The Day I Should Have Died: My Last Tour in Vietnam Almost Turned Out to Be My "last"

December 6, 1972; hump day. It was Wednesday, the precise center of the work week, and we'd been calling it hump day since the army moved from the five and a half day week.

I was working at the time as the chief of an intelligence analysis section at the sprawling Tan son Nhut Air Base on the southeast outskirts of Saigon. During November and December, with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units maneuvering very near Saigon, hump day had ceased to have a lot of meaning; we often worked for twelve to fifteen days straight, trying to keep up with what was happening. We were also busy getting ready for the eventual pull out of our unit, as part of the Paris peace talks and the drawdown of US forces in Vietnam. No one shared specific details like this with people at our level in the food chain, but we were a bunch of analysts who had ways of figuring out what was going on, and we knew that our time was coming. I'd been in country just over five months then, and most of my crew had even less time than I did, but we knew that none of us were likely to complete a one year tour.

Most of our time was spent preparing our files to be either shipped back to the states or turned over to our South Vietnamese counterparts. I often came in early to review and approve the work my section had done, and this morning was no different.

I got there early and went into my office, a corner office with no windows at the back of the building, and dove into a stack of folders that one of my guys had put on my desk. For reasons that to this day I don't recall, I decided to leave the paperwork and go out to the 'bull pen' and shoot the bull with the guys. While I was doing this, I heard the thud in the distance that could only mean incoming. Sounded like rocket or mortar rounds. I went to the door and looked out. In the distance, in the direction of Tan Son Nhut's main runway, I could see columns of smoke, and with each successive thud, the column seemed to be getting closer to us.

Darn, I thought, Charlie's shelling the air base. That didn't really surprise me; Tan Son Nhut had come under attack on more than one occasion during the war as the enemy tried to do as much damage as possible to the aircraft parked there. What worried me was that our building wasn't too far from the runway, and there was a risk that they were just lobbing B-40 rockets into the base, and not caring what they hit. We worked in a concrete structure with a tile roof. The walls were about four inches thick, and neither roof nor wall would stop a direct hit. But, we had no bunkers nearby either, so here we were stuck in the building until the attack ended.

I could have gone back into my office, where there was less chance of being struck by flying glass should the building be hit, but again, I made a fateful decision. I was on my second tour and had been through a number of VC and NVA bombardments. At the beginning of 1972 tour, I spent two months in Da Nang, and my compound was shelled at least three times a week. The guys in my section, though, were almost all on their first tours and none of them had ever been under fire before. I decided that my place was with them. So, I directed them all to get away from windows and doors and get under their desks to be out of the path of flying debris. I then crammed myself under a desk and read a paperback that I found on the desk, and waited for it all to stop.

The thuds kept getting closer and closer, and then there was a loud explosion, and there was dust and glass flying everywhere. There was another nearby explosion, and then the thuds sounded like they were moving away, and then they stopped. It was silent. There was still dust in the air and broken glass was all over the floor, but no one was hurt.

I instructed my crew to clean the place up and get things back into order and went back to my office. When I stepped inside my door, I got the shock of my life. In the wall, directly behind my chair at about where my head would have been if I'd been sitting in the chair was a hole not much smaller than my head. The contents of my desk were scattered everywhere, and there were bits of shrapnel on the floor in front of my desk.

That loud explosion was from a B-40 rocket that had landed just outside the wall of my office, one of 28 that they lobbed at us that day. Shrapnel had gone through that four-inch wall like a hot knife through butter, and if I'd been sitting in that chair, pieces of my skull and brain would have been mixed with the shrapnel on the floor. A guy in the building behind us was killed sitting at his desk. Elsewhere on the base, two other Americans were wounded.

I often asked myself how I escaped being killed that day. If I'd followed my usual practice, I would have been sitting behind my desk, feeling secure in the back of a concrete structure, and I probably would never have heard or felt the explosion but for a momentary stab of pain before total blackness. All I could figure was something an old soldier had told me during my tour in 1968; when you go into a combat zone, one of two things will happen; you'll survive, or you won't. If your ticket's expired, there's nothing you can do about it, and if you survive, just consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

References:

http://citizendia.org/Tan_Son_Nhut_Air_Base

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/timeline/timeline2.html