What Matters

My father’s war was one we didn’t win; evil was not vanquished, territory was not conquered, people were not liberated. He came home to demonstrations not parades. For years his war stories were mumbled through clenched teeth, through his anger about how he and his men were treated during the war and when they returned, by the military and the politicians and the public. Over time his anger was tempered by his pride in how they did what they could for each other, in how they tried to keep each other alive. With frequent retelling he polished his war stories into narratives of what mattered.

In the summer of 1967, my father went to Vietnam to where the Cua Viet River emptied into the Gulf of Tonkin. He was the Executive Officer of the First Marines Amphibious Tractor Battalion, tasked with keeping that major supply route open for boats going up to Dong Ha to supply fire bases along the DMZ.

In April of 1968, in the immediate aftermath of the Tet Offensive, he took A Company to C4, the northern most outpost along McNamara’s Line, where a platoon watched the beach; they were so far north the gunnery sergeant said his forward wire was in the DMZ. His first day there my father learned that anti-tank mines along the dune line endangered amtracs on patrol. Two engineers attached to the company located the mines and exploded them in place, but overnight the NVA replaced them. His second day there he decided to dig them out by hand so the NVA wouldn’t know which ones to replace. Without any special equipment or training, he loosened the sand around them with his knife, then lifted out the Soviet-made TM-46 nineteen pound mines.

The engineers and about ten of his men stayed back while he lay on his belly with his flak jacket propped in front of him, between his body and the mine, supposedly to protect all but his arms and hands from an explosion. Given the weight differential between him and the tanks the mines were designed to destroy, the question is who was the flak jacket meant to protect, him or his men watching. He dug out 29 mines with only one incident, the mine where a spring snapped back when he was unscrewing the fuse, making him think it might be booby trapped. He paused, but kept unscrewing the fuse, only saying when he tells the story, “well, I got away with it.”

The Battalion Commander hadn’t ordered, or even suggested, digging the mines out. But he appreciated that it worked. The NVA stopped replacing the mines and the amtracs patrolled without incident. One of the things my father is most proud of is his 92 days up at C4 without a casualty.

But the mine story doesn’t have a happy ending. He went home in August and no one else dug out the mines. The engineers went back to blowing them in place and the NVA went back to replacing them. His communications technician, Staff Sergeant John C. Yates, who worked the radios and led patrols in his spare time, wrote to his mother complaining about the mines the night before he was out with an amtrac that hit one. This was the Marine who had asked my father if he could take an AP photographer on patrol with him back in July. When they got back Yates told how they’d crossed the Ben Hai River and raised the stars and stripes so they could get a picture of the flag flying over North Vietnamese territory on the fourth of July.

When the amtrac hit the mine, the amgrunts knew they had 30 seconds before it blew. Because he hadn’t trained on amtracs, Yates hadn’t known that. He reacted immediately, climbing in to help the driver out, the driver who had already gotten out the other side. Yates was in the amtrac when it blew. For this, he was awarded the Navy Cross.

When my father left Vietnam, they gave him the flag they’d flown over Outpost Ocean View, telling him Yates wanted him to have it. When he got stateside he found out the photo had been on the front page of the Baltimore Sun, and later that Yates had been killed by a mine, and then later still that the photographer, Henri Huet, had been killed in Cambodia. A copy of the photo hangs in my father’s study and he sent a copy to Yates’ mother. Someday that will be the flag used when he is buried in Arlington.

My father still grieves men who didn’t come home, still carries certain events, certain days. He did what he could to control his little piece of the war. He did what he did to keep his men alive. And that, his stories tell over and over, is what matters.