We have been learning about Tracy’s Dave Ziemke, who enlisted in the Army in June 1967; trained as a field wireman; and deployed to Vietnam in December 1967. The Army assigned him to the 1st Battalion of the 5th Artillery Regiment, home based at Quon Loi, north of Vietnam’s capital, Saigon. Dave not only strung communications wire, but also performing a variety of other tasks to support his unit’s operations.

Dave’s Headquarters Battery Commander rotated him between the battalion base camp and the remote fire bases, so Dave spent about half of every month out on fire bases. He began describing life at those remote sites with a laugh and one word, “Grubby.”

“[There was] no water to bathe. You had your steel pot for shaving or whatever, but there wasn’t enough water. There was no hygiene in the field. A lot of Vietnam vets, you’ll notice, wear false teeth because they couldn’t take care of themselves.”

Dave explained there were no laundry services in the field, “Your clothes basically rotted off you — it was just a grubby life.” Helicopters periodically dropped off a bundle of uniforms the troops would sort through for their size. Dave described their living quarters at the fire bases.

“Your home was a bunker that you built yourself on top of the ground. We had foxholes, but in Vietnam you’re dealing with sandy soil. If you dug a foxhole, it’d cave in. So we basically had a shallow hole with a bunker over it. My own little kingdom was a little bunker with a crawl-out on the side, so that I was protected all the way around.”

Dave recalled one particular day in the field. “I remember the clerk ran me down in June because Tracy was on the front page of the Stars and Stripes because of the tornado.” His commander pulled Dave from the field and worked with the Red Cross for a week to confirm that his family was safe.

Dave reported that meals at remote sites like fire bases were generally C-rations (prepackaged, canned meals). But he well-recalled Thanksgiving 1968 as an opportunity for a great, hot meal. “We watched Chinooks bring Thanksgiving dinner. Underneath the Chinooks were these big, Mermite cans which were insulated, cooler-type things. They shipped us turkey, sweet potatoes, and all this good, hot food.”

Excited about a traditional, Thanksgiving dinner, Dave got in line for his meal.

“I’m going to my bunker. I’m not paying attention. Off to the side I hear this guy going, ‘Check fire! Check fire!’ I look up and there’s an eight inch [howitzer] barrel that I walked right under. It went off and my ear started bleeding. Well, some of my food went on the ground. I put it back on my plate and walked over to my bunker because out there you’re living pretty basic and a hot meal is hard to come by. The Colonel came over and all I saw was his hands waving and his mouth moving. He was chewing me out for walking under that gun. I didn’t hear a word he said. (Dave laughed) He took my tray and made me go back through the line.”

Earlier that year, Dave’s unit had moved through the countryside around An Loc and encountered a different kind of warfare for which Dave seemed uniquely qualified.

“An Loc was totally different. We’d go over there and you never saw the enemy, but we found many tunnels. I was the skinniest guy in the unit. Guess who got to go in the tunnel?” He explained the access points to these tunnel systems were nothing to write home about.

“Well, it was just a rat hole — enough room to crawl in. They used skinny people and called us worms.” He described the process of going down into these tunnel complexes.

“You’d have a .45 [handgun] and a flashlight. You had the red cover on the flashlight because you didn’t want the bright light. They’d tie a rope to you and as soon as you saw something, you yanked that rope and they pulled you out. Then they would take care of it.”

Dave recalled these tunnel complexes were not only dark and tight, but were frequently booby-trapped. “You’d crawl in and we would have to physically feel the floor all the way and the sides because you never knew what was coming. They would have drop-offs and down at the bottom of the hole would be punji sticks — split bamboo in long slivers in the ground so that when you fell, you’d land on all these pointed sticks, which are infected with buffalo dung or whatever.”

Many of the tunnels Dave checked out were stocked with ammunition, so his unit would blow them up after he crawled out.

“Zippo, one of the guys in the unit who wore [napalm] tanks, would spray it and they’d throw a grenade in there — light up the whole world. Or they would use C-4 (a military plastic explosive compound); or back off, call the artillery, and they’d collapse it. If it had ammo, there was quite a bit of fireworks going on.”

To this day Dave cannot enter tightly enclosed places, but his most extreme experience in Vietnam occurred on Halloween 1968, as he neared the end of his tour.

The Lyon County Museum is organizing an exhibit about the Vietnam War. To share experiences or help with the exhibit, contact me at prairieviewpressllc@gmail.com or the museum at 537-6580.

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