80-Millimeter Changes
As a young man drafted into the US Army in September of 1965, I knew not what to expect from the oncoming experience.
The draft came through my neighborhood like a freight train roaring past a whistle stop, with no orders to halt. Drafting 50,000 young men and boys a month was par for the course in the autumn of that year.
Basic training in Fort Dix was essentially a disciplinary exercise accompanied by lots of physical exercise. Following that, so-called Advanced Infantry Training found me in Fort Gordon, Georgia at the Army’s Southeastern Signal School.
I was lucky to be there. As a kid I attended a vo-tech high school, and learned about electricity and electronics in the school’s Tech-Elec curriculum. About the same time I earned my Amateur Radio license, and became a ham radio operator.
Those skills must have been revealed in the Army’s screening tests, as my orders came down for Signal School. I was grateful.
The 21-week course at Fort Gordon was truncated to 18 weeks, hustling GIs through in order to fulfill the ever-burgeoning call for warm bodies in Vietnam. When orders finally came through to deploy to Vietnam I had a Military Occupational Specialty, or MOS, of 31E20. I was a Field Radio Repairman, and that suited me just fine.
After a brief stint in DaNang my 8-man repair team was sent to the central highlands of Vietnam, away from hot and steamy coastal DaNang and into the cool mountains and plains of the highlands.
There we set up shop in the back of a modified deuce-and-a-half. Although our team comprised eight men, only two of us could actually repair anything, as both of us were radio hams. The six others seemed afraid to go anywhere near anything electrical, and they certainly had little or few electronics repair skills. So much for Signal School.
Duty wasn’t too bad. Occasionally I’d be asked to hop a chopper and head out to fix some radios at a remote Special Forces base in Cambodia. Flying on the helicopters was an adventure in an otherwise uneventful day-to-day existence.
One day a new man was assigned to our detachment. Johnny was a young lad from Chattanooga who had enlisted as a volunteer. He set up shop in a truck next to mine. He said he was a calibration expert, and his van teemed with exotic electronics test equipment. What’s more, it was officially off limits for the rest of us.
As far as I was concerned I could see no reason whatsoever why the Army would want someone with expertise in the art of calibrating other types of electronics gear, but the Army must have had a need for Johnny, so there he was.
Johnny was an only child, and his parents in Tennessee sent him all sorts of goodies. He received feather pillows, for example, and cans of nuts, and home-baked cookies from his mom, and books to read. Everyone loved it when Johnny’s packages arrived.
In the wee hours of the morning of January 7th, 1967 we were awoken by loud detonations. These weren’t outgoing flare sounds; these were incoming rounds. The North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong were attacking our compound. Sappers were blowing up helicopters, and ol’ Charlie hurled 300 rounds of mortar fie at us to cover his ground assault.
The evening before this attack we were instructed to polish our muddy boots and to stack our rifles neatly at the end of our tent in anticipation of a morning inspection by a new sergeant fresh from Fort Gordon. He had been in-country only a few days at most, and you could see the straw between his toes and fingers. But he was throwing his weight around, so everyone followed orders.
Before hitting the sack I decided not to stack my rifle. I much preferred to keep it next to my cot, should the need for quick access arise. I decided I would place it on the stack just before the inspection.
That was a lucky decision for me. An 80-mm Chicom mortar round, filled with high explosives, landed precisely where the rifles were stacked. Johnny was blown to bits before my very eyes. Everyone else received shrapnel wounds. I was luckier. Not a scratch.
That mortar never recognized whether its target was a calibration electronics technician or a field radio repairman. It didn’t care about wading through rice paddies, or hacking jungle undergrowth. It didn’t care about packages from parents in Chattanooga. It cared not that Johnny was an only child, and had no business being in a combat zone.
War is a funny thing. War takes its toll in unexpected and irreversible ways.
I lost my youth that night in January of 1967. Since then my thoughts sometimes return to Johnny’s parents, and I still wonder how they ever coped with their loss.
Today, top-of-the-line Intel microprocessors are fabricated in South Vietnam.