I was there 69-70

I was a US Army Combat Engineer (12B30). For the most part, I drove a 5-ton dump truck hauling sand, gravel, and dirt used to construct roads to connect outlying villages during the Vietnamization effort. I was mainly in the Mekong Delta South of Saigon and in the Iron Triangle. I saw plenty of road side bombs and had witnessed many injured and killed. In my truck I always had the M-16 and twenty+ magazines plus several grenades and flares. I've taken fire from tree lines with bullets striking the windshield and door but luckily wasn't hit. I just floored the truck and flew down the road as fast as I could go bouncing down deeply rutted dirt roads.

I had been sent out many times by helicopter to blow up ammunition or NVA supplies discovered by Infantry patrols with double primed C-4 charges. I spent many days and nights deep in Delta mud. There were some 500,000 of us over there but out in the boonies it was complete isolation. Fire fights were a free-for-all. Red tracers outbound and the NVA or VC ammunition had green tracers. Some of their ammunition initially burned green then changed to red.

I also went to Cambodia in June of '70 for three weeks and discovered cache of supplies hidden in a cave like structure. While there I was under a B-52 strike less than a mile away. The tremendous noise of the bombs descending was like a wild animal roaring, getting louder and louder until the bombs stuck the ground. The concussion was ground shaking and felt like a long continuous earthquake. Looking up at the sky the B-52's were some fifty miles South at high altitude - contrails. We never heard them coming.

The characterization of the U.S. forces withdrawal from Vietnam was misstated as it would appear that men were going home early. No, they actually just didn't replace the one's whose tour of duty was over. So that meant, for those of us that had just arrived and for those arriving later, we had to look forward to living out our entire one year tour in country. Units were deactivated but the men who made up those units stayed in country reassigned where necessary. I spent my initial tour in the 9th Infantry then was reassigned to the 25th Infantry when the 9th Infantry was disbanded. Actually, toward the end of my year of duty I got a three week early release back home.

I actually liked the country, beautiful and many towns had the French influence of street design and buildings. But, it was third world. People living in shanties made of cardboard, flattened tin or aluminium cans, boards or whatever they could construct. A lot of children. They would come up to the truck whenever I had stopped. I gave them candy if I had some or whatever I had at the time.

My time for this series was "A Changing War (1969-1970). It's one thing to view this documentary but completely different to actually have lived it, all at the ripe age of nineteen!