| I was drafted into the U. S. Army in January 1967 and trained as a sentry dog handler. A year later I arrived in Vietnam's central high lands, just in time for the Tet Offensive. My job was to go out alone at night with an attack dog and find bad guys, mainly Viet Cong, before they could infiltrate sensitive places and cause trouble. After more than forty years I have just a few memories of that year. One evening early in my tour, just before sundown, I met my buddy and fellow dog handler, Frank Tanzosch, in a field near Cam Ranh. Frank suddenly looked surprised and I noticed that a black panther was watching us. After a few moments of staring it leaped away. A few days later, just before Tet, Frank and I went to An Khe to replace some dog handlers who were about to be shipped out. We got word that one of our people, Gordon Currier, was killed in action at Binh Hoa, one of the first American casualties of the Tet Offensive. The state-of-the-art dog kennel at Fort Meade was named after him. My brigade, the 18th Military Police Brigade, has been credited as the principle force that crushed the Viet Cong attacks on Saigon and the American Embassy during the Tet Offensive. We were next to a large POL (petroleum, oil, lubricant) installation, and one night a rocket came in and made the whole area a world of fire. All the men and dogs survived without injury, but it was unnerving. There was also an attack on the so-called Golf Course, which was next to our little compound and was actually the world's largest helicopter airport, destroying a helicopter. So that was Tet, at least from my perspective.. Frank and I were reassigned to Pleiku later in the year. One night I found an Asian man fooling around with a large ammunition pile on my beat. It turned out that he spoke perfect English without an accent. He told me he was South Korean and was working for a contracting company. Viet Cong? I guess I'll never know, but I have always wondered. There were occasional fire fights and artillery attacks throughout the year, but I was lucky to always be on the periphery of the action. The most impressive thing was Puff the Magic Dragon, an airplane equipped with all sorts of weaponry. During the action, or sometimes afterwards, it arrived, dropped bright flares that lit up a large part of the countryside, and fired all sorts of machine guns, rockets, and so on, turning the area into toothpicks. I spent a few days in Kuala Kumpur, which I thought was an extremely beautiful city with wonderful architecture. Years later I met an Australian who lived in southeast Asia and told him about my vacation in that city. Later on I overheard him passionately condemning it as "a city without a soul." He stopped talking and seemed embarrassed when he noticed me. Odd. I liked most of what I saw of the place. |
| Military Service |