|
December 16th, 2020 To: Ken Pool (re Steve Pearce's experience in Vietnam)
Hi Ken I'm glad you got out of there. It was a bad war and we should never have been there in the first place. All four of us Pearce brothers had joined during the war. In your job I figure you saw a lot. One of early classmates if you were at Baumun Junior High was KIA in the same year I was over there. Samual Orlando who is buried at Arlington. He was a Navy Corpsman who was taking ammo to the Marines he was out with. I was telling the lady this morning in answer to her questions that on about the last day of October 1966 about nine of us had volunteered on a dirt road to help out an Infantry unit we were told was in big trouble. We flew into the top of a valley from some miles away. It's a long account of a small action so I won't get into the details as it took years to unfold as it first started to unfold in those long days in the hospital back in 1988. On the LZ where a Chinook with a jury rigged footbridge hanging below it told us they were going to wait over the stream about a mile down the valley for us to get down there to guide it in from the ground using the long heavy rope hanging below the hanging footbridge. After the Chinook off down the valley I was asked to go alone into the valley and guide it in while all the others remained up at the LZ to hold it. I knew none of the others on the LZ ad had not known I had a brain tumor and had not known how to tell the stressed out Sergeant that it was not fair that only one soldier go into the valley as our whole group of about nine was to have gone into the valley. Anyway I was under heavy fire at about the first half mile and had started to go into shock in the tall grass that I had jumped down into as the grass was pinpointing my position changes and rounds were striking all around me. I did make it to the bottom of the valley and as I wound through the tall thick brush near the stream there was no sight or sound of the Chinook. As I came around a final turn there to my complete astonishment was the bravest man I've ever met waiting to intercept me. In that ten second meeting he told me the Chinook had been taking heavy ground fire up at it as they hovered over the stream awaiting my arrival and had pulled out and were waiting my return up at the LZ a mile back up the trail (I'm guessing at the distance based on the time it took me to reach the bottom of the valley and discounting the minute or two I was under fire). He was completely dry and very calm. I was drenched and I think in shock. I knew in those few seconds that I was met by a brave man. Within twenty-four hours the memory of the valley was almost completely gone and in all the years ahead no one had ever said a word of the two day mission to me. By the mid 2000's I wanted to be able to show my then teenage daughters what I had done so in 2007 after years of ups and downs I started the years long search for truth and proof. To wrap this up, by 2008 I found the Sergeant who asked me to go alone into the valley and by 2009 I found the Officer in the valley (I thought) but his account was not adding up. But after three years of my phone question and emails he finally wrote that it was not him but a Infantry Officer from a nearby Battalion. From 2013 with the ongoing help of the National Archives and staff at Fort McNair I was able with their to find the Infantry unit and by 2015 I knew who had met me in the valley at such great risk. His name was Lt. Colonel Lewis R. Baumann who was the Battalion Commander of the 2nd of the 18th Infantry who I had never heard of before. He had died in 1995 so I never had the chance to thank him for waiting completely alone in that valley for a frightened young kid. He was one of the most highly decorated Officers in the military with five Silver Stars Purple Hearts from the Korean War. I did talk with his adult son in 2015 to let him know of the bravery of his father. There were two odd things that took place in my last few months that might have been an effort to get me killed. It made me wonder if the Captain had taken a huge reaming out over the fact that one one had gone into the valley. That the now retired Colonel somehow held that against me. I think he was a friend of the Sergeant on the LZ who asked me to go alone into the valley. I hold no ill will towards the Sergeant as it may have been his first combat mission where he was in charge. In the last week before flying home I had passed out due to the effects of the unknown brain tumor and while flat on my back in the shade a young Officer sitting in the dirt next to me told me when I reached the States that there was an award pending but I had been too groggy to ask or care what it was or for. The National Archives did send me a paragraph about the mission in 2013 but there was almost real useful information in it. I suspect that it was my ex Captain now the retired Colonel who I found was very caggy in giving me information. He would have known all the details of the mission but I think he had left from the dirt road in a convoy as soon as we were flown off on the mission as we did not be reconnected with them until the following day where they were waiting our arrival the next day at a big base delivered by Dan Litynski's group of about five tanks who had been waiting a few miles away from the valley to which we were flown to after I came back up out of the valley that late afternoon and whom we spent the night with. All I remember of that night was the feeling of great safety sleeping inside of the small lone circle of tanks who were awaiting our arrival. Dan is now a retired General and as of 2014 headed a department at WMU in Kalamazoo. Be well! Steve Pearce 587 Forest Edge Circle Woodland Park, CO 80863 |