[00:00:00] (Chorus) No one knows.

[00:00:05] (John) I never wanted to do anything else growing up or go to West Point. I no other school ever attracted me. No other profession ever attracted me. I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be an infantry soldier. And I wanted to lead soldiers.

[00:00:26] (Host) That’s John Hedley. And when he says he wanted to go to West Point and become an infantry soldier, he’s not just blowing smoke. John overcame a lot of obstacles in achieving that goal, including not one, but two rounds of experimental surgery just to get himself qualified to fight. His reward at the end of that long, difficult road was a tour in Vietnam starting in July of 1969, where he ended up leading the Army’s legendary Red Scarved recon platoon, known as Fox Force. In this episode, John shares the story of that journey, his experiences in Vietnam, and a surprise ending that will boggle your mind and warm your heart at the same time. Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, founders of the wall. This is echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host, Michael Croan, bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict. More than 50 years later. This is episode 56, the Red Scarf. John Hedley retired from the Army in 1991, after 24 years at the rank of lieutenant colonel. In the 32 years since then, he’s found a new purpose caring for veterans, especially those who served in combat. But even with 2 or 3 careers spanning 56 years, it was one year in Vietnam that defines John to this day. He wrote a book about that year called Saddle Up!:The Story of a Red Scarf. John grew up traveling the world as an Army brat. His father had fought in World War II and Korea, and had worked at one point for General Douglas MacArthur. As a young man, John’s father had been determined to go to West Point, and after three attempts he was finally accepted into the class of 1939. And then he wasn’t. The War Department withdrew his acceptance on the grounds that his entry date put him six days over the age limit. The unfulfilled dream of the father eventually became the obsession of the son. And that’s where our conversation begins.

[00:03:04] (John) In high school, we would make yearly trips down to West Point to go watch a parade and go to a football game. One year I was within touching distance of President Eisenhower. Maybe it was a reunion year for him or something. And that solidified my desires. I mean, there’s nothing more impressive than a full dress review on the plains of West Point, particularly for a high school kid. I tried to get to West Point out of high school. I didn’t make it. I think I was a fourth or fifth alternate or something, so my chances were nonexistent. So, the day after I graduated from high school, there was an O/D staff car in my driveway in Rochester to pick me up and drive me to the reception station in Buffalo, New York. Whereupon I enlisted in the United States Army.

[00:04:14] (Host) You enlisted?

[00:04:16] (John) I enlisted, yeah. At age 17.

[00:04:20] (Host) Wow.

[00:04:21] (John) I spent I spent my 18th birthday in basic training at Fort Dix, new Jersey, saying, to heck am I doing here? I had heard that the Army ran a prep school in those days. It was at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And I thought, you know, if I couldn’t get high enough grades coming out of high school, maybe if I go to prep school with all the emphasis on English and math, English and math, English and math, that’s all we study. It’s all we prep for. You know, maybe that will get this not too bright light, qualified enough to go. And so, I had to take a test entrance exam for that place.

[00:05:01] (Host) What year are we talking about now?

[00:05:03] (John) 63-64, and in those days, prep school was only for primarily regular Army soldiers who wanted to go to West Point. It wasn’t a prep school for recruited athletes like it is today or anything else. It was for soldiers out of the army who wanted to go to West Point and needed a little help getting there. And so, while we were there, we were encouraged to go down and see our congressman, because if we could get a congressional appointment while we were there, that saved one slot for another soldier who couldn’t get to a congressman or whatever to vie for the slot open to the Army guys. I managed to get to D.C. I met Representative Ostertag from the Rochester area, had a nice discussion with them; the end result was that he offered me an appointment to West Point for the class of 1968. And that’s how I got here.

[00:06:00] (Host) So you graduated West Point, spring of 68?

[00:06:04] (John) Yes.

[00:06:05] (Host) Right, so this is, this is after the siege at Khe Sanh. This is after Tet. I mean, those things happened during your last semester at West Point.

[00:06:13] (John) Yes. That’s correct. Yes.

[00:06:15] (Host) How much did that news inform your conversations at the academy?

[00:06:23] (John) You know, when we entered in the spring of 64, probably nobody could find Vietnam on a map. While we were there, we realized we were going to become a wartime class because that’s where we were going to go. As the news came in, particularly after 65 with the la Drang Valley fight with the 7th Cav, which was the first big fight with the NVA, we began to get more news. We began to get announcements of funerals for returning graduates who were going to be buried in the West Point Cemetery.

[00:07:02] (Host) Oh, my.

[00:07:03] (John) When we started to get a couple of guys from 66 or 67 come back, in a lot of cases, we knew those guys or we knew their names, so it became more of a reality to us.

[00:07:15] (Host) Yeah, it’s not just, it’s not just news reports at that point. Right?

[00:07:19] (John) That’s correct. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when a guy from your company who graduated two years ahead of you that you knew comes back to be buried, that has an impact on you and particularly when you’re a young kid.

[00:07:35] (Host) Early in his sophomore year, John began for the first time, to struggle with some of the physical requirements of West Point. At 6’4 and 180 lbs. or so, he had always performed well on PT tests, and now, all of a sudden, he wasn’t. He failed P.E. that semester and then he failed the re-exam. That would have allowed him to rejoin his class, and he was dismissed from the Corps of Cadets. At his separation physical, a surgeon named Thomas Gere could see no reason why John should be unable to ace the physical requirements. The doctor began to suspect that the problem was a kind of birth defect in John’s rib area. He decided that John’s difficulties were not his fault, that he should remain a fully enrolled cadet, and that surgery would enable him to stay with his class.

[00:08:25] (John) So I went to Walter Reed. I spent, oh, my God, probably a month or more there. I was kind of an experimental case for a bunch of thoracic surgeons. I remember being taken into their conference room you know, where they discuss unusual cases, and I was exhibit A one day and my X-rays and stuff. So, I went through some experimental surgery and recovered from it. Of all places, I was in the Vietnam War. So, guys, this guy, one guy used to come see me. He’d been a helicopter pilot, had a hole through his forearm from the 51caliber slug. My roommate had been an F-4 pilot, shot down in flames. His face was totally gone. They were rebuilding it. He had a blob of stuff for a nose with a couple of straws hanging out, and one day he had a pass and said, John, look at this, I’m going to go meet my wife. And he pulled open a drawer and pulled out this beautiful case and opened it. And there were two ears in there that he stuck on the stubs on the side of his head. And this is what I’m seeing as a as a sophomore at West Point.

[00:09:34] (Host) John recovered from the surgery and with the help of his professors and his classmates, finished his West Point career in good shape academically and physically. He received his commission and went straight to Ranger School, where the same physical problems started showing up again. He was in danger of being bounced out of the army altogether. Again, he had a separation physical, this time at Martin Army Community Hospital at Fort Benning, when a guest who was the chief of surgery there? That’s right, Thomas Gere. The doctor gave John three options medical retirement with a small pension, which John was entitled to a commission in a non-combat role like the Quartermaster Corps or another experimental surgery. John was determined to serve as an infantry soldier. He chose the surgery, which was successful, but returning to Ranger School was off the table while John regained his strength. He was assigned a platoon there at Fort Benning while he continued his post-op care. Then it was off to Jungle Warfare School, a sort of abbreviated version of Ranger School in Panama.

[00:10:46] (John) And then on my 24th birthday, I landed in Vietnam on the 9th of July, 1969. I came in at Bien Hoa and the airfield there, scared to death, you know, went to war with 200 of my best friends that I’d never met before. All by myself, very lonely, lonely trip. You sink into your own thoughts and the normal questions that one asks oneself before one goes to war, you know. Am I going to be able to hack this? When am I going to do if I get shot? I was married at that point. What’s my wife going to think if I come home without an arm or a leg or, and the biggest issue is, am I going to measure up? You know, I was a West Point grad. I was an infantry officer. And I wondered if I, you know, if I was going to be able to hack it or not. The question of, you know, am I going to be a coward or not?

[00:12:16] (John) So when I got off the airplane, the heat just almost knocked you back in the airplane. The smells of burning shit and rotting vegetation and all that kind of stuff got to you. And the fear factor. You know, Holy mackerel, anybody would shoot at us. They put us on buses to take us up to the replacement battalion, the buses all had screened windows, chicken wire type screening. The bus driver was very proud to announce it to the guys, that’s not for your ventilation, that’s to prevent hand grenades from coming through the window of this bus as we go up to 90th Replacement Battalion. Wow. Okay. Of course, none of us had any weapons or anything. And we flew up to Pleiku Air Force Base, unloaded there, got off the bus and went to Camp Enari, which was in the base camp of the 4th ID.

[00:13:10] (Host) This is the central Central Highlands, is that right?

[00:13:12] (John) Central Highlands? Yeah.

[00:13:14] (Host) Can you can you describe that for people who may not have seen it?

[00:13:17] (John) Oh, yeah. Sure, dirt roads, a lot of big holes in them let’s see, this was July, so I, I don’t think it was monsoon season yet. Dry dust all over the place. The primary means of transportation for the Vietnamese was a cart pulled by a water buffalo, or the ubiquitous Lambretta, belching big clouds of grey smoke and all kinds of people piled on the back with animals or produce or whatever. There were no rules to the road. The bigger you were, the more privilege you had. We went past, shacks, residents, houses that were totally built out of flattened beer cans, you know, so the whole wall was Budweiser beer cans that had been cut and flattened, and that was what they used to build the side of their house. Saw several of those. Saw one Budweiser, and I saw one from PBR. The place was dirty. It smelled, kids running around in rags, a lot of women carrying stuff on their heads and whatever. And a lot of guys just sitting around smoking and bullshitting and scowling at us as we drove by. Not necessarily a welcoming environment. I saw some guys on crutches, missing parts of their leg or whatever. I saw a couple of guys without arms, obviously. War casualties. But, you know, the thing that struck me was the kids and the kids running alongside the trucks, begging for cigarettes or begging for food. You know, American soldiers are normally pretty generous when it comes to kids. And so, guys throwing Kansas City rations down or the famous John Wayne candy bar that nobody wanted to eat and threw those down to the kids. So, we turned off the highway onto an even more bumpy, rutted dirt road, went past the battalion garbage dump, which smelled as you would expect an open garbage dump to smell like, and then all of a sudden, in front of me, I saw my new home. It was to be my home from July until the end of November, or maybe early December. Now, the first thing I saw was three concentric rows of triple concertina wire, tanglefoot barbed wire strung in between at varying heights and so forth, and a bunch of bunkers. So, we pulled into a parking area in the fire base. I got out of the truck. There was a young soldier there. I don’t know what his rank was. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or anything. And he said, are you Lieutenant Hedley? And I said, yes, I am. He said, please come with me. I’ll take you to the company CP command post where you can meet your company commander. I went up to me and my company commander, captain Roger House, and went into his C.P., which was a sandbagged bunker. I got a little briefing on the company and its organization and its strength and what it had been doing for operations. And he said, okay, I’m going to call your platoon sergeant. He’s going to come up and get you and take you down to your platoon CP on the bunker line. Then you get to know your NCOs and we’ll talk again. Okay. So, my duty sergeant came up hell of a nice guy and said, okay, Lieutenant, I’ll take you down, and I want to introduce you to the squad leaders. Right, and here I’m thinking, okay, this is it. I’m going to take command of 30 some odd combat veterans as a brand new, very wet behind the ears, Lieutenant. Obviously. I mean, my jungle fatigues were brand new. My jungle boots were brand new. The camel cover on my steel pot was brand new. I mean, I was a quintessential newbie, right? F and G, and we know what that is.

[00:17:27] (Host) Like you stepped out of a magazine.

[00:17:29] (John) Yeah, exactly.

[00:17:30] (Host) Mhm.

[00:17:31] (John) And every orifice in my body puckered up because how am I going to deal with this. Yeah. But I went down to my shop I, I met my RTO I had three squad leader, four squad leaders. There are three rifle squads, one weapon squad sitting down, just beginning to talk to them. And I had rehearsed, of course, and thought for hours about how what’s what are those first minutes going to be like? How am I going to approach this? How can I let these combat veterans know, that I want to learn from them? Right, and then basically, that’s what I started to tell them. Okay, I’m the new guy. Obvious. No bones about it, I admit it, I know it, I don’t know shit. You guys know it all. You’ve been there. You’ve been through it. I am the platoon leader so this is my responsibility. I’m responsible for everything that happens in this platoon, good or bad, but I would hope that you guys will help train me. I will ask for advice. I will ask how? How do you do this? What’s the best way to do that? Don’t ever hesitate to come up one on one to me and give me some advice. Don’t ever call me out in front of the soldiers because I won’t stand for that. But you’re more than welcome, one on one to come up and have a talk with me.

[00:18:59] (John) That seems to be going okay. And all of a sudden my RTO comes out and taps me on the shoulder and says, Lieutenant, CO is on the horn for ya. Okay. Hey, John, saddle your guys up. You’re leaving? Say again. Saddle up. You’re leaving? Okay. Where am I going? And he said, well we had a helipad outside the wire. You should go out to the pad and you’ll find I think it’s three trucks, four trucks there. And you’re going 14, 15 clicks further down the highway to a village that had been hit by the VC last night, and they need your help, and you’re going to go down there and secure them. Yes, sir. So, my call sign was Apache Six. The first platoon of Charlie Company, first Battalion, 14th Infantry was Apache. Right. So, I was Apache Six. And I thought, well, that’s pretty cool, I can be like, Geronimo, maybe, you know, fearless warrior, and again, no bones about it, I was scared to death. Here I am, going out on a mission. I’ve been in the in the battalion maybe an hour and a half. I don’t even know my squad leader’s names by heart yet, and here I go. And that was my first day in the field, in the first of the 14th. That first day is one of my worst nightmares, I will tell you, because we got down to the village and they had in fact been hit by the VC the night before because they had evidently refused to pay their rice tribute. Or maybe a couple guys had refused to go off with them and join them. I don’t know what the reason was, but my first sight as we got off the trucks was the village chief’s wife hanging by her feet with a baby that had been cut out of her stomach and was hanging by the umbilical cord. That was my introduction to the worst side of Vietnam. Her husband, the village chief, and the village schoolteacher had been executed and their bodies had been thrown down the well, which is the only source of potable water for that village. That was my first day. I mean, obviously still affects me. I will never I will never lose that picture of that poor woman hanging there. And I and I thought, oh my God, how can this be, you know. And I wanted to retch, but I swallowed it because, again, I wasn’t going to show a sign of weakness in front of my combat hardened soldiers. I will tell you, my knees were trembling, my stomach was in an uproar, and I was having problems comprehending what I was really looking at.

[00:21:54] (John) But then my training kicked in and I said, okay, you got to secure this freaking village, man. Okay, let’s go see how you do that. Fortunately, nothing happened that night.

[00:22:18] (John) Got up in the morning to the sound of roosters crowing. Vietnam in the morning is a wonderful place. It’s not as hot. The humidity is not as bad. You get good smells from the vegetation and stuff that’s damp from the dew. Right? It’s a beautiful country, and the scenery was pretty, and the villages, the huts were very picturesque. I mean, you know, if people hadn’t been shooting at you it would have been kind of a neat place, and so the villagers came down. They lived in the huts on stilts, and they had a nice long ladder to get up and bring all their, their animals up at night and then pull that log up after them. So the animals didn’t escape or didn’t fall prey to roving, whatevers. Pretty soon the fire started and you could smell stuff, cooking and whatever, and I felt a phenomenal sense of relief. I had made it through my first night. We stayed there for, ten days, I think.

[00:23:36] (Host) So how did the transition from Charlie Company to Echo Company? How did you learn about that? You must have heard of those guys.

[00:23:42] (John) Oh, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, they were either famous or infamous. You can take your pick, and they always wore red scarves 24/7. You never saw one of those guys without those red scarves. And they had a reputation, every time they went out, they got they got into contact with the bad guys every time without fail, even though that wasn’t their mission, but that’s what happened. And they were known as a rough, tough bunch of guys. Right. And their platoon sergeant was a big, huge, muscle bound guy, like a bodybuilder. And people were scared to death of him. He’d walk up the street on the fire base to go to the chow hall. Everybody would get out of his way. He’d go get in line, everybody in front of him would get out of his way so he could get in line. He’d get his food. We had a we had a kind of a fly tent set up with some picnic table, things to eat on. He’d go to find a place to sit. Everybody else at that table would get up and leave. They were scared to death. He looked bad. I mean, he looked like a bad guy. So that was my experience with Fox.

[00:24:45] (Host) The enemies experience with Fox Force was the stuff of legend. The unit had distinguished itself years earlier by fighting like tigers, alongside of South Vietnamese recon platoon that had an outsized reputation for bravery and ferocity. They also wore red scarves, and they were so impressed with the men of Fox Force that they gave their scarves to the Americans. And from that day forward, the men of Fox Force wore those red scarves everywhere all the time, even on combat missions, which is kind of like shouting hey Charlie, come and get me, I dare you! Alan Buckley, the board chairman at VVMF, served as Lieutenant John Headley’s FTO in Fox Force. We weren’t afraid that our scarves would be seen, Bucklew says. Our view was that if they were seen by an NVA soldier, it would be the last thing he ever saw. According to legend, the enemy offered a $10,000 bounty to any soldier who could kill a member of Fox Force and take his scarf.

[00:25:53] (John) One day, I’m walking past the Colonel’s hooch, and he called my name. Yes, sir. He said, come on in here. Yes, sir. He sat me down and talked a little bit. How do you like it here? Oh, it’s fun, sir. I love it. What do you think about that? And what do you think of your soldier and all those kinds of things. And then he said, are you a drinking man? I said, yes, sir. I’ve been known to do that once in a while. So he reached down into his field desk he pulled out a bottle of scotch and two glasses, and we drank to the regiment. And he said, I got a request for you. Yes, sir. I want you to take Fox Force the recon platoon. Now, to be a recon platoon leader is the primo assignment for an infantry officer, first lieutenant type in the whole United States Army. I mean, those are. That’s a select group of guys. And he said, I want you to take Fox. And I thought for a few minutes, he said, how do you feel about that? And I said, well, sir, , can I say no? He said, why would you want to say no? I said, well, sir, I don’t know that I’m experienced enough to go take those guys out and do what they’ve been doing. I think I need a little bit more experience. I need to go get shot at a couple more times. This is August, maybe late August, after I’d been in the battalion for 5/6 weeks, and he kind of looked at me and he said, well, okay. And so I walked out. I second guessed my decision, but I thought, Jesus, I don’t know that I really am up to doing what those guys do. And I put them in harm’s way if I go there and I step all over myself trying to do something that I shouldn’t be doing. So probably a week later, I walked past the old man’s hooch again. Lieutenant Headley. Yes, sir. Come on in here. Yes, sir. At that point, he had the bottle of scotch out in the glasses. We drank to the regiment, and he said, you remember the last time you were in here? Oh. Yes, sir. Do you remember the request I had of you? Yes, sir. Okay. This time it’s not a request. You are the new Fox Six. You are now the platoon leader for the recon platoon of 1st and the 14th. And he had my platoon sergeant standing out, hiding back behind his hooch so I wouldn’t see him, and brought in Staff Sergeant Harris, who just filled the doorway of this teepee small, and said, Sergeant Harris, this is Lieutenant Hedley. He’s your new Fox Six, take care of him, teach him what he needs to know. And so I walked out with Jimmy Harris.

This is a very, very close unit. Closer than any of the line platoons in the battalion, because they got into harrier stuff and were more dependent upon each other to get back. And so Jimmy took me in after the squad leaders. He took me around and introduced me to all the soldiers. I think I probably had maybe 25 guys. Okay. And the last guy he introduced me to was a guy by the name of Gary Nelson, and Gary Nelson was a quintessential peacenik Vietnam soldier. He had a mountain yard headband on. He had no shirt. He had all kinds of beads around his neck to include a big peace symbol, his hair was long, he hadn’t shaved in a while, and he’s cleaning his weapon. And Jimmy took up to him and said, hey, Nelson, this is, this is Lieutenant Hadley, our new Fox Six. And he looked, Gary looked up at me and said, with a peace symbol and said, hey, man. And I thought to myself, okay, I don’t need him in this unit. We’ll go see if we can put him somewhere else. Fortunately, I never did. He turned out to be one of the best soldiers and one of the bravest men that I have ever been around. He was one incredible soldier, but just a different personality. So as you know, we talked about there were red scarves. So, I didn’t get one. I had to go prove myself. I had to go prove myself worthy of wearing a red scarf, which meant I don’t remember how many 2 or 3, maybe, exercises outside the wire, a couple of contacts with the bad guys. One day Jimmy came up and said, okay Six, you’ve earned this, and he tied it around my neck. And that’s where it stayed for the rest of the time I was with Fox.

[00:30:53] (John) A little bit about those guys. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book. Okay. Because they were phenomenal young men. They weren’t baby killers, druggies, rapists or any of the other crap that we got labeled with when we came home. These were outstanding young men that you hold your place right next to the revered soldier from the greatest generation of World War II. We did get into some really, really hairy situations. As I got in with them, I learned that a lot of times we operated outside the range of radios, we’re on our own. A lot of times, many times we’re outside the range of direct support artillery so we had no big gun support on a lot of occasions. We got 17, 18, 19 guys wandering around the jungles all by themselves. A lot of times not, I swear to God, not able to talk to anybody. And me realizing that if I got in trouble, it was on me. It was on me. I had nobody to call a lot of times.

[00:32:07] (John) So one of the lessons learned for me, particularly with Fox, was the heaviest responsibility you can give a man is to be responsible for other mother’s sons. There is no responsibility heavier than that. Every one of those lives was my responsibility. And you know, when you hear the stories, I think I heard it on one of the things I listened to that when the bullets started, kind of upbringings, all the all the eyes turned to you. Well, not so much with Fox because we had immediate reaction drills. If we got into a contact guys, automatically squad leaders automatically know how to react and what to do. But we were, and this is not patting myself on the back because it’s not me, it’s the guys, but we were very, very good at what we did. We were probably the First Battalion, 14th Infantry was the only American unit in almost all of II Corps, maneuver unit, permanently in II Corps, which was a huge, huge geographical area. Every once in a while, one of the ones of the 101st or whatever would come in on an operation and operate an RAL. But most of the time it was us. And we had a we covered everything from, you know, almost to the coast up to the Cambodian border in the mountains where we spent a good deal of our time trying to catch the little guys coming off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Break

[00:36:47] (John) We had a lot of contact with the bad guys. Like I said, we never were ambushed, but we caught them a lot of times and we had a lot of small, if you can call a firefight small, we had a lot of small firefights against 3,4,5 bad guys that we normally were successful in eliminating all of them. I never got hung up on body count. You know, that was a measure of success for a platoon leader was body count. I never called in a body count. That that was a horrible way to quantify success in that environment, and I refused to do it. We get a call from the division commander. The battalion gets a call from the division commander. I want Fox Force to go do this, and evidently some intel had picked up what might have been the retreating NVA leaving the area because they hit us a second night as well, not through the wire, but in direct fire, direct fire or whatever and a little bit on the third night, and then they took off. And so I did basically a dusk combat assault. No time to do a VR, reconnaissance. Picked out a spot on a map. And so, again, there’s nothing worse than nighttime in Vietnam because we weren’t equipped to deal with that, and we didn’t know the terrain. And I’m sure other people have told you, you know, the night belonged to Charlie, not to us. Fortunately, the LZ was cold. We unmasked the birds, moved into a tree line, and we hunkered down. And I had found I had had a chance to talk with my squad leader on the map, I showed him a small hill next to the CP, next to the LZ, maybe 150m away or so, that we could easily traverse in the dark, and that we were going to go to the top of this hill and set up. We hunkered down for a while, make sure no noise, nobody heard us, saw us, whatever. And we very quietly and stealthily walked up, moved up to the top of the hill just as the sun was setting. I managed to get I like I said, I hadn’t had replacements yet for my casualties, so we were under strength, but we set up a perimeter up there, and we had no camo. We had no camo with battalion. We had no camo with the red lights. Charlie was on the fort frantically trying to get support because we got nobody out there. I have been told that the artillery was going to do a hip shoot for me the next day, where they’d move a couple of tubes, 1 or 2 tubes forward on their own to a place where they’d get me within their range so they could provide me some support if I needed it.

[00:39:25] (John) But I went ahead and, you know, did my thing with the map and registrations and whatever. It was very quiet, and I put out lights, and we hunkered down for the night, and we were going to go follow the bad guys the next day and see what’s up. Well, during that night, I don’t know what time. I got a call on one of the radios from one of my LPs that he heard movement out there. That’s what it was he said he couldn’t tell, but there was noise. And then I got it from another who said he heard what sounded like rifle slings dragging on the ground. Then I got it from another who said he thought he could hear metal clicking. Okay, the bad guys are out there. And I thought, okay, this guy knows where I am and he knows what I have, and he’s still coming for me, which tells me he probably has more than I do. That was one of the scariest nights I ever had Because there I am on this hilltop with nowhere to go and bad guys coming to get me and no radio.

[00:40:39] (John) And I got these other mother’s sons who are depending on me to get them home. And I finally figured a couple of courses of action. We weren’t going to just sit there and die. There are a couple of courses of action where I didn’t want to throw hand grenades down the hill, because they bounce off the trees and bounce back at you sometimes, but we could maybe roll hand grenades down the hill. We could do a mad minute and everybody open up and see if we could scare them off with that. We could charge into it, you know, like in the old days, fixed bayonets and go. Except I didn’t have bayonets, so I couldn’t do that. I did find another little hill doing a map with my red lens on my flashlight, underneath the poncho, another little hill. I got hold of Jimmy Harris, who was Ranger qualified and said, okay, Jimmy, we’re going to E and E off this hill because we’re in deep shit and you lead the guys to the hilltop, and I’ll cover you and get them out of here. Kind of strange that one side of my perimeter had no movement, which told me maybe the bad guys were waiting for me to do what I was.

was going to do. But you got to take that chance. You got to roll the dice and see what comes up. It’s the only recourse I had other than stand in place and die in place, basically. And then all of a sudden, Charlie Steiner comes over and says Six, Six, I got Puff. Puff, the Magic Dragon C-47 gunship, AC 47 gunship, and there’s a Puff Bird all of a sudden coming in. I don’t remember his callsign, but he knew mine. He called down. Understand? You’re in trouble. How the hell did you find out? And what happened was, while we couldn’t receive communications division, rear was monitoring our communications and picking up what we were sending out, looking for help. So anyway, Puff comes over and I’m thinking, okay, what are we going to do with this? And he said, do you have a strobe light? I said, yeah, I got one. He says, okay, what I want you to do is to take off your steel pot and put it on your lap. Have all your guys pull back and put their boots in your lap and turn on that strobe light and everything 15ft out from that is mine.

[00:43:06] (John) What. I’m going to surround you with fire.

[00:43:18] (John) Oh my God. Tell your guys to put their hands over their ears and open their mouths to try to equalize the pressure, because you have never experienced what you’re about to experience.

[00:43:49] (John) There was no panic in my guys. Absolutely no panic. As I whispered out to him what was going on? I never had one guy show any amount of fear. They were ready to do anything I told them to do. There was absolutely no panic. They were all locked and loaded, and if we were going down, there was a whole bunch of those other guys who were going to go down with us. You know, they would die fighting on this mountaintop all by ourselves. We did what we were told and Puff lit up the night. All the hot shell casings came down on us, and there was this absolute cone of red all the way around us. We heard secondary explosions. It was so noisy we couldn’t hear screams if anybody got hit.

[00:44:51] (John) He got finished spending. He saw a whole bunch of flashlights coming down in opposite ridgeline. We never used flashlights at night, so those were the bad guys. So he flew over there and Puff breathes fire again, and all the flashlights went out.

[00:45:29] (John) He circled around all night long until the sun came up and called down and said, how are you doing? And I said, thanks to you, we’re doing fine. Everybody is alive and well, thanks to you guys. That was an, incredible experience during which a lot of guys would fall apart. You know, you’re going to die, this is a last resort, not my guys, not my guys.

[00:45:57] (Host) That wasn’t the first time that combat air support had prevented Fox Force from being wiped out. Just a month earlier, following a sapper attack that nearly overran Fire Base Saint George. The platoon was sent out to plug a gaping hole in the perimeter. John could see a full company of enemy soldiers preparing to attack his 14 or 15 guys. He refers to this as the time he almost became the George Armstrong Custer of the Vietnam War. This time it was a pair of, UH-1 C helicopters known as Charlie Model gunships that saved him and his men, but we’ll come back to that. John retired from the army in 1991. He took a job at Raytheon, where the Japanese he’d learned as a Foreign Area Officer was put to good use, until eventually he and his wife moved to Denver, North Carolina.

[00:46:54] (John) But I wasn’t ready to quit. I needed something to do, and so I started networking, trying to find another job, something around here that I could do. I met a guy who had been a marine. He said, what do you miss most about being out of the Army? I said, people, shared sense of mission, being able to count on them, being able to believe them. You don’t find that necessarily in the civilian world. He said, well, go up and check out this place up in Mooresville called Pat’s Gourmet Coffee Shop. It’s run by a former Charlie model gunship pilot with his wife, and they just sell coffee to people, but he has a soft spot in his heart for Vietnam vets.

[00:47:36] And what’s the name of the town that Pat’s.

[00:47:39] Mooresville, North Carolina.

[00:47:40] Mooresville.

[00:47:41] Mooresville. It’s home of NASCAR. It’s probably about 20 miles from where I am now. So I did I went in and met Richard, Richard Warren, who was running it. He welcomed me home. I got to be good friends with him. I decided I wanted to do my own thing. So I set up my own company, do consulting for people wanting to do work in Japan. And shortly thereafter, I had a reunion of my recon platoon here. So I asked Richard. I said, look, can I bring my guys up before you open on a Saturday morning so that you can welcome them home? He had a girl Friday named Cheryl and who worked with him, and she made little key rings and with beads on a leather thong representing the US flag or Vietnamese flag or, you know, green for Army and scarlet for Marines and that kind of thing that she gave to everybody. And he said, sure. We all had our red scarves on and we trooped on up to Mooresville. Only the guys. I didn’t take the wives and kids with me and we walked in. And God bless Richard Ward. He had two tape decks going. And these days I have to explain to people what a tape deck is. But he had two tape decks going. One was the wop wop wop wop wop and a few of the helicopter blades that makes any grunt’s heart just beat. And the other was Vietnam era music. And he went around and thanked every one of my guys for their service and their service in Vietnam. Cheryl Ann went around and gave every one of them a hug and a kiss, and gave them this keychain and let them know how important they were. And Michael, I looked around and I had all these hard core, hard bitten combat infantrymen with tears in their eyes. Jimmy Harris is standing there with tears pouring down his cheeks. They’d never been welcomed home. They’d never had this kind of a reception.

[00:49:42] (Host) Gary Nelson, the soldier that John had initially thought was not a great fit for Fox Force, was also among those who were overcome by the reception that Richard and Cheryl put on at Pat’s Gourmet Coffee shop. Gary has since passed away.

[00:50:00] (John) We stayed about an hour and I brought him back to the house. I went up a couple of weeks later to thank Richard for what he had done, and I walked in to Pat’s Gourmet coffee shop and Richard, just a little guy, but he grabbed me and said, John, I gotta talk to you. And he started dragging me out of the shop onto the sidewalk. And I thought, Holy Christ, like I stole something or broke something. You know I’m in trouble.

[00:50:24] (Host) That was your first thought?

[00:50:25] That was my first thought. These are a rough bunch of guys still. And so he got me out on a corner, and he started asking me questions. Were you in such and such a place in December of 1969? Yes. Were you in such and such a situation? Yes. That was the time I almost became the George Armstrong Custer of the Vietnam War. He said, were you in deep shit? And I said yes. Were you having common problems? Yes. Did you have a fac overhead? Yes. And he said, do you remember who your first air support was that day? And what he’s talking about is I’ve got 14 or 15 guys in the circle to include me and my RTOs. We had stumbled into an NVA battalion in a bunker complex, so it was common for us. And I was looking at an NVA company forming up in the wood line, bugles blowing, whistles blowing whatever. And they were going to come get me because they knew that I was a pretty small little unit. And these two Charlie model gunships rolled in on this wood line, and expended. And when they circled around for their second pass, I didn’t see an NVA company formed up in the woodland anymore. And Richard that day outside, he said, do you remember who your first air support was? And I’m sorry, Richard, I don’t. I said I had a handset in one ear and my trigger going on the other hand. No, I don’t remember who it was. He said it was me. It was me and my my wingman. And my knees almost gave out. I mean, here’s a guy who saved our lives, right? And I said, how in the hell do you know that? He said, because we circled around to come in for another run. My crew chief gets on the horn and says, who are those crazy mfers down there wearing red scarves? So, years later, in Mooresville, North Carolina, I run into a guy who probably saved the lives of my soldiers and me on that day in December of 1969.

[00:52:40] (Host) And all of you guys were reuniting in his cafe. Yes. Without any I mean, obviously without knowing.

[00:52:48] (John) Without having any idea of who he was other than being Richard Ward. And we knew he’d been a gunship pilot.

[00:52:54] (Host) So let me ask you this. I mean, you guys all walked in there wearing red scarves. Yeah. But it was it was some time later that he put the pieces together.

[00:53:02] (John) It was it was a week or two later when I went up to thank him because he was busy going around welcoming all the guys, you know, and maybe the red scarves hadn’t hit right away or something. I don’t know why he didn’t ask that question that day. But there’s no indication that he was familiar with us at all. I mean, my knees about buckled. I, I broke down because here’s a guy who saved our lives that all of a sudden I was meeting about 35 years, 40 years later, and there was no doubt about the fact that he was there, and because all the details matched my situation and what he did and our red scarves. When I told my guys about it, it was the same reaction for all of them. I’d met a guy who was responsible for them being around and having kids and whatever. I mean, the guy was a was a saint and that was his thing was to take care of vets.

[00:54:14] (Host) John and Richard became close friends, but within a year Richard passed away from illness related to Agent Orange exposure. Before he died, Richard wanted to form a nonprofit called Welcome Home Veterans to carry forward his work with the community he loved.

[00:54:32] We managed to form a 501 C3 get it approved named Welcome Home Veterans, and we were able to tell them that shortly before he passed. When he passed, I was invalided as well. But when covered, we found we there were there was a crew of us who wanted to keep Richard’s spirit alive and keep this Welcome Home Veterans alive as an entity. We found a restaurant down near the interstate that will let us go in on Saturday mornings before they open and just get together and talk, with that small group, we formed a board of directors. We had a couple of meetings and we progressed. We found a place, a small place to rent, we rented that and got active again and started getting donations and whatever, and we found a bigger place. I’ve been the president and executive director for 14 years. We have built it up to an absolutely incredible place. Check us out on welcomevets.com. We take care of all kinds of needy vets. We’re all volunteers. The place is now paid off, a long process to do that. And it’s an incredible gathering place for veterans. And we have Richard started this tradition of free coffee for vets on Thursday. And we still do free coffee for vets on Thursday, but it’s now Richard’s coffee shop, it’s not anymore, Pat’s Gourmet Coffee Shop. Richard’s Coffee Shop.

[00:56:17] (John) So my, I can never pay Richard back for what he did for my guys and probably me that day in December of 1969. So, I’m doing everything I can to pay forward.

[00:56:45] (John) I’ve tried to keep his spirit alive.

[00:57:00] (Host) More than 21,000 veterans have signed the guest book at Richard’s Coffee Shop, which is a gathering place, a support system, a living military museum, a gift shop, an eatery and a 501 C3 nonprofit dedicated to honoring and advocating for America’s veterans, active-duty personnel and emergency services personnel. You’ll find Richard’s Coffee Shop right downtown in Mooresville, North Carolina. John’s book, Saddle Up!: the Story of a Red Scarf, is available at Amazon.com. And so is his other book, From the Shadows: A Tribute to the 1968 West Point Graduates Who Gave Their Lives in Vietnam. We’re grateful to John for sharing some of his experiences with us. We’ll be back in two weeks with more stories of service, sacrifice, and healing. We’ll see you then.

Full Interview with John Hedley