Reddit reviews One Hell of a Ride: Inside an Armored Cavalry Task Force in Vietnam

He did a lot of things! I know when he graduated from officer school he was a 2nd Lt in the South Vietnamese Marines where he saw a lot of heavy combat around the coast, especially the Da Nang area. He was part of the "sea wolves" battalion. It was pretty hard to get many combat operation stories from him, because he really hated talking about it (understandably) so I'm not sure of the exact nature of what he did when he took part in front line combat. All he'd tell me is that he'd be in units that went out for up to a month at a time fighting in the jungles. He was wounded 3 times in the field, the 3rd time being from a mortar or a rocket that showered him with a ton of shrapnel, some of which lodged right by his spinal cord and caused him to have to walk with a cane for the rest of his life (you see him with the cane in the 2nd picture). He still managed to get a silver star after this for some actions he took during an engagement with VC forces (I'll have to find the citation somewhere, don't have it on me at the moment).

Eventually he got promoted to Lt. Col and placed in a position as the District Chief of Di An district, which is about 15 km outside of Saigon. In wartime, the district was like a county, and the district chief was the administrative and the military head of the district. This part of his life was easier for me to find out about because there were some books written about it, one of which featured him pretty prominently as a character. There's a picture of him with Haponski (the author of the first book) I'll have to find. He took part in the Phoenix Program, which was a controversial counter-insurgency program. From what I've read, results were overall mixed but my grandfather's district was the absolute most successful by the end of the program (Per John Cook's book). Interestingly, the program's success in his district became pretty apparent when he was targeted for assassination at one point since he was deemed a pretty big enemy of the Viet Cong (the Northern-sympathizing insurgency). Col Haponski gave a small summary of his time knowing my grandfather at this random site I found via google.

One of the most incredible stories I got from him and my grandmother was about their experience in the last days before the collapse of the Southern government. They decided to hold their post and dig in throughout Di An instead of retreating. He told me that they all thought they were probably going to die that night, but the NVA armored divisions went around Di An instead of getting into another bloody battle when the end was so near. The day of the surrender was a pretty significant trauma in his life...in fact I'm pretty sure that was the saddest day of his 82 years of life. This documentary did a pretty good job of summing up the events surrounding that day, but there aren't too many well known books or documentaries I know of that do justice to the immense suffering he and his fellow soldiers experienced after the war.

Honestly, after writing all this, I'm curious and I wonder where I would find official US military documents that might help me figure out more of his story..