Guns Up! (41 page)

Gunny McDermott made a lifelong impression upon me. I wrote a couple of other books loosely based on him and another warrior I admire greatly, a Korean War–era gunnery sergeant named Francis Killeen. Gunny McDermott is one of those special warriors the Marine Corps seems to breed when America is in trouble. The gunny went back to the States in September 1968. He immediately drove those around him insane until he was sent back to Vietnam. He got back in May 1969 and stayed until August 1970. He was assigned to the Army as an adviser with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, 4th Battalion, 6th Regiment, 2d ARVN Division in Quang Nai Province. He said the Army called him “Mac the Magnet” because he managed to draw so much fire. I laughed. Those of us in Alpha Company understand. During his second tour, he managed to find the enemy with his usual regularity. He was wounded a total of six times but refused three of those Purple Hearts to keep from being sent home. Three Purple Hearts or two serious wounds, 48s, and you had to go back to the States.

Gunny McDermott was promoted to the rank of sergeant major in March 1977 and was transferred to Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. He was the Training NCO while stationed at Parris Island, South Carolina. Somehow, I always pictured the guy wearing a Smokey the Bear hat on Parris Island. Sgt. Maj. McDermott’s personal decorations include the Silver Star, three Bronze Stars with Combat V, three Purple Hearts, the Meritorious Service Medal, two Army Commendation
Medals with Combat V, the Combat Action Ribbon, and two Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry.

We spoke for a long time, then I decided to ask him a twenty-eight-year-old question. To tell you the truth, I did not know what to expect. It made me nervous to even broach the subject of a medal with a real hero. But after nearly three decades, I wanted to know if it was just my childish imagination or if he did tell my A-gunner he was putting me up for a Silver Star. I also now had a responsibility to the other guys who were put up for medals that night and never got them. One thing I could depend on with the gunny was that he would be blunt.

“Gunny, did you know our records got blown up by a 122?”

“Oh, sure. Killed a master sergeant, I think.”

“Pat McCrary just got a Purple Heart after all these years because his records were blown up in that attack. Corporal Huteson and some of the guys were supposed to get medals for that night.”

“I heard about that.”

“Look, Gunny, I’ve wanted to ask you this question since I was eighteen. My A-gunner came to me that night and told me that the gunny was putting me up for the Silver Star.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

Like I said, blunt. My heart sank a little. At least, and at last, I knew the truth. I felt embarrassed and a little bummed about it. “But why would my A-gunner tell me that?”

“It wasn’t me. It was Gunny Poertner.”

“Who is Gunny Poertner?”

“He was the company gunny. Remember Poertner at An Hoa, big red mustache?”

I did remember the guy. He had a really impressive
moustache, looked like a Viking. “I do remember that guy, Gunny! But he wasn’t in the bush with us, was he?”

“Sure! On company-size operations. Remember when Lieutenant Molonolf of Third Platoon got killed in An Hoa?”

“Yeah.” I remembered that Lieutenant Molonolf was an Australian. I called him Lieutenant Hawthorn in the chapter titled “Pay Back.”

“That’s when I took over the third herd. Gunny Poertner became company gunny with Captain Nelson.”

I was flabbergasted. I never knew there were two gunnery sergeants in Alpha Company. Of course, at eighteen, there was a lot I never knew. Retired M.Sgt. Billy Poertner remembered every detail. He said that he did write me up. He would do it again. Our company commander, Capt. Scott Nelson, remembered some of that night and a few of the guys also remembered. Doc Turley remembered. He was everyone’s favorite corpsman. Shortly after Gunny Poertner wrote me up for the Silver Star for the second time, he died. At least four other Marines, whose records were also destroyed, should have received medals for their selfless acts of bravery that night. Cpl. Fred Huteson, PFC Pat McCrary, PFC Richard Chan, and Chan’s A-gunner, name unknown. And there may well be others and probably are. L/Cpl. Bruce Trebil may have been another Marine who risked his life to save others in the graveyard. Gunny McDermott, too. The Marines of Alpha 1/5 risked their lives for one another every day.

Some of these Marines had more time in combat than I had in the chow line. They showed up brave the way civilians show up for work. The Corps doesn’t hand out medals easily, must be part of the budget problem, because it sure wasn’t a lack of guts by 1/5 Marines. I pray and hope that the others will be honored. If it doesn’t happen, it won’t be due to a lack of effort by our officers. Our officers are still dedicated to their men. Total professionals.
Lt. Col. Joe Griffis and Capt. Scott Nelson have always gone above and beyond for their men. They still do.

Capt. Scott Nelson left the Corps a highly decorated hero. He went on to become a big shot with the FBI. To all who watched him in Nam, that is no surprise. Leaders always rise to the top. He retired after becoming the head of the FBI in one part of the country and is now the head of security for Warner Brothers Studios.

I watch men like Scott in amazement and wonder how America finds these guys, for America found a lot of them in Vietnam. The media never seemed to notice them, but they were there, by the thousands, winning every major engagement in a decade of war, no matter the odds. It’s like a football team winning every game when only it’s defensive line is allowed to play. The U.S. Army did a great job over there, too. The Navy and Air Force didn’t let anybody down either. The NVA lost three full divisions during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong were basically eliminated. The enemy could not mount another offensive for three years after their beating at Tet. We heard some scuttlebutt that retired general Douglas MacArthur said, “Give me the First Marine Division, and I’ll be in Hanoi in a few weeks and end this war!” I think he was right. When President Nixon decided to force Hanoi to the peace table, it took only twelve days of B-52 strikes to bring them to their knees. Our combat forces left Nam in 1973. North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon almost three years later. If anyone lost militarily, it sure was not my Marine Corps.

Michael “Doc” Turley was one of our Navy corpsmen. I’m not even sure how many corpsmen we had. Remember, as a machine gunner I was in Weapons Platoon. But if the Third Platoon lost a gunner, I might get attached to them for a while. It was the same for corpsmen. One of our corpsmen was sort of arrogant, and I wrote about him quite often. That corpsman was not Doc
Turley. By the way, that snob corpsman saved a lot of lives, too. Doc Turley was in the Navy from 1966 to 1970. He went to Nursing School at Wagner College. He was varsity quarterback on the football team from 1970 to 1972. Doc went to U.S. Public Health Hospital in Staten Island, N.Y., and graduated in 1973. He joined the Coast Guard the same year and served in the Reserves until 1999. In the Coast Guard, he became an ER physician assistant, level 1 and level 2 trauma cases. Doc worked in Jacksonville, where this hero continued to save lives. Doc is in a battle with Agent Orange right now, but he isn’t whining, and he’s proud to have served with the Corps in Vietnam.

When the story of the missing records first came out, it brought some sorrow and some joy. One of the joyful moments happened a couple of years ago as the mystery began to unfold. One day my doorbell rang. When you have teenagers, you never figure it is someone to see you, but I answered anyway. When I opened that door, all I could do was stare. A man who resembled a boy I once knew stood before me holding a gray shirt. The shirt had the picture of an M60 machine gun on it with words above and below:
WHY WALTZ WHEN YOU CAN ROCK AND ROLL
. I stood reading that shirt and remembering a hundred times when this man ran forward under fire to help wounded Marines. It was a wonderful reunion. Doc was one of the most respected and beloved men in Alpha Company. Hugging him was like holding on to all that was good and right about my time in Nam.

Doc Turley had just come back from touring Vietnam with one of our old radio men, J. B. MacCreight. He had gone back to Hill 55 and Truoi Bridge and Hue City and a few other places that still haunted him. He had lost his best friend on Truoi Bridge: Cpl. Walter Roslie. Doc was from Staten Island and Roslie was from Valley Stream, Long Island. Corporal Roslie was another remarkable hero from Hue. He had been awarded the Silver Star and
two Purple Hearts in the Battle of Hue City. He was offered a field promotion to second lieutenant but turned it down. Truoi Bridge was his third and final Heart. Another hero, L/Cpl. Jim Tedesco, died trying to rescue Roslie on that bridge. Doc and J.B. wanted to say a prayer and throw some flowers off the bridge. A young Communist lieutenant would not allow them on the bridge. There were machine-gun bunkers at each end as if the war were still going on. The young lieutenant told them he could be shot for allowing Americans on the bridge. While visiting Hill 55, they decided to film a monument that had been built to all the enemy soldiers that the Marines had killed there. Mike looked up from filming to discover that he, J.B., and their driver, a former ARVN who had worked with the U.S. Marines, were surrounded by little pith helmets carrying AK47s. They told the Americans, “We can kill you, and your government can do nothing about it.” They took the Vietnamese driver and grilled him for hours before letting them go. I’ll not be visiting Nam with my tourist dollars unless they let me bring along a few friends—the First Marine Division and an M60.

In July 1998, my old executive officer, Fifth Marine Regiment, Lt. Col. Joe Griffis, called me on the phone. Aided by the tireless help of another retired Marine named Bill Harley, the red tape involved in presenting a medal thirty years late was worked out. It would happen at the First Marine Division Reunion in Cincinnati, Ohio, on August 8, 1998.

I drove up with my son, Shawn, and daughter, Bonnie Kay. My wife met us there along with Richard Chan. Chan is now the leading cardiovascular perfusion expert in the world. We are still buddies and still argue. Chan had a rough time when he came home. He had thirteen surgical operations and battled like the rest of the guys to fit in again. He finally met and married a great lady named Doreen. She’s a middle-school teacher. He
travels the world, teaching and lecturing on the subject of cardiovascular perfusion. He says that invariably at the end of a seminar, some person will approach him with a reluctant expression. He knows what’s coming. “I know this will sound silly,” the person will say, “but I read this war book called
Guns Up!
and it had a character named Richard Chan. Is it possible that you are the same Richard Chan?”

Chan was medevaced out only after two choppers were disabled. He still remembers the body bags on the medevac chopper. At 1st Med. Battalion doctors performed the first of thirteen operations on him. It took over a month for them to get Chan home. He had to be stabilized at each stop: Okinawa, Yokohama, Anchorage, California, Washington, D.C., and finally St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, N.Y. His weight went down to 130 pounds when he arrived at St. Albans. At 1st Med, they considered removing one of his arms because he’d spiked a fever. He begged one doctor, a family friend and commander of 1st Med, not to cut off the arm unless they were able to confirm a positive culture. The doctor said there was a terrible risk of gangrene spreading. He told the doctor that he was fully aware of the medical risks. Why does this sound so typical of Richard Chan?

Chan went into a coma for three weeks. He woke temporarily and has never forgotten the touching sight of a huge wounded Marine who had climbed out of the next bed. He was on his knees praying for Chan. “I was too dehydrated to shed many tears, but all that was left came out at that defining moment. It was then I was sure that God had spared me for better days. I wasn’t sure if I would have normal neurological functions or even two arms, but I knew I would live and will live for His purpose.”

Chan went through a postgraduate course that was two years long at Long Island Jewish Medical Center–Stony Brook University, one of the few universities in the
country at that time to offer this advanced degree. Today, there are twenty-three, but only five that offer an advanced degree. One of them is NSUH-LIUCWP. Chan is the director of this school. He has helped to develop many devices used in cardioperfusion. He has also developed physiologic calculators with his name on them. (I would explain that, but I don’t have a clue what it is.)

Chan and Doreen love my kids and spoil them rotten with their generosity. My son, Shawn McClellan Clark, is nineteen, a student at Saint Petersburg Junior College and heading for Florida State University, God willing. After that his father sees him as a second lieutenant in the First Marine Division, God willing. My daughter, Bonnie Kay Clark, is a sophomore at Keswick Christian School in Saint Petersburg, sixteen, beautiful, spiritual, and already more mature than her father, which is a little scary. They adore Chan and Doreen.

The day of the First Marine Division Reunion, there was a parade in downtown Cincinnati. The parade was to honor a Marine machine gunner killed in action thirty years earlier in Phu Loc, Thua Thien Province, Vietnam. He had been posthumously awarded the Bronze Star, thirty years late for helping a platoon of Marines hold off four hundred NVA at a place called Truoi Bridge. Of course, Red deserved more, as do many of the men who fought in Vietnam, but it still gave me goose bumps to watch his hometown finally say thanks.

Later that day, a smile walked through a group of Marines at the reunion. That smile made my heart stop. It was the same smile and same face I watched throughout my war: Sudsy. The real name of the radioman I wrote about is Cpl. Bob Carroll. Even as I write these words I feel ridiculous. I gave my limited view of a few incidents. I did not even touch on the depth of the men of Alpha 1/5. Bob “Sudsy” Carroll did not show up in Nam as a radio man. He was handed a radio during the Battle of Hue City, at the wall of the Citadel. He was one of the
3 percent of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, 1/5, Marines who made it through Hue City. Bob, like so many of the Marines of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, was wounded in Hue but never received a Purple Heart. The wounded were patched up and thrown back into the battle. The History Channel is currently doing a story about Hue City. When they asked the men for a good Marine to interview, a 1/5 Marine who saw it all, the answer was Bob Carroll. Bob “Sudsy” Carroll was involved in what could only be described as a suicide assault near the Citadel. That assault is considered to have been the turning point in the battle.