Due to rancor on the part of Sgt. Pflum I was at one time the "official detail man" for the Weapons Platoon. Among other details, this assured me of being on guard duty every 2nd. to 4th. night. I dreaded infringing on the rights of the local owners of our bunkers because of their enormous size and plenitude. I adapted to this inconvenience by spending all night lying flat on the top of the bunker, wrapped in a poncho and poncho liner hugging my M-16 like a Teddy Bear. The 3 other guys in the bunker let me know when I was on and off watch. One night I was laying there when I sensed something go within inches over my head. I saw sparks out of my peripheral vision. Almost immediately an R.P.G. exploded several meters behind the bunker. I was off the top of the bunker and down inside in a split second. Adrenaline had given me a rush. At that moment I no longer feared those numerous large rats in the least. The fear instilled from the R.P.G. exploding several meters behind me totally canceled my fear of the rats. I learned to share their abode that night, and for the rest of my tour. From that night on during my two hours off as I laid on the plywood bunk half asleep the owners were not even the least bit startling as they brushed up against my arms, and legs on there nightly travels.
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
In my numerous treks to guard duty, I was occasionally required to be the Guard driver. Basically I was at the Officer of the Guards disposal. One evening after I had delivered all of the M60’s and ammo to each of the bunkers, I went back to the command point which was close to the Twin 40MM. The sun was going down, and it was at the time just between dusk and the blackness of night. I was talking to the Officer & Sergeant of the Guard to see what to do next now that the M60’s were in place and ready. As the Officer & Sergeant of the Guard and I talked, I noticed someone apparently leaving one of the bunkers walking over toward one of the Twin 40MM crew members who was sleeping on the front of the vehicle. Since I new that he was not authorized to leave his bunker I yelled at him "do you need me to get you something?" He momentarily froze. All of a sudden he began to run directly toward the perimeter between two bunkers. The Officer of the Guard pulled his pistol and fired which quickly led to both bunkers firing their M60’s along with several M16’s joining in the noisy escapade. No one saw if the intruder was hit in that hail of fire, but if he was it did not slow him down one bit. A deer could not have navigated the barbed wire any better than our unwelcome visitor. It is my opinion that he meant to do harm to the crew member on the Twin 40MM.
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
I was the second one to get to the flight line one morning. The first to get there was on top of an H-Model looking at the main rotor. I was lugging through the loose sand almost to the PSP when I saw 3 shooting stars. Something in my half comatose brain thought something looks strange. I stop to think what was wrong. The shooting stars were going up not down. At that moment I saw the prettiest fireworks display that looked like two or three swirling balls with sparks flying out of them. My first thought slipped from my brain and out of my mouth. I started to say "Wow! Look at the pretty balls of fire." However the only word which had time to vocalize was "Wow!" At that instant the explosion found its way to my ears and adrenaline surged. At that moment I learned that a person can acutely wiggle down into the loose sand. I saw the guy who was inspecting the main rotor, run, and jump dive from the top of the H-Model to clear the PPS and land in the sand. The next one exploded more toward the Marine Mess Hall, and the last one went directly over our flight line toward the Navy. ( I was told that last one hit a Sea-Bee hooch and killed everyone in it. ) After all the 122 MM rockets were finished and we started to get back up again, I saw my friend who had probably earned a two, at the most 3 on his diving performance walk toward me. He looked irritated. When he got to me, he garbed me by my collar as if he wished to punch me in the nose. He was able to hold back his impulse, but caustically yelled "NEXT TIME YELL INCOMING, NOT WOW!!!"
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
I believe the same day that Jones was shot down in his LOH just off Hamburger hill was when I was at LZ Ann. We worked hard that day keeping the Cobras loaded. I took lots of pictures that day, and in a slow period, some one told me there was a bamboo viper sunning itself on the brush that the Engineers had bulldozed back. I went over and waked its head off with my bayonet. I picked up the head carefully, and tried to open its mouth with my bayonet. I did not see any fangs, and was almost ready to believe it was a nonpoisonous snake. All of a sudden it looked like a switchblade when two fangs flipped out and poison squirted. Fortunately my fingers were out of the ark of the fangs. Because they were as sharp as razors, they would have cut my skin easily. I returned to shoving 2.75’ rockets down tubs, and loading hundreds of pounds of 7.62 rounds. After a long hard day the sun finally started to settle, and the infantry which had set up to protect our perimeter were beginning to fly out. They told us that it was to dangerous to hold the whole landing zone after dark. As H-Model after H-Model left it became dimmer and darker. When we came in the morning of that day, Maj. Dolan told Ron Wile and myself to stay there until he came back to get us. Our uncertainty as to the wisdom of that order was increased as we were down to the last two H-Models which the infantry were presently getting on. Ron and I ran to one of our LOH’s to talk to the last Officers from B Troop that was still on the ground. After explaining our dilemma, he advised us that he could not reverse Maj. Dolan’s order, but if he was in our shoes he would not stay and wait. We ran over to the last H-Model as it was just about to lift off. After hearing our dilemma, the pilot said he was packed, but if we can get on we can ride. Ron Wile, being smaller, was able to squeeze in. I was left with the choice of standing on the skids and ridding back with my rear end on the floor edge or waiting to see if Maj. Dolan would eventually show up. I got some of my best pictures that evening as I rode back standing on the skid of that H-Model. Ron and I walked back to our troop area from the other side of the hill. We never said anything about not waiting and Maj. Dolan never said anything about us not being there.
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
One day I was on a detail to check trip flares as I walked around the barbed wire on our bunker line at Camp Eagle. We looked to make sure the pins were not rusted, also to make sure that claymores were still facing the correct direction. We were told that occasionally a sapper could be found reversing the direction. I personally never saw one reversed, but I guess it would be some what obnoxious if we ever set them off toward the reverse direction. It is imperative to be at the side of a trip flare when you begin to work carefully at making sure the pin is lose, and the wire is secure. For some unknown reason I approached a flare from the front, and was bending down to go to the side of it when I some how set it off. The cork hit my forehead and caused a small but bloody gash. A large band aid eventually fixed that. The rest of what happened I count as a miracle. The white phosphorus left pits in both lenses of my glasses. My glasses were so encrusted with what looked like welding splatter that you could not see through them. I received no phosphorus burns on my flesh at all. I had a slight sunburn from it, but not even the bridge of my nose was burned by the white phosphorus.
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
I believe the first hardship I endured was loneliness. I deeply missed my wife. The second most grievance was that I was worn out and so tired that I sometimes felt sick from lack of sleep. We would fly out to our LZ before the sun was up so that we would arrive at dawn to start our days work. After loading Cobras all day we would go back just about last light. It was then, after all the Cobras were back on the flight line that we had to go out and remove anything that was malfunctioning and replace it. For some obscure reason it was not approved procedure to use flash lights while working at night. It was rumored that Charlie liked to watch us work on the flight line. I remember on one occasion when it was so dark I could not see my hand in front of my face. I grabbed a turret mini gun and tried to swing around the end of it only to brush my mouth against the muzzle. That incident slightly chipped the corner of my one front tooth. Due to working long hours, pulling extra details, and such, I slept very soundly when I did have a chance. One night about 0200 I was sleeping sound when someone started shaking me frantically. He told me that I had to get out of bed and go to the secondary defense line, and we were being hit. He asked how could I sleep with all the sirens, and flares, and spooky working up above. He said that he was the last one going out the door when he saw me laying there, and came back to wake me. I have asleep got up dressed quickly, grabbed my M16, ammo, and helmet and quickly found my position in the secondary trench line. I remember looking back over by the old dump at Camp Eagle and watching the C140 flying in a circle and how its mini guns looked like a funnel converging down. I believe the Twin 40MM was doing its POOM PA POOM PA POOM. The flares were beautifully drifting down all along our line as well as all over Camp Eagle. I remembered my basic training well. I kept one eye closed as long as there was flares lighting the sky. I remembered the heavy rain pounding on my helmet and watched it run down the tip of it. As I propped my self in the trench I felt the water up over the top of my jungle boots. I was looking out through the sights of my M16 and tried to get as comfortable as I could. I succeeded to well, and with one eye closed, one eye looking past the water running off the front of my helmet as I sighted through my M16 sight, I dosed off and in maybe a few seconds, or maybe even a lot longer I jerked awake again. It was very much like falling asleep at the wheel of your car when you have driving to long. Even though we did not have any action on our part of the perimeter, I managed to stay awake from then on.
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
When we first got in country the most needed detail was sand bagging. I know that many of us made hundreds if not thousands of sand bags. Another job was filling 55 Gallon drums with sand to make revetments on the flight line for the helicopters. One problem was the little hole made it difficult to put sand in the drum. We started to remedy that problem by removing the top by using a chisel and hammer along the top edge. Mr. Scott (below) came down while we were doing this chore, and started telling us how he previously was in Viet Nam as an enlisted special forces liaison. While living and working with the Mont Yards they made drums to catch water in by removing the 55 gallon tops with det cord. He preceded to get some det cord and blasting caps. Mr. Scott showed how to put the det cord around the inside lip of the lid of the drum and then put a light layer of mud over the det cord. He attached the blasting cap and detonated it. It was fabulous, there was no jagged edge from chiseling, and the top was rolled up like a wadded piece of paper neatly laying in the bottom of the drum. The wadded drum top hit the bottom of the drum just hard enough to slice a hole to let rain drain through. Mr. Scott said if they wanted to keep from slicing the bottom all you had to do was fill the drum partially full of water and the water absorbed the force of the wadded drum top. His advice made the job much more easy and eliminated the dangerous jagged edges produced from the way we previously had been chiseling out the tops.
Randy Kunkleman 04/12/98
The monsoon season was miserably cold, and wet. We had the one big rain that almost washed away our flight line. As we were trying to sand bag and tie down the helicopters we were hampered with the difficulty of finding them. I remember walking on the flight line with water flowing over my boots and water hitting me from above, below and all four sides. Being unable to see more that a few inches in front of my face, I literally felt my way from revetment, to revetment. Our Cobras were the farthest out on the flight line, and they were the hardest to find. Even in the normal everyday rain we all were continually soaked from the feet to the top of our heads. Everyone tried to find some way to at least momentarily feel some dryness to their person. I would hang my socks over my light to try to dry them well enough to have a short period of time in which my feet felt dry. My feet were the second most rotten area that needed some relief. One evening I was laying on my cot when the mid section itch was over powering. I was at my wits end and soon proved it. I had a tube of NP27, a high powered Ben Gay type ointment and decided I was going to try it. My conclusion was that nothing could be worse than the horrendous itching. ( I was wrong. ) I applied my medication with care and laid back down on my cot. It was within seconds that I was unable to move as my fingerprints imbedded in the wood frame of my cot. Bill Mead (Left below) ran over immediately and questioned whether the itch was relieved. My answer was "It doesn’t itch, but it does burn some." He immediately helped himself to some of my NP27. He was standing when it hit him. He jumped up and when he came back down, started to run from one end of the hooch to the other. Each time he passed my cot which was in the middle of our hooch I heard him scream "Kunkleman if I ever stop running I am going to kill you!"
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
I remember how Mr. Scott would come to our hooch and talk to us lowly non-coms. He had such interesting stories of how he lived with the Mot Yards. I was very proud of men like him who as Green Berets lived through such hardship to help those people in any way possible. I admired Mr. Scott immensely. I believe Mr. Scott was a real example and can’t help but believe people he served on his previous tour also learned to have affection for him. He was a man with many talents. One day the conversation turned to hypnotism. Mr. Scott said that he had hypnotized someone before. As the conversation went on Ron Wile decided he was skeptical but game to see in he could be hypnotized. Within a couple of minutes it appeared that Ron was in a trance. As Mr. Scott encouraged Ron to slowly make himself ridged it became apparent that Ron was not just playing . Ron was the smallest guy in our hooch, but his body became so ridged that our largest could not move any part of him. Mr. Scott had us support his feet on a foot locker, and his shoulders on an other foot locker. Mr. Scott stepped up on Ron’s stomach and was easily supported as if he were on a ridged board. After Wile came out from the hypnotic state, he was not convinced of the preceding events. It was not until I showed him the picture of Mr. Scott standing on him that he was completely convinced.
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
My first experience in cutting hair was at Gray Army Airfield. I can’t remember who it was, but I remember cutting the hair on one fellow in which I said "It is still not even, I’m going to have to use the next smallest attachment. By grace I still had one left that was smaller. Ringworm was the biggest drawback to getting a haircut in Viet Nam. I was encouraged by some of the guys to cut hair not because of my skill, but because I disinfected my clippers after each cutting. I cut hair in the Avionics air conditioned trailer, at the NCO club, outside, and in hooches. One day I had finished one half of a head of hair when we had a red alert. I was impressed with how fast that guy found me when we all come back from the secondary defense line. My most creative hair cut was not of my choosing. Spec. 6 George Coggeshall was in an extremely intoxicated condition when he decided he was going to have a hair cut. He demanded I give him a wedge haircut. I explained to him that I was unfamiliar with that style. (How was I to know it would be popular 2 decades later.) George put his finger in the back of his head and said he wanted it smooth on both sides to his finger, and kept his finger there until I started cutting his hair. The next day in a much more sober state he was not very talkative with me, but never uttered one word of protest. In a day of two Jerry Ragsdale come to me and asked if I would give him a Mohawk haircut. I did this after making sure he was serious about it. It was always my opinion that Jerry felt sorry for George and wanted to take a little heat off of George. George really was ahead of us all. He started a popular hair style twenty years before it was in vogue.
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
One day Dytmore Snyder and I were walking down the walk in front of our barracks at Gray Army Airfield when we passed three lieutenants. We gave the proper respectful salute as we walked by. Having a sanguine personality, I ended my salute with "How are you boys doing today?" I spent the next thirty minutes taking a crash coarse on why I would never again disgrace an Officer with that horrible disrespectful greeting. Ironically I was able to help that lieutenant fix a flat tire on his car when we were driving back to Ohio for the leave prior to going over to Viet Nam. The preceding example is to show how I was not very much of a military type of guy, but if I had ever decided to stay in, I would want to emulated a career man like Sergeant Donald Tovey. I looked to him as a father figure. He took care of his men with a family type love. He was instrumental in keeping Abner Meadows from giving me an article 15. I was not paying the fifteen cents for eating breakfast in the Gray Army Airfield mess hall while I was on separate rations. Sergeant Tovey pleaded for me to Meadows and after much debating earned for me a second chance. He made a special trip to Coppers Cove to visit my wife and I to try to dispel her fears about my going to Viet Nam. He was kind and thoughtful the way he told of Viet Nam in away to relieve apprehension from the unknown. I was at Camp Eagle when I heard he had died in a Helicopter crash. I can not tell you how long or how hard I cried, but I can say it was the most excruciating sorrow I had ever experienced to that point of my life.
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
As an Aircraft Armor it was my job to fix , and load guns. On several occasions this skill lead to my going to a place called Rock Crusher. At Rock Crusher one Crewchief and one Armor set outside the perimeter of a small base where asphalt was made. The only thing I remember about the base was a wood memorial where a mortar crew took a direct hit. It gave the names of three GIs who went home in empty caskets. Out where the crewchief and I stayed it was a few sheets of PSP hooked together and a big pile of rockets along with lots of 1500 round cases of 7.62 ammo. I remember talking to Bob Matthews out there. We talked of home and many other things while we waited on Cobras to come in for service. I believe it was there he told me the story of how on his way back to Gray Army Airfield his motor cycle quit. He pushed it in a ditch and hitch-hiked the rest of the way back barley making it before we flew out. Rock Crusher is where I took a picture of a Cobra landing at dusk with the red sky in the horizon behind it. A number of the guys had pictures made off of that slide. Rock Crusher is where I learned to talk on the radio. The radio was our only communication to so called civilization. The one time we used it we had been without food all day long when I finally decided it was time to find if there was any one out there that remotely cared. I got on the thing and said "does anyone out there know we are sitting here at Rock Crusher with no food and we are hungry. " Some one came back telling me I was not using proper poetical. I explained that I was radio operating OJT and doing my best. It seems I did OK since within a short time we had an H-Model drop off two cases of C-Rations.
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
I remember Tam Key and the continual servicing of Cobras as the come in for ammo and to fix the guns. We run the mule back and forth to the ammo dump, ate C-rations heated on the engine head of the portable generator. During slack time we talked under the big tent. Two different things happened that sticks in my mind very vividly. The first is going out to load a Cobra that was just coming in and beginning to hover. All of a sudden the body started to whip around the opposite way the main rotor was tuning. The pilot instantly dropped the ship to the ground. I wonder what he was thinking when just a few seconds earlier he was hundreds of feet in the air with much more strain on the tail rotor than when it let loose. An other time I remember a LOH landing and the pilot complained to the crewchief that it was handling horribly. He and I went out to look at it and we found the linkage and hyme ball connectors had a round go through and destroy any means of controlling the ship due to being twisted and disheveled. No one could explain how the pilot was able to get it back at all. I believe that GOD is talking to all of us, but it seems that HE is yelling at some of us through little things called miracles.
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
The weapons platoon was a mix of personalities. I learned to love them like family. Like family, we did not all agree and we especially did not agree on music. I forget who bought the first real to real tape recorder, but somehow Ron Wile (below), Jim young, and a black fellow whose name escapes me right now each had one. Ron was on my right, the black friend on my left, and Jim across the isle to my left. I can remember Jim played county like Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash. Ron on my right would play soft rock and pop music, while the preference on my left was James Brown and Motown. I would lay there and listen to the volume go up at each location one right after the other. In time each of the guys got bigger speakers, and more wattage amplifiers. I am not sure who acutely won, but I know that my being in the middle made me the looser.
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
While at Chu Lai I made friends with a number of the Marines at MAG 13. On one occasion they took me to the beach for a cook out. The leader of this group was an E-7 we all called Top (Far Right below). Top was like no other gunny I ever met. He did not swear, drink or run around, but he did show something called tough love. He was demanding, but we new he cared. He acutely had Bible studies in the evening for any one who could make it. One night after going to his Bible study, he invited us over to his hooch for some cold ones. (soda pop) We started to sing songs, and as I left to go back to our area, those songs were going through my head. I was in our tent sitting by myself on the cot and subconsciously singing some of those words out loud. All of a sudden Michael Hillebrand come in and looked me in the eyes from about six inch away. He was noticeably intoxicated as his speech was slurred. He told me "Kunkleman, I have been drinking all night to get high, and I come back and find you higher than I am."
Randy Kunkleman 04/14/98
