They Were Soldiers

The Sacrifices and Contributions of Our Vietnam Veterans

Joseph L. Galloway, Marvin J. Wolf

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781400208807
• eBook ISBN: 9781400208814
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: History

They Were Soldiers showcases the inspiring true stories of 49 Vietnam veterans who returned home from the "lost war" to enrich America's present and future.  

In this groundbreaking new book, Joseph L. Galloway, distinguished war correspondent and New York Times bestselling author of We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, and Marvin J. Wolf, Vietnam veteran and award-winning author, reveal the private lives of those who returned from Vietnam to make astonishing contributions in science, medicine, business, and other arenas, and change America for the better.

For decades, the soldiers who served in Vietnam were shunned by the American public and ignored by their government. Many were vilified or had their struggles to reintegrate into society magnified by distorted depictions of veterans as dangerous or demented. Even today, Vietnam veterans have not received their due. Until now. These profiles are touching and courageous, and often startling.

They include veterans both known and unknown, including:

• Frederick Wallace (“Fred”) Smith, CEO and founder of FedEx
• Marshall Carter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange
• Justice Eileen Moore, appellate judge who also serves as a mentor in California's Combat Veterans Court
• Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell
• Guion “Guy” Bluford Jr., first African American in space 

 

Engrossing, moving, and eye-opening, They Were Soldiers is a magnificent tribute that gives long overdue honor and recognition to the soldiers of this "forgotten generation."

PART ONE

ARTISTS AND PROFESSIONALS

CLOVIS JONES

The Vietnam War spawned thousands of pilots, many of whom left their service and went on to fly commercial aircraft. Unlike soldiers in the air force, navy, and marines who were mostly trained to fly fixed-wing aircraft, most army pilots flew helicopters. Few army combat soldiers became aviators. Clovis Jones was likely the most notable exception. He first served a combat tour as an enlisted infantryman and then flew helicopter gunships. He went on to become one of the most unusual and accomplished pilots in American civil aviation.

Clovis Jones was born in Dawson, Georgia, in 1945. From his earliest years, he wanted to be a pilot, to soar through the air. During his last year of high school, he went to see an army recruiter.

“I wanted to enlist in the high school to flight school program,” he recalled. “I’m a young black kid from Georgia, thinking, Hey, I’m going to flight school. I passed every test. I didn’t realize these particular recruiters didn’t get credit for recruiting aviators; those were inducted through other recruiting stations. I think he put ‘Airborne Infantry’ on my contract to fool me.”

Jones finished basic training and advanced infantry training. He went on to jump school and earned the silver wings of a paratrooper. He thought he was going to flight school until he went to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he was assigned to a rifle squad. Then his “good test scores and good attitude” caught the attention of Command Sgt. Maj. Herbert P. McCullah, who wanted him to be a clerk, pushing him further from his goal. Jones recalled, “I didn’t want to sit behind a typewriter.” Nevertheless, Jones was sent to take clerk-typist classes at night, after his normal duty day, and then became a clerk at headquarters.

More than a year later he was transferred to the Eleventh Air Assault Division, which later became the First Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Jones was assigned to Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry (C/1/8) where he was designated his squad’s point man—the soldier who leads his squad or patrol through dense foliage as they seek to make enemy contact. It was a job more dangerous than most and one that suited Jones well.

By coincidence, McCullah continued as the battalion command sergeant major as he transferred from the 101st to the First Cavalry, and when that division deployed to Vietnam, tensions rose over the battalion mail clerk’s stingy hours. When men who had been in the field for weeks returned to base camp, they hoped to find mail from home. “Even before a shower, clean clothes, something to eat, and sleep, they wanted their mail,” Jones explained. The clerk, however, refused to deliver mail if it was after 1700; he insisted they wait until the next morning at 0800. Jones remembered, “The troops locked and loaded. They would happily have killed him.”

The next day McCullah solved the issue by designating Jones as the battalion “field” mail clerk. Again Jones objected. He wanted to stay with his buddies as the squad’s point man. McCullah, however, had the final say. From that day forward, whenever the battalion was in the field, Jones would drive the day’s mail, along with any official correspondence, from the base camp to the battalion’s forward command post (CP), where it would be distributed to the respective companies. If it was too far or too dangerous to drive, Jones hopped a Huey and was flown to the battalion CP. From there, he went to each company and distributed the mail, bringing comfort from home to the men.

Jones had other duties as well. “On November 12, 1965, I drove one of our S-2 sergeants to the Catecha Tea Plantation House to speak with the French manager. The manager confirmed the previous evening a battalion of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops had moved through the plantation on their way to Ia Drang.

“Patrols from the 1/8 reported that the NVA moving through the plantation had Chinese and Cuban advisors,” Jones said. “As NVA intentions were unknown, the 1/8 went on full alert.” The next morning, the 1/8 was pulled out of Ia Drang and ordered to their base camp at An Khe where they stayed for two days. Then, on November 15, they were redeployed to Plei Me, not far from Ia Drang, where the fighting raged.

One of Jones’s friends was hit, an experience that changed him forever. Jones said, “He took a bullet in his left temple. It was protruding from his right temple. I knelt and tried to pull the bullet out of his head to bring him back to life. When I realized what I was doing, it seemed as if I had been cut from my left shoulder down to my right ankle. A part of me wanted to mourn my friend. The other part said, ‘You’ve got a job to do.’ That was one of the pivotal moments in my life. A change came over me. It was the realization that when it’s time for fun, let’s have fun. When it is time to work, let’s get the job done. In a word, I matured.”

Jones had the sad duty of identifying the remains of other men killed in action. He was almost the only man in the battalion who knew every soldier’s name and face, and the casualties he witnessed took a toll on him. “To quote a line from a movie about Ray Charles, ‘This much killing just ain’t natural,’” he said.

Later, during the Ia Drang battle, Jones flew from the Plei Me Special Forces Camp to the base camp at An Khe. His pilot was Capt. Ed “Too Tall to Fly” Freeman, who some forty-four years later was awarded the Medal of Honor for his repeated flights into LZ X-Ray during the heaviest fighting there, bringing in vital ammunition and taking out the wounded. Jones and Freeman’s flight to An Khe included a short stop at X-Ray.

“I told him that I wanted to be a pilot—I told everybody that I wanted to be a pilot,” Jones recalled. “Freeman encouraged me. He put me in the copilot’s seat and asked if I knew how to fly a helicopter. All the way from X-Ray to An Khe, he told me how much he respected infantrymen. He said, ‘We will bring you support, even if we have to bring it to you at grass-top level. I know you are going to do the same thing when you become a pilot.’

“That was very encouraging,” Jones said. “I had repeatedly applied for flight school and heard nothing at all. Of course, many people thought I was a little deranged, so hearing that from Ed Freeman was encouraging.”

In June 1966, Jones was honorably discharged and felt frustrated with the army. “For almost three years, I tried to go to flight school and nobody listened to me,” he said. He returned to his home in Georgia, but that didn’t work either. “I didn’t fit in back there. I couldn’t relate to anybody. Then I heard from Jim Hutchison, my foxhole buddy, who lived in Chicago. He invited me to come to Chicago.

“He was press secretary for a gentleman running for Congress against Bill Dawson, the incumbent, a black congressman from Chicago’s South Side. I worked with my friend during the summer of 1966,” he said.

He also reconnected with Martin Luther King Jr., whom he had met during the Albany movement, a desegregation and voter’s rights coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. While in high school, he had been one of the students to attend and speak at the mass meetings in Albany. Then, after joining with King’s Chicago Freedom movement, which brought his civil rights movement from the South to northern cities, Jones and some Vietnam buddies led King’s march to city hall in August 1966.

A man of valor, Jones believed in the dignity of every person, no matter where they were. He went to Soldier Field to watch a game with some friends who had also served in Vietnam. They were sitting toward the top of the stadium, he said, “with no one behind us and a good field of vision. We were laughing and joking, acting like the silly twenty-year-olds we were, and a college kid overheard us reminiscing about Vietnam.

“He said, ‘You guys were soldiers in Vietnam? You’re baby killers.’”

Jones recalled, “He spat on me.” Then Jones picked him up over his head and climbed toward the top of Soldier Field “to throw him off. But my buddies grabbed both of us and pulled us down. From that day forward, I avoided crowds unless I was required to go to any arena for some important reason. I avoided busy sidewalks and street corners. If I had to catch a bus, I never stood on the corner but a short distance away,” he said, describing the precautions he took to keep himself in check.

During his time in Chicago, Jones continued to help with the civil rights movement. He attended meetings between King and other civil rights leaders held at a doctor’s house. “I got a chance to meet many of the civil rights leaders who had been in Albany. It turned out that the minister of my church in Dawson was a classmate of Dr. King at Morehouse College. I asked Dr. Benjamin Mays for a premed scholarship at Morehouse, and after I made application, it was granted.”

Jones left Chicago and went to Atlanta, where he enrolled in Morehouse. “Toward the end of my first semester, I got a call from the army aviation department. They wanted to know if I was still interested in flight school,” Jones said. Surprised by the question, Jones learned he had been accepted the previous year, but, he explained, “The First Cavalry wouldn’t let anybody out for a school, so I was never informed. If I still wanted to go to flight school, I had to reenlist.” Jones called Commnad Sgt. Maj. McCullah for advice, who told him to reenlist for Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and he would make sure Jones actually went to flight school.

“I finished my semester, took another flight physical, and then reenlisted for Fort Campbell,” Jones recalled. McCullah was as good as his word. By May 1967, Jones was at Fort Wolters, Texas, for basic helicopter training. Then he went to Fort Rucker, Alabama, for advanced training and learned to fly Hueys.

“I expected to go directly to Vietnam,” Jones recalled. “Instead, I was assigned to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and transitioned into the Cobra.”

Comparatively speaking, if the Huey is your mother’s station wagon, the Cobra is a Corvette with teeth and claws. “We had two pods of 7.62mm miniguns, each firing up to 4,000 rounds per minute, and four pods of nineteen 2.75-inch folding-fin rockets with high explosive warheads. In the nose was an automatic grenade launcher, firing up to 225 40mm grenades a minute,” Jones recalled.

Jones was among the first members of Alpha Battery, Fourth Battalion, Seventy-Seventh Aerial Rocket Artillery, which was activated on September 1, 1968. When the battalion joined the 101st Airborne (Airmobile), Jones flew the older, slower, and less lethal UH-1C gunship for a few months until the new Cobras were delivered. “I took a three-week refresher course at Qui Nhon, where I became an instructor pilot on the Cobra,” Jones recalled.

One afternoon while giving an in-country orientation and a check ride to a new pilot, Jones’s Cobra suddenly handled oddly. “We were down to about five hundred feet above ground level, and then on one of the turnarounds, the nose tipped forward,” he recalled. “I took the controls to see if there were any vibrations, any unusual feeling. There were none, but shortly afterward, when we returned to Camp Eagle and our skids were maybe twenty feet off the ground, the ninety-degree gearbox and the tail rotor left the aircraft.

“We immediately went into a spin. The Cobra’s nose went from nose up to nose down, and I was looking at the ground. It spun to the left as if it wanted to roll on its back. For the next ten seconds I thought I was dead three times,” Jones recalled. “It was pure instinct, plus what I learned the last day of flight training at Fort Wolters, that enabled me to get that bird safely on the ground.”

Jones’s first primary flight instructor had told him African Americans didn’t make very good pilots. His next instructor, Dick Strauss, however, showed him things the helicopter could do that were not in the instruction manual. He told Jones, “It may come in handy one day.” It came in handy that day.

Throughout his second year in the war zone, Jones did much more than fly. “I was the section commander,” he recalled. “I was an instructor pilot, the safety officer, and assistant operations officer, all as a W1, and then as a W2.” Ten days before Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jones went home, his superb leadership skills were recognized with a direct appointment to second lieutenant, field artillery.

From Vietnam, he went to the artillery officer basic course and then to Fort Rucker as an instructor at the Warrant Officer Career College. After completing his service commitment, Jones left active duty but retained his reserve commission. He recalled, “I joined the Georgia National Guard and, after fixed-wing transition training, I flew an OV-1 Mohawk in the 159th Military Intelligence Company.”

Because he was rated for both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, in 1975 Jones found his first civilian flying job with the Flight Test Department at Hughes Helicopters, working on the Apache program. Then Howard Hughes died and much of the Apache program was put on hold. “When my pay stopped, I went back to Morehouse for a year of premed. I believed I could be a good doctor,” he said.

But his passion was flying. Jones left school again and took a job piloting the Falcon 10 and Gulfstream 1 for Xerox Corporation. In 1978, he found a job flying passenger jets for Western Airlines, now part of Delta. “I started on a 737. My job was to sit on the jump seat, make announcements, and do the preflight,” he said. It was a role that was an insult to a man with Jones’s experience. After about three months, though, he was promoted to second officer, and then to flight engineer. In 1980, he was furloughed. Jones found a better job flying for Air California, based at John Wayne Airport in Newport Beach, California.

At the end of 1983, he was offered a job at FedEx. He started there in January 1984 and remained wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One: Artists and Professionals
• Part Two: Healers
• Part Three: Officeholders
• Part Four: Government Service
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Authors’ Note
• About the Authors