What They Don’t Tell You About Taking Fire on the Mekong River Delta

Gary Howard grew up in Atlanta and joined the Navy in 1968 to stay one step ahead of the draft. A few months later he landed at Tan Son Nhut on the night of Tet '69 – the whole countryside on fire, Intel telling everyone this year would be worse than last. It wasn't. What followed was a year as a Naval advisor with the Vietnamese Marines in the Mekong Delta: helicopter landings, MEDCAPs in remote villages, climbing telephone poles to lay phone lines, sleeping topside under a mosquito net with his M16 next to his head, and yes, waterskiing on the Mekong behind a mail-order Johnson 75 outboard.

In this episode Gary walks us through OCS at Newport, gunnery school, the bus ride into Saigon, the rocket that missed because his hat fell off, the mortar attack that interrupted a winning poker hand on his birthday, the overturned boat that gave him lifelong claustrophobia, and the moment a young woman spit on him at SFO when he finally made it home. After Vietnam he ran a nuclear weapons rework plant in Yorktown, went to law school in Texas, and tried jury cases in Arizona for forty years.

CHAPTERS 

00:48 — Drafted, so I joined the Navy 

02:06 — OCS at Newport (and getting caught asleep) 

03:30 — Gunnery school in Virginia Beach 

07:09 — Amphibious and small arms training 

08:25 — Landing in Vietnam on Tet '69 

13:16 — Bus ride into Saigon 16:25 — Aboard the USS Mercer 

19:36 — A 40-foot boat and 13 crew 

22:51 — MEDCAPs, DENTCAPs, and winning hearts and minds 

23:57 — Waterskiing on the Mekong 

26:36 — The rocket that missed 

27:58 — The telephone pole story 

30:24 — Mortars on my birthday 

35:42 — Food, heat, and the mosquitoes 

36:12 — R&R in Hawaii 

36:46 — Emergency leave home 

40:11 — The girl at SFO who spit on me 

43:22 — Two and a half years at a nuclear weapons plant 

45:43 — Law school and forty years of trials 

49:46 — What Vietnam taught me 

51:05 — The overturned boat and lifelong claustrophobia 

57:23 — Adjusting to "thank you for your service"

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