Bringing It All Back Home (11 page)

The U.S. government's color-blind, merit-based ideals squared nicely with Wallace's belief in equality. He would find himself at home in the NCO school, whose motto, “Follow Me,” had a different meaning for Wallace. Wallace was reminded often of how those words are used in the Bible. Jesus would ultimately ask his disciples to follow him in a life of sacrifice, and Wallace would be asking his men to do the same.

The New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, when they speak about Jesus, one of the things Jesus would always say to his disciples was “Follow me.” In essence he was saying, “Become fishers of men.” So that motto at infantry school stuck with me.

There was one trainee candidate from New York, and one morning in the formation during inspection I saw he didn't shave. He had to give me twenty-five push-ups. He was grumbling and mumbling. He was a little upset with me. I sent him back to barracks to shave. He had to do it fast enough that he could catch up with the company to deal with the training that was going to be going on that day. You whip them into line. They had to understand, just as we have to understand, that following orders and attention to detail later on could be the difference between someone living or dying.

Though he considered himself a peaceable man, Wallace would find NCO school and weapons training fun. Exposed to rifles in basic and hand grenades in AIT, he now received more detailed instruction. He learned you couldn't pull the pin on a hand grenade with your teeth, John Wayne–style, unless you wanted a broken tooth. He learned that a .50-caliber machine gun could penetrate an armored personnel carrier at a thousand meters, and how to open C rations with a P-38 can opener. He learned well enough, in fact, to finish in the top five of his class and was invited to stay on and teach the next group. With just two years of college and nine months of military training, he had achieved the rank of buck sergeant, a remarkable feat. Wallace was proud of the accomplishment.

Now you are an NCO, and you have to help the officers do what they do. There is an unwritten belief that NCOs run the military, especially the Army. The officers are there, but the NCOs keep the military on track. If you don't have the NCOs, you're not going to get the mission accomplished. I felt like I was on top of the world as far as being a soldier. I had the attitude that I was going to be a soldier's soldier. Now, with that comes the question, “What am I going to do when it comes to combat? Would I be able to function, as they have taught me?” That's what we have to do. To find out.

In January 1970, traveling alone, Wallace took the subway to Forty-Second Street to catch a Port Authority bus to Fort Dix, New Jersey. A day and a half later he was on a DC-8 with two hundred other soldiers and military personnel, a few of them headed to Vietnam for a second tour. As it began to snow, the passengers started cheering, thinking the flight might be canceled. In the manner of how he came into the world, Wallace would leave for Vietnam with deep snow on the ground. After a long flight with stops in Alaska and Japan, his plane began its descent to Bien Hoa Air Base. His arrival in Vietnam left an indelible impression, as it did for so many.

That plane spiraled down when we got to Vietnam. Of course we were told they did that because we didn't want to be on a glide path that Charlie, the Vietcong, could line up and shoot at our plane. We landed, and when they opened the door, the heat was unbearable. Your body was in Vietnam, but your mind was still in Fort Dix, in the snow. The heat was the one thing; the other thing was the smell … It was like, “What have I gotten myself into?”

Wallace and the rest of the soldiers were loaded onto buses with wire mesh covering the windows and driven to the Ninetieth Replacement Battalion near Tan Son Nhut. They saw surprising luxuries, such as a PX and a swimming pool. A few lucky soldiers would probably stay, but for most of the soldiers their time here would be short-lived.

You're seeing all this, and you say to yourself, this is not that bad. If this is what I have to deal with, nobody's firing at you yet. We can deal with this.

It was a nice fantasy, anyway.

Every few hours an officer would stand up and call out a list of names and unit assignments, and another group of soldiers would be shipped off. Unit designations such as First Cavalry or 101st Airborne meant very little to these newly arrived soldiers. The majority of the men arriving in Vietnam in 1970 came as replacements, individuals inserted into whatever unit happened to need additional manpower at the time. Wallace was assigned to the First Cavalry Division, a combat unit. He would be departing for the field in Tay Ninh province, near the Cambodian border and west-northwest of Saigon (today known as Ho Chi Minh City). The only problem was Wallace would never really be told exactly where he was. For him, this was just one small indicator of how the military was handling this particular war. While it was the best-documented war in American history, very often U.S. soldiers were given little information about its purpose and their place in it, both practically and metaphorically.

At battalion headquarters, another way station, conditions were far more spartan. He was given a rucksack and a weapon and was reminded of the laws of warfare and the Geneva Conventions as he eyed guard towers and combat latrines. Finally, helicopters arrived to take Wallace and the others in his unit, B Company, 2/7, First Cavalry Division, to Fire Base Jamie, near Nui Ba Den, where he would meet his squad for the first time.

He was apprehensive about being what many derisively referred to as a “shake-and-bake” NCO, a noncommissioned officer who had achieved his rank quickly. Those fears, however, dissolved when a seasoned soldier, Thurman Wolfe, approached him with words of encouragement:
“It's not as bad as you think.”

In early March, while in the field in Vietnam, Wallace would learn that his friend from home Willard Kelly had been killed on February 12 in a claymore mine accident.

He's gone and I've got to finish nine months in Vietnam. So tears start coming down my face. How am I going to make this? My goodness. My goodness. I got to push. I'm going to make it home. I kept saying, “I'm going to make it home.” I have to tell myself that because I couldn't let down the squad. That night, after I learned that, it was on my mind. But I also could not allow it to prevent me from doing the job I needed to do in dealing with these men. So I tried to put it aside, but it was always there.

Wallace steeled himself to take command:
I knew what to do.

As a squad leader, Wallace was open to what the members of his squad had to say. Like many other veterans, he recalls the enormous physical labor of simply carrying all his gear in the field. The men of his squad offered advice. He was told to carry his M16 ammunition on his belt rather than in his rucksack and not to wear underwear in the field because the chafing would break down his skin. They informed him that two canteens of water should be on his pistol belt and not in the rucksack. When soldiers made contact with the enemy, their rucksacks might have to be dropped, and they might have to go a long time without water. While Wallace remained in command, his squad helped him learn how to conduct himself in the field.

By 1970, there was speculation in the press about U.S. activity on the Cambodian border. The official U.S. policy, announced by President Nixon in 1969, was that the United States was beginning to disengage from Vietnam. In reality, units like Wallace's were being moved closer and closer to the Cambodian border, where they were poised to expand the conflict into another country.

When we go on these assaults or you're moving through the bush, you never really had a sense of what your operations were going to be. You didn't see the big picture. The higher military ranks and the president, they knew they were sending us toward Cambodia. Every place we went to, and you piece together where they are, you see this farther west, farther west. We just knew we were getting closer, because the closer you got, the more contact you made with the enemy.

On April 14, 1970, as his unit bunkered down for the night at Fire Support Base (FSB) Atkinson, in Tay Ninh province, three figures walked up to a night defensive position and tripped some flares.

They were startled by the instant light that lit up the jungle, and they were in front of our position. Like a robot I stood up, because my men were in front of me in their bunker and they were sitting there. They started firing, but I fired over their heads. Basically, you were trying to protect yourself and your unit, so those rounds went out there. You could not say which rounds hit. I can't tell you how many people that I personally killed in each of the contacts I made.

After that, my hands started shaking. Of course it was fear, but the other thing that upset me was the fact that I fired at another human being with no hesitation. Much of that came from the training, but at the same time you want to survive. It seemed to happen in slow motion. When the men went down, it didn't seem like they went down instantaneously. It seemed like some movie where they just melted away. In the morning we went to see them and to examine them and see what intelligence could be found.

Later that night he was wounded.

Wallace possesses a copy of the battalion after-action report he obtained from the National Archives. In it, the battle at Fire Support Base Atkinson is recorded in the dry language of Army bureaucracy.

On the evening of April 15, at 2200 hours F.S.B. Atkinson received incoming rocket and 60 mm and 82 mm mortar round [
sic
]. Early warning of the impending ground attack came from use of the ground radar on the firebase. Cobra gunships, flare ship [
sic
] and air strikes with napalm were called in for support. By 2400 the incoming had stopped. The base defense was so alert that not one of the enemy got as far as the perimeter wire. The following morning's sweep of the area located 55 N.V.A. [North Vietnamese Army] killed along with three wounded taken as prisoners. A total of 8 Americans were killed in action.

Three of them were in Wallace's squad. It was a bloody week for American forces in Vietnam. One hundred forty-one Americans died that week, the highest total since September 1969.
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Wallace's perspective was somewhat different.

As he recalls it, he and his men—Thurman Wolfe, William Di Santis, and Joseph Di Gregorio, known as Pepe—were sitting in front of the bunker and preparing for some to remain awake and on guard while the others slept. When the fight started, there was no time to give commands; everyone heard the commotion out front at virtually the same time and opened up as soon as they possibly could. They also knew that they had to move inside quickly.

We had to get into the bunker. We were not going to stay out there. We got in the bunker, and when we opened up, they opened up. When we opened up, the bunkers on the right and left opened up. That's how it started. That was real.

Wallace's bunker was not in action for more than five minutes, probably less.

Their training had taught them to keep their rounds low and close to the ground, because rifle rounds have a tendency to elevate. Wallace was also taught to detonate claymore mines outside bunkers. Enemy soldiers would be trying to break through the wire perimeter at the front of their position. As the situation intensified, Wallace's overriding recollection is of a choking sensation and an inability to see what was going on, because of the smoke.

It just amazes me how quickly the air filled up with smoke. You couldn't see anything. That was a little unnerving. It's not like television, where you think you can see everything that's happening. It wasn't like that. You could not see anything before your face. You couldn't see the enemy and are just firing blindly. All these things are going on in your mind when smoke is there and you see nothing. The other thing that you smell is one of the ingredients in the explosives called cordite. And of course [there were] the sounds of the rounds being fired from the weapons.

The bunker was loaded with firepower: an M79 bloop gun, an M60 machine gun, and two M16 rifles. To this day Wallace can remember the distinct sounds of each of these weapons. Wolfe was firing the M60 almost continuously, and Wallace could see that the ammo belt was nearly empty. He turned to get more ammunition, since there was no one to act as assistant machine gunner. That's when they were hit. Wallace believes that a rocket-propelled grenade or mortar hit the bunker.

The concussion blew all the sandbags and the shrapnel into the aperture of the bunker. That's why, with my back facing the aperture, I got hit in the back. My comrades were hit in the chest. Once that happened, it was like you were helpless. At that point I could do nothing more—you had to wait and see what the outcome would be.

Wallace never lost consciousness.

I thought I was going to die, and I remember it as if it was yesterday. I said, “God, if this is dying, I'm ready,” because I felt no pain. It was like, I'm cruising, and I was ready to step over from earth to heaven, and my life passed before me. From a youngster to an adult to that spot to my own funeral to the extent that I saw myself in a flag-draped casket in the church in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I could see right across family members seated there, and it was as if I'm looking down on all of this.

As Wallace waited, he expected the bunker to explode again, from either enemy fire or secondary explosions from the ammo stored there. It didn't happen. Dizzy and light-headed, he began to feel as if he were floating. As lights from the rounds flashed, he could only make out some lacerations on one of his hands. What he couldn't see was that his entire back, from his shoulder blades to his ankles, had been torn to hamburger. Later he would learn that blood was filling his lungs. He was asphyxiating. He had no idea whether his fellow soldiers had survived.