Bringing It All Back Home (5 page)

I mean, they were shooting at us. It's the damnedest feeling—and anybody else that you talk to, I'm sure, will say the same thing. You're flying along in a helicopter, okay? And I'm sitting there in the door with my feet hanging out on the rails, and I'm holding a baseplate,
1
my hands are over here on the side; Semler is over here beside me or right behind me, and you're looking down and you can see rounds coming up at you. The only thing that you can see are the tracer rounds—all these things were loaded, four rounds of ball, one round the tracer. And you're seeing the tracer rounds going up and over. These are .50-calibers.

Now, I've seen what .50-calibers do to people. You don't want to know, it's terrible—absolutely terrible. And you're wondering to yourself, “Why aren't we being hit?” And they're going over the helicopter and under the helicopter. I'm wondering where the other three rounds are. I can see the tracers.

So we fly in and we fly in fast … You could hear over the pilot's radios that it was way too hot; this was bad news. I mean, we're getting hit—
bing, chung, bing
, like that. I have the baseplate in my hands, and I felt this foot in my back go
boom
, like this.

He was kicked out of the chopper, landing in a rice paddy. As soon as he hit the ground, Eggers was off and running as fast as he could, carrying the baseplate for the mortars.

You don't think; there is no thought to this process. It's you or him, I guess. He's shooting at you when you're shooting back at him, and you just do what you have got to do. It was your job, you know. You take as many of them down as you possibly can.

This was his first real firefight, and it lasted only about five minutes. It was the first time he could ever remember firing in someone's direction and watching him fall down. His unit did not lose any soldiers that morning.

At those times you don't think of yourself as a commander; you think of yourself as a soldier with command responsibility. And thank God for Sergeant Montgomery, God bless him.

It's likely they were being fired upon by the Vietcong—South Vietnamese Communist guerrilla units—although there may have been PAVN—North Vietnamese regular soldiers—operating in the area. The unit spent the night in a village, Eggers and Semler sleeping in a house with a bed made out of a slab of mahogany. He used his backpack for a pillow and slept heavily.
I slept just like a bear. I hibernated that night. It was my first real, honest-to-goodness shooting.

The following morning they went out on patrol in an area with tall brush. As they moved down a path, they heard the sound of automatic weapons fire. Then they saw a line of ten uniformed North Vietnamese soldiers moving quickly along a tree line to the north, where the weapons fire had come from.

And all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose; that line of guys that I saw going in there, it turns out later, was an automatic weapons company of NVA regulars. These are professional soldiers, just like us. And they opened up. They had dug in; they had moved very quickly into this little dike area. They opened up on us and, Mother of God, there were bullets flying everywhere. I reach for my radio … [
Claps.
] I got hit.

Eggers and Semler, a native of Stockton, California, were both hit by a burst of fire from the same weapon.

Semler got shot in the neck somewhere, and he went down and I went down. The only thing I remember about it is this force picking me up—I was hit in the arm—picking me up off the ground and spinning me around. And when I came down, my M16 was halfway underneath me in the water and this arm was over my eyes, and I'm underneath the water. I thought I was dead.

I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, and I could feel nothing, because the pain hadn't hit me yet. And so I actually said, “Oh, shit, I'm dead,” and then the arm flopped down in the water, and the pain hit me. I have never felt pain like that—never. When a bullet hits you, hits bone, it shatters everything. How I still have movement in this hand, as far as I'm concerned, is a miracle of God. God wanted me to have both hands still. Because it blew the entire back of my arm out, all of it out.

After what seemed like an eternity, a medic emerged, wrapped his arm, gave him a shot of morphine, and moved on. As the firing decreased and he began to move, he could hear North Vietnamese bullets striking the paddy dike against which he rested. He watched a South Vietnamese Air Force propeller-driven aircraft drop napalm on the tree line where the rounds had come from. From a hundred yards away he could feel the heat of the exploding napalm. All of a sudden he heard the sound of a helicopter that seemed to come to a dead stop almost on top of him.

And out hops the door gunner and the crew chief, pick me up, throw me in on top of ammo cases, arm banging around like hell, and I say, “Don't forget him,” and the guys say, “Nope.” That was my radio operator. And we picked off the ground and I can remember looking out, and I'm seeing [Semler]; he's just, he's lying there in the rice paddy like this—his eyes wide open and he's dead, just wide open like this, just like a crucifix, just lying there, like this. I can see his face here today. I actually heard him die. I could hear him dying; he was drowning in his own blood. He didn't move—there was no movement at all. I think the bullet went in and hit his spine and severed his spine, so there was no feeling … but he had to have known that he was drowning.

At the battalion aid station they wanted Eggers to walk out of the helicopter, but he couldn't. He was bleeding too badly. Someone quickly hit him with more morphine, and then he had to wait. As soon as someone did speak to him, Eggers remembers insisting that the doctors patch him up and send him back to his unit. Whoever was attending him told him, “Lieutenant, you ain't going anywhere but home.” They took his helmet, weapon, and ammunition and placed him in a helicopter to fly him elsewhere for more medical aid. He remembers nearly falling out of the helicopter as it flew to the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon.

After debridement—a surgical procedure in which doctors and nurses attempt to remove foreign matter like dirt and other material from the wound—his arm was placed into a cast. The following day he was flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The next thing he remembers is a bank of telephones they wheeled in so that he could call home.

My wife answered the phone, “Hello.” And I said, “Hi”; there was this pause at the other end of the phone; she says, “Oh, hi, how you doing? How are you? Good to hear your voice.” I said, “Well, let's put it this way. I was wounded.” There's this long pause. “But you're talking to me, right?” I said, “Yeah, I'm talking to you and I'm on my way home.” She says, “Okay.” That's all she had to know. She never asked me where I was wounded. She never asked me how bad it was. She knew that I called her. I sounded like me, and I was on my way home. And that impressed me. Not then, but years later, thinking about it.

And I spoke with my father-in-law. Now, he was a vet from World War II; had landed at D-day, had his unit hit very badly; he was wounded, he had some nerve damage, he twitched, like that. And he was a tank commander. He was a major; he was the commander of a squadron of tanks or something like that. And he got on the phone and he asked me all kinds of questions, and I just … it was like a five-minute phone call, just that was it, that small, that short, and … done.

When it was time to go home, he was loaded onto a C-141 Starlifter aircraft and given new clothing. From there it was on to Hawaii, then Texas, then McGuire Air Force Base, and finally Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. By the time he arrived back in the United States, Eggers had dropped from his original weight of 183 to 155 pounds. His wound was extremely painful, and he had to have further surgery. He was hospitalized for much of the spring of 1966, often in traction. There is now a one-inch difference in the length of his two arms, the result of the destruction of the bone. And even now his arm aches when it gets cold outside.

There were other wounded soldiers at Valley Forge whom he will never forget, including a man with a spinal wound who had been hit by a .50-caliber round. He also remembers watching a young man get out of his hospital wheelchair and learn to walk all over again.

Talk about sheer guts and determination to live and go on. That impressed me so much. I can still see it in my mind's eye.

Witnessing the will of those soldiers moved Eggers deeply, and he left with a determination to get on with his life, despite his wound. To this day he considers himself fortunate to have gotten out of Vietnam alive with all his parts,
even if they were banged up a bit.

He had only been in Vietnam for thirty-five days, but when he saw his wife for the first time, he had been through a lot. It was a relief to see her. By March 1966 he was being allowed day passes to visit his wife and family outside the hospital. Eventually, the hospital arranged an overnight trip to Atlantic City. In contrast to the experience of some other veterans, Eggers recalls being treated like royalty by a tourist association there.

Like Ron Kovic in
Born on the Fourth of July
, Eggers was invited by his hometown to be the grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade. He agreed. The parade was the impetus for him to make his first visit back to Larchmont, and he has very warm memories of what took place. As he was dropped off at the arranged meeting place where the parade would begin,
you would've thought God walked in.

He remembers being saluted and the pride that his father and father-in-law expressed.

I was proud, too. What the hell. I didn't know why I was there. I thought there were other people a lot more deserving of it than me. But there I was, the grand marshal of the blasted parade!

Eggers was not given a medical discharge. Apparently, his arm was not damaged enough, and he had time left on his military commitment. In early June 1966 he got orders to head to Fort Lewis, Washington, where he became a company commander. And he loved it. Still, as he puts it, he was
prime meat to go back
to Vietnam, and he didn't want to.

He could have stayed in. He and his wife discussed it, but he had had enough of dead bodies. In addition, the Eggerses' second child had a serious case of bacterial pneumonia, and he just didn't want to be apart from his family at that time.

I liked the concept of the service; I was good at it; I was comfortable in it; my wife liked it too. We got to travel a little bit and do this and do that.

But Eggers was having doubts about America's involvement in the war. To him, it didn't seem that the country was committed to winning. He says:

The only way that this was going to be stopped was that we had to virtually take out Hanoi. If you want to kill the spider, you've got to get the spider in his nest. But there wasn't anybody out there who wanted to do it. That political risk internationally was way too big.

So, in early January 1968, he left the Army. Eggers went on to work for an insulation company and bought a home in Rockland County, New York. For the better part of two decades he didn't tell anyone he had served in Vietnam.
If somebody started to talk about it in a conversation, I just sat there. I never said I was or wasn't.

Eggers didn't want to get into a political discussion with anyone. He was just happy that his war had ended and that he had survived. Then things changed a little. The war ended in 1975, and Eggers's brother-in-law returned from Vietnam. He had had a very bad time as a medic, though Eggers declines to say more, and died at age forty-five.

His brother-in-law's struggles led Eggers to begin talking more about his experiences. He took some goading and at times had to defend himself:
I said, “Look, I was just a soldier. I didn't kill any babies that I know of; I was just a soldier; that's all I was.”

Though he was no longer silent about his combat experience, Vietnam was still mostly out of his everyday thoughts until 1991, when several things happened. First, the Gulf War began. It seemed to Eggers that the country was entering the Gulf War with the determination to win quickly and definitively that he hadn't sensed in Vietnam. He remembers imagining what it would be like to return to the service.

That triggered something deep, deep inside of me, that I could no longer deny that part of my life.

Another factor was Eggers's younger son, who was learning about the Vietnam War in high school and asked his father to tell him more about his experiences.

For the first time, I said, “Okay, but you better have some time.” And I don't know how many hours we talked. Over time I seemed to find a place inside of me that was more accessible. Gradually, it began to come out of me, and I began to talk about it to other people, if they asked. It became a source of pride eventually. But it was hard fought.

In the late 1990s he got a Purple Heart license plate for his car. Not long after, men from his unit began to contact him.

Today, he says that he is proud to have participated in the Vietnam War and that he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. At the same time, he doesn't seek out veterans' reunions or other veterans' events. He doesn't want his veteran's status to define him, instead choosing to be oriented toward his family and his church. He is the father of five and has been married for more than forty-five years.

I don't want it to consume me. Some of these guys are consumed.

Looking back, Eggers associates military service with the virtues of leadership he believes he's displayed as an owner or manager of small businesses. He recalls being under fire and the instinctive effort to do his job without panic, knowing that mistakes could be costly. He and Semler were the only casualties during the time he led the platoon. And while the majority of the men in his unit were African American, he also had whites and Latinos and remembers that everyone got along. There was never a need to take disciplinary action.