My Father's Vietnam Page #4

Got back on the dump truck to LZ Liz

and started working on the bunkers,

and we heard another explosion.

Another truck bringing

a load of dirt blew up.

Again the medevac was there.

But there were those two

in one morning.

The next day they

had sniffer dogs.

They accompanied us

for the next week,

and we never found

anything else.

But we lost two dump

trucks and two guys.

This is a Corgi die-cast miniature car.

I don't know the scale.

It's a De Tomaso Mangusta

that I sent to him as a Christmas

present, and we liked our cars.

And he wrote to me, he said,

"In the dark watches of the night, I roll

the De Tomaso Mangusta Corgi toy car"

that Rik sent me back

and forth very quietly.

I sit squishing the suspension up

and down for minutes at a time,

looking at it at eye-level,

digging its amber headlights.

But that's another form

of devotion entirely.

Huddled under my poncho, trying to

preserve the condition of my stationary,

all thought of quality gone,

writing away while monitoring

my trusty two-way radio,

looking out at the little

plastic Christmas tree

that one of our machine

gunners received in the mail

and planted before

his draped poncho.

Put the little metal car, the De Tomaso

Mangusta that I carry in my pocket,

beneath the plastic

tree and lo and behold,

we'll have toys under the tree

come tomorrow morning.

All the amenities are not lost.

One little Tupperware container

of mother's best cookies, too.

No, all is certainly not

lost at Christmastime.

Next Christmas Eve,

I'll perhaps remember

my rainy night

squatting beside my radio

on my plastic covered map to keep

my bottom unsuccessfully dry,

watching the bushes move, and every so often

munching on mixed nuts without peanuts.

"Maybe this was the Christmas Eve and

Christmas to make the rest worthwhile."

[John] For about

two-thirds of the time,

it was as a platoon leader.

I went in as

a second lieutenant.

March, April, somewhere in there, I

was promoted to first lieutenant,

and so I had a platoon of men.

We never had a full

compliment of people.

I believe a full compliment

would be 40 some people,

and we had generally running

close to about 30 at the max.

We would go out

on patrol during the day,

and we'd set up

ambushes at night.

Most of what we were looking

for were resupply issues.

The area we were in had been defoliated,

bulldozed, burned, and was a free-fire zone.

So anybody out there

theoretically was a target.

That made it difficult when you

actually wanted to eliminate a target,

you were told that you could possibly

impact some poor innocent civilian

who wasn't supposed

to be there in the first place.

So I was involved in planning,

deploying the troops, making sure

everybody knew what their mission was,

making sure the resupply came in, whether

it was weapons, food, whatever it was.

[Loring Sr.] Ring volunteered

to go out and carry the radio.

I wrote back to him saying,

"You get rid of the radio

as fast as you possibly can.

That is

a highly visible target."

He had already been in this unit, my

first unit that I was assigned to.

So when I first met

Loring he was spec 4,

I believe was his

rank at the time,

and he was my radio guy.

And so he was responsible for any

communication out of our field unit

to anything or anybody else

we needed.

Actually, when I saw

the picture, I...

realized, I hadn't remembered

a whole lot

from the picture you sent me.

I remember dark hair.

I always had the impression

he was a lot taller than I was,

but I'm not sure

if he was or not.

And the glasses.

He seemed like a, this sounds terrible, not

that the other people weren't civilized people,

but he seemed more civilized,

educated, reasonable, intelligent

than many other

people I ran into.

I'm the guy that when he went fishing

as a kid I threw the fish back in.

I had never hunted,

I had never been around weapons.

I didn't come from a family

that was into the outdoors.

We were tennis players

and swimmers.

So this gung ho, try to keep

yourself from being killed,

carrying a hundred

pounds of supplies

and being armed and shoot

to kill, very strange.

The minute I was in country

and the night we were rocketed,

I knew I didn't want to be

a combat engineer,

and I knew that I wanted to get as

far from the ugliness as I could.

And I went to the division headquarters

and I got a unit transfer application,

dutifully filled it out the second day

or third day that I was in country

or in Chu Lai and then did not

hear anything for four months.

During that period, we were

in Mo Duc building a bridge,

and I took pictures and wrote

a story about the project,

and I submitted it to the 31

st public information office,

and that was that, and about three

weeks later or two weeks later,

the squad leader over the radio received a call

from the captain in charge of the engineers,

"Have Sorensen on the LZ at a certain

hour with all his equipment,"

and the squad leader, of course,

looked a little askance at me,

"Where are you going,

and how'd you do it?"

So anyway, I got on the LZ

and the next thing I know,

the captain's personal helicopter

was there, picked me up,

and then flew me back

to Bronco, all of five miles,

and the captain was in his jeep

waiting to pick me up,

and he looked at me and said,

something to the effect that,

"You look a little scruffy to be someone

who's working in the rear now."

He explained that I had been reassigned

to the public information office.

The story that I had written

appeared in either "The Army Times"

and or "Stars and Stripes"

and so someone said,

"Take this guy out of the engineers and put

him in the public information office."

There happened to be an opening.

So that was the transition,

it was abrupt.

There were four people assigned

to the public information office

and two of them were officers,

two were enlisted.

So I was in a position where

I could come and go as I pleased

as long as I maintained a certain flow of

stories and pictures out of that office,

they didn't care if I showed up.

They didn't care what I did.

Sort of to further add to the confusion

and to the elation on my part,

the division thought the brigade was in

charge of the public information office,

the brigade thought the division was

in charge, so nobody was in charge.

[Peter] One of the things I did was fly

with either the combat assault unit

or they had a light observation

helicopter unit that did scouting work,

or drew fire, or visual

reconnaissance flights.

And there was a pilot named Rickert

and I typically flew with him.

Glenn Rickert was a captain,

very accessible, very friendly.

When I had to take pictures, when

we needed aerial photographs

or reconnaissance photographs,

I would go out,

or if I needed to take pictures

of a body or something like

that, he would fly me out there.

[Soren] This is Glen Aurelius.

He flew Light Observation Helicopters

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