War is hell on earth: it is not glorious; it is not "exciting"; it is gruesome; it is deadly; it takes the lives of the good, the bad and the ugly...
Another milestone: 54 years ago, I arrived in Vietnam beginning my tour of duty that would last a full year... It seemed like an eternity, but then again, it flew by! A contradiction? Perhaps, but there were times on the perimeter when situations could go from boredom to all out chaos in nanoseconds!
When I got off the commercial jet at Cam Ranh Bay, I was still in a half-daze... I didn't like the security setup I saw and was happy to get out of there, pronto... And I (we) did...
Ironically, I was transferred back to Cam Ranh Bay for the second half of my tour of duty...
I, and my police buddies, boarded a C-130 troop/equipment transport and headed north to my first base: Tuy Hoa (pronounced: two-ee-wa), in the II Corps theater of operations...
It was after-dark-thirty when the 130 hit the tarmac...
When we stepped off the plane, the first thing -- the very first thing! -- we saw were .50 caliber heavy machine guns, manned by Army gunners, pounding the enemy with tracer rounds, flying 1,000+ yards into the foothills. It was called harassment fire... And any enemy that might decide to sneak through the jungle to transport troops, arms and ammunition, or to set up their own firebases to shell our air base, or the army installation to our south, knew they could be shot to pieces by the big .50s...
What was my very first thought?
This was the real thing; I was really in Vietnam; this was not some magazine article; this was no Hollywood movie script; I'm here, and here I'll have to survive for a year, at least that was my hope...
After processing in at the personnel office, and assignment to a flight (equivalent to an army company), and additional weapons familiarization, I was assigned to various positions, including but not limited to machine gun bunker, observation tower, participating in sweeps (search and destroy) or machine gunner on escort convoys that seemed to take forever to get to our destination, all the while easy targets, exposed to sniper fire or mortar or rocket attack...
As the days morphed into weeks, January 1968 rolled around, and the Viet Cong in conjunction with the North Vietnamese Regular Army, launched the "Tet Offensive"...
(If you want to know what that was like, you can read my short story: The Battle For Oscar Six, available on Amazon...
I survived Tet, but some of my G.I. police buddies didn't...
In all, I lost one-hundred-eleven brother Air Force Police during the protracted Vietnam War. I pray for them every day...)
Memories...
Pray for peace and strength and honor!
Viva Cristo Rey! Bl. Fr. Miguel Pro, Fr. Emil Kapaun and Fr. Vincent Capodanno, pray for us...
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle...
Gene DeLalla
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