Commissioner Recalls Launch of Tet Offensive
Last-Minute Order Mystifies Young Airman
Roger Galvan was angry, to put it lightly. Not because he was drafted. Not because he was in Vietnam. And not because he was on duty at 2 a.m. Rather, he was riled because he was washing dishes.
Night after night for some four months, the 21-year-old “two-striper,” or airman second class, had been guarding Bunker O51 (pronounced oh-five-one) as part of the U.S. Air Force 377th Security Police Squadron stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base just outside of Saigon. Day had darkened to night, and once again Galvan was on a truck headed to the bunker…or so he thought. For no apparent rhyme or reason, the five soldiers usually assigned to night guard duty at Bunker O51 were issued alternate orders; Galvan got KP – kitchen patrol.
“What?” he responded. “I never do KP!”
The reply was straightforward: “Galvan. Get off that truck.”
It was an order, and a night, that Roger Galvan will never forget.
Photo, May 2011
Youthful Sacrifice
Veteran Judge Pledges Support to America’s Finest
Several years ago Nueces County Judge Loyd Neal journeyed overseas to commemorate the 65th anniversary of V-E Day. Neal, a 30-year Army veteran, joined a group of patriots at Pointe-Du-Hoc to honor Major Gen. James Earl Rudder, who took part in the D-Day landings as commanding officer of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion.
The occasion, sponsored by the Army Reserve Ambassador Program, was especially meaningful to Neal considering his personal history with Rudder:
v Neal was a member of the Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets while Rudder was Texas A&M president.
v In 1959 while in Army Ranger Class 3 at Fort Benning, Ga., Neal and his fellow soldiers studied the leadership strategies used by then-Lt. Col. Rudder on D-Day.
v In 1962 after completing his active duty tour, Neal joined the Army Reserve 90th Division and served under Commanding Gen. Earl Rudder.
As special as that ceremonial moment was, standing near a cliff top on the coast of Normandy some four miles from Omaha Beach, Neal had another experience on this European trip that touched him on an even deeper level: his visit with wounded warriors.
Neal and a fellow veteran traveled to Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC), an overseas military hospital operated by the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense. A majority of serious casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters are flown to nearby Ramstein Air Base and transported to LRMC, the largest military hospital outside of the continental United States.
The patients Neal visited had been wounded just one day earlier in Iraq. The first was a 23-year-old female soldier from Minnesota, and like Neal, she was an Army reservist. She was severely wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED), or roadside bomb, detonated next to the truck she was in, on her side of the cab.
The young woman’s wounds were extensive: two broken arms, one broken leg, a mangled face, and internal injuries. But despite all this, she was alert.
The general traveling with Neal was emotionally overcome and couldn’t speak for a moment. Neal drew close to the soldier’s bedside and asked, “Young lady, is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes,” she replied. “You can get me back to my unit.”
Photos May 2010
Memorial Day 2010
In the Dark of Night
El Paso County Commissioner Recounts Vietnam Experience
There was daytime, and then there was wartime.
Even when he was no longer in the U.S. Army, the moonless skies over Vietnam bred a deep darkness that brought Daniel Haggerty within earshot of the enemy.
On this horrific night Haggerty was on his third tour in Vietnam, this time as a civilian working for Federal Electric Corporation (F.E.C.) in Bac Lieu, a southern coastal province. Haggerty and his co-workers had taken up residence in trailers abandoned by military officers.
“The war was winding down,” Haggerty recalled, “and the country was being overrun.”
The familiar blackness – endured night after night when Haggerty came to the country as a 19-year-old soldier years earlier – had settled in, and Haggerty had fallen asleep. He was jerked out of slumber by an explosion that seemingly sheered the top off of his trailer. Haggerty glanced down; the white of his boxer shorts illuminated the inky blackness, so he quickly removed the shorts and dove under another trailer.
Haggerty lay naked among ragged, bug-infested sandbags and watched the enemy as they crouched and ran and jumped over sandbags, shooting to kill.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God! I’m watching them overrun our compound.’ It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen. There were at least 20 of them, Vietcong dressed in their trademark hats and black pajamas.”
Haggerty’s friend and co-worker Francisco, whose hometown was San Francisco, was killed that dark night, as were two others. F.E.C. eventually dispatched a helicopter to retrieve their employees, which, Haggerty remembers, barely touched down giving the men seconds to jump in.
Haggerty told F.E.C. that he wanted to return to the United States; however, the company told him he was too valuable and promised to send him to a safe place, Dao Phu Quoc Island.
“I was there with eight Americans and 36,000 VC prisoners of war,” Haggerty said. “They didn’t tell us about the prisoners when they first sent us!”
Some two to three months after his arrival, the airport was blown up and enemy prisoners began staging prison breaks. At one point the runway was restored, and Haggerty saw a plane touch down.
“I dropped my tools and ran across the runway. All I had was the shirt on my back.” He jumped on the plane and asked, “Are you Americans?”
“They said yes,” Haggerty continued. “So I said, ‘I’m not getting off this plane.’ ” They landed in Saigon, where Haggerty slept in doorways and wandered the streets for three days in search of the F.E.C. building. He finally came across the abandoned, ransacked office and began searching through overturned file cabinets for his passport, which F.E.C. had taken and filed upon his arrival.
“It was surreal,” Haggerty said. “The building was a disaster.” Unbelievably, Haggerty found his passport.
“I was so excited! I opened a drawer, and there it was! It was almost bizarre, but I found it!” From there Haggerty left for home; except for paperwork pertaining to taxes, he never heard from F.E.C. again.
As challenging as his civilian tour was, Haggerty’s first two tours endured as a young soldier are more difficult to reflect on and describe.
Photos November 2010
Veterans Day 2010
One Commissioner, Two Wars
Navy, Army Veteran Recalls Diverse Missions
In his first war, he was a teenager.
In his second war, he was in his mid-50s.
In his first war, he was a Navy sailor.
In his second war, he was an Army soldier.
In his first war, he was an enlisted man.
In his second war, he was an officer.
In his first war, he earned the Purple Heart when hit with shrapnel during a firefight.
In his second war, he had troops to take care of. Thankfully, none of them perished.
In his first war, he looked for enemy explosives.
In his second war, he tried to avoid them.
In both wars, he remembers being frightened.
When others compare the Vietnam War to the current war in Afghanistan, Bastrop County Commissioner William M. Piña gives pause for thought. After all, he was part of both.
“In Vietnam, we usually knew our enemy,” Piña recalled. “You knew who the North Vietnamese were by their uniforms. The targets were mostly military.
“Dealing with terrorists is different,” he continued, referring to his tour of duty in Afghanistan. “They target everyone – men, women and children. And the biggest danger is the IED (improvised explosive device.)”
Actually, explosives were a key part of Piña’s mission in Vietnam where the 21-year-old Boatswain Mate 2nd Class (BM2) was part of a six-man crew in Mine Division 113 onboard Minesweeper River Boat 5 (MSR-5). Piña was 18 years old when he enlisted during the Vietnam War, and 21 when he served in-country.
The crew, part of the Brown Water Navy, was charged with sweeping the waters for enemy mines thereby keeping open and protecting critical supply channels and denying their use to the enemy.
“Most of the mines were homemade and detonated by contact or wire,” Piña explained.
MSRs, equipped with special minesweeping gear and electronics, were used as command and control boats for the MSD (Minesweeping Drone). The MSD was a 23-foot, remote-controlled minesweeping boat powered by a 327 Chevrolet gasoline engine, Piña said.
As part of Operation Barrier Reef with the Border Interdiction Patrol, Piña participated in more than 250 minesweeping and combat patrols in Vietnam and was engaged in four separate firefights with the enemy.
Photos May 2009
Memorial Day 2009
Operation Crossroads
Veteran Witnesses Atomic Blasts
Eddie Janek is a retired Galveston County commissioner who continues to volunteer his time on behalf of the County Judges and Commissioners Association of Texas (CJCAT). In September 2007, the CJCAT saluted Janek in an official resolution for his assistance with the State Conference. Janek is also a veteran of the United States Navy.
The command was: “Close your eyes or you may go blind.”
“I remember thinking: ‘I’m 18 years old. I’m going to watch it!’ ”
Eddie Janek, serviceman second class, was assigned to the ship service department on the USS Bottineau APA 235, an attack transport ship, during World War II where he also manned the Quad 40mm anti-aircraft weapon.
The day was July 1, 1946, and Janek’s ship drifted on the outskirts of a fleet of more than 90 vessels assembled in Bikini Lagoon. These vessels were targets of Operation Crossroads, a series of nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll, one of the 29 atolls and five islands that comprise the Marshall Islands. An atoll is an island of coral that partially or completely encircles a lagoon.
The purpose of the military exercise was to test the effect of nuclear weapons on naval ships. The target fleet included four obsolete U.S. battleships, two aircraft carriers, two cruisers, eleven destroyers, eight submarines, numerous auxiliary and amphibious vessels, and three surrendered German and Japanese ships.
The USS Bottineau was tasked with using Higgins boats to transport soldiers from the anchored target ships back to the Bottineau.
Operation Crossroads included two detonations, and Janek witnessed both of them. The first atomic bomb known as “Able” was detonated on July 1, 1946, from the B-29 Superfortress Dave’s Dream, formerly known as Big Stink of the 509th Composite Group. Able detonated 520 feet above the target fleet with a yield of 23 kilotons. Carnage to the assembled ships was less than expected because the bomb missed its target by 710 yards. Investigators eventually concluded that a flaw in the bomb’s tail stabilizer had caused the miss, and the flight crew was cleared of responsibility.
The second test in the series was the detonation of “Baker” on July 25, 1946, some 90 feet underwater beneath the landing craft LSM-60 anchored in the midst of the target fleet, also with a yield of 23 kilotons. No identifiable part of LSM-60 was ever found. The damage included 10 sunken ships including a German heavy cruiser which sank in December, five months after the test, due to radioactivity that prevented repairs to a leak in the hull.
Janek said both blasts produced fiery flames shooting from the water accompanied by vertical sprays of water seemingly miles high, and the formation of heavy, rolling swells that Janek likened to tidal waves. He also witnessed tiny pieces of metal from decimated ships shooting into the air.
Able’s blast was quite bright while Baker’s was a bit dimmer, as the blast arose from the depths.
Photos Nov. 2008
Veterans Day 2008
USS Eisenhower
Culberson County Commissioner Recalls Life at Sea
“IKE flexes; Iraq backs down”
The intensity behind this headline that marches atop the front page of the Nov. 17, 1998, issue of the “Five Star Bulletin” is amplified by a black-and-white photo of sailors from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. In the photo the sailors are moving tons of ordnance to the flight deck of the aircraft carrier known to its occupants as “Ike.”
Tensions had mounted the preceding week as Ike patrolled the waters of the Persian Gulf. The ship had left its home port of Norfolk, Va., in June on the 10th-ever deployment of the nuclear-powered, NIMITZ class carrier named after the nation’s 34th president.
Saddam Hussein’s continued noncompliance with United Nations Security Council resolutions prompted the United States Central Command to set in motion Operation Desert Viper. The mission called for the launch of an air campaign on Saturday, Nov. 14, 1998, and some 4,700 sailors assigned to Ike assumed battle mode. Pilots clustered in briefing rooms, crews inspected their F/A-18 and F-14 jets, and weapons specialists loaded bombs etched with messages including “Smile, baby,” and “We only care to send the very best.”
Adrian Norman, age 21 at the time, was an Aviation Boatswain’s Mate (ABE) charged with operating and maintaining the arresting gear, barricades and flight deck launch and recovery equipment. In layman’s terms, Norman helped catapult the jets on takeoff and catch them on landing.
“I had always wanted to work with airplanes,” said Norman, now a Culberson County commissioner. “And I had always wanted to join the Navy.”
At 4:51 p.m., 69 minutes before what would have been the heaviest air campaign against Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, the mission was placed on a 24-hour hold. The next day the hold order was repeated following news from Washington that Iraq had sent a conciliatory letter to the United Nations.
Sailors on the 18-deck ship continued to fight the rushes of adrenaline as they anticipated reactivation of their mission. However, President Bill Clinton decided to accept Iraq’s cooperation pledge, and the mission was scrapped.
“When the order to cancel the strike was announced, a sigh of relief could be heard around the ship,” Norman recalled. “The 24 hours prior were very intense. Our division was ready to go, and we had to sleep at our assigned station. This is what we had trained for.”
As history reveals, Saddam Hussein’s pledge was short-lived, and Operation Desert Fox was launched as a four-day bombing campaign in mid-December 1998. However, Ike had already set sail for its scheduled return to Norfolk.
Norman’s tour in Iraq from June 1998 to December 1998 was part of his four-year enlistment spanning 1996 to 2000.
About three weeks before Desert Viper, Norman and his 32 fellow sailors with Air Department’s V-2 Division Arresting Gear celebrated 6,900 “traps,” a record number accomplished four months into the Mediterranean deployment. The sailors assigned to Arresting Gear were responsible for the equipment that was used to trap airplanes on the deck of an aircraft carrier. A “trap” occurred when an aircraft’s tail hook caught one of the four wires stretched across the aft section of Ike’s flight deck. Sailors who manned the arresting gear worked extremely long hours with minimal sleep.
The “Five Star Bulletin,” a newsletter that served Ike’s crew, celebrated the record number of traps with a front-page article that quoted Norman as saying, “It took a lot of teamwork to get us here. We had to be really motivated, but it’s worth every minute.”
In fact, the entire tour was a rewarding experience. As a veteran looking back, Norman said his years in the Navy opened doors of opportunity for him including the chance to attend college.