Shots fired over my head by a Green Beret

In an earlier post I said there were at least three times during my tour in Vietnam from October 1967 to October 1968 when I feared my life was in danger and the danger was posed not by the Viet Cong or NVA, but by my own people.

In previous posts I’ve now recounted two of those occasions – one, when I and hundreds of my colleagues were told to expect a fire fight when our landing craft rolled up on a beach near Chu Lai just days after we arrived by ship in Vietnam; and two, when VC infiltrators got inside our line and blew up some trucks, and our officers thought the VC sappers were in our vicinity and ordered us to form two lines and march toward each other with loaded M-16s.  Both were incidents when our Army officers either were having fun at our expense or were incompetent or both.

The incident I’m going to relate in this post via a letter I wrote to my wife Molly on September 19, 1968, is a lesson in how war and Army training can warp a person and why it’s not a good idea to make a Green Beret with an M-16 in his hand look silly.

It involves a soldier friend of mine named Clyde Hall from the 330th Radio Research Co.  He frequently visited a Montagnard village a couple of miles down the hill in the jungle from our company’s location on the side of a hill.  He called the language that the tribe spoke “Djerai,” but I can find nothing about such a tongue on-line. Since this is taken from a very long letter, I’m only including the relevant part here:

Dear Molly, 

….. 

Did I tell you about my excursion to the Montagnard village?  Clyde Hall, who has learned Djerai in his spare time just by going to the village every day and getting words and phrases down in his notebook, invited me to go out to Plei Ko Teng with him.  He knows practically every family in the village, so we went to several houses (bamboo structures built four or five feet above ground-level to keep floods, pigs and dogs out) where he interpreted for us and we drank lots of rice wine and ogled the bare-breasted women.  I can’t wait to see the slides I took out there.

Anyway, at one of the houses a Special Forces buck sergeant was drinking wine with a Montagnard friend of his.  This guy was quite a talker and considered himself an authority on sociology and psychiatry and you could almost believe him if you allowed yourself to take his jargon seriously.

After a while Clyde and I (grew bored listening to the self-centered sergeant blather, so we) wandered down to the village showers (pipes coming out of the hillside with the clearest, coolest spring water you’d ever want to bathe in).  After we’d showered, we wandered down to the river to take a skinny-dip with the village kids in the swift stream.  We were having a great time dunking the kids and jumping off the pipe bridge into the water, which was about chest deep with a sandy bottom.  Then, Clyde went off and hid in some bushes.  (He was going to sneak up on (another soldier friend of ours) George Duggins, who had joined us, but wasn’t swimming, and throw him in the river.)

But just then the Special Forces sergeant, whose name was Helling, came down the hill and started to cross the pipe bridge with M-16 rifle in hand. (The “bridge” was just large pipe across the river about five feet above water level with a bamboo railing tied to it at waist height to create a walking bridge).

So Clyde pushed Helling right into the river.  Everybody had a good laugh until the Green Beret came out of the water with a wild look on his face and started shooting.  He must have fired six rounds right past Clyde before we realized what was going on.  He said something to this effect:  “You fuck with me, Boy, and I’ll kill you!  I’m sorry, but we’re trained to react like that over here and you shouldn’t have done that!”

Then, he turned to me and said:  “Tell him he shouldn’t have done that.  Tell him!”

Like a fool (I was standing there in the river bare-ass naked) I said, “Man, I can’t tell him that, I thought it was pretty funny,” at which point he fired several rounds over my head.

Then, he turned to George Duggins and asked him why he was looking at him like that.  George was scared and said something like, “Man, I can’t see nothin’, my eyes are crossed.”  And with that this guy Helling sort of loses his bravado and asks us to forgive him, says he’s sorry and trots off to the village.

Clyde suggested that we go back by another path in case the guy wasn’t through playing games.  And that’s the last we saw of him.

Yes sir, Special Forces really trains some fine individuals….

(That’s the end of the relevant part of this letter.  More about my visits to the Montagnard village and other aspects of life on Engineer Hill in future posts.)