TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

John Burwell Wilkes
in his backside. I pulled off his headset and donned it myself trying to
call the FDC to send the corpsman, but no one was answering. I was
starting to get angry until I pulled on the cord, and the severed end
popped out from under the section chief.
One of the cannoneers ran up, squatted down beside me, and asked
me if I was all right. I think I said “Yes.” He then asked me if it was
all right if he went back into the pit and pulled the lanyard on the
howitzer. The howitzer had been fully loaded and the A­gunner had
been waiting for the command from the exec pit to fire when the
incoming round had hit. It took me a significant amount of time to get
my senses back. Thankfully, we took no more casualties that evening,
but when Lt. Ferrari assured himself that I was not a casualty needing
evacuation, he broke the sad news to me that the same 122 round had
killed three of our wonderful nineteen­year­olds: Pfc. Raymond Nito
Rivera from Texas, Pfc. Dennis W. Schonberg from Missouri, and Pfc.
Dale W. Schaefer from Wisconsin. As I write this over fifty years later,
knowing that, if I had been quicker to realize we were being attacked,
the boys may have been able to reach cover in time. Again, tears are
running down my face, as I remember those wonderful young men.
There can be no reasonable explanation as to why no fragmentation
struck my body. I was between the impact and the section chief, and
he received two serious wounds. I estimated that I was only seven feet
from where the 122 fuse had penetrated the ground, and I should have
been in the worst part of the burst pattern, I was black and blue all
over the back side of my body, and it was painful to move any part of
it for a long time, but from nowhere did I lose a single drop of blood.
There was certainly no remaining doubt that I was the luckiest man
alive.
The loss of our young men, the constant threat of incoming from
Laos, and our dwindling ammo, food, and water, made the first half of
February probably the worst two weeks of my entire life. When the
Russian mercenaries over in Laos fired their guns, their rounds started
out speedier than sound, but as the trajectory slowed the tube noise
would catch up and pass the rounds giving us about three whole
seconds of warning to find cover. We tried to keep the noise in the
battery down as much as possible in order to hear those distant tube
noises. Thankfully, the Russian gunners had a difficult time with
accurately placing the rounds inside our battery area. I suspect that
they did not have some of the nuances that give professional artillery
accuracy, such as weather information and ammunition lot variances.
The eastern side of the ridge right behind us was almost a vertical
drop, and many of the rounds barely missed us over the edge and
continued down into the valley where a fully equipped abandoned
NVA hospital was later found. One day I was in a gun pit when I heard
the telltale “thumps” in the distance. I dropped myself into a trail pit
facing east and actually saw the rounds fly right over us and sail into
the valley below. I have often used that experience to claim to be one
of the few people in the world to have actually seen incoming artillery.
The psychological stress caused by having to listen for, then survive,
the random incoming 122 rounds was devastating to many of our
folks. One of our cannoneers was a big strong boy who had played
football for Ohio State. As he was carrying the rear end of a stretcher
up to the landing pad, he passed through the neighbor 105 howitzer
battery unaware that a fire mission was in the works. He was very
close to a howitzer when it was unexpectedly fired. Our boy medevac
himself, never to return to the battery. Several weeks later, I was
A‐78