In August of 2018, Dad and I flew to Pittsburgh to attend his first reunion. I had just printed the first two hundred copies of the book, and many had already been delivered to former soldiers of Alpha Company. One was Joe Williams, who greeted us in the lobby and made us both feel very welcome. “It’s sort of strange reading something that’s written about yourself and your friends,” he said. While there, we met many more fellow troopers from the company, including Gene Cross, the guy whose helmet Dad recalls with the hole shot in it.
Another fellow I met was not a fellow soldier but rather a CBS journalist. Norman Lloyd was embedded with Bravo Company, 5/7th Cav during their incursion into Cambodia in May of 1970. His film features much of the footage taken as they fought the NVA there. The film is named for the young soldier, Chris Keffalos (nicknamed “Shakey”), who was killed atop a hill shortly after discovering what turned out to be an enormous underground stockpile of NVA weapons. While producing this film decades later, Lloyd reunited many Bravo Company soldiers who served during the Cambodian mission. He was kind enough to give me a copy of his documentary Shakey’s Hill.
We were sitting around late one night in the hotel, and Bobby Hansen was recalling their first big battle in the mangrove swamps, trying to rescue a couple of downed helicopter pilots on October 4th 1966. In very animated fashion, he was demonstrating how one of their Korean War veteran platoon sergeants would run from one spider hole to the next, killing NVA troops with wild abandon. “I got the little bastard!” he exclaimed. Another Alpha Company trooper I had just recently met, Chester Millay, remarked how all he could remember about that day was a bunch of noise, screaming, and chaos. He was perplexed at how Bobby could remember everything so vividly, “like it was yesterday,” as he put it. As I listened to their conversation, what struck me was that despite their outward appearance, they weren’t old men to me. To me, they were the same nineteen and twenty-year-old kids they were over fifty years ago.