The First Time I Saw GodA Story by Chris McGrath During my time in Vietnam, I endured many uncomfortable and some horrific circumstances. This one still haunts my dreams and can appear while I'm awake if my fever is high enough... Did you ever experience one of those moments when you wonder how in the Hell you ever got where you are? I was huddled behind a retention embankment that preserved the water level in a rice paddy. My companion and I were all that was left of a misbegotten raid on a weapons factory just upriver from Hanoi. My confusion came from fatigue mixed with recurring terror. We were somewhere North of the DeMilitarized Zone (DMZ) and trying to make our way South. There were no rescue helicopters for black ops mission grunts, operating where they couldn’t legally be. Wileman was sitting with his back propped against the embankment breathing heavily, catching his breath. He had gone through language school with me learning Mandarin Chinese. I knew I could count on him. My mind wandered in my weariness, thinking back on the serial cleverness that had landed me here. I completed my first year at Boston College, but my second year was a bust of boredom. I bought a Porsche for four hundred and fifty dollars, took a job as a shipping clerk at an electric parts supplier and waited to hear from Uncle Sam, hoping I would slip through the cracks. I never changed my draft status. I got my reclassification to 1A notice in April of 1967 and reported for my physical at the Boston Army Base. Just that one experience of being treated lower than dog manure convinced me that I needed to take action to fix this. I decided to enlist in the Air Force. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the Vietnam War. I had two older brothers who served in Korea as Marines. Dick made Gunnery Sergeant and was decorated with a purple heart. Chet made Lance Corporal three times. Once it stuck for a month before he was busted for yet another drunken brawl. The climate was so much different now though than when they had served. I had loved President Kennedy. He gave the youth of our generation reason to believe we could make a difference. It had been politically necessary to find a running mate from the South, and Lyndon Johnson fit the political requirements as well as he fit the leadership requirements poorly. I signed up with the Air Force on a Thursday and found myself on a plane to San Antonio, TX on the following Tuesday, the second of May, 1967. I had scored so highly on my tests (ninety fifth percentile across the board) that my recruiter had assured me I would get whatever assignment I wanted. He said that only the Army guaranteed Tech Schools and jobs. It wasn’t the AF’s policy, but that was no reason to believe that anybody would be stupid enough to put someone with my proven intelligence in an uninspiring position. In basic training at Lackland AFB, I learned how little I mattered to my new owners. See, even though the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) will tell you differently, you have become ‘property’ of the USAF. One thing that they insisted we all learned was how expendable we all were. Not even pieces of meat, but more like cogs in a machine of indifference. Well I could see four years of sand being sucked out of the hour glass of my life. I was determined, though, to do well and get that experience in office management and computers so I could be that far ahead of my contemporaries when I went back to college. Every
day in basic, we were learning to drill, eat, sleep, dress, and clean in a
military fashion. Every once in a while
we were pulled away from the constant marching to sit in a classroom and take
some test, or fill out some form or another, never being told why or how it
might be connected with our future military careers.
Then one day I was singled out to go to a testing session. It seemed I had scored highly in foreign language ability and I was to participate in a group of fifteen hundred to be tested for potential assignment to the language school at the Presidio of Monterey in California. At first I was outraged. Then I saw the pictures of Monterey Bay, and all thought of a dumb, boring office job faded to black, replaced by images of the Monterey Pop festival, and the beach at Carmel! We were told that we would all try to learn a bit of Chinese, be tested the next morning, and the top eighty would be enrolled in the Mandarin Air Force Aural Chinese program at the Defense Language Institute. Other high qualifiers would be placed in programs for other languages. Non-qualifiers would be sent back to their flights without recommendation. We were given a text book with vocabulary, text structure, and some example texts, all using a Romanization system developed at Yale. The book was Speak Chinese by M. Gardiner Tewksbury. I was selected as one of the eighty and was delighted. How could you complain about eight months in Monterey, California, and how could I possibly get stationed in Vietnam as a Chinese Linguist?? I should have known that this was too good an opportunity for Irony to let pass… I was sent to Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo Texas after completing the MAFAC program. Thirty eight of us survived out of the original eighty. I was shocked to hear that some of us would be stationed at a remote outpost called Monkey Mountain, just outside of Da Nang. I was lucky, though, for perhaps the only time in the Air Force, and received orders to Kadena AFB on the Island of Okinawa. Finally I knew I wouldn’t be seeing any combat. Okinawa was as alien a climate as I had ever experienced. The relative humidity rarely went below eighty five percent and I soon lost track of when I was sweating and when I was not, because no one was ever dry. It took about three days for my blood to thin out and make the climate tolerable. I checked in briefly at Kadena only to learn I was ‘on loan’ to the NSA (National Security Agency) at Torii Station. Bill Wilemen and I became fast friends. I was assigned to code breaking in the Northeast sector of China, and Bill was assigned to the Korean problem. We were enjoying happy hour at the NCO club when a friend of ours was dragged outside by two sergeants. Bill and I went through the door after them and broke up the fight. Unfortunately the two sergeants worked in personnel, and we ended up mistakenly assigned to some pretty sketchy temporary duties (TDY), all of which were life threatening, and somewhat crazy. On the first one, I was pushed out of a plane, complaining all the time to a marine lieutenant colonel, that I wasn’t trained for this and that someone was playing a trick on me. He heard nothing, and I landed in the middle of a firefight just North of the DMZ. On the trip back to Saigon, I managed to shoot two old ladies and two kids who suddenly started shooting AK-47s at close range into the Marines at the back of our two columns as we crossed a footbridge. I was awarded a silver star and the brass were convinced that I was a natural combat leader. Big whoop! Basically, I was rewarded for surviving by being stripped of all of the protection I had carefully woven into my position. I was sent back stateside for cross training in Vietnamese at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and a private training for Army Rangers at Ft Lewis in Washington. So here I sit, panting and staring across a flooded rice paddy, past a shanty-like farmhouse at the edge of a ridge hoping against hope that the North Vietnamese that had been pursuing us wouldn’t attempt to scale the ridge we had just managed moments ago. No sign
of pursuit and my mind began wandering again.
I wondered how many people lived in the shanty hut on the far edge of
the tiny rice paddy. My eyes were level
with the water and I began absently scanning for any rice stalks that might be
protruding through the otherwise calm surface of the water. Then I saw them, the unmistakable metallic
triple tines of the dreaded ‘Bouncing Betty’ land mines. Why would a farmer mine his own paddy? It was baffling, but I had learned that
everyone in country was Viet Cong, or VC sympathizers.
They had no concept of freedom and democracy. They only knew that their relatives North of the border were surviving and the corrupt government in the South was causing wide spread famine. Most farmers and fishermen in the Delta (Mei Kong) had buried at least one child due to starvation. I felt like an overpaid Hessian mercenary in our own war of independence. I kept asking myself what we were all doing there. It seemed every day we convinced the poor people of South Vietnam that we were monsters, capable of any atrocity and terrible ambassadors of liberty, which was a concept too far up Maslow’s hierarchy of need for them to care about. They were starving. The Bouncing Betty was a particularly insidious device. Mines are made to demoralize, not just kill the enemy. The VC had invented this one to terrorize whole groups of GIs. It didn’t explode when stepped on. The metallic spines triggered a spring that shot the mine up about three feet. The mine itself was two heavy disks, one on top and one on the bottom of the shrapnel that surrounded the explosive charge in the middle. Once sprung and exploded, they propelled the shrapnel in a full circle, cutting in half anyone unfortunate enough to be near the device. I saw some motion in the reeds on the far side of the rice paddy and nudged Wileman to watch with me. Some poor, unsuspecting animal was going to enter the mined paddy. Then I saw it. It was a naked baby, wandered out of the shanty in the early dawn hours. How could anyone be so careless. The rice paddy was only flooded with an inch and a half of water, but the baby would certainly steer clear of the water, wouldn’t it? Then it was too close to the edge and struggling in the mud. Still there was no sign of life from the hut. Then it toppled into the rice paddy sending ripples obscuring my visibility of the mines, and began struggling blindly toward one of them. I don’t remember thinking anything. I scuttled over the embankment and ran toward the baby. I can’t remember anything clearly in the moments that followed. I felt impact driving breath out of me and I realized that the Betty had torn through me, cutting me in half. I saw a woman all in white robes who smiled at me, then turned half away and appeared to be a man in white robes. It was all too bright. The man turned back toward me and again appeared like a woman and spoke with a woman’s voice. “Don’t be concerned. You are all here to help each other. You understand that. Few do. You will be fine.” Bill got me out of there. The impact I had felt was the body of the baby striking me in the abdomen, but shielding me from the lethal shrapnel. This entity visited me again in the hospital at Cam Rhan Bay, in December of 1970, while I was in a coma. I endured two near death experiences, and the second one much longer than the first. I was able to ask many questions the second time, and I’ve cherished the answers ever since, but that is another story…
© 2014 Chris McGrathFeatured Review
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5 Reviews  Last Updated on August 25, 2014 Tags: Vietnam, PTSD, Near Death Experiences Author
Chris McGrathHenderson, NVAboutEclectic Linguist Code Breaker - NSA Recently Published - Remote Control more..Writing
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