During the war, soldiers had darkly funny sayings engraved on their Zippo lighters or markered on their helmets. “When I die, I’m going straight to Heaven,” read one motto, “because I’ve already been to Vietnam.”
After Chick bid farewell to each of his buddies in Vietnam, they entered another ring of Hell as the Tet offensive raged on. He had no idea where or how they were until he—or they—returned home.
He had Richard (Richie) Reynolds Jr. on his list, but he never found him, because the young Marine 2nd Lieutenant was killed the day after Chick arrived. Reynolds’s younger brother Kevin said that the twenty-three-year-old officer was leading his platoon, part of the Third Marine Division’s A Company, in a charge to rescue a scouting party near Dong Ha, the northernmost town of Vietnam, that was surrounded by more than 300 North Vietnamese Army regulars. Reynolds was machine-gunned down from atop his amphibious troop carrier, killed along with twelve of his men, but the scouting party was saved.
Chick also didn’t find Joey McFadden, but for a less tragic reason. Joey had been sent home, as were all soldiers who contracted malaria twice in the monsoon-soaked, mosquito-infected jungle. His brother Steve (Pally) McFadden said that Joey arrived home in the middle of the night and didn’t want to wake their mother and sister. “We quietly went into our room,” Pally recalled, “and he told me everything he had seen. He talked for hours. Then he never spoke of the war again.” The two brothers would later open McFadden’s Saloon, which Nora Ephron would use as the setting for her Broadway play Lucky Guy, starring Tom Hanks.
“The Tet offensive started just days after I met Chick; and everything got churned up,” recalled Kevin McLoone, the Marine who’d returned to Vietnam as a civilian to help make helicopters safer. “Chick must have had trouble getting around because everything was shut down. Everything was off limits for about a month, especially the military installations.
“The whole country got hit. We were in the bunker and about fifteen to twenty mortar rounds came in. I started second-guessing myself: What the hell am I doing back here in Vietnam? The guy I’d flown up with turned around and went home the next day. I don’t blame him—he probably thought he’d be working in a hangar.
“Everybody was moving. The Cav [First Air Cavalry] moved east and north. We moved to Chu Lai, and hooked up with the Army’s Americal Division at the air base there. It was quite a show there for about a month. It was pretty nasty. We worked on all their helicopters and planes.
“At Chu Lai, we got rocketed and mortared every few days for a while during Tet. You can live with the mortars. The mortars they used were 60mm and 81mm. The bigger ones can mess you up. The small ones, they’d have to get pretty close to do damage.
“It’s the rockets that scare you. Even if you’re in the bunker, the rockets you feel. And they scream when they come in. They make this weird noise. We lost guys, for sure.
“In Chu Lai there were C-130s, F4 planes, and A-4D fighter planes—the Skyhawks—single-seat bombers that McDonnell Douglas built for the Marine Corps that could fly up to 670 mph and carry the same weight of munitions as B-17s could during World War II. They also had a lot of helicopters—all Hueys. They were all sitting targets.”
“So Chu Lai was on lockdown—you couldn’t go anywhere,” he continues. “And near Chu Lai, there are absolutely beautiful beaches. That whole area—China Beach, Hoi An, Da Nang—it’s beautiful up there. After Tet, we went swimming there.
“Later, they sent us to Nha Trang and Phu Hiep to scramble the aircraft radios there, and to Red Beach in Da Nang. Tet was the most violent couple of months of the whole war. We lost a lot of people. During Tet, we were inflicting more casualties on them than they were on us, but it didn’t matter. We were winning numbers-wise but, still, we were losing too many people. My cousin died. All kinds of people we knew died.
“And we got the bad publicity. Nobody back in the States had known how the war was really going. Westmoreland had been giving them stories, but the cameras showed reality.”
By 1969, McLoone says he and his colleagues at Dynalectron had scrambled the radio signals “of just about every Huey in country,” and after two years, it was time to go home. “My sister was getting married, and she said she would never forgive me if I didn’t give her away.”
McLoone went on to work for Westinghouse and Fuji Tech, and to marry Margo, whom, he says, “I’ve known my whole life” and with whom he has two grandchildren, Carly and Alexis. McLoone reconnected with Chick as soon as he returned home to Long Beach, New York. The two diehard Giants fans would attend every game, even away games, by renting a Winnebago and driving to far-flung stadiums. At least on these roads they knew they wouldn’t be attacked, unless it was by opposing fans. A voracious reader, McLoone has stayed in shape by playing tennis, riding bikes and enjoying the snowbird life with his wife in Jupiter, Florida.
Tommy Collins, the young MP Chick first found in Qui Nhon, says that when he came home, “They didn’t give you any orientation on what to expect. We arrived at the airport and they were screaming ‘Babykillers!’ at us. When I got back to the neighborhood, a car backfired and I hit the dirt. I didn’t know what the hell was going on for a while.”
Collins took the test for the New York City Police Department and he remembers the day he was called: June 30, 1969, to the 32nd precinct in Harlem. The seventies were a rough time and the 32nd a tough place: twenty-two cops in Collins’s precinct were shot or stabbed, and five were killed, including partners Waverly Jones, who was African American, and Joe Piagentini, who was shot thirteen times, both from behind, by members of the Black Liberation Army. Perhaps it was Inwood street sense, or his Vietnam military police experience, but Collins earned his gold shield within three years. “You know just about enough not to get yourself into trouble,” Collins quips. He was given the job of training five new recruits, part of the NYC Police Academy’s first class of women allowed to work the street, including beautiful Suzanne Oquendo. The two have been happily married for twenty-nine years.
After working with the Narcotics Task Force, Collins was one of the detectives asked to form the new Career Criminal Unit, focusing on perps who had been convicted of murder, armed robbery, or other serious crimes. Collins worked on the infamous “Tuxedo King” case, where kidnappers kept a wealthy garment manufacturer buried alive for twelve days. “I loved the job,” Collins says. “I’d still do it if I could.” Collins and Suzanne have retired, but they haven’t stopped working. Snowbirds in Ft. Myers, Florida, Tommy works at the spring training camp of the Minnesota Twins, and Suzanne works for the Boston Red Sox; they try not to argue about their beloved baseball.
Meanwhile, after Chick left Rick Duggan near the DMZ, his company engaged in some of the fiercest fighting of the Tet offensive. Rick engaged in 153 combat assaults in his time in Vietnam and was awarded the Purple Heart after being wounded in a six-day battle. Many other awards came later. Best of all, he is armed with a chiseled wit about life.
The First US Cavalry Division was sent closer to Quang Tri City at Landing Zone Sharon soon after Chick left Rick. They were ordered to block approaches to the city, as well as attack a base that the North Vietnamese built in the hills about ten miles to the west. An entire North Vietnamese Army battalion invaded the city, and it was one of the key battles of Tet. It lasted from 2 a.m. New Year’s until noon the day after; but they were chasing NVA soldiers out of there for about ten days.
Duggan recalls, “We went up to LZ Sharon to secure the perimeter. We had success in cutting off their supplies. They [army strategists] relocated us again after that into the lowlands, and we got into a firefight near the coast that lasted a day or two.”
It was then that Duggan was called home. “We were in the field when I was suddenly notified that my father was on his deathbed,” recalls Duggan. “I was to leave immediately to say good-bye to him. The military supposedly did this for everyone, but especially when the Red Cross got involved, which they did.
“They whisked me out like nobody’s business to Cam Ranh Bay. Twelve hours later, I was on a plane with six coffins and two other guys headed to Okinawa and then Alaska. We landed in Alaska in a blizzard, and the two other guys and I were still in our camo uniforms and we were freezing as the plane refueled. We took off for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and I took a bus up to New York from there, where my brothers met me at Port Authority. Thank God they brought me a coat.
“We went directly to the hospital, and I was absolutely filthy still from the field. I went into a rest room and literally had to scrape the dirt from my neck and arms before I saw my father.
“My father lived. I thought, maybe since I had done most of my tour, they’ll let me stay. But no go. At least, back in the neighborhood that night, I was able to stop into Doc Fiddler’s and tell the Colonel that Chick had found me, and that he had found Tommy and Kevin, so far. A roar went up in the bar.
“But since my father didn’t die, the army told me I had to go back immediately, to fly out to the Oakland Army Terminal in California and, from there, fly back to Vietnam. I flew right out to California and got to the base and caught a flight on a C-141, the huge cargo plane with canvas seats on the sides. I was back in Vietnam in twenty-seven hours, and then right onto a supply chopper to An Khe. I was back in the field within five hours of arrival in Vietnam. The guys were glad to see me—they thought I was dead. Later, we were sent to Khe Sanh toward the end of the siege there. The Marines took a beating there, they really did.
“Then we were sent to the A Shau Valley, which was the most bizarre place I have ever been in my life. It was where 17 Green Berets, 200 South Vietnamese Irregulars, and a MIKE Force company of Montagnards had gotten attacked by four battalions of the North Vietnamese Army in ’66. Later, when Tet started, the NVA had gotten a battalion in there and we had done an air assault and we prepped it with artillery and took them by surprise. It was a key locale for them, so close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.
“We got there in a mist, and it looked really strange, like Jurassic Park. Huge craters where the artillery shells had landed. There were no villages, no hootches. The NVA had abandoned trucks loaded with mortars and other trucks stacked with Chinese and Russian rifles—we seized all that. We recovered ammo they had stockpiled. All the guys from rural areas back home took souvenir rifles. I didn’t want one. Nobody from New York wanted a rifle.
“We patrolled different areas, every day a different event, maybe night operations, go support this unit, go support somebody else. Being a grunt, a foot soldier, a rifleman, it’s the old, ‘Yours is not to reason why.’ You don’t know what’s going on at the Command Center, what they’re planning, what their strategy is. You’re told what the objective is, and hopefully you’re successful. That’s the deal.
“It did get a little sketchy toward the end for us, because the NVA guys that we had pushed out of the A Shau Valley were now literally starving, and they had nothing to lose. They must have figured, ‘Let’s just overrun this perimeter.’ One of our ambush patrols got wiped out. They must have thought, ‘We’re going to die anyway, so let’s take some Americans with us.’
“Later on, my buddies were busting my chops, because they had all gotten a week or so of R & R at some point and they went off to some tropic locale and drank like kings. But the Army considered my visit to my father to be my R & R. When I finally did get back to the States, I was in Ft. Hood, Texas, on Thanksgiving weekend, and I got my paycheck and it was like, $2.50. I asked, ‘Where did all my money go?’ They said I had to reimburse them for that flight to California. By happenstance, it was my twenty-first birthday, so I bought myself a Schlitz tall boy and a couple of Slim Jims. That was my birthday dinner. But I was glad to be back in the USA.”
Duggan’s combat experience prepared him well for the job he took next: He joined the NYPD, working in the 41st precinct in the South Bronx, itself a war zone. His patrol partner was John Timoney, the future chief of department. Duggan soon made lieutenant, and with his first wife had children. Later, he met beautiful Noreen O’Shea, who, like Tommy Collins’s wife, Suzanne, was a pioneering female cop. They are together to this day, enjoying, finally, some well-deserved R & R.
When Chick found Bobby Pappas, he had what by any estimation was a big job. Pappas had gotten army training in radio and teletype communications so when he was deployed to Vietnam’s 576th Ordinance Company in the Third Ordinance Battalion at Long Binh, he was made a sergeant and put in charge of all communications inside the ammunition depot—the world’s largest. Working with the 25th Infantry’s 89th M.P. Battalion, which guarded the depot, Pappas says, “We had thirty-two towers connected to us via radio and telephone” in an underground bunker. “We had six roving jeeps mounted with M2 50-caliber machine guns constantly patrolling the perimeter. We were in constant contact with them. We also had four dog handlers. The dogs would tell us if anybody was out there.”
Even after the massive explosion Chick saw from twenty-five miles away at the start of the Tet offensive, when the Vietcong fired 122mm rockets into the depot, killing four of Pappas’s beloved officers in one hootch, the huge pyramids of ammunition remained primary targets.
“I would have to call in helicopter gunship support when it was needed,” recalls Pappas. “On two occasions I had to call in napalm strikes.”
Pappas remembers the day he left Vietnam: October 30, 1968. Like Collins, he notes, “They didn’t give soldiers any debriefing. Boom, you’re home, you’re out. I think it doomed my marriage—I didn’t see my wife and my baby daughter for the first year and a half.”
Pappas went to work for the Long Island Lighting Co., becoming a project manager. After twenty-three years, he took a buyout, but they offered him a sweet deal to work as a private contractor. While his work life was good, his personal life was not. “I had nightmares every night. I couldn’t sleep,” Pappas says. “I was drinking heavily.”
But then he made changes in his life that were akin to making a K-Turn midair with a C-130. “I stopped drinking in 1979 when I went into A.A. I started to get counseling for PTSD at the Veterans Administration. I still go. And I met and married Eileen.”
That would be Eileen Tarpin, a nurse. “It’s been great ever since I met her,” Pappas attests. They share grandparenting duties from their home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Pappas golfs and goes fishing whenever he can. “I just hired a boat with four guys from A.A. and we went fishing on a lake. We caught nineteen catfish. It was a good day.”
You could say that. Chick’s buddies who survived left Vietnam, but for a long time, Vietnam didn’t leave them. It took years, but they all seem to have built lives of joy. They deserve one good day after another.