The Demo

 It seemed like some guys, a lot of guys come to think of it, made a kind of hobby out of gonorrhea. It wasn’t that hard to do. On a trip to Phan Thiet I was walking down a side street with a guy from Sherry. Vendors waved us over and mama-sans pulled at our sleeves, “Come see top notch girl.” My companion followed the mama-san, but first took off his wedding ring and said, “I always take the ring off. Then it don’t mean nothin’.”

Five days after convoys to Phan Thiet—I could count them—soldiers lined up outside First Sergeant Stollberg’s hooch begging for a medical pass. They held their crotches while Top yelled at them. Then at formation the next morning he yelled at everybody. His tirades were aimed squarely at an audience of teenagers away from home for the first time, full of empty threats and crude references to male anatomy, which always got their attention.  “You come back with the clap, you’ll never see the rear again the rest of your goddamn tour. Tell you what, I’m going to start giving Article 15s for damaging Army property. Your dick belongs to Uncle Sam, you hear me? You can play with it all you want, but you bring it back dripping, I’ll have your ass.”

Top invited the battalion surgeon out to give us a talk on the ravages of venereal disease in Vietnam. The doctor said that one strain had no cure. Top interrupted him with, “In other words, you go to Japan and wait for your dick to rot off.” But the gonorrhea kept on, taking heavy casualties after every convoy.

Formation on this day was next to Gun 2. We fell in at ease while Top stood with his hands behind his back. We knew something important was coming when Top skipped the section chief reports. He got straight to the point. “Every time one of you goes to Phan Thiet you come back with a sore dick. So I give you a pass to get a shot in your ass. In a month you come back holding it in your hand again and crying for another pass. Well I’m sick of it. Goddamn fucking sick of it. So I’m going to help you out.”

Top reached into his pocket with his left hand and pulled out something small and square. “A lot of you have never seen one of these. It’s called a condom. When I was a kid we called ‘em rubbers.” He smiled, but in a wicked sort of way. “And for you momma’s boys who don’t know how to use one, I’m gonna show you right now. Pay attention.”

Top pulled his right hand from behind his back and held up a broom. He held it in the middle of the handle. “This is you.” Guys elbowed each other and pointed to the broom handle. Top thought a moment, “Well maybe this ain’t exactly you.” He slid his hand up to near the end. “Is that more like it?” Everyone looked at somebody else. More elbowing, some laughing, a dangerous thing to do in one of Top’s formations, but he let it go.

Top slipped the broom under his armpit, and went to open the condom. He struggled with it, ignoring the free advice com­ing from the formation. Finally he bit the corner and got the slippery thing out in the open. He then sent it into battle. He showed the tactical positioning on the tip of the broom handle. He demonstrated the maneuver of unrolling it. When he came to the last step he said, “You can’t pull this thing on like a sock. You got to leave some room at the end.” He snapped the little empty hat at the end of the condom. Everybody laughed and guys started punching each other on the shoulder.

Top ended the formation with a promise. “I got a whole case of these in my hooch. You come in and get a handful before going to the rear. They’re free. No excuses. You come back with the clap, I’m not shittin’ I’ll cut the goddamn thing off.”

…………………………

Not long after this I was at the latrine and could hardly stand for the burning. Oh boy, I thought. I was one of the old men in the battery, twenty-six years old, a section chief, overly serious about everything, and thinking back probably a little pompous. I dreaded what I had to do next.

I went to Top’s hooch and told him I needed to get to the hospital. “I don’t know how this hap­pened, Top. Honest to God I never put my toe in the water.”

He looked at me, “It’s not your toe we’re talking about,” and held out a handful of the little square packets.

I went to the regimental hospital in Phan Rang. The medics took a culture, which in itself was a minor adventure, gave me a bag of pills, and told me to come back in two days. When I returned the technician gave me a thin smile, “You got a whole zoo growing in there.” He said it was nonspecific ure­thritis from highly unsanitary conditions. I thought: VD without the fun. Vietnam always had new ways to screw you.

I never tried to tell the First Sergeant about how I really got the clap. It would have felt like trying to explain how a virgin gets pregnant. But I made sure it never happened again. I started washing my hands before going to the latrine.

Introduction

These stories come from my two books on Vietnam: Seven in a Jeep: A Memoir of the Vietnam War and its sequel Surplus: The Long Arm of Vietnam.

How to pick the few incidents to include here? Reading through Seven in a Jeep three years after publication I was struck by how many times First Sergeant Stollberg comes on the scene. Top and I arrived at LZ Sherry at about the same time and left within a few weeks of each other, spanning ten months together on that little patch of sand.

Most of my contribution to this history of B Battery will be stories about Top, and in this way I will tell some of my story too. Top and I didn’t get along all that well. He was Old Army to the core, a veteran of three wars; while I was a kid with a thin skin a couple years out of the Catholic seminary, and recently pulled out of graduate school. Eventually we came to a distant respect for one another, and by the time we were ready to leave LZ Sherry I came to appreciate the man behind the bluster.

I wrote home most often to my mom, to my future wife Kathleen, and to my two younger sisters Jayne and Mary Kay. God bless them these beautiful women saved every letter. These stories sometimes include quotes from those letters, in-the-moment comments from my younger self. The dialog in these stories isn’t word-for-word perfect, but comes close, because some conversations you never forget.

Top

Make no mistake, First Sergeant Stollberg ran LZ Sherry. The officers played their parts, but the first sergeant pulled the strings. He had spent his adult life engaged in warfare: WWII, Korea and now a second tour in Vietnam. Top was old school artillery, and half deaf because earplugs were for pussies. He knew more about artillery than the rest of the battery combined, and had seen battles we only read about in school. Top’s combat career showed in his face. Up close it looked like tire tread. And he did not take guff from anybody.

Every morning Top called a formation. He held it at dif­ferent locations around the battery, to keep the VC guessing. Placing soldiers in the same spot at the same time every day was asking for trouble. Top’s formations were quick and all business. He was keen on haircuts, upcoming inspections, work details, and the sorry state of the sad sacks under his command. Sometimes he pulled out a sheet of paper with a new policy from the Pentagon or battalion headquarters and read it word-for-word, not hiding his contempt for directives that had little to do with fighting the war.

Then there was keeping track of his boys, mostly teenagers, confined to a one-acre firebase like caged monkeys with guns. At the daily formation Top went down the rows for a report from each section chief. When he heard “All present” he looked up the rank and they had better be there.

Sometimes a section chief added, “…or accounted for.” Top would turn a red face in his direction, “So where the fuck are they? What are they doing that is so God-awful more important than my formation?”

Worst of all was, “One absent, First Ser­geant.” This was shorthand for, I am missing a man and I have no idea where he is. Top’s eyes would turn to blue marbles, “You go find him right now.”

The more I got to know Top the less I liked him. He had a temper, charming one minute and shouting the next. I never knew what would set him off. From halfway across the battery I could tell what kind of a mood he was in by the shade of his face.

FO Fever

I wrote my first letter home under a flashlight three days after getting to Sherry.

May 5, 1970

I know you are all anxious to hear about LZ Sherry, the firing battery that will be my home for the next few months. Well, the food is good; much better than anything the Army ever served up in the states. But most of all I suppose you want to know how safe it is here. I’m not going to tell you it’s like being in my mother’s arms. It isn’t. We take sniper fire and of course mortar rounds every so often, just like every other firebase in Vietnam. And there is always the danger of the gooks getting thru our perimeter.

I work an “8 on – 8 off” shift around the clock, which means I spend most of my time working or sleeping. I’m still very skittery, especially at night when the VC does all its work. During our first mortar attack I just about wet my pants.

That was the night LZ Betty to our south was overrun and LZ Sherry was hit with two separate mortar attacks. The action at Sherry stopped a little after 3:00 a.m. We had no ca­sualties that night, but LZ Betty was not so fortunate. In the morning we learned that she had taken heavy casualties, and that our forward observers there were badly hurt. An NVA infantry battalion of five companies in consort with five companies of VC, a force of about 350, had attacked LZ Betty. They killed seven U.S. soldiers and wounded thirty-five, leav­ing behind fourteen bodies of their own they could not carry off. That night 130 attacks occurred against firebases and in­stallations in the region. LZ Betty was the only one to suffer a ground attack.

A forward observer team from LZ Sherry attached to 1^st of the 50^th Mechanized Infantry, Sergeant Pierce and radio operator Bill Wright, were at Betty when the attack occurred. Pierce took a round in the upper leg that made him fall over backwards onto Wright. The two sat back-to-back firing their weapons when Wright took two rounds, one in the back and the other in the upper leg. The last thing Wright remembers is being pulled out by a squad of the 1^st/50^th. When Wright woke up he was in Phan Rang and Pierce was in the next bed. (Taken from Bill Wright’s account of that night posted on the 1st Bn (Mech) 50^th Infan­try website: www.ichiban1.org/html/stories/story_35.htm)

We shot fire missions for the 1^st/50^th and they often bivouacked at Sherry for a day or two. I hung out with the forward observers because I loved the FO training at Ft. Sill and liked listening to stories from the field.

After only a few weeks at Sherry l had lost my jitters, grown bored and had forgotten that the FO team from Sherry had just been chewed up at LZ Betty. I wanted action and in a letter home I laid out my plan.

June 2, 1970

This FDC job is sure boring. I am thinking seriously of becoming a forward observer. Sitting between four walls for 12 hours a day and getting very little exercise is getting to me. I’d rather be out and about. We’ve got a FO here now from the field. Think I’ll talk to him in the morning. We have endless inspections, formations and “busy” projects. I’d rather have the war – seriously.

The drop in action did not last long. Fighting intensified with the beginning of monsoon season. Thick cloud cover and heavy rains reduced visibility at night to near zero and curtailed air operations, making monsoon a good time of year for the NVA and VC. They could pretty much waltz around at will. Despite a sharp increase in fighting, I still lusted for action.

July 2, 1970

Enemy activity has significantly increased with the beginning of July. This is their busy season you know. A couple VC battalions have been roaming around the area. We fired on one of them just 1000 meters off our perimeter last Sunday morning. Gunships also worked over the area. That went on all morning. Sunday morning is a favorite time with the VC. The Sunday before last I started my breakfast three times. I’d get two bites down when the siren would go off for another fire mission.

Many of the fire missions that come over our radios sound like clips from a television serial. Infantrymen taking AK-47 fire and mortars, or a chopper pilot adjusting artillery fire. Often it’s hard to believe that it’s all for real. You know I don’t even have normal dreams anymore. All I dream about are machine guns and sandbags and helicopters. 

Last week we were alerted for a heli-borne operation. We were told we would be going to Bu Prang, which is on the tip of the Parrot’s Beak on the Cambodian border. But they have decided to send two guns from A Battery. I was looking forward to it; this place is so bloody boring.

I applied for FO school in early August, three months after arriving in Vietnam. Every forward observer, even graduates of Ft. Sill gunnery school, needed more training in Vietnam. After my first few minutes inside FDC and after listening to the FOs on the radio call in artillery with strange protocols and even stranger terminology, I understood why. This was not something you should learn on the job. I was approved to attend FO school in October and replace a guy leaving the next month. My heart beat a little faster at the thought of getting into the action.

Just before my departure Top pulled me aside. “The captain cancelled your FO school. He thinks you’re too valuable because you have formal FDC training. And there’d be a shortage if you left.”

I was crushed, thinking only of the endless tedium before me in this little firebase. “Top, what if I talked to him?”

“Won’t do any good. He made up his mind. That’s it.”

The POW

He was a child committing an act of war. We nabbed him in our concertina wire putting rubber bands around the trip flares. The VC and NVA often sent children to disable the flares before a ground attack. This made it easier for sappers to pen­etrate and blow holes in the wire, leading the way for NVA and VC regulars to come pouring through. We were already on edge from a special alert that had come down a few days before, and we were taking more than the usual amount of mortar fire. Days earlier a crew servicing the trip flares in the outer wire had dis­covered an anti-personnel mine. It was a homemade device: explosive material and four batteries in a plastic bag, with two bamboo sticks and wires for a detonator. It did not matter to a lot of guys that the enemy disabling our flares was a kid.

The soldier who caught the boy hauled him into the com­pound at rifle point. He looked to be around eight years old, just a whisper of a boy. His shoulder joints stuck up from his body in two knobs. He was dressed in a pair of shorts and Ho Chi Minh sandals, made with tire treads and strips of inner tube. He was crying. A crowd gathered and soon a heated discussion boiled up.

“He’s just a little kid, let him go.”

“Bullshit, these kids are soldiers. He’s a fuckin’ prisoner as far as I’m concerned.”

“He’s faking those tears, they train ‘em to do that, and I’ll bet he’s a lot older than he looks.”

“They don’t train these kids. They threaten their families or they pay them to do this shit.”

“He did this in broad daylight, right in front of us. He’s too stupid to be a soldier.”

“He’s a soldier if he’s working for the gooks.”

Voices rose to shouting. The boy knew no English, and we could manage only a few words of Vietnamese, none of them useful. We must have seemed like white giants to him, some with yellow hair that many Vietnamese had never seen and loved to touch when given the chance. The prisoner stood surrounded by these strangely colored behemoths as they bel­lowed at each other in their flat, guttural language.

In came Top; he was never far away. He listened without saying a word. With no explanation Top pulled his .45 and said, “I’m gonna shoot the little fucker right here and now.” He leveled the pistol at the boy’s chest.

The crowd fell silent. The boy stopped crying. There was a moment of stillness when the unthinkable was about to occur.

“NO,” we shouted together. One soldier stepped between Top and the boy. Then all was chaos and shouting again.

Top put away his pistol, and turning to leave said, “OK, girls, but get that little shit out of my battery.”

The boy stared with wide, unseeing eyes. His entire body began to shake. The soldiers who wanted him in a POW camp now petted his shoulder, rubbed his arms, crouched to look into his eyes saying soothing words to him. The kid started to cry again. Someone brought out a Hershey bar, maybe the great­est weapon of goodwill ever deployed by the U.S. military. The boy stopped crying and looked around. He took the candy bar and gave a smile that would melt the paint off a howitzer. That was all the encouragement we needed. Guys scurried off in search of more stuff. They piled the boy high with cartons of cigarettes, candy, C rations and a magazine or two. He stag­gered out the main gate hardly able to carry it all, but carrying a message from Top that needed no translation.

The Last Battle: Getting Home

We had a saying:

I was back in Phan Rang in the Air Force BOQ (bachelor officers quarters), because they had air conditioning and real beds. The Army BOQ had cots and old mosquito netting. It was the day I was supposed to fly to Cam Rahn to get my plane to get out of there. Of course all of us from Sherry had bad thoughts about that flight to Cam Rahn Bay. (Seven month before George Beedy’s plane ran into a mountain on that flight.) I’m up at 6:00 in the morning, it’s just getting light. I go outside my BOQ room, which is like a cinderblock motel, and there’s a guy out there with a mama-san smoking a joint. He’s an Air Force guy. I say, “How are you?” And I say, “I’m leaving today.”

He says, “That’s great. That’s really cool.”

I say, “I’m going to Cam Rahn Bay.”

He says, “Wow! Great! I’m flying that plane.” And he’s out there smoking dope.

I say, “You’re flying that plane?”

He says, “Yeah, we’re taking off in a couple hours.”

I thought: OK, there’s your sign. When Beedy’s plane ran into the mountain on his way to Cam Ranh it really shook everybody up. I convoyed from Phan Rang all the way up to Cam Rahn. My adventures were over. I was not going to fly in that plane.

Six months prior on November 29, 1970, Sp4 George Beedy died on his way home, when his plane out of Phan Rang hit a mountain in heavy cloud cover. There were no survivors.

So I got to Cam Rahn and hung around there for a couple days. We were in big barracks. They would come in and read off a list of names and you’d get on the plane. After two days or so, Bammo, there we go. I was the second plane of the day. The first plane went up and ours was four hours later. We get on the plane. I took a bunch of sleeping pills someone had given me and I was so wired to get out of there they didn’t do anything at all.

The pilot came on and said, “Look, normally we would make a stop along the way, but we got plenty of fuel, a tail wind that is kicking butt, and we can go straight on through. What do you guys want to do?”

Well you can imagine. Everyone said, “GO, GO, GO.”

So we did a non-stop, which was great. We landed at Ft. Lewis and started taxiing to the gate when the pilot came on and said, “We got a little problem. The plane that left four hours before us stopped along the way and got here just before us. We’re gonna be here on the tarmac for ten or fifteen minutes while they process those guys.”

Everybody’s fine with that. This is a whole plane full of lieutenants and captains. Everybody’s cool. Some guys could see their wives and their kids out at the gate waving to them. Fifteen or twenty minutes go by and nothing happens. Half an hour goes by and nothing happens. There’s no air conditioning on the plane. Finally somebody says to the pilot, “What’s going on here?”

The pilot says, “Well they got to search these guys and their baggage and they don’t have the facilities to search you guys at the same time. So they have to do the other plane before we can go in there. But we’ll be out of here shortly.”

Two hours later we are still on the plane. It’s hotter ‘n hell of course. The people are starting to get restless. I think the pilots had left at that point, sensing trouble. There was a major who was the ranking guy on the plane. He said, “Let me see if I can at least open up the doors.” They opened up the doors, but we’re all still sitting there.

Remember, most of us on the plane were getting out of the friggin’ Army in one or two more days, and whatever happened they couldn’t send us back to Vietnam. People could see their wives, kids and parents just a few hundred feet away. Some of them hadn’t seen their families for a year. The mood on the plane got ugly.

We’re now sitting on the tarmac for three hours or more. They send people out to the airplane and tell us it’s going to be ten or fifteen more minutes. The place went into open rebellion. People started tearing seats out and throwing them out the door. The door was fifteen feet off the ground and people were wondering: Can we just jump? They can’t stop us. It was crazy.

That did it. Someone came up and said they would take us off the plane now. They ran us through and didn’t bother to check us carefully. In another half an hour that plane would have been toast. I never saw anything like it in my life. It was the last insult.

When I got to the commercial airport it was six or seven at night. I got a plane back to Chicago, which left maybe six hours later. It was a Boeing 747, and I had never been on a 747 before. It was like the coolest thing in the world. I’ll tell you what the pilot did. I’ll never forget this. He came down and met me as I got on the plane. He shook my hand and walked me up to the front of the plane. He said, “You’re flying first class.” I was the only person in first class. I sat down and went to sleep before we took off and woke up when we were landing in Chicago.

But Am I Really Home?

Captain DeFrancisco used to point out a snaggletooth tree you could see from our firebase on top of a distant ridgeline that we used as an aiming reference. He said, “When I was here before I used that same tree as an aiming point.” When I got back to the states that was my nightmare: being at Sherry for a year and coming home safe, and then one day being sent back and waking up back in the same hell-hole, looking up at that same tree. I would wake up at night and be mixed up about where I was. Am I here or am I there? I thought maybe I was still in Vietnam and my life since leaving there had been a dream.

Going to Vietnam you’re in the United States and after a twenty-four hour plane ride you’re in Vietnam. I remember that flight coming down the coast at night into Vietnam, looking down and seeing the illumination rounds in the air below us and the tracers and all the shit going on and thinking: What in the hell am I getting into? Then they literally dive the plane into the airport to avoid being shot at. That whole jarring reality change in just a few hours.

It was even worse going back, because now you are settled into the reality of Vietnam, but you’re suddenly back in the States with people walking around like nothing is happening,   another sudden new reality. I would wake up in the middle of the night not sure if this was a dream or that was a dream, or where I was. You lose your sense of reality. Am I in Vietnam dreaming about home, or am I at home dreaming about Vietnam? The realities were so different and the edges so blurred that I just didn’t know. That lasted for a few years.

It’s not like we had the worst experience in the world. I can only imagine what the infantry guys went through. These days I think a lot about the guys who are sent on multiple combat tours to the Middle East. How can you keep your head on straight after going through that?

Fired In Anger

Like many veterans Bob was conflicted about his time in the Army, and at the same time is proud of his service. He has close at hand an ashtray made from a brass artillery canister, presented to him when he left Vietnam. The inscription reads: 

To 1^st Lieutenant Robert Christenson

12 July 1970 to 3 June 1971

From the Officers of the 5^th Battalion 27^th Field Artillery.

 It originally had a 50 caliber bullet in the center, but they confiscated the slug at Ft. Lewis, so now it is just an empty casing. It’s a wonderful thing to have. All the officers got one of those. It was made out of a canister from a white phosphorous round. If you look on the bottom it says “1944.” We had all that ammunition, just like our C-rations, from WWII. We used a white phosphorous round because its canister was brass. All the other canisters were heavy cardboard or steel. We’d put a minimum time fuse on them and shoot them straight up for a nice airburst or just over the wire. There were few uses for WP rounds in Vietnam, except maybe to start fires. On the bottom of the ashtray it says Fired In Anger, but really it was fired in order to get an ashtray.

Out of Vietnam Bob applied to Loyola Law School in Chicago, encouraged by a fellow officer at LZ Sherry. He had less than remarkable grades as an undergraduate, but gained affirmative action admission as a veteran. In class he sat with an intimidating group of other Vietnam vets. The professors and students gave them a lot of room, not knowing how crazy they might be and not wishing to find out. In a blind grading system, whereby the professors did not know the identities of the students they were grading, Bob graduated fifth in the class. He is now a successful labor attorney in Atlanta. He and his wife Kim have five kids and nine grandkids. Bob still flashes that mischievous smile he wore in Vietnam.

The Chill Continues

After Captain DeFrancisco left I became the battery commander as a 1^st lieutenant for a few months when they ran short of captains they trusted with command. Right away I had another run-in with the First Sergeant when I countermanded his order that the guys had to wear uniform tops in the mess hall. People complained about wearing shirts in the mess hall. I said to forget it, you don’t have to do that anymore, it’s crazy. Top got pissed and thought I was messing with his discipline, which I probably was. But I gained a little credibility with the men by doing that.

In general I let Top run the place and didn’t cross him. I said to him, “Look, it’s your firebase.” It was always his firebase anyway. “I know it. You know it.” That was my whole MO. I didn’t mess with anybody unless they needed messing with.

The Hardest Thing

There was a kid from Detroit whose name I can’t remember. He had been sent home on some kind of emergency leave because something awful had happened, his mother and father had been killed in a car wreck. It was pretty bad, but he came  back and had been in the battery for a couple weeks.  I was in FDC at the time with Barry Eckert on the radio, when another call came in telling us that this kid’s grandmother, sister and her baby had been killed in a house fire. I had them verify the information because it was so inconceivable that something else could happen like this. That afternoon I had to call the kid into my hooch and tell him what had happened. It was awful. They sent him home for good this time. Hardest thing I have ever had to do.

Not This Time

Just like at LZ Betty the year before, an order came down from Phan Rang to chain and lock up our M16s. They were concerned that there was going to be a rebellion at the firebase, that some officers would be shot. That was just insane. There wasn’t going to be a revolt at the firebase, and locking up our weapons in the middle of a war was the stupidest thing I ever heard, worse than the orders to keep the FADAC computer running. What idiots. We never implemented that order, which was one thing Top and I absolutely agreed upon. I told the rear that they could court martial me or throw me in jail, but I was not locking up our weapons, and they dropped it. They obviously had not learned from Betty.

In early May 1970, with all of its weapons locked away, including those of Delta Company of the 1/50^th Infantry that had just returned from the field, LZ Betty had been overrun by a combined force of NVA and Viet Cong.

Lousy Shots – Thank Goodness

 One day some papa-san was out gathering wood west of the battery in the off-limits zone.  Maybe he was VC, but who knows?  All the locals knew better than to hang out there, and the guy was around the creek wash that the VC used to sneak around in. So maybe he was up to no good. We fired a couple warning shots over his head but he didn’t pay any attention. Everybody wanted to shoot at the guy, and kept after me to let them go. I checked about five times with the ARVN clearance people because I really didn’t want to start blasting away at some farmer, but all they would say was: Go ahead and shoot. So I reluctantly let the Dusters on that side of the battery start shooting at the guy. There were about twenty people gathered around the duster. I think some of them were there to see this guy get blown away, and others because they couldn’t believe what was going to happen.

The Duster popped a few rounds out there that missed the guy pretty badly. Once he realized they were shooting at him he started to run, and the Duster guys opened up in earnest. There were rounds going off all around the guy. After about ten seconds of this, which seemed forever to me, I couldn’t take it anymore and jumped up on the Duster and told them to stop the hell shooting. The guy got away and in the end I think everyone was pretty relieved that they didn’t hit him. I know I was. The whole thing freaked me out. It would have been one thing if he had a gun or was obviously VC.  But this wasn’t the case. Thank God the Duster guys were such bad shots.

No Medal For Mike

Somewhere along the line I put Mike Leino in for a medal for saving a guy’s life. Mike was a laid back guy, and probably could have cared less about a medal, but he deserved one. They were burning trash and whoever it was poured gasoline on the trash to ignite it, and when he lit it, the guy managed to turn himself into a human torch. Leino was the only guy out there and tackled him and put the fire out. The guy had third degree burns and was sent home. Mike saved his life.

I thought Mike’s effort was pretty outstanding, so I filled out the paperwork and went through headquarters back in Phan Rang to get something for him. A few weeks went by without any response, so I started sniffing around. Finally someone told me that the battalion commander had nixed it because burning trash with gas was against regulations, and if he had submitted my recommendation it would have been evidence that someone in his command wasn’t following protocol. So no medal recommendation ever got past headquarters.

I was pretty pissed about that, and after I got home to the states I sent a long letter to the editor of the Detroit Free Press, Mike’s home town newspaper, explaining that they had a real hero in their midst and why, and explaining why he had never been recognized. I never heard anything back, and a few months later found out that the paper was on strike and not publishing. I guess my letter got nowhere. The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth about the Army.

On Further Reflection

We all did some dumb things, and I certainly did my share. But my all-time dumbest move took place when a few of us took a LOACH (a light reconnaissance helicopter) out to reconnoiter a coordinate that intelligence told us was being used as an NVA staging area for an assault on Sherry. Huge mistake and I knew better and am very lucky to be alive after that one.

I was a couple weeks from going home at the time. We got word that the NVA was going to have our asses one night, much like the warning we had a few months before. The intelligence gave us a general staging area so the battalion LOACH came down and we took off to have a look. I think there were three or four of us, I don’t think the LOACH could carry more than that. The area was about three miles or so out to the northwest of the firebase.

We got there and didn’t see much of anything, until someone spotted what looked like a shirt hung up on a tree branch and flapping around. Somehow, incredibly, I got talked into allowing the helicopter to land to check it out. I’m still shaking my head over that decision, but we were young and invincible, right?  We had a couple M16s and I had my .45 pistol. So we put down in a grassy area with pretty good visibility and had a look around. The pilot stayed in the LOACH and kept the rotors going. I had my .45 out and we walked around a little bit. We didn’t see anything suspicious. About a minute later I walked onto the top of a bunker that had been dug into the ground. It was built with concrete railroad ties and completely covered by grass that had been cut and laid over the top to hide the bunker. The grass was so fresh it was still green and not yet wilted in the heat. One of my boots went between the railroad ties and I started to fall into the bunker, and everything kind of flashed in front of my eyes. I thought how stupid I was seeing the fresh grass and knowing the NVA was in the area, and maybe this was the end for me. It sounds dramatic but I wasn’t really scared. I just thought: I’m going to take as many of the bastards with me as I can. Anyway, no shots from the bunker, and I caught myself on one of the ties before I dropped completely through. I yelled to the others to get the hell out of there.

We hit the chopper on the run and took off. On the way back to Sherry we took a reading on the direction of the bunker, and once back plotted on our grid chart where we had been. Later that night after it got dark and I felt like it was the right time, we shot a THREE ROUND BATTERY ZONE AND SWEEP on the target.  At least I think that’s what we used to call it. Each of our six guns shot three rounds at three different but close deflections and three different but close quadrants, for a total of twenty-seven rounds per gun, or a hundred and sixty-two rounds in all. That way we covered a lot of ground quickly around the target. I think we probably shot VT (radar fuses resulting in fifty meter air bursts). We got what sounded like a couple secondary explosions.

A few days later the ARVNs swept the area. They reported back lots of body parts and some ridiculous estimate of twenty-five or more dead. The idea was that we had dropped our rounds on the VC/NVA by surprise while they were all out there exposed. Of course we never got out there to take a look ourselves, so who knows? Body counts were notoriously unreliable. It may be that nothing was there but craters, and the ARVNs just told the higher-ups what they wanted to hear. Or more likely, the ARVNs never went out at all and just reported as if they had. The NVA attack never came, but maybe it was never coming, like the other time we had been warned. But who knew? Clearly something was going on out there.

Anyway, I got religion when I was falling into that bunker.  Someone had been there very shortly before we arrived. There were no more adventures or take-chances left in me. On my way home a few weeks later when I saw the pilot of my plane to Cam Rahn smoking dope with his momma-san, I convoyed.

The Last BC

 Lt. Christenson left LZ Sherry in June of 1971, just days before the battery and its equipment transferred to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. On August 31, 1971 B Battery and the rest of the 5^th Battalion were deactivated.

When I left Sherry there were rumors that we would be standing down, but that was about it. I had no idea that it would happen so fast. I never thought about being the last battery commander. I would rather that legacy be left to Captain DeFrancisco, who deserved a spot in the history books.

Joe DeFrancisco was a great officer. There’s no question about that. He was a good guy. I felt very at home with him, even though he had gone to West Point, which was pretty alien as far as I was concerned. He was Regular Army, and all that stuff. He was a guy who was very directed but didn’t act gung-ho. I thought he was terrific. He was bright, a good guy to talk to. He never overreacted. He was a great commander. He was a natural. We both took our roles at the firebase seriously, but for him it was his career. I can tell you Jon Varat, who came after me in FDC, and I had many, many conversations with him about: What the hell are you wasting your talents for in the Army? Joe embraced people who were worthy of expressing their opinion and having conversations with him on an intelligent level. Rank didn’t make any difference when you got in his hooch. The rank just fell off. Now, I am super glad Joe didn’t leave the military, because he was an outstanding officer. I have no doubt that Joe played a significant role in bringing the Army back from the disastrous shape it was in after Vietnam.

After four months as Fire Direction Officer 1^st Lt. Christenson again became the battery XO – Executive Officer second in command behind the battery commander.

Race Relations

 Our unit was a mix of all races, but I don’t remember any racial tension. The black guys had their area and the white guys had theirs.  I think I got along with everyone because I stood up for the enlisted guys and cut the crap where I could, so I was OK with them.

What I basically did was leave enlisted guys alone, both white and black. A lot of being a successful officer was asserting your authority only when you had to assert it. Otherwise leave well enough alone. They were doing their jobs and things were functioning well on the firebase. Rightly or wrongly I saw my job there as keeping all of us alive. I didn’t give a damn about shooting Vietnamese. We had to shoot fire missions on time and on target to protect our guys, but the idea was to keep us all alive and get us out of there. To the extent that I had command authority that’s how I always exercised it. That was my mission.

I know the black guys, the same with white guys, had their hooches and you did not go in there unless you were asked, which was fine with me. Nothing sinister about any of that. People want to be by themselves. They didn’t need an officer barging in there and looking around and giving them an inspection in the middle of the friggin’ Central Highlands. I mean, that’s stupid. Just stupid.

The Fragging

 It happened in my hooch, while I was gone on R&R, meant for a second lieutenant who didn’t have a clue to the point that some of the enlisted guys decided he was a danger to all of us. He graduated from college ROTC a second lieutenant, and then took the officer’s basic course for six months at Ft. Sill. He took thirty days leave and then they sent him to Vietnam. So he had never been in the Army. He never would have made it through OCS in a million years. He wanted to be liked, but he couldn’t help himself. He thought he was a hot item and marched around giving the gun crews silly orders.

He was outed early on when one of the gun crews asked him to safety some H & I rounds. He checked the sight picture in the pantel scope, but while doing so one of the gun crew guys held his hand over the top of the instrument, so the aiming stakes were invisible. The lieutenant said “Excellent sight picture,” and they knew they had him. After that the crews basically had their way with him.

One night, one of the crews called him over to a gun and told him they were concerned because the tube ring seemed to be off. Howitzer tubes were made of precision steel, and if you hit one with a small hammer or screwdriver it rang like crystal. Of course, tube ring means nothing, but the lieutenant didn’t know that. They had him running from gun to gun comparing the tube rings while everyone watched. That was the final straw, and he became the laughingstock of the battery. When he discovered that they had made a fool out of him, he doubled down on his alleged authority, but that just made things worse.

When I got back from R&R I walked into my hooch and there was a friggin’ hole in the bottom of my hooch where the sandbags had been blasted out. What the hell is this? Somebody told me we had a rocket attack while I was gone. I didn’t think anything of it. And then I started thinking how come there is a hole way down here? That’s not a rocket. Finally somebody told me this lieutenant got fragged. They rolled the grenade inside the hooch while he was there. Then one of the gun bunnies came up to me and said, “But sir, at least we waited until you were gone.” Shortly thereafter I was told that someone had overheard my argument with the outgoing XO just after I got to Sherry, and that it had gotten around the battery that I stood up for the enlisted guys. At that moment, thinking about that hole in my hooch, it was very nice to be appreciated. 

From Seven In A Jeep: A Memoir Of The Vietnam War,

by Ed Gaydos, FDC Section Chief

The lieutenant was shaken but unharmed. The perpetrator was never found, and frankly nobody looked that hard, including Top, although at formation the next morning he delivered an old fashioned, old Army tongue lashing, his face growing more crimson and his language more colorful by the minute.

An uneasy quiet settled on the battery. Captain Joe took the lieutenant off the guns, leaving him minimal responsibilities. The lieutenant spent his days drifting from place to place, avoiding the gun crews entirely, a manufactured smile on his face. He came into the FDC bunker every day and attached himself to Lt. Christenson. The two of them came to our little hooch parties at night, where Christenson was the comic center of attention and the lieutenant was happy to sit and be one of the guys. He eventually left the battery, a lonely, sad figure. 

Hunting Big Game

The rats were so pervasive around Sherry that we used to set rat traps with gum in them for bait. But that was kind of boring and the rats always eventually figured it out. So someone had the idea to take a pair of pliers and pull the lead part out of a bullet and cram the casing into a piece of soap, making it a soap-round. You’d chamber a soap-round in your M16, turn out all the lights and put something delectable out there. It only took about five minutes, and pretty soon the rats would start coming out of the sand bag walls. You could shoot and kill the rat without a lead round ricocheting around on the inside of the hooch. That really worked. You got two or three a night. I used to take the dead rats and throw them outside the hooch into the weeds. Finally it got smelling so bad that I had to stop doing that. We kept a chart in the XO hooch to see who was the mightiest rat hunter in the place. Obviously entertainment was at a premium.

Trick of the Trade

 Funny, but I remember George Peppard coming to Sherry. I got my picture taken with him. He was a little short guy but for pics he put his arm around your shoulder and boosted himself up so in the picture he always looked like the tallest person there. He told me it was one of the tricks of the trade.

Skunky Beer

One of the things I remember most about Sherry was the skunky beer. Don’t get me wrong, it was better than no beer at all. But we were at the end of the supply chain, so everyone from the ports people to the supply types at Phan Rang and then Phan Thiet got first choice before it came out to the field. And once it got to Sherry I think Top (who controlled the beer) might have siphoned off anything remotely decent. I think we got Budweiser in aluminum cans once, and that was probably by mistake. The rest of the time it was Carlings Black Label in rusty, pre pop-top steel cans. The cans were so old that they looked like they were left over from WW II. You needed a church key to open them up, something that had long since disappeared from life back in the states.

Big Doc and Little Doc

We had two medics at Sherry. Big Doc I think was from Pennsylvania.

Over a period of weeks Big Doc mailed an M-16 home in pieces. I told him he’d get caught, but later he said everything arrived, and he probably still has it today. Nice…they skin-searched everyone coming home but you could mail back a fully automatic M-16 without a problem. I think he even sent back a couple of 20-round magazines.

Big Doc also had a battery powered turntable and one record, by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He’d play it every night while we drank that warm Black Label. Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand became the soundtracks of my time at Sherry. They’re still two of my favorites, and bring back memories of Vietnam every time I hear them.

Little Doc Mason was from Ohio.

Because of Little Doc the Ohio state flag flew over the firebase on the Tipsy-25 radar mast, just under the U.S. flag. One afternoon a guy on one of the guns had his leg shattered when he got in the way of the recoil on his howitzer. He was in terrible pain, but Little Doc got him doped up, and we got him out a few hours later on a Medevac “dust off” flight. I think most of Little Doc’s other business was dispensing penicillin to take care of whatever diseases some of the guys caught during their regular trips to Phan Thiet and the whore hootch outside our wire. 

Two Close Calls

The first close call happened at night during another Medevac dust off. All our lights were out, including the lights on the radar tower. I was on the radio guiding the pilot in. As he was on final approach I realized I hadn’t told him about the tower and the guywires holding it up. Of course, his lights were also off. He got in anyway, to my incredible relief. Those dust off pilots were fabulous.

Then about midway through my tour I was calling in defensive fire on our position from Betty. These were pre-planned targets we would shoot in case we were overrun. I was walking it in as close as I could. I was in one of the guard towers on the perimeter, and for some reason I think Jim Jenkins was there with me. Normally, we ducked down behind the sandbags when the rounds came in, but on this occasion I was up watching the explosions. I was leaning up against one of the six-by-six posts that held up the roof, and a piece of shrapnel zinged into it right above my head. You remember the zinging noise shrapnel made as it flew through the air? A couple inches lower and it would have been curtains. I never did that again.

The Long Lanyard

Someone in Phan Rang got the bright idea that they wanted to find out if a time fuse actually had a built in two second delay, so if you set it on zero and shot it, it would still not go off for two seconds. They decided we were going to be the guinea pigs to find out. I think we all thought that this was a pretty hair-brained experiment, but we did it anyway. We made an extra-long lanyard, so whoever was shooting the gun could be behind the parapet in case the thing did go off right out of the tube. We told everyone in the battery to get down and behind something. Unfortunately, I believe I was the one who ended up pancaked behind the parapet and actually pulled the extra-long lanyard. Happily for me, we found that there was in fact a two-second delay, which of course was built in to keep someone like me from blowing himself up if he was ignorant enough or careless enough to shoot a time fuse set to zero.  What were we thinking?

The Artist Within

Memories of 1st. Lt. Christenson by Ed Gaydos, FDC Section Chief

From Seven In A Jeep: A Memoir Of The Vietnam War

From the beginning I liked this new lieutenant with the Tom Sawyer smile. His first order of business was to decorate his room in the FDC bunker where the officer in charge slept. On one wall he drew a caricature of Vice President Spiro Agnew wearing a hard hat with two American flags sticking from it. On another wall he created a perfect rendering of Mr. Zig Zag, the bearded figure on roll-your-own cigarette papers and patron saint of potheads. The lieutenant hung out with the enlisted men, and was often the only officer at our evening hooch parties, a frat brother as much as an officer. He and Captain Joe were the best officers I served under in Vietnam.

Shortly after my initial disagreement with the departing XO over FADAC, I began my career at Sherry as the Fire Direction Officer. In the beginning I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying to learn the ropes, and had some time on my hands I guess. I never had any artistic talent in my life at all: zero. Whatever it was, the pressure, the change of scenery, whatever it was, all of a sudden I could draw stuff. I discovered I could do it. It’s like these people who are in traumatic situations and something in them changes. I figured the place needed some decorating so I drew those pictures on the walls. I think I probably found a pack of Zig Zag papers (they were all over the place because some of the country boys liked to roll their own) and did the Zig Zag guy. Spiro Agnew I just drew from memory, which was crazy. I don’t know how I was able to do that.

And I’ve never been able to draw since.

It was the stress. Totally stress. I used to have hallucinations, not drug induced, but I would have out-of-body stuff, floating around seeing myself. Yeah. Three or four times pretty much the whole time I was there, which I never experienced before and never experienced after I got back to the states. I think it was being thrown into that crazy atmosphere. The artistic talent and all the weirdness was all stress related. It had to be. Very strange.

A Crazy Night in Paradise

The First Sergeant and I were never friends, and we hardly ever talked. It was Top’s firebase and everybody knew it. He had no use for lieutenants, especially those who were obviously not lifers. But we never had any real issues. I had very few conversations with him. Probably the longest conversation I had with him was when he chased one of our officers with a flare threatening to shove it up his ass.

It happened one night after this officer went into Top’s hootch when he was off drinking somewhere and took his fan. There was some VIP spending the night, which as you know was a real rarity. No one over the rank of captain EVER spent the night at Sherry. This officer took Top’s fan out of his hooch so the VIP could be comfortable.

Top came back to his hooch drunk as a motor scooter and went to bed not knowing the fan was gone. In the heat of the night he pissed himself, woke up, realized his fan was gone and went nuts. I am not making this up. He somehow found out who had taken his fan and went after him with a hand flare.

It was two or three in the morning. I remember being in FDC and hearing the commotion and running outside and seeing five or six guys standing around watching Top chase this guy around with the flare. Top was circling him with wet skivvies and bulging red eyes, and had one of those popper flares in his hands, growling that he was going to ram that flare up his ass and touch it off. He had taken the top off the flare and put it on the bottom so all he needed to do was smack it to make it go off. At the time, it seemed like a real possibility. The officer was dancing around as Top circled him, making sure that his butt was out of reach.

People were afraid, because Top looked like he meant it. Finally the guy got far enough away and someone, I think it was the Chief of Smoke, grabbed Top and calmed him down and got his fan back. Fans were like gold over there.

Of course this was another thing that never got reported to Phan Rang, and to me it was very uncharacteristic of Top. He was such a soldier that he would never go after an officer. He knew he was wrong, and he backed down. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever remind him of again.

When it happened,  I was afraid Top was actually going to do it, but with the passage of time the scene is so funny I get tears from laughing so hard. Just another crazy night in paradise.

Deadly Trash

One night we received an illumination mission, and when we plotted the trash coordinates on our charts it matched up with the location of a small village.

After an illumination round pops in the air the heavy steel canister continues along its trajectory, making it necessary to know where “the trash” is going to land.

We, or at least I, cleared the mission through a US contact, but that contact also cleared through an ARVN source, and in this case the ARVNs said go ahead and fire because the village wasn’t really there. “ARVN” stood for Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, our so-called allies.

As you may recall we, or at least I, had a strong distrust of the ARVNs: it seemed like we always got hit after an ARVN unit went by. I think they dropped off equipment and ammunition for the VC. I know they were dropping off drugs at the firebase. I recall one of our E-7 sergeants coming to me when I was battery commander telling me that he had spotted an ARVN officer outside the wire acting strange. I sent the sergeant out there, and he came back with a cube made up of about seventy small plastic boxes each filled with heroin. The ARVN officer had dropped it in the weeds to be picked up by one of the pushers on the firebase.

Anyway, I cleared the illumination mission several times, telling our US contact that our charts showed we were going to drop the empty canisters on a village. He said to go ahead and fire the mission anyway. I had a very bad feeling about this and got the guy’s initials, along with the initials of his Vietnamese counterpart. We weren’t on a secure radio network, so I could not get full names. I figured it would be me they would be looking for if we shot the mission without absolute protection.

We shot the mission, and sure enough about a week later we got an ominous radio call that we had wrecked a village with our trash and a number of people had been killed. The ARVNs wanted a full investigation, and I think, were trying to shift the blame to us for the mistake. But we had the initials and time of clearance and the whole story. After we explained what had happened and given our information to the US contact, the whole thing went away without another word.  I think we dodged a major bullet. If we hadn’t gone the extra mile to verify identification information, a bunch of us, probably me, would have been toast.

The All Important Hats

One night we were playing cards in the FDC – I recall it well because someone, I think it might have been Ed Gaydos, who always had a dry sense of humor, casually tossed off, “Sir, is that a scorpion crawling up your leg?” Damn straight it was. I jumped up, brushed the thing off, and stomped it. We had just dealt again when we heard some distant pops, and a round went entirely over the battery, and then a second and third round hit inside the wire somewhere.

I grabbed my steel pot, ran out the door and saw a round on the way in. It was streaming sparks so you could see the flat trajectory and where it was coming from. I ran back in and yelled that it looked like rockets coming from around 5600 (metric direction corresponding to northwest). As I recall we usually blamed any incoming on that unfortunate direction, and then ran out again and headed to the perimeter where the fire was coming from. We were always concerned about a ground attack coming in while we were taking fire. From the FDC, that meant running across the broad, empty and exposed part of the firebase where we used to play baseball, to get to the guard tower on the berm.

While I was gone a call came into FDC for an officer to safety check the settings on Gun 3 on the northern perimeter near where I had just arrived. They could not find me, but were able to get a new second lieutenant named McDaniel who had been at Sherry for a few months. Just as he arrived at Gun 3 the VC fired another round. I saw it coming so I hit the dirt out there between the perimeter and the gun.  The round went right over me and exploded about sixty feet away in the Gun 3 parapet, and I figured a bunch of people must have been hurt or killed. Funny, but I don’t remember much about that night afterward, except McDaniel bleeding in FDC with a few small pieces of shrapnel in his arm. I do recall the brass coming in to pin purple hearts on people a few days later and complaining to me that some of the guys, including me, weren’t wearing hats per protocol. Typical.

Four men were wounded on Gun 3 that night, none fatally. It turned out the attackers had used a recoilless rifle, probably left behind by the ARVNs who had been in the area the day before. Two rounds hit the ammo bunker, one going clear through without detonating and the other hitting outside the door and igniting powder charges in the doorway.

Fun With Flares

I remember Bill Cooper, although I never knew him that well. On New Years Eve, after we had a few drinks, Cooper went out and caused all sorts of problems when he got on the berm and blew off a red flare. Red flares meant that someone had spotted VC in the wire, and that gun tubes would be lowered to shoot beehive rounds and direct fire. Beehive rounds were like giant shotgun shells fired from a howitzer, literally flattening everything in front of the gun. Within seconds the whole firebase opened up. One of the guns fired beehive in the direction of the flare, which basically cleared all of the wire in front of it. Then someone fired off a couple claymores, and then the phu gas went off on that side of the firebase (C4 plastic explosive in a fifty-five gallon drum of Napalm, positioned in the ground on an angle toward the enemy). All this was happening with the howitzers firing defensive rounds, the Quad-50s and Dusters banging away, and tracers flying everywhere. The sound was deafening and no one knew what was going on except that the red flare alert had gone up and we were under ground attack.

About thirty seconds later Cooper came running back into FDC saying, “Wait, wait, wait.” He claimed the flare was an accident, but I don’t know how you shoot one of those things by accident. And then everyone realized it was all a big mistake. That was dangerous. Who knows who could have been out in front of those howitzers when they went off with beehive? When something like that happens you shoot first and ask questions later. I mean, Geez.

1^st lieutenant Bill Cooper, Executive Officer (XO) at the time, did not make a mistake. He intentionally fired off the flare to test the readiness of the firebase, but without telling anyone of his intention. Realizing immediately the gravity of his action he claimed he had made a mistake in order to avoid disciplinary action. Today he freely admits it was not the wisest decision.

Everyone in Vietnam did things they wish they hadn’t, including Bob Christenson.

I don’t know what we were doing or why we were doing it, but I had a white flare in the middle of the battery and I was going to shoot it off. Remember on the north side of the battery there was a small shed out by itself with explosive ordnance in it. I have this flare and I went to shoot it off, popped it off banging on the bottom, and I dropped it. The thing shoots along the ground right for this goddam shed, right for the door which was open. And I am looking at it and thinking: Holy shit! It’s going to blow everything! How am I going to explain it when this shed goes up? It missed by a few feet and died out in the grass. That’s between you and me. I don’t think I ever told anybody about it till now, it was too embarrassing.

But it wasn’t the worst mistake I made at Sherry. One quiet Sunday afternoon I had to test fire a howitzer which had received a new tube. I cleared the target grid, set the quadrant and deflection, loaded a round of HE high explosive, and fired. A millisecond later I realized I had fired a charge 7 rather than a charge 1, and the tube was pointing directly at Phan Thiet. I’ll never forget that feeling; I could picture a round of HE suddenly landing in the middle of Phan Thiet. I ran back to the FDC and checked the charts. It turned out that the charge and quadrant were just enough to get the round over Phan Thiet and out into the South China sea. A bunch of fishermen probably got the scare of their lives, and so did I.

The Highest Lowest

I graduated from Officer Candidate School a 2^nd lieutenant in 1969. My first assignment was at Ft. Sill in a Pershing Missile training battery. As a training officer I taught M60 machine gun, M79 grenade launcher, M72 LAW (light anti-tank weapon, shoulder fired) – all that fun stuff.

When I got orders for Vietnam I had no tube artillery experience at all. So I signed up for a gunnery refresher course at Ft. Still. Before I could begin training the battery commander called me in said, “How come the only lieutenant in our whole battalion who is not a member of the AUSA wants to take this course?” (The Association of the United States Army is its professional association.)

I said, “I understand.” So I sent my $25 into the AUSA and got my gunnery course.

I was made a 1^st lieutenant on my one year anniversary of graduating from OCS, which would have been in July of 1970, the same month I arrived in Vietnam

When I got to Vietnam I was assigned to First Field Force artillery in Phan Rang, and of course the question then was where you were going from there. At that point I still had not figured out all this artillery stuff. I was terrible at math, my worst subject ever. But they had a gunnery course in Phan Rang, about a week long, for all the new lieutenants plus the fire direction enlisted guys.

A funny story. So I took this course, and I’m a quietly competitive guy, and said to myself: I’m going to get the high grade. You got a Zippo lighter with your name, the battalion crest and High Scorer in Class engraved on it. The night before the test I took all the guys out and got them roaring drunk. And I got roaring drunk too, but I knew that I could function drunk and I didn’t think they could. And I was right. I got the highest score on the test, which I was told was the lowest highest score in the history of the course. I just remember the gunnery instructor shaking his head at all of us during the test – our breaths must have smelt awful. I got my lighter.

They sent me up to Dalat to meet Colonel Richard Tuck, the Prov Group commander, because being the academician that he was, he wanted the guy who had the highest score. I don’t think he knew it was the lowest ever.

I couldn’t believe the place existed…after a Huey ride from the heat in Phan Rang, Dalat was cool, lush and totally un-Vietnamese.  It didn’t even smell like a Vietnamese city. It was the Eurasian half French and half Vietnamese girls that caught my eye.  Some of them were stunners, dressed to the teeth just walking around. There were great French restaurants. And the first thing I was told when I got there was don’t worry about the VC because this place is off limits for both sides in the war.

Colonel Tuck had been a French professor at West Point, but as an artillery officer he had somehow been sent to Vietnam to get combat experience on his resume.  He made Dalat his headquarters because it was so French and had the great restaurants. He was a great guy, very classical almost 19^th century in his approach. But he cared deeply about his men. I remember when I first met him he had someone take a black and white polaroid picture of the two of us. I think he did that with all of his officers so he could remember them. He sent me a copy afterwards. He spoke in what sounded to my untrained Midwestern ear as an upper crust, up-Eastern accent. I never met anyone else like him in the Army. He had this strange refined existence in the middle of a war in a beautiful mountain city that seemed totally oblivious to the destruction raging around it. He never married. I exchanged Christmas cards with him for years afterward, until his death in 2002.

Colonel Tuck assigned me to the 5^th of the 27^th Artillery, and specifically to B Battery at LZ Sherry. At the time I knew nothing of Sherry or its history. I rarely saw Colonel Tuck after he assigned me to Sherry, but after my first six months in the field he called to tell me that he could get me posted to a general’s staff in the Philippines for the rest of my tour.  I eventually turned him down because for some weird reason I felt like I had to stay in the field to get my year in Nam behind me. I felt like leaving before my time was up would be a cop-out.

Colonel Richard Cabell Tuck, a direct descendent of Patrick Henry and graduate of West Point, was an assistant professor in the French Department at West Point for three years. Colonel Tuck was a graduate of the Armed Forces Staff College and the Ecole Superieure de Guerre, Paris (the French War College). He served in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, and in command and staff positions in Europe and the Pentagon. He holds the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star and nine Air Medals.

A Rude Introduction

The trip down to Sherry was unfortunately eventful. I had just gotten to LZ Betty at Phan Thiet, at Alpha battery, and I was sitting there eating lunch with a bunch of other people when there was a loud shot outside. Somebody had shot and killed himself in the chow line right outside the door. Some guy took his rifle and put it to his head and pulled the trigger. I thought: Holy shit what in the world is going on here? That was my introduction to the field

Later that night Sherry got hit and I watched, and heard, the whole firebase open up in response. The next morning I was there.

How He Earned His Chops

I came into Sherry as the XO. Within a week or two after I got to the battery I got into a shoving match with the XO I was replacing because I had countermanded an order he had given to run the FADAC artillery computer eight hours a day. This thing was the size of a small car, and was placed inside the confined space of the fire direction center. It sounded like a loud vacuum cleaner with issues, You could go deaf listening to that thing and it was driving everyone in the Fire Direction Center nuts.  Headquarters told us to run it to keep it dry in the Vietnam humidity, but we never used it for actual fire missions.

I remember going into the FDC, and it was Charlie and Jenkins and maybe Paul, and these guys were not exactly shy about speaking to officers. I came in and said, “If you guys could change anything what would you change?”

The first thing they said was to get rid of FADAC.

I said, “You’re right. Absolutely.” My feelings about orders from the rear were: What the hell, they’re not here. I’m here, my ass is here, and I’m going to do what I think is necessary under the circumstances.

So I turned off the FADAC, and that’s when the old XO got on me. He was kind of tight assed. I recall he wanted to be a lifer, or at least acted like it. We had had a few beers and I told him: Fuck you basically, we’re not going to turn it back on. And we bumped a little bit, and that was it.

I didn’t know it, but one of the enlisted guys – it might have been Paul – overheard our conversation when I told the lieutenant to take his FADAC and REMF orders and shove them, and saw the pushing. So I guess I became a champion of the enlisted guys early on, but didn’t know it until someone told me about it later. And that’s how I got my chops with the guys.

The Power of Service

 I previously mentioned that I commanded the 7^th Infantry Division Artillery at Fort Ord, California. While there, 1988-89, there was a junior enlisted guy down in B Battery, 6^th Battalion, 8^th Artillery Regiment – there must be something about Bravo Battery – who recently contacted me. He has organized reunions of the people in that battery. Because I was the division artillery commander he includes me as an honorary member. He’s going through all this trouble to organize reunions, based on two years of service twenty-eight years ago.

The letters I get from him to his fellow soldiers! He keeps saying it was one of the most fulfilling periods of his life. But this is not something unique or unusual in the men and women who have served in the military.

My father passed away at the age of ninety-two. He knew he was going to die and my two brothers and I had lots of talks with him. We asked him, “Besides your name what do you want to put on your tombstone?”

He told us:

Mario J. DeFrancisco

Second Lieutenant, U.S. Army Air Corp

1944 to 1945

He lived to be ninety-two years old, and what’s the only thing he wants on his tombstone? The two years he spent serving his country.

It’s an amazing thing. Go into any local cemetery and look at what’s engraved on the tombstones of people who served, WWII especially, but also WWI, Korea and Vietnam as well. Just look at what’s engraved on those tombstones. You will see Private First Class, U.S. Army – Petty Officer First Class, U.S. Navy – Seaman, U.S. Coast Guard – Captain, U.S. Army Air Corps. It could have been just a little sliver of their lives, but it was a defining moment for them.

It’s the power of service. You’re serving others, something larger than yourself. It was a feeling that came across strong and clear from the great soldiers of LZ Sherry. They would rather have been at home, but they did their duty, had pride in their unit and themselves and took care of one another. It was a great place to soldier. It is not surprising that so many have responded to Ed’s call to share information and thoughts from so long ago on that small island of America so far from home.

Lt. Gen. Joseph DeFrancisco, USA, Ret.

Army Associations

• Army Historical Foundation – Board Member
• Association of the United States Army (AUSA) – Senior Executive Associate and former President of the George Washington Chapter
• West Point – Served on the transition team for four successive Superintendents, leading the last two transitions
• Association of West Point Graduates – Board Member, Chair of several committees
• West Point Society of Washington, DC – former President for seven years
• Army Distaff Foundation – Board Member
• Army Aviation Association of America – Senior Executive Associate
• Army-Air Force Mutual Aid Association (now American Armed Forces Mutual Aid Association) – Board Member
• National Defense Industrial Association – former Board Member
• USO – former Board Member
• Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army for four Secretaries

Personal

• Son Eric graduated from West Point in 1989
• Daughter Laura has worked at the Pentagon as civilian employee of the Army since college, and is now a student at the National War College in Washington
• Married to Lynne since 1965
• In 2013 named a Distinguished Graduate of West Point 

Employment

• Lockheed Martin
• Honeywell
• Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) – today Leidos
• Private Consultant

The Army Since Vietnam

The Army has changed dramatically over the course of my thirty-four years of active duty and subsequent involvement with Army related organizations.

An Army In Crisis

I’ve already talked about the shock at what I found in Germany on my first assignment out of West Point: low troop morale and preparedness, poor to nonexistent leadership, and denuded officer ranks. It was not until I went to Vietnam with the 1^st Cav that I found some really good units and good officers.

Then after my first Vietnam tour I went to Ft. Sill as a training battery commander and encountered many of the same problems I saw in Germany, only this time marked by the larger societal problems of racial tension and drug use.

Then at LZ Sherry it looked like things had turned around again. Sherry was totally different. I think the world of the people there, the quality of their training, the quality of their character.

To this point in my career I experienced the men in the field in Vietnam to be more than just skilled, they were dedicated to their jobs and proud of the work they did, even though a lot of them would have chosen to be somewhere else. The same goes for the young officers and NCOs. Among the older career officers and sergeants the picture was mixed. Many were excellent, and many were not up to the task, because they were poorly selected for their jobs, poorly trained, or poorly led during their early years in uniform.

Right after my second Vietnam tour, which included time at Sherry, I went to graduate school. Understand that during this two year program I am not really “in” the Army. I’m just reading about things and watching TV news. It was not until I got to Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth in 1973, eight years into my active duty career, that I had a chance to know a large group of other officers and see another side of the Army.

At Leavenworth I came to realize how disastrous the aftermath of Vietnam was for the Army as an institution. There was a real crisis in confidence in the Army itself of itself, and in the American people about the Army. There was the Calley affair and controversy over body counts. There was controversy over careerism and the integrity of senior leaders. Many said officers did not care about anything but their own careers and would do anything to enhance their careers.

It was so much a crisis that the Army Chief of Staff, who was now General Abrams, convened special panels at Leavenworth to talk to us. We were the Army’s up and coming mid-grade officers, senior captains and majors. This group was nearly in revolt over the quality of leadership in the Army. Add in Watergate (1972) around that time, which also eroded confidence in our political leadership. Add in race riots in our major cities. With all this turmoil in the country and in the Army it was a real low point.

The Rebuilding Years

The following year Nixon ended the draft, just before his resignation, so now there is no more forced conscription. General Abrams decides that without a draft we are not going to war again without the reserve component. He believed part of the problem with Vietnam was that the American people were not with us, we did not have the reserve component involved. We had draftees and volunteers, but not the reserve component. He saw this as one of the reasons for the split between the Army and the people we were serving.

So you had a number of things happening at once. The end of the draft and beginning of the all volunteer Army, and you had the Army Chief taking a large portion of combat service support out of the active force and putting it in the Army Reserves and the National Guard. So now it would be impossible to deploy and impossible to fight again without the reserve components, and consequently without the involvement of communities across the nation.

Slowly, very slowly, we start to come out of this low period. It is turned around because of a bunch of lieutenant colonels, colonels and young generals who are determined to make the Army into a professional force again. There was a great emphasis on the all volunteer Army bringing in good people and a re-emphasis on training.

In Vietnam we lost our ability to do anything except fight in Vietnam, and toward the end we lost that ability too. There was a great drive toward enhanced training. It was at this time that the foundation was laid for what is today our network of Combat Training Centers. The National Combat Training Center at Ft. Irwin in California was the first. Today there is a light combat training center at Ft. Polk, LA, a center in Germany and another centered at Ft. Leavenworth designed to train senior staffs and commanders. So now we’ve got four .

The training center at Fort Irwin, California, trains primarily mechanized brigade level combat teams. The Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, trains infantry brigade level teams. The Joint Multi-National Readiness Center at Hohenfels, Germany trains all brigade combat teams assigned to Europe. The Battle Command Training Program at Fort Leavenworth prepares leaders for corps, division, and brigade command.

All these training centers feature exercises in the field against a skilled opposing force that uses the enemy’s tactics, techniques and procedures.

Then the Army developed training focused on sergeants, called the Non-Commissioned Officer Education System (NCOES). Remember in Vietnam I told you we were making captains in two years. We were making NCOs in a very short period of time as well, Shake and Bakes we used to call them. You’d come out of school an NCO without any of the background and experience you needed. We developed the NCOES program that said, If you want to get promoted you’ve got to meet these certain criteria and go to these certain leadership schools.

These schools teach leadership and technical skills at four levels: primary, basic, advanced and senior.

This system did a great service to the re-professionalization of the NCO corps. We sent officers to senior courses, so we said to our senior sergeants, You have to go too if you want to become a sergeant major.

Sergeant Major holds the rank of E-9.They serve as either staff Sergeants Major or Command Sergeants Major (CSM). A CSM supports commanders from battalion to four star general, including the Army Chief of Staff whose CSM is called the Sergeant Major of the Army. CSM positions are now highly competitive. Regardless of the level at which they serve they all hold the rank of E-9, but prestige and amenities differ according to position.

By the time I became a battalion commander in 1981 senior officers were centrally selected by a board. I think central selection began in about 1977. Up until that time you had to get to yourself into the right position so that an individual senior commander would pick you to be a battalion commander or even higher. The Army said, No more of this stuff. If we want the best we have to have a rigorous selection system. We are going to have a board and we are going to look at the files of all the people eligible and we’re going to centrally pick the best. That process applied to battalion up to brigade commanders. I believe we also select sergeant majors centrally now. I know there is a board for command sergeant major.

The end result of all this is the re-professionalization of the Army – not only in training, but also regarding professional demeanor and character. For example, there was a drive to de-glamorize the drinking of alcohol. When I first came into active service in 1965 all the way up until after Vietnam, you’d have almost mandatory happy hours in the officers clubs. It was a big deal to say you got drunk. I cannot drink enough to get drunk, because I tend to get sick first, which is probably a blessing. But you had people thriving on drinking and bragging about being drunk. I remember the unapologetic alcoholics I served with in Germany, superior officers and sergeants both, and how awful it was. All that ended in the early 80s. We had a parsimonious guy become Army Chief of Staff, General John Wickham who took the show girls out of the clubs and corrected all sorts of unsavory things like that. He did a lot of good for the Army.

So there was this great drive toward professionalism in the 70s and 80s, with very rigorous training, tighter selection of officers and senior sergeants, and an elevation of the professional environment of the Army. I was certainly the beneficiary of this new environment. I went through three Command Training Center rotations as a Battalion Commander, as a Brigade Commander and then as a Division Commander. And without the central selection of senior officers, I may not have been considered at all for the senior positions I was privileged to hold.

During the Reagan years in the 80’s we had a plus-up in military budgets and got all this new equipment, which by and large we still have today because of funding constraints. That plus-up also fueled our new training programs, which we also still have today.

The Payoff

The culmination of this new higher level of professionalism took place during Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Operation Desert Shield, August of 1990, was the operational name for the buildup of U.S. forces for defense of Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Desert Storm, January of 1991, was its combat phase.

 I had just returned to the Pentagon as executive officer to the Secretary of the Army, Michael Stone. The forces we put into the field were the result of all the great battalion and brigade commanders from Vietnam who had stayed on active duty and who had worked to revitalize the Army over the prior fifteen years. We wiped out the Iraqi army in a hundred hours. We did that because of the high level of training instilled in all those units. We had practiced fighting the Russians to a fare thee well, and unlucky for us the Iraqis they were using Russian tactics and a lot of Russian equipment. They never had a chance.

We continued this training and elevation of the Army after Desert Storm. Twelve years later we got involved in Iraq with a professional, all volunteer force. When we were called upon to do what we were trained for, which was the initial invasion, everything went great. But then … but then … when that conventional war turned into a counter insurgency, we were not ready for it psychologically or training wise.

Today

So where are we now? We have a highly trained Army, a highly disciplined Army with great soldiers. Still I am not one of these guys who says this is the greatest Army we’ve ever fielded. No, I think at their best the troops in Vietnam were as good as anybody we ever had.

In that Army, due in large part to the draft, we had a mixture of talent we do not have any more. Today in the all volunteer Army you don’t have the guys in numbers like we used to have: ambitious guys with the ability to do lots of things, who come with varied backgrounds from around the country, who have lots of talent, are very smart, and who are every bit as dedicated and patriotic as anybody we have today. I may be an outlier in this opinion. Of course by now I’m an old guy; I’m not one of the young guys anymore.

I look back on those troops I was with on my first tour with the 1^st Cav, what those troops did in battles like Ia Drang Valley; what troops of the 101^st Airborne did at Dak To and Hamburger Hill. I look back on my second tour commanding Bravo Battery at LZ Sherry. Those were among the finest field soldiers I saw during my career. And toward the end of the long war in Viet Nam they suffered the ravages of poor leadership – based on too rapid expansion of the Army, too rapid promotion at the unit levels, and careerism and politically motivated actions at more senior levels – and maybe even worse, the erosion of support from the American people. How did guys in the field maintain a level of commitment when the people back home didn’t believe in what they were doing, calling them murders and worse? Somehow they did until a combination of social conditions (war protests, drug culture and racism) and the loss of national commitment became overwhelming.

The bottom line is yes, we have a great Army now, but I take nothing away from the troops I was with in the 1^st Cav and my B Battery troops at Sherry.

Below is a link to a five minute interview with Lt. Gen. Joseph E. DeFrancisco (Ret.) on Retaining Talent in the Army. Released April 3, 2015. In it he draws lessons from his own career, and most notably to his decision to stay in the Army following his command of LZ Sherry.

Highlight the entire link, right click, choose ‘open link in new window’

http://youtu.be/0nVHIDppjJU

A Dream Fulfilled

Again the Army was good to its word in sending me to graduate school right out of Vietnam. I went to Rice University in Houston, a very good small school noted for engineering, but I went there for military history. Rice was one of the schools West Point used to train history instructors, all based on the presence of Dr. Frank Vandiver, one of the nation’s top military historians of the day and then Provost of the University. So I went there to study under him. I just had a marvelous time.

It was a two year masters program and I met lifelong friends in the program. There were five of us Army guys, all just out of Vietnam and all with two tours. There were two infantryman, two armor officers and me, a field artilleryman – we were all studying various phases of military history.

Dr. Vandiver was in the process of writing a biography of General John J. Pershing (commanded American forces during WWI). We each wrote a thesis on some aspect of Pershing’s career. My grades at West Point were not all that good except for history, but I won a prize for my masters thesis, which was a great source of pride for me.

From Rice I went to Ft. Leavenworth for the Army Command and General Staff College for a year.

The United States Army Command and General Staff College develops leaders for full spectrum joint, interagency and multinational operations. It serves as the first of the leadership programs leading to senior command.

From there I went directly to West Point to teach military history in 1974. I taught a seventy-five minute course twice a day, six days a week to seniors … and it was a blast. I taught a lot on the Civil War, the two World Wars, some on Korea, a big block on Napoleon, and what we called the “Great Captains” before Napoleon: Alexander the Great, Caesar and Hannibal.

When I said I had to go prepare for class, my wife Lynne would say, “No, you’re just going to read that stuff you love. You’re not working, you’re having fun.”

It was very fulfilling and very rewarding. I taught at West Point for three years and then spent a year in the Office of the Dean. After four years at West Point I was ready to move on.

Rapid Fire Promotions

One of the beauties of the Army is you get to do a lot of different things.

I had been promoted to major the year I went to West Point. In order to progress you had to have “troop duty as a major,” and I was running out of time. I was fortunate that on my next assignment in Germany I had three echelons of command in a three year period. First I was on an artillery brigade staff, and then I went to a battalion as XO (executive officer second in command), and then I served on the VII Corps Artillery staff. (The entire VII Corps deactivated after Desert Storm). As a result, out of Germany I went to Ft. Lewis, Washington where I commanded an artillery battalion, which was another intermediate goal of mine and another great assignment.

From there I went to the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, which is another one of those important steps you have to take in order to progress.

From there I went to the Pentagon as Chief of Army War Plans, then to another job in the area of strategy and policy, whose title had a string of letters too complicated to describe. These were wonderful jobs and a great two years at the Pentagon. During this time I got promoted to full colonel.

From Teaching History To Making It

Joseph DeFrancisco now becomes a high level participant in the major military events of his time.

Panama

I left the Pentagon in 1988 and went to Ft. Ord, California to take command of the 7^th Infantry Division Artillery. At the time the 7^th Infantry Division was the Army’s only light infantry division. My division artillery had three direct support battalions, and one general support battalion.

It was during that time that Operation Just Cause occurred just before Christmas of 1989. The U.S. essentially invaded Panama to capture the strongman dictator Noriega and put him in jail.

Noriega did not have a real Army, he had a bunch of thugs. These were not pitched battles. Still the US suffered 23 killed and 325 wounded. As I recall we lost the better part of a Navy Seal unit that was killed trying to capture Noriega. They just landed at the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as artillery is concerned, we used artillery more for intimidation than for indirect fire. We fired on checkpoints; we fired illumination; we also direct-fired into a couple buildings to entice the occupants to surrender, which they did.

It was a wonderful operation that took only a couple of months. Operation Just Cause was the first time in my experience that the U.S. military did a lot of things right: a multi-service, multi-unit operation that included airborne, mechanized and light infantry, Air Force and Army helicopters all brought together from different places in the U.S. to converge on Panama at the same time.

The real value of artillery during that operation was fire support coordination, which was more of an asset than actual firepower. As usual our artillery guys – our forward observers, our recon NCOs and specialists (MOS 13 F) – had a better communications link than the infantry. We called in the vast majority of the Army helicopter air strikes because our artillery guys knew how to do it and had the connectivity. The Panamanians, the bad guys, did have mortars so we had counter mortar radar, upgraded versions of what we had at Sherry and very effective. The outstanding thing was that everything worked when we got in there. We did the job quickly and we got out quickly.

In addition some of my battalion commanders took on non-artillery roles in what we call non-standard missions, such as force protection of installations and running convoys. This was nothing new to artillerymen, who are versatile, smart guys. They did a great job on non-standard missions in addition to the artillery fire support. It was no different in Vietnam, and would be the same in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Return To The Pentagon

Right after Panama I was selected in late 1991 to be XO to the Secretary of the Army, another stepping stone job and highly competitive. As it turns out my commander in the 7^th Division had that job when he was a colonel and he recommended me for it. That’s how my name got funneled up. I had to go for an interview, was fortunate to be selected, and subsequently received my first star (promotion to brigadier general).

The Secretary of the Army is the highest ranking person in the Army, the top guy in command, even senior to the Army Chief of Staff (the highest uniformed officer in the Army). He’s a civilian political appointee, who has to be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

The Army Secretary at that time was Michael Stone, a wonderful person, a successful businessman, and a very wealthy guy. He decided he wanted to give something back to the country that had given so much to him. So he went into government service. He became one of our top officials in Egypt as the representative for the Agency for International Development, a job he held for a number of years. Then he came to the Army where he held a number of Assistant to the Secretary of the Army positions. He was ASA for financial management; then Under Secretary of the Army, and finally became the Secretary under President George H. W. Busch.

Mr. Stone was Army Secretary for the whole First Bush administration, meaning he was there for Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In fact I went to work for him the day before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. So I did not participate on the ground, but I participated seven days a week out of the Pentagon. I spent two years as his XO, another wonderful job that was supposed to be for a year, but Secretary Stone asked me to stay another year. I say, “He asked me.” But when the Secretary of the Army asks you to stay another year there is really only one answer.

Half The Battle Is Knowing What You Want

The Other Half Is Sticking To It

After two years as his XO Secretary Stone asked me what I wanted to do next. He said, “I’ll give you whatever job you want.”

I said, “I want to be an assistant division commander.” (This would be an infantry unit command with multiple support units from other branches.)

As an artilleryman I figured that I was best suited for that job because I had a lot of experience in maneuver units. I had been with and around the infantry since Vietnam. My first tour with the 1^st Cav put me in combat with the infantry during fighting around Hue, the relief of Khe Sanh and the A Shau Valley Incursion. Then my battalion was with the 9^th Infantry Division at Ft Lewis, Washington – so I was with infantry guys again. I did not command them, but lived with them and worked closely with them. Then I commanded the 7^th Infantry Division Artillery at Ft Ord, California for the Panama operation, again in close proximity to the infantry. I had been at every level with the infantry, so it was a natural progression to be an assistant commander to an infantry division.

Instead I was offered the Corps artillery assignment at Ft. Sill, but I did not want to do that. I thought it would be too narrow a job, still all artillery and I wanted a broader job. So I said again I wanted to be an assistant infantry division commander.

Fortunately the Army listened. I became one of the two assistant division commanders of the 24^th Infantry Division at Ft. Stewart, Georgia. This was the first time I was in the direct chain of command of infantry troops. This was something I wanted to do, because ultimately I wanted to be a Division Commander, and I knew this job would better my chances. I held that job for a year.

South Korea

Then in 1993 I was promoted to two star (major general) and went to Korea as Operations Officer for all forces in South Korea.

The organization was a collection of joint commands, so involved that its new Operations Officer needed an hour and a half briefing just to explain its structure. General DeFrancisco’s comments are here presented in outline form for purposes of clarity.

It was a complex set of four different organizations:

• A United Nations Command (UNC) composed mainly of U.S. and Korean forces but included also small contingents from other nations
• A Combined Forces Command (CFC) of Korean and U.S. forces
• U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) was a joint command of U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine forces
• And the Eighth Army composed solely of U.S. Army forces

UNC, CFC, and USFK were all commanded by the same Army four star while the Eighth Army was commanded by an Army three star.

I was operations officers for all four of those organization, each of which had a deputy commander reporting to me. I had:

• A two-star Korean general as my deputy for the UNC and CFC
• A Marine colonel for USFK
• And an Army colonel for the Eighth Army.

This was another really interesting job. Kim Il-Sung was still in charge in North Korea. We had nuclear crises; we had border incursions; we had the North shelling the disputed islands. We had emergency after emergency. All a lot of excitement, and all due to the great people I worked with.

A Call To Return

While I am in Korea I get a call to return to Ft. Stewart to become the commanding general of the 24^th Infantry Division, where I had been an assistant commander. My hope to put myself in line for a division commander position seemed to have worked; I never guessed it would be back with the 24^th and that it would happen so quickly. I had been gone less than a year, so there were still a lot of people I knew and had worked with.

During my command of the 24^th we executed a number of overlapping deployments. I sent troops to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for about five months, and deployed a battalion plus for the Haitian Incursion.

The Haiti operation was sanctioned by the United Nations to restore the deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As the invading force was in route the Haitian leadership capitulated. Commanding general Hugh Shelton’s mission changed in an instant from military invader to diplomat, whose task was now to work out a peaceful transition of power.

I sent troops to Guantanamo Bay, which at the time was not the prison it is now. It was primarily a holding area for Cubans and Haitians fleeing their countries for the U.S. I sent mess personnel and Military Police, in another of those non-combat roles we so often were called on to perform.

At one point I had people in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Haiti and Guantanamo Bay, in addition to the deployments in the U.S. It was a very exciting and very enjoyable assignment.

Enough Fun

I’m getting ready to leave the division, then I got selected for a third star (lieutenant general) and assigned as the Deputy Commander in Chief of Pacific Command in Honolulu, Hawaii. This was 1996. The CINC (commander in chief) at the time was a four-star Navy Admiral and I was his deputy. It was a huge command with Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine forces deployed from the west coast of the United States, including Alaska, all the way through Hawaii, Korea, Japan and Thailand. It all came under the command and control of CINCPAC – Commander in Chief, Pacific Command.

Following this assignment it was time to leave active duty. There were only about thirty-five three-star generals in the Army and maybe ten or eleven four-stars. Things either worked out or they don’t at that level. There were no opportunities at the time enticing enough for me to stay, and I had thirty-four years worth of active duty. Lynne and I essentially had had enough fun in uniform. It was time to retire.