Brooks, Roger, PNCS

Memories
I have been ask many times if Vietnam was right, wrong, political or what?
Here are my thoughts about the Vietnam War, and my participation in it.

I was a career man in the Navy. I was a Petty Officer First Class (E6) when I received orders and was sent to Vietnam. I was 26 years old. The average age of the service personnel in Vietnam was nineteen. As I stated earlier, I tried to look at this assignment as I did any other assignment in my career. I trained for what I needed to be able to do, and I went where I was sent. I know there was a rather involved attempt by the Personnel Officer in San Diego to get my order canceled and to have me reassigned to a ship. This was done without my knowledge until he was unable to get it accomplished, and told me that. I never did understand his motives. He simply said that someone must really have wanted me to go in country and was in a position to see that those orders were carried out. When I got to Vietnam, I was surprised to find that it was a very beautiful country. I think I expected to see nothing but bomb craters and demolished buildings. My first two months were in an area that was fairly secure, but every place in Vietnam was subject to attack. When my turn came to "go south" to operation sea float, I knew I was getting into the area where the fighting could be fierce. I was to be assigned with the Commander of Task Force 116 as his clerical aid and interpreter. I did serve as a Boat Captain for one trip out to the river mouth. I never came under direct fire from the enemy. Only when fired upon, from a distance, did we return fire with 81mm mortars. We used machine guns to fire on anything floating in the river. We knew the enemy was always trying to float bombs down the river to sink our barges. Sippers (swimmers) would try and swim out from the shore to place bombs on the side of the barges. We threw hand grenades over the side to kill any swimmer attempting to do this. I help load rockets into the rocket pods on helicopters returning from a firefight with the Viet Cong (VC) somewhere close by. Usually they were helping the riverboats get out of an ambush. Did I kill anybody? Not face to face. When returning fire with the mortars and using the machine gun on the river, maybe. I do not know for sure. All I know is, I did everything in my power, to remain alive and in one piece, to stay only as long as I had to in any one situation and then move on.

What was my Job? I was an interpreter and a translator. I worked to decipher documents that were captured and determined what they were and what they were for. There was always gunfire in the distance, and there were always grenades being lobbed over the side of Sea Float to kill any sipper trying to reach the barges. I carried a service .45 pistol and a sawed off 12 gauge shotgun for my protection. Was I scared? Yes, many times over. When the shooting started, or we heard the call for support and we started firing the mortars or loading rockets, we were scared, but we did what we were trained for. See the book "NAM a photographic history" for the worst side of Vietnam. The pictures I took show the nicer side of Vietnam. Should I/we have been there? Probably not. It has been said that it was a politicians war, but we were there, and we did the job we were asked to do, whether good, bad, or indifferent. I am proud that I served with integrity while I was in Nam, I ask only that people realize that and support me for it. War in any form is HELL, and people die, civilian, military, and even worse, children; war is like that. There is never a good war. Because I was there, I like to think I am a better person for it. After my tour at Sea Float, I returned to Cam Ranh Bay and spent the remainder of my time serving as bodyguard to visiting dignitaries and carrying documents back and forth to Saigon. When it was time to leave, I was very thankful that I was able to do so with all my facilities and body parts in tact. There were many that did not come home, and there were many that did come home, but were never the same again. There were many that fell victim to many mental problems. There were many that fell victim to isolation and would never come back to reality. I chose to move on with my career and tried not to let this experience ruin my life, but rather use it to try and better understand my life. Do I still think about it? Yes. Do I still have dreams? Yes. I have chosen to accept what I had to do, and I truly believe that God knows and forgives for what I or any other military person has to do when called to duty. I only wish that we would have had the support of the people, as the troops today have. Is it different? NO! War is war, people die and when your country asks you to fight you do so because you are trained to do so. Was the government right back then? I guess I would ask, are they any more right now?