It gives an overall view of what was going on in Vietnam with the
dealings of the politics involved behind the scenes. Things that the Marines could do and
not do without the okay of the Vietnamese Government. A good start in trying to
understand what was going on.
Ronald H. Spector
(The Tet Offensive of early 1968 was supposed to mark a
turning point in the Vietnam War. But ins pit of a halt to the bombing of the North and
the onset of the Paris peace talks, the year that followed Tet saw the war’s fiercest
fighting, as a large and awesomely equipped American fighting force found itself bloodied
by an enemy that seemed to evaporate before the its firepower only to reappear once the
smoke cleared. Christian Science Monitor)
I have found this book to be highly informative about the
time I was in Vietnam. While it left a lot of questions, it answered and supported what we
in the trenches felt was going on. The politicians were running the war and didn’t know
what they were doing. For in trying to run the Vietnam War from Washington, it lost the
war due to ineffectual leadership. Handwringing of "what if scenarios" only
bolsters my contempt of politicians who when elected to the job are ineffectual and look
the over way when they know what they should do.
As a result of lessons learned here in Vietnam, our later
engagements in South America and Iraq wee successful. Also to the Vietnam Vets still in
the military who did not want to see another fiasco develop when the politicians try to
blame their ineffectiveness in Congress on the ordinary servicemen.
by
Keith William Nolan
"Alongside Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosin,
tomorrow’s Marines will add the name of Hue. For 26 days Marine infantrymen proved
the adage that in the nuclear age, it is still the rifleman’s courage and tenacity upon which
a conflict can turn. An excellent history of what may well have been the most sage,
sustained combat the Marine Corps saw in Vietnam. Perhaps no house-to-house combat
has been more bitter this side of Stalingrad."-Marine Corps Gazette
I found this book very informative for me. At least I now know
what led me to be put out in the field. On page 83 is this situation explained:
Sergeant Burghardt was with his platoon in what looked to be a hospital. They were
getting geared up to go across the open field in front of them to the next row of buildings.
Two point men started across. They ran past a trench in the field-then there was the
sudden clacking of AK-47s, and the two Marines fell wounded to the ground.
Burghardt saw it from the window, then shouted over to two
corpsmen crouched inside with them. He told one of them to get out there and get
them.
The corpsman he told to move was short - due to rotate home in a
couple of weeks. He balked.
Burghardt got angry and snapped, "You damn coward!"
Burghardt himself took off out the door. He sprinted across the grass, and went tumbling
down into the ditch. Fire cracked over his head. He reached out, grabbed one of the
wounded, and dragged him down in the ditch with him. By the time Burghardt was going
for the second man, the enemy fire had died down. The platoon came across and got
them.
This incident had occurred in Feb. 1968 between the 8th and
12th. I was sent out in the field on the 12th. I had been told that there had been a death
threat made against the corpsman and that we, the US Navy medical people, couldn’t
allow that to happen. This corpsman deserved another chance with another outfit. I never
met him. He was transferred to another outfit out of the area.
*
I didn’t realize, then but my ongoing nightmare just
began. In talking with Greg Holmes, the radioman who befriended me after Sergeant
Burghardt got wounded this past Dec, 1998, I finally realized what had been driving me all
this years while at work in the VA, I couldn’t stand being around incompetent people. It
was stressing me out. It was this life/death situation where I had put myself on a higher
level of achievement than the rest of the corpsmen did. I didn’t know who was going to
kill me. The enemy, Viet Cong because of me doing my job as expected or by my own
troops because of not being able to do my job as expected by the Marines. Once I realized
this, it seemed like my stress level started coming down.
On page 178, 2nd paragraph from bottom through 179, 3rd
paragraph from top is the story of the day Sergeant Burghardt got wounded. (I
figured it was about Feb. 23, since first action was about 3:40 A.M. on Wednesday,
January 31, 1968):
Burghardt and Neas were survivors. They’d been through
twenty-four days of it, weeks of running those streets, making it while half of Alpha
Company got killed or wounded, and they started sending up the rear-echelon Marines as
replacements. Now, they were leaving.
The Company started out in the morning, sweeping south, house to
house to a bridge on the eastern section of the South Side, along the canal. They were to
leave the city over that bridge. The Marines found nobody in their sweep, and finally,
Burghardt, Neas, and a couple of other grunts came around a small pagoda and stopped
behind a low wall. The two of them stood behind the bricks, shoulder-close, and
Burghardt waved two men across the bridge to secure the far side so the platoon could
move over.
The first man go on the bridge and enemy firing commence. The
AKs roared from nowhere, mortars came in, and the man on the bridge went down,
clutching his knee.
Then a burst raked over the wall, Burghardt saw a giant white flash
explode in front of his face and he went flying back against the opposite wall, his helmet
slamming down hard on his nose, crying out, "God, forgive me!" Neas lay
beside him against the wall, holding his arm. The same burst had put a round through it.
He put his hand up on Burghardt’s neck to let him know he’d been hit, and then he saw
the blood. He couldn’t believe his sergeant was wounded. A Corpsman ran up and
stripped off Burghardt’s flak jacket. The bullet had gone through his neck and ploughed
out his shoulder, so the doc tied a bandaged around the exit hole and gave him a shot of
morphine. Burghardt was scared, not because it hurt, but because it didn’t. He couldn’t’t
move.
(I was this corpsman who was merely trying to do his duty. I had
worked on 7S, a Neurology/Neurosurgery ward at Great Lakes Naval Hospital which
dealt with neck and spinal chord injuries. I did everything I could think of to prevent
further damage. I didn’t want him to be paralyzed like some of the ones I had taken care
of.)
Neas started crying as he watched the corpsman work on
Burghardt, as Burghardt kept calling to him by his nickname Alphie, asking him to find his
wallet. Neas hardly hurt from his arm wound, but his heart felt like it had been ripped out
as he stared at his good friend and trusted sergeant being loaded on a door for evacuation.
Somebody dragged up the Marine who’d been shot on the bridge, and a Marine
nicknamed Hoppy pulled up in a jeep. They laid Burghardt across the back on a stretcher,
Neas and the other man climbed aboard, and Hoppy hauled off for the Hue stadium.
Things started going fuzzy for Burghardt. They got to the stadium LZ and he could feel
the cold mist in the air, and then he was being carried on an Army chopper. They landed
at Phu Bai. Another short wait and he was in another helicopter. Within two hours of his
being wounded, the corpsman aboard the hospital ship Repose in the South
China Sea were pushing him into the operating room.
The next day, the doctors told him what had happened. The round
had nicked his spinal cord, causing bone chips to sever some of the nerves. He was
paralyzed. A quadriplegic. That second day on the ship, he was strapped to his bed with
his head fastened in a brace, when an officer pinned the Purple Heart to the sheets.
During the third week aboard the hospital ship, a newspaper article
about him appeared in Stars & Stripes, and some of the corpsmen taped it
above his bed. The headline read "Marine Kills 7 in Hue Battles." By then,
Burghardt could barely move his left arm.
Sergeant Burghardt had been my first battle casualty in Hue and
as it was also my first firefight. I was just trying to do my job in taking care of my
Marines. Doc Tura came by sometime later on in the day and had told me the bad news of
Sergeant Burghardt being a paraplegic. He told me even though I had done everything
right it was the bullet wound that did it. I had forgotten this part over the years but in
reading about this it came back to me.
After I had treated Sergeant Burghardt, I ended up treating another
black Marine who supposively got a piece of schrapnal in his hand. I did what I had been
trained to do, only this time after we had gotten settled in for the night, it came over the
radio that the captain wanted to see that raw green corpsman who gave him his fourth
Purple Heart. This occurred after the Marine had accepted me and started kidding me
about my lack of concern for my safety. I chain smoked a while and shook a little
too.
There are a still a lot of fuzzy areas in my mind as to where I was at
any given time. In reading this book you get a feeling that days run into one another and it
became easy for an individual to loose all sense of time. The only way I could keep track
of time was to write letters to family and friends. I wish that I had those letters today
because at least then maybe it would help me continue to piece this time period
together.
THE GRUNT PADRE
by
Father Daniel L. Mode
Many people have written raves about this book how it had inspired them to go on
striving to do their best under dismal odds and conditions. I can’t describe how it had
affected me that easy. You see, I remember hearing about this Navy Chaplain back in
Feb, 1968. Something was said about a Navy Chaplain being killed in the fall of 1967.
He was well liked and respected by all the Marines in 1st Marine Division. While I felt
some remorse at the time I had thought “That’s Life”.
While I was at the 1st Marine Division Association Reunion in San Diego in
August 2000, I met Father Mode after he had given his talk about “How I came about
writing about Father Vincent Robert Capodanno, a man who died when I was only 6
months old.” I told him how during his talk a chord was struck in me about this man
who I never met. I had to find out more after realizing that the Navy Chaplain and
Father Capodanno were the one and the same.
Something compelled me to go and get this book and to start immediately to
read. I was drawned by this Man’s willingness to serve under very hard circumstances
without concern for his own safety. He ended up dying going to the aid of a downed
Corpsman ARMANDO GARZA LEAL, JR.,who had been fallen going out to aid a Marine. I realized as I read on that I
needed to continue in my struggles because of Father Capodanno. I and every
Vietnam Vet owes it to him to try to continue bring peace to our fellow man, to continue
to help and most of all to never forget the sacrifices we made then in trying to help
others nor to ever forget Father Capodanno.
As I finished this book, I took another deep long look at myself. I was ready to
give up and retire from the medical profession. I felt like everything had been closing in
on me, that all was for naught. I remembered another time that I had taken a deep look
inside to see if I was doing what God had intended for me to do. I realized at that other
time that I was intended to work in Medicine to help people. So after being Medically
Retired from the Service due to my wounds and going on to college becoming a
Physical Education Teacher, teaching for 2 years and losing a star athlete to a bicycle
accident late at night, I got back into the medical profession believing that I could make
a difference.
I realize now that I have made a difference in those lives that I touched. So I am
now asking you to get and read this book,”THE GRUNT PADRE by Father Mode who
has donated all monies from this book to The Reverend Vincent Robert Capodanno
Foundation to continue to take care of “His beloved Marines” located at:
The Reverend Vincent Robert Capodanno
Foundation
Mr. B.G. Burkett is a Vietnam Veteran with a different outlook on
Vietnam. He volunteered for the Army because "The logical choice was the Air
Force, but slightly high blood pressure and an inner-ear problem meant I couldn’t pass the
pilot physical." He went through basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in
June, 1966 and graduated in September. He went to Advanced Infantry Training at Fort
McClellan, outside Anniston, Alabama. He then went to the Ordnance Officer Candidate
School at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in Nov. 1966 as Sgt. B.G. Burkett for 6
more months of training. He graduated in May 1967 as a second Lieutenant.
He did not volunteer right away for Vietnam. ( ) He was assigned
to the 1st Armored Division at Fort Hood, near Waco, Texas and assigned to a computer
project. He worked there for 9 months before making a formal request to be assigned to
duty in Vietnam. Finally after repeated requests his orders came through in April of 1968.
He reported to Fort Lewis for overseas processing and shipment. While here he learned
of his making first lieutenant. He then was at McChord Air Force Base outside Tacoma
Washington. He left June 11, 1968 to Anchorage then Yokota, Japan. He entered
Vietnam on approximately June 12, 1968.
He reported to Qui Non where he had been assigned prior to leaving
the States. On the second day there, he was assigned to the 199th Light Infantry Brigade
located at Camp Frenzell-Jones near Bien Hoa. In reporting there he was assigned to be a
"material readiness expediter" (dog robber in Navy). So instead of being
assigned out in the field he started his illustrious tour as a rear echelon officer procuring
supplies. He was assigned a room (8x9sqft) in an officers barracks, his home for 11
months. This time period is known now as mini-TET. (He served with B Company of the
7th Combat Support Battalion. His duties consisted of fire marshall and leader of a rifle
platoon. ( He lived comfortably in the rear while others were out in the bushes.)
He shipped out May 5, 1969 from the 90th Replacement Depot three days later.
While I have the highest respect for Mr. Burkett in his efforts in
bringing back the Honor to all Vietnam Vets, he has a completely different viewpoint from the rear
of what was really going on than the men who were out in the field. His closest call ,
other than getting mortared once a month () was taking photos , tore a gouge in his knee
and the day a VC leaped on his jeep’s hood in Saigon. He also spoke of his reckless
behavior after a friend received an unexpected promotion. My impression of his time is
that he is looking at the war through rose colored glasses when he denounces PTSD and
the effect being out in the field had on a human being. Otherwise, it was well written.
