Brothers in arms
Two men, one from Nyssa, the other from Alabama, share their Vietnam war experience

By Pat Caldwell
Argus Observer
PatC@argusobserver.com
Saturday, November 7, 2009 10:17 PM PST

Ontario — Gary Cleaver considers himself lucky.

So does his good friend, and former squad leader, Billy Smith.

They are older men now, but long ago in a Southeast Asian nation Smith and Cleaver became brothers.

Their relationship was one forged in blood and grime, fueled with good memories and bad.

Yet, both Vietnam veterans look back on their time with the 2nd Platoon, A Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division with pride.

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“I’d do the same thing again,” Smith, Elba, Alabama, said.

Cleaver agreed.

“I left the dead there,” Cleaver said.

Cleaver served in the 25th Division in South Vietnam from April 1969 to early spring 1970. Smith, who also served one year in Vietnam, left for home in December 1969.

In between, Cleaver and Smith were in the same platoon and shared the risk, triumphs and setbacks common to the American infantryman in South Vietnam.

“We were right in the middle of what they called the Iron Triangle,” Smith said.

Area of responsibility

The 25th Infantry Division arrived in South Vietnam in January 1966. The division was deployed primarily in Tay Ninh Province and conducted operations near the city of Dau Tieng and the big Michelin Rubber plantation.

Smith was a squad leader when Cleaver arrived at A Company in the spring of 1969.

That was a tough time for Alpha Company, Smith said.

Normally, a company of infantry in Vietnam was more than 100 men, and individual platoons were supposed to have around 30 or more soldiers.

“We got down to 42 people. And our platoon had 12 or 13 guys in it,” Smith said. “We just had not got any replacements.”

Cleaver was one of the men sent in to beef up Alpha Company.

“There were five of us who came in as replacements,” Cleaver said. “I was the only one who made it the full year.”

One element that is particularly striking is the relative young age of the men in Alpha Company. Most were between 18 and 22. Smith, for example, was younger than Cleaver.

“Age didn’t mean anything. We were all young,” Smith recounted.

When Cleaver joined the 2nd platoon, he was assigned to man one of crucial weapon systems in the unit — the M-60 machine gun.

For most of the next year, Cleaver would carry that weapon through the rice paddies and the jungle providing his squad and platoon with heavy firepower.

Most of the time Cleaver and Smith were in the field conducting patrols, searching for the North Vietnamese Army of Vietcong guerrillas.

“Some missions were longer than others,” Smith said. “We’d have times when it was just snipers. Then we’d have a day when we’d walk and find nothing. It varied.”

As time went on Cleaver picked up key lessons from the more experienced men like Smith.

“You had to know what you were doing,” Cleaver said.

He learned, he said, when to know something was not quite right.

“If you didn’t see kids playing (in a village) you were in big do-do,” Cleaver said. It was often a dice roll regarding meeting the enemy when they were on a mission, Smith said. Sometimes they encountered the North Vietnamese or Vietcong and entered a stand-up fight.

“The NVA (North Vietnamese) would set and fight. The Vietcong would fire a few rounds. And there were a lot of booby traps,” Smith said.

In the field, Smith and Cleaver lived in mud, heat, bugs and jungle rot.

The company would be on patrol for days, Smith said.

“Once we were out for three weeks,” Cleaver said.

The extended time in the field took its toll, Smith said.

“Everyone’s feet were messed up,” he said.

Still, the group of young soldiers learned watch out for each other, Cleaver said.

Sometimes the company would board helicopters and move across the countryside searching for the enemy.

“There for a while they’d hopscotch us. We might land five six times a day,” he said.

Once, Cleaver and Smith’s unit received a mission with new maps.

“We had that mission, and we didn’t know if we were in-country. The way the commander briefed us, it seemed like we were going into Cambodia,” he said.

Cleaver, too, recalled that particular mission.

Nothing spectacular occurred on the task, however.

“When it was over, we had to give back the maps,” Cleaver said.

Other times, the company would deploy into the villages and set up night ambushes.

Once, as Cleaver’s platoon was setting up for the night, a nearby sister unit was hit.

“We were just getting ready to set up, and then they blew the ambush on the other platoon. We went to help and then blew some booby traps,” Cleaver said.

Stranded in what amounted to a minefield, Cleaver and his fellow soldiers had to use knives, or whatever else they could dig up, to find the booby traps and get out of the dangerous situation.

“I started leading, found a booby trap. We put a helmet on it to mark it. Then we ran about 400 yards out in the rice paddy, saw the NVA were retreating and called in artillery,” Cleaver said.

The engagement was a small one, but it illustrated the kind of war the men of the 27th Regiment were fighting in South Vietnam. In a sense, in a war with no front line, the GIs were always in danger. Cleaver, for example, was wounded as he was preparing to leave Vietnam while stationed at a firebase.

“A chunk of it (shrapnel) slammed into my arm and tore the heel off my boot,” he said.

Cleaver could have went to the medics and received first-aid. But he said he wasn’t wounded very bad, and he wanted to go home. So he conducted a little first aid on his own wound and left Vietnam.

“When I got home, Mom pulled the shrapnel out,” he said with a smile.

Forged in battle

Both men remain, in a many ways, shaped by their experience in Vietnam. Neither, though, said they let the war define their lives.

Cleaver came home to work his family’s ranch near Nyssa. Smith went back to Alabama and took a job at Fort Rucker as a civilian employee.

Smith and Cleaver both said they were personally disappointed at the way some Vietnam veterans were depicted later in American popular culture.

“You know, we didn’t mistreat the people. We didn’t have drug abuse problems,” Smith said.

And neither man carries any serious misgivings about their service.

“I think about the 53,000 who died and the 100,000 that were wounded for nothing. That is the only thing I regret. We could have won it if we wanted to. It was all politics,” Smith said.

If anything, both men are fiercely loyal to their friends in the 2nd Platoon. Smith and Cleaver said they both try to stay in touch with many of their former comrades as much as possible.

“We have a reunion every two years,” Smith said. Cleaver admitted that he suffered from nightmares for many years after he came home, but a visit to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., changed all that.

“The wall, it made me see things were over,” he said. Cleaver, 62, and Smith, 61, get together often as well. Smith just finished out a hunting trip with Cleaver in October.

“I felt like we went over and did the best we could,” Smith said.

Cleaver, though, summed up his feelings now about his former comrades the best.

“You didn’t realize how close you were until you left the place,” he said.