TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

John Burwell Wilkes
no more fire from across the riverbed calmed me down directly.
I was finally able to get some artillery smoke rounds shot into
the tree line, and the platoon was able to cross the riverbed and
find the crash site unopposed. The downed airplane had hit the
ground in a power dive that spread its pieces over a large area. It
took the whole platoon to put a perimeter around the wreckage.
This left just a few of us to search for the crew and the “black
box.” I believe I was the first to spot both bodies. The one I
presumed to be the pilot was in the middle of a large thick bush.
He was pinned upright with his arms and legs seemingly bent in
the wrong directions, but the most notable image was a round hole
in the middle of his forehead, which I guessed to be of 50­caliber
size. The backseater had ended up careening through covering
foliage to the bottom of a gulley. The top of his skull had been
removed at the level of his eye brows. His own mother could not
have recognized him. At first, I erroneously thought I knew the
backseater, but somehow found out he was not who I thought he
was. I do not believe that either man had a nametag on his flight
suit. I made sure they were covered up and went about looking for
the “Black Box,” which I never found. Sadly, I think the VC got it
before we arrived.
A few days later, in the same area, one of the troops on the
perimeter found the lid to an underground bunker living quarters.
The subterranean hooch was obviously not part of a tunnel. There
was nothing anywhere nearby for a tunnel to connect to or bypass.
I suspected the inhabitants would be embedded NVA liaison from
the north. The fact that the lid had been concealed from the outside
lead me to believe there was probably no one at home. Of course,
a local VC could have camouflaged it after his I&I inhabitant had
entered.
I was the senior Marine and the platoon commander was not
present, but none of the infantry Marines were really under my
command to make me comfortable in ordering any of them down
into the void. I decided it was something I would like to say I had
done someday, so I tasked myself. I took off all my deuce gear,
donned ear plugs, chambered a round in my 45, grabbed an extra
magazine and a flash light, clicked off the safety, and lowered
myself into the abyss.
The underground bunker had two rooms. One was obviously for
sleeping, and the other was for all other things one might do
underground. Luckily, it was unoccupied. I quickly realized it was
the exclusive quarters of an NVA liaison officer who was from
Hanoi. I found no weapons, but I confiscated many of his personal
belongings including letters from home and a pearl­handled
straight razor which had been made in Eastern Europe. The
lieutenant was obviously a young single man, since practically all
his letters from home were from his sister. I was struck by the fact
that the letters contained sentiments so normal to our own society.
Since I could read Vietnamese, I read them all before eventually
turning them over to the battalion intelligence officer. I kept the
razor and carried the razor in my dop kit for years before it
mysteriously disappeared. I even shaved with it a few times.
At some later point in time, I either remembered or was told that
Dale Wyrauch, my favorite classmate from The Basic School and
Artillery School, was flying around in Marine Corps aircraft as a
back seat fire support aerial observer. It occurred to me that the
body I had pulled out of the Go Noi gulley could have been Dale.
Eventually after our retrograde back to base, I ran into some
A‐62