They Were Soldiers by Joseph L. Galloway

Author:Joseph L. Galloway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

JEFF FREDRICK

A trait long associated with Americans, and with American fighting men in particular, is their indomitable spirit, their dogged refusal to give up or quit, even in the face of the most desperate circumstances. There are very few better examples of this spirit than Jeff Fredrick, who had every reason to quit, to accept defeat and live the rest of his life as a powerless victim. But that is something Fredrick will never do.

While serving with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam in 1968, Jeff Fredrick attended a three-day combat leadership course at Bien Hoa, an enormous US base just north of Saigon. “If you’re respectful, and they were going make you a three-stripe sergeant, they’d send you to this course,” he recalled. It was mostly three days crawling on the ground and learning to use field explosives. Fredrick was nineteen. His impression of the twenty-year-old sergeants teaching this course was that they didn’t care much what their students learned.

When he returned to his unit, Company B, Second Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry, no one would speak to him. “I felt like a pariah,” he said. “I was no longer one of them. Because none of the guys I knew were still alive.” Over the next four or five days, he got bits and pieces of what had happened. On July 22, Bravo Company lost seventeen dead and about twenty-four wounded. “One of the first to die was Spec. Allan F. Hamsmith,” Fredrick explained. “We were always together in the field. I knew fifty years ago and I know today that he was where I would have been had I remained with the company. As he entered a wood line, he encountered a VC spider hole concealing a sniper and two machine gunners. They pinned Bravo Company down. Hamsmith was shot in the groin and in the throat. He bled to death. And the rest of my squad was killed too.”

A year earlier, just out of high school in Winter Park, Florida, Fredrick had learned he could volunteer for the draft and then volunteer for airborne. “That’s what I wanted. I was interested in Special Forces, and I planned to reenlist or ask to be reassigned,” he recalled. “After a few months in Vietnam, I put in for an in-country transfer to Fifth Special Forces.”

On July 27, however, while on combat patrol, Fredrick triggered a booby trap that blew off his right leg. Two days later, still fighting for his life in a Cu Chi army hospital, he received a letter encouraging him to submit a transfer request to Fifth Special Forces.

When he returned stateside, Fredrick was assigned to the amputee center at Fort Gordon, Georgia. “When I got back, there was no physical therapy,” he explained. “There was no anything. They just said, ‘Here’s your discharge papers,’ and you walk out the door with an artificial leg.

“I never had any problem with anybody spitting on me because I’d fought in Vietnam. I’d have killed them. You could sense my attitude a mile away.

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