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Field Ethos
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By Scott Longman
When we first heard the story of S.O. “Roy” Arce, it sounded like one of those war stories that starts with “so . . . there I was.” Sometimes, the correct response to that intro is to treat what follows as entertaining fiction, pull out your entire collection of challenge coins, and order another round. But this story was so intriguing that we had to track down the man himself. Turns out, RC is alive and well at the age of 80, and Holy Hannah, did he validate the story.
July 15, 1967—USAF base, Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam, 366th Tactical Fighter Squadron. It was about 0020 and Airman 1st Class (E4) Arce was doing some rounds through several barracks before packing it in for the night.
That was when the first sledgehammers hit.
Immense explosions erupted across the base, including one at the southern wall of his barracks. And then, a direct hit on the barracks itself.
Punched in the Mouth
RC was on the receiving end of what would prove to be the single largest attack on the Da Nang base in the entire war. The NVA had planned carefully, and smuggled 122mm rockets, 140mm rockets and mortars within range, and then coordinated that stand-off attack with a preceding group of infiltrating sappers. The explosion that A1C Arce had heard to the south of his barracks was an IED that a sapper had placed on—of all things—a fuel truck that some soup-sandwich had parked immediately adjacent to the building, despite regs prohibiting just exactly that. The explosion launched a fountain of JP-4 onto the structure.
RC survived those initial hits, and helped evacuate airmen from the barracks. His next thought was to report to his defensive duty post, which was to protect the flightline. Inexplicably, despite the enemy at the gates and an active war zone, the Air Force didn’t allow its personnel to, oh, say, actually be armed off duty. In the face of that idiocy, he had to go to a half-assed armory of a Connex full of M16A1s and ask “Mother may I” before he could defend the base. Roy had begun running to do just that when the life-changing cataclysm hit him from behind.
He describes it as an intense wave of superheated air, accompanied with a slamming impact that threw him at least 25 feet, tumbling and spinning, before landing him in an already-existing roadway crater and smashing him unconscious.
Adrenaline and shock had kept him from feeling the crippling pain that he should have felt, let alone allowing him to have the slightest understanding as to just how horribly he had just earned his Purple Heart. He rose, fell, rose again and kept staggering to the armory.
He made it there, but the sergeant staffing it refused to issue him a weapon, because the entire back of Roy’s blouse and trousers were heavily saturated with blood. Still in shock, Roy insisted, demanding his rifle.
Just then, a Navy truck pulled up. The men aboard had been badly hit, two men in the bed literally holding their guts in with their hands, and about a dozen others jammed in, every one of them wounded. They were bound for the hospital. The armory sergeant must’ve recognized Roy’s shock when he saw it but was smooth enough to handle it: if he issued Roy his rifle and told him he had the mission of riding the truck as security—which in any event was a good idea—Roy would be delivered to the hospital and they wouldn’t let him go once he got there. Roy signed out his rifle and the truck roared off, with Roy prone on the cab, scanning. All lights on base had been shut off, which left the only illumination from a steady, surreal stream of parachute flares. He hung on.
The truck got there. Despite Roy then slowly trying to ghost off under the pretense of a smoke break, the hospital staff yanked him in and evaluated him. He was a wound disaster, too much to go into here, but the most pressing issue was the shrapnel wound on his back and loss of blood. They packed him into a UH-1 to go for higher care. That was where he lost consciousness for the second time.
And that was where things got weird.
Not Quite Dead Yet
When he regained consciousness, he couldn’t see. Well, he could see light. But no images. And there was something wrong with his big toe, on his left foot. And it was hard to breathe.
With his biological batteries at only about one percent, he managed to weakly push at the thing on his face that kept him from seeing, and discovered it was a cotton sheet. Looking down, he saw that he had a toe tag. A corpse’s toe tag.
Someplace, maybe in the Huey, maybe after drop off, somebody had called him for dead, and sent him to an outdoor morgue, surrounded by a huge number of corpses. Lying there, it hit him that, had the makeshift morgue had enough body bags, he would now be zipped up and suffocating, helpless, in one of them.
With the last of his vitality, he was able to alert passing soldiers that he wasn’t just quite yet done.
What followed from there is a very long story of transport and rehabilitation, and lifelong disabilities.
But the one thing that didn’t get hit was Roy’s sense of humor.
“Them sons-of-bitches took one of my dog tags to attach to my toe. To this day, instead of the pair I’m supposed to have, I only have the one.”
And he still wears it.
The post I’m Not Quite Dead Yet appeared first on Field Ethos.
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