The Vietnam Archive Oral History Project Interview with Eric Kenney Conducted by Steve Maxner January 22, 2002 Transcribed by Shannon Geach

Transcription

1 `ATTENTION: Copyright The Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. "Fair use" criteria of Section of the Copyright Act of 1 must be followed. The following materials can be used for educational and other noncommercial purposes without the written permission of the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. These materials are not to be used for resale or commercial purposes without written authorization from the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. All materials cited must be attributed to the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. The Vietnam Archive Oral History Project Interview with Eric Kenney Conducted by Steve Maxner January, 00 Transcribed by Shannon Geach NOTE: Text included in brackets [ ] is information that was added by the narrator after reviewing the original transcript. Therefore, this information is not included in the audio version of the interview Steve Maxner: This is Steve Maxner conducting an interview with Mr. Eric Kenney on the nd of January 00 at approximately :0, Lubbock time. I am in Lubbock, Texas and Mr. Kenney is in or near Sullivan, Illinois. But you re actually somewhere else aren t you sir? Eric Kenney: Yeah, I m actually in Freeport, Illinois. SM: Ok. Freeport. Why don t we begin the interview sir with a brief discussion of your early life? If you would tell me when and where you born and where you grew up. EK: I was born in Decatur, Illinois in 1. Grew up in Sullivan, Illinois. Graduated high school from Sullivan. What was the rest of the question? SM: You answered it. What was it like growing up there? EK: Small town. Rural town. Farming community. In the middle of the corn and soybean belt. Majority of the crops that feed the world are grown. SM: What did your family do there? EK: My father was an employee at Caterpillar tractor company in Decatur. Built heavy equipment machinery. My mother worked on the draft board. SM: On the draft board? EK: Yes. 1

2 SM: Ok. Did you father or any of your other relatives serve in the Second World War or Korea? EK: My father served in World War II. He served in Burma and he flew the Hump. The Himalayas. His cousin served in Muriel s Marauders and was the guy who took care of the mules for Muriel s Marauders. SM: Did you get to talk with your father or with his cousin very much about their service overseas? EK: Yes. Some bits and pieces over the years. When you re young you don t retain or understand a lot of that. Now, they re so old it s hard to sit down and dig into that in depth. So, yeah it was a different time. People looked at their service in a different way than they do today. SM: What did you enjoy about living there in Decatur and what did you enjoy about school, things like that? EK: The typical things that kids do. Sports, school, extracurricular activities. Church that sort of thing. SM: Did you like any specific subjects in school? EK: I don t know that I liked school at all (laughs). I don t know. I think I learned to be a good reader and a good writer during my high school days. Which taught me to be a more effective communicator. SM: When did you graduate from high school? EK: 1. SM: Had you heard at all about Vietnam prior to graduating? EK: Yes. I had a friend who was from a nearby town and there were other friends in the local community. But he and I wrote back and forth to each other. He was currently there in country and would tell me about it. He at that time was at Marble Mountain in the helicopter squadron. He was in the Marine Corps at that time. He was writing me about Operation Hasting. Some of the bloody battles that happened south of Da Nang in those days. SM: Did you know any other people that were serving in Vietnam just as you were graduating high school?

3 EK: I m going to have to think about that. I knew a kid by the name of Richard Hukstep. He was in the Army. Came back telling some heroing tales. SM: Do you remember the name of your friend who was writing you? EK: Yes. Jerry Ensign. Just like the boat. He lives down in Texas now. We still communicate with each other. In fact he lives right next, two doors from one of the guys in the th Engineers. SM: Oh, really? EK: Yeah. Well, did his correspondence with you did that have any kind of effect on you in terms of your decision to enter the Marine Corps? EK: No. He just kept me informed as to what was going on. That certainly was no picnic. People were playing for keeps. I then went off to college. Basically just ran out of money. Through searching around as to what I could do I got to talking to some people who had just come home from Marine Corps boot camp. They explained to me the ins and outs of the GI Bill benefits. That s really what coaxed me to in the service. SM: So, it was primarily you ran out of money and had to do some thing else. EK: Right. I knew I was going to get drafted anyway. In those days we didn t have any choice. We had a draft. My mother worked for the draft board so I was fully aware of what the benefits were there. So, once your classification changed you were subject to the draft. By talking to people about what the different benefits were in the different services, the different branches. In those days you could go four years Air Force four years in the Navy, two years in the Army. The Marine Corps at that time was given a three-year hitch. Which is about what I figured I needed to finish my college. SM: Where did you start college? EK: The University of Illinois. I came back and finished up. I have a Bachelor s from there. SM: How long did you stay at University of Illinois? EK: Before I went in the service? SM: Yes, sir. EK: A semester. I actually worked a semester before I went so I could get some money to go.

4 SM: What was the atmosphere like on campus? EK: It was laid back. It was more hippie [anti-establishment] type. Not hippies. What s the word I m looking for? They weren t anti-war yet there. They were still in the old beat-nick level so to speak. I don t think the anti-war and the hippie movement started until early and later on. That s my recollection. What year was Woodstock even? I don t remember. SM: I don t necessarily think I remember. EK: I think it was or, which I think is what most people consider as the big turning point of the anti-war movement. Excuse me, I ve got a cold. I m still trying to get over it. Go ahead. SM: What were you going to study there at University of Illinois when you first started? What were you studying? EK: I was in business. I graduated in Finance with a minor in Insurance and Risk Management. SM: Although there was no obvious anti-war activity do you remember talking much to other college students about Vietnam and the Vietnam War? Of course, it was in the news and people were being drafted, going off. EK: No. SM: It wasn t really discussed too much? EK: No. Now, when I came back it was. But, in early no. It was not. I joined the Marine Corps in September of. SM: Right. So, what was that like? EK: What was what like? SM: Going into the Marine Corps? EK: Well, I had a good idea what it was going to be like from talking to my friends. I had a real good idea of what boot camp was like. I was in very good physical condition in those days. My friends prepared me for that before I ever went. So, I was in the right mindset and I was young and in good shape. I really sort of excelled at the physical part of the training. To the point where I was later on asked to become a Drill Instructor. The Marine Corps used to have a system called the performance and proficiency club. If you earned between 00 and 00 point that gave you a special

5 certificate out of boot camp. Then you were eligible to become a Drill Instructor at a later date. Just because of your physical [prowess]. The physical demands of going through Marine Corps Drill Instructor school are beyond what anyone really comprehends. When I did get back I was offered the chance to do that. At that time, I was a Sergeant. Of course, I was out of shape and disenchanted and lots of other things by then. [I wanted to finish college.] SM: What did your parents think about you going into the Marine Corps? EK: They were understandably fearful because of the consequences. My mother was very worried about it because she had close contact with all the recruiters. So, they would tell her things. So, I m sure that disturbed her to hear the different recruiters come in and say well this story they heard. Or this thing they knew. My father he just said don t drink the water (laughs). Because it s poison. Of course, he d been in Burma and China. There wasn t many things fit to eat or drink in those days when he was there. SM: What was the most challenging part of boot camp for you? EK: Most challenging? Oh, I don t know. I don t know that I was really challenged physically. They got me in real good physical shape. I guess maybe the most challenging things was maybe that I was a house mouse. Do you know what the house mouse is? SM: No. EK: During boot camp the drill instructors learned to evaluate troops and how they fit into their little pecking order. One of the things that they do is they pick out people from the group that are capable of not only doing their boot camp duties, but other duties besides. So, the drill instructors pull people out that they call house mouse. These people come into their duty hut, make their bed, shine their shoes and do all their extra duties for them like a houseboy. If you perform well, a lot of times because you re doing double duty, you usually make rank right out of boot camp. The head drill instructor at that time was a little bitty Irishman about my size. He was from Boston named Malloy. Who in fact was killed in Vietnam. Have you heard of the book, I m trying to think if the name of it right now. Operation Buffalo? SM: No, I have not. Haven t read that.

6 EK: Pretty well know book. But, Anyway In Operation Buffalo Staff Sergeant Malloy is featured in that book. It actually in fact tells how he was killed at point blank range by a recoilless rifle shell. I m trying to think. The guy that wrote the book is pretty famous. I m surprised you haven t heard of it. SM: No, I haven t read it. I had heard of the book but I hadn t read it. EK: Anyway, my drill instructor was John Malloy and he was from Boston. According to this book, one of the things they say in the book is that Sgt. John Malloy is the best damn NCO in the Marine Corps. That s what his men thought of him. You just have to get the book and read about it if you re that interested where that was. I guess that probably the hardest thing in getting through boot camp was the fact that I was doing double duty as taking care of the drill instructors quarters. Sweeping it, their boots. We d take a brush and brush off their DI hats even. So, I guess that s my recollection of doing all that in boot camp. The physical part I had it pretty well mastered. I was doing 0 pull-ups and push-ups. I maxed out just about every physical thing that they had. SM: Did you make rank faster out of boot camp because of that? EK: No, I went off to engineer school. After you get in there then the rank just went through the toilet. I stayed an E-, which is Lance Corporal. I made PFC a short time. But then I stayed E- for a long time until I d been in Vietnam almost six or seven months, which was almost two years later. But I did make Corporal, which is E- while I was in Vietnam. Then shortly after I came home I made E-. So, I don t know that time period between E- and E- and E- was slow in those days. It was because of where I was at I think. SM: What kind of weapons training did you receive in boot camp? EK: We snapped in or we fired with an M-1. We fired.s also. We didn t qualify for.s but we qualified on the 1s. SM: Any work with the M-1? EK: Not at that time. I don t think it was developed until in. Maybe it was, but it would have been so new that they wouldn t have been using it for training. Now, when you went to ITR you had the old M-1 and some of that equipment. In ITR infantry Training after boot camp. No, we qualified with the 1 at 00 yards. SM: When you graduated you went on to engineering school?

7 EK: Yeah. See, there s two kinds of Marines. There s Hollywood Marines and there s real Marines. That s the big argument. The real Marines go to Paris Island in North Carolina. The Hollywood Marines, they go to San Diego. See, the Hollywood Marines they get towels and sunglasses (laugh). SM: I understand. Yeah sure. So you were a real Marine? EK: I left California. SM: You were in California? EK: I was a Hollywood Marine because I was sworn in in St. Louis, Missouri in the basement of the Union train station, which is now a fancy, fancy resort place now. So, after boot camp there I went to Camp Lejune, North Carolina in Jacksonville. Engineer school in those days was out at Courthouse Bay, which is where the infamous Amtrak [ and Recon] boys were at. That s where Steve McQueen got in all his trouble (laughs). SM: What did you focus on in your engineer school? EK: When I went to engineer school I went into heavy equipment. They had heavy equipment maintenance, they had heavy equipment operators. They even had a mine school there also. So, that s all the stuff that they did at the engineer school in those days. You lived in Quonset huts there. I don t remember how long the school was. It was a couple months. Then from there you got assigned to a unit someplace finally. So, I ended up by the th Marines in main side in Camp Lejune. I think I was in a battalion called Second Service Support or something like that. Was there about a year. They generally did Mediterranean cruises to the Mediterranean. Everybody in the unit always tried to get on those cruises because you went to Cuba or you went to places in the Mediterranean. You d be gone for six to eight months. Well, they only had so many billets. They can only take so many people on those ships. I think I missed the Med cruise by one man. Of course, all the people that I had been with were all going on the cruise and here I wasn t going. So, I just said the heck with it send me to nam. So, that s what happened. That s how I got there. SM: What was your MOS or what was your specialty with heavy equipment? Where you an operator or mechanic work?

8 EK: I was a mechanic. I did later on do some operating. I had licenses for quite a few vehicles at one point because we had to move stuff around from place to place and on and off ships and so forth. So, as I progressed I began to get like a driver s license for different pieces of equipment. When I got back to the States I was on e of the few people that had the ability to drive equipment around from place to place so that they could work on it or move it from place to place so it could be operated so we could do stuff with it. [Repair them or use them to do work.] That was real true out at Pendleton because Camp Pendleton s very large. It s 0 square miles. SM: I m sorry go ahead. EK: I think I m getting you off of where you re wanting to go here. SM: No, not at all. I am curious in terms of the types of equipment that you were working on. EK: Bulldozers. Scrapers they called them MRS 00s. MRS 0s. These were big pieces of equipment. The big scrapers were very big. We had TD-1s, which are big International dozers. Then we had EIMCO dozers, which are kind of like these lawnmowers that spin around in a circle right now. They re very complicated pieces of equipment. The driver set on the very front of the dozer. If you pushed one gear forward and one back it would actually spin in a circle. SM: Wow. EK: So, it was quite a piece of machinery. They had General Motors diesels mounted backwards in those dozers. We had quite a few of those. That was what we thought was a pretty exceptional piece of equipment. If we could keep them together and keep them from being blown up. SM: So, you stayed at Camp Lejune for a year before going to Vietnam after your schooling? EK: I went to staging in probably June or July of. I got in country about August. I imagine staging was eight weeks. I got in country last part of August of. SM: Now, as you were going through your training at boot camp and then in engineer school, how many of your instructors were Vietnam Veterans? How much did they talk to you about Vietnam if at all?

9 EK: Not a whole lot then because it was early on. There was one or two in the infantry training after boot camp, but the other places there weren t a lot of Veteran s then. I don t know you could look up the figures. I don t think that many people had been in country then. The advisors left in what? Late early? SM: The United States had advisors going back to the early 0s. EK: But I mean that s when they quit doing them and really started pumping troops in was early. May of, I mean we got in country in May of, our battalion. So, I would say I would be the first round replacement. Being there in August of. SM: Did you meet many guys that had been over to Vietnam and back in your unit when you were there at Camp Lejune? EK: Yeah, there were a couple out at Lejune. I remember Sergeant Gallovick from Indianapolis. We though he was just the berries because he had a brand new Super Sport Chevy. We could ride home with him on weekends. He was a Sergeant, he was good to us. He d been to nam. We thought that was kind of neat. Kind of looked up to him. There were some other guys that had been there. SM: Did they talk much about their experiences? EK: No, they didn t a whole bunch. Most of them said heck, it s not that bad. You could go over and you ll be all right. What the heck? Go. You ll be fine. Save your money and come back you can get out if you want. Or stay in if you want. So, no they didn t make it sound like it was some big hellhole that you couldn t live through. I didn t feel I experienced that. Maybe some of the grunt units feel that way. I didn t feel that way. Engineers don t end up in the bush all the time like the grunts do. We ve got the ability to ride on dozers and trucks and stuff like that that they don t. Our mission was different. Our mission was to be all along route one from Da Nang all the way to Chu Lai. So, we re talking 0 some miles of road. Now, we had hills along the way that were pretty much out in the boonies. Be that as it may you still had a place to sleep underneath a tin roof most of the time. If you weren t under a tin roof you were in a bunker. SM: When you left to go to Vietnam in August of did you get any kind of briefings?

10 EK: Oh, yeah. We went through staging. What staging is in Pendleton, you go through booby trap, mine field training. They actually teach you how to survive on your own. They send you through a POW camp. You fire a lot of guns again. You do escape and evasion. Those sort of things. You take a whole bunch of shots and then you go over. I think that takes about eight weeks. Of course, they try to get you in good physical condition also. I can remember during escape and evasion. What they do is turn everybody loose and the idea is not to get captured. If you get captured they take you back to the POW camp. Well, I was one of the first ones to get through it and get back to the place where you were supposed to be. I remember waking up in the morning with great, big, black tarantula spiders all over the top of me. As big as your hand. SM: Was this part of training? EK: No, they were just there. They re indigenous to southern California. SM: I didn t know if maybe someone put a bunch on you. EK: No, they were indigenous. As we would be walking along on those five and ten mile jaunts you would see just packs of them walking across the road in a line like a wave of water. They were as big as your hand. I can remember getting through with escape and evasion and the place where we did this was at the top of this big hill that looks down over I-. Interstate Five that goes along the Pacific Coast highway that goes down to San Diego and the other one goes to Los Angeles. So, I pulled a poncho over me because it was kind of not misty, but it was dew and thing like that. So, when I woke up here were all these tarantulas allover the top of me. Must have been 0 of them, SM: Were you afraid of spiders? EK: No. Of course, there were rattlesnakes there too. You learned what to do if you re running in formation how to scatter and hope nobody got bit. You just kind of dealt with that. I remember some guys going up in the mountains and for fun catching rattlesnakes and bringing them back. I thought they were nuts. I think they were. They seemed to know what they were doing. They were kids that had grown up around rattlesnakes wherever they were from in Arkansas or Texas or wherever. It was no big thing to them to deal with rattlesnakes. SM: What did you think the United States was trying to accomplish in Vietnam before you left?

11 EK: Before I left? SM: Yeah, in before you left. I think they were trying to accomplish what they ve always tried to accomplish throughout the course of history in this country is allowing people the chance to be free. Allow them to experience democracy. It had been done in many other places and many times over the years. I didn t think this was any different than any other time. It was doing in Guatemala, Cuba, Spain, the Philippines. Over the years go back to the Spanish American War what really was taking place there. SM: What were your first impressions upon arriving in Vietnam? EK: My first impression was God dang, this place is hot. It just hits you like a blast furnace when you came off the plane. The first thing I saw was a guy with a guard dog who had ears and scalps on his belt. His guard dog was tied to a fence and he was laying there in the middle of the noonday sun dead asleep. Like he was two steps away from death because he was so tired. This dog was barking so loud that I don t know how anyone could have slept through it. Of course, the jets were going. Taking off and landing. In the midst of all this I don t know how anybody could have slept through that. Here I m looking at that and I ve been in country ten minutes. Wow, this is a hell of a place you ve got yourself into. Here s this guy with ears on a loop on his belt. I m sure he was rotating out of country probably with the dog. Sure he d probably been there nine months. SM: Where did you arrive in country? EK: I arrived in Da Nang at the receiving barracks. That evening they got mortared. I thought geez. I think they walked some mortars in behind the Continental jet that we flew in on. Yeah, they got mortared that night. Of course we thought oh gee, God we don t have any weapons. We didn t have any blankets. They just pointed us in a direction and said go over there and then come back in the morning. We didn t know where the mess hall was or anything else. So, then when they mortared that night it scared the heck out of all of us. In the middle of the night people came in and woke a bunch of people up and said come one; come with me you re going on guard duty. Some of them were taken to the outskirts to be on guard. Of course they didn t have any weapons. They thought how am I going to guard anything I don t have a weapon. I guess there were weapons out in the bunkers where they took them.

12 SM: How long did you stay there? EK: I don t know. Two or three days. Eventually you keep going back and they would cut your orders because there were hundreds of people coming through there at once. There was some big meeting of the mind in the sky that would decide ok, these five people are going here and there, five there. Until they cut the orders and sent you there that took a matter of time. SM: Did they have any kind of in country briefings for you while you were there for the first couple of days? EK: Have any what? SM: Any kind of in country briefings, you know dos and don ts things like that? EK: No. Just hurry up and wait. SM: So, your initial orders were with the th Engineer battalion, is that correct? EK: Right. Then when I finally got those orders they flew me on a C- down to the Chu Lai airstrip. Then from there I had to figure out how to get to the main headquarters, which was several miles away. I don t know if somebody there at the receiving thing called them. Somebody came over in a jeep or a six fire or something and picked me up. Took me over there. Then we went from there. Because the main base was a couple miles outside of Chu Lai. SM: What were you first impressions upon arriving at the unit? EK: I don t remember I think I was so busy checking in. I think they sent me right down to supply and said here s your weapon, here s your flak jacket, here s your helmet. Here s so many rounds that sort of thing. Gave me web gear. Not sure they didn t even give boots then. They gave me a blanket and a cot. I was pretty busy as soon as I got in there. I knew right away where the heavy equipment place was. I ended up sleeping in a hut where there was about guys in a hut right away. Of course, they were all heavy junk guys like me. It was kind of like my home. I knew I was going to be in for a year. SM: What was the morale like in the unit when you arrived? EK: It was good. It was really good. When I arrived there everybody kept telling me oh, hell this is a cakewalk. We ve never been hit. We ve never had incoming. That sort of stuff, which was true at the main Chu Lai headquarters. Out into the other 1

13 outposts and some of the company areas that were out along the road that would have been different. In fact, I know it was different because I know all the history of the th Engineer battalion. Most people don t know that. I ve got a lot of history in my head that nobody else would know. Because I ve come in contact with every body that was there. Had all these stories that I m able to put together like a puzzle that some of the other people aren t aware of. SM: What was your primary responsibility when you got there? What were you going to do? What were you assigned to do? EK: We were in heavy equipment. Our job was to keep all the generators and all the heavy equipment running and moving no matter where it was at. It could have been on the DMZ, which was 0 miles away. We were just scattered all over everywhere. Point of fact we mine swept 0 some miles of road [per day]. Maybe it was miles of road per day. When you think three teams of men are just mine sweeping miles of road, that s a very demanding day in day out piece of work to be done. Just on that particular thing. In addition to all that there were trucks hauling rock. There were water points in a lot of different places. There were generators everywhere. We also had two rock crushers. Two rock piles if you will. At one time, one was south of Ch Lai and the Korean Marines were down around that area at that time. Later on another area was developed that was north of the Tam Key area around hill, hill. We always had outposts five [ten] miles south of Da Nang and two mile from Chu Lai. Point of fact from the moment we came in country. In fact our unit was specifically sent there to do that specific missions. We were hand picked to do it. We were formed in Pendleton and sent just to do one mission, which was to keep the road open from Chu Lai to Da Nang. SM: So, you yourself were involved a lot in the minesweeping? EK: No, I wasn t. SM: Oh, you were not? EK: No. But we all knew about it because we all went up and down the road constantly. You had equipment everywhere scattered from one direction to the other. When this stuff would break down they d say ok, get in the contract truck. We re going to the rock crusher. The rock crusher broke down. So, you d have to go up and down this road on whatever vehicle you were on to go there to repair that. Maybe make two or 1

14 three trips if you didn t have the right part to fix it or whatever. That s what was constantly going on. In the midst of all this Bridge company was building bridges. As I said the mine sweep was doing their mine sweeps everyday. Heavy equipment was keeping all the equipment and generators working and then you had utilities guys that were doing plumbing. You had electricians that were keeping the electric lines hooked up to the generators so the people in different places could have electric lights. Basically our task was a support unit. Although we were right in the middle of everybody that needed support. SM: What were the most common problems with equipment in Southeast Asia? Were they generic general problems? Were they problems caused by heat? EK: You took combat loses. Some hit mines. One of the big problems we were having at that time was we couldn t get supply parts. Everything that we requested they would say back order, back order, back order. We couldn t get it. While I was there an Inspector General a group of them came around trying to figure out what the problem was in the supply chain that wasn t getting us the things that we needed. I don t know whatever came of that. This is prior to computers and all the logistics that they do today. I know in those days we did submit our requests via what do you call the little cards that had the little hole punched out in them? Punch cards. We were submitting requests on punch cards in those days. The punch card would come back and it would be written on it back order, back order. We couldn t get it. These things went to Barstow, California. They went to I think Albany, Georgia, which were main supply depots. That s where these cards would go. Then they would apparently go out in this big supply depot, look for what it is we wanted and box it up and ship it to us. Of course, that was mostly being brought to us by ship. Well, you can imagine how long that would take because the cards got to get to Albany or to Barstow, California and then they got to have it. Then they got to box it up and it s got to get to a ship and then it s got to come to us. Now, we scrounged. Much of our time was spent scrounging and stealing from others. To keep things going. That was one of the hidden traits of the th Engineer battalion (laughs). That we were barters, con men and thieves. We worked very closely with the Navy. The Navy would I think six month rotation tours. The Navy would bring all the things that they needed for six months and then they would go back. At the end of their tour they d 1

15 say we can t take this stuff back that they didn t use, so they would give it to us. Of course, some of it they d give to us some of it we would trade for. We would get things like hand grenades, AK-s. You name it. If it was Vietcong contraband we could use those things to trade for things that we needed to keep us going. That s what we did a lot. The Navy people we re good to us. Many times they would give us a lot of stuff that they still had left. One of the big things was fuel injectors, for example. We could rebuild our own fuel injectors in the field. But, you had to have a fuel injector body and some other thing that went with that in order to do it. It was kind of dangerous work. If you got spurted by one of these that the fuel injector are under so much pounds per square inch that if it goes through your skin when you re working with it the spray would go through your skin and it would kill you immediately. You had to know what you were doing. We didn t let too many people do that. You still needed, there was a little part inside the fuel injector that was like a filter. You could not touch that with your human hand because it was so precise and the tolerance was so precise that if you touched it with your finger you d ruin it. So, you had like little tweezer things that you would put this in place. You couldn t get those pieces to do what you needed to do anyway. So, the other thing we did was cannibalized. You know what that means? SM: Oh, yes. EK: We would cannibalize off of other equipment, which was totally against regulation, but we did it. If you could take a clutch off of one thing and make something else work, what s wrong with it. We would have to try to remember where we took it off of when we got the other one in and then put it back. We did a lot of that too. SM: You say cannibalizing was against regulations? EK: Yeah. Yes it was. You could get court marshaled for that. We had good superiors and they said go ahead and do it. We ve got to make this equipment run. Our mission is to do this and we can t do it unless we have equipment to do it with. We had cranes that would bust booms. If you re lifting a load wrong and you just collapsed those booms in half. After you do that that cranes not worth a diddle if you don t have another boom to go on it. Things like that happened a lot. Or cables would bust. I ve seen quite a few cables, dragline would bust. You know these big rollers that you see them rolling on the construction sights that are big as a truck? We had quite a number of those that we 1

16 would roll along the road to break the road down because you were dropping rocks as big as boulders down. The idea was to roll that into the soil. Those things were heavy. We d lift those upon low boys, flat beds. They were always breaking the booms on the crane with those. When these boones would break those cables, which would be probably about as big as your middle finger would go flying through the air. If those cables hit you, man you re gone. They d cut you in half. SM: Were there many accidents? EK: Yes, there were. We have a fair number of people that were killed due to accidents. We had a kid who drowned. We have a kid who fell off [a telephone pole]. I shouldn t say kids, but we were. We were 1 or 1 years old all of us. A guy who was up on a pole working with an electric line and the pole collapsed. We didn t have telephone poles. We took metal tubing that the [shell] rounds came in and welded them together and made telephone poles out of them. Well, this kid was up at the top of this telephone pole, working with some electric lines and the pole collapsed and he fell. It killed him. We had a fair number of accidents. More than you would realize. Then you re dealing with Malaria and the rest of the health maladies. We still don t know how many KIAs we had. Wish we could figure that out. We ve got a total of 0 some that we ve been able to document, but we think there s another 0 there [still missing from the list]. SM: For the year that you were there, what were the most difficult missions you supported? Was it the road clearing? The mine clearing? EK: [Yes and]i would say and you re not aware of this the bridges. SM: Oh, bridges construction. EK: bridge construction. We re credited the th engineers with having built the longest bridge in the history of the Marine Corps. It was built over the Song. The S-O- N-G, Ba, B-A, Ren, R-E-N, Song Ba Ren River, which is south of Da Nang. The bridge was feet in length. There had been an old French railroad bridge there and it had kind of fell down. Then the rest of what was there before had been blown up by the VC. We were given the task to build an all-new wooden bridge. They hauled in the wooden pieces for the bridge from Da Nang. We trucked them from Da Nang to the bridge, put them together. If you go to our website you can see a picture of the bridge. It tells you 1

17 all the dimensions and how long it took us to build it and so on. That was a major undertaking for our battalion, which was about 1,000 people at that point [all during our time in Vietnam]. SM: That was one of the most dangerous mission you had? EK: Well, there were lots of different dangers. Going on patrol was dangerous. SM: Oh, absolutely. Did you do that much? EK: We patrolled all our own areas. We were basically self-sufficient. Our purpose was to support all of the units in the area. To keep the roads open and allow the food and the cargo to go up and down the roads so that the infantry could eat. So, they could be supplied. We worked on part of Route nine, which was an east and west road. Which was another interesting tale. It s hard to answer that question. Over when you say mission, every day was a mission. SM: When you got into Vietnam what were you issued as a personal weapon? EK: I had an M-1 with a selector. You know it was fully automatic. SM: You never got an M-1? EK: Yeah, I got an M-1 later on. One of the things that we were charged with while we were there, which was an interesting thing. Along about I would say March or April [1], well, it was after the Tet offensive of. Some guys had been overrun at either Quang Tri or Khe San or someplace up in there. They had been in a massive firefight. The Marine Corps thought that the reason that these guys had been wiped out is that their guns had jammed and wouldn t fire. So, we go the illustrious task to try to test and to make these guns not fire. So, we were given somehow by headquarters of the Marine Corps the job of trying to do this. We would go out and fire these M-1s and we d put different kinds of lubrication on them and we d throw hem down in the sand and do everything we could do to try and make the weapons misfire. Try to duplicate what the problem had been. Now, years after the fact, I suspect that the only problem with the weapons was that they just didn t have time to clean them. The weapons had misfire because they were just dirty. We had tried everything. We threw them down in water. We did everything we could and we couldn t get one weapon to misfire. Now, if we took a weapon out and we fired it and fired it and fired it and didn t clean it, we could get it to misfire. So, the test was, the belief was that there was a lubricant that went on 1

18 the bolt. There was a white one and a yellow one as I recall it. There was a lot of technical theory that this lubrication that went on the bolt of that M-1 was the cause of these misfirings. They d found these guys overrun in their fighting holes. They had taken their cleaning rods and pushed them down to try and free their weapons. They knew there was a legitimate problem that the guns were seizing up. They weren t firing. So, somebody surmised that it was the lubrication for the bolts. That was one of the things that we did while we were there. Which was probably a worthwhile thing. SM: You say the only time you could get the weapon to jam was if you didn t clean it? You just fired it and the carbon built up over time. EK: There was a little pin inside the bolt. SM: The extractor. EK: Yeah. It was silver looking and shaped like a bullet. That flew back and forth. There would be residue that would build up on the inside of that pin. That s more than likely what happened. Residue from the gunfire that seized them up. Those guys had been in the bush so long they probably didn t have time to clean their weapons properly. Or they had just not done it because they were too tired. They were just pushed to the limit. Rather than clean their weapon they slept. One of the parts [dilemmas] of war, I guess. We were given the task to do that. I can show you the command chronologies where it tells about it. SM: This will end interview number one with Mr. Eric Kenney the nd of January. SM: This is Steve Maxner conducting an interview with Mr. Eric Kenney on the rd of January 00 at approximately :. I am in Lubbock and Mr. Kenney is in Illinois. EK: Freeport, Illinois. SM: Sir, why don t we go ahead and pick up with a discussion briefly of base life. I was interested in learning about the kind of base camp you lived in? Some of the physical characteristics, security. EK: You mean in the States or overseas? SM: Well, in Vietnam. EK: Ok. 1

19 SM: What was the base like that you operated out of as a central location? EK: As a central location, the central headquarters was just a large elliptical circle with wooden hut with tin roofs on them. It was maybe a quarter mile across I diameter. Dirt, well actually sand. Everything was sand. The sidewalks were pallets. Were pallets. Wooden pallets that we had unloaded all the equipment off of. That it was stacked off when it came off the ships. We just saved the pallets and used them for sidewalks. We did have electricity. We did have water. We had I think four showers. Four shower heads. The plumbing or the outdoor shitters were two and four hollers. They dumped them every day and burned them off everyday. They were -gallon drums with diesel and that was it. It was just diesel fuel and that was your toilet. It was the same way for your stand up duties only those were outside [out in the open entirely]. We did have a mess hall there. Once you left that compound then you would be anywhere from 0 miles or more to 0 miles from that base. You might get one hot meal a day. You might have electricity, you might not. The plumbing facilities were the same. You mostly ate C-rations. You probably lived in a bunker, which was just a sand bag hole with a slit out the front. You generally had a cot to sleep on, whether you were out away from the main headquarters or whether you were there. Unlike the infantry or the grunts we generally had a place to lay our head at night. The grunts on the move like they were a lot of times they slept right out in the open, much of the time. I guess you could say we would be out in the open because we d be on patrol and on perimeter guard. That was basically the arrangement. You didn t get much sleep [anytime]. SM: Now, did you spend more time in the base area or did you spend more time out? EK: I spent more time at the base area because I was heavy junk. That s where everything took place. Everything went in and out of there. Guys from time to time in the th Engineers rotated from company to company sometimes depending on what their MOS was and what the qualifications were. Some guys did that as a way to get away from the base headquarters and get out into the boonies too. Our job was to keep the equipment going. We were always on the go. Sometimes you would have to go out and bring the equipment in because they couldn t get it in. You might have to take part of it apart in order to get it on something to haul it. Just depended on what the situation was. 1

20 SM: Did you guys have any kind of heavy recovery equipment for larger vehicles like tanks, things like that? EK: No. We really didn t. All we had was cranes and bulldozers. Lowboy trucks. That s really all we had. We could get use and access to that generally from the Army. We had no helicopters whatsoever. Our battalion commander had private use of a helicopter that the Army furnished for him that would fly him from hill to hill. We should have had, but that s one of the things that Colonel Perea says to this day was a very bad planned idea of the Marine Corps is not having a way for an engineer battalion to move around quickly over long distances because we were spread out so far. SM: You mentioned yesterday that at times you would go out on patrols. Was that in the base camp area? EK: We went on patrols everyday no matter where we were. Whether we were at the base camp or whether we were on the hills. We patrolled our own areas. Whether it was hill, hill or hill at Tam Ki or hill up by Da Nang or Chu Lai down by Chu Lai. We patrolled our own areas and set up our own ambushes. We took care of ourselves and sometimes bailed out people when they did get in trouble. We would get calls where the infantry was getting overrun at on e particular place or another. We would send people to their aide. SM: Did you yourself get sent to any of those? EK: No, I didn t. I did have a guy that called me up one time out of the blue from St. Louis area and said I just want to say to you thank you. I saw an ad in a magazine some place about th Engineers. Said you guys came and saved our butts where we were getting overrun. I didn t know his name or anything. He didn t really want to tell. All he wanted to do was to thank me and for me to pass along to the membership of the th Engineers [Association] what had happened [and that we saved his life]. SM: How about contact with the enemy during your patrols did you have any? EK: Oh, yeah. Did I personally? Oh, yeah. We were followed. We many times were followed to the rear. They mostly wanted to just watch us I think. At the times I went. Now there were other patrols where they took fire. They tried to set them up in an ambush and so on. Things didn t get bad until Tet of. That s when they came I and 0

21 told us that we were surrounded by,000 NVA and you couldn t take you clothes off. You had to sleep in your clothes and boots and everything. You better have everything locked and loaded and your flak jacket and helmet ready to go. Because if alert comes boom you re gone. Usually when that alert came you were getting mortars or rockets into the compound. SM: Well, why don t we go ahead and talk about Tet of? Did you guys get any kind of warning that Tet was going to happen? EK: We knew it was [near] the New Year. It pretty much coincides with our New Year. We knew about it. We were hearing I guess intelligence that Victor Charlie or the VC were going to do something. Then all of a sudden they did. At the main headquarters at Chu Lai, probably a mile or two across the road was a large what you calla rubberized, great big rubber balloons full of gas. The Vietcong hit those direct on from behind [our compound areas]. Four, five, six, seven miles away and they also hit the Phantoms [airplanes] direct hit on the Chu Lai air base. When they hit that fuel dump there were six or seven guys that were there that were guarding that fuel dump. Some of them were up in towers. Some were down on the ground. It vaporized them. They never found them. That s how big an explosion it was and how much heat there was. It was like a couple miles [hundred yards] away it felt like you were at Hiroshima from the heat from it and the light. It was quite a concussion. That was my first feeling of what Tet was like. We ve got picture some place of some of our men standing down in a crater where this happened. You know it s huge. It s big enough to drive a couple train cars into. Just the left over crater. That was my connection there at Chu Lai [at Tet] was that big explosion. Then after that they would shoot at us at night. They would shoot flares off. They would snipe at us. Everything in the daytime and the nighttime picked up. I don t remember if it was that period that we went like six or seven day s without sleeping. Because every time you would try to eat you d have incoming mortars or incoming fire. Every time you tried to sleep it d be more of the same or you were on perimeter guard yourself anyway and you had to stay awake. It went on like this for six or seven days without a stop. I can remember that you got so dopey that you didn t know where you were. SM: Did you guys lose many men during that period? 1

22 EK: Trying to think. Well it was later in March that a gentleman by the name of Heavy Savara was killed in a mortar attack [about were wounded some time]. He was a communication guy. He was a radioman. I went on several patrols with [him]. I know that was in March. I m trying to think in January, February time period. There were [other] people in th engineers killed, but they were out on different hills [at that time]. Of course, you know the scuttlebutt or the gossip that runs from one area to the next is like lightning. So, if somebody gets killed 0 miles away on another hill you hear about it pretty quickly. You ve got people running back and forth all the time anyway. You have to have people bring in food and taking them gas, taking them water and things like that. That s how you hear. It travels pretty fast, the news. I m sure I could go back and look it up and talk to you factually but just off the top of my head I can t remember [exact numbers]. SM: During Tet do you recall if your unit engaged and killed or captured any enemy soldiers? EK: Yeah. There were some patrols captured. Some prisoners. It was eight or ten. They always loaded them on a six by and took them to a prisoner of war camp. There was a prisoner of war camp between Chu Lai and Camp Kie someplace on the west side of the road. I think it was the east side of the road, toward the ocean. SM: Did that occur on any of the patrol you were on? EK: No. I don t remember ever bringing any prisoners in. I ve been there when patrols came back and they were right out in font of us. I remember one firefight that I was in where they started mortaring us. There was three villages there in the Chu Lai area called An Tan or Tic Tay. Tic Tay one two and three. Supposedly these were the villages in the area where Ho Chi Minh had grown up as a child. Anyway it was supposed to be a big VC sympathizer area. Anyway they were shooting artillery in on us or mortar in on us from that village which was maybe 00 or 0 yards away. When they did that they had a patrol that was trying to come back in the wire on that same night. What they were trying to do was get us to shoot our own men. Because they came back in. I can remember prisoners being on that particular one [return patrol]. People were pretty upset because they tried to set us up to get us to shoot our own men. I forgot the other part. What was the question to start out with?

23 SM: Just if you remember. EK: Prisoners, yeah. We ve got pictures of them some place. SM: If the patrols you were on personally? EK: Personally brought any in? No, but I was on perimeter guard when a lot of prisoners came in. SM: You were talking about an ambush that you were on. Did you guys when you set up your ambushes did that net many enemy casualties? EK: I never did. I know there were some. I know there were some supposedly killed. I know there were some blood trails and that sort of thing. They didn t want to mess with us too much. They wanted to pick on you when there was two of you and there was 0 of them. There was of you and they knew you were on the hunt, they didn t seem to mess with us too much. SM: Now was that the typical size of your patrols about men? EK: Yeah, I m thinking eight to ten guys. You had a radioman and a man in charge. Something like that. I don t remember now. I have to think about that one. You always had a point man and sometimes he carried a shotgun, sometimes he didn t. I can remember laying an ambush one time and the fire ants getting to me (laugh). I couldn t move, but I had to. They were eating me alive. SM: How did you handle that? What d you do? EK: I just suffered. It was the most harrowing night. I don t know how long we laid there in ambush it wasn t more than an hour. In fact, we laid in ambush in a cemetery is where we did it that night. Those ants just chewed me alive. I can really remember that because it was so damn uncomfortable. Of course, it was hot and sweaty and we were wet anyway because we had walked through the rice patties to get there to start with. We were probably wet almost to our waist. Then you re hot and sweaty and you lay down and so you re wet and the mosquitoes started attacking you. Then the ants got me. I m trying so hard to lay there and not make any noise. It was terrible. SM: Any other incidents involving insects or wildlife? EK: Oh, yeah. Some guy shot some water buffaloes. I know some guys shot some geese for fun and got in trouble. SM: What happened to them?