Michael's Dispatches

If I may: I be leave Pvt. Garris was doing his duty. Simple as that. Thank you Pvt. Garris, Welcome Home.

[quote name="Heinz Rainer"]Sorry Sir,
What exactly was your business in the Vietnam - Laos border area. I went there in 2012, and now after 40 years we have innocent kids losing their limbs from land mines and other ordnance which the US never removed from these areas.
You may have been wounded but you should not have been there in the first place.
:sigh:[/quote]

Thank you for your interest in my story. Since I was only a PFC at the time, I was not privy to the strategic or tactical deployment orders of the divisional command for that company level movement, that day. However, what I've learned since is that we were one of several companies of the 1st Cav that were sent out to clear the area of enemy troops, subsequent to our mission to relieve the Marines at Khe Sanh FOB. They had been surrounded by NVA since before the Tet Holiday Offensive in early February 1968. I had arrived in Vietnam at about the same time that Tet began, so I hadn't been there very long -- about three months. When the Cav attacked, it was the largest (two brigades) cavalry charge in our history -- horse, armor or chopper -- up to that date. We came in in several waves of massed helicopter sorties, landed on the tarmac at Khe Sanh under artillery fire, among the destroyed hulks of helicopters and C130 and Caribou cargo planes that littered the landing strip. It looked like the trenches of the Western Front in WWI. The next day we were deployed to the Old French Fortress, a former base of the French Foreign Legion in 1954, which was completely leveled by our B52 bombing. Later, we went back to Khe Sanh FOB, then walked out on the 9th of May, through the deserted Khe Sanh village and the destroyed Lang Vei Special Forces Base, toward the southwest. As we came close to the river gorge marking the border with Laos, we stopped for a break, and while I was kneeling down on my rifle, I set off a booby trap that tore into my knees and threw me in the air. I wasn't too badly wounded, but I couldn't walk very well. My courageous squad members took turns carrying or dragging me up the hill to where the medivac could land. The commander of the Medivac refused to send in his Dustoff choppers, so the battalion commander was going to come in for us. After his chopper was nearly shot out of the air, he withrew, but an unknown (to me) pilot of a Medivac helicopter took the chance against his own commanders orders to come for me and another three wounded.

I hope this satisfies you, Mr. Rainer. As a matter of fact, I agree with you. We shouldn't have been there. But I didn't understand that then as an 19 year old, Gung Ho grunt. I had to come home, go to college to study history, before I understood the truth.