Williams served country, now serves others

in the military, but Uncle Sam had other ideas.

It was 1966, and Williams, a 1964 Comanche High School graduate, worked as a Halliburton forklift operator.

“I had a good job and a girlfriend I was planning to marry,” Williams said. “I never thought about going in the military.”

Then, the draft notice came in the mail. Not only would his world be turned upside down, but he would also go to the other side of the world.

“I had some family members who had been in World War II and they had talked about it, so I had some preconceived ideas of what it was going to be like,” Williams said. “It didn’t turn out that way. None of my family members had been in the infantry and I was in the infantry.”

Williams rode around in a helicopter from Point A to Point B. He and his fellow platoon members would drop off the aircraft and return on foot to where they had started. Of the 365 days he spent in Vietnam, only 12 days were spent at their base camp. The rest were spent in the jungle.

“There’s a lot of stuff I can’t forget, but don’t want to remember,” Williams said.

Only five members of his platoon returned from Vietnam.

He said he doesn’t like to talk about “the blood and guts” part of his time in Vietnam though he did mention one harrowing experience.

“In the movies, you see the men walking behind the tanks so they won’t step on landmines, but that’s not what happens,” Williams said. “We walked in front of the tanks. You only have to pay a $10,000 life insurance policy on a soldier. A tank costs a lot more.”

Williams was a radio man and recalled walking through a field with his lieutenant telling him to stick as close to him as possible. Williams followed in his lieutenant’s footsteps when a landmine exploded just a few feet in front of the officer. Williams got some of the shrapnel, but the lieutenant got the worst. Williams said he heard the officer died a couple of weeks later.  Williams said he had shrapnel in his neck for many years until his body eventually absorbed it.

He is also reminded of a story about Thanksgiving from the front lines when this time of the year rolls around.

“They had put five of us up on this mountain in the middle of a valley and our job was to watch around and see what activity was going on, and then I would call back in the afternoon and tell them what we saw,” Williams said. “One of the guys said, ‘Hey, you know what? Today is Thanksgiving.’ We said, ‘How do you know that?’ He said, ‘Well, I decided it was.’”

The rations consisted of rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

“We cooked the rice, put it in a steel pot and mixed it up and got it all good and sticky and molded it into a turkey,” Williams said. “Then we sliced it and had Thanksgiving. Of course, it was all white and I like dark meat.”

He told another story of commandeering a Jeep to go to another unit that they heard had hot water, hot food and dry uniforms.

“They had hot water and dry uniforms, so two out of three ain’t bad,” Williams said. 

The roads consisted of driving on a divided part of rice fields. On his and his fellow soldier’s return to their unit, they heard the familiar zing of bullets. 

“He went one way into a rice field and I went the other,” Williams said. “There went our dry uniforms.”

When he returned to the U.S. he bought a Ford Mustang in Oklahoma before being stationed in Fort Carson, Colo. He and one of his Vietnam buddies, Rene Dinieth,  decided to go to Pike’s Peak.

“That Mustang was calibrated for Oklahoma, not Colorado, so every once in a while it would backfire,” Williams said. When they slowed at a Ranger station to have their brakes check, the car backfired and with Vietnam still fresh on their minds, they both dove out their doors. The park ranger gave them a curious look.

“Mind your own business,” they told the ranger.  

Williams is still serving, though his service now is to veterans and the community. He has been active in leadership in the American Legion for many years. He is also a member of the Stephens County Honor Guard, where he has worked at approximately 1,100 funerals of veterans.