Forgetten in Memorial: The Casualties of War
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George Watkins was a grunt with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade. In April, 1968, near Camp Evans, in Quang Tri province, he stepped on a land mine. He lost both legs and both eyes. His legs were amputated just a few inches below his pelvis. He lives with his sister in the Appalachian town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. "She cooks and cleans the house, but I take care of all my personal needs--getting on and off the couch, into bed, going to the bathroom." Sitting sideways at one end of the couch, he carefully lights a cigarette. His empty wheelchair is next to him, an ashtray attached to one of its arms. He taps an ash into the familiar spot and asks about my minidisc recorder, wants to know how it compares to the cassette player he uses for books-on-tape. Looking into his bright blue artificial eyes, I have to remind myself that he cannot see the machine; that I need to slide it over to his hand. My daddy built this house. He built it from the ground up, a piece at a time. We moved down here when I was three-years-old. He wanted to get all us kids out of the coal camps. He was a coal miner for thirty-six years and he did not want us in the mines, period. That's one thing Daddy would not let. He told the man who run his division of Westmoreland Coal that if he hired any one of his sons, that'd be the day he'd walk out of the mines. I have a brother in the railroad, and one that makes mining equipment, and one that just retired from the highway department. So we all stayed out of the mines. I was drafted on June 19, 1967. I knowed it was coming. Just a matter of time. Come close to not getting drafted. Had high blood--borderline. They kept me three days at Roanoke to watch my blood pressure. I think the three days just laying around doing nothing brought it down. I knowed very little about Vietnam. I mean what I know now about it and what I knowed then is just from scary. I didn't really pay a whole lot of mind to it. I just knowed that we was fighting over there against Communism, so-called. I started doing more thinking about it after I got drafted, in basic training, trying to find out more, but in there it was hard to find out anything. I went to Fort Bragg and then to Fort Leonard Wood. Spent two months training as a combat engineer. That's what my MOS [military occupational specialty] was. I was told when I left I would be with an Engineer Battalion at Pleiku--that's where I thought I was going. But when I got to Vietnam, I reckon they needed infantry and I reckon they just drawed the line somewhere on the list and I went to infantry and the rest of them went over to what they's supposed to. In Cam Ranh Bay they said I was going to Chu Lai to the 196th and I hadn't had one bit of infantry training. The first night I was out there, they put me behind an M-60 machine gun and I had about a two minute lesson. "Here's the safety, here's the trigger, and here's the bolt." Our worse time was about the entire month of December, 1967. We stayed in the field. Everything we had, we had on our back. Where we stopped, that's where we slept. It was just a continuous patrol and ambush at night. Search-and-destroy in the day, and every third night you was on an ambush. You was lucky to get four hours sleep. It was nothing to go thirty to forty hours with no sleep. As a matter of fact, the longest we ever went was seventy-one hours. We lost quite a few people that time. Seemed like everywhere we moved, they was right behind us. Seemed like we couldn't get away from them. We went from ninety-three men down to forty. They brought one Chinook in and took us all out. One Chinook. As they say in the army, we was no longer an effective fighting force. Then we was in one valley, called the Que Son Valley, two miles wide and ten, twelve miles long. We cleaned out every living thing in that valley--people and animals--and destroyed everything else. We just rounded them all up--four to five hundred people--and started moving them eleven klicks to some type of a camp. All their animals was killed. Then we made the valley a free-fire zone. After we cleaned it out, anything you saw was a legitimate target. Two days later, half the people were right back in it. They went back to nothing because we burned and destroyed everything. They had to be some good people to withstand all that. They come right back to nothing and start over. Go out and get some thatch or find some that wasn't burnt, tie it together with a couple branches over some poles and sit up under it with their little beat up aluminum pots. They's some of the most determined people I've ever run into. I don't hate them. They did what they had to do. It's the politicians that put everybody in that place. Although I would like to get ahold of that one that set the booby trap. [Laughs.] They moved us up to Camp Evans right after the big push into Hue during the Tet Offensive. That's where I got hit. We was doing a road sweep. We had about a five mile stretch of road and we had to sweep it every day for mines. All that area is flat and sandy--real sandy country. There just about wasn't any cover. Just dirty white sand. Over the years it had blackened like soot. I've still got some of it in me. The doctors say that sand was probably the only thing that saved me. Instead of coming straight up, it spread the explosion out real big. It was real early, just after day break on a Sunday morning. We moved out in two platoons to that road we were supposed to sweep. My platoon was last and I was second or third from the very last man. We had just moved about a hundred feet when I hit it. Seems like I remember looking at my watch and seeing seven-thirty. Sometimes I think that's why I was looking down--why it got in my eyes. I was unconscious for just a couple minutes. I come around and I was laying in a hot hole with my arms up on the side. There was absolutely no pain, just numbness--total numbness. It was hot from the blast. That's the only thing I remember. I told them to get me out of that hole because it was hot. I got some burns on my back from that. They tell me I hit a pressure-detonated mine--one of our duds, a 105-millimeter round that had been booby-trapped. Its about twenty inches long and 105 millimeters in diameter. Roughly forty people walked by it before I hit it. It also hit a boy in front of me and one to my immediate right. That boy lost a left eye, his left ear, and I think some movement. And I had just mentioned to him to move because he was way too close, just about shoulder to shoulder. I met him later at the hospital in San Antonio and he thanked me. He thinks it would have got him worse if he hadn't moved. And the boy in front, the radio saved his life. He was carrying the radio on his back. Our platoon leader wrote me a letter while I was in the hospital saying they found a piece of shrapnel the size of your hand embedded in the radio. Doc patched me up and the helicopter sent me to an aid station at Camp Evans. A doctor did something and I was right back on the helicopter and they took me out to the S.S. Sanctuary hospital ship. That's when the pain really started hitting me and then it was just unbearable. They pushed me over to the side and was taking people over me. I think it was a triage decision, probably taking the ones that was worse. I can remember laying on that stretcher and it seemed like a long time, but they say in circumstances like that sometimes you don't lose a lot of blood. A lot of times the force of the explosion will seal the ends of the arteries and veins. I knowed something was wrong with my eyes, but I was telling myself that my sight wasn't gone, that it was just sand or powder burn. When I come to after surgery my whole head and face was wrapped in bandages and I just kept telling myself I could still see. Nobody did tell me, but the more the days went, I finally began to tell myself, "No, you're going to be blind." A few days later a doctor says my eyes were just like you took and scrambled an egg. Like you took an egg and you just scrambled it. He said that was the shape my eyes was in. I'll tell you what's surprising. I didn't think about my legs. Legs was a second thought. For some reason my sight meant a lot more than my legs. That's all I can say. All my thoughts and worry was on my eyes. I still had my right leg for seven days. The doctors told me there's four inches of bone missing, but there was a little bit of tissue still holding it together. They tried to save it, but after seven days gangrene set in and my temperature got up to a hundred and six. I was plum out of it. The next thing I remember is running my hand down to my leg and feeling with my fingers. I just said, "It's gone." I don't have much bitterness. Well, I don't think I do. I just wish that none of it ever happened--for everybody's sake. It was a bad political mistake. Have you been to the Wall? I was there in '85. I guess that made me feel the worst that I had felt since I'd been home. I sat right in the middle of it, right at the "V" of it, and run my hands up a ways on it. All those names. And then we went from end to end and picked out some that got killed in our outfit. I felt them. Spelled them out even. Each letter. I sat right there and just tried to think, 'Why did all these people die?' The majority were my age. Their lives and their families all messed up. What was gained from it? At the end of the interview, he worries about how the published version will turn out. "I say things that don't look good in print." He cannot be convinced otherwise. On my way out, he makes a request I do not know how to honor: "Fancy it up," he says.
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