David Newcomb

This is 1968, September 1968, when I was drafted. At that time, you had to register in the county which you are a resident. Right after you registered, you had to take a physical to verify what your draft category would be. It was kinda interesting because you got a free train ride from Chanute to Kansas City, first time I’d ever been to Kansas City. And the Draft Board, the place where they do the physical, is just a couple of blocks down from the Union Station in Kansas City. You got free meals and a place to stay. The doctors were very professional, and you received a physical report that was sent to the Draft Board to categorize you. I was, at first categorized, and I forget the designation, but it was for a college student deferred--deferred from the draft. But then, when I graduated in May of 1968, then my category changed from whatever the category was to "1A", which is a draftable person; and my name went into the bin, and it got pulled out, I suppose sometime in July or August. I had just gotten married, August third; and a week later, when we returned from our honeymoon, my draft notice was waiting. [I was] drafted on September the third. So, I had a month, well three weeks really, to get my wife situated and a place for her to rent.

I didn’t mind [being drafted] at all. Several of my family members had been service members. As a matter of fact, my father was a career soldier in the Air Force. Three of my favorite uncles made a career of the Navy or the Air Force, and most of the other male members in my family--my uncles, and so on--had all been in the service. I’d spent all my youth on Air Force bases; so it was my turn, my turn; just my turn.

It was much more rigorous, and--what’s the word?--regimented, structured than I thought it would be. The first two months, I believe September and October, I spent in basic training at Leonardwood, Missouri. The Sergeants were meaner than I thought they would be. The Drill Sergeant much meaner than I thought.

The physical training, the P.T. was much tougher than I expected. The first few weeks was to get you into physical shape, and where you would follow orders closely. After those two months of November and December, I was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for Artillery Training. Of course, it was a little looser and you could go off base, and you could wear civilian clothes when you weren’t in training. So, that was a little better atmosphere.

You were always so busy because in Basic Training you’re accounted for every minute. You woke up at 4:30 and you go to your P.T., your physical training, for an hour. Then you came back and you had breakfast, and then you went to classes until noon. You have classes until 5:00. And, always, you know, you have to be in bed by a certain time. You’re kept pretty busy sometimes.

You don’t have a lotta time to think about other things--make sure that boot lockers are nice and neat, and everything’s in order, and shine your boots, and so on. In both Fort Leonardwood, Missouri, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma the barracks were nice. They’d be just like a university or college dormitory today. Four people slept in a room, and each floor [had] groups assigned.

I went to Vietnam February 9, 1969, and [was there] fourteen months. I was in the U.S. Army, a Specialist Five, it’s the equivalent of a Sergeant. We left, as a group, from Fort Sill, Oklahoma and flew--by commercial airline--and flew to Oakland, California. At Oakland there is a huge transition place where you turned in your U.S. clothes and got combat fatigues, boots, steel helmets. Then we flew--United--out of Oakland. We stopped in Hawaii for a couple of hours, and then flew to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines where we transferred to a military plane which then flew to Bien Hoa. We stayed there overnight, and were issued our weapons, ammunition, knife, field pack, sleeping bag, and those kinds of things. I went to Nha Trang where I stayed two or three days until I was assigned to a permanent unit--6th Battalion, 84th Strike Artillery, Headquarters Battery--at An Khe. We flew from Nha Trang on a C-135, would be like a Boeing 707, that had no seats. We sat on the floor, there were no seats. They had ropes strung from one wall to the other, and you held onto the ropes. Now, when we flew from one place to another within Vietnam, we flew on a C-97 plane that had a propeller and web seats.

In Vietnam, I was stationed in several places. The outfit I was in was a Strike Artillery outfit, so we traveled around wherever we were needed. I was at An Kee, Ban Me Thout, Pleike, Dalat, Phan Rang, and several other’s I don't’ remember.

I remember seeing the movie Platoon several years ago, and one of the things that really got me about the movie was that cricket and insect sound--that background noise. That just about drove me bananas. There wasn’t that wild jungle sound like you might think. It was generally quiet, a quiet sound, and the insects would be mosquitoes. Not a lot of bird sounds.

Usually if there was a kind of barbecued-hickory type smell because that’s how just everyone cooked their meals, no barbecued briquettes; but what they used, they would take limb’s, and in affect charcoal them. So, any place there was a fire, and there was usually some sort of a small fire in the villages throughout the jungle, it was kind of that burning smell from the smoke. It would be kind of a flavored smell.

The animals that were there looked a lot different, and most of the vegetation looked different than we are used to. The bananas weren’t curved, they didn’t curve. They were straight, and only about four or five inches long, and you ate them green. If the outside tuned yellow, they were rotten. The pigs were sort of a wild boar. It didn’t look like a domestic pig in the United States. Long tails that didn’t curl, big teeth, the two incisor teeth, or whatever they are, would stick up. Their faces are longer, and the noses are longer and more pointed. Lots of hair on the back. A wild-looking pig. Lots of water buffalo.

The other thing really different that made you appreciate what we have would be (houses). We traveled a lot. So, I got to see a lot of the countryside, a lot of the little villages, and the way people lived. The average, the typical, house for a family to live in had a dirt floor, cardboard or corrugated-metal sides, and roof.

I can only remember seeing a paved road in two villages, no sidewalks. Most children didn’t go to school. Most of them started working about five or six. You’d see the little girls and little boys going out to the jungle to pick up sticks so that they could bring them back home to do whatever they do to burn them--to turn them into barbecue sticks for fires. Little kids are always babysitting other little kids. You could see an eight or nine year old girl, and she would have a little baby on her back, that was her little brother or sister, and she had (to) take care of (them) because her folks were out working in the rice field or farming.

The typical Vietnamese person is very poor. No running water; you got your water from a local well. There isn’t any kind of convenience, like wood house or a wooden floor or carpeting or television set. Lots of radios. No cars. Nobody had a car. Some bicycles. Most people walked any place they went. Every once in a while, you’d see these--they used to be called "Jeepneese." It’s like a motorcycle front, with a platform built on the back to carry four or five people.

It was never really cold. As a matter a fact, when we got there we turned all our equipment in, field jackets and stuff like that; and we were issued five sets of jungle fatigues, and jungle boots. It was eighty to one hundred five degrees every day. Not humid. It was a dry heat, it’s kinda like that heat in say, Arizona or Nevada. So, it really didn’t bother you that much.

One place I was at, Dalat--Dalat is where (we were) for one week, just to guard the President of Vietnam who was coming to Dalat. That’s where they have their officers candidate school, and they were having their graduation. Our Artillery Unit was sent in for that one week to be stationed close by the academy to guard while the President was going to be there. It’s up on a plateau, and so the temperature got down to like seventy degrees or so. We thought we were freezing. We had out ponchos and a poncho liner--a poncho liner is like a blanket, a camouflage quilted-type thin blanket. And we were wrapped up in them at night, ‘cause the temperature would get down to like seventy degrees, and that was cold. If you were out in the jungle, you had your poncho and poncho liner. If you were lucky, you had a blow-up air mattress to sleep on. You either slept out in the open; or , if you knew you were going to be in that place for three weeks, or so, you’d usually dig your hole down like a bunker. You’d dig it down deep enough for say two to four people to sleep in, and stay in. You’d sand bag the edges, and put some sort of a corrugated metal sheets across it. Then two to three layers of sand bags on top of that. I remember one time I had slept on--we called them "refrigerators", actually, it’s about a five foot wide ice chest. I had to sleep on one of those for two or three days. One time, during the monsoon in October, we were on a hill out in the jungle. When we first dug our bunker down, we didn’t put enough of by-pass around it for the rains, it flooded. One time we woke up all wet. We didn’t bring our little drainage ditch around it good enough.

[Our living quarters] depended on whether [we] were at a Base Camp, or out in the jungle. If you were in a Base Camp, you stayed in a building that was like a barracks with a concrete floor. Wood sides that came up about five feet, and then screen that went up another couple of feet. Then a corrugated metal roof. Inside is divided with partitions so that you had two people [in], I guess you’d call it, a room. Sand bags all around the side up to where the screen was.

One time we were building some tangle foot--it’s where you use barbed wire around your perimeter, and you stake it in the ground, and make it go out in a sort of checkered fashion all along the ground--and I got laid up for a couple of days from carrying the barb-wire rolls. At certain times, when it would rain so much, I got a fungus infection on my arms and hands. The veterans administration have me with a twenty percent disability--it’s merely a category--for that. There’s no real disability.

The food was different, and it varied quite a bit. I don’t remember any problems with the food. If you were at a Base Camp, then you ate in a kitchen that was cooked right there by Army Cooks, you know. One of the sections you had in your Company was the cooks, and they cooked American food. If you were eating breakfast, you could go in and you could have, you know, cereal in little packages--Kellogs Corn Flakes, Corn Pops--all those things; you could order eggs, eggs and bacon, or eggs and sausage. You ordered it, and they cooked it right there the way you wanted it. There would be a set cafeteria-type meal for lunch and supper. That varied from day to day, not like we have here at school, you know, you didn’t hardly ever get hamburgers or cheese burgers or pizza, things like that. It was like mashed potatoes and gravy and pork cutlets; or Salisbury steak, things like that, with your vegetables, and almost always the desert was ice cream. You always had ice cream. The ice cream came in big jugs that was just scooped out on your tray.

If you were out in the jungle, you would take K-rations with you. K-rations come in a cardboard box, and you had some kind of a meat, there were twelve kinds of meals like chicken an’ noodles, spaghetti and meatball, franks and beans. You had one can that’s a meat, like a main dish, and you have a can that has some kind of a bread or cracker in it. Then you have a can that’s some kind of fruit. There’s twelve different kinds, so there’s a little bit of variety there. We’d poke a hole in the meat can, take everything out of the cardboard box, set the can inside the box, set the box on fire; and that would be enough heat to heat the can so that you could have hot spaghetti, or hot beef, or hot chicken an’ noodles, or whatever. Every once in a while, if you were out at a camp for, say four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, something like that, and if there wasn’t a Base Camp too far away, once every three of four days they’d send a Chopper in with some hot food. If you were with some other kind of unit, like for a while there, we were with Montagnard group, they got their food from the Special Forces, which got their own special kind of food even.

One of the, I guess you would consider it a delicacy; you could get French bread with water buffalo steak--water buffalo sandwich. When they sold it to you, you bought it like [from] a vender or someone you might see if you were going through a village. They would wrap it up in a newspaper. For a dollar you could get a water buffalo sandwich on French bread, and it was just like eating one at Jim’s Steak House, I mean melt in your mouth. It was just like a steak.

Which reminds me. The original outfit I was in traveled around quite a bit. We traveled by helicopter, boat, and by truck. One time we were going from An Khe to Pleike, and along the way there were various passes that you had to go through. Usually the passes had guard posts, to help guard the passes and keep the roads clear. One of the places we went through had the pass guarded by a whole group of Korean soldiers--you see, the United States was not the only country in Vietnam. There were Korean soldiers, there were Australian soldiers, there were some Philippine soldiers.

One of the places we passed, we stopped at, had Korean soldiers for guards. One of the first things they’d ask you is if you had any dogs to sell, because that’s a delicacy [for them].

I was in the Artillery so we would be three or four, or even eight to ten miles away from the actual hand-to-hand combat. Quite often, we could be called on to fire support with our guns. There were only two occasions--at night--where we could actually see someone attacking us, and we were fighting directly back at them.

One thing is that the life that I led is pretty much reversed of what most people consider life like in the United States. In other words, during the day was sleeping, and then working at night. The day was say, sleep from six to four or five; and then, if you had to, there were some details you had to take care of before it got dark--like it you were on some crew, you had to fill some sand bags or help. You’d do that, say between four, and when it got dark at eight or so--and then, from usually around eight till five or so the next morning, you were working.

I’d get calls to do firing, to have the guns fire at a certain location. I was in FDC, Fire Direction Control, towards the end of my tour. I had about five guys under me who would take in calls from Infantry and Artillery Units that were out and needed some fire support. So, I would have my crew calculate what trajectory, what angle, what size and kind of shell to use. We’d fire on locations, and we would have them call back to see how close we were, and whether we had to adjust fire to get closer, or certain depth, or whatever. I was the one that would have people do those calculations, and would tell the guns what angle, what elevation, what trajectory to use, how many rounds to fire; and that, for the most part, was all night-type work. Generally, we would be up all night. We’d fire all night long. Sometimes we wouldn’t fire at all, but we’d need to be there.

[Sometimes] we would fire where someone had seen maybe a new trail, or some sign that people had been passing by this place and they shouldn’t have been in that area--that’s not a normal area where the local farmers or villagers go--so, we might destroy parts of that area to hinder people from passing through. Or, we did what was called a "hazardous firing." In other words, maybe someone had seen someone going through a certain place one time, they’re not there now; but we randomly chose times during the night, and we would fire a few rounds at that location just for the chance that we might hit something. More often than not, we would be called to back up something that was going on.

One time, it was in October of 1968, the outfit that I was with was one of the outfits in the Vietnamization Program, started by President Nixon, to turn more of the fighting over to the Vietnamese. So, the one Strike Artillery outfit that I was in turned all of our equipment over to the Vietnamese in August of 1969, and we abandoned the place where we were. All of our equipment was turned over to this South Vietnamese Unit. Just literally put all our equipment--everything--up just like we were going through an inspection of all our equipment. All of our kitchen equipment, all of our rifles, and everything we just turned over to the South Vietnamese unit; and all of us got split up and sent out to make up the difference in other American units.

I was sent from a unit that used big guns, big canons, to a unit that used smaller canons. I was only there a couple of weeks when another unit that had big canons needed, just temporarily, some people that were familiar with the bigger canons. So, for about two months I was one of the people who was sent temporarily, to this other outfit which went into a campaign by the Cambodian border.

So, for about a month and a half we spent, by "we" I mean about thirty Americans, spent a month and a half out in the middle of the jungle. We were dropped off by helicopters, and set up a camp on a hill that didn’t have anything on it, in the middle of the jungle. The next closest thing was ten miles away. There was another Artillery outfit just like us three miles from the Cambodian border. There were thirty Americans, and about fifty Montagnards. Montagnards are like native Indians. To the country, they’re not Vietnamese they’re the Indian group that originally settled in Vietnam. They would be comparable to our native Indians. Vietnamese didn’t like them, and treated them poorly. They usually stayed to their own village, but they were very pro-American and so a lot of Montagnards would be hired by American Forces to help guard us. So, we were like thirty Americans on the top of this hill, and we had about fifty Montagnards that stayed around the bottom of the hill that acted like our perimeter guards. We would usually sleep during the day and, uh, fire the canons at night over a long supply line of paths that the Vietnamese were using to come through Cambodia to get to South Vietnam. We were pretty much stranded there. We’d have helicopters that would bring us food and ammunition and things like that. But for about three of four days it was really raining. It was like the monsoon season, and all it did was rain all of the time. And we ran out of food. There was no way to get helicopters in there to send some. We sent a couple of patrols out to find something to eat, and one of the patrols brought back a wild pig. So, we had wild pig one day. We went three days without any food, and then had a feast, with this roast pig.

When we were on that hill by Cambodia our Lieutenant--we didn’t have a Captain, we had a Lieutenant--I can’t remember his name. I have a picture of him. He’s from Muleshoe, Texas. Towards the end of October, we started to get rocketed each night. We couldn’t tell it was the North Vietnamese 9th Division that was following my outfit. One night our Lieutenant was shot. He got hit by some shrapnel. Not killed, wounded which was bad enough; but he was able to be helicoptered out. The fella that they brought in in place of him only had, like ten days left. One night we got attacked pretty strongly, and the next night even stronger, and we had to leave. We had to retreat, escape back to a Base Camp. When we were leaving, we blew everything we had up. We put a shell in the end of each cannon, so it would blow itself up. This Lieutenant, the replacement, got wounded pretty badly. I don’t know if he made it or not. He was in pretty bad shape. He had to be carried eight miles and we were split up. I had no idea if he made it or not. You kind of remember certain people like that, like I remember, I can’t remember that Lieutenant's name, other than he’s from Muleshoe, Texas. You always wonder, you know. I’d kind of like to go down there, an’ see if anyone knows if he’s still around.

[In Vietnam you had] two fears, I suppose. One of them was, of course, the fear of not making it back home. The other one was, you see you had to depend on what other people did around you, and if you could trust what someone else was going to do. If you couldn’t predict what they would do at a certain time, you couldn’t trust them to follow orders. So that, to me, that was much more fearful. It was having some dummy, other soldier, that was suppose to be doing something for you or helping you, make a mistake that gets you harmed.

Two things I missed most would be China, silverware, and glasses. Because if you were at a camp where there was a mess hall, a kitchen, then everything was metal. You had a metal tray with plastic knives and forks. I also missed nice restrooms with flush toilets, and things like that, because there weren’t any.

I got to Vietnam on February 9th, 1969. My time was up on February 8th, 1970. I was going to go home. At that time you had to stay in the Army your full two years, twenty-four months. When you’re in a combat area, and you come back from combat with less than five months left in the service, the Army will go ahead and discharge you. Five months pay, having to move you, transferring you to a new outfit, they figure if you’re in the U.S. less than five months it’s not worth their while to do that. So, a lot of people did what I did--go ahead, extend and stay in the combat area so that when you have less than five months left they would go ahead and discharge you right then. So, I stayed over there two more months until April, 1970.

I’m a very patriotic-type person. As I’ve mentioned, several people in my family have been military. I’m a pretty patriotic person, and I consider myself fortunate that I could serve the country. I was in Vietnam to help a country that was being invaded from the North and the East. We encountered troops from North Vietnam that shouldn’t have been there.

Of course, there were lots easier jobs. There were a lot of supple type jobs--clerk positions, administrative positions, an’ so on, that were in places that were fantastic. They had their own rooms. The beaches were right there. Most of the large bases were along the coast. So, there were a lot of cushiony jobs. The people of the United States are so fortunate compared to many of the other countries. The hardships they bear is not comprehended by the average American teenager. I think a good lesson for people in high school would be to compare what they think are hardships to what happens in so many other countries in the world.

This interview was conducted in January, 1989 by Shannon Butler and Sheldon Gillespie.

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