My name is Miguel Chacon and I am a Vietnan War veteran.
I was just out of High School when I joined the service,
Lyndon Baines Johnson was our president and the Vietnam War was in
full force. Years earlier American soldiers had been sent there by
then President John F. Kennedy and later by President Johnson to
help the South Vietnamese army fight off a communist invasion from
the North.
This is a short summary or an overview of that conflict as I saw it
and experienced it. I will spare you the gory details:
I wanted to go to
college right after high school but my family could not afford to send me and
financial aid was a rare thing in those days so I had to join the service
to get an education. I chose the Navy and after basic training I was sent
to Medical Corps School. There I learned to administer first aid to wounded
Marines under battlefield conditions. That means that as you treat their
wounds you're also getting shot at.
After a year in the Navy I was transferred to the Marine Corps at Camp
LeJeune, North Carolina because the Navy supplies the Marine Corps with
its medical personnel. Shortly afterwards and after some more training
I was on my way to Vietnam. The flight to Vietnam seemed to take forever.
I remember that as I looked around the plane at the other Marines I
realized how young we all were, our ages must have ranged from 18 to 22. Ten thousand miles later and after a short stop at Okinawa we finally arrived in Vietnam.
We arrived at night and there were very few lights, just enough to land
the plane. There was an eerie silence as we debarked
the plane, we didn't know what to expect. We were quickly ushered out of
the plane, you could here gunfire in the distance and sometimes flares
would light up the sky over the horizon.
We slept at the landing site that night but in the morning we were
scattered to the front lines with different units. We were taken there
by convoy or in trucks. Everything in Vietnam looked so different and
felt so distant from home. The trip to the front lines was dangerous
because the enemy would sometimes plant land mines on the roads to blow
up the trucks bringing in fresh troops. Sometimes they would even ambush
the trucks, and many had been killed that way.
We were trying to act natural but we were tense, every thing
seemed so surreal. When we got to the front lines I was quickly placed
with my unit. The base was under ground in fortified bunkers. That's
because we were close to the enemy and they were always shooting their
big guns at us, large rounds that would explode right on top of us, of
course we were shooting our big guns at them too and much more.
One thing I remember about Vietnam that is never evident in "the world", that's what we use to call America as we looked at it from Vietnam,
'The World', is that in Vietnam and especially in the front lines we were all
Americans, we weren't Black or White or Hispanic. Obviously we were aware
of our differences but for a little while it didn't matter, for a little
while we were one.
I guess we needed that kind of unity to survive, being so young and so
far away from home under hostile conditions. For most of us it was our
first time away from home. As you can imagine life in the front lines
was a very violent one and you were always wondering if you would make it out
alive. If you were a man of some faith you would cling to it
wholeheartedly like never before.
The
'Nam Dong Ha '67 / '68 By MChacon
