I recently heard someone on the radio talking about an Austrian composer and violinist named Friedrich “Fritz” Kreisler who fought with the Austrian army during the early days of World War I.

Here is a short biography from Wikipedia about Fritz Kreisler:

Friedrich “Fritz” Kreisler (February 2, 1875 – January 29, 1962) was an Austrian-born violinist and composer. One of the most noted violin masters of his day, and regarded as one of the greatest violin masters of all time, he was known for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing.

Photo of Fritz Kreisler.

He served briefly in the Austrian Army in World War I before being honourably discharged after he was wounded.

On the radio show, the announcer talked about Fritz’s perfect pitch, or absolute pitch. According to Wikipedia:

Perfect pitch is a rare auditory phenomenon characterized by the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.

Besides its value in the realm of music, Fritz’ perfect pitch endeared him to the men who served with him in the trenches during World War I. Perfect pitch enabled Fritz to distinguish the sounds of incoming and to tell his comrades where incoming artillery rounds were going to hit.

In his memoir, Fritz said this about the sound of incoming:

I, too, soon got accustomed to the deadly missiles, in fact. I had already started to make observations of their peculiarities. My ear, accustomed to differentiate sounds of all kinds, had some time ago, while we still advanced, noticed a remarkable discrepancy in the peculiar whine produced by the different shells in their rapid flight through the air as they passed over our heads, some sounding shrill, with a rising tendency, and the others dull, with a falling cadence.

Hearing about Fritz’ abilities to pinpoint artillery round sounds and the location they would strike led me to think about the trenches of Khe Sanh and how, if one survived long enough and had scrambled away from close encounters with 152 millimeter shells lobbed at us from Laos, then he may be gifted with the ability to tell where a round was going to hit.

I remember yelling at new arrivals during the months of February and March that it was time to move when I heard the report of certain 152s leaving the mouths of caves across the Laotian border on their way to wipe us out. There was a particular “thump” sound—more hollow than the sound of the rounds that fell farther away—that told me it was time to di-di mau for a safer place. Usually, the new guys would look at me like I was stupid or crazy, but if they survived that round, they paid attention to me the next time I announced it was time to move.

Michael O’Hara at Khe Sanh. Photo courtesy of Michael E. O’Hara.

Unlike Fritz, I couldn’t accurately predict the impact area for all the incoming: the 130 MM, the 122 MM, the various mortar and rocket rounds, the sniper rounds, all of which we received plenty.
And every one of them made a different sound.

I remember those big rounds, those 152s sounding like a train.

In our film, BRAVO!, Michael O’Hara made this comment on 152s:

“But it’s like a freight train coming through the bathroom when you’re taking a shower. And you know it’s coming and you can’t get out of the bathroom.”

Michael also said this about the big guns firing into Khe Sanh Combat Base:

“I thought to myself, this is crazy. People don’t understand what it’s like for all that artillery to come in like that. It’s just terrifying. It’s meant to do more than just tear up your body. It’s meant to tear up your mind. It will scare you to death.”

But it wasn’t just the 152s that could kill you. It was all of the various types of hardware the NVA threw at us.

The late BRAVO! Marine Lloyd Scudder said this about incoming:

“Every time there was incoming or the ammo dumps, you know, were blowing up, I was scared to death. That shhhheeeww and the whistling of the rockets and the poof of the mortars and the kapoof sheeeewhirwhirwhir. That right there scared the hell out of me.”

Yes, the big stuff could kill and maim, but the silent slap of a sniper round could get you, too. And the worst part about it, as anyone who has been sniped at knows, is you don’t hear the round coming because that sleek and stealthy killer travels faster than the speed of sound. I suspect that muzzle velocity is responsible for the old saying, “You don’t hear the one that kills you.”

BRAVO! Marine Ron Rees had this to say about snipers:

“ . . . rounds from a sniper. It was like a mosquito. They were buzzing your head constantly . . . you just realized that was a bullet.”

Lloyd Scudder. Photo courtesy of the late Lloyd Scudder

Besides being killed or maimed, there was the psychological assault–as alluded to earlier by Michael O’Hara–that all of that incoming delivered to each one of us in the Khe Sanh area; not just the Combat Base, but Hills 861, 861A, 558, 950, 881 South, Lang Vei, and Khe Sanh Ville.

Again, Ron Rees:

“You hear it leave the tube and then just the seconds that it takes . . . and you know how long it is . . . when you heard it leave the tube, you knew how long you had, and from the time you heard that round leave the tube until it hit, you imagined death; you’re thinking all along, Is it you?”

And as this happened, sometimes over a thousand times a day, day after day, it had an effect, a life-long effect.

When people plan for the future, near-term or farther out, and I’m involved in their plans, I often times find myself thinking, “Why are we spending all this time working on plans? We don’t know what the future will bring. This is all a waste of time. A minute from now we might all be dead.”

Ron Rees. Photo Courtesy of Ron Rees.

Ron Rees had something to say about that, too:

“I really learned to live—because of the incoming and counting and everything else—to live by the second. You hear people say they live like that, I mean they literally live like that. My whole life I’ve never stopped living like that.”

As I thought about Fritz Kreisler in World War I and the men at Khe Sanh during the Siege, I felt a strange sensation, a linkage, related, I suppose, to the notion that even though there was a span of more than fifty years between Fritz’ experiences with the horrors of war and mine, we both learned to survive, and in some instances that survival was related to our ability to employ perfect pitch or some facsimile thereof.

***

If you or your organization would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town, please contact us immediately.

DVDs of BRAVO! are available. Please consider gifting copies to a veteran, a teacher, a history buff, a library, a friend or family member. For more information, go to https://bravotheproject.com/store/.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject?ref=hl.

April is the cruelest month . . .

–T. S. Eliot

But October 1967 was pretty cruel for the men of Bravo Company. Or so we thought. It rained. Everything was soaked. We ran patrols in red mud and slick jungle grass. We went on LPs when you couldn’t see three feet in front of you. The same with ambushes. It was a time when everything dripped and leaked and water ran down the trenches like creeks in a flood. Your feet were soaked and wrinkled and if you were lucky you got foot rot and went on light duty. It seemed like everybody was on light duty. For those of us who weren’t, the workload was cruel. Working out in the downpour for the battalion pogues, working on our own trenches, our own bunkers, our own fighting positions. Going on patrols. Running ambushes in the black of night. Listening posts, too. Falling asleep on our feet while standing watch and tumbling into the muddy red water that flowed around our knees.

For the bulk of folks here in the States who don’t know combat, these words call up images that intimate cruel notions.
During October 1967 the company conducted operations on Route Nine. In the drizzly fog. We ran patrols out to the east and to the north. We endured the blast of a typhoon. Then with a gaggle of new men and a new company commander, we humped up to Hill 881. It didn’t rain that day as we struggled up the east side among the remnants of blasted trees and thickets of bamboo.

The mist smothers Khe Sanh.
Photo by David Douglas Duncan

After that, for the most part, the sky intermittently drenched us, then spit on us almost every day, and most nights the dark was invaded by heavy mists. We were sniped at from a ridge to the east. And we patrolled that ridge and sought the enemy. On the days when the sun graced us with its warmth, farther west into Laos, we sat in our fighting holes and watched the North Vietnamese move their war goods. We watched the B-52s pound the ridges and the highways of Laos, the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

But if my memory is correct, those sunny interludes were sparse. For I remember rain.

Rain sluiced off the lips of our helmets. It drizzled off our helmets’ back ends and down our necks. The rain alternated between warm and chill. It got in our beans and franks, it ruined our Lucky Strikes and Old Golds. The sulfur heads of our matches dissolved when we tried to strike them. Inside our boots our feet became harbors for leeches. We cleaned our weapons every evening but the next morning I often had to kick my M-16 bolt open. Rust had seized its innards.

A trench line on Hill 881 South.
Photo courtesy of marines.org

Down to the east, on the flats of Vietnam, men were dying at places like Gio Linh and Con Thien. But we were soaked and wrinkled like prunes and we thought life was tough. October blew a cruel breath. Or so we thought.

But that was before January 21, 1968, before the beginning of the Siege, when life grew very cruel.

We look forward to upcoming screenings at the Meridian Library in Meridian, Idaho, at 6:30 PM on October 22; Oceanside, CA, on November 1; and Newport Beach, CA, on November 15, 2014. Please join us and invite your friends.

If you would like to host a screening of BRAVO! in your town this winter or spring, please contact us immediately.
DVDs of BRAVO! are available. For more information, go to https://bravotheproject.com/buy-the-dvd/.

BRAVO! has a page on Facebook. Please “like” us and “share” the page at https://www.facebook.com/Bravotheproject/. It’s another way to stay up on our news and help us reach more people.

Last September I wrote a blog for this site titled “Why I Fight” about, in part, an Ethiopian refugee whom Betty and I met in Washington, DC. That gentleman was in the US because he made a documentary film that angered his government. For his own safety, he was forced to leave his home.

Last month, at one of our Clovis, California, screenings I met another man who came to the US as a refugee from his country.

The gentleman I met in Clovis was originally from Cambodia. His name is Lieutenant Colonel Lay Prum, or as it would be represented in Cambodia, Prum Lay.

Lt. Colonel Prum escaped from Cambodia in 1976 and his story is one that illustrates the harrowing experiences of a lot of folks who come to the US to escape the variety of tyrannies the world has to offer.

To refresh memories, in 1975 Cambodia underwent a violent regime change that led to the Khmer Rouge—a Maoist regime with a particularly vicious way of re-educating its citizens—taking over the country. During the Khmer Rouge’s rule from 1975 to 1979, an estimated two million Cambodians died in what has since been classified as genocide. In 1979 the Vietnamese forced the Khmer Rouge out of power.

Back in the 1970’s, Cambodia was involved in fights with the Vietnamese Communists who used Cambodia’s border regions as bases from which they infiltrated into South Vietnam. American forces bombed these regions, creating chaos in the border regions between Vietnam and Cambodia. The Cambodian government, besides fighting the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies, soon became involved in a civil war with Cambodian communists, or the Khmer Rouge.

Enter Mr. Prum Lay, who graduated from Phnom Penh University in 1968. He enlisted in the Cambodian Army and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1972.

In 1973, then 1st Lieutenant Prum was involved in rescuing four American journalists whom he found in two black Mercedes stranded on Route 3 between Phnom Penh and Takeo Province during an attack by his Cambodian forces to take back a village the Viet Cong had overrun. He and his troops carried the Americans to safety.

On April 17, 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. By then a major in the army, Prum Lay, in danger of losing his life, convinced the Khmer Rouge that he was a taxi driver. They asked him to drive a taxi and later put him to work in rice paddies.

On May 20, 1976, Major Prum Lay escaped into Thailand. Fortunately for him, he encountered a man who had served with him in the Cambodian Army, and that man told the major that since Prum Lay did not have a passport, he would be put in jail by the Thai government. Instead of going into a refugee camp, Major Prum hid out in an abandoned schoolhouse until June 15, 1976.

On that date, he and another Cambodian friend managed to reach the United States Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. He was interviewed by the staff at the US Embassy and was granted refugee status but remained in Thailand pending the appointment of a sponsor here in the States.

On August 15, 1976, Major Prum Lay came to Spokane, Washington, where he became Mr. Lay Prum.

To me, what follows is what is most moving about this story. In spite of the obvious cultural impediments, Mr. Lay Prum became the liaison between the residents of Spokane and the considerable Cambodian community that moved there after the fall of Cambodia. He was also, among other things, the owner of a restaurant and helped out in the local schools as a math teacher and ESL teacher. He also went back to school and learned how to be a welder and went on to work for a number of Spokane companies.

In 1986, Mr. Lay Prum moved to Sonoma County, California, before moving on to Fresno, California, in 1988. There are over 50,000 Southeast Asians living in the Fresno area. Allies of our government in the wars we fought overtly in Vietnam and clandestinely in Laos and Cambodia, they fled to the US after their governments were defeated in the various conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s.

In Fresno, Mr. Lay Prum remade himself yet again. Something we often have a lot of freedom to do in this country if we have the drive to do so. He became a drug, alcohol and mental health counselor for Fresno County until his retirement in 2010. Now he is involved in veterans organizations that recognize his (and other Southeast Asian warriors) service during the wars of the 60s and 70s. What he and his compatriots endured is not forgotten.

In 1975, the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge was viewed by a large segment of the American public with a big ho-hum. As a nation, we had grown tired of our involvements in Southeast Asia. I would even venture to say that some Americans were rooting for the Khmer Rouge to win their war against the Cambodian government. But history has since exposed the Khmer Rouge regime as being a murderous government that killed millions of Cambodian citizens.

Mr. Lay Prum, Lieutenant Colonel Lay Prum (he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel after joining United States National Defense Corp. on November 13, 2010), was lucky to get out of that hell and into a place where he was allowed to become what he wished to make of himself.

Like that Ethiopian filmmaker I mentioned earlier, Lt. Colonel Lay Prum can say what he wants to say, and he can change what he does for a calling. In spite of all our knots and warts, we Americans offer folks a lot of opportunity to create a useful existence as well as respite from the chaos of their native countries.

I have said for years that I am not sure why I went to Vietnam and fought. I don’t know if it was adventure I sought, or heroism, or if it was patriotism. I suppose the reason changes from day to day and from one experience to the next. But today I want to say that seeing men like the Washington, DC, Ethiopian and the Lt. Colonel live a life that allows them to succeed and speak their thoughts without fear of being killed or going into prisons or forced labor camps—that’s why I fight.