Engineer Memoirs
-m--
Washington over a weekend when all of the senior officials at the State Department
were out of town. These messages reportedly blamed Diem for the killings at Hue
and threatened to withdraw U.S. support. This led to a lack of confidence in Diem
and resulted in a series of events which led to his death. Diem was, at the time,
what Syngman Rhee was to Korea, the father of his country. After his death, one
leader after another tried to take over thereins of the Vietnamese government. But
none emerged who were able to take charge and from then on the Vietnamese
fought a losing battle against the Viet Cong. Even so, after the North Vietnamese
organized regular units and the U.S. entered the war, we could have defeated them.
However, by that time the support of our soldiers back home was so weak that
winning the war was impossible.
Our ACTIV reports recommended that U.S. troops not enter into combat but
remain as support troops for the Vietnamese. But these recommendations were not
very popular back home. Neither General Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, nor Mr. McNamara, the secretary of defense, took hold of our
recommendations. As a result, they poured in more and more U.S. troops in the
face of rising opposition of the press and the U.S. public. In the end, even though
Tet was a military victory, the war was lost. We finally pulled out of Vietnam,
making it a tragedy. It was particularly damaging to the U.S. military
establishment.
Q ..
Weren't you shot down in a helicopter? When did that happen?
A ..
After I had been in Vietnam about 11 months, I was shot down in a
Yes.
helicopter not far from Saigon. We were taking off at Tan Son Nhut, the military
airfield, when a sniper's lucky shot hit the tail rotor of my helicopter. The pilot
tried to maneuver the chopper but couldn't do so because without the tail rotor he
could not steer it. He engaged the overhead rotor into an auto-rotation mode and
we started to drift towards the earth. However, without its tail rotor the helicopter
began spinning faster and faster. I was strapped into the middle of the back seat.
Otherwise I would have been thrown out when the helicopter hit the ground, as
were my aide and a sergeant who was manning a machine gun. The sergeant
suffered a broken arm and leg, and my aide fractured his tailbone. The pilot had
both his legs broken and subsequently died in the hospital as a result of an
embolism. He had saved my life because he stopped me from getting out of the
helicopter after it hit the ground.
The main rotor was still rotating and in my haste to get out, fearing a fire, I would
have walked into the rotor. My aide was evacuated to the States. Six weeks later
he was sent back to Vietnam to finish his tour. As for me, I was kept in the
hospital overnight because of bums from the seat belt.
--
84
Previous Page
