Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. [Charlie Company, 4th Battalion, 12th Infantry, prepares to board helicopters to conduct an airmobile assault on an enemy bunker complex located in Gia Dinh Province, South Vietnam on June 2, 1968.]
June 2, 1968: the day is etched in my memory because I lost two good men that day. As company commander, I mourned the loss of every man, but that day one man in particular stands out in my memory, and he is among those photographed on pick-up zone: Private First Class Charles Clifford Bailey was 21 years old when he was killed that day.
“Cliff” was the name he went by in his platoon. I remember the day he joined our company in late April of 1968. It was my practice to meet and talk with all the replacements who joined the company before assigning them to a platoon, finding out a little about their background. Cliff was a taller than average guy with a warm smile, and I remember him telling me that his hometown was Eureka, Kansas, a small mid-western town of around 3,000 people. He’d graduated high school, and attended Emporia State College before he was drafted. I told him he’d be paired up with one of the more experienced soldiers in his platoon, and to always listen closely to his sergeants and lieutenant. Cliff seemed to fit in nicely with the other guys in his platoon and was by everyone’s account a good soldier who followed orders cheerfully and got along well with everyone. With a bit more experience in a rifle platoon, I may well have picked him to be one of my radio operators. I always chose the best and brightest for radio operators.
By June 2, 1968, Charlie Company had been through some of the toughest fighting of the war including the Tet Offensive and the May Offensive, and we lost a number of good men. Things seemed to be quieting down a bit by the beginning of June, but there were still a number of enemy units in our area, so I wasn’t surprised, when on the morning of June 2d, we were called out to reinforce another company from our battalion that was in a vicious fight with an entrenched enemy force.
Soon after our combat assault into the flooded rice paddies, we moved out toward a tree line and came under heavy automatic weapons and machine gun fire. Cliff’s platoon bore the brunt of the fire and casualties. I, along with my radiomen, was moving between Cliff's platoon and another platoon from my company. My men returned fire and continued to advance on the tree line, and I started splashing through the flooded rice paddy toward the scene of the heaviest fighting. I didn’t see Cliff fall, but I got there just as his buddies were carrying him to a more secure location from which he could be evacuated. His body appeared lifeless, but I hoped the medics might revive him. They couldn’t. As I helped lift his body on the medevac chopper, I began to tear up. Cliff’s buddy, Lloyd Martin Starkey, from Hardy, Virginia was also fatally wounded along with several other less seriously injured men. Both men were American heroes who gave their lives for our great nation. Their names are etched in the black marble of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Panel 61W, Rows 9 and 17.
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I try to visit the Wall each Memorial Day and Veterans Day to mourn and remember our fallen heroes, and I think of them each and every day of my life.
Robert Tonsetic is the author of a number of books including Foresaken Warriors.
Click to download an excerpt.
