Carmichaels Vietnam War veteran recalls harrowing battlefield encounters
George “Skip” Black, commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3491 in Carmichaels, discusses his service in the Vietnam War in the VFW office.
George “Skip” Black of Carmichaels in a photo he sent to his mother letting her know he arrived in Vietnam with the U.S. Marine Corps in 1968
Vietnam War veteran George “Skip” Black said he does not think much about the United States’ humiliating retreat from South Vietnam during the 1975 Fall of Saigon.
The former U.S. Marine from Carmichaels said he prefers to focus instead on his service to his country during the war, in which U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended 40 years ago this week when North Vietnamese troops overran Saigon.
“What keeps me sane is, I was 17 years old and I did what my country wanted me to do, right or wrong,” said Black, who was wounded five times in Vietnam and holds three Purple Heart medals.
Black enlisted in the Marines in 1967 and arrived in Vietnam in April 1968. He was soon warned by someone there to stay off of Hill 881 North if he wanted to survive the war.
He was handed an M-16 rifle and a flak jacket before his unit was shuttled to that very hill, just below the Demilitarized Zone near Khe Sanh in Central Vietnam.
“I thought, ‘I am dead now.'”
A monsoon rolled in and the rains pelted the troops from every direction, he said. “I was a grunt, a foot soldier.”
He said his unit was then moved to Hill 689, only to be overrun by 2,000 members of the North Vietnamese Army.
“There were only 49 of us. It was like turning on the water faucet. They just kept coming and coming. That was the first time I got shot,” said Black, who bears a deep scar on his left upper arm from the wound. A grenade also landed nearby, injuring his back on July 7, 1968.
The battle resulted in 1,000 enemy deaths, he said.
“Somehow they secured the hill with just a handful of guys.”
Black said he was taken to a hospital in Cam Ranh Bay to recover from his injuries.
He had $60 in his wallet when he recovered, money he decided to spend over the next two weeks before being sent back to the DMZ “to get killed.”
“The dirt was ground into me so bad. Can you imagine three months without bathing?” he recalled.
Black said he was promoted from private to lance corporal upon his return to his unit, only to be “sent out on a suicide mission” within two days.
They were dropped off about 2 a.m. that day and told to set up a perimeter, he said.
“The next thing I knew it was daylight and we were in an L-shaped ambush.”
Someone from behind the enemy line began firing an AK-47 rifle.
“The guy in front of me dropped,” he said. The gunfire stopped. It was 10 a.m. and, Black said, he found shelter in a bomb crater.
“The next thing I know I was getting peppered in the side of the face.”
Black said he lost part of his ear that morning before a U.S. helicopter arrived to pick up the wounded and its tail was blown off.
The rescue crew went back to get another helicopter, leaving behind a crewman to stay with Black.
“He said, ‘Hey buddy. We’re not leaving you.’ He grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled me into the chopper. There were a lot of heroes, everyday heroes doing their jobs.”
Black, 65, said he spent the next nine months recovering from his wounds before being sent back to the United States and assigned to lead a unit of 300 members of the military police.
He went on to work for 35 years at the Hatfield’s Ferry Power Plant near Masontown, retiring in 2005.
Today, as commander of Carmichaels Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 3491, he helps to ensure other local veterans receive benefits they are entitled to from the Veterans Administration. Black said he also has been diagnosed with an illness presumed to have been caused by his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.
When it comes to remembering the Fall of Saigon, said Black, who left Vietnam in 1969, “Why dredge up memories?”
Although he was not serving there when Saigon was taken over, Black said he knew others who were there at the time.
“The Vietnam veteran is the most disgraced veteran in history. Unless you’ve been there you have no idea what we went through.”