Bill Curwick graduated from Marshall High School in 1968 and attended some college before enlisting in the Army and training as a combat engineer. He deployed to Vietnam in November 1970 where the Army assigned him to Company D, 26th Engineer Battalion, 23rd Infantry Division at Chu Lai.

The Division’s Chu Lai base camp was on the South China Sea, which provided troops recreation, but also posed dangers.

“Once you got past the barbed wire, you had a nice, sandy beach. We played a lot of football on the beach or swam. They had Loaches, small helicopters, flying around looking for sharks. If you had more than one shark in the vicinity, you had to exit the water. If there was only one, (Bill laughed) you took your chance like everyone else. We didn’t have many shark problems, but we had undertow problems. While I was there four people drowned from the undertow. One of them was our medic. He went out and brought someone in and went out again, but never came back. That was a sad day.”

Bill described the overall mission of the 26th Engineer Battalion as well as his Engineer platoon.

“The 26th Engineer Battalion’s mission was to support the Division’s firebases, listening posts, and observation posts by building, maintaining, and helping fortify their perimeters. My platoon’s mission was to go to Firebase Tien Phouc and build a road called the Hao Duc Road. We were building it toward another firebase, going over mountains and across rice paddies. We never made it to the other firebase before they pulled us out.”

The terrain they were building through was mountainous in places, low-lying in places, and dangerous.

“There was a path there. You couldn’t call it a road. Going up the mountain we had to shear 10 or 15 feet off the side to create enough room so a truck could operate. The territory where we were building this road was considered Viet Cong and we couldn’t get infantry to run security for us. They said it was too dangerous. So, we ran our own security.”

Bill recalled enemy action they encountered on the construction site or while convoying to it.

“We had snipers shoot at us almost daily. You always told the new guys, ‘Don’t shoot back because you might hit him and then they’d send someone who can actually hit something.’ (Bill laughed) Yeah, it was concerning, but as long as he didn’t hit anything, we weren’t too worried. But we encountered snipers that were good and we lost people. We got ambushed almost twice a week for a couple weeks in the same, general area.”

The platoon was sick of these ambushes, so their next worksite convoy included more machine gunners and grenade launchers.

“When we got hit, we opened up on that tree line and shredded it with a wall of lead and grenades coming in from the back side, walking in on them. When we ended it, there were 18 bodies. I recognized some as the Provisional Forces (PF) that had helped us earlier, because they often played both sides of the fence — PF during the day and VC at night. We didn’t have any ambushes for a long time after that.”

The road and bridge construction required heavy equipment.

We had dozers, graders, trucks, and Hough Loaders. When building this road we used the big dozers. Mostly it involved getting down below the softer clays and bringing in gravel. It wasn’t a paved highway, just a road.

Bill’s platoon sometimes enlisted villagers’ assistance on bridge projects.

“We made friends with local villagers as we allowed them to work on bridges. They used two-thirds less cement than us and built a better bridge than we would have. (Bill laughed) So, we brought the cement; they used what they needed; and kept what was left over. They built a schoolhouse in one village. They were happy they got free materiel and we were happy we didn’t have to do the work. (Bill chuckled) We just ran security.”

One combat engineer mission involves clearing mines – a dangerous task.

“If we suspected a mine in the road, part of my job was to find and disarm them. (Bill laughed) You don’t have time for that in a combat situation, so I’d put a small block of C4 plastic explosive on the mine with a blasting cap, run my 10 feet of wire, and then hook that to my spool of wire where I could get to a safe distance to detonate it. I was taking my 10 foot wire to hook to my spool wire, holding the wires in my hand in a V, not touching each other. A sniper fired a round at me because I’m always a target. A demolition specialist had a short life span in Vietnam. The round went between those two exposed wires and static electricity detonated my C4, which detonated the mine. It left a hole about 10-12 feet across. (Bill chuckled) I was 10 feet away. I had my head down looking at the wires when this happened. It was the only time I ever wore my helmet. It looked like someone had taken a ball peen hammer to it. My clothes and boots were shredded. My arms and legs had enough gravel in the skin that I could have sanded a board. But there wasn’t any real damage to me outside of my hearing. For the second time since I’d been in Vietnam, I’d survived an explosion uninjured.”

Not everyone in Bill’s platoon shared his good fortune.

©2025 William D. Palmer.