FRENCH FORT EXPLOSION

My assignment at the old French fort ended in one blast

The Tay Ninh Province Chief had stored his munitions there years earlier, in the fort at Tay Ninh East. He was worried about theft. He never thought about them blowing up.

The fort held more than ordnance. Vietnamese Special Forces lived there too, along with Popular Forces and Provisional Reconnaissance Units. Space was tight, so the soldiers were billeted on the second floor — directly above the ammunition.

When the first explosion hit, the concussion threw me out of my bunk and knocked me cold. I don’t know how long I was out. When I came to, half the roof was gone. Glass from the windows lay scattered across the room. Everything loose — including my uniform — had been sucked out through the hole in the roof.

I looked up and saw a mushroom cloud climbing thousands of feet into the sky, turning the night into day.

My only thought was shelter. I crawled across the floor in nothing but my briefs, trying to reach the one upright bunk left in the room. Six cases of Coke blocked the way underneath it. I reached under, swung my arm once, and sent them flying across the room like they were empty. That’s what adrenaline does.

I hid under that bunk for what felt like hours. Then I started the long crawl to the main bunker.

I left a blood trail the whole way. Broken glass and shrapnel had torn up my entire body. If I wanted to live, I had to reach that bunker before a piece of shrapnel — or an unexploded bomb — got to me first.

The explosions didn’t stop. Hundreds of 105mm and 155mm artillery rounds cooked off one after another. Each blast lifted my body off the ground and slammed it back down onto more glass, more shrapnel. My hearing went. All that was left was a high, steady ring in both ears.

I made it to the bunker. All five of my men were alive. But Sgt. Peterson had a serious wound in his lower back.

He’d come running to me, yelling that he’d been shot. When I checked, I saw a piece of shrapnel lodged next to his spine. I didn’t want to touch it. He begged me to pull it out — the pain was too much.

I tried. He screamed, and I jerked my hand across the jagged metal, slicing my thumb open. My blood ran down onto his back faster than his own did. It took two men holding him down and a 50-caliber shell clenched in his teeth before he could stay still. I had no surgical clamps. I improvised with two bullets and a bootlace and pulled out two inches of shrapnel.

The pain eased. He came back to himself. I bandaged the wound, checked his pulse — alive, semiconscious, and grateful the worst of it was over.

Two hours later he was back on his feet, running the M-60 on the bunker roof.

At Tay Ninh base camp, the surgical team told him how close he’d come. A quarter inch further right, and he’d have been paralyzed from the waist down.

The explosions kept going for four more hours. Not until sunrise did we risk digging our way out.

What we found when we surfaced didn’t look like our compound anymore. Just an empty field and a crater — thirty feet deep, a hundred feet wide.

The Vietnamese soldiers quartered above the ordnance never had a chance. Over two hundred of them died in the first blast. Their quarters were vaporized. All that was left was twisted structural steel and human remains.

We searched for classified documents and whatever personal belongings survived. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon helping the Vietnamese gather the pieces of their dead, scattered across the grounds. In 100-degree heat, the smell of rotting flesh hung so thick we needed makeshift masks just to breathe.

Unexploded ordnance was everywhere — bullets, grenades, 60mm and 81mm mortar rounds, 105mm and 155mm artillery, 500-pound dumb bombs. Late that afternoon, we gathered what gear and belongings we could find and left the French fort for the last time.

Looking back as we drove out, I saw what was left: four red brick walls and a few collapsed buildings, standing over all that death.

We were lucky. We’d made it through the night.

The ride back to base camp felt like flying. Cool evening air swept across our bodies, clearing our lungs, washing the fine white powder of the explosion out of our hair and eyes.

We had beaten death. Once we hit open country, the men broke into laughter — just glad, for that moment, to be alive.