1st Battalion 22nd Infantry Kuhn's Story Page 3

1st Battalion 22nd Infantry

THE CONVOY

On the Convoy back to Tuy Hoa, I once again got to see all kinds of Vietnamese people and how they lived,
mostly in shacks or cardboard huts along the road. I even saw one hooch made out of crushed coca cola cans.
Many of the people seemed to be beggars along the highway. We rode on big trucks called deuce and a half’s (2 ½ ton trucks)
and there were also gun trucks and tracks escorting us for protection. We passed a tank convoy headed north.

Everyone was in a good mood and glad to be out of the field. I was half falling asleep, laid back and relaxing on the back
of the truck in the warm sunshine. I think most of the other guys must have been asleep too, when suddenly I heard a loud explosion
and opened my eyes and could see smoke pouring out of the truck that was directly behind ours. Then within seconds the truck
behind him got hit too. I thought our driver must not have heard the explosion since the truck engines were so loud. We were still
rolling down the highway and we started yelling at the driver to stop, “STOP! They’ve been hit, they need help.” There was thick black
smoke pouring out of the trucks. The Driver looked back and then he floored it! We stopped a few miles down the road.

Later I found out that a convoy never stops for anything, especially a roadside ambush. The drivers are trained to get
out of the area as fast as possible. They leave the retribution up to the gun trucks to handle. The gun trucks
have big machine guns, quad 50’s (four 50 caliber machine guns). They fired up the hillside where the two B-40 rockets
came from. So the driver did the right thing and may have saved a whole truck load of our lives.

If those B-40 rockets would have hit one of the trucks carrying us troops, there surely would have been a large
number of us killed. Two of the guys from our company were wounded and several others from the escort company were too.
I only saw two of the guys that got hit; they went flying by us in a truck. One was hit in the leg the other had a bloody face.
They flew past us in a truck to meet the medevac choppers as we were still stopped along the highway.
We remained stopped along the road next to a village for quite some time until the choppers took the wounded.
Everybody was really pissed off and the villagers were the nearest target. Guys were threatening the people,
yelling at them. The little kids were still coming up to the trucks begging for food, which we always gave to them
before, but not this time. The mama-sans were gathering up the kids and running away. The villagers all scattered and disappeared.

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