Photo By Chuck Cannon | Navy Vietnam veteran Mike Brown... read more read more
Editor’s note: This is one of a series of stories about Vietnam War veterans being published ahead of Fort Polk’s Salute to Veterans event taking place Nov. 8 at 10 a.m. at the 1st Battalion, 5th Aviation Regiment hangar. A meet and greet for participants will be held in bldg 4297 at Polk Airfield at 8:30 a.m. RSVP at 531-8973/0127.
FORT POLK, La. — Mike Brown, a native of North Louisiana’s piney hills near Bernice, was attending Southwest Louisiana Technical College in Lake Charles in 1968 when he and four buddies realized they were about to be drafted.
“Most of the people getting drafted were being put in the Army and sent to Vietnam,” Brown said. “We didn’t want to go to Vietnam.”
As a result, the five young men headed to the Navy Reserve Center in Lake Charles and signed up. They felt like they had avoided the potential hazards of war.
“We had one-year worth of weekly meetings and a two-week boot camp in San Diego,” Brown, who had moved to DeRidder in the sixth grade, said. “It looked like our plan worked.”
But, as the well-known poet Robert Burns penned in “To A Mouse”, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
“At the end of the year we got orders for active duty for 24 months,” Brown said. “We were sent back to San Diego and 10 days later we got our orders posted on the bulletin board. Three of us — including me — got orders to Vietnam. They sent the three of us to Camp Pendleton, California, for weapons training. After that we were sent to Coronado Beach near San Diego where the underwater demolition (today’s SEALS) trained. We received survival, evasion and escape training. They let us go home for 30 days before shipping out to Vietnam.”
Brown said he assumed that since he was in the Navy, he would be assigned to a ship. He was mistaken.
“I got stationed in Da Nang, Vietnam,” Brown said. “They sent me to a shallow water ship landing and made me a radio operator. When I got there, I met with the commander. He looked at my paperwork and said ‘Brown, what do you want to do?’ I was thinking, ‘The commander is asking me what I want to do?’”
Brown said he told the commander to assign him a forklift and let him offload ships and barges like everyone else. He told me he had enough forklift operators and asked what I knew about radios.
“I said, ‘Nothing, sir,’” Brown said. “He said, ‘Well, you’ll pick it up.’ He sent me in to relieve the radio operator, so I became a radioman.”
If you had to be in Vietnam, Brown said Da Nang was about the safest area to be.
“We were surrounded by Marines, Army, Air Force and Navy,” he said. “We never had a ground attack, but did have a couple of threats. We had occasional incoming rockets. After a few weeks you learned the difference between one of our destroyers firing and the incoming rockets.”
Brown recalled an occasion when he heard rockets hitting the ground at a distance, and then heard more and they were closer.
“A couple of minutes later they were closer still and headed in our direction,” he said. “It was 2 or 3 in the morning and I was lying in my bunk, listening, and ready to run for the door and a bunker.”
Brown said an alarm sounded and a voice on the compound intercom announced, “Rockets in the air, rockets in the air,” while sirens were blaring. “I was the first one to the door, and slammed the screen door open,” Brown said. “The instant the screen door slammed against the building, a rocket hit nearby, right in front of me. All I saw was red, instantaneous and an earth-shattering explosion.”
Brown said he stayed on his feet and sprinted to the bunkers.
“I was in my bare feet and there was crushed rocks on the ground between the barracks and bunkers,” he said. “I ran across those sharp crushed rocks and dove into the bunker. I was so scared I didn’t even feel the rocks.” Brown said another rocket hit a stack of 55-gallon barrels filled with asphalt, while a third hit the oxidation pond for the barracks.
“It was quite a mess,” he said.
As with the case of most service men and women in Vietnam, additional duties were the norm. Brown said he picked his up by accident.
“There was an Army staff sergeant that would come to our area to get supplies periodically, and on one of the trips he visited the radio room and handed me an M16,” Brown said. “None of our guys had weapons. Right across from us was the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force, so we were well protected. When we’d have an alert for a possible ground attack, the Marines would come around to our gate with a M-60 machine gun mounted on a Jeep manned by two Marines. When the guy gave me the M16 with two magazines with ammo, I went to my chief’s office and told him about the M16. He said, ‘OK, you’re our reactionary force. Put the weapon behind my door, if you have need for it you know where it is.’”
I wasn’t long before Brown said he had to take his “place” on the reactionary force.
“Soon after we got a call about a possible ground attack,” he said. “I ran in, grabbed the M16, and ran outside just as the Marines were pulling up in their Jeep. I joined them. One of them turned and acknowledged my presence, no words exchanged. The threat diminished, they left and I went back inside.”
Brown said the occasional rocket attacks were unnerving because you never knew where they were going to land.
“You got in a high state of anxiety,” he said. “There was a few times I feared for my safety, but I got out without a scratch.”
There was one incident that Brown said has been indelibly imprinted on his mind. He said a co-worker was riding on the side of a forklift, stepped off of it, and the rear wheel ran over his foot, crushing it.
“Four of us went to see him in the hospital the next day,” Brown said. “As we were walking up to the hospital, there was a commotion. Two or three people were pulling and pushing a gurney with a Marine laid on his back on it, and other people bringing out portable partitions. They put the gurney on the helicopter pad and set the partitions up around it. I wondered, ‘How is the helicopter going to land to pick this guy up?’”
Inside, Brown and his fellow visitors learned their friend had already been evacuated and was going to be OK.
“Then we heard a loud explosion,” Brown said, tears welling in his eyes 50 years after the event. “We learned the guy on the gurney had been accidently shot with an M79 grenade launcher. It hit him on the top of his nose between his eyes, and lodged in his face and sinus cavities. He was still alive — unconscious, but alive.”
A male nurse told us the young man, 19-years-old, had the grenade lodged in his face. The doctor in charge said they were not going to risk the life of a doctor trying to remove a live grenade from a Marine’s head, and they couldn’t put a body with a live grenade on a plane to evacuate him.”
Brown said they took the Marine out to the helipad and put the partitions around him.
“They put a C4 (explosive) charge on him,” Brown said, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. “That was the explosion we heard. The nurse said his family probably got one of his uniforms and a flag, and that will be it.”
Brown said he doesn’t talk much about his time in Vietnam, because it's still an emotional experience for him. He recalled another occasion that periodically haunts him.
“Once, it was my day off,” he said. “I was heading back to the barracks after eating lunch. A Huey helicopter was flying over, kind of low, with rocket pods on each side. I was watching and his forward motion stopped, almost right over me, and he starts firing his rockets. I thought, ‘Good grief, what am I supposed to do?’”
Brown said he was not close to a bunker and wondered what the helicopter was firing at.
“I wondered, ‘Is there a ground attack?’” he said. “He was firing to the ground outside our compound. I never found out why. That spoiled the rest of my day off.”
Like most of the other Vietnam veterans, Brown said there was no ceremony when he returned home.
“My parents and my wife, three people, met me at the airport and welcomed me home,” he said.
Brown said he’s happy for the recognition coming to Vietnam veterans now.
“A lot of us didn’t agree with what we were doing in Vietnam, did not agree with why we were there, and it just didn’t make sense to some of us,” he said. “Too many Soldiers died, too many Vietnamese people died. Over time I came to think that if we had stayed home, if we had not gone to Vietnam, no Soldiers would have died and fewer Vietnamese would have died. That’s my feeling today. We didn’t belong.
“We went because we were in the military and following orders. “I did what I was told to the best of my ability, because that’s what you do to survive while you’re over there.”
| Date Taken: | 10.26.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 10.26.2018 10:02 |
| Story ID: | 297832 |
| Location: | FORT POLK, LOUISIANA, US |
| Web Views: | 131 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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