Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:06 | He was drafted, but with a college degree, he was eligible for Officer Candidate School. Mike Paque went through basic training and advanced infantry training, then it was off to Fort Benning for OCS. It was tough, maybe tougher than what was coming.
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Newly minted Lieutenant Mike Paque was at Fort Polk, moving large numbers of draftees through training and on to Vietnam. It was not a satisfying job, so he volunteered to go ahead and go himself. He knew he would be going, anyway, so he might as well get out of that place.
Mike Paque had just arrived at division headquarters in Pleiku when he met the supply officer, who was about to rotate home. He wound up with his job by virtue of his business administration degree and began to improve the situation and make friends.
He was a supply officer for his first three months in Vietnam, but they decided to send Mike Paque into the field. When he got to Camp Hard Times, the CO made him the supply officer for that unit. Vietnamization was underway, so that outfit was disbanded and he went to a mechanized unit as a platoon leader.
Camp Hard Times was in a valley which led up to the mountains and was there to block Viet Cong movement down from the high ground. Mike Paque remembers the village next to the camp and how pleasant the people were in their rural life which was almost untouched by modern times.
You used a lot of artillery support when you moved. Mike Paque was leader of the scout platoon and when they moved in their armored personnel carriers, they would walk artillery fire in front of them to clear the way. At other times, they were air mobile, traveling above the fray in helicopters.
The airmen didn't like the infantry's dirty boots on their PX floor, but they changed their tune after a Viet Cong attack. Those infantry boys were welcome, after all. Mike Paque recalls that, after that incident, his entire division moved to the Cambodian border in a bid to clear out enemy refuges.
Camp Radcliff encompassed a huge area. It was so big that, when a VC mortar was tracked down, it turned out that it was being fired from inside the camp. Soon after that, the battalion moved to the Cambodian border, where Mike Paque watched ARVN units move in to rescue civilians from the Khmer Rouge.
Mike Paque's unit was operating in a beautiful mountain valley south of An Khe. It was gorgeous country, but every morning there were newly buried mines in the road. They were easy to spot, thankfully, but one day they found a spot in the road that was much larger than usual.
When his time in Vietnam was up, Mike Paque flew to Cam Ranh on a C-130 with some odd Air Force procedures in flight. He made it there and had to wait three days while the Army watched departing soldiers for signs of drug use. Then it was home to a fractured country, where many people despised him for doing his job.
Why were there US tanks in Vietnam? Mike Paque answers that question and tells what happened when a new commander thought he had a better idea about how to use them. It was a civil war there and a difficult situation for an outside force to intervene on one side.
You didn't move at night unless you had to. Mike Paque took patrols out and they always made a secure position at night. He only had two disciplinary problems during his time as a platoon leader. One guy wanted to play his radio on patrol, but the other one had a bigger problem
While on foot patrol, Mike Paque's men found a whole case of rounds for an M79 grenade launcher. Too much to carry and not going to leave it for Charlie, so he prepped a charge to blow it up. It didn't go as planned.
Anytime you would move, you would walk artillery in front of you to clear out the enemy. This was how you did it, but someone high up decided that we were spending too much on shells in Vietnam and made a rule that you would have no artillery support unless you had enemy contact. Mike Paque reveals what happened next.
