5/7 Cav.- Tet Offensive Viet Nam a Warrior’s Story

University of Texas Alumni Magazine ^ | 9/3/10 | self

[bareford101]

From his hospital bed Captain Howard Prince had a clear view of the TV screen as President Lyndon Johnson came on to address the nation. It was March 31, 1968, and the war in Vietnam was going badly. Prince knew. He’d been downrange, fighting in the rice paddies and marshes of Southeast Asia.

[bareford101]

From his hospital bed Captain Howard Prince had a clear view of the TV screen as President Lyndon Johnson came on to address the nation. It was March 31, 1968, and the war in Vietnam was going badly. Prince knew. He’d been downrange, fighting in the rice paddies and marshes of Southeast Asia. Five weeks before, during the Tet Offensive, Prince was leading an assault to relieve the Marines caught in the city of Hue when a mortar round landed virtually on top of him, shattering his right ankle, snapping his right tibia, and blasting open his whole right side. When his commander-in-chief started speaking, Prince forced himself to sit up. Johnson’s address lasted just six minutes, at the end of which he announced something only he and Lady Bird knew beforehand — that he would not seek re-election. The war, he seemed to Prince to be saying, had been a mistake. The news landed like a mortar, and for Prince, it cut deeper than all the shrapnel that surgeons had pulled from his body. “I was really angry at Johnson,” Prince remembers. “I felt betrayed. People I knew had been killed and wounded in Vietnam. I was in the hospital and didn’t know if I would ever walk again, ever use my right hand again.” .

The first time Howard Prince jumped out of a helicopter and landed on the battlefield of Vietnam, he was on a hair trigger. Officers who have never seen combat feel incredible pressure to prove themselves, particularly when the men they’re supposed to be leading have often done several tours. As he jumped off the helicopter, Prince mistook the door gunner’s covering fire for incoming and ducked down. His battle-hardened sergeant strolled over, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him everything was OK, sir. It didn’t take long for Prince to establish himself on the battlefield. Bob Child was a lieutenant under Prince at the time. “Sometimes we got a captain who was kind a jerk and was never out there with you,” Child says. “Howard was not a yeller. He was very competent; he was well trained and well respected. He wouldn’t ask you to do anything he wouldn’t do.” Typically, Bravo Company, a group of about 100 men that Prince commanded, made two air assaults a day. Groups of six helicopters, each carrying a pilot, a co-pilot, a door gunner, and seven men, would fl y into an area, hover for a matter of seconds while the seven jumped out, then fl y back to pick up the next wave of 42. Once on the ground, the troops secured the immediate area and got organized. This was where Prince ran the show. He had to find the enemy, determine how best to attack, and direct the assault. The resulting battles could last two hours or two weeks. Whenever it was over, it was on to the next site. “We were always moving,” Child says. Juan Gonzales served during Vietnam as a pathfinder, an elite airborne soldier who specialized in aviation and helicopter warfare, and got to know Prince in late 1967. “Prince came in, he was a West Point grad, and he was good,” Gonzales remembers. “When Captain Prince talked, everyone listened.” As a pathfinder, Gonzales could walk with whichever company he wanted. Almost always, when Bravo Company moved out, he did too. On Jan. 30, 1968, in violation of a mutually agreed-upon ceasefire, the North Vietnamese Army launched the Tet Offensive, surprising the American military and capturing the coastal city of Hue. Marines south of the city counter-attacked and reached the citadel, where they became bogged down in urban fighting. On Feb. 8, the 5th Battalion of the 7th Cavalry regiment moved into the woods north of Hue to help relieve the Marines caught in the city’s center. “It was a true hornet’s nest we were dropped into there,” Child says. On Feb. 21, the Army, tried to punch through the enemy’s main stronghold on the northern perimeter. The battalion commander, who had come to rely on Prince, made Bravo Company the tip of the spear. To attack meant leaving the woods and crossing an open area, an infantryman’s worst nightmare. Prince’s forward platoon made it across under cover of darkness, and at daybreak, the Battle of Ti Ti Woods commenced. Needing to see what was going on, Prince, Child, and three radio operators moved up into the open to assess the situation. The only cover they could find were a few Vietnamese burial mounds. There they were, a cluster of troops crouched among graves, with three radio antennas sticking up. They were a ripe target. Prince doesn’t remember hearing the mortar that landed next to him, but he remembers a cloud of dirt and manure raining down on him. Shrapnel from the explosion ripped open his entire right side and shattered his eardrums. His body mostly shielded the others from the blast. One of Prince’s radio operators was also wounded, but Child, lying only feet away, escaped unscathed. Somehow Prince managed to crawl back to the treeline, where, broken and bleeding, he passed out. “I didn’t think he was going to live,” Child says. “There was so much blood. He was wide open.” Prince needed an evacuation if he was going to survive, but the fi refight raged on. The pilot of the medevac helicopter didn’t want to land. Gonzales, hearing the pilot’s reluctance over the radio, grabbed the receiver and told him to land or he would shoot the helicopter down himself. Then Gonzales did something incredible: he told the pilot to follow him in and proceeded to sprint into the clearing. “I remember they were shooting at me, and I could see the bullets hitting the dirt,” Gonzales says. The helicopter came in, Gonzales lifted Prince inside, and off it went. “He looked like he was dead,” Gonzales remembers. “He was totally out of it, covered in blood and limp. It hit me hard. I had a lot of respect for that man.”

What Prince heard and felt that day spurred an interest in leadership and ethics that would come to define his career. Four decades later, Howard Prince, PhD ’75, teaches ethical leadership at the public policy school named for Johnson. There is perhaps no greater expert on leadership development in the country. No one has more profoundly altered the character and leadership training of the modern United States Army.

[knarf]

It’s humbling just to read the words.

[knarf]

It’s humbling just to read the words.

[Little Bill]

TET sucked, the three months after TET Sucked, Tet Two sucked, May. It is the opinion of all my friends and relatives who served during Tet that it sucked, Army and Marine.

[bareford101]

I think we all do the best we can with what we have. thank you for your reply.

[Farmer Dean]

When you live in America there are heroes all around you.It’s always been that way,and it will be in the future.I thank God that he let me be born an American.

[oh8eleven]

TET sucked, the three months after TET Sucked ...
Not sure what your point is but I was in VN for 13 months up on the DMZ (including Tet) and the entire tour "sucked."
On the other hand, I knew guys who were down in DaNang during Tet and they barely knew a war was going on.

[detch]

Great read — heroes abounded in that war.

What was not mentioned was, right about that same time, Johnson said a DMZ was declared.

So, from about Easter of 1968 until Easter of 1972, except for a Son Tay raid in 1970 that was small in scope and was an unsuccessful single mission, no Americans went north of the DMZ (a Vietnamese Mason Dixon line).

Think of it — for the length of time of the Civil War, or of US involvement in WWII, we quit fighting up North against the North Vietnamese and limited the conflict to fighting Viet Cong in the South. Finally, in 1972, we started fighting in the North again.

Talk about dumb. That was Johnson for you (as well as our lame military leaders, Westmoreland and McNamera).

[bareford101]

I know what you are saying is true. IMO, the politicians are the ones who actually destroy (kill and maim) more of our service men and women than the enemy through their need for votes for themselves. this is a sad truth

[ustanker]

Well Said!

[Little Bill]

My point is The Tet offensive sucked. I was with the 3/4 Cav, My cousin Paul was with 3/5, my step brother John was with 2/7, and there were friends and neighbors scattered among various Marine and Army Units and at the local VFW Post in 11/68 we voted that TET sucked, still stands as far as I know.

[Mrs.Liberty]

Thank you for your service. And Welcome Home.

[STD]

May They all rot in Hell!

[oh8eleven]

Thank you, much appreciated.

[Screaming_Gerbil]

Fortunately he is still alive and teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.

Howard T. Prince, II

Clinical Professor and holder of the Loyd Hackler Endowed Chair in Ethical Leadership; Director, Center for Ethical Leadership

http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/directory/faculty/howard-prince

To bareford101 - Thank you for posting this story about this amazing man and warrior.

This story is also a testament to all those brave men who fought in Viet Nam, and what they had to go through.

To Little Bill and oh8eleven - God Bless you (and all your friends and family who were there in Viet Nam) for your military service in fighting that war over there so long ago.