Tank Battle Vietnam - Ben Het 1969

So true CPT Jack Durish

Congressional opposition was led by a democratic congressman from Massachusets named Ted Kennedy.

SGT Robert Pryor Priceless!

SGT Robert Pryor - That's hilarious. I bet his wife freaked out. We lost a lot of good people from our ranks in '69 and '70. I think I mentioned when I was sitting at the bar in Group's compound right after I had returned to begin my second tour when one of our SFQC classmates walked in and thought he saw a ghost. He had been told that I was KIA. I wish I could remember his name. There was a Phillip M. Brown who was in CCN. The way the story went down was he had an altercation with two or three Vietnamese at a bar in I Corps. Weapons were drawn, shots fired and "scarface" took a bullet. The idiot was somewhat to the four breezes and managed to live. In the meantime, Phil "Squeaky" Brown had been KIA. In your case, however, no matter how hard they tried, the Viet Minh couldn't get rid of you. Good thing too.

MSG Felipe De Leon Brown - There are a number of times I shook people up, other times people were quite stoic the way Dudley was. The strangest reaction was from SFC Efren "Esse" Renteria (weapons man at A344 when I arrived, later replaced by SFC Dudley). I got Esse's address from SFA in about 1996 or so and wrote him, providing my phone number. A few days later I got a message from Esse on my answering machine using every filthy word imaginable and promising to kill me. He left his phone number, so I returned his call. He went right back into his tirade, accusing me of being a wannabe stealing the name of a friend of his who died in Viet Nam. Esse had been at A-341 Bu Dop and was on the horn monitoring with SSG Mike Parks (Jr. Commo) when I died. So I described things that only someone who had been assigned to Bunard would know. He wasn't buying any of it. He admired my ability to discover such things, to include the flags from The Playboy Club, but said it meant little and he was still going to kill me. Then I described a very private conversation he and I had on the first evening of my very first patrol -- it was only Esse, me and our CIDG. No one in the world except Esse and me could have known about that conversation. After a pause I could hear Esse faintly crying. Then, through tears, he said, "The told me you were dead." Mike Parks, on the other hand, was stoic when I first made commo with him -- a couple of years after finding Esse. His response was, "They said your brains were hanging out the side of your head and you were toast. I broke the sad news to Mike -- none of us are gonna make it out of this existence alive.

SGT Robert Pryor – No one who has never been in combat can ever truly comprehend the depths of feelings for one another. We've been where very few others fear to tread and it remains a part of our being. I believe that I know how Efren felt to realize that you had lived. Thanks for the share, Robert.