Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans

COMBAT STORIES FROM Vietnam

A Kim | 5th Marine Regiment

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Showing : Vietnam Videos

Gary Campbell - Army +5 Total Videos

196th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Div.

Gary Campbell discusses a B-52 Arc Light mission that resulted in 138 NVA (North Vietnamese Army) deaths.
Bob Keller - Army +6 Total Videos

5th Special Forces Group

Bob Keller plans an attack on an enemy position on a hillside, but the plan doesn't include firing his weapon.
Willard Womack - Army +13 Total Videos

18th Aviation Operating Detachment

Army pilot Willard Womack explains how his Air Medals are no big deal because they were automatic with the number of combat missions flown. And in a guerrilla war like Vietnam, every flight was a combat mission. (This interview made possible with the support of RALPH J. TINGLE.)
Jesse Beck - Army +1 Video

5th Special Forces Group

Jesse Beck, a Special Forces soldier, describes how his unit used technology to "sniff" out the enemy in Vietnam.
Will Gehlen +14 Total Videos

French Foreign Legion

Will Gehlen, a German member of the French Foreign Legion, relates the tale of his imprisonment by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu.
Andrew Robbins - Army +8 Total Videos

3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division

The inexperienced company commander led his men straight down a trail into an ambush. He was soon to be awarded the nation's highest award despite this blunder. Andrew Robbins was part of a force sent to help the pinned down unit. His own platoon leader had it in for him and ordered him to go retrieve a body and then to hold a light for a forward observer flying above, two very dangerous tasks. Robbins was starting to think he was gunning for the wrong target. Part 3 of 5.
Carl Fedde - Army +6 Total Videos

42nd Infantry Platoon (Scout Dog), 101st Airborne

Carl Fedde first arrived in Vietnam in the city of Saigon. There, he and his platoon trained the scout dogs they were working with on how to alert on Vietnamese only. He talks about a mission with his dog, Charlie Brown, that made a believer out of him and everyone else.
Galen Hoover - Navy +13 Total Videos

River Interdiction Division 40

After a quick leave, Galen Hoover and a buddy from a nearby town, started the long trip to Vietnam. He stopped in a frigid Alaska on the way, but when the airliner doors opened in Vietnam, it was a different environment. It was hot and it smelled really bad. And why was that chicken wire on the bus windows?
Charlie McMahon - Marines +6 Total Videos

Combined Action Program, Hotel 6

17-year-old Charlie McMahon is sent to the Mediterranean to train as a US Marine. Under the tutelage of hard-as-nails Vietnam vets, he learns the lessons that will save his life.
Bob Keller - Army +6 Total Videos

5th Special Forces Group

Bob Keller and his unit are chased down a cliff and through a creekbed by rock-throwing NVA troops.
Mike Peterson - Marines +4 Total Videos

Combined Action Program, Group 3, 1st Unit, 8th Platoon

Mike Peterson came from a military family, but enlisted in the Marines with a certain degree of doubt. After a rocky start in training, he finds his place as a radio operator.
Larry Jennings - Army +9 Total Videos

510th Engineer Company

Larry Jennings' engineer unit was ordered out of Pleiku and back to the Saigon area. After a long trip that included passage on LST's, they settled in and waited. He had a short time left and he was trying to keep his head down when his buddy organized a trip to Saigon.
Andrew Robbins - Army +8 Total Videos

3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division

After threatening to kill his own platoon commander, for perfectly understandable reasons, Andrew Robbins was swiftly court martialed and sent to the Long Binh stockade. This was just another step in his long ordeal that began because he knew the facts about the criminal death of another soldier. While there he would find himself in the middle of an incipient race riot and he would meet a mysterious clandestine operative he called The Contractor. Part 4 of 5.
Bo Blasingame - Army +8 Total Videos

212th Infantry Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division

Vietnam was alive with animal life according to chaplain Bo Blasingame. Aside from the pythons, the tarantulas and the pet mongoose, there was a bird in a banyan tree that had a habit of making a noise that sounded like an obscenity during services.
Jim Lawrence - Army +12 Total Videos

2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry

Jim Lawrence could only watch as A-1E Skyraiders turned the tide at the battle of Landing Zone Albany. He'd been shot in the head and couldn't move his legs. After evacuation, the first doctor he saw had a bedside manner that was lacking. Part 5 of 5.
A.R. McCahan - Army +24 Total Videos

Headquarters, US Army, Vietnam

While the doctors tried to find out whether he'd had a heart attack or not, alarming telegrams began to go out to Mac McCahan's family, despite the fact that he'd signed a document directing the Army to send such messages only in the event of death. Part 2 of 3.
Ken Adams - Navy +6 Total Videos

Capt., U.S. Navy Pilot, AW16 USS Oriskany, VA-163

Ken Adams, along with three other pilots, attack a bridge. The mission earns Ken the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Fred Mills - Army +8 Total Videos

498th Medical Command, Air Ambulance

Fred Mills had a rookie pilot on a evacuation mission who nearly hit the only tree in a rice paddy. Other stories include a refused Purple Heart, tracers through the cabin, and landing a replacement craft next to the still smoldering craft it replaced.
Owen Ditchfield - Army +13 Total Videos

101st Airborne Division

Halfway through his second Vietnam tour, Owen Ditchfield was put in charge of the division's Kit Carson Scout program, which used Viet Cong who had turned to the South's side. These soldiers were so useful that American units competed to recruit them as they finished their indoctrination.
Mike McCormick - Army +8 Total Videos

125th Signal Battalion

When he was a young lieutenant, Mike McCormick had an embarrassing incident during an inspection by the commanding general which caused the general to remember him in a lighthearted way.
Mike Morris - Army +11 Total Videos

1st Battalion, 5th Infantry (Mechanized), 25th Infantry Division

Mike Morris recalls the time his unit was almost overrun by the NVA. The enemy were good fighters and smart. Despite the imbalance in firepower, they called the shots.
Owen Ditchfield - Army +13 Total Videos

Public Information Detachment, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment

While he was chaperoning reporter Peter Arnett around Vietnam, Owen Ditchfield got to hear the exciting story of a soldier who lost his rifle during an ambush and had to rely on his knife. He was also there when Martha Raye invaded the colonel's trailer. The reporters he hosted ran the gamut from celebrated author Joe Galloway to guys who wouldn't leave the hotel in Saigon.
Brig Gen Robert Titus - Air Force +4 Total Videos

Multiple Units

They tried to put fighter and test pilot Bob Titus in logistics, but he wasn't going to sit at a desk and order supplies. He managed to avoid that fate and went to his third war in Vietnam to test new planes in a combat situation. Once that was over, he extended with another unit and scored three MiG kills.
Paul Jacobs - Navy +8 Total Videos

Multiple Ships

Why did he join the Navy? Because he got a brown envelope from the Army. Paul Jacobs was already an engineer out of Maine Maritime Academy, so he was commissioned and made Chief Engineer on his first ship, at only twenty one years old. He saw action off the coast of Vietnam on several ships providing support and Naval gunfire.
Ernest Washington - Marines +7 Total Videos

1st Marine Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division

When you were pinned down by overwhelming enemy fire during a firefight in Vietnam, you called in an airstrike. Unfortunately for Marine Ernest Washington, the wrong coordinates were given and the airstrike came in right on top of his unit.
Kenneth Moorefield - Army +12 Total Videos

Advisor, 21st Infantry Division, ARVN

After the Tet Offensive, it was expected that the enemy would take some time to recover and launch new attacks. Not so in the Southern delta, where Kenneth Moorefield was advising a South Vietnamese unit. In the middle of a firefight, he found out first hand the effect of a high velocity round on the human body. Recovering at Walter Reed hospital, he found out that he'd left one battlefield for another.
Dennis Haines - Army +15 Total Videos

C Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, 199th Light Infantry Brigade

Years after his head wound, Dennis Haines found the surgeon, John Baldwin, who operated on him in the field hospital. Only then did he learn how close to death he had been, so close that he was put in the group of patients who were deemed not likely to survive.
Mike Waugh - Army +10 Total Videos

7th Battalion, 13th Artillery

Mike Waugh rotated through nearly every job for a Lieutenant in the artillery unit. At one point, his battery was split and he took three guns to a a nearby spot called LZ Pony. Halfway through his tour, he was moved to battalion headquarters, where he was responsible for the firing of many batteries.
Frank Cox - Marines +23 Total Videos

F Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division

Unlike some outfits, Foxtrot Company based it's number of kills on actual body counts, but a touring colonel made them take down their sign, saying no outfit had killed that many. As Frank Cox tells it, one sergeant took exception to that and did something totally inappropriate.
David Andrews - Army +9 Total Videos

17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division

David Andrews talked about his first major confrontation in Vietnam and the situation that led to this major battle with a company that was en route to Saigon for the Tet Offensive.