Vietnam

My older brother was in Vietnam with the 9th Infantry, was shot up and lost a leg. I tried to enlist in the Marines when I was seventeen, but my mom would not sign the permission form. And she did not want me to be a Marine. So I waited until I was 19 and enlisted on my own. The day I went down to enlist they were recruiting for Marines, but I said no, I wanted tanks in the Army. There were no openings in tanks, and that’s how I ended up in the artillery. After basic training and then artillery training at Ft. Sill, I went to jungle training at Ft. Lewis, Washington. After that straight to Vietnam.

Ernie’s Vietnam adventures began on the way to his first assignment at LZ Sherry. Like everyone on their way to Sherry at that time he processed through its forward command post at LZ Betty, a large administrative complex outside Phan Thiet.

Note: LZ, or landing zone, was a term applied to air assault locations ranging from a patch in the jungle to permanent sprawling compounds like Betty.

In early May 1970 I was on the chopper pad at LZ Betty with two other guys waiting to go out to LZ Sherry. That’s the night Betty was overrun.

In the early morning hours of May 3 an NVA infantry battalion of five companies in consort with five companies of VC, a force of about 350, attacked LZ Betty. They killed seven U.S. soldiers and wounded thirty-five, and left behind fourteen bodies of their own they could not carry away. The attack lasted one hour and fifteen minutes.

We just stayed on the chopper pad the whole time. It was ugly. The perimeter machine guns were turned around firing into the compound. With everybody running around I didn’t know who to shoot at. If I opened fire I’d draw fire from both sides no matter who I was aiming at. I didn’t want to make a mistake and shoot an American or a South Vietnamese soldier either. I told my guys not to shoot at anybody unless it was point blank at an enemy soldier. Hell, one of my guy’s ammo clips that did not fit his rifle.

They were blowing up helicopters, so we stayed with our chopper to guard it. In a little while a lieutenant come out and asked if any enemy had been up on the helicopter, and when we said no he and his crew jumped on it and took off. Looking back we should have got on with them. Instead we stayed the whole night on the pad and caught a ride out the next morning to Sherry.

LZ Sandy

I was at LZ Sherry only a few days when the battery commander asked me, he was looking at my papers and he said, “We have a gun on loan up at LZ Sandy and I have to send one of you new guys up there. You’ve got more time in grade than the two others you came in with, so I am going to ask you first. Down here we’ve got it good, we’ve got good water, we’ve got good wire. Up there they’ve got bad food, bad wire, and they get hit a lot. It’s your choice.”

I was thinking, It’s only a matter of time before I get killed. My brother had got shot up and I knew at least eight guys from back home who got shot up. I said, “I’ve already seen this place, I’m ready to go.”

He said, “I knew you would do it.”

My trouble was I volunteered for too many things. I stayed up there at Sandy a long time, maybe five or six months. Our gun was on loan up there from Sherry to shoot illumination and counter mortar, things our 105 mm howitzer could do better than their big eight inch and 175 mm guns. We also helped out on fire missions for the infantry: the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 1/50th Mechanized Infantry, and we shot a lot for the ARVNs. The 1st and 2nd Cavalry, we worked a lot with those guys too. We were busy.

The howitzer on loan to Sandy was Gun 3, the howitzer that had taken a direct mortar hit the previous summer resulting in the death of Howie Pyle.

Wounded

One night while we’re shooting illumination a mortar round came in, you could hear it leave the tube, and it landed short in the wire. When I saw it was a short round I gave my whole crew orders to get to the gun to shoot counter mortar. We were set up for illumination so the tube was cranked way up in the air. John Walker was already at the gun and cranking it down. A second mortar hit close to our hooch. I grabbed my flack vest and as I’m putting on my helmet another mortar went off at the gun. I saw the flash but did not hear it explode. It was like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat. Everything went into slow motion and started spinning around. I seen blood and I’m going up and over backwards. They told me later a fourth mortar burst in the air and blew me back down to the ground. The First Sergeant found me wandering around the battery covered in blood while the mortars are still falling.

I took a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder and a sand blast in the face. I was like – lucky. Duncan got wounded worse than me in that third mortar blast at the gun. He ended up paralyzed. It was a miracle we both lived through it.

Years later a piece of shrapnel he did not know he had brought home with him worked its way out of Ernie’s back near his spine.

Rubber Legs  

That’s Rubber Legs, Gary Duncan’s cat. It was a little crippled. She got shrapnel in her one night trying to follow me out to the howitzer, and after that she would loose her rear end when she walked. After awhile she couldn’t walk at all, couldn’t eat and couldn’t drink and was really miserable, so I had to put her down. I had to shoot her.

Corporal Peppard

We got hit really bad one night and the next morning I was sleeping on a cot and this guy came in and said, “Man, get up. I come all the way out here to see you.”

I said, “Who are you?”

“I’m George Peppard.”

I said, “Well, I’m Ernie Rich and leave me the hell alone.”

“You don’t know me?”

“No, I don’t know you.”

He said, “Did you ever see The Blue Max?”

“No. They said it was a good movie, but I never got a chance to see it.”

“Well I was in it. You ever see The Carpet Baggers?”

“Nah, I didn’t see that one either.”

He said, “They told me not to come out here to Sandy but I come out anyway. I was in the Marine Corp myself and I’ve been shot at before over here.”

I said, “Really!” I had a lot of respect for him then. He was a super nice guy and it was really big of him to come out. His chopper took fire coming into Sandy, and when he left.

Peppard enlisted in the United States Marine Corps July 8, 1946 and rose to the rank of corporal in the 10th Marines , leaving the Corps in January 1948.

Papa-san

The VC had killed his wife and his son. All he had left was his daughter, and the two of them sold trinkets out of a suitcase for a living. I taught him English and gave him cigarettes to smoke. He said he was my father, and I said Okay I accepted him as my father. He was a super nice guy and wanted to come back to the states with me. He would tell us anything that would help us. He gave me all kinds of stuff: a hand carved ivory pipe with a dragon’s head. It got broken when I shipped it home and I wish I had saved it and repaired it instead of throwing it away. He basically adopted me as a son and I got to know his daughter a little.

I got grief from the guys for teaching him and his daughter English. “You’re teaching the enemy.” Or they said I just wanted to get into her pants. None of that was true; they were friends.

When I left Sandy to go to Sherry I lost contact with them.