Invincible in Vietnam
I hesitate to post a war story, but I wanted to personally thank a young man whose name was lost to me until a recent fortuitous communication from John Mayer, someone I served with in Vietnam. John was just reaching out to see if anyone else from his company happened to be out there in the world. Somehow, he tracked me down and we've exchanged a few e-mails. While it's fresh in my mind, I want to tell the story of a mutual friend who changed both of our lives.
I
will back up a bit first to give some of the atmosphere in which this story
takes place. In fact, I will go back to my communication with the draft board
in Pitkin County. Every 18-year-old was required to register for the draft but
based on my personal beliefs, hinted in an earlier post about killing a deer, I
wanted status as a conscientious objector. I was of course intending to do a
couple of years of alternative service rather than going into the army, where I
was sure both the army and I would be unhappy. The draft board saw otherwise
and assigned me a draft status of 1AO, meaning that I would have to serve in
the military if drafted, but I would be assigned to a some duty where I didn’t
need to carry a weapon. My first reaction was disbelief coupled with a bit of
anger. I could either accept their verdict, file an expensive legal appeal, or
consider moving to Canada or Sweden. Legal appeals had been filed by others,
but they were always denied unless the appellant was a member of recognized
religious organization that opposed war. I had my own “religion,” a form of
animism or pantheism that was certainly not organized.
Eventually I had to make a decision: go to jail or go into the army. I almost didn’t have to go. I spent close to a year at Fort Ord attached to a NATO field hospital. We were ready to head to Germany from the California coast in an instant. But the instant never came, and eventually, with just over a year remaining on my two-year active duty obligation, I found myself in Vietnam.
We flew out of Oakland via Alaska because the government didn’t want to provide “the enemy” with any predictable patterns. I crossed the dateline between Alaska and Japan at around midnight on March 31, landing in Japan on April 2, 1968. When we finally reached Southeast Asia, it was April 3. The plane spiraled down from its cruising altitude to the ground in about five minutes time. As we dropped into the valley of death, I could see tracers zipping past the wings. Welcome to a year in hell.
As a CO medic, I naturally expected an assignment to a field hospital somewhere … or maybe I would get an office assignment, since I had a college education. But no. At our orientation, they ligned us up and had us step forward to pick up our weapons and essential kit one at a time. I refused a weapon, and got nothing more than a shrug from the supply/armaments clerk. Then we got to listen to a sermon, I think supposedly reassurance, from a firebrand preacher who knew that God was on the side of the Americans. He made me glad that I had no official religion. Then we got our assignments.
I thought there had to be a mistake. I was assigned to 101st Airborne Division. The news was full of I news about the battle on a place called “Hamburger Hill,” and they needed replacement troops due to the heavy casualties. Field hospital? Good luck, GI. You might want to reconsider carrying a weapon.
I eventually found my company command post in a small town called Nuoc Ngot, which meant something like “Soda Water” or “Sweet Water,” as I was led to understand. It was far from Hamburger Hill, far from the newsreel images of Vietnam. A farming village, and a railroad bridge over the river. The railroad ran north to Hue, and south to Da Nang paralleling Highway One. Nuoc Ngot was just an incidental wide spot. Soon, I found myself stripped to my underwear and jumping off the bridge into the river, enjoying a relaxing day off. The company commander, Captain Kelley, told me he had someone who could drive me out to join my platoon the next day, so in the meantime, I should just relax. Welcome to Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry.
I hung out with the platoon medic and the company medic. The company medic was part of the command post along with the commanding officer, the executive officer, a first sergeant, and a radio man. The same structure was more or less repeated for the platoon that was guarding the Nuoc Ngot bridge, plus there were a couple or three dozen troops making up three squads in the platoon, and three platoons in the company. It was a simple structure, but what would they do with a conscientious objector?
Nuoc Ngot was rice paddies and the lingering smell of charcoal smoke lingering everywhere within the broad valley, several miles across. Mountains surrounded the village on three sides, and to the north east was the ocean, as I would eventually learn. The villagers and the GI’s mixed casually, but most of the GI’s carried their M-16s with them everywhere they went, while the villagers appeared to be unarmed. Dinner was C-rations. Breakfast was C-rations. Bed was a poncho liner (a thin quilt), a blow-up air mattress, and mosquito repellent.
The next morning, Captain Kelley had me pack up my gear … a heavy backpack that was mostly food and sleeping gear, plus a ready bag filled with emergency field dressings, and an aid bag that was more or less a miniature doctor’s office. The entire backpack weighed around 40 pounds, guessing from the old days when I used to go backpacking in the Colorado wilderness. I rode in an open jeep, just me and a lieutenant who was on his way to another village farther along the coast. He drove about two miles making irrelevant conversation, then stopped in the middle of the road. It was at least a mile to next village.
“This is where you get off,” he told me.
Hesitating, not sure he wasn’t pulling my leg, I hoiked my backpack out of the jeep and settled it onto my shoulders. The weight was heavy but doable.
“Follow that path,” the lieutenant said. “Second platoon is right over there by the village in the jungle, along the road.” I looked at him, then looked for a road, or even a path would do, and looked at the distant grove of trees, hoping for a glimpse to confirm that I was heading towards the platoon I was supposed to be joining. “There,” the lieutenant pointed. “Just follow the dike between the paddies. You’ll find your platoon in a small village by those trees over there.” He nodded toward an overgrown jungle grove that edged the rice paddies about half a mile away. “They’ll be expecting you.” Then he drove off, leaving me standing alone on the road, in the middle of nowhere.
I had no weapon. I had no way to contact anyone. I was abandoned in the middle of nowhere, in a war zone. Only one thing to do. I resettled my backpack and started following the faint path that threaded between the rice paddies. Should I be worried about landmines? Did anyone really expect me?
I looked ahead, hoping to see a couple of GIs coming my way. I saw what looked like a young teen riding on the back of a water buffalo, and behind him, the distant mountain that defined the southern end of the Nuoc Ngot valley. And closer, I saw half a dozen Vietnamese kids wearing thin cotton pajamas, all chattering among themselves but definitely heading my way.
You know the first thing I thought of? My Grandma Dottie, who died when I was eleven years old. We used to visit her summer house in Carmel and spend hours exploring Carmel or spending time on the beach. At the end of the day we would return to her large eponymous “Pink House” to play games with siblings and cousins, and to look through all the hundreds of books on the shelves. I had a favorite, a light blue hardbacked book called “A Yankee Hobo in the Orient.” I don’t think I ever actually read the book, but I used to go into a reverie while staring at the exotic picture on the frontispiece. It showed a young oriental boy riding on the back of a water buffalo, with a distant heavily forested mountain in the background. I was right there, in the middle of the picture. This was the exotic land I had dreamed of visiting someday. I was in French Indochina! My wish had unintentionally manifested itself.
The kids surrounded me and walked me towards the village. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but was able to pick out a few understandable words. I remember “Souvenir me chop-chop” in pidgin French-English-Vietnamese. Their words were mush in my brain. Here I was, weaponless, surrounded by Vietnamese, no way to contact another soldier… it did occur to me that I could just be led off towards the mysterious and idyllic mountain on the horizon and take up life in a cave, and nobody would be any the wiser. Would it have been heaven for me? Or hell?
Before I had a chance to test those abstract waters, one of the kids grabbed my hand and said “This way, Doc.” They knew I was the new medic, and they took me directly to my platoon, who were bivouacked in a casual day camp on the edge of the jungle, just as had been described to me. I hadn’t even dropped my backpack on the ground when a stone-jawed first sergeant named Varner stepped in front of me and blocked my way.
“You’d better go back,” he challenged me. “You forgot your firearm.” His manner was blunt and unforgiving.
“I don’t carry one, Sarge,” I answered. It was a bit like basic training where the battalion commander would shout ridiculous demands in your face. I had learned to just stay detached and ignore the words. “I’m a CO,” I added unnecessarily.
“Well I don’t want no cherry medics in my platoon,” Varner barked. “Everyone pulls their weight around here.”
“Don’t worry about me, Sergeant. I’ll do my share. I just won’t carry a weapon while I’m doing it.”
“We’ll see,” he answered.
It was almost like it was a setup. Near dusk, we left our bivouac … Sergeant Varner, me and a squad of soldiers carrying M16’s or machine guns or grenade launchers … we left our bivouac and started walking back towards the highway the same way I had come earlier. We then walked toward Nuoc Ngot, although Varner told me would only go halfway back. He called on the radio to let the platoon at Nuoc Ngot bridge know that we were moving in their direction, so don’t call the artillery on us. Then we moved along silently in near pitch black following a ditch beside Highway 1. The train tracks ran along an elevated bed of cinder on the other side of the highway.
The point man and two other squad members crossed the highway towards a footpath leading over the tracks. Before they got there, the cinder pile was suddenly lit up by red tracer fire, and in an instant, everyone was on their bellies and firing at the tracks. Someone started lobbing grenades. When there was no response, they shot a phosphorous flare and a scout crawled forward to scan the paddies. He saw nothing. Everyone crossed the tracks. About 50 meters on the other side, near two intersecting dikes, we found a dry rice paddy and set up a 3-point ambush. If anything happened on my watch, I would just have to wake someone else. In this instance, “somebody else” would be Sergeant Varner. Four hours asleep after two hours watching for movement, then awake again for another two-hour shift.
At first light, we headed back to our encampment for a C-ration breakfast. Sergeant Varner grabbed his breakfast then came over and sat down across from me.
“You know,” he said, “as a medic, one of your duties is to write up recommendations for Purple Hearts.” He rolled up his sleeve and showed me a burn mark on his left forearm. “I got a burn from the barrel of my M-16 during that ambush last night. I want you to write me up. You can just forward it to the battalion surgeon.”
I immediately pictured all the people I’d either seen or read about who had real injuries, who won their Purple Hearts the hard way. I was as polite as I could be, but I refused to recommend him. Instead, I handed him his morning malaria pill. First thing every morning, everyone got a dapsone tablet. That was a medic’s real duty. I offered the sergeant some ointment for his burn, but he refused and headed back to the shade offered by his poncho stretched between two bushes.
After that encounter, I was almost Sergeant Varner’s friend. A few days after the ambush by the train tracks, another new soldier found his way to our platoon encampment. He was my polar opposite … a macho infantry man out to prove how tough he was. He had picked a tour of duty in Vietnam as an alternative to a jail sentence for assault. And nearly as soon as he joined our platoon, he focused on me as an easy target for bullying. “Where’s your gun, you cherry medic,” he said just within range of Varner’s hearing.
Sergeant Varner stepped between the two of us and faced down our new macho man. “You want to complain about Doc Child, you talk to me first,” Varner said. “He’s a damn fine medic.”
I didn’t get any more complaints about my being a conscientious objector. I had proven that I could hold my own under fire, that I took my role seriously, and that I was not easily intimidated.
I wish I could gather a roster of all the souls who spent those days with me. Practically everyone had just a nickname, or a last name, so my memory is more like a shadow play than an address book. I remember Captain Kelly of course, and First Sergeant Varner and Lieutenant Good, and many others. Some names just flicker across the screen. Others are embedded. Tennessee. Smokey. Satch. Crandall. Sipes. Doc No Heart, the Sioux Indian with a heart of gold. Frank Smith, another soldier who, like me, had Quaker roots. Robert Watson, which happens to be my dad’s first and middle name.
Bravo Company, 1/327, 101st Airborne, stationed near Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam, in 1969-'70. Less than two months after landing in the field, I had been moved into a new position as company medic, with three platoon medics working under me. When we travelled, I stayed with the Company command post. The command post at that time consisted of Captain Kelly, Lieutenant Schrock (the executive officer, also know as the XO), Sergeant Varner, a radioman named Herbie, and me. Periodically we would pick up Kit Carson scout – an English-speaking Vietnamese who had switched sides, and who might or might not be feeding us accurate intel from the villagers. Aside from Herbie’s radio, none of us wore any markings to distinguish us from the rest of the men in the company.
One day in July, my first week as company medic, our entire battalion was in the jungles above A Shau Valley. We had been sweeping Dong Ap Bia, better known as Hamburger Hill, verifying that the mountain was still clear of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers following a major battle for the hill a month earlier. We got intel that a group of NVA stragglers were trying to get back into Laos over a nearby ridge. We were supposed to move into place so we could possibly intercept the stragglers near the border. This was on a hill south of the Rao Lao River and a few kilometers from Hamburger Hill.
From a landing zone a couple of miles from the Laotian border, the familiar UH-1 helicopters (Hueys) were to drop us between the NVA and the border. The first two choppers went in and once they were on the ground, they started taking incoming, and the Lt. Schrock was immediately wounded and had to be extracted.
Captain Kelly decided to send me in to patch up Lieutenant Schrock, then evacuate him. Once the original eight men were off the hill, he was ready to call in air support. I had just been with the command post for only a couple of days as the company medic. Before that, I had been a medic with the 2nd platoon. When the chopper came in to take me as its only passenger, I was feeling like it was a suicide mission. I was a conscientious objector, and did not carry a weapon of any sort, just an aide bag full of field dressings, going into a hot LZ on my own. I had to make my peace, and the thought crossed my mind that it was a blessing to know the likely moment of my death in advance.
As I approached the chopper, the Radio Telephone Operator (RTO), Herbie, drifted away from the command post and approached me near the ready-to-take off chopper and offered his M16 to me. He suggested I might want it. I thanked him, but said my hands were going to be full, that I'd come this far without a weapon, and besides I didn't even know how to use it.
The chopper actually took off with just me aboard, but then Captain Kelly called it back and said he changed his mind, we were going to take everybody into the LZ. So Kelly joined me, plus Herbie the RTO, as well as a machine gunner and his ever-present assistant. We were in the lead chopper, in air assault formation.
My recollection is necessarily clouded by the stress of the moment. I think it might have taken five minutes to reach the pinned down squad, but more likely it was much quicker than that. It just seemed like an eternity. I had a special prayer someone had given me, a Persian prayer to be said in moments of great peril. It was written inside the back cover of a Baha’i prayer book I carried with me. I had it memorized and muttered it over and over in my mind every moment we were airborne. “Ya Zahibu Zaman!” I have no idea whether the spelling is correct, but that’s the way I remember it.
By the time the five minutes on the helicopter to hell were finished, my spirit was floating in a magical land. I could smell attar of roses, and felt an invisible and invincible shield around me. We took incoming fire from an NVA 51 mm machine gun just as we were approaching the bare shoulder of a mountain that would serve as our landing zone. But as we approached the LZ, as the machine gun opened fire on us, as the door gunner on the chopper returned fire, I heard the pilot shout “Jump!” With forty pounds of backpack, with my aid bag, with my mystical prayer, I jumped from around six feet, landed and rolled behind a downed mahogany tree. Then the madness.
By the time I had Lt. Schrock patched up, I heard the yell, “Medic! Medic!” Captain Kelly pointed to my left. There was the RTO Herbie Amrhein lying against the downed mahogany tree unconscious. I started to do a quick triage on him, then noticed the wound in the back of his head. A bullet had entered and now pressed against the forehead from the inside. He had a peaceful look on his face, but it was obvious he was badly wounded.
Herbie and Schrock left together on one of the first helicopters I could find. The rest of the day is a daze. I wasn’t heroic. I wasn’t a particularly efficient medic. I remember a bruise on the back of my leg from a flying piece of shrapnel that bounced off. I remember seeing a smoking C-ration can at my feet … the projectile that had ricocheted off my leg, my leg that was protected by an invisible shield. I remember evacuating fifteen other wounded men. I remember the quiet aftermath, the long drag on a cigarette to calm my nerves. I remember having to do a quick field training with one person from each platoon, individuals I had drafted to be emergency medics until we could get replacements for the three who had been evacuated among the other wounded. I remember exhaustion. I remember it each night still, as I go to sleep.
In the end, Herbie was the only one who died, a day later in a field hospital. I remember clearly his stepping forward and offering me his weapon. I remember the last words we exchanged. If I had taken his weapon, would that have changed things? Would Herbie Amrhein have survived? Maybe he would have been in a better covered position because he didn't have his weapon? I'll never know, but I've always felt like maybe he took a bullet that had my name on it.
The
day he died, July 18, 1969, has become a real keystone moment in my life. Herbie
was the real hero that day, in my estimation. He stepped forward. He offered me
help when I appeared to be in imminent danger. I still live in relative good
health today, while Herbie was killed in action nearly 51 years ago. RIP,
Herbie, and my condolences to any still-living friends and family.
Copyright Don Child 2020
Herbie Amrhein
Hard choices, tough times. Thanks for writing about this Don.
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