A Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry 25th ID - Vietnam

Personal Experience Narratives (War Stories)

"Fear"
by John G. Jerdon

     Fear and anxiety are related but psychologists point out that they are separate, fear being a base or primal emotion while anxiety is an emotional state.  Now if you find the last sentence confusing, you're not alone.  I've wrestled with it for several days now and here's the best I can figure it out.  Let's say you're been flirting with a woman, just a little innocent fun.  Maybe you could be a bit anxious of this becoming public knowledge, but if you turned around and found your wife watching, that anxiety turns to fear quicker than gossip.

     The human mind can only process so much fear.  Whatever the threat may be, we soon become inured to the source of that threat.  When I first returned from my stint as a 'government worker' I tried to explain that my first three months in Vietnam were the most exciting time of my life.  The middle six months were like punching a time clock, some satisfactions, some disappointments, some excitement.  Those last three months though, they were dominated by  a constant sense of fear so pervasive and chilling that it just blew anxiety all to hell.

     In early May of '68, I was bragging to the other infantry dismounts that I had never been wounded, never hit a mine, and never lost a track.   We were back in Cu Chi for only the second time since Tet and every man was digesting the steaks from dinner and sipping beer or whiskey. I considered myself a wily old veteran, one who had seen the worst that little yellow brother could dish out and found it wanting.  We were laying around the "Eight Ball Inn", Alpha Troops second platoon infantry hootch, and I confess I was feeling my oats.  I had been running the dismounts since Doug Hogan rotated home in March and even though it would be almost thirty years before novelist Tom Wolfe popularized the term, I considered myself 'a man in full'.  I was nineteen years old.

     We were traveling in column through the Hobo Woods, the Third platoon was leading, and a scout track, Saber Alpha 31 was just behind the lead tank.  Slim Mason, the Scout Section leader, was in the drivers hatch.  That was something Slim would do from time to time, he loved driving those things.  My driver, Sandy Starnes, wouldn't let me near the drivers seat in our track.  He probably heard some nonsense about me driving into a low boy one night on a thunder run.  I had been looking toward the head of the column, the trail broken by the lead tank had started to bear left through the heavy underbrush.  Rome plows and Agent Orange had reduced triple canopy jungle to a thick, almost impassable snarl of dead and dying vegetation about five feet high.  I was thinking how much Charlie probably loved this, you couldn't see the ground from the tracks deck when the first shots rang out.  Slim was standing straight up in his hatch firing his .45 into the brush surrounding his track.  Side mounted M60s and the big fifties started to work over the brush to each side of the column as we slowly reversed to break contact and re-orient ourselves on line.  After we came on line the Captain Bill Coomer, called for the platoon leaders and sergeants to meet at his track.  I wandered over to 31 and Slim told me that they had just popped up around his track and if they hadn't broke like that, we never would have seen them.  He said he got three of them.  Pretty fancy shooting with a .45 I thought, jealous as all get out.  Remember, I was nineteen. We spent the next few hours assaulting on line with no dismounts.  We'd hit them hard, pull back for air and gunship strikes, then mount up and hit them again.  At one point, the Colonel in his chopper spotted a group of them trying to maneuver behind us and pulled our left flank back just in time.  By mid afternoon Charley Troop joined us.  They came on line to our left.  I was the extreme left flank track of Alpha Troop; to my left was the extreme right flank track of Charley Troop.  Again we rested and drank water while the gun ships and jets worked over the enemy position.  Lt. Nishimura called over the radio that this time we would put out our dismounts between the vehicles.  I put Paul Gritten into my TC hatch, grabbed a new guy named Bill as my RTO, and pulled the dismounts together for a quick brief before the next assault.

    We came on line this time moving very slowly to accommodate the dismounts.  We fought mostly from behind the tracks, advancing only when a specific target was pointed out by one of the vehicle TCs.  Soon, the track to our right was pointing and hollering to Bill and I at a fighting position about fifteen meters to our front.  Bill asked if he could destroy it and after walking him through it, I covered him as he crawled forward and flipped two grenades into the bunker.  After the explosions, Bill crawled up and carefully peeked in.  He ran back to me in a crouch, told me that two dead bodies and something that looked like 'fire extinguishers' on backpacks. were left in the hole.  Like a cartoon character from Looney Tunes,  dollar signs popped up where my eyes had been.  Captured AK-47s were selling for $85 a copy down in Ton Son Nhut.  How much I wondered, would a genuine Chinese flame thrower bring in from some Air Force commander down there?  My first assessment had them at $450 to $500.  Pretty steep for a war trophy but a real one of a kind.  I was mentally calculating my new wealth as I grabbed Bill and started sprinting for them when the RPG hit my track about five yards behind us. Remember that nineteen year old "man in full"?  I had turned up my nose at the new flack jackets we were issued early that year.  I much preferred the old WWII style jacket, the one without the collar that rubbed my neck raw.  Simultaneous to the explosion of the RPG, my neck snapped over to the right as I felt the hot, burning piece metal.  I was on my back looking toward my track.  Paul Gritten was a mess with so many small shrapnel wounds that he was covered in blood.  Bill was on the ground next to me and we both got up to run back behind the track.  Bill kept falling and stumbling and I had to help him back, he was hit in both legs.  Getting my bearings, I started to run toward the Lieutenant's track when the first paralyzing strands of fear started to wrap around me.  I knew I had been hit in the neck, I knew I wasn't in much pain, and I knew Grit would need a dust-off.  What I didn't know was how quick shock could hit and what I didn't remember was that I wasn't wearing any shirt under my flack jacket.  As I felt the sweat rolling down my torso, I thought it was blood.  The other guys later told me I went down three times running to the lieutenant's track.  I remember holding onto the back of his track telling him about the need to get Grit onto a dust off.  A fact that any numskull could plainly see.

    I rode back to Cu Chi in the same ship as Paul Gritten.  We had barely got above the trees when AK-47 fire raked the ship, wounding one of the pilots and one of the medics.  We made it to Cu Chi, sliding across the runway instead of hovering.  I later learned  that a lucky round had clipped a hydraulic hose which gave us quite a ride.  We were pulled out of the first chopper and quickly placed into another for the short hop to the 12th Evac.  There, a triage nurse separated us and I was told to sit on a bench and wait.  After about five minutes she returned and asked me what was wrong with me.  After seeing so many badly hurt GIs, I reluctantly pointed to my neck. It didn't seem to impress her and she turned me over to an X-ray nurse for pictures.  By this time I was feeling bad about not feeling bad.  I came back from X-ray to my bench and began wondering if I would be Court Martial-ed for cowardice.  I sat there stewing for another half hour thinking myself a disgrace, when the doors at the end of the corridor burst open and the triage nurse was hollering for me to get on a stretcher and don't move. This time the icy fingers of terror came with a sense of relief.

    The fear never left me after that.  I only had another month of field duty before I was to start processing out, but every waking moment, every conscious act was colored with fear.  Every breath, drunk or sober, . . . . . well, you get the idea. A Man in Full.  Sure.


John Jerdon
Ocean City, Maryland.