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Back to Viet Nam
Leaving the Ship Cold and Wet Christmas First Dead Razorback and Rockpile
	We left Oki on a new ship I think it was called the Vancouver, it had a small landing pad on the rear of the ship for helicopters to land on and below that were amphibious landing craft for hitting the beach. They jerked us around all the time on that ship cleaning brass or more classes on fighting, but it was the never ending drills of us leaving the ship, never knowing if this was the real thing or not that drove me crazy, trying to move quickly through those narrow passage ways, your gear always catching on something and jerking you back. The scariest of all was getting into those landing craft not wanting to be the last man in, facing that door when it would open on the beach and your ass was first out. I had a friend on the ship we met in Oki, Ron Hebert, and he was a radioman but more important he wanted to be a artist like me, he lived in Attleboro Mass and wanted to go to Rhode Island School of Design to study art, we had the most in common and are always talking about what we would do when we get out of the service. We were at sea for weeks, you would go up top side and ask a sailor, where are we, and one time he would say off the coast of Saigon, we thought embassy duty, all right, next time he would say off the coast of Hanoi, oh shit, not where I want to be landing. We had a small aircraft carrier with us only for helicopters, it had a dentist on board, you could go over and get a tooth fixed if you had to, well this sounded like a good way of getting off the ship for awhile, I did not have a bad tooth but they didn't know that, so I get on this old chopper to go over, and it's full of bags of stuff and some other Marines and it can't lift off the deck, so they start throwing things off until it just takes off going over the side of the ship just skinning the water below and then getting airborne, boy what a ride. On the carrier I made friends with this Marine, who like me is going to the dentist for a tooth filling, he goes in first and the damn dentist doesn't fill his tooth he just pulls it out, pissing off this Marine, he comes out telling me this story, and I say to hell with this guy he'll just pull one of mine out for the hell of it. So we hang out on the carrier for a few days wasting time. I will insert his name here some day because he was one of the first Marine killed in the first mortar attack at the Punchbowl, he was sitting eating his c rations when a shell landed near him.
Leaving the Ship
	The day finally comes and we are leaving by air, so up on the deck we wait for the wave of helo's coming to pick us up, three or four the first time, but I'm not sure that many come back the second time to pick us up, I'm thinking where or what happened to the other helo, too late, I 'm on and we seem to be flying a long time, not knowing where it will land us. It finally lands some where, I 'm out being told to dig in, trying to dig a fox hole with a E tool, it seem like it took for ever. Welcome to the DMZ, this hilly landscape is a lot different from Danang, that's good I think, we are here to take over for the Marines who took Mutter's Ridge, which was a hell of a fight ( See a old copy of Life magazine October 28 1966 for full story) . We finally settled in at the base of a strange looking mini mountain range call the Razorback to our front and the Rockpile behind us, this is to be home for a while, it's to be known as the Punchbowl, we have to make some kind of bunker, which we will improve in weeks to come, so we have to make do with what we can find to cover our ass the first week or two. Little did we know that we had monkeys and other wild animals out there at night making noise, we had lots of guys shooting things up at night on watch, finally the Captain comes down with a order the next one shooting better have a VC body when he's done, that put and end to the trigger happy firing. For more photos Click Here
Cold ,Wet and Miserable Patrols
	November 1966. We get here just in time for the Northern Monsoon season, cold, wet and mud up to your ass, no place take a bath, no clean change of clothes, just daylight patrol one day and night ambush the next, then off one day, digging bunkers, filling sand bags or digging trenches making this place as safe as we can. I remember going out to string up barbwire in the mud and cold to make this ridicules wire fence that was to eventually stretch the length of the DMZ, we finally quit working on this dumb idea after a while. About this time we lost our squad radioman and the LT tells me that I'm now the radioman, but I don't know anything about the radio, what makes me the radioman is that I was seen talking to Ron Hebert, the radioman on the ship, but we never talked about the radio just about our life after Nam. So now I have to carry this heavy thing on my back along with everything else, boy was I unhappy, me being a tall lanky 125 lbs soaking wet kid. But I was tough, being a country farm boy who had always had to work hard. Now I 'am in the middle of the squad with the squad leader in front of me and the medic behind me on the patrols. Do I feel safer now, not really with this antenna sticking up in the air for all the NVA to see. Kill us first and you have mass confusion. I really hated going out on patrols now, always wet and cold, it could have been a lot worse if not for those poncho's that kept us semi-dry and semi-warm on all those day patrols and night ambushes in November, December and January.
	Christmas in Hell
	You talk about being depressed, well I remember around Christmas time sitting and talking about how we could have each other break one of our legs by hitting it with something, just to get out of here and onto one of the hospital ships for a warm clean bed and hot meals, but we just couldn't do it, so now we were even more depressed. My Uncle Nick Percherke had sent me a pint of Seagram's 7 for Christmas in a care package, that helped us for a little while. I was to have had Christmas day off because of being out for the two days before. I was the only 3rd platoon radioman in base camp Christmas day, when this Regimental Chaplin Raymond L. Hustin comes and wants to go up the Razorback to give Christmas service to the guys on duty up there, and he has to have a radioman on the patrol, well I was really mad and made a big fuss about not wanting to go, but they made me go anyway. So climbing up the Razorback I have this real bad, don't give a damn attitude, I grab a hold of this small tree and it breaks loose and I fall over backwards off the mountain, did a summersault and landed on a ledge on my feet below, damn I said to myself I just can't get hurt, God must want me on this patrol, so my attitude changed and was glad I went, because the Chaplin took a group photo of everyone and said he would send a copy to our parents with a letter, and he did just that. I wound up spending New Years Eve up on the Razorback, I'll never forget LT's radioman Ron Hebert calling me up at midnight and saying Happy New Year. A bad thing happened up there, a Sergeant was on night radio watch with me, and he falls asleep on his watch and did not check in with base camp, and blamed it on me, saying I was on duty at that time. He was a lifer and did not want it on his record. I lost a stripe promotion because of that. If you ever read this, and you know I know you're name, an apology would be nice.
	First Dead and Wounded

	I don't have the exact date when we first came under mortar attack from the NVA, up on the Razorback, because it happened more than once. But I do remember that under the first attack, that dental friend from the ship, getting killed and me thinking back to all the laughs we just had a short time ago together. It hit me hard. We went up the Razorback to find the NVA many times, most times they left just before we got there. I remember being up there and Mike Company coming under attack to the East of the Razorback and they calling for a air strike on the NVA. The first jet dives, drops the bomb and pulls up, something went wrong and the bomb bounces off and lands on Mike Co., wounding and killing some Mike Marines. We were going up one time from the west side long the top to the east side, when Sergeant Corrie was first to see the NVA coming, and got a bullet hole shot through the top of his helmet missing his head, he kept that helmet for a souvenir. As we returned fire, I some how was pined down between some rocks and next to machine gunner PFC. Hughs and his ammo man, he was blasting away with that machine gun and all the hot casings were landing on my exposed neck skin, burning the hell out of me. We were out numbered and were ordered to get off the Razorback by morning, because they were calling in for a massive air strike. We had to climb down that mountain all night in the pitch black, with no trail to follow, a few Marines fell getting hurt, some real bad, but by morning we were down and the jets were right on time dropping their bombs.
Razorback and Rockpile
	We spent a lot of time climbing up and down the Razorback looking for NVA I hope other Marines will e-mail me with their own experiences up there to add to this page. A helicopter did crash up there and 3rd platoon PFC. Joe Farrone rescued the pilots from the crash and NVA. The Razorback was full of caves and more than once PFC. Rich Banks a avid U.S. cave explorer went into those caves looking for NVA. Rich was a handsome well built California dude who was married to a beautiful looking blond just before he got drafted. Well this bitch decides that she can't wait two years for Rich to come home, so she writes him a dear john letter, it just about killed Rich, he had to see the Chaplin a lot. Rich I hope that bitch has had a miserable life without you, more stories about Rich later on. The Rockpile behind us was another mountain that we had to defend because of all the radio equipment up there, to this day I think it was a spy radio relay station, we were never aloud to talk to the radiomen up there about it. What a nasty place to have to go to, no area big enough to lay completely stretched out at night to sleep, always wedged between rocks, rats crawling on you at night and those damn little monkeys making noise at night. It was a real scare to be dropped off there, jumping out of the chopper as it hovered in mid air over the very top, hoping you didn't miss and go over the mountain. Looking through the huge Navy binoculars during the day for NVA in the far off distance is that we took turns doing every day, at night I would point it to the moon and look at all the creators on it. I was talking to a Lt up there one night, he was telling me that he used to be a pilot and flew a jet in the Marines by following the US highways to get from one base to another during training, they finally caught up with him when he had to land on a aircraft carrier at sea and failed. True or not, it did make a great story that night, For more photos Click Here.