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Two Vietnam War veterans
share
their unsettling tales from combat
INTERVIEWS BY GARY RIDOUT for the
Smithfield Weekly Sun
Robert
(Bob) Kraft is a native of Minnesota who moved
here after his military service with his wife,
Deidre, a graduate of Smithfield High School. He
then worked 30 years with the U.S. Postal Service,
for a brief time as Smithfield's postmaster.
Rudy Baker is a Four Oaks native who served
as an officer in the U.S. Army for 33 years.
He presently resides with his wife, Pat, off
Cleveland Road west of Smithfield.
Here are transcripts of Gary's interviews with the
two Vietnam "vets":
BOB KRAFT enlisted to fight with the
Marines
Robert (Bob) Kraft with wife Deidre at this
week's Vietnam War Veterans Day observance at
the Courthouse. A leader in the local DAR
chapter, she was in charge of organizing the
event.
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Many
people have asked me why I would enlist in the
Marines at such a volatile time in the 1960s. I was
born in 1946 in Mound, Minnesota and graduated from
high school in 1964. I was a teenager when John F.
Kennedy was being inaugurated in 1961, and I
remember when he declared that we should "Ask not
what your country can do for you, ask what you can
do for your country."
I loved that idea, and I always felt
obligated to do something for my country. In my
senior year of high school, he was assassinated.
I started college at Mankato State College in
Minnesota in the fall of 1964. I didn’t really have
much money so I dropped out of college and went down
to the enlistment center in Minneapolis. I was
headed to the Air Force recruiting station and
walked by the Marine recruiting station. I heard a
voice say: "You better keep going, you would never
make it here!" Being a cocky 18-year-old, I said to
myself: "I’m a high-school jock, I know I can be a
Marine!"
Next thing I knew I was standing in line waiting for
the induction physical. A man in Marine dress blues
walked in and handed out bag lunches for all the
recruits. I said to myself : "I have really picked
the right place! They are nice to us!" Needless to
say, that was the last time they were nice to me! In
a few days I was shipped to the MCRD (Marine Corps
Recruit Depot) in San Diego, California. There I
received physical and mental training. After 12
weeks, I was sent to Camp Pendleton and then on to
Camp Lejeune. So at age 19, in the fall of 1965, I
was formally introduced to the state of North
Carolina.
Camp
Lejeune was a staging point for all those being
shipped to Vietnam, but I was allowed to go home to
Minnesota for Christmas. I was shipped back to Camp
Pendleton for advanced jungle-warfare training. We
then traveled to Okinawa, Japan where we checked
into our unit before going on to Vietnam. From then
on, we were known as the India Battery, Third
Battalion, 12th Marines which was part of BLT
3/4.There were 77 men in our unit. Eight of them
were killed and have their names on the Vietnam Wall
in Washington, D.C.
In March
of 1966 our unit boarded a ship toward Vietnam and
just like in the WWII movies, we made an amphibious
landing. We went over the side of the ship, down the
nets, and into the mike boats. We had had a good
breakfast, were given ample live ammunition, and had
a 60-pound pack on our backs. It was a nerve-racking
landing because we did not know what to expect. When
the front of the mike boat went down, we hit the
beach, expecting to be fired on at any minute. However,
the first thing I saw was a young Vietnamese boy
coming down the road, asking me if I wanted to buy a
Coca-Cola! I said to myself: "This isn’t going to be
that bad."
We got
into our first position and set up a perimeter. We
were asked for volunteers to help stand the
perimeter for a sister artillery battery. One of the
guys that volunteered was killed that first night,
and it suddenly made everything real.
Next on
the agenda were Vietnamese mosquitoes and "amoebic
dysentery." The
mosquitoes were so large that when you slapped them,
you could hear their "bones" crack! Amoebic
dysentery is an infection of the intestines caused by
a parasitic amoeba that is very common in the
water in Vietnam. When you have it, if you think you
have to go to the bathroom; it’s already too late.
It takes your body about 10 days to get used to the
water, so they keep you in a rear area until your
body has adjusted.
My MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) when I went
to Vietnam was Ground Radar. When I checked in with
my battery, the First Sergeant said: "We don’t need
Ground Radar. We’ll put you in Fire Direction
Control." That was my job initially.
In May 1966, I was in Da Nang for training as a
Forward Observer. All of the officers who were
trained as Forward Observers had been killed, so
they decided to train five enlisted men, including
me, to be Forward Observers because we were thought
to have better survival instincts. During that
training, we were being sniped at, and we called HQ
for help. That
help appeared in the form of a very unique gentleman
who was becoming famous for his incredible sniping
ability. He walked up to me with a white feather in
his cap and a rifle in his hand. I asked: "How do
you get away with wearing that feather?" He replied:
"I’m Carlos Hathcock, and they don’t mess with
snipers!" Thirty
minutes later, with one shot from his Model 70
Winchester, our sniper problem was solved.
It turns out Hathcock became the most famous Marine
sniper in the Vietnam War. His military career
officially began in 1959 when he enlisted in the
Marines at the age of 17. By the time he deployed to
Vietnam in 1966, he’d already won the NRA's
Wimbledon Cup. He
originally served as a military policeman but
quickly transferred to the 1st Marine Sniper
Platoon. It didn’t take long for Hathcock to make a
name for himself. He earned the nickname "Long
Trang," or "White Feather," from North Vietnamese
soldiers, thanks to the distinctive feather he
always wore in his cap. He was pretty unpopular
among the North Vietnamese, who eventually placed a
$30,000 bounty on
his head.
Our unit spent all our time north of Phu Bai, which
is near the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). Because our
unit was Light Artillery, we were moved all the
time. We provided artillery protection for the
Marine Corps Infantry. On September 18, 1966, we
were bombed by a friendly Air Force TPQ bomber. That
was my 20th birthday, and I will never forget it.
Thirty years later I was carrying the mail on my
route in Clayton, and one of the people on my route
was an Air Force General. I knew that he had been in
command of the bomber group when the "mistaken"
bombing occurred. One day I happened to meet him at
his mailbox and asked him about the incident. He
looked me straight in the eye, smiled, and said "no
comment."
 Life in
Vietnam was very tough. During the monsoon season,
we stayed wet all the time. There was rarely a place
to do laundry, so local villagers would do it for
us. The only way to dry the clothes was by hanging
them over a fire. There was no wood, so they burned
dried buffalo dung. This gave our clothes a "unique"
odor, but that odor did help to keep the bugs away!
It got very hot in
Vietnam, but the humidity was the big problem. In
the jungle areas, 100% humidity was the norm. We saw
many snakes: cobras, kraits, and bamboo vipers
routinely. I don’t remember any of our unit being
bitten by the snakes, however. Showers were rare. We
went into places where we could not take showers or
baths of any kind. Some of the men would wash in
nearby creeks, but then there was a problem with
leeches in those areas.
Food consisted of a steady diet of C rations.
However, a hot meal would usually be flown in on
major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Our daily lives in Vietnam were upside down most of
the time. We would get what sleep we could in the
daytime because the fire missions were at night. You
couldn’t sleep at night anyway because of the mortar
fire and probes by the enemy, and you wanted to be
awake to watch for rats, especially at KheSanh.
In December of 1966, our unit was in Quang Tri
province. There was a five-day Christmas truce from
December 22 to December 26. This truce meant that
there were no patrols, and they would fly beer into
our area. They provided us with two cans of warm
beer each day as nothing to drink was ever cold. We
decided that, as a unit, we would not drink the beer
during the Christmas holidays and then we would have
a great New Year’s Eve party on December 31. We
stored the beer in a tent but soon some of the guys
were stealing the beer from that tent. We put concertina wire (razor wire) around the tent and
installed remote antennas around it to try and
secure the beer.
On December 28 (two days after the truce ended), our
unit was hit with approximately a hundred rounds of
mortars. I remember that day well because that is
when I lost my hearing. Eight in our unit were
killed and several were wounded. The beer tent was
hit ten times and completely destroyed. The enemy
evidently thought it was a command post because of
the extreme fortifications. I will say that whenever
you see a movie where a soldier is standing up
during a mortar attack, it is a lie. You get as low
to the ground as you possibly can to survive such an
attack.
Also in December of that year, the Marine Corps had
offered us a deal where if we extended our stay in
Vietnam for an extra six months we could get 30 days
leave anywhere in the world that there was a
military base. Four or five of us had decided we
would extend and o to Switzerland to ski. After the
bombing over Christmas, we told our superiors that
the deal was off and we would not extend our stay.
Our next assignment was Khe Sanh, which was located
12 miles from the border with Laos and 14 miles
south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). We were in
this area way before the "siege," known publicly as
the Tet Offensive. Khe Sanh is famous because the
January 21, 1968 Battle of Khe Sanh began about two
weeks before the actual Tet Offensive – a major
escalation and one of the largest military campaigns
of the Vietnam War. It was launched on January 30,
1968 by forces of the Viet Cong (VC) and North
Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) against
the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the
Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the United States Armed
Forces, and their allies. It was a campaign of
surprise attacks against South Vietnamese and Allied
forces. For 77 days, U.S. Marines and their South
Vietnamese allies fought off an intense siege by the
enemy – one of the longest and bloodiest battles of
the Vietnam War.
We were some of the first Marines to go to Khe Sanh
before the Tet Offensive. It was a very
active place with lots of mortars, snipers, and
probes. At that point we were using recon to
determine what enemy convoys were coming down the Ho
Chi Minh Trail. Our unit would shoot fire missions
on the convoys. The NVA (North Vietnamese Army)
figured out if they moved slightly west, they’d be
out of range, and we could not hit them with our
weapons.
I was one of 20 Marines and two 105’s then sent to a
Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, a very lonely and
dangerous place, to try to take out these convoys. At
that camp there were six Green Berets, thousands of
land mines, and a group of very brave native people
called Montagnards. Montagnard is a term for various
indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of
Vietnam. This is a French term, which signifies a
mountain dweller, and is a carryover from the French
colonial period in Vietnam. The U.S. military,
particularly the Special Forces, developed base camps
in the area and recruited the Montagnards. They were
valued allies because of their resolve, skills in
training, and knowledge of the region.
The following night we
shot fire missions at these convoys. Based on Force
Recon’s Forward Observer reports of secondary
explosions, we had hit several locations from the
camp at Lang Vei and were congratulated by our
superiors because we "spoiled Charlie’s night." In
common language that meant that we were able to take
out a large convoy of enemy soldiers and supplies
that were heading our way. "Charlie" is a slang term
the military used to denote Viet Cong and/or North
Vietnamese Army. As a result of this and other past
artillery actions we were involved in, the battery
was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation.
During my time in
Vietnam, my best friend was named Charles Moon from
Smithfield. I wanted a pen pal in North Carolina,
and through Charles, I began to write to a girl
named Deidre, who had just graduated from Smithfield
High School.
Charles Moon recently passed away from exposure to
Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide and defoliant. It
was used by the U.S. military as part of its
herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War
from 1961 to 1971. Its purpose was to destroy the
forest cover and food resources necessary for the
implementation and sustainability of the North
Vietnamese style of guerilla warfare. Many
servicemen who suffered long exposure to Agent
Orange in Vietnam later developed a number of
cancers and other health
disorders.
I started writing to Deidre in the summer of 1966
and then met her in person when I returned to the
United States in April of 1967. We tried to write
each other once or twice a week, so we probably
exchanged a hundred letters over that 12-month
period. Deidre always sent her letters in a yellow
envelope so I could recognize them during mail call.
Whether we received mail or not depended on our
location and the amount of hostile action that was
occurring. Sometimes we would get mail once a week
but other times only twice a month.
After Lang Vei, I was
taken back to Khe Sanh and rotated home. As I look
back on my time at Lang Vei and Khe Sanh, I realize
how fortunate I was. Luck and timing were everything
in Vietnam. Every veteran’s story is different
because the war changed so quickly. While I was at
Khe Sanh, our main enemies were the rats that were
common in the camp and a few mortar rounds from time
to time. That was nothing compared to the 6,000
Marine troops that were continually attacked during
the Tet Offensive of 1968. Lang Vei was also
relatively peaceful while I was there, but after I
left it was attacked and overrun twice by enemy
forces.
After being in Vietnam
for 13 months and five days, I left for home. We
were first flown to Okinawa; we were given
up-to-date vaccinations and new uniforms. The old
uniforms did not fit anymore as most of us had lost
weight. We stayed in Okinawa for several days to
"wind down." Going from a wartime environment to a
peaceful place is a huge transition. You are a
different person, and it is difficult to make a
quick change. On the plane to the United States were
a large number of Airborne troops and a large group
of Marines. You would think that there would be a
lot of bantering and noise in the airplane because
everyone was glad to be going home. This flight was
very quiet, almost somber.
The plane landed in San Francisco. In the airport we
were cordoned off with yellow tape, possibly to
avoid contact with the war protestors. There was a
drink machine on the other side of the yellow tape,
and one of the Airborne soldiers went to get a cold
drink. He was shoved back to the cordoned-off area
by a police officer. All of the Airborne went wild,
tearing the drink machine up and attacking the
police officer. No one understood that six days
before we had been in a war zone. We did not
understand why we would be treated this way in our
own country.
I then flew to the Los
Angeles airport from San Francisco. I couldn’t get a
flight east so I had to spend the night in LAX. An
airport janitor realized the I was alone and took me
into the custodial break area where they ate their
lunches. Most of them had children that were serving
in Vietnam so they understood some of what I was
going through. They had a thousand questions, and
they shared their food with me as we talked.
After 30 days at home, I was sent to Camp Lejeune in
May 1967 and met Deidre in person that summer. To
reward myself for my service, I bought a brand-new
1967 Camaro. Deidre and I were married in September
1968, I was discharged from the Marines the next
April, and we moved to Minnesota.
The Vietnam protests in the United States really
ratcheted up in the summer of 1970. I decided to go
back to school and first attended junior college in
Minnesota. Many of the students would not allow
Vietnam vets to join their study groups. We veterans
then formed our own study groups to help with the
coursework because many of us had not been in a
classroom setting in seven or eight years.
When I went on to the University of Minnesota, it
was very common to have anti-war protests on campus.
I would have to walk through the protests to get to
class, listening to put-downs and profanity toward
Vietnam vets. We got used to that but really did not
like it. There was never any "thank you for your
service" heard during that time.
One day in class we heard a particularly loud
protest demonstration outside of the building. The
windows of our class were open, and in a little
while we could tell the police had sprayed tear gas
to quiet the protest. As a Marine, I was trained to
deal with tear gas. I smiled to myself watching the
other students suffering from the tear gas that had
drifted into our classroom.
I graduated from the University of Minnesota in
1973. Deidre and I lived in my hometown for 10
years. One day in 1978, I was shoveling two feet of
snow off my roof down onto my driveway. Shoveling that
snow onto the driveway meant that it would have to
be shoveled again. I said to myself: "There has to
be a better way than shoveling the same snow twice!"
Shortly after that, we moved to North Carolina.
I began a career of government service with the U.S.
Postal Service in 1979. After 30 years I was
recruited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
from where I retired three years later. Deidre and I
continue to make our home in Smithfield. Nearly 60
years later I greatly value and will never forget my
experiences in the Marine Corps and in Vietnam.
RUDY BAKER fought as an Army Airborne
officer
 I was born
in Four Oaks, North Carolina in March of 1936. We
lived on a dirt road in a one-room house. The house
had no glass windows, only wooden shutters. The day
I was born, it snowed so much the doctor could not
get to the house and I was delivered by a midwife.
My mom and dad could not agree on a name, so my
birth certificate was recorded as “Baby Baker.” When
I applied for Officer Candidate School at age 25, my
parents finally agreed to name me Rudolph.
Following
graduation from high school, I was accepted to
attend North Carolina State College in Raleigh. That
summer it became apparent that the conditions of the
crops meant that we would not have money for me to
go to college, so on July 20, 1954 I joined the U.S.
Army and began my military career.
Seven years later – in September
1961 – 238 of us reported to Fort Benning, Georgia to
the Officer Candidate School. We came from all over
the world to take advantage of this training. In March
1962, 119 of us graduated. Then we went our separate ways all over the world. In January
2012, I got a phone call from someone named Thomas
Vaughn. I was puzzled because I could not remember
anyone by that name. It turned out he was one of the
graduates from 1962 and he wanted to get a reunion
together. We had the reunion and 26 of the original
group were able to attend. Several of them said:
"Let’s write our military experience stories down and
create a book." The Boys of
Benning was written and published in March
2013.
 In January
1964 at Fort Campbell, I was the Commander S-4 for a
new battalion. We built the battalion very well
through intense training and smart leadership.
Physically, our men were well-prepared. Each day at
4 p.m., the men donned full combat gear and ran four
miles. When we got to Vietnam, we did not have the
heat casualties that some of the units had.
I was first told that I was going to Vietnam in
April 1965. At that time I was the First Lieutenant
of B Company of the Second Battalion 502nd
Infantry of the 101st Airborne. We were
based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and I was having
fun! I was given a few weeks leave to get my family
settled and get myself ready for deployment. The
Battalion Commander told me I was going to be the
S-4 Battalion Leader in Vietnam.
When I visited my mother in North Carolina, we were
not allowed to discuss the deployment plans. She was no
dummy, however. My own mother said to me: "I know
you are going to Vietnam. Why do you stay in the
Army? You are just dumb to stay in and you are plain
stupid to jump out of airplanes!" I never heard of
anyone’s mother calling them dumb and stupid in the
same sentence.
I flew to San Francisco and
then Nha Trang that summer. By July 1965, my life
changed dramatically when I stepped onto Vietnamese
soil.
September 18, 1965 was a very tough day. We lost 13
men in our unit. We went on a mission called "a walk
in the woods" but it turned out to be horribly
different. The
Battalion S-3 operations officer and the Charlie
Company Commander were killed on sight in the
attack. The B Company Commander and the A Company
Commander were both wounded inside their helicopters
as they attempted to land. They were both evacuated
to the hospital. These were four very important
leadership roles that were lost suddenly that day.
Sadly, on Panel 2E, Row 86 at the Vietnam Wall in
Washington, DC, there are 13 names that I will never
forget.
As a member of the 101st Airborne in
Vietnam, we were expected to make jumps from
aircraft. At that time, I was a Second Lieutenant
in the Army. During the summer of 1965, I made
several jumps out of helicopters with Special
Forces guys that were for training and fun. When
our full battalion arrived, our jumps became more
serious. On the second jump with the battalion, I
was seated next to the Battalion Commander. Just
before the jump, he looked me straight in the eye
and said: "See you on the ground, Captain!"
When we hit the ground, they
said "Don’t get out of your parachute!" Pictures
were taken as they pinned the Captain bars on me
with the parachute blowing behind. It was
beautiful and exciting!
December 10, 1965 was
another memorable time in Vietnam. I was the
company commander and our battalion was in the Ben
Cat area. It was very frustrating because our
company had encountered booby traps and snipers,
but we really had nothing to shoot at when
returning fire. The night of December 10 my job
was to set up a secure perimeter around our group.
At 3:00 in the morning, we were attacked by the
Viet Cong. In the dark, I was running from one
place to another to support the troops who were
fighting. We repelled the two-hour attack and I
was given a bronze star for the leadership I
displayed.
From that night I had bullet
holes in my fatigue shirt and pants, but not a
scratch on my skin. I will never forget that dark
night, although for some reason my brain blacked out
the details.
In late May 1966, I was one month from going back to
the United States. Our Commander, Lieutenant Colonel
Hank Emerson, believed that men who had that little
time left in combat would either get too cautious or
too foolhardy, thinking that they had it made. He
approached me and said: "Rudy, meet Captain Johnson.
He is taking command of your company for this
operation. You will be the S-4 again until you
leave." I said: "Like Hell! I am going with my
troops." His response was definite: "Captain, you
are now the Battalion S-4."
That is where I spent the last
days of my first tour in Vietnam. I was listening to
the radio the night before I left the Battalion area
when I heard the Company Commander call in napalm on
his own position.
In May 1968, I was deployed to
Vietnam again. In this second tour of duty I was
assigned to be an advisor to the 23rd
Army of Viet Nam (ARVN). These were Vietnamese
soldiers who generally could speak English, though I
had had some language training. The 23rd ARVN
Division had three regiments: the 45th, a good
hard-fighting outfit; the 44th, a good unit, but not
up to the standards of the 45th; and the 53rd
Regiment, which was worthless. The philosophy of
the 53rd was not "search and destroy" but "search
and avoid." The advisory duty was good at times and
frustrating at other times.
Some weeks later a Special
Forces Detachment with about 100 Civilian Irregular
Defense Group (CIDG) soldiers strayed into Cambodia
and got into firefight. The leader called for air
support. Any airstrike had to be cleared through the
23rd ARVN Division of which I was an advisor. When I
plotted the location, it was clearly inside
Cambodia. I knew if I sent it in that way, the
airstrike would be denied. I called it in using a
location just inside Vietnam. I knew that when the
fighters talked to the leader on the ground, they
would put the strike where it was needed. The trick
was to get the clearance. It worked and all the
Special Forces troops survived. Only a few of the
CIDG troops were killed.
About two hours later, I got the worst chewing out
from some Colonel in Saigon. He informed me that
only General Westmoreland had the authority to clear
a strike across an international border. I
apologized but thought to myself : "What are they
going to do to me, send me to Vietnam?" The troops
who survived couldn’t care less about an
international incident with Cambodia, and I felt the
same way.
Like all other assignments, this advisory duty
finally ended and I returned home in June 1969. I
served an additional 18 years in the military
including a two-year deployment in Iran, working at
the Pentagon and the War College in Washington,
D.C., and attaining an MBA at Syracuse University. I
was very happy to retire on May 1, 1987 after 33
years in the U.S. Army.
Without
a doubt, all the success I enjoyed and all the fun I
had can be traced to the six months of training at
the Officer Candidate School in Fort Benning,
Georgia. The self-discipline I learned and the high
standards set during that course have stayed with me
to this day. May God continue to bless us all!
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