By Paul Churchill
A lot has happened since the last letter. The morning of the 10th I was transported to the hill where the 3rd platoon of Lima company was located. I can’t remember if it was hill 22 or 55 but when I got there I was immediately assigned to the Sparrow Hawk squad. This was a squad that was extra heavily armed and on standby to be ready on a moment’s notice to assist a patrol or other unit that was in more trouble than they could handle. The men in this squad were pulled from squads that were not assigned patrols or ambushes on a given day and rotated in and out of Sparrow Hawk as they were available. My time with Sparrow Hawk was quiet but short. Because we had not been needed that day I was available for patrol duty that night and went out on my first ambush. We went out a mile or so from the hill and set up in a spot where we could watch a fairly large area for suspicious activity and waited for whatever might happen. Very nerve racking and tense but nothing tonight. After a few hours in position we were told to start back in to the hill and went back by a different route. By the time this letter was written I had been on eight or ten patrols most of which were fairly routine lasting 3 to 5 hours. We had to be constantly on the lookout for booby traps.
When I first arrived to the third platoon I had looked around and thought “what a bunch of pigs these guys are”. They had been in the field for quite a while with no change of clothes, no showers. No bathrooms, no nothing. A week later some more new guys came in and I am sure they looked at me and said “what a pig that guy is”.
A day or so after this we jumped off on a search and destroy operation. It was called Operation Georgia. We were flown in by helicopter and our job was to spread out and push any VC in the area towards a blocking force that was set in and waiting to capture or kill them as they retreated. We had several Viet Namese Army (ARVN) troops with us and they were supposed to identify any homes that were VC residences (Grass shacks maybe fifteen feet across) that housed a family and all that they owned. We had to get everyone out, women and kids and burn everything as they sat sobbing as the life they knew went up in smoke. Contrary to popular Hollywood myth this was not done with Zippo lighters but with White Phosphorous Grenades tossed through a door or window, no glass, just a grass flap on a grass shack. I was called upon to toss several of them when the Marines found that I had a pretty strong and accurate throwing arm. I found it to be an exciting but heartbreaking task. Not an easy thing to have to do since we did not fully trust that the ARVN wasn’t just be out to get even with someone they didn’t like in some cases. These same grenades were used to burn cane fields when we took sniper fire from VC hiding in the tall cane.
That evening as we were digging in for the night a sniper started shooting at us from across the small river where we were setting up. We answered with everything we had with us and after several minutes of this we stopped and when we did we saw him jump up and run across the field where he had been hiding. He must have had a pretty good spider hole to survive all that we sent his way. I think he should have stayed in it for a while longer because we were able to see where he ran to and an F4 Phantom took him out. One of the shots he fired at us went through my shirt just above the waist on my left side without touching me.
As the operation wound down we sat up by Dai Loc village and were running patrols and ambushes out of this area for a few days. The VC would hit us every night at the same time from another village just across a river where the only crossing was a small bridge at one end of the village and every night we would send a patrol after them crossing that bridge, a bad move. The VC figured out what we were doing, hit us as usual and, as they had come to expect, we went after them. They had set up a Claymore mine at their end of the bridge and set it off as we were crossing. We were knocked off of our feet and blinded by the blast but only Cpl John Wamback was injured. He had a cut across the bridge of his nose that was easily treated and we were ordered to continue the patrol. We were saved because the VC had set the mine up backwards and we received only the back blast from it.
After being at Dai Loc for several days and operation Georgia being over we were about to be moved to provide security for the Naval Support Activity Hospital near Marble Mountain. That is when the events of this letter occurred.
The last letter I got started off by saying how glad you were to get my letter. That’s just how I’m going to start this one. One of my men had just died a few hours before your letter came and I don’t know what I would have done if your letter hadn’t come. I was so shook up and filled with hate that I was afraid to speak to anyone. The reason for this is that the man who died, any of the rest of us should not have been where we were but a second lieutenant was trying to make some points. He had us sweeping villages when we should have been moving into position as a blocking force. On the third sweep the man to my immediate left stepped on a booby trap. His left leg was mangled beyond description and his right was not much better. Shrapnel had gone up between his legs into his abdominal area and his throat was ripped open. He also had a small hole in his head next to his left eye. There were two of us there to work on him. (I put a tourniquet on his left leg, bandaged his head and tried to keep him breathing while Doc Williams finished the bandaging and started an IV. It was about thirty minutes before a chopper could get there and somehow we kept him alive though he quit breathing four times on us and we had to give artificial respiration and external heart massage.) When we put him on the chopper we thought he was gone were resigned to the fact. You cannot imagine how overjoyed we were when we heard he was still alive. Later when we heard he had died it was like losing another man.
I have to say here that I don’t fully remember the portion I have bracketed in the section above. The thing I remember most vividly is eight inches of bare Tibia protruding below the left knee and as we worked to save him he tried in his, I pray unconscious state, to arch his back and roll to his side driving the bare exposed bone several inches into the dirt where he lay. This sight has never left me. I live with it daily. It is what I see when there is an animal on the side of the road. It is why I had to stop hunting.
After the Medevac, Cpl Kellams, one of our best squad leaders, who it seemed could smell a booby, trap found four more of them and our combat engineers blew them all without further injury. Cpl Kellams then a SSgt would be killed by a snipers bullet on a later tour of duty in Viet Nam.
Two days earlier the Marine we had lost had saved another man’s life. As we were moving through some heavy brush and hedgerows we heard loud brush cracking and a man groaning loudly. As we looked toward the racket we saw a Water Buffalo charge out of the brush with a Marine hanging from her horns. Pfc Ruch immediately spun to his right and shot the buffalo dropping her just feet away from the tree she was attempting crush the Marine on her horns against. Fortunately the Marines flak jacket had deflected her horn from his chest and he was shook up pretty badly but had no serious injuries.
Since then any blast I hear gives me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and finds me worrying about what I will find when I get to the spot of the explosion. I was beginning to wonder why I am here but when your letter came I knew again what I was doing here and that no matter what, it’s worth it.
Now I have some good news, though I feel guilty about it knowing that Dave might be in a bad area, but my unit has been pulled back to a fairly safe area to rest and wait for replacements as about 2/3 of our men been have killed or seriously wounded, most of them before I got here. It seems an awful price to pay for a little rest and I wish I could repay those who bought it for me. Maybe someday. Today though while moving in here to guard the air strip we found that even a safe place isn’t too healthy. We caught several gook’s setting booby traps in our area. Thank God we caught them.
As mentioned earlier my platoon wound up at the Naval Support Hospital near Marble Mountain and another platoon was sent to provide security at the Da Nang air field. It was while we were here that we received a few new guys fresh from the recruit training. On patrol a couple of nights later we were working our way through a wooded area when the man in front of me stopped. He was about fifth in line and there were two or three Marines behind me. After several minutes I eased up and asked him what he was waiting for. He said they’re not moving doc. I said who’s not moving? He said them pointing a few feet in front of him. I said that’s for sure, trees hardly ever do. The poor kid was as blind as a bat at night. The rest of the guys wanted to hustle to catch up with the rest of the patrol. I told them we didn’t even know which way to go as we had already been separated for several minutes. I said we would set up where we were and wait for the rest of the patrol to come back to us. John Wambach was one of our best squad leaders and I knew it wouldn’t take him long to find us and that would be a lot safer than trying to chase him down in the dark which would been chasing disaster. About ten minutes or so we could hear movement ahead of us. I popped a green flare to signal that we were indeed friendly’s and the squad was soon reunited. We radioed in and were given permission to abort the rest of the patrol and with our night blind Marine holding on to the cartridge belt of the man in front of him we got back to our platoon area without further incident. This would be his final patrol. He would be removed from the line companies and hopefully sent home, a survivor of the McNamara experiment.
