Once upon a time
Random items from my past, present, and future.Saturday, July 07, 2007
My Military Service - Part 2
I should add that shortly after arriving in Oklahoma in 1977, I was promoted to Major in the reserves since I had been in long enough and had completed the Field Artillery Officers Advanced Course. I never actually wore a uniform as a major.
My Military Service
I plan to later write some detail about individual assignments or events. This is a high-level summary of my military experiences.
My first encounter with the Army was in September 1962, my freshman year at Oklahoma State University. I had to take ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) which was then mandatory at OSU. All males had to take ROTC during their freshman and sophomore years. For these four semesters, you took a two-hour course each semester and one hour of drill (called lab) each week. You had your choice of Army or Air Force ROTC. I chose Army (since my eyes would prevent me from being a pilot, I thought the Army seemed like a better choice).
I enjoyed the military courses I took. Drill was easy although I didn't like being out in heat, rain, and cold. I particularly enjoyed a military history course I took. I enjoyed it so much that a couple years ago I used ebay to purchase a used copy of the book that was used for the course. The course was taught from a military perspective, so it focused on the conduct of the battles, not on the personalities of the commanders involved. One battle that made a big impression on me was the Battle of Cowpens during the Revolutionary War. It was one of the rare battles where the Revolutionaries won big. Once when Charolette, JJ, and I were on our way from Maryland to South Carolina to visit Mother, we stopped at the battlefield to look it over. The battlefield is near Cowpens, South Carolina.
I went ahead and took the optional two years of ROTC during my junior and senior years. Each semester consisted of a three hour course plus one hour of drill per week. I also took a six week summer camp at Fort Sill between my junior and senior years. During those two years, I was paid $50 per month during school and paid as a fulltime private during summer camp.
In summer camp, we were divided up like an infantry unit. There were about 10 of us in each squad living in a squad tent together. We each had a twin-sized bed and footlocker in the tent plus about one foot of space each for hanging clothes in the center of the tent. The beds were around the outside of the tent. The sides of the tent rolled up for ventilation. We had the sides up when we were in the area and we rolled them down for security when we went out to training each day. We took turns pulling KP (Kitchen Police) which meant we peeled potatoes, washed dishes, etc. for all three meals on the day we did KP. I think I did KP three times during the six weeks. I would get there early in the morning to avoid being assigned the job of washing pots and pans, which I considered the worse job.
Fort Sill was hot in the summer, but I don't remember too much unpleasant about living in a tent. The unpleasant part was the bathroom facility. About 200 of us shared one bathroom building. It had a large shower room with about 20 shower heads in it. There was one room with 20 commodes facing each other in two rows of 10 with no stalls or dividers anywhere. There was a room with lavatories. There were some urinals also.
During my junior year, I pledged Scabbard and Blade, an honorary military fraternity. In my senior year, I was a member of their drill team. We carried swords. It was fun.
I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant on July 29th, 1966, the day I graduated from OSU. I didn't go on active duty until the next summer as I went to graduate school. I had gotten a Fellowship that paid all my fees plus about $200 per month to live on.
In June of 1967 I reported to Fort Sill to begin taking Officers Basic Course, the primary training for new officers assigned to Field Artillery. I belonged to the U.S. Army Field Artillery School. I believe the course was 10 weeks long. This was my thing. I enjoyed going to this school a lot. I finished second in my class with my average being only a couple hundredths of a point less than the guy who finished first. The school averaged all your test scores for the 10 weeks. Anyway, because I finished so well, I was asked if I would like to teach Gunnery at the school. Gunnery is about half of the training I took at the school. Gunnery covers the particulars of how to be a Forward Observer (call for and adjust artillery fire), how to run a Fire Direction Center (how to take the information the Forward Observer sends you and convert it to data the howitzers can use), and how to operate the guns/howitzers. The rest of school was things like tactics, communications (how to use radios), maintenance of vehicles and equipment, and such. I took the job to be a Gunnery Instructor. The Gunnery Instructors were considered to be the best of the best at the Field Artillery School.
Little did I realize how tough it was to become a Gunnery Instructor. They laid out a schedule of preparing and giving dry runs of the 12 hardest classes you have to teach. I would prepare and give one or two dry runs per week for the next eight weeks along with several special outdoor training sessions and being an assistant instructor for real classes going on. The dry runs (called rehearsals) were attended by one experienced instructor who graded them very critically. Giving any bad or wrong information was considered fatal. There were three possible grades from each rehearsal: Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and Unsatisfactory Rehearse. The first rehearsal was called FB 2/5 which stood for Firing Battery class 2 and class 5. Many years ago I believe they had been two separate classes, but now all the material was taught as one class lasting six hours. In a few months it would be renamed GFB 020 meaning Gunnery Firing Battery class 020 when everything got renamed to uniform lengths for the purposes of entering them in a computer database. Anyway, the rehearsal of this class usually took three to four hours. The whole six hours was not needed because some of the time was for student exercises. The class covered the real basics of operating a howitzer, to include how to get the howitzer pointed in a very precise known direction. I was one of the rare people who did not get an Unsatisfactory or Unsatisfactory Rehearse on this rehearsal. As I recall, I got only one Unsatisfactory and no Unsatisfactory Rehearses during my 12 rehearsals. I did much, much better than the average instructor trainee.
When I finished my training, I went on to instruct the Gunnery portion of the training to four different OCS classes. We stayed with each OCS class for about four months. We also worked as assistant instructors for other peoples' classes. There were field exercises and classroom instruction. We didn't teach every day, because we needed some preparation time to get ready for some of the classes. The officer candidates also were going to other classes besides Gunnery. We did stay busy. I can remember having some very busy days and working lots of evenings. During both my Officer Basic Course and my Gunnery Instructor days, we worked on Saturdays until noon (nominally). The Army had 5-1/2 day work weeks.
One of the more enjoyable classes were the OP (Observation Post) classes where students would call for and adjust artillery fire. Each OCS class would have about 10 of these classes, to include a couple where they would be in airplanes. I used to get very sick in the Army's lightweight airplanes. I probably flew a dozen times doing classes like these.
After teaching four OCS classes, I taught part of a Field Artillery Officers Vietnam Orientation Class beginning in August 1969. These were classes taught to artillery officers going to Vietnam who had not used their artillery schools lately and needed a refresher. I was supposed to teach the Gunnery part for the duration of one class, but I had a collapsed lung after a couple weeks and ended up in the hospital for several days. The class only lasted about four weeks, so someone else took over and finished it. I was assigned to teach the class because I was under orders to go to Vietnam in September 1969, so I didn't have time to teach another OCS class.
I had finished my initial two year obligation on active duty while assigned to the Field Artillery School. I would have been released from active duty with the obligation to serve four years of duty with the reserves as a civilian. For various reasons, I was not sure I wanted to be a civilian at this time. I ended up going Volunteer Indefinite and signing up to stay on active duty until either the Army or I decided to call it quits. Immediately upon doing that, the Army issued me orders to go to Vietnam (as I knew they would). During my tour as an instructor, I started off as a Second Lieutenant. I was promoted to First Lieutenant after one year of active duty and then to Captain after another year of active duty. Promotions came fast during the Vietnam War because the Army needed people of higher ranks to fill all the positions they had due to a large turnover of personnel.
I flew to San Francisco in late September 1969 after renting a house in Oak Park in Bartlesville for Charolette to live in while I was gone. My flight to Vietnam left from Travis Air Force Base in California. Travis is located about halfway between Oakland and Sacremento. I flew into San Francisco where my Dad's brother, Bill Hawkins, picked me up. He took me to Fisherman's Wharf for a meal. Then we stopped briefly to see my Dad's sister and her husband, Louvenia and Paul Aragon in Pinole, California. We crossed the Bay Bridge to get there. Then Bill took me to Travis where my flight left about 9:00 in the evening.
My flight was on a TWA aircraft (Boeing 707). The military didn't have enough planes to handle all the personnel going to and returning from Vietnam, so they hired civilian firms to do it. I flew from Travis to the Honolulu Airport where the plane was refueled and the crew changed. I spent an hour at the Honolulu airport. I did get to walk around and I called Charolette. I think I still have the dime that I used in the pay phone for that call. Since I called collect, the dime was returned. Then we flew to Okinaw where we landed right at sunrise. The plane was refueled and the crew changed. I walked around for about 30 minutes. The next stop was Long Binh Aiport in Vietnam. This is right outside Saigon. There were 100+ people lined up on the tarmac waiting to get on our plane as we got off. We were sat down under a metal roof and given an orientation. Then we were bused to a replacement facility in Long Binh to await our individual assignments. I was issued jungle fatigues and boots. I had to order and get name tags sewed on them. There were vendors at the replacement facility you could pay to do that. Since I was an officer, the military didn't do it for me. I got everything ready. After two nights there, I left to go to Dalat, Vietnam to my assignment. I was assigned to the Provisional Artillery Group of the First Field Forces Vietnam (IFFV). Apparently they needed more artillery groups than were currently activated in the Army, so they created an unnumbered temporary (provisional) one which would go away when it was no longer needed. I was assigned to Group Headquarters which was commanded by a full colonel whose name I can no longer remember. Since I had been a Gunnery Instructor, I was going to be used to go around to all the various units in the group and check out their gunnery abilities. The units were scattered over about 200 miles, including one battery located on the hilltop where Group Headquarters were. The Headquarters building was an old French plantation house which was painted white and we called it the "White House," which name was even painted on the side of the building. There was a 20-foot high chain link fence around the building to act as a standoff across rocket fire. If the Viet Cong were to fire a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) at the house, it would hit the chain link fence about 30 feet from the house and explode there, instead of hitting the house and exploding. That fence was one of the many reminders that you weren't in a friendly place anymore. The enlisted people assigned to the headquarters lived in partially bermed wooden barracks with the roofs covered with sand bags and sandbags along the part of the walls that stuck up above ground. The bachelor officers quarters (BOQ) was the building that had been the servants quarters for the plantation. I was assigned to a room with another officer (another captain). There were sandbags covering the lower part of the windows and around the porch. There was a tarp covering a hole in the roof where an RPG had hit the roof about a month before I got there.
Being a provisional group, we didn't have a full complement of troops, so our perimeter was manned during the night by "Ruff Puffs," Vietnamese Regional Forces/Provincial Forces, which is like their national guard. These guys lived in Dalat and came over everyday to guard us at night. We had to have an officer continually go around all night and keep them awake. Most of the Vietnamese troops also had a day job, so they were working two jobs and getting paid twice. Needless to say, they were always sleepy.
I was only at group headquarters for a few days. I can remember going to see a movie being shown in the mess tent one night. I can't remember which movie it was. I was sent to Pleiku to attend an orientation course for a week. I had to catch a flight to Nha Trang and then another one to Pleiku. The Air Force ran the equivalent of a scheduled airline all over Vietnam using planes designed to carry either freight or people. You used your travel orders to get issued boarding passes for flights if room was available. I can remember that all the flights from Nha Trang to Pleiku were full the day I was trying to go, so I went to some place called the "Hot Spot" where you could bum rides on non-schedule aircraft going to various places in the country. I caught a ride on a Lear Jet. It was used to move generals and VIP civilians around the country. It was going to Pleiku to pick up some general, so several of us got to ride in it on the way to Pleiku. I think it held 8 people besides the pilots.
I got to Pleiku, to a location called Artillery Hill, and attended the course for five days. I graduated first and got a Zippo cigarette lighter for that honor. On my last day in Pleiku, I was waiting for a ride to the airport, there was an explosion up the hill towards the headquarters building. Then there was another one down the hill by the heliport. We were being hit by Viet Cong rockets. I went into a bunker near where I had been standing. One more rocket hit the hill. We later learned that an Army helicopter had seen the rocket firing and called in its position, but that the Viet Cong packed up and left before permission to return fire was obtained. Whenever you wanted to fire into an area with civilians, you had to get permission from the senior civilian in the area first. That slowed things down a lot.
I got back to Dalat by catching a couple of the scheduled flights. While I was gone, something had come up and I was going to be sent to the boondocks as the artillery liaison to an infantry battalion. Apparently something had happened to the person who had been assigned that duty. The night after I learned of my assignment, my lung collapsed again. I was taken by a two Jeep convoy to the limited Army medical facility in Dalat. The Army doctor there sent me to the civilian hospital in Dalat to get an Xray taken. The Xray showed the collapsed lung, so the Army doctor sent me to a major Army medical facility in Cam Ranh Bay. I can't remember how I got there. It might have been a medical helicopter.
At Cam Ranh, it was decided to send me to Japan for medical treatment. I flew there on a big Air Force Jet. I ended up at Camp Zama Army Hospital. Then I was sent to Travis Air Force Base. Then to Brooke General Hospital in Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. I had an operation and a 30-day convalescent leave. Then I was assigned to the U.S. Army Field Artillery Board at Fort Sill. I got the assignment because of my technical background (math degree and gunnery instructor). I got to the Board about mid-January 1970. I stayed there through March 1971. I worked on developing statistical procedures related to testing equipment. I participated in several tests. In one test, we were testing new, classified bomblet munitions. An artillery shell would fly over a target and drop a hundred or so bomblets on the target area. The bomblets were designed to be both anti-personnel and anti-materiel. After dropping a set of bomblets over a target array, we would go and document the damage. The target array consisted of several jeeps, several 2-1/2 ton trucks, several armored personnel carriers, a couple tanks, several simulated people, and one Soviet T32 tank. I still have a piece of the T32 tank. During that test I also got several tank and artillery rounds which I still have (inert ones).
I was also involved in testing some fuses which were causing rounds to detonate in the air when they passed through clouds/fog in cold weather. They weren't supposed to do that.
I also led a group of three privates with technical degrees. We developed a new procedure for calculating the location of where artillery rounds exploded based on the azimuths reported by two observers at known locations.
JJ was born right before I got out of the Army. I left on April 1, 1971. Since I had served another 21 months of active duty, I no longer had any reserve obligation. However, while I was living in Maryland, I did complete the Field Artillery Officer Advanced Course by correspondence and by attending some classes at a reserve unit in Wilmington, Delaware. This is a nine month course for people on active duty (normally majors). Then for about six months in 1976 I was in a reserve unit in Alexandria, Virginia. We met on two Saturdays per month. I would leave Bel Air, Maryland about 6:00 in the morning on Saturday to be in Alexandria by 8:00. We would get through at 5:00 and I would drive back to Bel Air. I was an assistant operations officer for the reserve unit. One thing I had to do was inventory all the equipment (desks, chairs, cabinets, rifles, etc.) in the armory and sign for them. I got tired of the drive after six months and quit. I would get two full days of captains pay for each Saturday I attended.
After we moved to Oklahoma in 1977, I did not get involved with the military again, and I eventually asked to be discharged.
My first encounter with the Army was in September 1962, my freshman year at Oklahoma State University. I had to take ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) which was then mandatory at OSU. All males had to take ROTC during their freshman and sophomore years. For these four semesters, you took a two-hour course each semester and one hour of drill (called lab) each week. You had your choice of Army or Air Force ROTC. I chose Army (since my eyes would prevent me from being a pilot, I thought the Army seemed like a better choice).
I enjoyed the military courses I took. Drill was easy although I didn't like being out in heat, rain, and cold. I particularly enjoyed a military history course I took. I enjoyed it so much that a couple years ago I used ebay to purchase a used copy of the book that was used for the course. The course was taught from a military perspective, so it focused on the conduct of the battles, not on the personalities of the commanders involved. One battle that made a big impression on me was the Battle of Cowpens during the Revolutionary War. It was one of the rare battles where the Revolutionaries won big. Once when Charolette, JJ, and I were on our way from Maryland to South Carolina to visit Mother, we stopped at the battlefield to look it over. The battlefield is near Cowpens, South Carolina.
I went ahead and took the optional two years of ROTC during my junior and senior years. Each semester consisted of a three hour course plus one hour of drill per week. I also took a six week summer camp at Fort Sill between my junior and senior years. During those two years, I was paid $50 per month during school and paid as a fulltime private during summer camp.
In summer camp, we were divided up like an infantry unit. There were about 10 of us in each squad living in a squad tent together. We each had a twin-sized bed and footlocker in the tent plus about one foot of space each for hanging clothes in the center of the tent. The beds were around the outside of the tent. The sides of the tent rolled up for ventilation. We had the sides up when we were in the area and we rolled them down for security when we went out to training each day. We took turns pulling KP (Kitchen Police) which meant we peeled potatoes, washed dishes, etc. for all three meals on the day we did KP. I think I did KP three times during the six weeks. I would get there early in the morning to avoid being assigned the job of washing pots and pans, which I considered the worse job.
Fort Sill was hot in the summer, but I don't remember too much unpleasant about living in a tent. The unpleasant part was the bathroom facility. About 200 of us shared one bathroom building. It had a large shower room with about 20 shower heads in it. There was one room with 20 commodes facing each other in two rows of 10 with no stalls or dividers anywhere. There was a room with lavatories. There were some urinals also.
During my junior year, I pledged Scabbard and Blade, an honorary military fraternity. In my senior year, I was a member of their drill team. We carried swords. It was fun.
I was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant on July 29th, 1966, the day I graduated from OSU. I didn't go on active duty until the next summer as I went to graduate school. I had gotten a Fellowship that paid all my fees plus about $200 per month to live on.
In June of 1967 I reported to Fort Sill to begin taking Officers Basic Course, the primary training for new officers assigned to Field Artillery. I belonged to the U.S. Army Field Artillery School. I believe the course was 10 weeks long. This was my thing. I enjoyed going to this school a lot. I finished second in my class with my average being only a couple hundredths of a point less than the guy who finished first. The school averaged all your test scores for the 10 weeks. Anyway, because I finished so well, I was asked if I would like to teach Gunnery at the school. Gunnery is about half of the training I took at the school. Gunnery covers the particulars of how to be a Forward Observer (call for and adjust artillery fire), how to run a Fire Direction Center (how to take the information the Forward Observer sends you and convert it to data the howitzers can use), and how to operate the guns/howitzers. The rest of school was things like tactics, communications (how to use radios), maintenance of vehicles and equipment, and such. I took the job to be a Gunnery Instructor. The Gunnery Instructors were considered to be the best of the best at the Field Artillery School.
Little did I realize how tough it was to become a Gunnery Instructor. They laid out a schedule of preparing and giving dry runs of the 12 hardest classes you have to teach. I would prepare and give one or two dry runs per week for the next eight weeks along with several special outdoor training sessions and being an assistant instructor for real classes going on. The dry runs (called rehearsals) were attended by one experienced instructor who graded them very critically. Giving any bad or wrong information was considered fatal. There were three possible grades from each rehearsal: Satisfactory, Unsatisfactory, and Unsatisfactory Rehearse. The first rehearsal was called FB 2/5 which stood for Firing Battery class 2 and class 5. Many years ago I believe they had been two separate classes, but now all the material was taught as one class lasting six hours. In a few months it would be renamed GFB 020 meaning Gunnery Firing Battery class 020 when everything got renamed to uniform lengths for the purposes of entering them in a computer database. Anyway, the rehearsal of this class usually took three to four hours. The whole six hours was not needed because some of the time was for student exercises. The class covered the real basics of operating a howitzer, to include how to get the howitzer pointed in a very precise known direction. I was one of the rare people who did not get an Unsatisfactory or Unsatisfactory Rehearse on this rehearsal. As I recall, I got only one Unsatisfactory and no Unsatisfactory Rehearses during my 12 rehearsals. I did much, much better than the average instructor trainee.
When I finished my training, I went on to instruct the Gunnery portion of the training to four different OCS classes. We stayed with each OCS class for about four months. We also worked as assistant instructors for other peoples' classes. There were field exercises and classroom instruction. We didn't teach every day, because we needed some preparation time to get ready for some of the classes. The officer candidates also were going to other classes besides Gunnery. We did stay busy. I can remember having some very busy days and working lots of evenings. During both my Officer Basic Course and my Gunnery Instructor days, we worked on Saturdays until noon (nominally). The Army had 5-1/2 day work weeks.
One of the more enjoyable classes were the OP (Observation Post) classes where students would call for and adjust artillery fire. Each OCS class would have about 10 of these classes, to include a couple where they would be in airplanes. I used to get very sick in the Army's lightweight airplanes. I probably flew a dozen times doing classes like these.
After teaching four OCS classes, I taught part of a Field Artillery Officers Vietnam Orientation Class beginning in August 1969. These were classes taught to artillery officers going to Vietnam who had not used their artillery schools lately and needed a refresher. I was supposed to teach the Gunnery part for the duration of one class, but I had a collapsed lung after a couple weeks and ended up in the hospital for several days. The class only lasted about four weeks, so someone else took over and finished it. I was assigned to teach the class because I was under orders to go to Vietnam in September 1969, so I didn't have time to teach another OCS class.
I had finished my initial two year obligation on active duty while assigned to the Field Artillery School. I would have been released from active duty with the obligation to serve four years of duty with the reserves as a civilian. For various reasons, I was not sure I wanted to be a civilian at this time. I ended up going Volunteer Indefinite and signing up to stay on active duty until either the Army or I decided to call it quits. Immediately upon doing that, the Army issued me orders to go to Vietnam (as I knew they would). During my tour as an instructor, I started off as a Second Lieutenant. I was promoted to First Lieutenant after one year of active duty and then to Captain after another year of active duty. Promotions came fast during the Vietnam War because the Army needed people of higher ranks to fill all the positions they had due to a large turnover of personnel.
I flew to San Francisco in late September 1969 after renting a house in Oak Park in Bartlesville for Charolette to live in while I was gone. My flight to Vietnam left from Travis Air Force Base in California. Travis is located about halfway between Oakland and Sacremento. I flew into San Francisco where my Dad's brother, Bill Hawkins, picked me up. He took me to Fisherman's Wharf for a meal. Then we stopped briefly to see my Dad's sister and her husband, Louvenia and Paul Aragon in Pinole, California. We crossed the Bay Bridge to get there. Then Bill took me to Travis where my flight left about 9:00 in the evening.
My flight was on a TWA aircraft (Boeing 707). The military didn't have enough planes to handle all the personnel going to and returning from Vietnam, so they hired civilian firms to do it. I flew from Travis to the Honolulu Airport where the plane was refueled and the crew changed. I spent an hour at the Honolulu airport. I did get to walk around and I called Charolette. I think I still have the dime that I used in the pay phone for that call. Since I called collect, the dime was returned. Then we flew to Okinaw where we landed right at sunrise. The plane was refueled and the crew changed. I walked around for about 30 minutes. The next stop was Long Binh Aiport in Vietnam. This is right outside Saigon. There were 100+ people lined up on the tarmac waiting to get on our plane as we got off. We were sat down under a metal roof and given an orientation. Then we were bused to a replacement facility in Long Binh to await our individual assignments. I was issued jungle fatigues and boots. I had to order and get name tags sewed on them. There were vendors at the replacement facility you could pay to do that. Since I was an officer, the military didn't do it for me. I got everything ready. After two nights there, I left to go to Dalat, Vietnam to my assignment. I was assigned to the Provisional Artillery Group of the First Field Forces Vietnam (IFFV). Apparently they needed more artillery groups than were currently activated in the Army, so they created an unnumbered temporary (provisional) one which would go away when it was no longer needed. I was assigned to Group Headquarters which was commanded by a full colonel whose name I can no longer remember. Since I had been a Gunnery Instructor, I was going to be used to go around to all the various units in the group and check out their gunnery abilities. The units were scattered over about 200 miles, including one battery located on the hilltop where Group Headquarters were. The Headquarters building was an old French plantation house which was painted white and we called it the "White House," which name was even painted on the side of the building. There was a 20-foot high chain link fence around the building to act as a standoff across rocket fire. If the Viet Cong were to fire a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) at the house, it would hit the chain link fence about 30 feet from the house and explode there, instead of hitting the house and exploding. That fence was one of the many reminders that you weren't in a friendly place anymore. The enlisted people assigned to the headquarters lived in partially bermed wooden barracks with the roofs covered with sand bags and sandbags along the part of the walls that stuck up above ground. The bachelor officers quarters (BOQ) was the building that had been the servants quarters for the plantation. I was assigned to a room with another officer (another captain). There were sandbags covering the lower part of the windows and around the porch. There was a tarp covering a hole in the roof where an RPG had hit the roof about a month before I got there.
Being a provisional group, we didn't have a full complement of troops, so our perimeter was manned during the night by "Ruff Puffs," Vietnamese Regional Forces/Provincial Forces, which is like their national guard. These guys lived in Dalat and came over everyday to guard us at night. We had to have an officer continually go around all night and keep them awake. Most of the Vietnamese troops also had a day job, so they were working two jobs and getting paid twice. Needless to say, they were always sleepy.
I was only at group headquarters for a few days. I can remember going to see a movie being shown in the mess tent one night. I can't remember which movie it was. I was sent to Pleiku to attend an orientation course for a week. I had to catch a flight to Nha Trang and then another one to Pleiku. The Air Force ran the equivalent of a scheduled airline all over Vietnam using planes designed to carry either freight or people. You used your travel orders to get issued boarding passes for flights if room was available. I can remember that all the flights from Nha Trang to Pleiku were full the day I was trying to go, so I went to some place called the "Hot Spot" where you could bum rides on non-schedule aircraft going to various places in the country. I caught a ride on a Lear Jet. It was used to move generals and VIP civilians around the country. It was going to Pleiku to pick up some general, so several of us got to ride in it on the way to Pleiku. I think it held 8 people besides the pilots.
I got to Pleiku, to a location called Artillery Hill, and attended the course for five days. I graduated first and got a Zippo cigarette lighter for that honor. On my last day in Pleiku, I was waiting for a ride to the airport, there was an explosion up the hill towards the headquarters building. Then there was another one down the hill by the heliport. We were being hit by Viet Cong rockets. I went into a bunker near where I had been standing. One more rocket hit the hill. We later learned that an Army helicopter had seen the rocket firing and called in its position, but that the Viet Cong packed up and left before permission to return fire was obtained. Whenever you wanted to fire into an area with civilians, you had to get permission from the senior civilian in the area first. That slowed things down a lot.
I got back to Dalat by catching a couple of the scheduled flights. While I was gone, something had come up and I was going to be sent to the boondocks as the artillery liaison to an infantry battalion. Apparently something had happened to the person who had been assigned that duty. The night after I learned of my assignment, my lung collapsed again. I was taken by a two Jeep convoy to the limited Army medical facility in Dalat. The Army doctor there sent me to the civilian hospital in Dalat to get an Xray taken. The Xray showed the collapsed lung, so the Army doctor sent me to a major Army medical facility in Cam Ranh Bay. I can't remember how I got there. It might have been a medical helicopter.
At Cam Ranh, it was decided to send me to Japan for medical treatment. I flew there on a big Air Force Jet. I ended up at Camp Zama Army Hospital. Then I was sent to Travis Air Force Base. Then to Brooke General Hospital in Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. I had an operation and a 30-day convalescent leave. Then I was assigned to the U.S. Army Field Artillery Board at Fort Sill. I got the assignment because of my technical background (math degree and gunnery instructor). I got to the Board about mid-January 1970. I stayed there through March 1971. I worked on developing statistical procedures related to testing equipment. I participated in several tests. In one test, we were testing new, classified bomblet munitions. An artillery shell would fly over a target and drop a hundred or so bomblets on the target area. The bomblets were designed to be both anti-personnel and anti-materiel. After dropping a set of bomblets over a target array, we would go and document the damage. The target array consisted of several jeeps, several 2-1/2 ton trucks, several armored personnel carriers, a couple tanks, several simulated people, and one Soviet T32 tank. I still have a piece of the T32 tank. During that test I also got several tank and artillery rounds which I still have (inert ones).
I was also involved in testing some fuses which were causing rounds to detonate in the air when they passed through clouds/fog in cold weather. They weren't supposed to do that.
I also led a group of three privates with technical degrees. We developed a new procedure for calculating the location of where artillery rounds exploded based on the azimuths reported by two observers at known locations.
JJ was born right before I got out of the Army. I left on April 1, 1971. Since I had served another 21 months of active duty, I no longer had any reserve obligation. However, while I was living in Maryland, I did complete the Field Artillery Officer Advanced Course by correspondence and by attending some classes at a reserve unit in Wilmington, Delaware. This is a nine month course for people on active duty (normally majors). Then for about six months in 1976 I was in a reserve unit in Alexandria, Virginia. We met on two Saturdays per month. I would leave Bel Air, Maryland about 6:00 in the morning on Saturday to be in Alexandria by 8:00. We would get through at 5:00 and I would drive back to Bel Air. I was an assistant operations officer for the reserve unit. One thing I had to do was inventory all the equipment (desks, chairs, cabinets, rifles, etc.) in the armory and sign for them. I got tired of the drive after six months and quit. I would get two full days of captains pay for each Saturday I attended.
After we moved to Oklahoma in 1977, I did not get involved with the military again, and I eventually asked to be discharged.
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