We have been learning about Doug Hamilton, who grew up in Grove City and Atwater. He met Chari Olson at Willmar Junior College and they married in 1968. But Doug lost his education draft deferment when he left school and received his draft notice in November 1968, the day before Chari gave birth to their daughter, Becky.

Doug completed Army Basic Training and then Advanced Individual Training as an artilleryman at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The young family was together at Fort Sill, but were separated when Doug received deployment orders for Vietnam. They spent a sad pre-deployment leave in Willmar before Doug departed in May 1969.

The Army flew Doug from Minneapolis to Fort Lewis, Washington. Doug recalled his flight on an airliner full of troops headed for Vietnam.

“It was very somber. They gave us Kool-Aid to drink. (Doug laughed) Tan Son Nhut (Air Base) was where we landed. As soon as the door opened the heat and humidity just “Whoomf!” hit you in the face.”

The Army sent Doug to Long Binh Base for in-country training.

“We went to ‘Charm School’ for a week. They were teaching us how to go through the jungle and stuff. That was more for the infantry. Within a week we were in the field. My unit was Bravo (B) Battery, 1st Battalion of the 30th Artillery Regiment.”

His next adventure involved traveling to his artillery battery in the jungle.

“That was my first trip in a Huey. That was OK, but I remember seeing guys standing on the skids and thinking, ‘What the heck are they doing? This is crazy.’ There’s no straps holding them in and the helicopter’s banking.”

The helicopter dropped Doug at LZ Grant (Landing Zone) at the base of Nui Ba Den (Black Virgin Mountain), an extinct volcano not far from the Cambodian border that towered over the landscape. This was the first of several fire support bases that were Doug’s homes in Vietnam.

“LZ Grant was an established LZ. They had a regular mess hall. Their bunkers were built and they had a lot of reinforcing stuff that temporary LZ’s didn’t have. The berms that were around us were fortified, too. They had a lot of Claymores, fougasse, and lots of concertina wire.”

The fougasse was a directional fire weapon planted around a fire base perimeter for close-in defense. Doug described them at LZ Grant.

“Fougasse was like napalm. It was a jelled gas in a 30 gallon barrel. C4 (explosive) was on it. They usually had sandbags on the back and side of it to keep the blast directed forward.”

Doug discussed their living arrangements at LZ Grant.

“Culverts. (Doug laughed) We didn’t have bunkbeds. It was just 42-inch, half-culverts. Each was maybe 30 inches long. Three or four of them would make up your place. You’d set that on Bangalore torpedo boxes to get them off the ground, so they had some height. Two Bangalore torpedo boxes would raise it enough so that you could squeeze in there. You didn’t have much room (Doug laughed) for pictures and things.”

The troops layered their culvert homes with sandbags for extra protection.

Doug was a new guy so he experienced latrine detail. Latrines were simple, wood huts with wooden seats over open 55 gallon drums cut in half with diesel fuel in the bottom. Hatches in the back of the latrines enabled the detail to pull the cut-off drums outside to burn off the waste.

“They’d check the level of the latrine and every three or four days poured more diesel on top. They’d have an engineer stake bent with a crook in it so you’d have a stirring stick. You figured out which way the wind was blowing and lit her up. You’d stir that down until it was ash.”

The reason Doug’s unit was at LZ Grant was to provide artillery support to infantry operations in the region. Their six ton, 155 millimeter howitzers had a range of 12 miles. He explained how B Battery, 1st of the 30th Field Artillery was organized.

“We had six guns in our battery and they split us up three and three. One set of guns would be on one LZ and the other three would be on another so that we could cover each other if we got hit.”

Doug explained that each of the three B Battery guns on LZ Grant had a gun pit.

“Each gun pit was a circle with the powder (bunker) at one side and the rounds (bunker) at the other side. So, if the powder got hit or if the rounds got hit, hopefully it would not hit the (other) bunkers, too. It was ten to twelve feet from (the gun’s) breech to where the powder was and the same for the rounds.”

Each gun was supposed to have a section of six, but they were always short-staffed. Doug explained his starting role in his section.

“They called us gun bunnies to start. My initial job when we got a supply of rounds was to take the tips off the rounds and put the fuses on. When we had fire missions, my mission was usually on the ramming staff to ram the round (in the gun’s breech) beyond the loading tray.”

Doug didn’t have to wait long before he was helping his gun section on fire missions.

Please join us at the Lyon County Museum Saturday, Jan. 20 at 2 p.m. for “A Gold Star Family” to share the experiences of a Lyon County family whose son and brother was killed in Vietnam.