TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

A Tour of Duty in Vietnam
processing to go home at 3/12’s rear in Quang Tri. Our Ohio boy had
been working there trying to recover on light duty, but that night he
went off the rails again. He had a berserk episode and was acting as
though he might hurt himself. Because he was so fit and strong, it took
several Marines to help me catch him and hold him down. During his
ranting and raving, one of pleas that cemented itself in my brain
forever was “Tell Captain Wilkes I am not a coward.” I tried to tell
him several times that I never thought of him as a coward, but he
didn’t even realize who was talking to him even though our faces were
only a foot or two apart. It was very heart breaking.
On another day I was running through the middle of the battery area
when I heard the ominous tube noises come from the direction of
Laos. I immediately spotted a hole large enough for my body just a
few yards in front of me. I made a broad­jump­type leap that landed
me on my back inside the hole. The landing was very soft because the
hole was the battery’s temporary repository for excess powder bags! I
should have remembered its location. As the 122 rounds detonated
outside, I was struck with the realization that I could be a crispy critter
in the span of a nanosecond if any hot metal or flaming material fell
into the hole and ignited just one of those bags. Again, my luck held
and I skated.
A distraction we had during this period was listening to Hanoi
Hannah on the radio trying to entice us into changing sides. One of my
fellow battery commanders had absent mindedly used my name in a
radio transmission. Consequently, there were a couple of days that
Hanoi Hannah talked directly to me by name and the troops of 1st
Prov. The troops got a big kick out of it, and she actually boosted their
sagging morale.
The aggravating part of these dark times was the fact that the NVA/
Russian 122 gunners knew our exact location, but we had no reliable
information on their locations. Every time we had rounds land in or
near the battery area, I would run out to dig up the fuses to measure
their angle into the ground and obtain a back azimuth from whence
they came. With this information and what we thought we knew about
Russian 122mm trajectories, I would go to the map and try to guess
their locations. We would then fire multiple 155 rounds at these map
spots. Sometimes we could detect secondary explosions over in Laos
but, with no eyes on the targets, we had no idea how successful we
were. The only good news was the fact that we had virtually unlimited
ammo as long as we could get resupplied, and they did not have that
luxury.
After two weeks of bad weather, however, the lack of supplies had
become so dire, the infantry perimeter was even out of small arms
ammunition. Once I walked down to the fox hole in front of our
battery and asked the grunt how many rounds he had. He looked at a
big pile of fist sized rocks he had assembled next to his foxhole and
said “I think I’ve got about 20 rounds there, sir!”
Finally, circa February 17, we received an afternoon of blue sky and
sunshine. The aerial resupply effort resembled a swarm of bees. Nets
full of artillery rounds, C­rations, as well as water bulls, were being
dropped everywhere. One had to be careful he wasn’t near one of the
nets when it was released. All hands were rushing to redistribute
everything to where it belonged. The weather break was certainly
fortuitous because, by my memory, that night was the night of the
infamous NVA suicide sapper attack on LZ Cunningham. As it was, a
band of about fifty NVA sappers, high on drugs and armed with
A‐79