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29 Off with the Old and on with the New On the first morning I woke up in Colonel Taylor’s bunker, which turned out to be 20 May, a soldier told me an American helicopter was en route and intended to slip into the city. I needed to get ready to go and it didn’t take long. I was happy to find that Major Jack Todd, who had first welcomed me to Team 162, and Lieutenant Pep McPhillips, the shot-down FAC, were also planning to leave. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Benedit, an advisor with the 5th ARVN Division, succeeded in joining us. I sought out Colonel Taylor and gave him a .38 snub-nose I’d carried in my pants pocket for several years. While my back-up gun might not be anything he’d need, giving it to him made me feel a little bit better. The four who were leaving met at the foot of the stairs before climbing out of the bunker. Once in the open we took turns jogging past the burnedout T-54 to the helicopter pad, about a hundred yards through clutter and junk. It was blistering hot and the sweat immediately began to run. Four seriously wounded Vietnamese soldiers had already been carried to the pad by the time we arrived. They were strapped onto stretchers and looked tiny and sick. Artillery rounds were whistling into the city, and the explosions caused me to flinch and duck. Several rounds came screaming into our immediate neighborhood, and my American buddies and I crawled into an empty concrete drain pipe lying discarded at the edge of the pad. Getting wounded or killed was still a very real possibility. There weren’t any options for the Vietnamese who remained strapped to their stretchers. As I lay in the drain pipe it crossed my mind that I’d probably never be in that kind of situation again, provided we were able to get out of town. I began to count the incoming rounds. For the next ten or fifteen minutes I stretched out in the dirt with a pair of worn and scuffed jungle boots in my face. I counted to fifty, and then I Off with the Old and on with the New 151 gave up as shells continued to impact around the city. I decided to restart my count and limit it to just those rounds close enough to be dangerous. The time dragged in a haze of sweat and anxiety as we continued to wait for the helicopter. The only solace I could take from the situation was that the soldiers on the stretchers were even more exposed than we were in our drain pipe. Then suddenly and without any warning an American Huey helicopter came roaring across the treetops from the south and twisted around to land hard on the pad in a swirl of dirt and rubbish. I forgot my count as I scrambled onto the steel mesh of the pad. Within a few seconds the wounded soldiers were moved from their stretchers to the floor of the aircraft. My three American comrades and I climbed in and got seat belts cinched up in less time than it takes to tell. The rotors had not slowed and the helicopter immediately lifted off in a small cyclone of flying dirt.As we cleared the neighborhood I leaned out the open door for one last look at An Loc. Staring back at the sweltering town I saw five or six dirty puffs of smoke blossom on the pad we’d just left. The enemy had evidently used that location to register several mortars and once they woke to the fact that a helicopter had flown in they started firing. They missed us by about ten seconds. As a footnote to our departure experience, North Vietnamese shelling was never completely turned off in the An Loc area. Some five weeks later, on 9 July, Brigadier General Richard Tallman, who had only recently replaced Brigadier General John McGiffert as General Hollingsworth’s deputy, was mortally wounded and four members of his party were killed on that same pad. They had flown in to inspect the town and were shelled before they could get under cover. General Tallman and two other Americans who were wounded in the incident were immediately evacuated to the 3rd Field Hospital in Saigon. The two wounded soldiers, Major Joe Hallum and Captain James Willbanks, survived; General Tallman died on the...

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