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Vietnam 1967-68 - Cherry Hill 1
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Cherry Hill - Jan.
22,
1968 - Finally, after 2 months at Divarty with no radar and pulling details, I am assigned to
a
unit with a functioning Q-4 Radar and can get on with the job that I am trained to do. The
Warrant Officer in charge of the section is CW2 A.E.Trovato (Mr."T"); The Senior Radar
Operator is SP5 Charles (Weasel) B. Day; SP4 Radar Operators are J.W.(Abby) Abruzzino, Bill
Trent, Gary Boyd and J.B.Dickinson. These guys came from California, Ohio, Virginia,
Kentucky and Georgia and were some of the best people that I served with while in the
Army. We were authorized a Section Chief but did not have one at the time. After a succession
of
several that were only with us a short time we finally got a good one who stayed, SSG Donnie
Parks. Unfortunately SSG
Parks
was later killed in action; Read more about him on the tribute page. Shortly after joining the
section I was promoted to SP5 which was the authorized rank for my job. The unit had come to Vietnam a month earlier than I, after training together at Ft.Hood, TX. They came with a Radar Mechanic but, lucky for me, he had been transferred to the 101st Airborne division. Early in his search for a replacement mechanic, Mr."T" called Major Beemer at Americal Divarty to see if any Radar Mechanics were available. Maj. Beemer asked me if I would be interested, got a resounding "YES!" and cut the orders immediately. By the next day I was on Cherry Hill as the Radar Mechanic for the Radar Section for the 1/14th Artillery, 198th Infantry Brigade. I found the section to be well equipped, well trained, well organized and well run. Mr. "T" was and is today an expert logistician. The operations bunker, built from 4 x 8 and 12 x 12 timbers, was dug into the side of Cherry Hill near the top and was strong enough to withstand a direct hit from just about anything the VC might use. Because of its position on the sea side of the hill a direct hit from a rocket, which might penetrate it, was just about impossible. The radar itself was surrounded up to the antenna by a sandbag wall and fortifications for the electric power generator were underway. When I arrived on site the bunker was an operations center only. Later we added to the operations bunker sleeping quarters and a machine gun port as well as a wall around the roof. The sleeping quarters became very valuable once the TET offensive was underway and we were operating 24 hours per day. You will note from the construction photos that the walls were about 5 feet thick. We stacked every sandbag and barrel although I will admit that we often paid Vietnamese to fill the sandbags for us. Mr. "T's" living quarters consisted of a 16 foot diameter hexagonal tent on a wooden frame with a wooden floor and screened door, adjacent to the operations bunker. The troop living quarters consisted of a GP Medium tent on a wooden frame complete with floor and screened doors at each end. We all had cots and mattresses to sleep on and as usual with Americans built things such as clothes racks, foot lockers, shelves and even a desk or two. We even had electric lights. We ate at various mess halls of other units on the hill since our own unit, the Headquarters & Service Battery of the 1/14th Artillery was outside of the compound and several miles away at LZ Bayonet. Occasionally we would acquire some of the food uncooked and grill steaks or fish at our site. There was a latrine and shower nearby. The shower had a tank on the roof with water heaters but the heaters seldom worked so we generally took cold showers. We even had an small refrigerator. 
We also had a housegirl who picked up after us (not a small task) and kept our "hootch" clean.
"Long" was 21 years old and the daughter of the chief of a nearby village. She was fluent in
several languages and was studying advanced mathematics during the time she was with us. She
spent many hours studying in our hootch. She had a younger and very pretty cousin "Phoung"
who often came to work with her. I wonder where they are today. For those of you with vivid
imaginations and little knowledge of reality, our housegirl was sort of like a surrogate mother or
perhaps sister. She was a good listener and friend. There were no illicit activities with her. And
I
don't think that we were particularly unusual. Many had housegirls; I know of no one, except
perhaps in Hollywood movies, that had anything else.At first I wondered why our quarters had not been improved as had the other artillery unit quarters on the hill with a corrugated metal roof and wooden walls. Later on when the VC "walked" mortars down that row of buildings, hitting several of them, I was glad that we did not have a metal roof. Ours did not get hit but the metal roof of those that did insured an overhead explosion of the mortar round and also added to the metal fragments thrown throughout the building. With a canvas roof there was a good chance that the round would not explode until it hit the floor, there was no extra metal to add to the shrapnel produced by the round itself and if you were lying down a few feet from the impact point there would be a good chance of survival. There was a Vietnamese store run by a Mr. Mau of Ahn Tan at the top of the hill adjacent to the top of our bunker. Laundry service, haircuts, cokes, snack items and various other Vietnamese merchandise were available there. We provided daily transportation for Mr Mau to his larger store in Ahn Tan for his laundry and other merchandise with our 3/4 ton truck. For doing this we got free haircuts, black and white film developing and occasionally other gifts from him. We also become good friends with him and his whole family. I would like very much to know where he and his family are today. I certainly hope that they survived the war and are well and prosperous now as they were then. As with most of Vietnam the day was ours but the night was "Charlie's." When I first arrived the Radar was operated from 7PM to 6AM; later this changed to 24 hours per day. I enjoyed working as an operator as well as being the mechanic. There were two men on duty at all operating times. One acted as radar operator and the other handled plotting and communications. We alternated every other night from early shift to morning shift. We had every fifth night off. During the day we did maintenance on the equipment and worked on other projects such as enlarging our operations bunker. When we went to 24 hours per day it was a bit more difficult - 12 hours on Radar duty; several pulling maintenance on weapons and equipment and 5 or 6 hours per day to sleep. Special projects were usually not done during these times. It was our job to provide radar coverage for the Chu Lai Defense Command. A secondary objective involved radar coverage of other units in the field and within our 12.5 kilometer range. Soon after I arrived on the hill, it lost it's distinction as "Cherry" Hill. It should have then reverted to it's original and official name of Artillery Hill but had been called Cherry Hill for so long that the name continued to be used. I was off-duty that night and sleeping in our hootch across the road. Sometime during the night mortar rounds began landing on the hill; Charlie was "on-target" that night and was "walking the rounds right down the row of 15 or so hootches of which ours was the one on the far end from where he started. I woke up, grabbed my clothes off of my footlocker and headed for our operations bunker. As I went out the door I tripped on a bomb- grate that we had put there to clean our boots on and slid headfirst into the parking lot that was covered with gravel and cinders. I quickly regained my footing and ran across the road and into our bunker. As I entered the bunker a mortar round exploded in the road that I had just crossed. When I entered the bunker one of the guys asked me how bad I was hit. I responded that I was not hit and why did he think I was. I turned and looked in a mirror and saw that I was a mess - covered with dirt and cinders and bleeding from numerous superficial scrapes suffered in my clumsy fall. As I dressed I realized that I was missing a sock. The next morning I found remnants of green cloth that I suppose were from my sock under the tail fin of the mortar that had hit in the road that we had just crossed. A few seconds later and I would not be here today. After this first baptism of fire Charlie mortared the hill many more times but never with such accuracy as he did that night. We got our first confirmed kill on one of those subsequent attacks - one mortar and two VC; We got intelligence reports later that indicated that a ground attack that was about to start was aborted because of the artillery that we called in. I expect that the fact that we were locating him quickly and calling in Artillery on him may be the reason that he was not so accurate. He had to shoot and then move quickly if he wanted to survive. One of the things that we became very adept at was "scrounging" things that we needed. We made numerous trips to the dump and salvage yard at Chu Lai for the express purpose of finding things. On one trip we "found" a large crate containing 18 man inflatable assault boats complete with a transom capable of mounting an outboard motor. It had been hit by a mortar round. We loaded it on our truck and took it back to our site. When we opened it we found that several boats were still intact. We traded one of the good ones to marines at the airbase for a bomb trailer. We gave another to the motor pool in return for lengthening our trailer. One we kept, loaded onto our new trailer and towed to the Chu Lai beach where we swam, fished and went scuba diving. We looked for but never found an outboard motor. On another salvage yard expedition we found most of a 50 Caliber machine gun. Later we found enough parts to complete the weapon. We test fired it but as it was a bit too heavy a weapon for our use turned it into our armorer and got an M60 machine gun in return. The biggest thing that we "scrounged" was a 50kw diesel generator. We had help from another unit on Cherry Hill doing this and the big beast was put to good use powering not only the radar but the perimeter lights on the hill. It was far more reliable than the 12.5kw gas generator that we normally used. In the early part of March the VC began firing 122mm rockets at the airbase with great regularity. The "book" says that the Q-4 radar is not capable of accurately locating a rocket firing site - we proved otherwise around the first of May and it was "my" location to boot. Normally when a projectile passes through the 2 pie shaped radar beams blips are produced on the radar scope. The operator records the time between the first and second blips as well as marking the locations of the blips on the scope with a grease pencil. The blips are strobed with the two pairs of cross hairs on the scope and the time is entered into the now antiquated electromechanical computer. The time entry applies artillery firing table data that enters a curve into the equation that locates the origin point of the projectile. We correctly reasoned that without the time entry the mathematical formula would assume an infinitely fast projectile and would calculate a straight line rather than a curve. Since a 122mm rocket travels in a straight line until it's fuel is used up and if we catch it before the motors burn out we should have an accurate firing location. We tried it and it worked!! The first few times we gave the artillery coordinates for a rocket location they "walked" artillery all over the area and got the rockets. Later on when they realized that we were giving them accurate locations they fired only on the locations that we gave them. On May 22, when they hit the MAG 13 PX that you will find a picture of on this page the location that I gave them was dead center of the rocket launching ramp. One of the more fearful times that I had was the night that the bomb dump at Chu Lai exploded. Several of us were leaning against the sandbagged wall in front of our bunker enjoying the cool night air and clear skies. As we looked across the airbase at the South China Sea beyond a huge fireball erupted from the south end of the base; It looked like it was miles in diameter. My immediate and thankfully incorrect thought was that Charlie has the Atomic Bomb and I and 3 other guys went thru the bunker door simultaneously. I wound up on the bottom of the pile in the back corner of the bunker at about the time the noise and ground shock got to us. The bunker shook and sand and dust came through the cracks between the timbers but all remained intact. After we extricated ourselves from the corner and looked at the map we realized that the location of the explosion was one of the Chu Lai bomb storage facilities. Since the shock wave was enough to "knock" the radar off of the air, as the Radar Tech I sat down at the console to restart it even though I was not "on duty." It restarted without difficulty and I got an immediate rocket location. Soon thereafter Cherry Hill was also mortared. We also got locations for the mortars. Charlie's coordinated attack paid off for him as he not only blew up the bomb dump but several parked aircraft as well. He did pay a price though as we located both rockets and mortars in separate locations and got confirmed "kills" on both. We had by this time developed a very good reputation as a "crack" outfit and began to be in demand by other Radar units for assistance with training and serious technical problems. Mr "T" and I as well as a couple of our operators made road trips to several other nearby units to assist them with problems. I secretly hoped that this proficiency would induce the Generals at Chu Lai to keep us there where living conditions were good to make sure that the base was always well defended. But it was not to be..... In mid May we got word that we would move to Kham Duc in a couple of days to help defend the Special Forces base that was there and expecting a major attack at any time. The night before we were supposed to go the base was overrun and I have heard still has one of the highest MIA tallies of the war. You will find a link on my Links page to a site done by someone in memorial to the people that were killed and captured at Kham Duc that night. Would we have made a difference if we had been there? Probably not as the attack was primarily a ground attack. Would we have been added to the casualty list? Probably. In any case I am glad that we escaped it. On the morning of June 3 we got advance notice of a possible move to LZ Clifford. By afternoon it was definite and we began to ready the equipment and our personal gear. Since it was only supposed to be a 2 day operation we decided to go with combat gear in "fanny" packs only. That was a BIG mistake as we wound up staying there for about 10 days. We were a very smelly group of dirty and unshaven Americans by the time we got back to the base. See the LZ Clifford page for more about this operation. |
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No. I am not still in the army; I was
discharged in November of 1969 after completing my 3 year enlistment. I don't have a set of
Jungle Fatigues so these Stateside Fatigues from 1969 will have to do here. The shirt fits; the
pants....Oh well.... Click here to contact me by
Email. This site is best viewed with a maximized 800 x 600 size and a high color display setting. Placing your cursor over any of the pictures will display a description for that picture. The music that is playing on this page is 'Suicide Is Painless' which was the theme from 'Mash' a TV show about medics in Korea in the 50s. |
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