Don’t know how I missed the conversation and call for personal Vietnam accounts. But then, I notice that I have been forgetful and less observant these days. Then again, I do remember Vietnam, with a mixture of pride and some sadness. My story.
Taking my chances with the draft after our graduation, I earned my master’s degree in Mineral Engineering at Stanford and was offered a job in
Like songs and photos, our stories remember when. On my way to Vietnam in the summer of 1971, I read a cover story in a magazine with a misleading article entitled something like `How graduates of the Ivy League were sitting out the Viet Nam War.’ I knew and learned that Dartmouth graduates served, shed blood [as did Peter Barber ‘66], and died [Bill Smoyer, ’67 and Larry Hogan, ’69 and others].
I was in Vietnam from June 1970 to May 1971. I got there by trying to avoid getting drafted and sent to fight in combat as an enlisted man. My dad had been shot up pretty badly at Anzio in WWII by a German machine gun and he always advised to go into war as a “behind the lines” officer. I took his advice.
After graduation from Navy OCS in June 1970 I joined the crew of the USS Knox (DE-1052) a small destroyer manned by seventeen officers and 230 enlistees. As a weapons officer I spent two deployments on the Knox in the western Pacific with extended periods in the Tonkin Gulf and along the coast of Vietnam.
Nick North shares some photos from his time in Vietnam.
Chinook and a landing gaggle of Hueys:
Cholon - a grimy section of Saigon where a lot of the refugees fleeing south would settle: