By Joe Arterburn
This is Gary Clancy’s story, not mine but he’s not around to tell it anymore because of aggressive cancer caused by that fucking Agent Orange—another reason to hate war, any war.
When I first heard his account, I told the big smiling Irishman it was a poignant story, and he should write more about his Vietnam experiences. He said no, that it took him into dark places he didn’t want to go.
But this story he did tell. His father, when a young man, injured his right eye. Clancy was a little boy at the time and didn’t remember how the injury occurred but remembered his dad determinedly training himself to shoot left-handed. So he taught Gary to shoot from either shoulder, his father not wanting him to go through the same difficulty should he lose his dominant eye. From then on Clancy would occasionally shoot ducks or pheasants, or a deer or turkey, left-handed just to prove he could. Sometimes when ducks were winging in left to right, he would shoot twice right-handed then switch and shoot the last one with the left. “Pa always got a kick out of knowing that all that time he had spent helping me learn to shoot from both sides paid off,” Clancy wrote.
In October 1969, Clancy, a self-described Army grunt, was the “slack man” just behind the point man at the head of a Big Red One platoon following a faint path through the jungle. The point man’s job was to look for tripwires, the slack man’s to look for snipers and ambushes.
To his hard right Clancy saw two black AK-47 muzzles poking from elephant grass. In a split second he realized it was NVA waiting for the entire platoon to walk into the kill zone before opening up.
As he took his next step, Clancy switched his M-14 to his left hand and opened fire from his hip. There was a moment of silence, he wrote, apparently the NVA soldiers were briefly shocked that their ambush had gone wrong. Then all hell broke loose.
“The closest I can come to describing the never-to-be-forgotten, unmistakable chatter of AK-47s mingled with light machine guns burning through belts of ammo from both sides, the sputtering of full-auto M-16s and M-14s, RPGs and thump-guns, is to imagine a dozen chainsaws stuck at full throttle and all running right next to your head,” he wrote. “Throw in some bone-jarring explosions and you’ve got an idea of what a real firefight sounds like.”
Amid the hell, two Cobra gunships were called in and when it was over and U.S. wounded evacuated, the rest of the platoon “humped 10 klicks to an ARVN compound.” Sitting on the floor of a sandbag bunker, Clancy scribbled a note in the dim glow of his flashlight on the back of cardboard C-ration packaging (peaches and pound cake, he remembered.) “Pa,” he wrote, “You saved my life today. I’ll tell you about it someday.” He signed it, “Your son, Buck.”
Clancy did not expect to return from Vietnam. He said he and many of his buddies spent every dime of their Army pay because they expected to be killed. When he didn’t die and returned home to Minnesota, he had no savings. But that’s a different story.
One morning, years later, his father long gone, Clancy was helping his mother, then in hospice care, when she asked if his father had ever talked about the note.
“No,” he said. They’d spent plenty of time together but neither spoke of the note. His father was a WWII vet and “like most men of that time, when the war was over, he simply came home and went to work building a family and a career.” Clancy further told his mom that he and his dad “never talked about his war or mine.”
His mother took Clancy’s hand and said she had seen his father cry only twice, and one of those times was when he read that handwritten letter. She then read the letter herself and asked the elder Clancy what it meant. “Something I taught him long ago,” his father said.
The morale of the story? That’s up to you. I’m just telling you Clancy was a hell of a man.
