Below is Part 2 of VBC veteran Jerry Augustine’s account of serving in 1966-1967 with B Company, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 196th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam. The excerpt below is adapted from Jerry’s Vietnam Beyond and
By Jerry Augustine
Mail call was always the one bright spot in our days, a reminder of The World back home. When the company executive officer handed me a Red Cross message saying I’d become the father of a boy, a wave of emotions hit me all at once. I was thrilled, scared, confused. Out here, life and death felt so close that I didn’t know if I’d ever get to hold my son. When word came later that my wife had named him Gerald, after me, I couldn’t help wondering if it was some kind of omen.
A few weeks later a letter arrived from my mother. She told me my best friend back home was seeing my wife. That betrayal hollowed me out. I felt humiliated, angry, and suddenly unsure about everything. For a while, I just wanted out of the whole mess.
Around me, other guys were dealing with their own bad news—whispering about it while cleaning weapons or settling into positions at night, sometimes talking recklessly about the quickest way home. We always talked one another down.
Eventually, I steadied myself, but something in me had changed. I wasn’t the same young guy who had flown into Vietnam.
Night Defensive Position
One night on a long operation, we set up our position the usual way: a twelve-foot sandbag wall about three feet high with a trench dug behind it, just enough protection from small-arms fire or mortars. Three of us shared the position, rotating one hour on watch and two hours of sleep. We set our three claymores ten or fifteen meters out front, spaced them properly, and kept the activators just behind the wall where we could find them in the dark. Weapons were loaded, gear placed where we could grab it without light. Nights in Vietnam were pitch-black, and a single cigarette glow could give you away.
My watch that night ran from midnight to one. I sat with my steel helmet against the trunk of a small tree behind our sandbag wall, trying to stay alert.
A little before one o’clock, as I checked my wristwatch, something slammed into the tree with tremendous force. I was blown backward, landing hard on my helmet. A moment later, flares from the LZ lit up the sky, but there was no incoming fire. The silence told us it probably wasn’t the enemy.
About fifteen minutes later, a warrant officer came over with a flashlight. I told him what happened, and he began probing the tree. He dug out a jagged chunk of steel almost a pound in weight—right from the spot where my head had been resting.
At first light, two more warrant officers returned. They told us the truth: the explosion had been friendly fire. A 155mm howitzer round fired from Cu Chi, twenty-five miles away, had been meant for suspected VC movement in the area. They simply hadn’t realized our battalion was out there.
First Injury
In early December 1966, during a routine platoon patrol near our base camp, as we moved through the heat and brush, a heavy branch suddenly snapped loose and struck me across the face. Whether it was a booby trap or just bad luck, I never found out. My left eye socket took most of the hit. The medic patched me up, and by evening I was on a medevac back to base camp for further treatment.
Saigon
The next morning I was sent to Saigon for an appointment with an elderly Vietnamese eye surgeon. I was ordered to travel in civilian clothes so I wouldn’t be recognized as a soldier—a reminder that the war reached even into the city. With a black eye patch and little more than a map and my Brownie Hawkeye camera, I rode into downtown Saigon feeling like a tourist dropped into another world. The streets were busy, vendors sold American goods on the black market, and life seemed almost normal.
At the U.S. Embassy mess hall, I was shocked by the air conditioning, real food, and the young Vietnamese waitresses in white ao dai dresses. One of them, Lin, took a liking to me. After months in the jungle, her kindness caught me off guard. We talked as best we could, and she encouraged me to return for dinner.
The next day, after the surgeon examined me and gave me medication and instructions to keep the eye patched, I went back to the mess hall. Lin greeted me again, and that evening we went to a movie theater together. I stood out—tall, white, patched eye—but once the lights dimmed, I settled in. The film was in French with a jumble of subtitles, but it hardly mattered. It felt like a glimpse of another life.
We said goodbye the next morning over breakfast, and a C-130 carried me north to Tay Ninh.
When I returned to my platoon, the camp felt wrong—too quiet. I changed into my fatigues, checked my gear, and then learned the news: on the last ambush patrol, two of my closest friends, James R. Van Cedarfield and Anthony Schiavalino, had been killed, and two others badly wounded. The mood in the platoon was heavy. Losing the first men we had trained with since Fort Devens changed all of us. The war felt different. We knew not all of us would be going home.
Not long after, our battalion set up a temporary base camp far from Tay Ninh, and my company headed out on another search-and-destroy mission. The next morning we moved into deep NVA territory, following fresh trails under triple-canopy jungle. The smell of wood smoke told us we were on someone’s trail. Then a sudden explosion shattered the quiet. A booby trap on the left flank. We’d walked straight into an abandoned VC base camp.
We froze in place. No one touched anything. The word came down that Sgt. Bob Dozer from First Platoon had taken the blast full in the face. We eased out the same way we’d come in and set up a perimeter so a medevac could get him.
That night, B-52s pounded the base camp we’d stumbled into. The ground rolled under us as the bombs hit—five-hundred-pounders dropping in long, terrible waves. Lying there in the dark, feeling the earth shake, I understood again how thin the line was between catching the enemy sleeping and being the ones caught instead.
Another company search and destroy mission took us directly through a dense jungle. No trails, no paths, just spread out in columns chopping through the foliage with machetes, searching for what intelligence said was a major NVA encampment. Elements of the 25th Infantry Division were in a blocking formation far beyond our path of direction.
By then we had five months in-country and knew the signs: fresh trails, broken branches, the smell of smoke, caches of rice and weapons scattered through the brush. Everyone felt it: the quiet before something bad.
During a short break, Master Sgt. James Durfee, my platoon sergeant since Fort Devens, suddenly handed me a machete and ordered me to walk point on the right flank. He’d never liked me, and we all knew it. My buddies questioned him. Point men were the first to die, but he shut them down. I left my M-60 with my crew, grabbed an M-16, and stepped out front alone.
The jungle was thick and hot, and every few yards I paused to check for a signal from the men behind me. After nearly an hour of cutting brush, the terrain shifted. The trees were stripped bare, the air too still. I knew instantly: I was walking into a VC base camp.
Then everything happened at once—a single shot, then bullets snapping past my head, and an RPG slamming into a tree just five feet to my left. It struck at an angle and fell by my boot without detonating. If it had armed, I would’ve vanished where I stood.
I threw myself behind a termite mound, expecting a second shot, but the two VC guarding the camp took off down a trail instead. They ran straight into a 25th Infantry unit waiting on the far side and were cut down by machine-gun fire.
When my platoon regrouped, someone told me Durfee had been sent back to headquarters—“nervous breakdown,” they said. I never saw him again.
Rotation to the 4th Infantry Division
After seven months in-country, command finally decided the 196th couldn’t keep operating with the same men at the same base forever. They broke us up and reassigned a percentage of the brigade to other units around Vietnam. Most of us hoped that we’d land in some rear job as short-timers. My MOS guaranteed I would remain a grunt.
My orders came in early March: transfer to the 4th Infantry Division—2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry, Charlie Company based twelve miles east of Tay Ninh in the Michelin Rubber Plantation. Word through the grapevine was that the 4th had been getting chewed up by the 9th NVA Division.
We rode in a convoy of deuce-and-a-halves with our duffel bags and military records piled in the back.
I checked in at the First Sergeant’s tent and found out the man I was replacing had been killed in action. My new outfit was out in the field, leaving the base camp oddly quiet—thousands of rubber trees stretching out in neat lines, the town gate just down the road, and an off-limits swimming pool in the middle of company area that made no sense in a place like this.
When the company finally returned the next morning, I started answering all the usual questions: where I’d come from, what the 196th had been through, whether Tay Ninh was as bad as they’d heard. Before long, I felt like part of the platoon.
Junction City was in full swing, the biggest operation of the war so far, and the 4th was right in the middle of it.
One fight stands out above all the others: LZ Gold, the Battle of Suoi Tre, March 21, 1967. At first light our platoon was moving in when the fire base started getting overrun. We were ordered to flatten ourselves to the ground as mechanized troops in M113s and tanks of the 34th Armor thundered past, firing everything they had. If it hadn’t been for that armor, the place would have been wiped out. When it was over, the ground was torn to pieces. I snapped a few photos as we pulled out by chopper. My friend Jim Brewer, one of the originals from the 196th who’d also been transferred, was killed by a direct mortar hit that day. It felt like another piece of home had disappeared.
For the next three and a half months, we lived in the jungle. Filthy uniforms, C-rations, leeches, heat, firefights, and the constant job of watching your buddy’s back. Sometimes aircraft sprayed a slick film over the canopy. We just wiped it off and kept moving.
One afternoon a resupply bird brought out a hot meal, and I was told I’d been granted R&R in Bangkok. For four days I lived like a human being again—showers, real beds, food that didn’t come in cans, a little sightseeing, a few distractions like every other grunt. Then it was over, and I was back in my fatigues, helicoptering into the bush.
Getting Short
As the months wound down, I started marking the number of days left in my tour on my helmet cover. Every morning the number got smaller, and the hope of making it home felt a little more real. My new platoon leader promoted me to Spec-4 and told me with thirty days left, he’d pull me from the field and put me on daylight gate-guard duty.
Before that break came, he sent me on a mission to Saigon with Sgt. Davis to deliver a classified packet. Davis was a good soldier but a rebellious one, and I knew I had to keep an eye on him. After we dropped the package at headquarters, I took him to the officers’ mess—the same one I’d seen months earlier when I was injured. He couldn’t believe the difference in how the rear lived. Cold air, linen tablecloths, real food. It felt like another planet.
We found a cheap room downtown by trading a case of 7-Up—a commodity civilians prized more than dollars. The next day Davis decided we weren’t going back yet. Against my better judgment, I followed him. One thing led to another, night fell, and we broke curfew. The MPs scooped us up, held us overnight, and shipped us back to Tan Son Nhut at dawn. A few days later, the Article 15 landed on my record.
My Last Thirty Days
When my thirtieth day hit, my platoon leader kept his word. I moved into a bunker at the main gate, worked eight-hour shifts, took daily showers, and ate at the mess hall. After nearly a year of sleeping in the dirt, it felt like stepping back into the world.
On August 3, my platoon leader brought me a crate to pack for home. Grunts were allowed 200 pounds, officers; 300 pounds and up. I stuffed that crate with my old jungle fatigues, jungle boots, helmet, gas mask, entrenching tool, web gear, a hand grenade, civilian clothes, and other incidentals. When a warrant officer came by to inspect it, he said, “Oh, Augie, just nail it up.” He didn’t even look inside.
I was on my way to embark on the “freedom bird” the next day.
Home
I flew through California and into McGuire Air Force Base, then finally to Connecticut. My parents met me on the tarmac. I kissed the ground. I had made it.
Inside the airport, people turned away when they saw the uniform. Not at me but at what I represented. After everything we’d done and endured, that cold shoulder stung and confused me. I was home, but it was like I wasn’t there. I’d just spent a year fighting for my life, and now I was a nobody.
I tried to pick up the pieces the best I could. The monthly combat pay that I sent home to my wife was all spent. My reception at home was cold. I began to work right away as a roofer’s helper with my dad. The 1940 Ford street machine that I left garaged and on blocks was taken apart and left outside by a friend. Even the engine was gone. I was so discouraged, I sold it for a pool table and $250.00.
The marriage I’d left behind was already cracked down the middle, and it didn’t take long for it to break. I blamed myself, blamed the war, blamed everything. Mostly, I just kept moving, hoping speed would outrun whatever was chasing me.
But it caught up with me anyway. I didn’t have a name for it in those days. Shell shock, battle fatigue. I lived in overdrive: working long days, lifting weights late into the night, snapping at people for no reason, burning through helpers on the job because no one could keep up. I didn’t understand that I was trying to drown out the noise in my own head.
War doesn’t end when you leave the battlefield. It follows you into your house, into your marriage, into your sleep. It shows up in your children.
But I’m here. I made it. Many didn’t.
And for that, I’m grateful.
