New Mexico and the Vietnam War: Portrait of a Generation; Interview with Don Loftis, Disc 1 of 2

Speed. Speed. Let's just do a little bit of warm up. All right. And then I'll ask you like what was memorable. But, um, and relax, take a deep breath. Um, how did you get into the service? Well, it was very, very strange in 1968, 1967, when the draft calls were 80, thousand a month. You know, everybody was concerned. You go to check your grades at the professor's door and guys would go, Oh, no, I'm going to Vietnam now, you know, because they got an ask for whatever. So, uh, there's a lot of contemplation. Do I go down and try to, try to sign up or go wait and see what happens? And I sort of waited and then I was drafted. And then, uh, but I caused I was a college graduate. They allowed me to take a test and I said, you can go to officer candidate school. So that, that's, that's how I got started. And then, uh, but it was basically a draft. What did you think when you got drafted? Well, you know, it, it sort of ended up climatic because they give you a notice just to take

a physical and then you would take a physical and then you, uh, pass it and that means then you start getting serious. You know, that you're on the block. This was before the lot, lot, the lottery. So you knew your memorable moment was standing there in the line, uh, that you, where you had to give your analysis test. And the guy next to me, one new was a football player, you know, a six foot five to 180 pound physical monster. And, uh, he flanked his physical, you know, even though he was a star on the football team, you know, he kind of, and I, I passed mine, of course, with flying colors. So he didn't have any to worry about. I did in terms of the draft. What were you worried about? Well, you know, what, what do you do? You know, no, your life is totally up to someone else. You know, you're, you're not in charge anymore. You're in charge, Uncle Sam now is in charge. So then you don't know anything about it. I didn't come from a military family. Uh, so you're, you're ready

to go. You know, and all you hear are the negative things. At least that's what sticks with you, the positive things. You kind of sleep away and concentrate on the negative. So yeah, it was a lot of unknowns. The big thing was you're not in charge. Uncle Sam's in charge and see what's happening. You know, that was, that was interesting. Okay. And you could just say, like, reinforce what we talked about. Right. Or scared. No, it wasn't scared because, you know, there's a lot of time between when you go and then when you actually enter combat, but you don't, you know, you might end up being a truck driver or a clerk or someone that's not in the harm's way. And so it, no, I wouldn't afraid. I wouldn't scared. Why don't you drop, notice it? What did it read like? You know, report to the Houston in processing station and don't bring any clothes and don't, you know, bring your social security card and be prepared to not return home that night. That was,

that was a, I think the message. Well, I'm going to say question again. Maybe you could say, you're done. Yeah. Yeah. You're done, Uncle Sam, won't you? No, that, that would be, you know, what you see from the sign, I won't you? No. You're a lot of technical stuff in there about where to show up, what to wear, when to be there, et cetera. But the big thing that news was, you're drafted, you're coming, you know. So, say this for an idiot. You're done. Okay. Cool. All right. Um, I take it. Did you fly one of those, uh, um, US carrier flights over or how did you get over? It was some, um, it was a charter. I don't remember the name of it and it left out of Oakland. Very interesting flight, though. And, you know, it's, there's a saying and I hope I don't offend anyone that the

closer you get to Vietnam, the uglier the stardust is get, you know. And so you'd stop in Guam, you stopped in Calcula or, you know, various couple of places before you got there. And then I arrived new, you know, New Year's Day. And I don't remember the effect of an international date line and all that stuff. But when we landed the, the, the head stardust said, welcome to Saigon. Happy friggin' New Year. And everybody sort of went on a churring, you know, for New Year's Day. But when we arrived, you, you, you, from all the war stories in your training, you think you're gonna have to get, get a helmet on and crawl off the plane into a ditch and because it was gonna be combat everywhere. Wrong. But the funny thing is, some person who had a lot of real humor in his life set up a process where as you walked off, the guys waiting to get in your, going home, you walk side-by-side

where they jeered the hell out of, you know. There's my, you know, and, and you're scared, you know, you're getting nervous and they're going home. And side-by-side, not a very, kind of a cruel way to, uh, introduce someone to the war. What did it smell like? What did it feel like? What were you thinking as these guys are gearing up here? Oh, you're just trying to ignore it. You know, I mean, there's nothing you can do about it. And, and of course, you're astonished that everything looks kind of normal. You know, I mean, it looks like an airport and an airport, you know. And, uh, earlier discussions about the arrival, you get there and you put on a bus and the only thing that looks like there might be danger is the, the wire over the windows. But other than that, you're, you know, form your, it's nice day and you're driving to, and you look out your right and you see people playing softball and volleyball

and probably a swimming pool. Hey, this, this war is okay. You know, this is pretty nice. Go to a fairly nice barracks. You check in and, uh, go through some classes and the next day you're, you're sent out to another, uh, headquarters. In this case, uh, two-field forces headquarters. And it was in an old French officers club. Very nice. At night, we played poker. Had a, had a good meal. And then, uh, went to, to a division compound. Very nice. And, you know, long story short, but the time I got to the unit that I was with, it was total culture shock. Absolute culture shock. What was your job? I was a, uh, a senior advisor to a Vietnamese infantry battalion. Um, back, uh, as part of that story was, when I finished a OCS, I stayed at Fort Benning, my roommate, uh, stayed at Fort Benning. And we all got

our orders after about three or four months. He had the 101st Airborne. I had the 101st Airborne. Then, uh, an edict comes down and says, we need 500 to the tenants and captains to go to language school and become advisors. Well, they said, we, we checked your records and, you know, in reality, this went down eight through L. Then they got to L. They had their 500. So I went to language school. My buddy, Joe Rufti went to, uh, 101st Airborne. And I didn't, of course, that delayed me getting there because I had to go to 26 weeks of school. Joe Rufti was killed a month. I got there, uh, January 21st, hamburger, hamburger hill. So those, those, uh, coincidence, uh, you know, I just happened to be lucky. I'm around at the right end of the alphabet, I guess. And, uh, so that, that was my job. Okay. Well, that's, like, kind of a lot of light coming in. Okay. You were in charge of

it. How big your group? Well, I was not in charge. I was a senior advisor to the, uh, battalion commander. And a battalion is about, uh, Vietnamese battalion was about, uh, 600 men. And, you know, three, three infantry companies, headquarters company. And, uh, their mission was to close with and destroy the enemy. And what, what kind of advice did you give? I'm giving you my, my counterpart, number one, had been the, uh, in that unit for 13 years, fighting VC, you know, 13 years. I've been there 13 days. You know, I wasn't giving a lot of advice. So what advisors really ended up being like they are today in Syria, uh, Afghanistan, et cetera, are provide combat support, artillery, airstrikes, uh, medivacs,

logistics, and going and help them running an, uh, an aerosol on helicopters, because you're speaking at least they don't necessarily. And you sort of run those operations with battalion commander still in charge. It was an example of one of those operations. Well, I'll give you one. Uh, we used to go to a little town called Bindlock, a Bindlock, which was a Navy base headquarters and catch these, uh, LSTs of French landing craft and go up the river with, and they had advisors, Navy folks, and they had alpha boats. And we'd go up the river and, and then at the correct spot, we would pull off. And then everybody would, would, would, would, uh, dismount the boats and start wandering in the Vietnamese, you know, each probably weighed 105 pounds versus American at 160, 180, 190 pounds. And they would, they would tip, tip across the water. And we would sort, sort, crawl, uh, to

barely move because the mud would be up to your waist. And then you, you 40, 50, 60 pounds in your back, you just had to crawl. That's the only way you could get out. So then you would spend 15, 20 days in, in this area between that river and Cambodian border, uh, looking for tassets, looking for enemy, uh, looking for, uh, uh, interesting thing you could find. But mainly you were looking at tassets because they would bring them down on all these canals, dump them in the river. And then the, the V.C. could come and retrieve them and then take them back into South Vietnam to, to use. So we were trying to break that chain. That's one example. Did you? Well, you know, you don't know. We, the first, very first operation I went on, we had, uh, five different, huge cache A's we found. So significant. I didn't know, but the CIA even flew out and looked and took some samples. And so whatever it was was pretty significant that the CIA would be interested. And, uh, and it was more

than we could carry. We had to bring in helicopters to lift it all out. But, uh, yeah, I think we were successful on that one. But overall, how do you know, you know, you can't get in shot at. So, um, did you get shot at a lot? Well, you know, remember I was a battalion senior advisor. So on an ambush, for example, you go out to squad level, nine or ten men. You don't have any Americans with them. You're back from behind them, maybe half a, half a mile. But the battlefield has no front. So, you know, there's sometimes you got directly shot at. Sometimes they were shooting it. The people in front of you and you were catching the end of it. But, uh, you know, I don't know. That's a hard one to answer. You know, but I know many times I would, in my youthful ignorance, I got to raise my head. My 13 year experience counterpart would grab me by the shirt and blow me down because he knew more than I did

if I were the bullets were flying. And thankful. One time though that I remember, we set up an asymmetry. And, uh, you know, it just happened to be a lot of, you know, cover from the tombstones. And boy, it was like a western movie with the zings off of the tombstones that going all around you. But, uh, something funny that night, there were four hootches out in front of the cemetery and we started getting fire from, from one of them. And one of the things I used to do was always call in elimination the big flares. So we could see what was going on while we were getting our mortars ready as the US artillery. And so the second one I called the flare, the parachute didn't deploy. So this flare went straight down and hit that hoot for the enemy was. And the Vietnamese looked at me like I was somebody from God, you know, that could do that, that accurately. And they were always asking me

to put flare on that. I said, go on guys, I'm not that good. So that was an interesting example of, uh, sheer luck. You mentioned you were working with there. Um, what did you think of the troops? I mean, you were coming from America, you're coming into a new, um, military environment. How would you describe the troops to us? Well, you, you, you, because of the negative publicity that the Vietnamese were getting before you laugh reading, you know, listening, uh, you, you expected the worst. And when you got there, you, I was, uh, very, very, very, I was impressed. Number one, the length of time that they had been doing this. And number two, uh, the, the lack of training in a sense that, you know, we kind of have a way to jail people in the States like I did for four or five months before you went over. They, they come out of their training. They go straight to a combat unit. And

the next day, their own operations. So, uh, you know, the, the one thing you get in any of these third world countries is corruption. So the corruption, you know, trickles down and bubbles up. Example, if you, uh, didn't want your son to be a machine gunner, then if you paid a little bit of money, or, you know, when you went to the unit, the sergeant major would take that money and make sure he got in the headquarters. And then Pearl Joe, who didn't have any wealthy family, he carried that machine gun. So some of that stuff you, you, you've tolerated because that was their life. That was the way it happened. But it did, it did help, it didn't help them around a lot, I don't think. The one thing I did notice, I went on an operation one time and went purposely right in a squad ambush just to see how good they were at what they were doing. And, uh, we had, we had a contact. And four guys walked in front of us. We fired every, uh, piece of ammo we had, didn't hit

a thing. So I went back to my counterpart. I said, you know, we, we need to, we need to have some marksmanship training. These guys can't, they can't, they can't hit a barn, you know. So we did, we brought in and it was, I think the battalion commander was a little embarrassed because it was like he realized how bad they were at, at firing, you know, that bad. So, and it helped a lot though, the marksmanship training, we brought in some US, uh, from the 25th Infrared Division over to, you know, provide the training. It was really helped. Why don't you feel about making your difference? Yeah, I, I think so. You know, you, you, you had so little time because we, we would go, our soccer would be 28 days in operation and back for three days of rest in recuperation and cleanup and then out again for 28 days. And a lot of time for training in that, in that scenario. So, um, you know, basically, I, I don't think I had a big impact because of that, of this opt-tempo, we're going all the time. And I don't think I gave

a lot of great advice because counterpart, like I said, had been fighting VC for 13, 14 years. In fact, I asked him when I said, how did you become a battalion commander? He said, well, 13 years ago when I joined this battalion, I'm now the only, only, only one of the lieutenants still alive. All the rest of them. So he rose to be the commander. But he was pretty good too. Interesting guy, uh, no, he spoke relatively good English. I went in one day and he was studying, studying something. Every time I'd seen when he went working, he would study. And what are you studying? He said, I'm studying Chinese. He said, I, I can speak French. The French left. I had to learn English because you were coming. You're going to leave. Now the Chinese will go. Very perspective. The health of perspective he had, you know, and it's true. Chinese are there now. And the Americans are not. When we did go, uh, when, when we, when I felt like, when I, when, when I felt like I was

doing some good is during the Cambodian invasion. If you remember, Nixon authorized the American and Vietnamese forces to go into Cambodia to attack the sensuaries that, that the North Vietnamese had built up from the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And, uh, so that was suddenly became a conventional war, not a insurgency. We had, there were front lines and you were moving, you had, you had brought into North Vietnamese force. You had to use, uh, friendly modern tactics to, to, uh, take them out. And, uh, and I was, I think I helped him a lot because, you know, a couple of times, uh, he, he, he didn't, you could tell he wasn't quite sure what to do. And, and I was able to, uh, give him some advice particularly in how to fire, suppressive fire while another unit moves.

He was just moving the unit and the unit would begin under fire instead of suppressing that enemy and then letting the unit move. So I think he learned that for me. I don't think he'd ever admit it. But, but I handed him about that. And then, uh, one time, you know, I said, you got to, can't be bashful when, when you have a need for armor, don't be bashful. You don't have any, but call your regimental commander and get tanks and, and, and, and assault vehicles. And we had a, when we were pinned down, good move, had a lot of casualties. And I get, and he finally called the armor and they, we were here. The enemy was here and he flanked them with, with the tanks and, and, uh, armed personnel carriers and routed the enemy. So that was a, it took three days to do that, but it was a pretty, uh, pretty good lesson that we learned. So you probably, what's going through your mind? Give us a community example.

Well, you know, you probably heard this from other veterans that, no, I'm going to, yeah, in the left corner of your mouth, you got a little something there. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Do you need a drink or are you good? No, I'm fine. Okay. The, um, you probably heard this from other veterans that, you know, Vietnam was five minutes of sheer terror. It's all about two, three weeks of boredom, because, you know, in Firefox, it's the other way it is. You go out and you set up ambushes or you run into somebody and then you'll go another week or so, and nothing will happen. And so what you're thinking of is number one, am I, am I behind something that will protect me? And number two is ensure that the visor to the commander in his primary source of firepower. Uh, let me see, let me start trying to get artillery or, uh, illumination or gunships or whatever is needed. Let me start working that and you're immediately get on the radio and start

getting some attention. And then when he's ready to tell you where he wants it and you're, and you're not waiting that five or ten minutes, you've got it ready. So you're not, you're not really thinking, you're not scared because you don't have time to be scared. You're thinking about what you got to do. If you lay there and did nothing, you'd really get scared. Okay. Um, back to the Vietnamese troops a little bit. Uh, uh, the individual troop like, I mean, how would you describe the soldier there? Because they've heard so many different things. How do you, what was your experience with the soldiers themselves? Um, you know, it's a, that's a very, very difficult question to answer. And, and I, I found that, um, you know, we, we, our motives, but we, we operated in Vietnam, not in Cambodia in Vietnam. We, we would go find an area and set there and saturate it. And we would put like a wagon wheel. We would have stretches of units out into circle.

And we would set there in the middle and basically what we were doing is starving them out. Eventually, somebody's got to come out of the hole and go, go get something to eat or go get food or go get ammo. And, and so when the daytime, we'd sleep and then we'd stay up all night and move around and look and, and, and sure enough, we'd catch somebody or capture them, kill them, whatever. They'd have a shopping list, you know, five bottles of Newt Mom and three, three ducks and four chickens and, you know, that kind of thing. So, so it worked very well, but, you know, the, the US's thought was, well, we ought to be maneuvering all the time and doing, and, and, and so when we got complain one day, a company commander from another unit came to coordinate and we were asleep. And we just like to get into these all, just sleeping and laying around and I said, number, number one, I said, we, we do this 28 days a row and we go out every night and we stay out all night and we, we rest in a day time. I said, plus these guys have been doing this for 13, 14, 15, 15 years and,

and they're not in, they're not in a big rush. They know this isn't going to be over in one year like we think we're going to do. So, respect them or that. This is their country. This is their war. This is the way they're fighting it. They're not setting back in some base camp. They're out here in the field fighting every day and they're not getting many rewards. They're not going on R&R. They don't have a PX to go to. They don't have a bunch of fancy Bob Hope shows to go watch. I said, this is their life and it's not a very, very good life. But that's what, that's what they've been signed up to do. So, I think we should look at it in their perspective. Yeah, they were pretty good soldiers. I mean, we fought toe-to-toe with a North Vietnamese regiment in one in Cambodia. And I've even got their battle flag that was given to me in front of the enemies. The regimental, the North Vietnamese regimental battle flag that we captured.

So, yeah, I think, I think they were okay. I'm having a guy to write. If you could just, because we're editing this, it's not, you know, you know, we'd be sleeping during the day because we'd be out all night. Right. You'd just say that kind of clearly. Yeah, yeah. We would, our, our motives of operations would be to sleep all day and originally slept all day because we stayed up all night. Okay. So, I got that in the corner of your mouth. I'm going to get him a little while. Hold on, you're, you're, you're wired in. Yeah. What was the field operation like? I mean, you know, you know, paint a picture for me. I mean, we were doing this and we were doing that or I was standing here and this happened or, I should try to somehow get a better feel because, um, you, earlier, you talked about going into Cambodia and going on highway one, things like that. So, we just give us an example of one of those operations that, um, you were working on. One that's memorable. Oh, yeah, I'll give you one,

it was almost a mistake. Um, so when, when, when the word came out about Cambodia, you know, we didn't get that word. We just, they started moving people. So, they started moving people. Yeah. So, during the Cambodian, pre, pre, prior to the Cambodian invasion, they did a lot of movement of, of troops around. And the troops didn't know. I didn't know what, what we were moving around for. So, um, we, we were to move and take over a base camp right on the edge of the mission of a rubber plantation right near a place called Nui Baudin by Virgin Mountain. South of Tainian. And, uh, it's an old French fort. And, uh, so, they didn't get the word that we were coming to replace them. And, and so we pull up and one of the worst things you can do is have two different units intermingled

in the same place. Gotta get in fights. They'll steal from one another, etc. So, they said, all right, we didn't know you were coming. So, just go down here to this corner of the rubber plantation by this little village and, uh, and spend the night and then we'll work out tomorrow. You get moving in. So, we went down there totally unannounced. And, uh, so some of the, some of the things that you hear about the Vietnamese units may be, there's two different ones. There's kind of the, the home militia and then the tactical regular units. I was in a tactical regular unit. The ones that stayed around the villages were the militia. So, what we found that was happening in this particular area, the militia would let, would every night before they'd get the list of the ambushes, they would let the VC know where the ambushes were and the VC could go and come, and there wasn't anybody getting shot and it was a nice arrangement. So, suddenly here, after all the lists have been changed, here is suddenly 500 Vietnamese troops parked right in

the middle of this village. And, uh, so I'm never, never forget, we were staying in this guy's front yard out to the right. And, suddenly, uh, shooting started and then I look over to the front door of this little hooch that the guy lived. And he comes out with an AK-47 and just starts spraying everybody. We shot him, of course, but I mean, here we are. Absolute chaos in this village. I don't know, half of them were VC, I guess, because they all had AKs. They're all shooting at us. And so, we moved some units and maneuvered and they started moved out into a creek bed, started going down the creek bed, and then it had mortars with them, so now they were mortaring us. It's an indirect fire. So, you know, we were in there, we didn't know anything about, we were getting fought from all around. We had guys that we were trying to keep track of, uh, leaving and shooting us. So, my counterpart asked me if I could get some gunships,

because they knew that artillery was, we were too close for, for artillery. So, I called gunships, and we, you know, you have a strobe light, you have a lot of strobe, and it blinks so they know that you're not the one to shoot, that was a strobe light, and pop smoke, if you had to. So, you had them pop and smoke to mark your positions, and the pilots could see this string bed, and I said, just start pouring it on that string bed. So, I did, and I had the, one of the staff officers in this other unit calling me up, what are you doing? Your waste, you're getting, you know, you're, I said, we're killing enemy and leave us alone. And, you know, one of the rules is, you never overcome, try to overturn somebody's decision, when they're on the ground and you're in a, in a building, you know, looking at a map. So, I just ignored him until he was alone. So, the next morning, we finally get into the thing, and we did our sweep of that string bed, found 13 dead enemy, from those, from those gunship

attacks. And so, I mean, the fact I was in the bathroom, and this guy pulled up, so, well, he really caused a rocket's last night, because he didn't know yet what the body cat was. Yeah, we did, did real well, and told him, and he was all upset that we'd done so well, I guess. But, you know, that was an example of one that was very strange, and ended up very well, though. We didn't, we had no casualties, that was, that was pretty good. Okay. Um, you said, what was it like to be chasing people through the night trying to uh, keep up with them and not get shot? Hmm. Well, nowadays, of course, uh, you look at all these clips on people's helmets, and they have very nice night vision goggles that I can use. The thing that you had for night vision, if you had any, was a color star light scope, and it was about this big, weight about 15 pounds, and gave you maybe a hundred meters of visibility at best,

real grainy, real hard to look at. So, basically, you, you didn't use it, you know, because you, you could barely see out of it. So, I, I don't, I don't know, uh, again, it's one of those you, you don't, you don't think about it when you're, when, when, when the combat's there, and those things are happening, you just, you know what your job is, you're trying to do your job. You, you, you, uh, do your best to move to a position where you're not as vulnerable as you could be. Like, I remember this guy had a whole ton of tin stacked up, I guess, to build a, a new house or something, and we got in and around that tin to help, help protect us, because it would really make a noise when the rounds were hitting it. But, um, yeah, you're just, uh, you, you try, the biggest thing at night, in that instance, when we were, not in there after dark anyway, that 500 troops spread all over the place, is to not have people shooting each other. That was probably the biggest fear, because our, because we, we didn't have anything rehearsed, planned or plotted.

We just were there and, and, and so the commander did a great job of telling people not to fire unless you were fired up on. And then only then, but don't start, you know, shooting it, what you're not, not aware of. So, otherwise, if, if we let everybody kind of loose, we'd have had self-inflicted casualties across the dude, but he kept them, kept them under control, and that, that worked out pretty good. So, what do you, I'm still interested into your mind a little bit here, and, and place me there on the ground with you, and what you're seeing, and what's going on around you. I'm, I'm just giving you snippets of exciting things you remember. This is back, now we're going to switch to Cambodia again, okay? Well, you've already set up the, the stream bed thing, that's why I was asking you. Oh, the stream bed, okay? Well, you know, the, the big thing, my fear was that I was going to hit, fit, fit, fit, friendlies. I went in from either the area, very much at all.

In fact, I, I kind of looked at the map to determine there was a stream bed. I didn't even seen it, you know, the daylight. So, I just assumed there was a stream bed there, because it was on the map. You could sort of see a little bit of the entrance of that, of that stream bed. But my biggest fear was there was another piece of the village over there, and I was going to hit it, you know, that was what I was afraid of. Now, the potential, you know, they have an vision they can see better than you can. They would have probably cautioned me if they had it, had been another village or something. But my biggest fear was hitting friendlies or, or civilians. I wouldn't, wouldn't worry about it. And the enemy, you know, he turned that strobe light on. So, the first day of, he turned that strobe light on the mark. And of course, that started drawing fire. At least I was smart enough and learning enough then. When you turn the strobe light on, you, you toss it out away from you. Otherwise, no. And sure enough, they were shooting at that strobe light. Are there longer two guys where I guess.

But if you just let it yourself and held it up, you would have been a better donor. So, yeah. You know, again, yeah, you're scared to death because a figure of necessarily getting shot, but you don't, you immediately get out of that and go into what you're mission, what are you trying to do, get those, get the gunships, get the artillery, get elimination going. You don't, you generally have your artillery and elimination going at the same time. You have helicopters because you can actually shoot your own helicopter out of the air accidentally. How do you shoot at somebody and I know what you're doing? Well, again, being a, being an advisor and as a battalion commander, you know, I carried an, an M-16. But if I was shooting my M-16, I wouldn't do my job. So, you know, I wasn't physically John Winning at all because my, my, my weapon was my handset and my radio because that's where I got all the firepower. And that was my job.

So, I didn't worry about, you know, you know, firing at night. Generally, if you shoot at night, you send ten to shoot too high in the dark. So, you train soldiers to shoot lower. But other than that, you can, you can, if they're using tracers, you can use that as a pinpoint. All right, cool. What's your guess a second? Pretty well warmed up. Some of those memorable things. I know you heard a poem about one of them. Yeah, I'll do the negative first, I guess. Yeah, so, so, so was that that, it was at that same place, the French fort that we'd, we'd taken it over in the other units lab. Where do you know that, so you could... Okay, the French, so after we moved in to the, to the new area near a rubber plantation, near Tainin, it was on the French fort and we replaced, replaced another battalion.

And we were not on that 28 day in the field cycle that we'd been on before. We were waiting on orders and again, this was the build up for Cambodia. And, and, and there was a lot of unknowns because of trying to keep that, that operation secret. So we weren't moving out as much. And I was setting on the outside, I was setting one day in the, the out, the little guard shack, just talking to the guard and, and seeing, you know, kind of looking at what was going on outside. And, you know, the Vietnamese came running up and said that one of our, the regional force, the militia, local militia, saying, can you get a medevac? Can you get a medevac? We have a child that's been injured. So I call the medevac. And, so the medevac actually got there, the child was not there yet. And, you know, they're a little peeved at me because here I call a medevac,

it's a very precious commodity and nobody showed up yet. So they were about ready to leave, I think, when, when this screaming came from this man on a moped, and I couldn't see him, anything but him because he was coming toward me. And he was screaming actually a little in a little bit of English. Help me, help me, help me. So he pulls up there and I'm looking on his back as his daughter, hanging onto him. And she had hit a booby trap that was quite phosphorus grenade. And that, why phosphorus will burn right through you, the piece of skin. And, and so I ran over to pick her up and get her off the bike, hollered at the medevac to get started. And the guy, the corpsman came over with the, the stretcher. So as we lifted her, lifted her off to put her on the stretcher, and all the skin came off of her arm, and it was in my hand. And all I could see was the bone of her, of her, of her what was left of her arm.

Of course, she was in shock. She wasn't, her eyes were this big. She wasn't screaming or crying because she was in shock. So then the corpsman helped me lift her and put her in the, in the, and then as we did it, the skin on her backs came off in her hands. The corpsman dropped down and started puking. And I started trying to get her comfortable. And then we got her to the helicopter and let her, it often do this, let her father go with her, because you get down to Saigon somewhere in the hospital, never find somebody, you know. So they let the family members go. Never heard if she lived or died. But, you know, my point was, you know, you forget about the civilian casualties and, and worked out. And, and her gruesome, usually much more so than soldiers ones, because they're generally not treated. They're generally not expected. They don't have the protective equipment. And so here's a perfect example, you know, of a, of a young girl.

Didn't do anything to anybody. But she certainly probably died or if not, she suffered a rest of her life from massive stars and stuff. So, that was never very memorable, something you never forget, never goes away. The other, the other negative memory I have that sort of that. So when we got to Cambodia and we went to, got off the, I mean, literally once we got our mission and we got off the trucks and we started moving within an hour, two hours. We suddenly walk into this open rice paddy and we start getting fire from everywhere. And the North Vietnamese had set up in every corner of the rice paddy. There was a... I'm going to start the story over here. Sorry. Yeah. Okay, can I pause then? Yeah, that's it.