Printable VersionThe images still haunt Sisto Sandoval.
“Sometimes, I still fear going to sleep, thinking that this is a dream and I'll wake up in Nam again,” he said.
“It was such a nightmare that even now sometimes I say, ‘I don't want to go to bed.' I don't want to go to sleep because everything's too good. Everything's going the way I want it. And what if now this is a dream and I wake up and I'm out in the jungle again?”
Sandoval enlisted in the Army 40 years ago. He joined the military for not only the experience but also the benefits it would provide after he was discharged. He was 22 when he enlisted. Like many that age, Sandoval thought he was indestructible.
“I was too young, too naïve,” he said. “When you're young like that, you feel that nothing can hurt you.”
In 1967, he was stationed at Fort Lee, Va., where he took a 12-week Vietnamese language course at the Department of Defense Language School.
From there, he was sent to Vung Tau, Vietnam, where he was assigned to the United States Army Strategic Command, Long Lines Battalion South. This later became the 369th Signal Battalion.
While in Vung Tau, Sandoval worked as a quartermaster at a base camp called VC Hill. His job was to supply technical equipment to troops, to maintain remote outposts with supplies, to direct and install bunkers, to secure communications systems and to assist the outlining posts when they came under fire.
He also was a courier for the Long Lines Battalion. As courier, he was responsible for transporting classified information from the remote outposts to main headquarters in Saigon. Sandoval kept the classified information in a briefcase, which was handcuffed to his wrist.
Sometimes he would transport the information via Vietnamese taxi. One time, the taxi driver diverted from the main path, taking Sandoval down a strange alleyway. He told him to turn around, but the driver refused, saying there was a lot of activity on the main road.
“I didn't trust him,” Sandoval said. So he sat with his .45-caliber pistol pointed at the driver “just in case.”
“There you don't know who your friends are and who your enemies are because they're all the same,” he said.
For example, Sandoval regularly went to a Vietnamese barber for a trim and a shave. The barber used a straight razor for the shave. One day after a firefight, Sandoval said he happened across the barber's corpse when doing a body count. It turned out the barber was a Viet Cong.
“After that, I never trusted anybody with a straight razor,” he said. “Even now, I won't go to a barber and if he has a straight razor and he says, ‘Do you want me to shave you?' I say, ‘No,' because I start shaking.
“The idea that he could have-even though he seemed like our friend, you never knew.”
While in Vietnam, Sandoval procured and distributed supplies to outposts no matter how remote. His duty, he said, had no boundaries.
He roamed throughout Can Tho, Saigon, Vung Tau, Tan Son Nut and Long Binh in the south. He also traveled through the central highlands of Pleiku, An Khe and Dak To as well as the South China Sea at Qui Nhon and Da Nang.
Delivery was made by any means necessary. Sandoval remembered using planes, helicopters, boats, trucks, even elephants to deliver supplies. The elephant transport was to a Special Forces unit outside of Pleiku that needed medicine and more ammunition.
There was too much activity on the main roads, so Sandoval and his men had to take an alternate route through the jungle.
“I was scared all the time, but I felt it was a need that had to be done,” he said of the mission.
A nearby village supplied the men with five elephants. Sandoval's team was made up of 10 soldiers, only two of which were American. The others were South Vietnamese, Korean and Australian. Sandoval at first feared there would be a language barrier. But for the most part, the team communicated well, he said.
The mission took a week. In all, the team covered about 15 miles.
“You had to be real silent,” Sandoval said. “You tried to go as slow as you can-as quick as you can. Slow and fast.”
The team took every precaution because if the supplies were to “fall into the wrong hands you lose a lot,” Sandoval said. Just to be safe, he and his men took a number of detours to ensure that they would not run into enemy fire.
“Now when I look back, it was interesting. But at that time, it was scary,” he said. “Now I say I'm glad I did it because I did help a lot. But at that time, I would say, ‘What am I doing? What kind of fool am I? Why did you volunteer for this?'
“All I know, the man upstairs took care of me. You do learn how to believe in God. That I do know.”
On average, 250 U.S. soldiers died every day in Vietnam, Sandoval said.
If no blood were shed for three days, “You knew that at least 750 soldiers were going to die,” he said. “But you didn't know where or when or anything or if you were going to be it.”
This uncertainty brought him closer to God.
“You could be in the worst firefight and come out without a scratch. Or you could be walking down the street in Saigon and a sniper shoots you and that's it. You don't know when your time comes. And I think that's when I learn to believe in God. No matter if my time would have come, I was ready,” he said.
Sandoval said he went to church whenever he had the chance. Although Buddhists far outnumber Christians in Vietnam, he said there were a number of Catholic churches where he could go to pray.
But he said there were times when he questioned his faith, especially “when you see your buddies getting killed.”
During a supply mission in March 1969, a remote outpost on the outskirts of An Khe came under attack. Sandoval was there in the middle of it all.
“As always, fear overtook us,” he said. The Americans were outnumbered and being overrun, but not knowing the outcome was the worst part, Sandoval said. The battle lasted two and a half days, then as quickly as it had started it ended.
“What seemed like about 20 minutes of complete silence went by,” he said. “The only sounds were your ears ringing, your heart beating and the burning wood crackling. The smell of burning diesel oil and what seemed like rotten fish burned your senses.”
Another soldier broke the silence, saying to him: “I wish could explain what I feel.”
It was then that Sandoval decided to put his thoughts down on paper. He gathered cardboard from empty ration boxes and wrote a poem entitled “To My Comrades.”
At the time, Sandoval's tour was almost over. He was burnt out, he said, and yearned for home.
“I lay down my weary body beside my comrade. I feel his hand upon my shoulder as to say we are soldiers.
“I see his tear roll down his cheeks, as we see our friends leave in peace.
“It feels as a dream and soon I will awake to see my loved ones beside me instead of all the dead.
“I gather the strength to go on further, to make another day. Praying that I will not be the one put to lay upon the ground and there to stay.”
Today, Sandoval talks to students about his experience in Vietnam. “It's not in-depth,” he said of his lectures. “Because it's hard to go and explain to somebody in-depth what actually you really feel.” Poetry helps him articulate what he wants to say, he said.
His most vivid mental image from Vietnam, the one he said will never leave his mind, is that of the first person he saw killed.
“I had been there (in Vietnam) for maybe three days,” he said. “It was dinner time and I ask this guy if he knew where the mess hall was.”
The soldier said yes, he knew and offered to take him there. But Sandoval said he had forgotten something at the compound, so he ran back to get it. After he had gotten what he had forgotten, Sandoval saw the soldier waiting in an alley.
“All of a sudden, I hear shooting,” he said.
A sniper had opened fire. Instead of running for cover, Sandoval stood dumbfounded. A third soldier ran over and told him to lie on the ground. When the shooting stopped, the soldier who offered to take Sandoval to the mess hall was lying in a pool of blood.
“It's too late,” the third soldier said after checking the fallen soldier's pulse.
“I didn't go to dinner that day,” Sandoval said. “That will never leave my mind. Maybe that's why I remember it. I think, What if I hadn't forgotten what I forgot?”
He also remembered the tranquility. At night, there would be complete silence.
“I mean you could feel your heart. I would think the enemy could hear my heart because of how loud I would hear it,” he said. “I would put my hand on my chest and try to calm it down so it wouldn't be as loud. And I thought, They're going to hear it, they're going to hear it, I know they're going to hear it.”
A lot of soldiers cried at night, Sandoval said. He never belittled someone for crying, in fact he said he encouraged it.
“It's a way of relieving the sorrow that you have. So you say, ‘Go ahead and cry. Everybody does. That's not going to make you less of a man.' And it doesn't.”
When they were in the jungle, the soldiers would eat lizard or mongoose. A mongoose looks like a squirrel but is a member of the rodent family.
“It tastes like corned beef,” Sandoval said. “It was good.”
No fire was necessary to cook a mongoose or lizard. The soldiers would let the animal bake in the sun. After it was cooked, the mongoose or lizard meat was put on banana leaves and mixed with rice, then rolled up into a burrito.
“When you're hungry, that tastes good,” he said.
He also ate dog on one occasion. Some South Vietnamese soldiers at one of the outposts were having a barbecue one evening, and they asked Sandoval to join them.
He saw an animal cooking over a spit, “but at first I thought it was a goat,” he said. “That's what it looked like. And when I ate it, I didn't know it was dog.”
It was not until the next day when the American soldiers noticed that one of their security dogs was missing that Sandoval realized what he had eaten.
“It was a little hard. But they did it very good. They knew how to prepare it good,” he said of the dog. “To them it's a delicacy you see.”
Yet the thing he remembers most is the camaraderie, Sandoval said.
“The soldiers were not fighting for the country. They were fighting for each other, to protect each other,” he said. “If one of your friends got killed, anger overtook you so that gave you the courage to do what you had to do.
“It wasn't because the country had sent you over there, it was because you made friends with somebody and you had gotten really close to them.”
He said all of his friends from Vietnam have a special meaning to him.
“Sometimes you say, ‘Well, I have a friend and I know he'll give his shirt off his back.' But when the time really comes, will he take off his shirt? These guys will. You learn to trust them.”
Sandoval would try not to get too attached because many of the soldiers he befriended wound up dying.
“And that's the sad thing. They became your family, more than your family because they were a part of you. Now all of a sudden, they're not there. And that's what hurt,” he said. “But it wasn't as painful as not having known them.”
He was discharged May 28, 1969. He had served two years in Vietnam during one of the bloodiest periods of the TET Offensive. When he came home, Sandoval sought counseling. Like many veterans, he had trouble matriculating back into society.
“One day you're fighting, the next day you're supposed to be Joe Good. It doesn't work,” he said.
Twenty-two hours after being discharged, Sandoval was in San Francisco waiting to catch a flight to Phoenix. On his way to the airport, he encountered a group of protesters from the University of California, Berkeley. The group belittled Sandoval, calling him a baby killer and throwing rotten tomatoes and eggs at him.
“I can still see their faces now,” he said of the protesters. “They're all over. I would hear them but I would try to block it off.”
Fearful that the episode would repeat itself, Sandoval bought civilian clothes as soon as he reached the airport.
“There's an in-built anger that goes in with you because you did your duty, you did what was told of you,” he said. “In a way, (the protesters) did help stop the war. But I think they did it at the expense of not having compassion towards the Vietnam soldiers that were coming out.”
After his discharge, Sandoval earned degrees in business management and industrial studies from California State, Los Angeles. He worked as a building mechanical inspector for the city of Los Angeles for 29 years. He and his wife, Pat, moved to Lake Havasu City after he retired in 2001.
Even though he still has nightmares, Sandoval does not regret his experience.
“I'd do it again,” he said of fighting in Vietnam. It was, he said, better than the alternative. “I'd rather fight in some other country than have it come home and have it fought here.”
Shortly before Memorial Day, Sandoval wrote a few sentences describing what the holiday meant to him.
“I have deep devotions for my country and those who served and continue to serve. It is embedded in my heart and soul. First, God, then country and family.
“I see the beauty of sunrises and sunsets because of the brave men and women in our armed forces who gave me the privilege to do so. And I thank them in prayers and remembrance.”
You may contact the reporter at raap@havasunews.com
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