By Marie Hughes
Director, Chambers County Museum at Wallisville
By 1969, the Vietnam War had reached a turning point. There were still 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, but public support at home was rapidly declining and strategies were beginning to shift. Intense combat continued despite talks of withdrawal, and jungle warfare, ambushes and guerrilla tactics remained common.
It was at this time that Sam Glass, of Oak Island, Texas, was drafted into the military. He was instructed to report to Local Board 86 of the Selective Service System on March 26, 1969, in Liberty, Texas.
The executive secretary who sent the draft letter to Sam was standing nearby when he boarded the bus.
“Mamma was crying, the boys were crying, everybody was upset and I’m sure she got plenty of cussing from them,” Sam said. “People were not happy … the war wasn’t popular.”
“I graduated from high school in 1967,” Sam said. “When I got out I already had a journeyman union pile driving book and I owned a ’65 Chevrolet Impala SSI, Super Sport with a 396 engine. It was bad, it was fast, it was pretty and a chick magnet, so I certainly didn’t want to go into the service.
“I was making the same money my father was. I could weld and run equipment because I started working when I was 15 years old. I passed the apprentice test at Local 2079 in Houston and got my union book, so I was set. Life was good.
“It rocked along to 1968, and the war was really getting bad. The most soldiers killed in the Vietnam War were killed in ’68, so in ’69 they needed some fresh blood to shore up the ranks.
“The last part of ’68 they sent seven busloads of us from Liberty to downtown Houston at the Federal Building on Fannin to take a physical. If you had a pulse, it was good enough for the military.
“On the second bus trip, March 26, 1969, I was drafted. At that time, I had a ’68 Road Runner and life was good. All I wanted to do was go home, but they said, ‘You’re in the Army now, boy.’”
Sam laughed at the memory.
“I had never been on an airplane before and the furthest I had been was over to Louisiana to work. They carried us out to Hobby Airport in Houston.
“We were all there in our civies and they had a circle drive around the front. We were sitting on the curb from one end to the other, ready to board the plane to fly out west to the base.
“We got to Fort Bliss and the first thing they did was buzz everybody’s hair off. We each had to pay one or two dollars for the haircut, which they would deduct from our pay.
“I’d never paid for a haircut in my life. My mamma always cut my hair.”
Listen & Live
“I kind of lucked out; the unit I was in, our drill sergeant had spent two tours of duty in Vietnam. I believe his name was Hayes. He was kind of a short guy, but he was tough.
“He wasn’t like a lot of the drill sergeants that only knew hollering, yelling and screaming. He point blank told us, ‘The physical training, you’re going to get that, but these weapons I’m going to show you how to use, you better be able to do it blindfolded. I’m not interested in this stateside prim and proper military. You’ve got a choice; you can listen to me and maybe your dumb asses will stay alive over there.’
“We all knew what we were getting into, and sure enough, we got through basic training. It wasn’t too bad. Then we started getting our orders. There was probably 250 of us. I was in Delta Company.
“They’d holler out your name and say 11 Bravo, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Well, everybody knew Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was radio school infantry. In other words, you were packing a radio on your back, or as we called them, a bullet magnet because that’s what you were going to be.
“They came to me and my MOS (Military Occupational Specialization) was 62 Fox Trot 20. There were only about two or three of us who got a different MOS than the rest.”
Based on Sam’s entrance paperwork, he was assigned as a crane and shovel operator and was sent to Fort Leonard, Missouri.
“The PT training at Fort Leonard was tougher, to say the least.
“At Fort Leonard we ran five miles in the morning and five miles in the evening. Then we’d catch these buses and go out to what I think they called the ‘million-dollar hole,’ which had been a quarry.
“They had ledges as you went down into the hole and all the way around the top they had equipment of some kind — RT (rough terrain) cranes, cable backhoes, crawler machines, draglines and shovel-front machines that scoop up rock and drop it out the bottom.
“I could already run it all. We even drove some piling with a drop hammer. The instructors quickly saw that I knew how to run everything and put me helping the other guys.
“The classrooms were built in a circle with an atrium in the middle of it. In the middle of the open atrium, they had this orange peel bucket we had to walk around every day.
“I had never run one, but I knew what they did. It was just like a clam bucket, and I had run a clam bucket before. It was for picking up rock. It was a big sucker, probably a 15-yard bucket.
“When we got ready to pass the test, I probably could have passed it easily. There were only 100 questions on it, but the instructor said, ‘I’ll give a hundred to anybody who can tell me what that machine is in the atrium. If you write it down and bring it to me and you have the correct answer, I’ll give you a 100 on this test.’
“I thought, this is too easy, so I wrote down that it was an orange peel bucket for handling rock, and I was the only one who took the answer up to him.
“He said, ‘Alright, you made a 100. See you later,’ so I walked on out and left the rest of them in there sweatin’ out a test.
“The Army wasn’t going to fail anyone anyway.
“Anyway, I graduated top of my class just because I knew what a damn bucket was, but that still wasn’t going to get you out of Vietnam.”
Despite graduating at the top of his class, Sam’s orders would ultimately take him overseas.
“When they started calling out our orders, 230 of the men went to Vietnam and two of us were sent to Hanau, Germany. The other guy was like me and had been raised on equipment and was an excellent dozer operator.
“We all went home for two days leave and kissed everybody good-bye, then I went to Fort Dix, N.J., and flew from there to Frankfurt, Germany.
“From Frankfurt, I rode the train down to Hanau, about 70 kilometers away, which was a really nice place.
“I was in what was called a CC&S Company (Collection, Classification & Salvage). That’s a big hat title term for a junk yard.
“Most of the stuff we had in Germany was junk, much of it from World War II. I was the only crane operator, and even my ole man would have culled the equipment I was running.
“The good stuff they sent to Vietnam, which was fine because they needed it.”
A Selfless Decision
Sam spent about three months in Germany.
“In front of the sergeant’s office they had a blackboard where they posted what was going on,” Sam said. “On one part of it, they posted certain MOSs that they needed in Vietnam.
“One morning, about September 15, I was passing by and on the blackboard they had 62 Fox Trot 20 in that section — my MOS. It was only Gillin and me that were construction engineers. Gillin was GI and I was GF, so I figured he would be going before me.
“September the 24th was my birthday, and they let you off on your birthday. It was kind of like the moon and the stars had lined up. I went to Hanau to a really good pizza place they had and got me a good Italian pizza. They make the best pizzas. I also got a couple of jugs of that Italian wine with the straw around it.
“Yep, that was probably a downfall.
“I got really gassed up, and the next morning, I was thinking about it and thinking about it — that I should take Leslie’s place. It had been weighing heavy on my mind since I saw the posting.
“I thought, what the hell, my cousin, Bert Griffith, and I got drafted the same time, and he was going to Vietnam. It was just weighing heavy on me because Bert and I were tight, and Leslie had a family.”
Sam shared with me the real reason he decided to volunteer. If he was drafted to be in the war, he wanted to be in it and get the job done.
“So, that morning I went into the first sergeant’s office and told him I was volunteering to go,” Sam said. “I was hung over. Oh, my God, I was hung over.
“He went to rippin’ on me, ‘You dumb SOB, you’re going to get your dumb @$$ shot.’ He might as well have shot me right then.
“He said, ‘If you’re that stupid, go ahead, sign here,’ and I signed.
“I didn’t have a clue at the time that they sent the papers to mother to let her know where I was going. I wish they hadn’t. She always felt like I was in a safe haven by going to Germany.”
Sam went home on leave before going to Vietnam, then traveled to Fort Lewis, Washington.
When he arrived at Fort Lewis to report, the line was so long that by the time he got to the front, they were going to give him an Article 15 for reporting late. When he explained that the line was so long they had been sleeping on their duffle bags and getting others to hold their places so they could take restroom breaks and eat, they gave him a lesser charge.
They decided they all needed to prequalify on the weapons, so they spent two weeks in the cold, deep-snow-covered mountains on an antique rifle range to qualify. They had them in a kind of holding pattern so they would arrive in Vietnam at the first of the year.
“We were miserable in Washington,” Sam said. “The only thing that saved my life was I had a field jacket my sister-in-law had sewn a liner into. The rest of those boys didn’t have nothing, and they didn’t issue anything to them.
“When we left Fort Lewis, they flew us to Anchorage, Alaska. From there, I think they flew us to Hawaii and then to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam.
“The Yankee boys gave us two weeks of hell because we couldn’t handle the cold weather in Seattle. When we stepped off into the heat of Vietnam, it just hit you in the face, and those Yankee boys started going down.
“I said, welcome to my world, you 6@3!@$#. I got two weeks of your world. You’re going to get a whole year of mine,” Sam said laughingly.
Fear in His Heart – Duty in His Steps
“We landed in Cam Ranh Bay the first week of 1970. We got off the plane a bunch of kids scared to death, and we didn’t even have a gun.
“We went to the receptionist’s desk where they were passing out the orders. Cam Ranh Bay has a lot of sand dunes, kind of like being on the beach.
“This guy opened up with an M-16. He must have had it on full automatic. We all started crawling under the sand like a bunch of ostriches with our heads in the sand.
“Come to find out, all he was doing was shooting stray dogs, but he about caused a runaway there.”
Sam chuckled at the memory.
“When I got my orders, they were to go to Da Nang to 156 HEM Company. HEM means Heavy Equipment Maintenance.
“I didn’t know what to expect when they put us on an ole C-130. That was the first time I’d ridden on a C-130, but I had plenty of rides after that.
“We made about three or four landings before we got to Da Nang. They call them skips. We took off from Cam Ranh Bay that night, and we were in the war real quick, it seemed.
“They had cargo on aluminum flat plates with rollers under them that would hold quite a few pallets and stuff. When they made a skip, they would land on the runway and as soon as the plane hit it, they would open the back and slide the cargo out.
“We had a pretty good view out the back of the plane when they delivered the cargo, and there were always quite a few explosions. All we could see out the back was fireworks.
“We never knew if we were seeing flares or what because Charlie (Viet Cong) loved those C-130s when they were coming in. If he got lucky, he could hit one of them with a rocket.
“Of course, we were scared to death.”
When Sam arrived in Da Nang, he was assigned to EVAC, a heavy-equipment recovery unit based near Marble Mountain.
“When we got to Da Nang, they got me and carried me out to Marble Mountain, which was about seven miles south of Da Nang.
“It was a unique place. Today it is a large, beautiful tourist attraction.
“Special Forces had an encampment right across the road from us. They were between us and the South China Sea, and we were between there and the Dong Ha River.
“Charlie really liked that place … that was his backyard, his home.
“I was an E-3, a PFC, and they sent me to a section called EVAC, which had about 250 men. Within about a month they moved me up to E-4, which is Specialist Fourth Class.”
The dangers of the area were well known.
“In 1968, the EVAC center got a rocket right in the center of their hooch that killed four servicemen. They didn’t have a chance; they got hit at two o’clock in the morning.
“Four men were killed and thirty-something were wounded.
“On that compound, since they’d been hit, they had a pretty elaborate perimeter. Plus, Special Forces were right across the street with a POW camp right in front of the Special Forces camp.
“The Special Forces camp was the headquarters for I Corps, which was the northernmost military region of South Vietnam.
“Our area was the I Corps area and ran from Marble Mountain to the DMZ and from the South China Sea over to the Laos border near Cambodia.”
Flying Lead & Hot Brass at Dark-Thirty
“EVAC was not what most people think of when they hear EVAC. We went out into the field and evacuated big heavy equipment. If something broke down, we had to go get it. We were basically a king-size wrecker service for the military.
“We had tanks and howitzers on tracks; anything on tracks, we hauled it. We had two RT (rough terrain) cranes in that unit, four ten-ton tractors and four dragon wagons. We called them dragon wagons because that’s what you could load a 52-ton tank on.
“I was a new guy, so I pulled a lot of guard duty. About the first two weeks, it seemed like I was pulling guard duty every night.
“About every 100 yards they had a sandbag bunker on the ground, and above that they had a tower. Each tower had an M-60 on it. When you pulled guard duty, you and three or four others went up into the tower.
“In the tower was a bunk on each side of the gun and ammo all around you. You would pull two hours on the gun and sleep for four. When you were on the gun, you put on your boots and uniform, but the rest of the time you’d be in your shorts and T-shirt because it was so hot over there.
“We would set the radio on the frequency they gave us before the start of our duty. There were several towers that ran from Marble Mountain all the way to Da Nang, and the first one was about 50 feet from the perimeter at Marble Mountain.
“On the top of Marble Mountain, the Marines had a recoilless rifle on a truck. They would fly it up there with a helicopter. They were 500 to 600 feet above us. You could hear them talking on a still night.
“The Marines were pulling patrol for us because the Da Nang River was about 400 yards from us. We were okay on the South China Sea side because the Special Forces were between us with their concrete bunkers.
“The Marines would come into our NCO Club and wait for it to get dark to go to their positions and start pulling patrol. We’d have little Filipino bands for entertainment and girls in miniskirts and go-go boots.
“When it got dark, we cut all the lights off on the perimeter and the Marines would go out of the wire. I watched them there one moonlit night. One of them went straight, one went left and one went right, and they had a rendezvous point where they would meet back up. That way, if Charlie was sitting out there to snipe one of them, they were kind of dodging the bullet.
“There was one of these young boys who had been in the club. They said he wasn’t but 17. He stepped out of the wire and they killed him.
“Those Marines went berserk for about two weeks. I mean, it was crazy.
“We went on alert and went to the control bunker, and they captured some Vietnamese. I believe they were Viet Cong. They had a big lieutenant or captain — I don’t know, but I mean he was a big dude.
“They brought the Vietnamese into the underground bunker. I think there were four of them, and they squatted down on the floor.
“The Marine could speak Vietnamese as well as they could. I mean, he could rattle it off. He started giving them what-for in Vietnamese, but we couldn’t understand any of it.
“I seen him literally pick one of them up by the throat and slap him up against the bunker and rattle something off to him. That little dude started ratting them out then.
“For the next two weeks, we were steadily living in bunkers or in the towers.”
One night, Sam got his first taste of combat from a guard tower overlooking the perimeter.
“One time I was pulling guard duty in the tower, and I didn’t know anything about anything. I was just going along with the motion of the other guys.
“It was my turn on the gun, about two o’clock in the morning. I think I was in Tower Five.
“They were always popping flares, and command called my unit and said, ‘You’ve got movement.’
“He couldn’t actually see anything. They were really high-tech,” Sam said with a laugh. “They had motion detectors on the outside of the perimeter, or human radar as they called it. Anything would set them off and they were hardwired to their console.
“I never looked so hard for something in the dark in my life. I’m sitting there on the M-60 and I can’t see nothing to shoot at. There’s nothing out there, to tell the truth.
“The other guys were sleeping on the bunks and I didn’t want to wake them up, and that was my biggest mistake. All I could think about was what if one of those Marines out there got hit and he was crawling back in under the wire and set off the motion detector.
“Command called back down there again and said we had movement.
“I was staring a hole in the dark by this time, and they called again and said, ‘By God, you’ve got movement. You have a free-fire zone. Shoot, shoot, shoot!’
“And buddy, that was the first time I’d pulled the trigger on anything over there.
“I pulled the trigger back and it was like I could not let go of it. I think there were 150 rounds in that can going up to that 60.
“Like I said, my biggest mistake was not waking the two dudes up. When they said, ‘You’ve got movement,’ I should have woke them up and they could have helped me look.
“When I started pulling the trigger, the one dude on my right was laid up in his drawers and T-shirt, and I was putting hot brass all over him.
“The other one was the loader who was supposed to come put the next box of rounds in. He started loading the ammunition, and the other dude was jumping all around because every time that hot brass hit him it was branding him.
“They finally called cease fire. I don’t know how many rounds we ended up shooting.
“Hopefully all we shot up was a bunch of dark. I sure didn’t want to kill anyone, especially one of the Marines, but that was my first experience of shooting at anything over there.”
When the Worm Turned
“After about two weeks of being there, they finally let me go with the guys to recover equipment.
“Down on the Da Nang River they had a bridge, and right beside the bridge they had what they called a river ramp. It was like a king-size boat launch. I mean, a big one.
“They’d bring those LSTs in there and unload ammunition and equipment. One time they did get hit there. They caught a rocket and there was ammo on board, and quite a few were killed. I think it was a Filipino crew.
“They had a retro yard near the water for equipment coming off the boats. They would classify it there for restoration or scrap. We’d load stuff up and carry it around to Marble Mountain, which was about five miles away.
“It was during the time Nixon was pulling the military out, and we were giving a bunch of this retro equipment — bunches of equipment — to the South Koreans and Filipinos.
“We stayed there in the Da Nang area, loading and unloading for about three months. Then the worm turned.
“We started going all the way to the DMZ, about a hundred and sixty miles, a grinding day trip. We had to travel over Hải Vân Pass on Highway 1, which ran between Da Nang and Huế. You had to get up in the clouds to get over it and down the other side.
“We couldn’t haul heavy weight up that mountain or coming back. We hauled little ole Sheridan tanks — they didn’t weigh much, they were aluminum — ammo carriers, all light stuff. But we couldn’t pull heavy artillery.
“You couldn’t pull that much weight, and if you did get up there, you couldn’t get down because they didn’t have Jake brakes on those trucks. If you red-lined one of those Cummins, it would just scatter it under the hood. That happened several times.
“When we first got up there on the hill, we’d been grinding on it all day trying to get up there before dark, because Charlie had it all night long.
“When we arrived, the two guys we were going to relieve came in on two 88 tank retrievers, and they looked rough.
“They had a mess hall there. It wasn’t much, but it was better than C-rations.
“The guys on the 88s knew we were coming, so they pulled up next to us when we were getting ready to go in and eat. They had a .50 on the front and a 60 on the back. Both of them had four guns on them, and they were loaded for bear.
“They were really a good piece of equipment, used to pick up disabled equipment to change the engines out in a tank. They have the same design yet today.
“Each one who got off the 88s, instead of going in to eat hot chow, pulled those guns off, stripped them down, washed them out, put them back on there and loaded them with ammo. An ammo carrier would pull up next to them, and they were loaded to the hilt.
“I was the oldest one in our group and I told the others, welcome to the war, these dudes play for real up here. And they did. They knew that gun was going to keep them alive.”