Reader's Digest Soldier Stories by Reader's Digest

Author:Reader's Digest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reader's Digest

Beyond the Call of Duty in Vietnam

BY KENNETH Y. TOMLINSON

Braving heavy communist gunfire one muggy afternoon in April 1969, helicopter pilot Lt. Robert Vinson picked up eight seriously wounded men deep in the treacherous Ashau Valley of Vietnam, and flew them to the base hospital. It was the end of three grueling days of combat and resupply missions for this 23-year-old from Belmont, Massachusetts. In that time, he had seen four of his squadron’s helicopters shot down and three pilots killed.

But, weary as he was, Vinson had still another mission he wanted to fly. Right after debriefing, he took a chopper 20 miles north to a village nestled among the rice paddies of the Huongdien Peninsula, just below the Demilitarized Zone. He trudged through a muddy field to a half-finished school. Surveying the work, he said to a Vietnamese builder, “We’re going to need more cement. I’ll have some here in a few days.”

In the last year, even while fighting communism, Vinson has been engaged in a personal war of his own—against sickness and ignorance in rural Vietnam. When he first visited the isolated Huongdien Peninsula in early 1969, three poorly equipped medical dispensaries served 34,000 people. There were only nine schools, each riddled with bullet holes, and the sole, two-room high school had to hold classes in three shifts. “This is intolerable,” he said. “These people must be helped.”

Wherever he went thereafter, Vinson was on the lookout for surplus material. Flying a colonel to a briefing in Danang one day, he saw a large stack of two-by-fours piled next to the landing pad. “That lumber could help put 50 kids in a school,” he told a supply sergeant. The colonel was flown back to camp with lumber crammed in with him. Vinson scrounged bags of rain-damaged cement, tin and lumber from ammunition boxes. Other helicopter crewmen joined in to help, and every effort they made was matched by the people of Huongdien. After Vinson’s 158th Aviation Battalion donated $1000 for an addition to the high school, the South Vietnamese district chief searched for funds for a second building.

What has it all meant to Huongdien? Five dispensaries have been constructed and stocked with medical supplies. Six new schools have been built, while the nine others have been repaired. The high school now has eight rooms—and a library. The day before Vinson left Vietnam last January, village and hamlet chiefs honored him in a simple ceremony. The district chief said, “We can never thank you enough.”

• • •

All over South Vietnam our soldiers are engaged in similar humanitarian missions. An artilleryman from New Jersey spends a free afternoon stacking sandbags at an orphanage outside Pleiku so the children will be protected from communist mortar attacks. An Army engineer from California distributes toys he bought in Hong Kong to the Longbinh orphans his unit adopted. A Marine rifleman from Texas, on his way in from an all-night patrol near Danang, stops to treat huge sores on the back of an old Vietnamese man.

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