The Family That Served, Vietnam 1965-1972

The freezing winter wind stung my face as I left the Cessna 180, it was my last free fall skydiving parachute jump at the Big Fork junction in Montana on November 8^th. 1965. The frozen ground hit me hard as I did the parachute landing fall. I tried to shake off the shivering cold, gathered my parachute, and walked to the highway to wait for my ride back to Kalispell.                        

  Three weeks later, on November 28, 1965, I stepped off the Pan Am passenger jet, which landed at the Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam Airport, and felt suddenly smothered with the sweltering heat and high humidity which took my breath away. The climate was at the extreme opposite edge of the cold Montana weather. After custom procedures, a RMK construction company representative took my passport and other documents. Then I was transported with a few other civilian company workers to a field in the middle of the airport where we were told to pick a tent and cot and told to stay put while being processed by Vietnamese and US Government agencies. I was lucky that the holding area lasted only for three days and two nights. Other personnel had been there over a week and were still waiting in the sweltering heat. It was the start of a nearly seven-year Vietnam career with the RMK-BRJ construction company, which ended in June 1972.

I never dreamed the Vietnam War would involve my father and two brothers. My father would arrive a month or so later to work for RMK-BRJ.  Two brothers would follow me, Jess, a Marine, and Peter in the US Army, both would serve a tour of duty in Vietnam. A third brother, Gary, served in the US Army and was assigned to Germany during the Vietnam War. In all, my family would serve a total of ten years of combined Vietnam field service.

                     

The Second World War C-47 had landed at Cam Ranh Bay, than I was Jeeped to our company work site located on the beach about a mile south of the US Air Force base. It consisted of tents for American and other third national workers,  and large tents for a mess hall and dispensary. Our shower was a large 50-gallon drum supported by a wood platform with ocean water pumped to it. Due to the two-week monsoon, the ground was sloppy muddy; our tents and bedding were soaked wet. It seems to take weeks for things to dry out. 

I spent two years at Cam Ranh Bay from November 1965 through January 1968, where I was the sole medic responsible for the care of 4,000 Vietnamese RMK-BRJ workers. I lived and worked in the Vietnamese camp 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the only American to do so. I lived with them and ate what they ate. I trusted my safety with them, and in turn, they knew that I would give my best care to them.  From time to time, the Vietnamese Army and US Army would raid the Vietnamese camp arresting VC suspects, draft dodgers, and recovering weapons and demolitions. I never feared for my safety. During one day of rioting between Vietnamese and third-country nationals, I would be suturing up knife lacerations on arms and hands while mutual combatants were sitting across from each other watching me work while waiting their turn. All the while, yelling and fighting were occurring around my wood shack dispensary. After suturing the same Philippine worker on three different occasions during the day of rioting, I strongly urged him to go back to his tent and take a break.

 

Fortunately for me, it was accepted by all employees that my dispensary was a haven.  I became very experienced in diagnosing and treating tropical diseases such as dengue fever, Q fever, rat-bite fever, and malaria. I worked through three plague epidemics with up to 12 Vietnamese patients in my dispensary. I learned to accept the Vietnamese custom of families moving to the patient’s bedside. I let them become involved in their care, cooking, and feeding the patient. 

Several months later, all of the Americans and other workers moved on to the US Air Force base, which provided modern housing mess hall and dispensary as they built concrete runways, military hospitals, bridges, and paved roads. I remained back at the Vietnamese camp for two years, being the only foreigner to do so.

My Father, Victor P. Hundahl, was a hardcore construction worker who had intermittently worked on US Government projects from dams to Nike missile faculties. In 1941 he was working on Wake Island for Morrison-Knudsen construction company and was on the last ship out, the  "USS Matasonia.” The boat was between Hawaii and San Francisco when Pearl Harbor was attacked, followed by the surrender of Wake to Japan. Two hundred of his friends and coworkers were taken prisoners and shipped to Japanese prison camps. The remaining ninety-eight civilian workers, at forced labor, built concrete bunkers and fortifications under Japanese direction. When they were of no use to the Japanese, they were lined up on the beach and machine-gunned down in cold blood.

  

My Father followed me to Vietnam a few months later.  He was hired by the same company as me and worked as a sheet metal worker and draftsman, who laid out the plans for the manufacture of sheet metal works. Dad was assigned to Chu Lai, Vietnam, and worked there for several months.  At the urging of Mother, and becoming frustrated with no tools to do his trade and lack of work, he resigned. I had the opportunity to meet my Dad in an unexpected meeting near the Continental Hotel in Saigon. My interpreter Cao Minh Chinh, and I arrived the previous night from a medical evacuation of a male Vietnamese Viet Cong suspect who had been severely beaten by his Vietnamese Army interrogators. I spent two precious days with my Dad.  Due to the Buddhist revolt of May 1966,  the Vietnamese Government grounded all military and civilian aircraft, and Vietnamese were not allowed to travel. I left Chin Cao Minh behind to take care of my dad until he departed. I then hopped on C-130 military aircraft back to Cam Rahn Bay.

During the nearly two years of living with the Vietnamese day and night, I became accustomed to their culture, mindset, Buddhist beliefs and aspirations, and found them hardworking if you treated them with respect most became loyal to me. This learning experience would serve me well in critical touchy situations that I had to deal with the Vietnamese in my work in Vietnam.

    

During a Military raid for draft dodgers and Viet Cong, an Air Force military policeman standing 40 feet from my dispensary fired his revolver at a running Vietnamese male striking him in the back. I was immediately called out and ran down to examine him, and found that he was dead. A military ambulance arrived soon after that. As we were loading him into the ambulance, the Vietnamese police drove up and demanded that we unload him and put him back on the ground. After hours of discussions between the US military and the Vietnamese Government, It was decided the camp area was under the jurisdiction of the US military, which resulted in the Vietnamese Government representatives and Vietnamese police withdrawing. And for some unexplained reason, the US military also withdrew.  Now the construction company Project Manager and I had to deal with victims’ relatives who were demanding an enormous amount of payment retribution. During the first night of negotiations, I requested that the family allow me to move the body to the military morgue to preserve and treat it with respect. This request was naturally denied; it would stay in place until an agreement was made.

Meanwhile, demonstrations and unrest continued. After three days of negotiations, I was authorized to move the body. It was an eerie scene as Chin and I, in the hot, humid night, dressed in surgical gowns and masks, gagging from the smell, struggled to fit the bloated body into the small Vietnamese type wooden casket. Finally, we loaded it onto a US Army amphibious vehicle, which would transport it across  Cam Rahn Bay. Chin and I set a bonfire to the tent bedding and bunk bed to decontaminate the area. I learned rapidly not only was I responsible for the living, but I was also responsible for the dead.

Having inhaled and ingested a giant fly, I came down with infectious hepatitis and admitted to the 12^th USAF Hospital at Cam Ranh Bay on February 2, 1967. Due to the severity of my illness, Doctor, Lt. Col. Fred Conrad suggested that I evacuate back to the states. I pleaded my case to him that I trusted his care, and the treatment would be the same as back home, and that it was necessary for me to finish my 18-month company contract.  To this day, I am grateful to Dr. Conrad and the military nurses who cared for me for the seven-week hospital stay at the 12^th USAF Hospital. I still remember the I.V. tubing, vomiting, diarrhea, painfully swollen liver, and exhaustion.  During a  visit by my interpreter Chinh Coa Minh at the hospital, he said: “Your mind is now almost like the Vietnamese. You are so yellow you now look like the Vietnamese.” After discharge and back to work, it took months to recover my strength and stamina.

                         

I arrived at Chu Lai, Vietnam, in January 1968. Initially, the employees lived in a triple deck houseboat located next to the Army swift boat ramp, located at the most northern point of the base. The RMK-BRJ  worksite, including my dispensary, was located one-fourth mile from the main gate entrance and road, and a half-mile opposite the new jet runways.  NVA rockets which the Viet Cong fired from the mountains, would pass over or drop short into our work area during attacks on the airfields, hangars, ammunition bunkers and aircraft fuel depots.

During the TET offensive, the base was taking a pounding from rockets, which severely damaged the large metal jet hangers. I moved to the houseboat area, being tired and saying to hell with it, was lying in my bunk listening to the thuds and explosions in the direction of the airfield when the dusk night went bright, seconds later the houseboat shook. Grabbing medical gear, I ran out, hearing AK rifle fire, I crawled to the edge of the deck looking out to the opposite shoreline and received more AK fire. I looked back toward the shore where the house barge was tied up and saw a full line of US troops pointing their M16 rifles where the AK fire was coming. We were in between them. Rapidly we crawled and slinked down the steps, and in a crouch ran to the troops joining them in the trenches. American soldiers opened fire as a swift boat was speeding around the river curves trying to reach the safety of the ramp, its crew screaming, “We're friendly’s! We're friendly’s!" It passed safely and docked as rifle fire burst around it. The massive blast that shook us the night before mangled the three-story metal aircraft hangers. Viet Cong rockets caused considerable damage to the base. Rumors abounded that Viet Cong sappers had breached the perimeter and were responsible for some of the damage.  After a couple of days, the Viet Cong Tet offensive was over.

 

It was the end of March 1968, on a Sunday morning, as I was standing on the top deck of the barge talking with the Korean company workers when they stunned me. “Do you know that US Army troops from the Americal Division killed 300 civilians near here?” They answered my challenging questions; The attack took place in a village called My Lai, about 3 miles away along the road we were building; they further stated that US troops killed old men, women, and children. The Korean workers seemed to be smiling at my discomfort and disbelief. I responded by telling them that our military was supposed to be better than this. 

                  

One morning in July 1969, as I was having coffee in the houseboat mess hall, a lanky US Marine enters and leans his m-16 rifle against the wall and drops his gear on the floor with a thump. He looks like somebody I should know, then I realized that it was my younger brother, Jess Hundahl, who I had not seen for five years. Jess joined the US Marines on November 13, 1966, at 19 years old. Upon completion of boot camp and infantry training, he underwent aviation electronics training for servicing aircraft radar and electronics. Jess arrived in Vietnam just at after the Tet offensive in March of 1968, and served until July 1969, with his unit, the Marine Air Group 16, at the helicopter base at Marble Mountain. His duties were to maintain aircraft radio and radar systems and defensive patrolling of the base perimeter. The unit underwent weekly rocket attacks, and a few times, sappers breached the perimeter. During one raid a Vietnamese who worked in the officer’s mess hall was found dead armed with a handgun, wrapped up in the barbed wire perimeter fence. Reports indicated that he was an NVA Army Colonel. 

Jess spent his two-weeks leave with me at Chu Lai staying at my dispensary. It was a time that I enjoyed and got to know him better. Jess retired from active Marines in 1983 and served in the Army Reserves until retirement in November 1995. 

       

In January 1970, I transferred to the company dispensary at Tan Son Nhut airport. It was a choice assignment, as I lived in my rental villa, and it was usually a relaxed eight hour, six-day workweek schedule.                        

Just like his brother Jess, Peter Hundahl unexpectedly showed up at my Dispensary at Tan Son Nhut airport near the end of his tour in late 1971. Nineteen-year-old Peter enlisted in the Army on July 11, 1969, and after basic training was trained as a radio communication specialist arriving in Vietnam in January 1970, serving until December 5, 1971. Upon arrival, his unit, the First Field Force of the 7/15^th Artillery, was assigned to landing zone Black Hawk which was located south of Pleiku in the central highlands on Highway 19 at the base of Ming Yang Mountains. As a communications specialist, Peter operated the PR25 radio and frequently went on long-range reconnaissance patrols lasting 3 to 4 days to set up observation posts to call in coordinates for self-propelled 175 Howitzers missions on enemy troop placements. Since the PR25 radio usually had an un-obstructive effective range of five miles, this required a hill or mountain peak for an observation post. The patrols struggled to carry their heavy ammo and equipment up the Jungle Mountains to their assigned site.

 

During Peter’s tour, he underwent small arms fire and rocket attacks, “but nothing big.” When officers were not present, Peter called in artillery strikes to adjust effective fire on enemy personnel, vehicles, and tanks.  After eliminating the enemy, he and his unit entered the strike zone to perform the damage assessment. Peter searched the enemy personnel for letters, maps, and other documents of which could be of military intelligence value. In one encounter, his unit wiped out about 142 enemy personnel. Peter would radio in a damage report, which included enemy unit ID, equipment type, and enemy personnel killed in action and other significant intelligence information.

Peter suffered Typhus fever for three days while in the field, becoming so sick he was med-evac to the US military hospital at Pleiku, where he was in the intensive care unit for nine days. On the 12^th day, he returned to his group at LZ Black Hawk.

Peter and participated in the Cambodia excursion with his unit providing artillery support missions to American and Vietnamese infantry. Within a day, they moved the self-propelled artillery guns from LZ Black Hawk to a short distance from the Cambodian border. They supported two main areas; Southwest of Pleiku in Duc Co and Northwest of Pleiku near the tri-border near Ben Het.

 

Near the end of Peter’s tour in 1971, Peter was cut military orders for a six-day leave to visit me in Saigon. After arriving directly from the field, he walked into my dispensary dressed in full combat gear and rifle, a grown young man who I hardly recognized. I will always remember our short time together as I showed him the sights and sounds of Saigon. After serving his required four years of active service transferred to the Army Reserve, where he served as an ROTC Officer training instructor. He retired after 30 years of service as a Sergeant E-7.  Peter at the age of 70, died May 25th, 2020 of cancer due to the effects of Herbicide Orange. 

                       

  Gary Hundahl joined the US Army in August 1970 at the age of 19, and after training was assigned to the Third US Army Infantry with the 2/64^th Armor Tank Regiment and was a gunner on an M60 A1 Tank stationed in Germany for two and a half years.

It was not until 35 years later, while Peter and Gary were visiting the Vietnam Wall, Peter told Gary that when Peter was in Vietnam, the Commanding Officer called him into his office and presented him with Gary’s formal request for a transfer to a combat unit in Vietnam. It was a requirement that Peter sign off for approval for Gary’s transfer. Peter, in large block letters, wrote “F**k No” on Gary’s transfer request form. As a result, the military commander denied Gary's Vietnam transfer request.

                   

My last year, I was assigned to a short assignment at Dong Tom than transferred to Phu Quac island, at the tip of South Vietnam and Cambodia in the sea of Siam. It is known for having a large POW camp for several thousand Viet Cong and North Vietnam prisoners.

A two-story houseboat served as the base living quarters for company supervisors/technicians who were building and installing radar equipment on several small island mountain tops. It was kept quiet, but a few hints led me to believe that it was radar for ocean surface vessels. 

Without advanced notice I would receive instructions to get  ready to be picked by a CIA operated Air America silver and blue Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter, affectionally called the "Huey. It would would fly me to some unidentified  isolated small island to attend to a company worker. The Huey would drop me off at a unknow location  and leave, telling me they would be back in a few hours to extract me. I was acutely aware if our chopper went down in the hostile territory below; the Viet Cong would naturally assume that I was a CIA agent. The Viet Cong would enjoy themselves torturing me day and night, and when becoming bored, execute me. Oh well, I accepted this as one of the risks of the job. Anyway, In my young mans mind set, these things always happens to the other guy, not me. Right?

Most  of the American and Allies troops had withdrawn from South Vietnam, leaving US military advisors only. American civilians were entirely dependent on  Vietnamese troops for safety. On Easter 1972, all hell broke out when the North Vietnamese forces attacked overwhelming the Vietnamese Army. The NVA and VC attack was stalled when American bombers and Naval aircraft fighters and Naval battle ships supported the South Vietnamese Army. One day during the country wide battle, C-130 Hercules transport aircraft were line up in the sky waiting in line to approach and land one by one at the An Thoi air strip to discharge their  NVA/VC prisoners of war. The prisoners were off loaded from the C-130 Hercules and held under guard until they could be trucked to the prisoner of war prison camp about a mile away. I had climbed a watchtower located close to my dispensary and took photos of the aircraft landings, take offs, and the off loaded NVA/VC prisoners of war. The Easter invasion lasted one month. During the invasion the American and Australian supervisors and I wondered if we would be overrun, captured, and end up in the nearby prisoner of war camp. 

June of 1972, my work was over.  I departed Vietnam and returned to the states.

                                        

 I thought I had finished with this article, but something bothered me about my interviews with Peter. So I called him and pointedly asked him if he observed the effects of the artillery missions he called in. He replied, “Yes.” He then told me about going into the strike zone and searching through the dead enemy’s soldier's pockets. I asked him why he never mentioned this when I interviewed him previously. His reply was, “I never talk about it.” I understood the demons that haunted him. From time to time, my repressed demons haunted my nightmare's. 

The ambulance headlights in the nights heavy fog and rain, catching two badly burned almost non-humans; one with outstretched bat-like arms dangling ragged clothing, stumbling slowly toward me with dying chilling shrill screams and moans. I reached out to help him and when touched, black chard muscle tissue and clothing fell into my hands. Unable to touch him, I wrapped a white sheet around him and with help from my interpreter slung him down  to  a stretcher. Or from to time, kneeling in the bloody dirt to collect a spleen or liver and other torn body parts to put them in a body bag. A feeble attempt to make a human whole again.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

Thank you Vic for the story. You need to write a book. Your family did great things. The story was well written and you made the reader understand the danger and the situations. I wanted to read and know more. Thank you for sharing the outstanding story.
Coyote