My Vietnam War - Part 4

After a few months, we parted ways with the 101st and went off on our own to an old Marine fire base called LZ Sharon. The Vietnamization of the war was starting, so instead of American infantry protecting us we had Vietnamese troops and American air defense artillery. At LZ Sharon, the Vietnamese troops were draft dodgers who had been caught, but the Vietnamese Army would not give them guns; so they had clubs and knives. Our air defense artillery was a quad-50 machine gun, four 50-caliber machine guns mounted together on the back of a five-ton truck. Because it was closer, when it fired the tracers made almost as good a fireworks show as the platoons of infantry back at LZ Sally. For some reason, probably because as chief computer I was pretty good at calculating how to aim artillery, I had my own eighty-one mm mortar. However, I only had illumination rounds to support the quad-50; I did not have any high explosive rounds. Most of our battery’s shooting was done at night. Usually around 4:00 in the morning everything would quiet down, and the guys on the quad-50 and I would be about the only people awake. I would shoot some illumination rounds along our perimeter and the quad-50 guys would look for any movement. If they saw any movement, we would have to clear a whole map “grid square,” a square kilometer, with higher authorities before the quad-50 was allowed to shoot. It was not exactly rapid response, but perhaps it let the bad guys know, if there were any out there, that somebody was awake.

We were at LZ Sharon during monsoon season, and the moisture meant that the powder in the eight-inch howitzers burned more slowly. As a result there was usually a huge flash as the projectile left the barrel and the unburned powder hit the air. In our fire direction center, the explosion would make the dust on the desks and the floor rise up about an inch and then settle back down. One night, after a particularly loud shot, the plywood walls of the “hooch” where we were working fell off, and we were left standing in the two-by-four framing in the middle of the night.

I think it was while we were at LZ Sharon that I saw Bob Hope’s Christmas show in December 1969. It was at the Phu Bai combat base near Hue, which was a long drive for us. I don’t remember much except telling my mother to look for me on TV, sitting about ten rows behind the guy with a monkey on his shoulder. She always claimed that she saw me, although it was unlikely in that sea of uniforms. Still, it was very patriotic of Bob Hope to come, and it was encouraging when there was so much opposition to the war to feel that there was someone publicly supporting us
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