My Father's Vietnam Page #3

and I figured I wasn't

gonna make it 24 hours.

I figured the environment or the

temperature was going to do me in.

I wasn't going to make it

because of the weather.

[Elizabeth] I was scared that

something might happen.

I knew he wasn't going to be in the

jungle, that would have freaked me out.

I guess I didn't constantly fear the way I

would if he had been in combat or a Marine.

And then at night, I remember there was

some kind of either an arc: light,

which is a B-52 drop,

or there was a firefight, something

going on in the mountains.

And I remember looking, coming out of the

hoooh and looking toward the mountains,

and it was like there

was a large thunderstorm.

You'd see a flash and then

there'd be a four-minute delay

and then you'd feel

the concussion.

It brought home that

you know where you are,

and then tomorrow or the next

day, the day after that,

you're going to be closer

to what's going on there.

Loring was assigned to an infantry

brigade, an infantry battalion.

I was assigned to an

engineer company,

and essentially he went off and did his

thing and I went off and did my thing.

His first letter

indicated that he had,

on the day of his arrival, that

night, they went out on a snake.

That was a case of where

you blackened your faces,

you're heavily armored,

and he was with

a group of machine gunners,

and they set up

a blocking force.

And he said, the blocking force,

we were there,

but nothing occurred.

[Peter] From Cam Ranh

Bay orders to Chu Lai,

which is the military

headquarters company

or headquarters

for the Americal Division,

and it was there, they have what

they call the Combat Center,

which is like graduate school,

and for a week you were there to acclimatize

yourself and also go through a quick kill course,

where you had a BB gun and had

to shoot at pop-up targets,

booby traps and mines

and try not to set them off.

Everybody set off something,

which is kind of debilitating...

Warning lectures on drugs.

All the hooches had

essentially plywood walls,

screens, and then

corrugated tin roofs.

And then attached,

or very close by,

there were culverts or half

shells covered with sandbags

which were for rocket

attacks or incoming...

The defensive

positions essentially.

The first night I was there,

we had incoming rockets.

There was an explosion.

We were green. We were looking

at each other, what was that?

And finally somebody came

running through the hooch

and said, "Everybody in the shelter,"

and we all got in the shelter.

There were three or four more

rockets that came in that night.

So the first night that I was in Chu

Lai, we received rocket attacks,

probably B-1 Os

or Soviet-made rockets.

They were just set up with bamboo

stakes out in the hinterlands

and they were launched

towards the American base.

I don't think there were

any casualties or anything,

but that was my

introduction to incoming.

From there, we got orders

to Duc Pho, which is about

on the coast,

it's in Quang Ni Province.

I was assigned to the

engineers, from the engineers

I was shipped out to LZ Liz,

or Landing Zone Liz,

which was a forward

fire support base.

And there were three mountains, one

large lump where the LZ was located.

There were a couple of howitzers there, and I

stayed there for four months or so, five months,

doing mine sweeps

and construction.

[Soren] For soldiers of the

Vietnam era and their loved ones,

letter writing was the most

useful method of communication.

As much as pictures tell us what the

war was like for these young men,

their letters home are as remarkable,

not only for what was written,

but also for what was left out.

[Rik] He wrote to us

to protect us.

He wrote to us and tried

to look at the light side.

He wrote a letter about a duckling

that he took with him for three days,

a little duckling that he carried on heli-

copter rides and finally let go somewhere.

There was Pete the puppy clog who followed

them around. He wrote about micro frogs.

[Loring Sr.] Oh, he was upbeat.

It was an upbeat deal.

He made it that way. I could tell you

one letter that he sent to his wife,

three or four paragraphs of

disassembling and assembling...

a machine gun,

a 50-caliber machine gun.

I don't think he copied it out of the

manual, but it was very, very close.

And he wrote this...

"Also, saw an enormous

python the other day."

Those exciting animal names grow

a bit meaningless or prosaic

when we think of them as automobile

models or can opener trademarks.

"But a real python opens your eyes and gives

new meaning and respect to the name."

He was in a God awful

environment...

just hideous.

[Peter] He was carrying 70 pounds of pack,

and then going from place to place,

and at night

setting up ambushes.

If it was the monsoon season,

you were wet to the bone,

48 hours, three days,

four or five days at a time.

Elizabeth, I wrote once a day. If I

missed a day I used to write two.

I probably got back

an equal amount.

It wasn't like World War ll where everybody

wrote, and everybody sent cookies,

and everybody did this. It was fairly confined

to the closest relatives and closest friends.

So you didn't get groundswells of mail, but the

ones I counted on obviously were Elizabeth's,

and friends.

I wrote him a letter

every day and did that.

But when he was gone,

he left in September

and at Christmas, which was a big family

gathering around the Christmas table

with my parents and Aunt Susie and Uncle

Atwood and all of the cousins and everybody.

And here I was having

been married one month.

And he left in September

and it was Christmas.

The entire Christmas clay and

through the entire Christmas dinner

not one person mentioned him,

he was not toasted.

He was not... it just

wasn't in their conscious.

Part of our job was

to get up, very punctual,

so that the enemy knew

we were coming.

But there was at least

eight of us,

this parade of people

going down the road.

We did the sweep, and then

at the end of the sweep,

what would happen was a five-ton dump

truck would be filled up with sand.

It was called pressure testing,

and it would back down the road,

so anything that we missed electronically,

theoretically the clump truck would set off.

We did this one day,

got onto the truck,

because the pressure testing had been done,

and they would drive us back up to LZ Liz.

And on this particular day, we were working

on bunkers and then all of a sudden

we heard an explosion

down toward the road.

It was after the monsoon,

so they were repairing the road.

Anyway, we got down there and

the medevac was just leaving.

The dump truck driver...

The mine went off right under

the cab and it blew his eye out.

He had other injuries, but we had to

do another mine sweep of the road.

So this is the second mine sweep

within four hours, five hours,

and they did another

pressure test.

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