J.T. McDaniel Official Website

There were times when I found myself wondering just what the hell I was doing here. I'd volunteered to join the Army, but I couldn't help thinking that there had to be better places to spend that enlistment than Viet Nam. I just figured it was probably more pleasant in Germany.

That thought was going through my head at that very moment. I had come over to the Enlisted Men's Club at the 160th Group to get something to drink—that something being a Coke, since I didn't drink alcohol at that time and, for that matter, wasn't old enough to buy it in any case—and instead I was flat on the floor, trying to get as much of me under a small table as possible, and listening to the clatter of gravel and chunks of Russian steel on the tin roof. (Not everything at Camp Eagle was tents—a number of buildings had been constructed by using the time-honored technique of bribing the Sea Bees with booze.)

In this situation, when the so-called Viet Cong were dropping mortar rounds and 122-millimeter rockets into the company area, standard procedure for most of us was to try to get the hell out of the way. We weren't in a position to shoot back, so about all you could do was get as low as possible and hope that any of the really nasty stuff would go over you.

After a few minutes, we could hear the Cobras going after the bad guys with rockets and the 7.62-millimeter minigun mounted under the nose of the two-man attack helicopter. The minigun always sounded deceptively benign, for it fired so fast that it was virtually impossible to hear the individual cartridges firing. Instead, there was a continuous noise, resembling nothing so much as a zipper being pulled down.

Once that started, you figured the enemy would be too busy trying to stay alive to keep dropping things on you and you could get back to what you'd been doing.

Or not. Since I was at Group when the attack started, what I'd been doing could be considered finished. It was time to wander back through the cemetery to my own company area, where they would be counting everyone, just in case the bad guys had managed to blow somebody up.

Mortar and rocket attacks weren't exactly uncommon. The enemy liked to set up their mortar tubes or rocket launchers, drop a few rounds into random areas of Camp Eagle, and then clear out before we had time to find them. Sometimes they accomplished little more than making noise and getting on everyone's nerves. Other times they blew up expensive equipment and killed people.

It was the very randomness that was unnerving. You never knew when they were going to attack, or where. And luck was as much a factor in survival as skill. While I was putting in some time at 3rd Brigade—at least, I think it was 3rd Brigade, as I wasn't there very long and not every memory is as clear as it should be 35 years later—I had gone to Japan on R&R. When I got back I found out that the enemy had dropped a rocket right into the slit trench in front of our hootch, so if I'd been in camp instead of relaxing in Atami it was entirely possible I'd now be quietly decomposing somewhere instead of sitting here writing this.

That was the same period when they mustered everyone in HHC for a head count after someone sat down in front of headquarters with a block of C4 in his lap, stuck a hand grenade on top of it, and pulled the pin. As suicides go, it was effective, but extremely messy. They had to do a muster because there wasn't enough left for anyone to identify visually. People recognize each other by their faces, mostly, and this guy no longer had one.

You think about life and death in any war, even when you don't spend much time running around where people are shooting at you. You think about it even more when they are.

I can't say that I ever came very close to getting killed on those days when I got to ride along with our helicopters as they inserted troops. They were certainly shooting at us, most of it happening in slow motion, which isn't a movie cliché, but is exactly what happens under sufficient stress. You get scared later, after it's all over. I suppose this is nature's way of dealing with dangerous situations. You get through them and worry about what didn't happen later.

The closest I ever came, curiously, was on routine perimeter guard duty, and didn't even involve the enemy. Part of the defenses surrounding Camp Eagle included a string of sandbagged bunkers just inside the wire, with foo gas set to cover their front.

Foo gas was a simple device, and extremely effective. You took a 55-gallon barrel and filled with napalm, then laid it on the ground on its side. A claymore mine was placed behind it, and the whole thing was backed up by sandbags. The idea was that detonating the mine would rupture the barrel and spread burning napalm over the area in front of it.

One of the things you did when you arrived at the bunker for guard duty was to connect the telephone and check the mines and foo gas barrels to insure the detonators—ordinary electric blasting caps—were still properly inserted. I had just finished with that, and was walking back to the bunker, when there was a loud bang behind me and the barrel I'd been squatting next to half a minute earlier exploded spectacularly.

After I got up off the ground I was naturally a little curious to know what had happened. When I got into the bunker, everyone was standing around, looking a little nervous. One of them admitted that they'd been testing the phone and had hooked it to the wrong wires. When they cranked the ring generator the current had been more than enough to set off the detonator in the claymore and, in a natural sequence, the foo gas. Everyone seemed quite apologetic that their little error had nearly incinerated me.

I'll just say that I suggested they pay a little more attention to the labels on the wires from then on.