Tết - New Year's Day in the Chinese and Vietnamese traditional lunar calendar - fell on January 30 in 1968. In Việt Nam, Tết is a day of celebration, the day for setting the path of the year to come; the first person to cross the threshold of a house that day establishes the good or bad fortune of all its residents for the year and great care is taken to determine who that person will be. It was, that year, the day selected by North Việt Nam to launch a 'General Offensive and Uprising' throughout South Việt Nam, where were 17 million Vietnamese and half a million Americans.
I was up-country in a smaller provincial capital living in a compound in the middle of town with 180 other Americans, almost all of us Army. About 10 a.m., we were all called into assembly and informed of the overnight assaults elsewhere and told we were restricted to the three buildings of the compound. All enlisted personnel were assigned shifts of guard duty and KP for the immediate future. We returned to our rooms; I seem to recall that we could pick up AFVN radio from Saigon but I don't recall that anyone listened to it regularly.
'Our' attack came two days later. On the morning of the second day, word went out that the Vietnamese Local Forces ("ruff-puffs" - don't ask) in the province were taking positions outside town and one of the two advisory teams would go with them. Bill was the radio operator on that team, "Echo" man - not because of the radio but because he was fifth in order: Alpha, Bravo... - but he went on sick-call with a stomach complaint. Mike, his counterpart on the other team, volunteered to fill in. Mike was a particular friend of mine, an all-around good guy from Colorado somewhere. When my brother had copied Sgt Pepper onto an audio-tape and sent it to me, Mike and I had listened to it together.
That night, I had guard duty in a rooftop bunker of the compound. The town was quiet and I began my hours by reading Playboy (the Jim Brown interview - I read it for the articles, of course). After nightfall, as expected, all hell broke loose outside town (while all remained quiet in town beneath my perch). My bunker had a PRC-10 Army radio as well as a phone line to the rest of the compound. At perhaps 9 o'clock, I heard over the radio a call for a Medevac: "Echo's been hit." This was followed by confused discussion of the fact the chopper pilot said the site was too dark and too hot for him, then some talk of positioning a couple jeeps to use their headlights to establish an LZ, then the call: "Don't bother; he's gone." ........
Three days later, word came in that there was an American body at the Province Hospital. "Doc", the compound medic, was going to pick it up and needed someone to go along who knew Mike. Since Mike's team was in the field, it turned out I was the only one who knew him well enough to identify him. So Doc and I drove across town, found Mike among a couple dozen Vietnamese bodies on the ground outside the hospital, ascertained it was he, put him in a body-bag and took him to Graves Registration at the airfield. He'd taken a round in the femoral artery and bled out on the battlefield.
Oh, Bill? At some point, somebody mentioned to him that that should have been him if he hadn't gone on chicken-shit sick call, and Bill replied "Fuckin' A right!" Nobody, I think, ever said anything about it again.
Mike Stottler: Miss ya, man!
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Casualties around the country were, of course, very high during that period on all sides. As I recall, U.S. KIA was running about 800 a week. Stars 'n' Stripes ran the full list, of course, and most of us, I think, would run an eye down the list every time we got a shipment of newspapers, maybe twice a week. But I found out about Larry because he got his own 1-inch article in S&S: "Youngest umpire in baseball killed in VN" ... That was special, of course.
Larry and I had been best friends in 8th grade in Azusa, riding our bikes to school together. Larry was something of a 'bad kid' but I understood he was a heck of a baseball player and held the home-run record in his Little League. He used to shop-lift at the Sav-On down the street, just - I guess - for the thrill of it, but he never justified it to me or tried to get me to do it, and we were both disgusted when Tim, another classmate, asked Larry to shop-lift a comb for him. Larry got me into scorekeeping at the bowling alley, and his mom used to pick me up on Friday nights to take us to 'work'. A fellow could pick up $3.00 in an evening and we each had a team for which we were the regular scorekeeper. Good times.
Larry and I went to the same high school but seldom saw each other; I was 'college-prep' and he wasn't. The last time I saw him was his senior year (I had gone to college after 3 years), when I purposely went to a baseball game to say 'Hi' to him through the fence. As I learned later, he went from high school straight to becoming an 18-year-old umpire in the Pioneer League in the Northwest, then got drafted and chose to be a Marine.
Larry Smith, I'd sure like to hear some of your baseball stories! Miss ya, guy!
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I never knew Tommy, but I know his mother, who is now 94 and misses him every day. As I hear it, he was a pretty good high school athlete in North Carolina, went to State but then transferred to a smaller private college when he decided to be a lawyer instead of an engineer. Tommy joined up and became a Green Beret officer - the best of the best, in those simpler times. Tommy was killed - heroically, according to his medal citation - that same February 68 in the same province I was living in (though I've never told his mother that last part).
Tommy's mom tells me she has all his letters in a tin box in her bureau; she intends to read them again but ... "I'm not ready yet".
Tommy, I wish I'd met you. Miss ya, guy!
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Maybe somebody else here has a friend or loved one in that class of Tết 1968 you'd like to remember below?
Long time ago ... but also just yesterday, doncha think?