Colonel Arntz, an ROTC Infantry Officer through and through, was the Team’s Senior Advisor. Lieutenant Colonel Jungerheld, a West Point Infantry Officer, was the Deputy and SGM Hayes was the Sergeant Major. Captain Ferguson was the team’s Admin Officer at that time.
Colonel Arntz was the ideal image of the Infantry Colonel. He was tall, slim and always wore starched fatigues, spit-shined jump boots and a clean, unblemished soft cap – even during rocket, mortar or ground attacks. I never once saw him wearing the steel pot or flak jacket that we all wore during these attacks.
LTC Jungerheld, a West Pointer, was the Deputy Senior Advisor. He was a very religious Catholic, so I had a lot of respect for him even when he arbitrarily extended my duties to include dropping surrender leaflets over enemy territory while flying in the team’s O1E Birddog piloted by an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel attached to our Advisory Team. LTC Chavez, an Infantry Officer, took over as Deputy Senior Advisor halfway through my tour. LTC Chavez had been an enlisted man in the Navy during the Korean War. Under the Korean G.I. Bill, LTC Chavez had enrolled in the Army’s ROTC program at some New Mexico university and was appointed a second lieutenant upon graduation. He decided to make the army a career since it was a peacetime army. He was a pretty regular guy who just wanted to put in his last two years of service and retire.
Colonel Arntz left shortly after my arrival there to command the 5th Special Forces Group at Ft Bragg and was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Sanger who had a PhD in English Literature and was on the promotion list to Colonel.
LTC Sanger did not live up to the job as Senior Advisor. He was brash and irritating with an attitude that did not sit well with neither enlisted nor officers. He had the ability to annoy anyone without even trying. At one point during a hard night of drinking and wearing nothing but underwear shorts and a steel pot, LTC Sanger sauntered over to one of the corner bunkers on a moonlit night and grabbed the bunker’s M-60 machine gun. He opened up an ammo can, loaded the ammo belt onto the M-60 and commenced to firing from the hip into the darkness for no reason at all. With every fifth round being a tracer, it was easy to see he was not being consistent, spraying a massive area with wasted rounds. An officer ran over to LTC Sanger and took the machine gun from him then walked him to his hooch while the rest of the men were rushing over to our assigned positions believing it to be an enemy ground attack.
The 25th Vietnamese Infantry’s Brigadier General Chinh did not like LTC Sanger and felt offended that a Lieutenant Colonel (Promotable) had been assigned as his Senior Advisor. LTC Sanger was crushed that the ARVN General would not grant him the incoming audience. After trying and being rejected by the ARVN General three times, the newly assigned LTC Sanger called MACV headquarters in Saigon to address his grievance. SGM Hayes and I were in an adjacent office and we just looked at each other and grinned. SGM Hayes whispered, “Sounds just like a goddamn whiny kid calling daddy to complain about being mistreated at camp.” I agreed.
During this period of turmoil, LTC Chavez, then Deputy senior advisor, was shuffling back and forth as the go-between meeting and conducting business with the ARVN General Chinh until such time as MACV and ARVN representatives came and met with General Chinh finally establishing a dialogue between the ARVN General and the Senior Advisor. During this visit from MACV, LTC Sanger was frocked to wear the full colonel eagle.
SGM Hayes had WWII and Korean service as an infantry soldier; however, he was grossly overweight struggling to keep up with the Senior Advisor during walking tours of the various Vietnamese battalion advisory units. SGM Hayes had completed 30 years of service and had already retired just before his son completed Warrant Officer flight training and had been appointed a Warrant Officer with orders to Vietnam. SGM Hayes did not want his son in Vietnam, so he called Department of the Army Enlisted Infantry Branch and requested to be reactivated once more with assignment to Vietnam. His son's orders were canceled and he was given new orders assigning him to Fort Hood, Texas.
SGM Hayes treated me more like a son than a Specialist 5. He once asked me if I had already written my “In Case Of” casualty Letter.1 I felt that was creepy and unnecessary. “Actually, Sergeant Major,” I replied, “That’s very unnecessary. I don’t plan on dying in this dreadful place. I have every reason to believe I will make it out of here and back to the world alive and kicking.”
“Ojeda, take it from an old soldier. Do it and address it to your next-of-kin. Write your letter and seal it. I will store it in our safe along with mine and the colonel’s.”
I wrote my letter without addressing it. On the outside of the envelope, I wrote “To be opened on the KIA2 or MIA3 of Sp5 Antonio Ojeda.” It was a brief letter asking that no one grieve for me since I chose the direction my life had taken me. SGM Hayes stored it in our safe. When I left Advisory Team 99 a few months later, the Admin Officer stopped me on the way to the airfield where I was catching a chopper to my next unit. “Ojeda, you can’t leave this behind!” he said. “Sergeant Major Hayes gave it to me for safekeeping on his departure. You made it through all this shit, so take your goddamn letter with you!”
When I arrived at my new Advisory Team 51, I asked the Admin Officer to store my ICO letter in his safe. The admin officer took it and stored it in the team’s office safe commenting that these ICO’s were a marvelous idea saying, "I'm gonna bring this up to the Senior Advisor. Maybe he can make it a planned requirement for all team members.”
Sadly, I forgot to retrieve my letter upon leaving Team 51 several months later. I’ve always wondered what happened to it and who might have read it. Strangely and to this day I feel an open wound by having left that letter behind. I had intended to tear it up and dispose of it upon leaving Vietnam.
It was after one of his trips with Colonel Arntz that SGM Hayes got a call from the Red Cross telling him his son had been in a helicopter accident at Fort Hood. Seems his son was flying along between the banks of a ravine near Fort Hood and failed to see electric wires strung across the ravine. His helicopter hit the wires, crashed and his son was seriously injured with a broken back, several broken limbs and problems with internal organs. SGM Hayes was crushed by this and kept repeating to me, "If I had let my son come over here, this would never have happened."
SGM Hayes was not himself after that. I could see him sinking into deep depression, had become forgetful and just lost interest in everything. I was in the office when Colonel Arntz had a stern talk with him telling him to get over it and concentrate on his job. SGM Hayes came back to the office we shared with reddened eyes. “Ojeda,” he said, “I’m going for a walk. If anyone asks, I’m in my hooch.” I didn’t see him again until breakfast three days later. The Senior Advisor never asked about his absence but directed me to fill in for the sergeant major and accompany him on his daily flights to outlying advisory teams. As it turned out, his son recovered but SGM Hayes never did. He was never the same after that.
As tough a soldier as he was, Colonel Arntz had a soft spot. We were returning from a trip to Camp Swampy, a nearby Special Forces camp, when we witnessed a Vietnamese boy some five or six years old on the side of the road crying and trying to get his water buffalo to move. His younger sibling was trying to comfort his older brother. I was driving the jeep, and Colonel Arntz directed me to stop. I stopped, and he jumped out of the jeep. The grossly overweight SGM Hayes was in the back seat struggling to get out. I came around to the Vietnamese boy to hear Colonel Arntz say “He fell off the water buffalo and scraped his arm. His arm is covered with blood. Get me the first aid kit.”
SGM Hayes gave up the struggle and seemed content to just stay in the jeep and watch the colonel winning hearts and minds.
I raised the passenger seat, opened the tool compartment and handed Colonel Arntz the first aid kit. He pulled out the iodine, cotton swabs and band-aids. Without speaking a word, Colonel Arntz grabbed the boy’s arm, cleaned it with the swabs, poured iodine on it and put a band-aid on it. He handed the bottle of iodine and some band-aids to the boy who was now smiling and seemed thrilled at the attention I’m sure he never got at home. Colonel Arntz slapped the water buffalo’s backside as the boy pulled on the reins. The water buffalo nonchalantly started down the road following the boy.
With not a word said, Colonel Arntz got back in the jeep, and we proceeded on back to our Advisory Team compound. I expected Colonel Arntz to include this incident in his daily journal. When he gave me his daily notes that day, no mention was made of the water buffalo incident. Such was his focus. Elaborate on the military mission and not the humanitarian side of it.
We had an exceptional group of eight team members in my hooch. One can learn an awful lot from colleagues during mortar and ground attacks. Our group never wavered in defense of our perimeter. At times we were asked to send a man or two to augment other sectors of the perimeter. During one harrowing ground attack, I was the only one left to defend our sector. Enemy rounds were ricocheting off a nearby bronze statue near my sector, and the whole outer perimeter was lit up with parachute flares deployed from multiple positions around the perimeter. The medic was in the team’s clinic caring for the injured while the others were either reinforcing other sectors or transferring the injured to our clinic. That was one of my scariest attacks I ever experienced.
The day after that ground attack I was driving Sergeant Major Hayes to one of the outlying battalion advisory teams to see how they fared during the previous night's attack. He asked, "Where were you during the attack, Ojeda? I didn't see you."
"Sergeant Major, I was securing our northeast sector ALL BY MYSELF!" I replied. "The other three folks that should've been with me were evacuating the wounded and reinforcing other positions."
"Oh, okay," he replied. "That was one Godawful night. Let's hope we can have some peace tonight."
I asked Sergeant Major Hayes if he ever got scared and shared with him my fear and hopelessness. "Ojeda," he said "Don't ever let anyone tell you he was not scared. Fear is something you can never overcome. You just have to put it aside, go on autopilot and perform the duties you were trained to follow. I was scared, too."
During times of fear and as time went on, I was exposed to more mortar and ground attacks, but I was able to better handle the fear factor. Fear never left me, but I learned to manage it better as time went on.
1 A brief letter opened only after the advisor's death. The Senior Advisor would forward it to the next of kin.
2 Killed in action.
3 Missing in action.
©Copyright texan@atudemi.com - January 2022