A Minnesota PBS Initiative
Left for Dead: A Second Life after Vietnam
The following is an excerpt from Left for Dead: A Second Life After Vietnam by
Jon Hovde and Maureen Anderson (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Copyright 2005 by Jon Hovde and Maureen Anderson.
Used with permission.
I tried not to think about that. I tried not to think about a bullet with my number. I tried not to think about Godbout. But every time I managed to put something out of my mind, something else replaced it.
There was a superstition that guys who traded in their boots were either going to get wounded or killed. I needed new boots when we were back at base camp for Christmas, so I got a pair. I never considered doing otherwise. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about the boots.
Then there was my lucky piece of shrapnel. I had been hit in the chest when we were going through a cemetery, trying to advance on some VC who were firing at us. I was moving to the front between the tombstones and I felt this thump.
“Damn!” I thought. “I’m wounded!” I hadn’t felt the round, never even heard it. But that’s how guys always said it would happen. You wouldn’t feel or hear a thing. You’d just feel wet. I didn’t dare look down. I just stood there for what seemed like forever, and eventually I realized I didn’t feel wet. Maybe I hadn’t been hit after all.
I looked down and no lie, there was a hunk of shrapnel about the size of a fifty-cent piece sticking out of my shirt.
It was cool in the morning so I still had a shirt on under my flak jacket. I always left the jacket open, and the shrapnel had tapped my chest right over my heart. It was just hanging there. It had all these jagged edges and was obviously part of a hand grenade. My lucky piece, I decided. To have been hit with something that big and not get hurt—that was something.
I carried it in my pocket from then on. It was my security blanket for weeks. One day I lost it, probably when I was changing shirts. I wasn’t one to get upset about much, and certainly not something this minor, but it bothered me a lot. I wrote to Darlene about it: that’s how much it got to me.
I tried not to think about Godbout, I tried not to think about the boots, and I tried not to think about my lucky piece of shrapnel. For that matter I tried not to think about my dad, who had cried twice in his life that I knew of—once on the day I left for Vietnam. Suddenly that worried me. I wondered if he knew something I didn’t.
I had done my best to reassure Godbout that what we were up to the night he died was no more dangerous than anything else we did routinely. Now I knew better. It was dangerous, much more so than working with the Rome plows. I hoped.
I told myself that road running was more dangerous, and now things could get back to normal. We were back to pulling security for the Rome plows, like we’d been doing day after day for months. I just wanted things to get back to normal, and working with the Rome plows felt like that. The morning of January 8, 1968, felt normal. Comforting even. I just wanted back into our routine. I don’t remember what day of the week this was. We never thought in terms of that, it was just days left in our tour: 265 in my case.
I went from 265 days left, to zero. My track had hit an antitank mine. Its six-cylinder Chrysler diesel engine broke through a two-inch solid steel cover like it was wet toilet paper and landed fifty yards away.
I was so glad to be back with the Rome plows on this particular morning I didn’t even worry about the sandbags. The night before I’d taken all the sandbags out of the APC to be replaced with new ones. The floor of the track was 3 1/2 inches of steel, but we put sandbags on top of it for more protection against shrapnel.
You had to replace them every so often because they’d break. These were in bad shape, and after I tossed them I bailed sand out of the bottom of the track. But it got dark before I could get new ones in there. Once night fell, you couldn’t see anything at all, so that was it. I didn’t really worry about it, though. If something could penetrate 3 1/2 inches of steel I doubted sandbags were going to help much.
I wasn’t worried about not having the extended laterals either. Remember, extended laterals let you drive on top of the APC, and instead of just 3 1/2 inches of steel on the floor of the track you had 3 1/2 inches of steel on the top, too. It helped protect you from mines. I wasn’t as worried about mines anymore, not after what had happened to Dick. I just didn’t want to be on top of the track.
We pulled out for the day at seven, as usual, and I was driving inside the track because I didn’t have the laterals. The first thing I heard on the radio was the CO asking me where they were. “They’re back in the ditch where we got in that firefight on Road One,” I told him. “The night Godbout was killed I got caught in the crossfire and the footfeet fell off.”
“God!” the CO said, pissed. “You should have them!”
I didn’t respond. It was time for me to break trail for the first cut.
“Delta 22,” the CO said a moment later. “Pull around the two tanks and make a hard left into the jungle.”
Before I could even pull alongside the first tank, that was it. I went from 265 days left, to zero.
My track had hit an antitank mine. Its six-cylinder Chrysler diesel engine broke through a two-inch solid steel cover like it was wet toilet paper and landed fifty yards away. Darrell Dyer from my squad was sitting on a two-by-eight board in the TC hatch and was blown straight up in the air, hitting the board so hard with his ass on the way back down that he broke it in half. The rest of the guys were blown off the track except for me and another guy.
“Where’s Hovde?” Cowden, the medic, hollered. “He’s inside the track!” someone hollered back. Cowden saw smoke and flames coming out of the hole where I’d been sitting. His hair caught fire when he pulled me out of it. Somehow they got that put out while he took my pulse. He knew right away my left leg was gone. He pulled me out of the hole and the leg didn’t follow. It was still inside the track.
Biographical Details
Submitted From: Detroit Lakes, MN
Story Subject: Military Service
Military Branch: U.S. Army
Dates of Service: 1967 - 1968
Story Themes: 1967-1968, Army, Art, Book, Close Call, Combat, Death and Loss, Detroit Lakes, Firefight, Jon Hovde, Maureen Anderson, Memoir, Physical Wounds, WIA, Wounded in Action