Sergeant Chuck Hagel in Vietnam 45 years ago.
On training he got in Vietnam:
The guy next to you may be the guy that saves your life. It may be because of him you either die or live. If he’s not paying attention, then you’re in trouble. That’s effective, and they work that, but again, in the kind of numbers we’re talking about, you’re going to have guys that are and were not prepared to be in those situations.
And a lot of guys cracked up.
A lot of guys were — either hurt themselves or someone else or got others killed or got themselves killed because they weren’t ready for it.
On walking the point:
Well, a point man, as I think most people know, is the individual who was out front. And these are usually squad- sized patrols, sometimes a company-sized patrol, depending on the mission.
And you have the front — physically the front position, but also the responsibility of essentially not walking your squad or your company into an ambush or a trap. So you had to be very, very focused on the peripheral vision and the antenna and just the sense and the instincts and something doesn’t look right or grenades hanging in trees, which booby traps were just a way of life.
You dealt with that all the time.
And just generally having an antenna that’s on 360 degrees all the time. And there were a lot of guys who just didn’t pay attention to it. They just — it’s just the way they were.
And I, again, always felt better if I was up front than maybe some others.
On what he was doing when the Tet offensive began Jan. 30, 1968:
We were securing the rubber plantation not too far from Long Binh, the old Michelin rubber plantation [just northeast of Saigon]. And so my units were the first one into Long Binh as that ammo dump was — was being blown.
And of course, they were getting — the VC were getting into MACV headquarters, and as you know, part of the objective there was to take Westmoreland hostage.
And nobody knew what was going on. Something — something was happening. It was pretty big, but (snaps fingers) we were pulled up out of the Michelin — we left — we left ponchos. We left everything right on the ground. And we grabbed guns and were on those APCs and down that road.
And I was the third track in the Long — got into the Long Binh ammo dump. And as we were getting into the ammo dump, it started to blow. I have a picture in my office — sometime you’ll have to stop by and see it — that was sent to me a couple of years ago by a guy I did not know and still have not met, but he was in my — he was in another company, Alpha Company that was right behind Bravo Company on the tracks going in.
And he took this picture on his Kodak camera, and it looks like a nuclear mushroom cloud that morning when the ammo dump went up.
There were two tracks in front of me that hit — that hit — hit this. Essentially as vaporized as you can be in one of those.
We were the third track in.
And we got the blowback on it. And the force was so bad that it essentially picked the track up a little bit and turned us around and took us right into a ditch. Some of us were burned a little bit, but nobody was seriously hurt…
After Tet, I was acting company sergeant for about two weeks until we could get some senior NCOs in. Our — one of our captains, I remember him very well. He was right next to me. We were in a cemetery one morning, and a sniper shot him right between the eyes, and he was right next to me. We had a pretty high mortality rate for officers during that time.
On Mar. 28, 1968:
We were on an ambush patrol. We knew that VC had been in this area. And we were walking through a very dense jungle, and we were crossing a — a stream. And someone hit a — in fact, my brother Tom and I had been walking point. Had been walking point almost all day.
This was a company, if I remember. I think it was company strength. And my platoon had had the point position. And Tom and I had been out on point most of the day.
And the company commander, I think Captain Davis, rotated my squad back to the second-position squad, and they moved up a squad.
And about an hour later, we were crossing a stream. One of the point guys hit a tripwire in the stream. There were large Claymore mines that had been placed in the trees. And so when that tripwire was hit, the Claymores exploded and of course took down the guys in front of us. Hit me with shrapnel in the chest. Tom got shrapnel in the arms and I think some in his chest.
We — there wasn’t — if I recall, there was a — there was a bit of a firefight, but what the VC would do, they’d slow you down and stop you with these major booby traps, and this one was a major one.
And then they usually would leave behind some snipers.
Occasionally, they’d have a couple of machine gunners that would pick some of you off because in the disarray of the explosion and you’re trying to get to your guys, you’re vulnerable. And some of that happened. And I don’t remember how many people were killed there, but I know there were quite a few wounded.
And then we had to — somewhat of a firefight, and they were able to get the dead lifted out. It was hard to get in with choppers because it was so dense. And then of course you got problems, too, with the security of bringing those choppers down that low. And they were concerned about bringing them in.
And so we — we stayed there up — we had to, until nightfall, to get the dead out and then the more severely wounded. Tom and I, the captain came to us and said, “Can you guys make it?” And we said, “Yes, we can.”
And so he said, “Can you get back on point and lead us out?”
So Tom and I were wounded, but we got back on point, and I think that was — I was as afraid that night as I think I’ve ever been because it was dark. And when it gets dark, it’s — it is dark.
And how many more booby traps you’re going to walk into that you really can’t see. We almost hit another one. My brother Tom saved us. There was another — about — we started to move out. Probably it wasn’t 20 or 30 yards from where we were as we started to get — it was starting to get dark, moved out.
And Tom spotted a — a live hand grenade hanging with a little — a little thin veneer there of wire, which it would have gotten me. And he was able to grab the grenade and defuse it. But we walked them out. We finally got out. I don’t know at what time. Maybe 11:00 at night and finally got out, and the choppers came and picked us up.
It wasn’t that bad. I mean, they took us to hospitals and — I still have some shrapnel in my chest. It was peppered pretty good and punctured and a lot of blood, but there was not anything that was life-threatening. And they took us into a field hospital, and we spent, I think, three days there. They dug most of the stuff out of us, out of Tom and out of me, but they left some of it in me because it was around the heart. And so it’s interesting when I get chest x-rays. (laughter) They show up.