The names of roughly 200 sailors are etched into a 15-foot granite obelisk at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.
Among them is the name of a man retired Master Chief Gerald “Jerry” Gandy saw die.
“I don’t even want to read about him. I don’t want to see his name … Because he is not dead to me. He is still with me,” Gandy sternly said.
The 82-year-old met with a reporter and photographer at his Virginia Beach home to remember those he lost in battle.
Memorial Day, then dubbed “Decoration Day,” was first recognized in 1868 to honor soldiers killed during the Civil War. In 1971, the day became a federal holiday. Over time, Memorial Day became an unofficial celebration kicking off summer. But for combat veterans, the day has little to do with the beginning of a new season. Rather, it is a reminder of the untimely, violent end of a brother or sister in arms.
For nearly four hours, the Vietnam veteran painstakingly recounted the fights, detailing the sights, sounds, smells and the bloodshed of his time in the jungle — including the attack that left him wounded. Gandy shared his experiences under the condition that the deceased not be named.
Gandy, a radioman first class promoted to chief petty officer, served as captain of a river patrol boat from Sept. 13, 1969, to July 17, 1970, as part of Task Force 116 during Operation Game Warden. He participated in 178 combat patrols and engaged in armed conflict seven times. He was 29.
The operation ran from December 1965 to March 1973. The mission was to deny Vietcong access to resources in the Mekong River Delta. Because water travel was the primary means of transportation and communication, control of the Delta — which winded through 15,000 square miles of Vietnam — was considered crucial.
Rows of nipa palm trees crowded the banks of the narrow rivers and canals. The broad leaves of the palms grew to 30 feet high, allowing enemies to move virtually undetected.
The Navy used 31-foot patrol boats, typically manned by a crew of four enlisted sailors and one South Vietnamese law enforcement officer or soldier, to check cargo and identify papers of boaters plying the waterways, set up night ambushes at suspected enemy crossing points, support allied forces with gunfire and transportation, and enforce curfew restrictions. The boats — often traveling in pairs — were equipped with radar, radios, and front- and rear-facing .50-caliber machine guns.
Skirmishes and bloodshed were commonplace.
“In our area, it was rancid with dead people floating in the canal, floating in the river. The stench was something that — a person might look at me and say, ‘I can’t stand this stench,’ but I had smelled it so long, I couldn’t even smell it anymore,” Gandy said.
Question: Can you give me an example? Describe an incident where you lost a crew member.
“You work so closely with your people, you get to love them just like they are your brother. But you also know that you are in a war zone,” Gandy said.
“I had a forward gunner. … We were going into ambush one night … We pulled up to the bank and tied up. My forward gunner, his job once we tied up, we had a small rope with a heavy screw on it. He would part the nipa palm. It would completely engulf the edges of the canal and you were blind — you could see nothing behind it. He parted the nipa palm to throw the rope and I saw a hole come through and his head just exploded,” Gandy said.
The crew was setting up along a Rach Giang Thanh waterway.
“We didn’t know they were there. We just happened to tie up at the wrong place … It was just boom, boom and it’s just over. And the shock doesn’t hit you until two days later. You are mechanical, you just go through the drill,” Gandy said.
“You carry that with you. I told him to tie us off and that is what he did. Here with you now and two seconds later, he is not with you anymore … I wrote his fiancé a letter. She wrote me back and thanked me, but there’s no way to make that easy,” Gandy said.
The last time Gandy saw the forward gunner was as his body was hoisted up to a helicopter.
“Even if our people are dead, you don’t want to leave them,” Gandy said.
Question: Can we shift to the incident that left you injured? Describe the minutes leading up to when chaos broke loose.
“We would all go in right after dark … I would be given coordinates to set up my ambush … I have a chart, a map. But, you know, we would never use light. You’re doing 30 knots up a canal and you don’t even know which way it is turning because you’re scared to go any slower. And we use these little red flashlights and I would follow the chart until I got to the X where I knew we were supposed to set up. And that would be our ambush position,” Gandy said.
The crew was about 40 minutes, or just over 6 miles, into its commute to the ambush position near Phouc Xuyen on the Perfume River when things went south.
Question: Had the journey there been uneventful until that point?
“It was very quiet. That’s why I wasn’t that worried. You go on intel of contact. We had no intel of any recent action in that area. We knew they were there because intel told us they were there, but they wasn’t picking on the boats,” Gandy said.
Under Gandy’s direction, the boat was “running the banks,” driving parallel to shore in shallow water in order to maximize their speed.
“I was standing in the cockpit, standing beside the boat captain. I had just got through instructing him on where to pull in for our position. I guess I was looking over with my red eye — the little red flashlight — and then all at once I heard it and I knew what it was,” Gandy said.
A rocket-propelled grenade struck the bow of the 31-foot fiberglass patrol boat.
“There was a third class — he was a Vietnamese third class,” Gandy said.”We were in the period of Vietnamization where we would take one or two of their people at a time, bring them on our boat and train them. I got very close to him. He took me home with him one time. He was just a wonderful young man.”
“When it hit, he was forward of me. And it hit him first. And I didn’t realize I was going down. I was completely coherent at that point and I was going down and he’s reaching for me to help him — he was just tattered with shrapnel. And his hand had been blown off and all I could see was two big white knuckles reaching for me. He was reaching for me to help him and I couldn’t. I failed him. And that’s the last thing I remember. But I’ll always hold myself responsible for not being able to help him.”
The blast punctuated Gandy’s time in Vietnam.
“When that RPG hit the boat — it is what put me out of country actually. I lost three sections of rib, a large lobe of my right lung was gone, and about half my liver,” Gandy said.
The damage to Gandy’s lung was suffocating him.
“I could not breathe. It is a horrible feeling, let me tell you. They had given me morphine, and what they did is they dumped me on a riverbank and turned me on my good lung to keep my insides out of the mud — I had a big gaping wound… I was begging them to shoot me,” Gandy said.
Gandy drifted in and out of consciousness.
“I remember laying on the deck of a helicopter, blood washing everywhere. I saw a body bag beside me and I knew it was that Vietnamese. We took a last trip together,” Gandy said.
The Vietnam War officially ended April 30, 1975. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, lists more than 58,300 members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went missing in action. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.
Operation Game Warden had ended two years prior, in 1973. The game warden forces lost 200 sailors in the boats from its inception to its discontinuation. But Task Force 116′s kill ratio — about 40 enemies killed in action to every one American — was one of the highest of U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.
In the decade that followed his Vietnam service, Gandy was awarded two Bronze Stars with valor, two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. The awards, fixated in shadow boxes, decorate the walls of his home.
Gandy spent three years in and out of hospitals being put back together. He is marred with scars from Vietnam — his rib cage was never rebuilt and his body is still speckled with tiny black dots of shrapnel.
“But not all wounds you see,” Gandy said.
Gandy keeps a photo album of roughly two dozen photos taken while he was in Vietnam. Among those is one of him with four of his crew. Gandy is shown kneeling in front, while his forward gunner has his arm draped around the Vietnamese soldier.
Question: Can you reflect on the others you lost whose names are on the monument at Little Creek?
“Losing one of them is like losing a part of you … I just hope they rest in peace,” Gandy said.
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