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Unarmed and under fire: An oral history of female Vietnam vets | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Priscilla Mosby: One guy, Jessie Montague, he got killed on Valentine's Day. That was in 1972. He and I were stationed together at Fort Knox before I went. When I volunteered to go, he decided that he was going to sign up to take care of me. He was a military police and he got a job as an escort with my band. We were on our way back to Saigon, from the last show that I had done. I was going home in April and I wasn't going to perform anymore. We were sitting around the camp and we wanted to bed down for the night because it was monsoon and it was raining so hard you couldn't see anything. We got under sniper fire -- that's when they just start shooting at you. Jessie put me in the bushes, in a rice paddy behind some bamboo shoots. He said, "Stay here." And he gave me the .45 and said, "If you think you're going to get captured, take this, and blow your brains out." And I said, "Got it." I stayed there all night. I still have leech marks on my legs where they got me. I wasn't going to say nothing. I know what happens when you open your mouth. A couple of times I heard splashes behind me. That was Viet Cong that somebody in our camp had spotted. And all I did I was pray, "Lord. Please. Help me." Eleven hours later, when all the smoke cleared, Jessie was the only one who got hit. He got killed from the sniper fire. And then one night, a little after 10, somebody came in and said, "Spook's outside and he really wants to see you." And I went outside and the duty officer said, "You can't go out there. I'm giving you a direct order you can't go out there." And I said, "I'm sorry. I have to go." And so I went out. And he was there and I talked to him. And when I came back I got busted for that. I got demoted to E2. Name: Camilla Wagner
"We were in a hotel over there in Saigon and almost all of them have a wall around them. A bus came around at 6:30 a.m. and picked everybody up. And as we were walking out of the gate toward the bus, somebody threw a grenade. There were Chinese guards for our hotel and one of them was killed. I had three or four pieces of shrapnel in my leg, and some in my back. Not much, but if you're wounded at all from enemy fire, you can get a Purple Heart. A lot of people ask about it, like, "Were you braving gunfire?" but it isn't really that way. Peggy Ready: I was in Saigon November through June, during Tet. It was scary. I learned real quick that you tried not to get in a crowd, and if you did, that you watched out for things like anybody who had anything in their hands. You don't get near that person. If you've driving down the street, you never did anything so foolish as run over a crumpled bag, because too often it had a bomb in it. And to this day I find myself, if I'm driving down the street, and there is trash on the road like a crumpled bag or a box, no matter how small, I will do with practically everything to get away from it, before I realize that it probably doesn't have a bomb in it these days. | ||
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I had one real good friend, an Australian guy. The Australians had troops there, too. We would go out on our off-time -- we would go to the NCO (non-commissioned officers club) and meet up. His name was Spook. He was reported killed in action. Somebody told me that.
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