke of all of you and from what he’s told me of you I feel I’ve known you for a long time. I was also asked if I knew anything of Howie wearing a ring or watch. As far as I can remember Howie never wore a ring. Most of us out in the field never wore rings because of our jobs. As for the watch Howie broke that awhile back and was planning on buying a new one.

The letter you wrote to my commanding officer mentioned my welfare. This made me feel real good knowing that Howie wrote you and mentioned me. I am doing fine and will be home in about 44 days. I hope very much to see you all then.

Tommy Mulvihill

After I got home my dad and me went up to Tarrytown. We got there in the afternoon, and we stayed all afternoon and we had supper there.

Tommy Mulvihill

PART THREE

March, 1969 – 1^st Time Wounded

What really sticks in my mind is the first time I got wounded. It was during a mortar attack. Shrapnel went underneath my steel pot, knocked my steel pot off and knocked me out but I was semi-conscious so I could hear but I could not talk. I heard “Mulvihill, Mulvihill, he’s dead, he’s dead.” I had a head wound and there was blood all over the place. I could hear them and I’m trying to say no I’m not. I’m still here. Then somebody came over to check on me, and they carried me into my hooch. Then they took me up to the medic and check me out, bandage me up, but they did not medevac me out.

The next day people from the rear had to come out to give shots and pay people. Whoever was in charge looked at me and I still had the bandage around my head. He knew we had a mortar attack the night before and that was when the captain got his ass reamed out. And Top got his ass reamed out for not medevac’ing me out. The officer, whoever he was, took me back on his helicopter to the hospital at Phan Rang. They checked to make sure there was no shrapnel still in my head and they sewed me all up. I was back there may be six or seven days and then I was back out in the field again.

I remember my mom getting a letter from the Red Cross that I was wounded before I could write to my folks. My mom got the letter on her birthday. They were nervous wrecks. 

April – Young and Stupid

 I did a lot of minesweeping. They promised me an extra $65 a month. That’s what you got for hazardous duty pay when you went to Vietnam, an extra $65 a month. Well they said that minesweeping was extra hazardous, so I got an extra $65. I said, “I’ll take it.” I’m fucking young and stupid, nothing is going to hurt me. Sure I’ll do it. Whenever a convoy went out, I did the mine sweep.

You had headphones and a battery pack on your waist in addition to the sweeper that you held in your hands. You didn’t carry an M-16 because you couldn’t. A guy 10 to 15 feet behind you carried your weapon and walked in your footprints.

The first time I found a mine, I pretty near shit in my pants. You’re taught to freeze, lay the sweeper right there on the ground to mark it, and then backtrack in your own footprints. A sergeant or lieutenant who was way back there in the jeep would come up and figure out how they were going to disarm it. This officer came up and it  was like a WWII movie. He’s on his hands and knees with a bayonet going into the ground trying to find the mine. I thought, OK, better you than me.

Another incident while I was out mine sweeping, I got shot at. The bullets are hitting right in front of me. I turned, ran back to the guy with my weapon, aimed it and shot back. When we got back to the battery, this sergeant or lieutenant, whoever was in charge of the convoy, wanted to give me an Article 15. I did not have permission. You needed permission to shoot in the daylight. I said, “Are you out of your mind? You’re going to give me an Article 15 for defending myself?” When this guy told Top and the captain what he wanted to do, they looked at him and said, “Good-bye. There’s no way he’s getting an Article 15.”

At a certain point, I had been doing it for so long, I said to Top, “I don’t want to go today.” He said, that’s fine, so they got somebody else. And don’t you know it, it wasn’t 15 minutes later and I heard KABOOM. I jumped in a jeep and drove out there. I talked to a guy there who said when the mine went off the guy who was mine sweeping his body was up on top of a pink cloud. Another guy got killed too. I felt guilty about that, because that should have been me. But then again I could have found it. (This was the incident in which Percy Gulley and Stephen Sherlock were killed.)

 Another time I mine swept we went in, swept the whole road, got our ammo and supplies and were coming back. We did not mine sweep on the way back because the VC set their mines at night. Well this time they had re-mined the road and one of our deuce and a half trucks hit a mine. It was the tankers’ truck, and it was the only one that didn’t have anything in it. It blew the tires off and the bed of the truck looked like when you put your hand through a piece of tinfoil. Thank god nobody got hurt. 

May – Wounded Again

Two guns from B Battery are on a mobile operation at a place called Outpost Nora. One of the guns is Gun 2, BAD NEWS. While shooting a fire mission in support of the infantry, a round with a bad fuse explodes coming out of the barrel of BAD NEWS. It kills Lloyd Handsumaker and James Johnson on the other gun, and wounds three on Gun 2.

I was still on Gun 4 at the time, and went up to Nora to relieve the crew on Gun 2, BAD NEWS. I remember it was almost dark. Bombers had just finished an airstrike, or maybe it was a mortar attack, on the mountain side where we had to land and the tree trunks were still smoldering. The helicopter that took us either wouldn’t or couldn’t land and we had to jump out and then walk up the hillside to the firebase.

We were shooting a fire mission. I think it was a battery of three (both guns shoot a succession of three rounds). And then the next thing you know, BOOM. I got thrown back 30 feet. Me and Tony Bongi and Leroy Leggett – the three of us were hit. Leggett got hit in the stomach and he went down. Bongi got hit in the hip. I got it in the leg. And two guys on the other gun got killed. We all got medevac’d out, except Bongi. He wasn’t bad enough and they needed everybody they could get.

That time when I got hit my folks got the letter from the Red Cross on their anniversary, and like the other time I didn’t have a chance to write them yet. 

After I got wounded a second time Howie used to say, “Stay away from Mulvihill because he attracts metal.”

Three or fours years back from Vietnam I was in the shower washing and I felt something like a pimple, but I couldn’t see it. So I had my wife look and she said it’s black. I never gave it any more thought, until years later the VA took x-rays for my legs and that’s when they saw the shrapnel that’s still there. Only it had traveled from my thigh down to my calf and was pinching a nerve. They got the shrapnel out but it had already done its damage. The doc said the inside of my leg had the look of a 90 year old man. 

June – Don’t Mess With Tommy

 I was a corporal and crew chief on Gun 4, when they brought in a shake ‘n’ bake sergeant over me. He and I did not hit it off and I was not there very long. He came in like gang busters. He did not know what he was doing, but he thought he did. He did not know how we ran the gun. As much as I tried to tell him certain things, he just did not want to hear it.. He ordered me around like I was a piece of shit. Constantly telling me to do this and do that when they had privates there that should have been doing it and not me as a corporal. The guys still came to me, and I’m sure that rubbed him the wrong way, and he was on me even more because he had an extra stripe. It was little shit that just built up.

Then one day he accused me of being asleep on guard duty. There was no way. I told him, “Are you out of your mind? After being hit two times? You’re accusing me up falling asleep  on guard duty.”

I freaked. I went up to my hooch, grabbed my M16, locked and loaded it, and pointed it at his fucking head. I told him, ” You ever, EVER fucking accuse me of falling asleep on guard duty again, you will not see the sunset.” And then I put a bullet in the dirt between his legs. He stood there in total shock. After that they shipped me off to Gun 2.

I could have gone to LBJ (Long Binh Jail) for firing on an NCO. I got along with the brass because they respected me. I did a lot of mine sweeping. I did things that I was told. I was the crazy Irishman and they took care of me.

We are in Tommy’s study sifting through pictures. The sergeant occasionally appears, at which Tommy says, “There’s that fat fuck again.”

Tommy Mulvihill

Gun 4 Crew Chief

PART TWO 

Tommy was a wild Irish kid, but a hell of a crew chief. He held the rank of corporal in a job that normally went to a sergeant. His Gun 4 was on the western end of the battery near the bunker that housed ammo for the whole battery. What happened one night on guard duty tells the story of Tommy and a frightened newbie. Another shows a leader under pressure doing his job. Both stories explain why nobody ever forgot Tommy Mulvihill.

I was on guard duty and out toward the ammo bunker I hear somebody crying. So I went over there, and I didn’t know who it was, but he was brand new in country and was scared shitless. I just sat and talked to him.

I said, “First of all you gotta move. If a mortar comes in look where the fuck you are, in an ammo bunker. Come over by me. We’ll keep each other company and we’ll keep each other awake.”

…………………………..

During a mortar attack my Gun 4 took a direct hit. Thank God nobody was on the gun at the time. When you hear somebody yelling INCOMING that’s when you run around and wake everybody up. So the gun got hit before anybody was on  it. The explosion flattened out both tires and we had to manhandle the gun (5,000 pounds) to get it into position to fire while the mortars were still coming down. For that incident our gun crew received the Army Commendation Medal with V Device for Valor. 

Sergeant Farrell

I got two Sgt. Ferrell stories. Every night, cause I was Irish like him, he would hunt me up and sing Danny Boy to me. I swear to God, and we would drink beer. Not every night really, but enough to remember. And he would try to teach me. And I’d say, “I can’t sing. Come on Top.”

Another time we were shooting our weapons on the perimeter. A bird flew by and he took out his .45 and boom, he took the bird right out of the year. He said, “See how good I am?”

I said, “You were lucky.” But sure enough he took that bird out of the air.

It’s those two things that I remember most about him.

The Most Scared

I did a lot of mine sweeping so I went on a lot of convoys back to LZ Betty at Phan Thiet for ammo and supplies. On one trip I see an M60 machine gun sitting there with nobody around it. It calls out to me, so I load it into the truck with the supplies and off we go back to Sherry. Now we got an extra machine gun and need a guard tower to put it in. I had two years of carpentry in high school and built the best hooches, and Top even had me build ammo bunkers and the beer hall, I liked doing it. So I can build a guard tower, no problem

We put it on top of another hooch to get it up in the air. The roof of the hooch was this metal runway material and we built it right on top of that. We are nearly done and this thing is maybe eight feet above the roof of the hooch, made of heavy lumber, sandbags, ammo boxes and more runway material – I’m up on top and the whole thing collapses, right through the roof of the hooch below. I am trapped under the pile with ammo boxes pinning my legs. I can look up through this small hole to see the sky and get some air, but I am down there and more scared than anything that ever happened to me in Vietnam, including the four times I was wounded. I am down there a long time before they can get me out, plenty of time to be scared.

A guy by the name of  Jimmy Jones, a big strong black guy, saved me. They held him by his feet while he pulled away the sandbags and junk that was on top of me. Then he lifted me right up through the hole. Doc Townley got ahold of me and said I was OK. Then the two of us went to my hooch and had some beers – quite a few beers.

It wasn’t long after that inspectors come out looking for their machine gun. Sergeant Farrell gave it to them right away, instead of making them search the entire battery. I guess he figured they’d find it eventually anyway. He made up some story about finding it along the side of the road.

January 12, 1969

Ground Attack

We were in a fire mission. We did not know that we had a ground attack until after the fire mission was over. My Gun 4 was at the other end of the battery from where they came in. My thought was that base piece behind us was firing because the FO wanted something and it was a single shot. It didn’t sound louder than usual, but then again a howitzer firing a charge seven is loud. And that’s why I didn’t realize we had a ground attack until after the check fire. Then the word spread quick that the tank had fired and taken out the sappers.

I got put on the detail to collect the bodies out of the wire. Body parts were all over the place. I am in country only two months, just a teenager, and this happens. I just got lucky I guess. The bodies had bags of heroin on them. They were all heroin’d up. That’s how they keep on coming. You shoot them and they don’t even feel it.

As it got light we had to wait for almost three hours for people to come out from Phan Rang before we could load the bodies up. There was a whole shitload of brass. They had to come out and do their count, because at that time it was body counts that they were sending back to the states.

By the time the brass left it was 110° out there. Picking up the bodies and the parts, they were like mush. We loaded them up in the back of the deuce and a half truck, drove them off the perimeter, blew a hole in the ground with C4, just dumped them in there, and then covered them over. That was probably my first traumatic experience.

One of the bodies in the wire was our barber. The day before I was in the tent with him getting my haircut. The guy only had one arm and he used to shave your hair with a straight razor. All he had to do was take that straight razor and take it across my throat. From that day on me and Howie cut each others hair. We saw the barber in the wire, and that was it. Done. That’s when you didn’t trust nobody.

A couple of days later the engineers came out with a bulldozer and leveled an old building that was right by our perimeter just off of our wire. The sappers got close because they were able to hide behind that building, that’s where they snuck in through. It was a cement building. That’s why I always thought it was some kind of church. It was not a hut. It was cement and it was blown apart in several spots but it was out there. They called in a crane and the crane dropped the bulldozer down and they leveled it all out. While they were at it they cleared more brush and took our perimeter further out.

There was another incident, whether it was that same day or not. This guy Beenie, I don’t know his real name, he was a Mexican, and he was a good guy. He was on my gun. We went out on top of the perimeter and we found a body. A single body out in the wire off of Gun 4, off my gun. I don’t know if it was that same day, it could’ve been another time, but it was a single sapper in the wire trying to get in. And the guy that we found in the wire also had bags of heroin on him.

Tommy Mulvihill

Gun Crew Chief 

PART ONE 

Tommy still lives in Hicksville, Long Island where he grew up. It is just a four hour drive from Boston, so on a crisp spring morning I head south. The last long leg of the trip hugs the industrial coast of New York, thick with semis and potholes. It thankfully skirts Manhattan, then crosses Long Island Sound across a magnificent bridge at Throggs Neck, and finally swings east through the center of the island. I pick my way through a neat Hicksville neighborhood looking for house number 131. Then I see something that makes the house number unnecessary. On the rear window of a black pickup I see University of Vietnam, School of Warfare. Classic Tommy.

 Tommy hasn’t changed much from the Irish kid at LZ Sherry. He still don’t take shit  from nobody.

June 1968

When I graduated from Hicksville high school my cousin got me into General Electric Credit Corporation. I was basically a bill collector. Then I got a job at Castro convertibles, a large New York furniture company, to train to be an assistant credit manager. For a kid right out of high school, that was a big deal. But soon as I passed my physical for the draft, they fired me. They would have to hold my job, and they could not afford to do that. So I walked into the draft board the next town over and said, “I know I’m going so I want to go now.”

I got fired in May, and June I was gone. It was the day after Father’s Day. I’ll never forget that because my father took me down to Whitehall Street in New York to catch the bus. I went to Fort Hamilton and got sworn in there. Then we got on the plane and went down to South Carolina for basic at Fort Jackson. We were all from New York. We get down there 11 or 12 o’clock at night, stand in front of the barracks and they’re yelling, “Alright all you mother fuckers, we want the guns, we want the knives, we want the switchblades. We want everything.” And sure enough, I could hardly believe it, guys started throwing all this stuff out onto the pavement.

Trainee 241

Early in basic they give you all these tests and have you fill out a ton of forms. We all had a number in basic. I was 240 and the guy sitting next to me as we’re doing all this paperwork is number 241. He’s married with two kids, was drafted and wants to get out in the worse way. He tells me he’s going to put on his form that he’s queer, that he’s a homo. I tell him please don’t do that. I begged him, DO NOT DO THAT. Well he does it anyway, and soon the sergeants are making life miserable for him. Every time they shouted out his number I thought they were after me – “two forty …” until they added the “… one.”

I overhear four black guys say they’re going to give him a blanket party that night. Beat the crap out of him without leaving any marks. Before bed I go outside and find a big stick and go to him and say, “We’re switching bunks tonight.” I get good and hidden under the covers and when these guys come around I jump up on the bunk and say, “You guys need to know something.” I tell them about his wife and his kids and why he let out he was queer. From then on I had this guy’s back, and so did these four black guys.

After a week of processing, loosing our hair, getting fatigues and filling out forms, we get assigned to our regular training companies. They call us all into formation; there must be 300 of us. This sergeant then goes down the list alphabetically. This guy’s name starts with a W, and when the sergeant gets that far he says, “Werth – Number 241. Company D.” And then this sergeant says out loud to the whole formation, “He’s a queer.”

After that I don’t know what happened to Werth. One thing for sure, the sergeants made life hell for him.

Howie

When we got assigned to training units, me and Moore and Pyle got sent to the same basic training company because our names are close in the alphabet. We were all in the same barracks and we all kind of hit it off, more so between me and Howie. Then we all went to AIT together at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, and the three of us did an extra two weeks of training on self-propelled (howitzers mounted on what looks like a tank).

Howie and I were both New Yorkers and became instant friends from the minute we met. He went to college for a year and was a year older than me roughly. He liked to smoke pot and I did not like to smoke pot, not even in high school, nothing. It was drilled into me by my parents not to. He would always try to get me to smoke with him. I would say, “ I’m doing fine. I’m good with my beer.”

Howie and I did a lot of things together, we were practically joined at the hip. We used to go down to Jackson to the beer joints together, the strip joints, have fun. At Fort sill we’d go down to Lawton and just have fun and get into fights down there with the locals, the hippies that were antiwar people. We both did not take any shit from anybody. And I’m still the same way today.

The Long Wrong Way to Sherry

 Howie, Jimmy Moore and I all went to Vietnam together on the same plane. We landed at Cam Ranh Bay at night. When we got off the plane – the stink, I’ll never forget the stink. To this day I don’t like fish. From there we went to  Phan Rang and that’s when they gave us our M16s and they told us where we were going. Howie and I were going to B battery out at LZ Sherry.

They put all three of us on a helicopter and instead take us out to LZ Sandy, the wrong firebase. That night they put us on perimeter guard duty. Me and Howie and Jimmy alone in a guard bunker our first night in the field. We were cherry boys shitting bricks. Early in the morning I see this guy walking right in front of our bunker and he looked like a gook. He did not have the ARVN uniform on. He was wearing sandals and black pants just like a VC. I was about to shoot him, but Howie stopped me. Thank God I did not shoot him. It’s funny now when you look back at it, but not at the time. Scared, man we were scared. Dark! Oh my God was it dark.

Later that morning they found out that we were in the wrong place and shipped us all off the LZ Sherry. What happened to me and Howie and Jimmy was very rare, going through training together and then ending up at the same little firebase in Vietnam. At Sherry I was assigned to Gun 4. I think it was called BEWITCHED. I started as an ammo humper like everybody else and worked my way up. Howie and Jimmy went to Gun 3, BENEVOLENCE, which was base piece. (the gun in the center of the cluster of six guns. Firing data was computed from its location, making it the most accurate of the guns.)

When you first get to Sherry you put your fingers in your ears when a gun goes off. But once you get assigned to a gun you really can’t. And if you had ear plugs in you couldn’t hear the settings for the fire mission and you couldn’t hear commands to the guns. If you’re the gunner, assistant gunner, or even the guys cutting the fuses and the radio operator, if you had ear plugs in you couldn’t hear what you were supposed to set the deflection at and the quadrant at. 

Brothers

When Howie made corporal, I made corporal, and both of us became crew chiefs on our guns. He was a good leader just like me, and that’s why we were promoted.

We’d bullshit, play cards, talk about what we were going to do when we got home. We were going to try to move close together, maybe start a business together. In what we really did not know. We talked about going cross country when we got home. He loved life. He did. Of course we used to call him Gomer.

Howie and I became so close that his parents would write me and send me care packages. Howie always wanted to fix me up with his sister. He would only talk about his sister, I did not even know that he had two brothers. He showed me pictures of her. She was hot. I think maybe it would have worked.

Whenever we had downtime, when you weren’t shooting a fire mission or working or on guard duty, we were together. We talked to each other like brothers, real brothers. We even looked like brothers. If you look at that picture of us together you could see a similarity.