By Nate Jones
Staff Writer
During a time when many young men in America were doing everything they could to avoid the draft, a 39-year-old James Gibbons requested to be put back into active duty in November, 1969, only three months after retiring as a Staff Sergeant from a military career spanning 20 years. He had already lived through three tours in Korea.
“I knew, having been in combat before, that they would send me right to Vietnam,” Gibbons, now a 78-year-old Cape Elizabeth resident, says. “All of my buddies had all been there before and I hadn’t; I felt kind of slighted.”
Gibbons enlisted in the Army when he was 17, and was stationed in Okinawa, Japan before being deployed to Korea in 1950 as a Private First Class, where he says he learned how to stay alive.
“Our platoon commander had served in World War II, so I figured he had good luck. I stuck to him so close if he stopped walking I would bump into him,” Gibbons says. “He got shot in the head by a sniper and I figured his luck came onto me because he was gone and I was still alive.”
Gibbons was promoted to Sergeant after 176 men of his 240-man unit were killed in action.
“We woke up that morning and the first thing we heard were bugles,” he says. “They came at us on horses – Mongol soldiers – and there were so many of them you didn’t even have to aim, you just pointed and fired to hit one.”
Having no experience commanding, Gibbons found himself in charge of a 10-man heavy infantry unit armed with a heavy machine gun and bazookas to battle the Red Army.
“Once you pulled the trigger on the machine gun you only have about 30 seconds to live,”
he says. “They focus all their fire on taking out that gun.”
Gibbons says he was struck twice in Korea; one round blew up his canteen and injured his backside, and another round hit his helmet.
“I always told my guys a helmet will save you, even though I’ve seen guys get shot right through [their helmets],” he says. “It was a spent bullet that hit me; it was probably fired from far away. I had a headache for a week but without my helmet I would’ve been killed.”
After Gibbons retired and re-enlisted, he was sent to Fort Riley, Kan., for training.
“They sent me there to learn how to fight in the jungle. After three tours in Korea you would think I had figured it out,” he laughs.
On Christmas Eve, 1969, a battle hardened Gibbons landed in the front lines of the Vietnam conflict as a tank platoon leader, with nearly 40 men under his command.
Although he was no stranger to fighting in the jungle, Gibbons says Vietnam was a very different war than Korea. Unlike the Chinese, America’s true foe in Korea, Vietnamese “sapper,” suicide bomb soldiers would strap sticks of dynamite to their back and try to take out entire units, he says.
“I used to walk the perimeter at night and check for the guys on watch in case they fell asleep,” he says. “I’d sneak right up behind them, point my .45 in the air and fire off two rounds. It wouldn’t hurt them but it would scare the hell out of them. Falling asleep on watch is one of the worst things that can happen. We used to say ‘if you’re not careful you’ll get sapped!’”
Gibbons found himself leading a different sort of American soldier in Vietnam. Many of the men who had been drafted to fight in the war were involved with alcohol and drugs, which made it difficult to keep them motivated, he says. Leading his men by example in both combat and by following orders, Gibbons took nausea inducing anti-malaria pills most soldiers refused to take.
“I took it every day,” he says. “I felt like I had to because I was in charge.”
On April 9, 1970, Gibbons’ unit came under attack in South Vietnam. A rocket-propelled grenade destroyed Gibbons’ tank. Despite his wounds, he wielded a .50 caliber machine gun on the turret of his tank to discourage further enemy attack, secured the perimeter around his men and began caring for the wounded before tending to his own medical needs.
“I wasn’t thinking about medals at the time, since most guys who earned them were dead, you know,” he says. “They messed with the wrong platoon leader is all.”
Gibbons shared his Purple Heart with the platoon mascot, Smokey, after the battle. He says more often than not people are interested in what happened to the dog rather than the other soldiers in the photo.
After 11 months on the frontline of Vietnam, a medical officer accused Gibbons of having a drinking problem while they sat around a fire together.
“I told him ‘I’m in the bush, how the hell can I have a drinking problem?’” he says.
The medical officer was reacting to several blisters on the back of Gibbons’ hands, a common sign of soldiers who drank too much. After 11 months in Vietnam, Gibbons was sent to a military hospital in Japan to be treated for the blisters, which doctors believed could have been an allergic reaction to the anti-malaria pills.
“I’d been in three different countries with Malaria and never got it,” Gibbons says. “They made me take five pills a day to ‘challenge the disease.’ The Japanese doctors couldn’t figure it out so they asked me if I wanted to go to the States and I said, ‘Yeah.’”
During his medical leave in San Francisco, Calif., Gibbons received an envelope postmarked from Vietnam. Inside was a letter and a certificate informing him he had earned the Silver Star for his actions in the April 9 battle.
There was no medal inside.
Most likely a soldier in Vietnam opened the letter and took the medal out as a souvenir, Gibbons said.
“I forgot about it for 10 years,” he says. “If they don’t want to send me a medal the heck with them.”
Although the blisters never returned, Gibbons was deemed “combat ineffective” and was stationed at Fort Hood in Texas to train other soldiers on leave from Vietnam.
“It was hard to do anything, most of them were on drugs,” he says. “They wouldn’t show up, and what could you do, kick them out of the Army? That was what they wanted.”
After struggling as a trainer for two years, Gibbons moved to New York in 1972, and served as an Army recruiter.
“They like recruiters with experience because they have a lot of medals,” he says. “But I was in the middle of Chinatown. You know how hard it is to try to convince them to go fight in Vietnam?”
Gibbons was deemed an “ineffective recruiter” by his superiors and returned to retirement. He followed his sister to Maine, where he lived in South Portland for 12 years while he worked as a federal security officer for the court system. Eventually he moved to Cape Elizabeth, where several friends overheard his story about how he never received the Silver Star.
After some calls to U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, Gibbons received the award last Monday, May 5, nearly 40 years after surviving the fierce battle in the Vietnam jungle.
Although he was engaged five times, Gibbons remains a bachelor and spends his days looking for moose in the Cape Elizabeth woods, traveling the country – he’s been in all 50 states – and sharing his stories with other would-be soldiers around town.
“I tell them if you like it, you’ll stay in,” he says. “I signed up for two years and spent nearly 50 in the Army. I liked it.”