Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
4:23 | Many deaths in Vietnam were accidents, reports radio operator John Craven, who remembers one grisly incident involving a soldier walking into a helicopter blade. The young age of the troops had a lot to do with it, he says. His radio job started out well, but then he realized how much weight he would have to carry in the field.
When he got to Vietnam, John Craven's buddies were sent south to different units and he was sent north to the 101st Airborne. "I ain't jumping out of no airplane," was his response, but in Vietnam, airborne meant air mobile, deploying by helicopter. After a while, he got the urge to ask to be assigned as a radio operator.
John Craven describes the life of an infantry soldier in Vietnam, the food, the rain, the booby traps and the enemies they faced while in the field almost constantly. The villagers were glad to see the American soldiers, he says, but you always had to be on your guard because any one of them could be Viet Cong.
It was a fiasco, according to John Craven, an ambush that went terribly wrong. As daylight broke, a soldier began to retrieve the Claymore mines set out for protection in the night. Suddenly there were explosions and chaos and casualties. Even the Medivac and air support became a disorganized mess.
Radio operator John Craven was back at battalion recovering from jungle rot on his feet when they decided to put him to work in the TOC, the Tactical Operations Center. Now he was attached to a colonel instead of a captain, and had a much easier time of it, better food, too. After his tour, he was reluctant to talk about his experiences, given the political climate in the country.
