Sp4 DANNY YATES

 I was drafted in October, 1965 and did my basic training at Ft Leonard Wood, MO.  After basic, I was assigned to Ft Sill, OK for training in Artillery Survey.  After six months of survey training, I received my orders for Vietnam.  I took a 30-day leave and was about to fly from Illinois to California when the airline strike hit and not a single airline was flying.  I went to Chanute AFB at Rantoul, IL and asked if they had anything going west.  I hitched a ride on a C-119 flying boxcar to some place in Nebraska.  There the government stepped in and started chartering airlines for us.

I arrived in Vietnam on July 24, 1966 where I was assigned to the 2/9th Arty, 3rd Bde, 25th Inf Div in Pleiku.  I made it home on July 21, 1967.

MEMORIES

Shortly after we arrived at Duc Pho, someone wanted coordinates of the top of the hill, so another surveyor and I were sent up to the top -- by foot.  Along the way, we found a trip wire across the trail, tied to a potato-masher style grenade.  When we got to the top, everyone was so upset that we had walked up, telling us that the hill had been mined by the French, the Marines and the Viet Cong!  When we finished our survey, a Huey was sent up to get us:)

 

This story appeared in the Denver Post on 26 Jan 1967:

100 N. Viet Soldiers Trapped in Big Cave

SAIGON, South Vietnam – (UPI) – U.S. Infantrymen Thursday trapped an estimated 100 North Vietnamese soldiers in a cave where the Reds held women and children hostage and shot to death an American officer when he tried to save the civilians. It was not immediately known how many women and children were being held by the Reds in the massive granite cave fortress. The cave-clearing operation took place in the Bong Son area in the Central Highlands.   A group of American paratroopers made one of the rare combat jumps of the war on a sandy peninsula along the coast to clear the way for a helicopter assault by the 1st Air Cavalrymen driving inland toward the cave fortress com-plex. UPI Correspondent Leon Daniel was with the American infantrymen in the dangerous operation of clearing out the natural caves honeycombing a jungle-sloped mountain in the highlands about 280 miles northeast of Saigon.
When soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division, supporting the 1st Air Cav in Operation Thayer II, first ran onto the huge cave complex, they heard voices of women and children inside one of the dark, dank tunnel mouths.

The commander of one of the infantry companies went up to the mouth of the cave and tried to talk the civilians into coming out. First Lt. Jerry Orenstein, 23, of New York City, said a North Vietnamese soldier pushed a woman and child out of the tunnel, using them as a shield. The company commander, a captain, lowered his gun, and the North Vietnamese shot him through the head, killing him instantly.

The cave was blown up with explosives, sealing in the Communists.

I spent about 5 days with the infantry there.  My job (as Artillery Surveyor for the 2/9th) was to get coordinates of the caves for subsequent B-52 bombings of the caves.    At the time, I thought the B-52's were a little overkill, but having read the article after all these years, it makes more sense if you never wanted anyone to see what/who were in those caves.

Back