The Dirty Boots: The Stories of a Reluctant Warrior

Copyright 2012 John F. Holm.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

isbn: 978-1-4669-4825-9 (sc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-4827-3 (hc)

isbn: 978-1-4669-4826-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913425

Trafford rev. 07/25/2012

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Contents

Acknowledgments

I

Life Before Vietnam

Join the Navy and See the World

Hospital Corps School

Fleet Marine Force Medic

Camp Le Jeune Naval Hospital

II

The Nam

Joining 1/9

LZ Stud

First Serious House Call

Combat Radio

It Had Hit the Fan in Leatherneck Square

Search and Destroy

Test Day

State Flag

Adventures in DMZneyland

Map Reading: How and Why

Daily Business or This is War

Animal Life

Well Armed

Firebase Ann

Out of the Mist

Hill 950/ Who Is Pig Pen?

Sweep Around Stud

Sea Knights, Hueys, and Jolly

Green Giants

LZ Moon

Chippendales in Vietnam?

Pillage and Plunder

When Pig Pen Flies

The Rock Pile

Khe Sanh Revisited

An Olive Green Christmas

My Christmas Miracle

Bullets Were Not the Only Dangers

That Was the Week That Was

Don’t Drink the Water

More Than One Way to Save a Life

Adapting to the Environment

Thon Xa Village

A Gourmet’s Guide to Vietnam

The Mess Hall

New Year’s Eve 1969

Not My Drugs

III

Dewey Canyon aka

the A Shau Valley

Casualties of War

The Gooney Birds

Left Behind

Keeping the Pressure On

Down by the Riverside

Where Purgatory meets Paradise

Boo Coo Busy Day

Once More into the Breech

Ho Chi Minh Mart

Closing the Trap

Out of the Bush

IV

Back to The World

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

A few special people come to mind when I think of whom to thank for making this project a reality.

My sons, Peter John and Andrew Christian, for encouraging me to write down my memories. Both have also been helpful when I fought with the computer.

Neitcha Valor for being at the right place at the right time to give a lot of computer help.

My sister-in-law, Dr. Stephanie Myers Schim, who took a part of her vacation time to do a read—through. She offered several good suggestions for clarity and helped fix some loose ends.

A wonderful friend and neighbor, Teresa Misco, MALS, for her editorial assistance, creative energy, encouragement, and moral support. She never changed a story and helped me make them easier to read.

The men who served with me, who inspired these stories and kept me alive to tell them. They will always be my heroes.

My loving wife and special friend, Harriet, who endured the process of this project in both time and clutter, who knew me before and loved me after, and has shared my life for forty-eight years.

Dedication

To my fallen comrades.

I

Life Before Vietnam

I have often said that there is a very thin line between heroism and stupidity; sometimes, only the final outcome determines the name by which it may be called if you survive it or if you don’t. Recently, I have read others’ recollections of some of the same situations that I will describe. It has shown me that people see a given situation slightly differently depending on who they are, where they are standing, and what they are doing at the time. I am sure that their accounts are just as accurate from their vantage point as I have tried to make mine. Since these stories are about me and it is a family history, you should probably know what led up to the events that follow.

After keeping my mother awake all night, I was finally born around eight in the morning of June 22, 1947, in Three Rivers, Michigan. It was here that I lived with my parents and two younger brothers, James D. and Jack A. Holm, a black and white English Setter named Lady, assorted cats, goldfish, turtles, and birds. Our paternal grandparents lived not too far away in our town. Our maternal grandparents lived on a farm a few miles outside town. We visited often with them, as well as with many aunts, uncles, and cousins. My father was a master machinist and worked in a factory, and when we boys were older, Mom worked in a five-and-ten-cent store. We were the kind of hardworking, blue-collar, middle-class American family that was very typical in our country during the post-World War II, Cold War years—a politically turbulent time during which the communist countries, led by the Soviet Union and China, and the noncommunist countries, led by the United States and most European nations, were trying to exert their power and ideals upon smaller countries around the world. Each side kept making rockets and atomic bombs, trying to be bigger and stronger, in hopes that the developing countries would choose to be like them. It truly was the biggest-kids-on-the-block-fighting-with-each-other scenario. Instead of actually fighting themselves, they used the smaller kids as pawns. They should have been working together to make the neighborhood a nice, safe place for everybody.

We lived in a two-story white house on a street lined with maple trees, across from our grade school, and only five blocks from the high school. We walked to school every day. Although it was not really uphill both ways, in the heavy Michigan snows, there were times it seemed that way. I was a cub scout and a school crossing guard on the corner of our street. I attended the Ninth Street Methodist church regularly and had a newspaper route for six years. I won the Inland Daily Press Newspaper Boy of the Year award twice during that time. I also played the coronet in the high school band, for which I earned my high school letters. I was notably not athletic, so receiving a letter in sports was not likely to happen. I was a fat, uncoordinated bookworm, who, during my sophomore year, stood five feet five inches tall and weighed 225 pounds. I had a few good friends but was never really a part of the in crowd. I studied hard, had a solid B grade point average, and because of a small part in the senior play, earned just enough extracurricular points to graduate from high school with honors.

In November of my junior year of high school, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, began increasing our troop strength in what was being called a police action in Vietnam. It was really a civil war between the communist-backed north and democracy-supported south. It was happening at a time when young people in their teens and early twenties had been challenged by President Kennedy to make a difference. In his inaugural address, he said, Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

This became the country’s youth mantra.

Many in my generation became very interested in the political process and formed opinions that did not always agree with the current policies. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum, women were becoming more liberated, and humans were preparing for the first steps on the moon. The nightly news was filled with images of large groups of young people demonstrating in the streets. Sometimes this was peaceful and sometimes not. From the battlefields of Vietnam came daily film footage of helicopters, explosions, and dead and dying soldiers. Truly, this was a time of change and growth in our country, complete with the inevitable growing pains.

Because I did not really want to be in a war and the military draft could be deferred for higher education, I applied to college and was accepted at both Western Michigan University and Central Michigan University. I chose the latter but did not do very well there. I was a small-town boy in a big school, with poor study habits and no specific goals. I did, however, meet a wonderful young woman, a dark-haired, hazel-eyed beauty with fantastic legs. When picking her up at her dorm, I would sit where the first part of her I always saw were her beautiful legs coming down the stairway. Her name was Harriet, and she would one day become my wife, but that was still a few years away.

Join the Navy and See the World

After two semesters, my poor grades made the possibility of being drafted a very real concern again. During World War II, my father had been on a Navy Destroyer in the Pacific. Since I had seen no blue or white uniforms on the six o’clock news in recent jungle combat footage, I went to the Navy Reserve Station in Kalamazoo and enlisted. I also enrolled at Southwestern Michigan Community College.

I did much better in a smaller school setting but still had no specific career goal in mind. So I got to thinking, which historically had seldom worked out the way I had planned it. My Navy pretest scores were high, and I could choose from many assignments. I had some interest in the field, so I decided to try medicine. That way I could experience the work, find out if it was something I really wanted to do, earn some money and GI education benefits that would allow me to continue with college, and stay out of Vietnam. If I did go, at least I would be offshore on a ship with three hot meals a day and a clean, dry bed.

Hospital Corps School

During the spring semester in college, I applied for and was accepted into Hospital Corps School, Class 86-67 in San Diego, California. This allowed me to finish the semester and begin my two years of active duty. Corps School was sixteen weeks of intensive training, shortened to fourteen weeks by adding night classes; more Corpsmen were needed because of the troop buildup in Vietnam. I learned many interesting things, like the fact that our enlisted men’s club, The Pink Palace (only in California), so named because of the pink color of the stucco covering it, was the place where Bill Cosby, one of my favorite comedians, had performed when he went to Navy Corps School. Liberty was usually spent teaching myself to play the guitar and going to the San Diego Zoo or Balboa Park. Both were just across the street from the hospital/school complex.

Our company nurse instructor was Lt. Commander M. A. Coefield. We all referred to her as Ma Coefield, with a great deal of respect, but not to her face. She was a very good instructor who had congenital amblyopia (also known as lazy eye), which in her case was not a good name for her condition. While her eyes did not track together, she could see equally well from either one. We got away with nothing in her classroom.

The person with the highest overall grade point average was the Honor Man of the company. He could pick his next duty assignment after school. Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Chicago was very close to home so I really wanted to be Honor Man. I studied very hard and came very close. I was the third highest out of forty and only missed the mark by 0.12 points. This was not too bad considering we had three college graduates, and the average educational level in my company was over two years of college.

About half way through school, I heard someone say, After graduation, the whole company is going to FMF training.

What’s that mean? I asked, not trusting any military anachronism containing MF.

Fleet Marine Force School, man.

Again. What’s that mean?

That’s where they teach us to be mini-marines.

Why would I want to do something like that?

Don’t you know anything, man? Navy corpsmen also serve as combat medics in the Marines.

No, I didn’t know that. So how do I change jobs?

You don’t want to do that, man. Rumor has it that hospital corps school dropouts or washouts (failures) are sent straight to swift boat duty in Vietnam.

Fleet Marine Force Medic

That certainly did not sound like something I wanted to do, so in September and October of 1967 it was off to Oceanside at Camp Pendleton, where we were issued our first set of green fatigues and met our next set of instructors.

Drill Sergeant Green and his staff were a mix of Marines and corpsmen, all with recent experience in Vietnam. Sergeant Green, an African American, could easily have been featured on a recruiting poster. Over six feet tall, just standing still in his crisp utility uniform, he inspired confidence.

The training was very demanding, both physically and mentally, because they knew what they were training us for. The higher our level of preparedness, the better were the chances of our survival and of the troops in our care. We marched or ran in formation to meals, classes, everywhere. We learned basic battlefield tactics and the language of combat so we could act and react as part of a fighting unit. We studied the basics of nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, along with map reading, and building field latrines and showers. Compass navigation, evasion techniques, and how to eat off the land were also part of the training.

Then came the medical part, learning how to give the most and best treatment to the men in our units with the resources we could carry or what was naturally available. We learned how to make a splint out of wood from an ammo box, a tree limb, a rifle, or even how to use an unbroken leg to immobilize a fractured one. Cellophane from a cigarette pack or C-rations could make an airtight patch over a sucking chest wound. We learned these and many other bits of knowledge, some of which I have continued to find useful over the years.

We spent hours practicing treatment drills, where half of us were the corpsmen and the other half played the wounded. As a casualty, you were assigned a wound or injury and would be lying on the ground alongside the grinder (an asphalt-covered area behind the barracks where we also practiced marching). As a corpsman you ran up to your patient, read the slip of paper that listed the wound/injury (it was assumed that some injuries would be so severe the man could not speak) and treat the injury. We did all this while the instructors walked up and down the line watching our work and constantly advising:

Keep your head and body down.

The wounded man may be your only cover.

Keep him between yourself and the incoming fire.

He is already shot and you’re not.

You are of no use to your men if you’re dead.

We ran this drill over and over and over, both in daylight and darkness. When we became good at it, we were taken out into the field to do it some more. Of course to get to the practice field/camping area, we packed our tents and equipment on our backs and marched in. The terrain was similar to the set where they filmed M*A*S*H* with dry hills and lots of sagebrush. We set up a camp, ate C-rations, and went through the drills again and again. Now each time we practiced, we had the added effect of being harassed by an aggressor force. Playing the roll of the enemy soldiers were men that had returned from Vietnam.

Corps School in San Diego had taught us how to take care of people in a nice, clean situation. Field Medical Service School at Camp Pendleton taught us how to do the job under much more adverse conditions. We were often in awkward and uncomfortable positions, using only what could be carried or made, all while being tired and a bit frightened. They made it as real as possible, and every one of us hoped that we would never have to use this knowledge.

We had been issued M14 rifles adapted to fire blank rounds, and if we were attacked, we could fire back. We were not really expected to take any offensive action, but nobody said we could not. One evening we came under attack from a very small number of individuals. What the heck, I thought. Combat does not have any hard and fast rules. My position was far to their left, so I would try to outflank them. Using the stealth skills taught to me by my father and grandfather while hunting, I was able to come up behind them, unseen. I shot one and captured the other two. Of course the advisors made me give them back, but it did feel good to score one for our side. We experienced the normal scratches and bruises from physical activity in rough terrain. The only real casualties on this drill occurred when a few of the men got lice from their sleeping bags. Fortunately, I was not one of them.

It was not all work, and we did get some time off. We were near the town of Oceanside, California, which had a train station. One weekend liberty I went into town and caught the Amtrak train to Anaheim where I made my first visit to Disneyland. For a kid from the Midwest, this was a dream come true. I did several of the rides. Pirates of the Caribbean and It’s a Small World were new back then. I also toured a few of the stationary venues and really liked the 360-degree theater. Suffice it to say, I had a wonderful time, even though I had to leave early to catch the train back and missed the famous Disney evening parade and fireworks.

A couple of weeks later Disney had an Armed Forces Day. They closed the park to all but military personnel and their families, so I was able to go a second time. This time I traveled in a semi-truck trailer, which had been