[00:00:00] (HOST) In episode 64, we introduced you to the Mobile Riverine Force, a joint Army Navy task force that patrolled the brown waters of the Mekong Delta in an effort to disrupt enemy traffic along the canals and tributaries. You heard a little bit about the history and tactics of the group, and what it was like for soldiers and sailors to work and live and fight side by side. In this episode, we’ll go a little deeper with stories of enemy engagement, environmental hazard, the lingering effects of the River Rat experience, and of course, brotherhood and healing. This episode contains graphic descriptions of combat injuries and death, so it might not be appropriate for every listener. These accounts can be hard to listen to, but for those who can stomach it, we think they’re important to hear. 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 65, River Rats, Part Two.

[00:01:37] (SCHROEDER) I was the executive officer of a medical clinic. A surgical facility on board the ship, four ships.

[00:01:48] (HOST) Bob Schroeder was a battalion surgeon’s assistant in the Army, an ROTC graduate from the University of Wyoming. He was commissioned in 1966 and arrived in the Mekong Delta in July of 1968, I asked him what it was like to work with the Navy for the first time.

[00:02:05] (SCHROEDER) It was kind of a huge experiment that turned out to work very well. The Navy guys were great to work with and in all echelons. They just did a phenomenal job. And of course, the Navy chow was a whole lot better than the Army’s shore side chow. A lot of the Navy guys would come to us because, they had, a need for medical treatment that didn’t go into their permanent records and affect their promotion ability.

[00:02:42] (HOST) Whoa. That’s interesting. Can you say more about that?

[00:02:46] (SCHROEDER) Sure. A lot of the Navy guys would, would frequent the, houses of ill repute on shore. When they got over there and then when they, came back if they went and reported that to the Navy it went into their permanent record. And when they were reviewed for promotion it affected their promotability, particularly the enlisted guys. And so they would come to come to our facility and we treated and only kept the record as long as the treatment lasted. And then we destroyed them.

[00:03:28] (HOST) Is that right? Who was the first Navy guy to figure that out?

[00:03:35] (SCHROEDER) Oh, well, I’m sure it was some, high ranking NCO at least that sent his guys there.

[00:03:46] (HOST) What was it like just mechanically to work with the Navy?

[00:03:52] (SCHROEDER) I think there was a giant mutual respect, especially for the troops that went with us.

[00:03:57] (HOST) Frank Moran landed at Tan Son Nhat in December of 1967 as a 21 year old lieutenant. He was assigned to the 2nd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division, which was the Army element of the Mobile Riverine Force.

[00:04:10] (MORAN) Those that were on that stayed on the boats, they were okay, you know, they were doing a job, but those that came with us and actually drove the little boats and commanded those little boats had a lot of respect. And I think they had quite a bit of respect for us. I’ll give you an incident that I remember. We had one of our guys screw up pretty bad. And the guy on a boat, the ship’s captain is allowed to punish you for whatever you do. I mean, they hold the Uniform Code of Military justice, and they can punish you. Well, one of the punishments that they can do in the Navy still was to put you on bread and water. Now, our guys were army. We don’t have that in our uniform code of military justice. So when that guy tried to impose it on our guy, our commander went back and said, no, we’re going to have to find a different way because that’s not in ours. So that’s going by way of telling you that there are some differences mechanically and administratively that that the two branches do different. But I would say overall, I think there is just a tremendous amount of how do we work this out together to make it come out good for both of us.

[00:05:19] (HOST) The veterans I spoke with agreed that over the operational life of Task Force 117, the soldiers of the 9th Infantry Division far outnumbered the sailors involved. But at the MRF reunion in Saint Louis, I saw just the opposite way more sailors than soldiers. I asked Frank why that might have been the case.

[00:05:41] (MORAN) I don’t know the reasons why. I guess, the camaraderie of them was probably better at that time because they were living together. They were on little boats together. But our guys, you know, it was like, let’s get this year over with. You know, I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be a logical reason, because if you took a look at some of the statistical data for the Navy versus the Army, if you compare the 2nd Brigade to the Navy element of the Flotillas, you had almost exactly the same number of men that were killed. I think one of them had 2500 over the three year period, and the other one had 2600. So they probably saw the same amount of combat.

[00:06:28] (HOST) These numbers are very difficult to verify. According to the Mobile Riverine Force Association website, the 9th Infantry Division had just over 2600 killed in action, but that number might be for the entire division and the entire war. Only part of the 9th was assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force, and that force only existed from January of 1967 to December of 1970. But Frank’s larger point is an important one. Anyone who thinks that the Navy guys were somehow in less peril or less frequent peril than their Army partners is misinformed. Here’s Terry Sater, who was a gunner’s mate on two different Tango boats starting in March of 1968. He later wrote a book about his experiences.

[00:07:15] (SATER) I remember telling the guys that, you know, how they couldn’t wait to get off the boat, or the guys were telling me how they couldn’t wait to get off the boat. I didn’t like getting off the boat. I do remember one time we were going down the river and it’s in my book, but, we were going down the river, and I was talking to a guy from the 9th, and he was making, actually a disparaging remark about how easy we had it being on the boats, which was unusual. He’s the only one I ever heard that from. And, uh, we were standing there talking, and he was saying how easy it was for us on the boat. And he had a name for us and that, but he was waving his arms around. And about that time we were ambushed and a chunk of shrapnel went through his hand. And, karma, I guess I don’t know, but the guys, it was true. They felt like sitting ducks most of the time on our boat. And we just didn’t want to go into the jungle at all. Oh, I had such admiration for him. They went through hell seeing them traipsing through the thick jungle and coming back and being knee deep or waist deep in the Mekong we were picking them up, and there’s a picture I saw of a group of them on a Tango boat after we picked them up and the look of just exhaustion, and I don’t know how to describe it, you know, you hear about the thousand yard stare and it’d be kind of like that, but I never heard them complain once. I never heard these guys complain. And, that’s something I really admired about them.

[00:09:06] (HOST) You know, you said you’ve got a seven man crew and more guns than crew. What are the troops that you’re carrying? Either in or out? What are they doing? Are they just ducking, you know, trying to take cover as best they can? Or are they. Are they also firing?

[00:09:22] (SATER) It depends on who we were carrying when we were carrying the 9th Infantry Division. They were the best. They would jump up on the guns, but it wasn’t always that way. We carried, Vietnamese Marines, the Vietnamese (ARVN), the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. And sometimes we carried, like their National Guard, the regional force, popular force, which we call Rough Puffs. And I remember one firefight with them I was on the well deck and we were ambushed. And all the rough puffs, the Vietnamese Rough Puffs huddled on the deck. Guy who was below my feet or next to my feet while I was manning the 50 and 30 caliber machine guns and he was in a fetal position, scared to death. And I kicked him and made him get up and reload the machine guns for me. He was a kid, you know. He looked like a little kid. I don’t know. But most of the time when we carried troops especially 9th Infantry Division, they were in the fight with us.

[00:10:39] (HOST) Henry Hahn arrived in Vietnam in March of 1969 as a radioman on a Howitzer monitor boat. He is the current president of the Mobile Riverine Force Association.

[00:10:49] (HAHN) The enemy would know you know, you’re going to be coming down this canal at some point in time, or you’d be going down this waterway. And they would they’d set up ambush points and, they got they got good at it. They would do things like try to catch you in a bend to the river so that you could if you shot at the last boats in the column that were already around the bend, they’d be shooting across into the boats at the beginning, and things like that. We lost a lot of boats to mines, mostly to RPGs, most of the injured in these firefights that we were in, were injured by the rocket propelled grenades. Even though we had this one inch ballistic steel that would be on the sides of the boats. The RPG would penetrate up to 12in of conventional steel. And, uh, uh, the RPG had something that was called a shaped charge. So it would actually turn the ballistic steel into shrapnel. So this shaped charge would it would spin, through the steel. And when it got on the other side, it would take the molten steel and fling it all over the place. So you would get pieces of the shrapnel that would be any size, that would, of course do everything from producing death to maiming and or producing enough shrapnel that it would create a lot of injury. I mean it. There’s tales of boats being hit by three, four, five RPGs at one time. Fortunately, the first boat I was on, which was a Monitor, you know, we were fortunate that the RPGs that hit us didn’t kill anyone on my boat while I was there, but they certainly injured some of the people on my boat.

[00:13:24] (JONES) On the Tango boats where there were not much room to move. If a if a something went off in that Tango boat, probably 60, 70% of the people were wounded with something. My name is Dale Jones, but you can call me Doc. Everybody else does.

[00:13:43] (HOST) Doc Jones was, of course, a medic. He was drafted into the Army and landed in Vietnam in September of 1968.

[00:13:52] (JONES) Even if it’s just small fragmentation wounds in their there’s probably two inches of blood on the bottom of the boat because of all the minor wounds. And about all you can do is, you know, throw bandages to everybody, because you can’t move or can’t go anywhere because…

[00:14:11] (HOST) There’s like 60 guys on there.

[00:14:12] (JONES) So yeah, those were as far as blood goes, probably some of the bloodiest things because the blood was limited to the bottom of the boat.

[00:14:24] (HOST) As tricky as operations could be in the daylight, they were even more treacherous at night.

[00:14:30] (PEAT) Oh, it’s inky black. Inky black. And when you’re trying to do this, maneuver up the river at night, you know, you just have one little tiny red light on the back of the boat in front of you, and that’s all the light. So it’s, you know, tricky driving. I mean, we did it, but…

[00:14:48] (HOST) That’s Randy Peat, a gunner’s mate who served in the Mekong Delta in 68’ and 69’.

[00:14:55] (PEAT) Yeah, that so we decided when we knew that this was going to be our mission for a while to replace the Mark-19. And what I had noted at that point was that the Browning 50 calibers were extremely reliable, and that meant a lot. I told the boat captain, I said, okay, if we’re going to replace it, let’s put a 50 in there. So as soon as we got back to the mothership, we talked to the head gunner’s mate there, and we took part of the mount off and took it up on the main ship, myself and my assistant gunner’s mate, and we worked all night long reforming that mount so we could put a 50 caliber in. Now it’s morning and we’re walking off from the pontoons onto the first boat, and we’re about 4 or 5 boats rafted out there. And as Benjamin takes the first step he trips and the mount goes in the water. So then I thought, oh my God so I went back up to the ship. Now we’re leaving within 15, 30 minutes.

[00:16:12] (HOST) With or without it.

[00:16:12] (PEAT) With or without it, we’re gone. Which I would have just grabbed an M16 or something and shot out the turret with that no substitute for a machine gun. So I go back up to the to the gunner’s mate on the ship, and I said, you are not going to believe this. They said, we deep six that mountain. I said, I’ll take anything. Do you have anything that I can shoot out that view slip? Because when you get in a firefight, you know your view slips about like this. But when you get in a firefight, it feels like it’s going like this all the time. So you want to be shooting. So he said, hey, a 20 millimeter will drop right in what’s left of the mount. And so he gave me a 20 millimeter in a box made by International Harvester in the 50’s. And, we took it out and got (unknown) and gave me all the right bolts and told me how to do it. And I said, okay. And so off we went, you know, 30 minutes later, we were underway with this box on our well deck and a handful of bolts. And what I can remember you’d said and we got it in there, and what we didn’t have was an electronic way to fire the gun. You know, there was an electronic trigger. And so I had to fire the gun manually. If you can picture this out of the bottom of this machine gun, there is a sear, and there was a way to attach a wire to that sear. And so from this, which is what you release, when you want to fire the gun, you release the sear. So, from the bottom of the sear, we put a piece of wire on it and ran down about 4 or 5 inches off from the deck and put a stirrup, which we had. I had to put one foot in that stirrup and then the other foot. I had to bounce around moving the gun around. And then I was doing pointing and training up here. So I had to bounce around and crank down on that thing. But it worked, it worked, it worked, it worked. The next time we went back to the ship, I got the electronic.

[00:18:31] (HOST) Wow.

[00:18:32] (PEAT) Firing thing so I didn’t have to dance anymore. And I think I put around 4000 rounds through that thing while I had it, because you had to keep track of approximately how many rounds, so you knew when to change out parts. But yeah, that thing worked good. And the boat captain told me later, he said, you know, when we get in a firefight, I always feel better when I hear your 20 working. And that’s true. I think we all did.

[00:19:05] (HOST) A.J. McCaskey was a 21-year-old draftee in 1968 when he arrived in Vietnam in September. He was assigned to the 9yj Infantry Division and sent to Dong Tam. What were your impressions of, life on board the ship?

[00:19:23] (MCCASKEY) Well, it was, air conditioned ship, which was sweet. The food was great. There was a huge platform, kind of a thing anchored to the side of the ship where the, supply depot with all the guns and ammo were stored. And then adjacent to the platform where all the Tango boats and, armed boats and so, you know, the next morning we get up and, put on all the, flak jackets and helmets and go down on the, on the platform on the barge there. And, uh, they load us up with whatever we wanted to carry, grenades, smoke grenades, 45 pistol. And then, you know, they were assigned, there’d be 4 or 5 guys with M16’s and one guy with an M60 machine gun in the platoon. And, get on the Tango boat, and we chugged down the river or up the river and go into a tributary and then into another tributary, and they would, the Navy guys would, prep the shoreline, beat the hell out of it with their 50 caliber or whatever armor they had on the boat. And there were even flamethrowers on a couple of the boats, too. And, after they pummeled the shoreline, the front end of the boat would go down and off we’d go. And sometimes it was a struggle just to get off, because the mud would be up to your knees or whatever. There was a lot of impact from the tides. The river went both ways. Or the canals and the tributaries sometimes would reverse direction because of the tide coming in. And I don’t know how far from the ocean we were, but, it was a ways. And, so, yeah, sometimes when we got off the, when the front end of that boat went down, it was kind of like a World War II scene in my mind. The ramp went down and off we’d go. Sometimes the ramp couldn’t go down because the vegetation was so thick you’d have to climb up and over it. I distinctly remember a couple of Navy guys just, you know, picking our brain, like, what are you doing out there and what’s it like? And, God, I wish I could get off this ship and go out there with you guys. And we’d tell them, no, just stay here. You don’t want to be out there. Are you familiar with the term Lurps? They’re like an Army Ranger. They were long range reconnaissance patrols. These guys would go out in groups of two, maybe three, and basically spy or try to provide intelligence. They really did not want to engage the enemy, but, they would go out and then radio back, you know, there’s a regiment here, a company there of and then provide the intelligence of where the elusive Vietcong were. Anyway, the report was that the, the Lurps, the Rangers had found a big cache of weapons and whatever else it was referred to as Cong Island. Why, I don’t know. C-o-n-g. So, at any rate everybody piles on the Tango boats and up the river we go. And the front end went down and just crashed. All hell broke loose. And I mean, they knew we were coming and it was just a scramble and, just turned into a horrific battle. And it was very early on when I first got there, too. I mean, the one Ranger, you know I was assigned to carry the M60 right at that point in time, and we got our ass kicked off there because, I mean, they had two guys. The one Ranger I was just burning. I was burning that M60 machine gun screaming for ammunition. The Army Ranger beside me got was killed. Radio operator was killed. And, we managed to get back on the boat and get out of there, and we just got our ass kicked. You know, and that was early on. And so when that ramp went down, you never knew what the hell to expect.

[00:24:22] (HOST) With names like Snoopy’s Nose, Parrot’s Beak, and Crossroads, there were certain locations in the Delta where you actually did know what to expect. And it was, to put it bluntly, nothing good. Here’s Frank Moran.

[00:24:37] (MORAN) Anybody who was ever on a boat knows about Snoopy’s Nose and what happened there Michael is the nose, if you would is a little, let’s say three quarters circle. All right. And when your ship is coming in on the bottom of the circle, they’re going to allow you to go to a certain part to go back to the top. Now you got a string of boats going all the way from the bottom of the circle to the top. So they put 1 or 2 guys in the middle. He starts shooting at the bottom one. The bottom one has the Navy with 50 caliber guns that can shoot. This thing was probably about a kilometer or a kilometer and a half as far as big as it was. So he starts shooting at the boat at the bottom. The Navy on the top has got 50 caliber so they’re shooting at that, at that noise. And now those bullets are hitting the convoy. That’s up on the top.

[00:25:25] (HOST) Mhm.

[00:25:26] (MORAN) So it just creates havoc. There was a place called the Crossroads. And Crossroads was next to a town called Ben Tre, B-e-n T-r-e, two words and I don’t remember a time going there where we didn’t really get shot at and severely wounded. On one of those operations, in I think it was April the 8th, I lost eight men on that operation. What happened, Michael, is that when they beached us, there was a machine gun waiting. And you’re extremely vulnerable when you’re inside the inside that little boat and you’re trying to get out and bullets and stuff, and shrapnel is flying all over the place. So I lost eight men on an operation there in I think it was April the 8th. It was early April in 68’.

[00:26:18] (HOST) All of them. You lost all of them on the beach?

[00:26:21] (MORAN) Yeah, just before we got off. But as we were trying to get off.

[00:26:28] (HOST) How many of those firefights do you think you saw in Vietnam? Terry Sater:

[00:26:32] (SATER) That’s a still a big mystery for me. I’ve always said that I remembered about a dozen, but other guys I served with said that they, you know, we were in 100. So I don’t really know. And, of course, I think it depends on what you would classify as a firefight, what you would classify as action. We were under more mortar attacks than I could ever count. I have no idea how many mortar attacks we were in or how many times we took sniper fire. And I’ve always felt, too, that if you took two guys and handcuffed them together and you sent them into the Vietnam War or Iraq or Afghanistan, and they spent the whole time handcuffed together, and you asked them what it was like when they came back, you would get two entirely different answers because everybody filters it through their own eyes, their own emotions. And like on my boat when I was in my 20 millimeter cannon gun mount, I had a slit about 9 or 10in, maybe a foot wide, that I saw all the action through and just rotated the turret back and forth. That’s the only part of the battlefield that I saw. The guy on the I was on the starboard 20. The guy on the port 20 saw things completely different. Guys in the well-deck saw things completely different from us. The guy on the Mark 19, on the stern up above the rest of us, he saw things different than we did. And, you know, one guy might be looking one way and see somebody get their head blown off, and another guy is looking the other direction and doesn’t see anything.

[00:28:34] (HOST) More stories from River Rats are coming your way after a short break.

[00:32:02] (HOST) Direct enemy contact wasn’t the only threat to the river rats of the Mekong Delta. Men were lost to environmental hazards, friendly fire, and accidents of every imaginable kind. Here’s Terry Sater.

[00:32:12] (SATER) Quite a few guys died from drowning. The Mekong was a deadly river, and I’m not sure what made it so deadly. It the appearance of it I always compare it to the Mississippi River. You know, in Saint Louis here we don’t live too far from the Mississippi. It’s wide and brown and moves pretty fast, but I think that the Mekong had a lot of turbulence in it. If you don’t mind me bringing up one guy, one amazing example of courage that I saw there didn’t have anything to do with combat. My boat was tied up outboard of a bunch of the boats one night in the Mekong, and we were out in the middle of the Mekong, and there was probably a dozen or so boats tied up. My boat was on the outside. I heard a splash in the water and I heard somebody in the dark. It was pitch black. Somebody yelled, man overboard, man overboard! And a guy, Bill Martel, who was about halfway back to where the ships were on the boats, grabbed the life preserver and jumped into the pitch black night air into the Mekong to go rescue this guy. I just thought that was amazing. And, he said that he could hear the guy yelling that he was going down. And so Bill Martel yelled to him to kick his boots off, and he said, I just got them. He was a guy that was on one of the ships normally, and getting the jungle boots was kind of a great souvenir, I guess. And he says, kick them off or you’re going to drown. And he says, I just got them. He says, kick them off, I’ll get you a new pair. So the guy kicked him off and Bill Martel saved his life. And Bill Martel told me that later he did get the guy a new pair of jungle boots and a pair of, VC sandals made out of tires. And but I often think about Bill Martel because, like, in combat, you do what you’re you do what you have to do to save your own life and the lives of those around you. I just did my job. But Bill Martel chose to risk his life, grabbed that life preserver and jump into the pitch black night to save this guy that he didn’t know. And I just thought that was amazing.

[00:34:54 (HOST)] In those initial weeks or months of being there and doing that job in that place at that time, what was what were the biggest surprises for you? Good or bad? Here’s Bob Schrader.

[00:35:08] (SCHROEDER) Probably when I took a helicopter ride on a medevac just to do some liaison with other hospital facilities in the area. And when they dropped me off at the ship, they went over shoreside to drop off another MSC that had been along at his facility, and when they took off from there for some reason, the year the aircraft crashed. They think the theory was that he saw the flashing red light on a tower and thought it was another helicopter or another aircraft and stalled it and dropped it into the Mekong. But the next morning I was in my quarters and I had a landline from my radio operator to me, and my quarters was cranked job, and he was ringing like mad. And I answered the phone and they summoned me to the pontoon next to the ship. And when I got up there were up and down there discovered that there was a crew member, caught between the pontoon itself and one of the ships that was tied up there. And when we got him out of the water, I discovered that that was the pilot that had been flying the aircraft the day before. And so I kind of experienced war firsthand right there.

[00:36:47] (HOST) I’m sorry, Bob, I’m going to need I can we can I just I want to clarify. So the crash occurred at night and the next morning and this guy, this pilot had survived the crash.

[00:37:02] (SCHROEDER) He had not.

[00:37:03] (HOST) He had not.

[00:37:03] (SCHROEDER) The divers the next day went down and found the helicopter and the rest of the crew. His body had broken loose from the wreckage and floated down the river and perchance, hooked up on the side of the ship.

[00:37:18] (HOST) And got wedged. Got it.

[00:37:21] (SCHROEDER) And one of the command and control helicopters, brought a wounded soldier in and brought him to our flight deck, and we got him down to the to the surgical clinic so they could treat him. And one of the crew members was taking his gear out of the helicopter and grabbed the guy’s shotgun around the barrel like that and pulled on it. And the trigger mechanism was caught up in the, in the harness and it went off, shot his hand and I’m standing right there next to him when that happened, and I took his wrist and I led him down the ramp and down into our surgical facility and.

[00:38:08] (HOST) Wow.

[00:38:10] (SCHROEDER) Took care of him there.

[00:38:11] (HOST) And how old are you? While all this is going on? Oh 22?21?

[00:38:18] (SCHROEDER) Yeah. Older than that, but I got to think a little more than 44. And that was 68, so.

[00:38:25] (HOST) Yeah, 24.

[00:38:28] (HAHN) President Nixon was elected and became president in 1969, and Nixon ran on a platform of ending the war.

[00:38:40] (HOST) Harry Hahn.

[00:38:41] (HAHN) You know, he wanted to get us out of Vietnam. So his tool in doing that, if you want to call it that, was what he called Vietnamization. And Vietnamization was supposed to turn over the equipment, the training and develop the South Vietnamese Army to the point that and Navy, to where they could take over the war and we wouldn’t have to fight the war. The US involvement would end. So, you know, starting in 1969 with Vietnamization, we started to turn over the boats to the South Vietnamese. Okay, so we started first in 69 with River Division 9-1. 9-2 and then, turned over 11-1 and 11-2. And then in 1970, I turned over the river squadrons 13 and then 15. So at the end of 1970, going towards 71 is when the Mobile Riverine Force, as it was known, existed no longer. All the boats were turned over to the Vietnamese.

[00:40:08] Randy Peat:

[00:40:10] (PEAT) In spite of everything that I have been through, if I had to do it over again, I would. In spite of the Agent Orange, which I have terminal cancer. So I’m, you know.

[00:40:24] (HOST) Randy.

[00:40:25] (PEAT) I’m beyond the point where they can do anything for me from a immunotherapy point of view and all of that. So now every 90 days I get scanned and we just wait for the cancer to come back, and then we take care of it with radiation or removal or whatever, ablation or whatever.

[00:40:44] (HOST) When did you find out?

[00:40:46] (PEAT) I’ve been dealing with this since I was 56. The first cancer was prostate, and we would remove my prostate, and then the next cancer was kidney, and we didn’t catch that one quick enough. And so it metastasized. So it’s, you know, all over. But I’ve made my peace. I’ve had a good life.

[00:41:12] (HOST) Doc Jones.

[00:41:14] (JONES) First thing you learn, I guess, is you always in your mind, have a place where you’re going to be if something happens and it doesn’t. At first, it’s a conscious thing, a conscious effort and later on, it’s just it’s ingrained that you’ve already seen if something happened here where you’d be and it’s already programmed in your head, pretty much. So the bullets start flying. You’re somewhere already, you know? I mean, it’s like a self-preservation thing because you say you’re looking for a big tree to hide behind or a ditch to jump in, or it’s just there, you know? You know that. But then you have that feeling the rest of your life, you know, you always know if something happens where you’re going to be kind of. It’s what I, it’s an awareness thing. It’st part of PTSD, I’m sure, of everything else. You know, it’s just an unconscious thing.

[00:42:22] (HOST) You enter an unfamiliar situation and just, you know, some part of your brain is figuring out, okay, where would I where could I take cover?

[00:42:30] (JONES) Yeah. You know. Yeah. That kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah

[00:42:33] (HOST) Doc, how many how many tours did you do?

[00:42:36] (JONES) Just one.

[00:42:37] (HOST) Just the one. Do you mind if I ask how old you are?

[00:42:39] (JONES) Oh, well, I was 21 at the time.

[00:42:41] (HOST) No, I mean now.

[00:42:42] (JONES) Now I’m 76.

[00:42:44] (HOST) So out of 76 years on the planet, you spent one in Vietnam?

[00:42:51] (JONES) Yeah.

[00:42:52] (HOST) And you still walk into a room and figure out where you’re going to take cover or some shit goes down.

[00:42:57] (JONES) Oh, yeah. Because everything there is life and death.

[00:43:02] (HOST) Yeah. You know, I just think it’s remarkable. It’s one year out of 76, and it’s still, you still carry it with you.

[00:43:09] (JONES) Oh, yeah. I think most of us do.

[00:43:12] (HOST) How important has it been for you to be part of this, this group?

[00:43:16] (JONES) It’s probably my favorite activity, with the exception of getting and leaving here, you know? I mean, it’s If I traveled a lot, you know, and it’s like traveling isn’t as enjoyable as it used to be. Yeah. But it’s good to be here. But yeah, traveling is getting more difficult, I think, for all of us as time goes on.

[00:43:53] (HOST) Thanks to Harry Hahn, Doc Jones, AJ McCaskey, Frank Moran, Randy Peat, Terry Sater and Bob Schrader for sharing their stories and to all of the other River Rats who spoke to me for these two episodes. Even if you didn’t hear your voice on the podcast, know that your contribution helped give shape and context to the final product. Terry Sater’s book is available at Amazon.com. It’s called The Nightmare of the Mekong: A True History of Love, Family, and the War in Vietnam. And for those of you who saw and loved Scramble The Seawolves as much as I did, I have some great news. The same filmmakers who made that, Jeff and Shannon are bio are working on a documentary about the River Rats. It should be out next spring. I promise I’ll keep you posted. For those of you who may have missed it, we started putting up little mini episodes called postscripts, and they’re like little companion pieces to the full episodes. There will be a postscript to River Rats coming very soon, an interview with a remarkable young woman named Dakota Tolbert. She was raised by her grandfather, a River Rat, and the recipient of a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars, one with Valor, although he passed away a few years ago. Dakota still attends the River Rats reunions as a way of feeling closer to him, honoring his service and that of all veterans. Keep an eye out for that. Of course, if you just subscribe to Echoes wherever you get your podcasts, you’ll never miss an episode or a post-script. They’ll just magically show up on your smartphone every time we release a new one. That’s it for 2023. If you find yourself jonesing for more Echoes over the holidays, may I suggest revisiting Episode 19, Christmas and the Vietnam War? I just gave it another listen myself, and I have to say, it did put me in the holiday spirit in a complicated kind of way. We’ll be back in mid-January with more stories of service, sacrifice, and healing. See you then.

Full Interview with Harry Hahn

Full Interview with Dale “Doc” Jones

Full Interview with AJ McCaskey

Full Interview with Frank Moran

Full Interview with Randy Peat

Full Interview with Terry Sater

Full Interview with Bob Schrader

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