UNBREAKABLE

take a bamboo stick and take a nail with a projectile on top of it. So when you’re walking on a trail, if you stepped on that, it’d push it into the ground and that nail would make it blow your foot off. A week of jungle warfare training, and they thought we were ready to go.”

He flew to Da Nang, Vietnam, with the 101st Airborne Division, and any hopes he had of avoiding heavy combat were dashed.

‘Sit your duffle bags down. There are 200 body bags over here.’ So we loaded the bodies back into the plane, and then we went to the hanger to spend the night. So that was my welcome to the front lines.” .”

“All the dead bodies went to Da Nang,” DeCardenas explains. “We landed, and we were going farther north. There were probably about 100 of us, and when we got off it was raining. It was in the middle of the night, and they said, ‘Sit your duffle bags down. There are 200 body bags over here.’ So we loaded the bodies back into the plane, and then we went to the hanger to spend the night. So that was my welcome to the front lines.”

Firefights became routine, taking place up to six or seven times a day.

In 1967 neighbor Mark DeCardenas received a letter saying he’d been selected for service, making him one of 648,500 Americans drafted into the Vietnam War.

They called him in for a physical.

“By the end of the day, I was being sworn into the Army,” DeCardenas says.

He went to basic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. He took an aptitude test and scored high, so they told him he was going to train as a medic. He was assigned to the Illinois National Guard in Springfield, and he hoped that meant he wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam.

Then he got another letter.

He was sent to a field hospital in Saigon, Vietnam, at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. When he arrived, he began jungle warfare training, where, among other lessons, he learned to spot booby traps.

“There were hand grenades hooked to trees, and they had white phosphorus inside,” he explains. “White phosphorus is like rock salt, and if it touches your body it starts burning the flesh immediately. Or [Vietnamese soldiers] would

“We ran so many different missions,” he says. “We always took a lot of incoming mortar rounds, but the firefights you didn’t know when they would happen. The Viet Cong mostly stayed in these huge things underground.”

The United States soldiers called in airstikes to throw down Napalm, a highly flammable liquid, that would fall into the underground spaces and drive out the Vietnamese soldiers.

“Viet Cong would come out the other end on fire,” he remembers. “Never even hollering or anything.”

But it wasn’t all bad. DeCardenas also has memories of Vietnam that make him smile.

“When we got to Da Nang, they gave us some boxes of chocolates,” he says. “But these were left over from the Korean War, probably, because there were little Hershey bars in them that were white because they were so old. So we decided to throw them to the little Vietnamese kids that were along the road. But as soon as we’d throw them to the kids, they’d throw them back at us because they knew it was old candy, and they didn’t want it.”

For the second half of his service, DeCardenas left the 101st Airborne Division and became a medical adviser for Military Assistance Command, Vietnam [MACV]. “Medics could only stay in the field for six months,” he explains. So he spent the remainder of his tour of duty with a group of Australian soldiers who drank like they “had hollow legs” and played Poker every night, he says.

After being honorably discharged, DeCardenas returned to East Dallas, near his roots. He grew up by White Rock Lake, a graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School. After working for 13 years in the grocery business, a friend encouraged him to get involved in the John Franklin Sprague VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] in East Dallas. The people he met there quickly became his close friends.

“I could just sit down and talk with them,” he says. “We all had something in common. We’ve all been in a war or a conflict, and that’s our bond. I just love [the VFW]. It gives me a place to come every morning.”

The VFW, which is a national organization that works to secure rights and benefits for military veterans, proved so valuable for DeCardenas that he took on a leadership role as a service officer. So when neighbors call the John Franklin Sprague VFW that’s located on Garland Road, they’ll more than likely be directed to talk with DeCardenas.

He helps veterans and their families with a range of needs, from advocating for veterans who’ve been wounded or who suffer from PTSD, to helping families prepare military funerals.

“If I hadn’t gone to Vietnam, then I wouldn’t have the opportunity to be here,” he says.

Applewhite

Joe Applewhite, who lives at C. C. Young retirement community in East Dallas with his wife, Mary Beth, was a farm boy from Mississippi who’d never been out of the country when he joined the Army.

He’d already seen the Great Depression and World War II as a boy, but it was his time in Korea as a young man that gave him a new take on life and death.

“You become aware of what’s really important when you’re facing death,” he explains. “When you’re in a position where you don’t know if you’re going to live past tomorrow or not, you live differently than if you think you’re going to live for 30 more years. It gives you a totally different perspective.”

Although there are a few moments that stand out in his mind as having come especially close to death, every day was a risk.

Applewhite was a first lieutenant who served as a recon (“reconnaissance” is a military term for gathering information) and field artillery officer, and later as a field artillery forward observer. In both cases, he spent his days as close to enemy lines as possible.

The opposing sides North Korea, which was backed by China, and South Korea backed by the United States — were pressed against the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which runs along the Han River right at 38th parallel north.

His job was to communicate between the artillery and infantry, so when the infantry made plans to cross the river at night to capture Chinese soldiers and interrogate them, he made sure the ambush patrols were protected in case of a firefight.

“We were as far forward as you could get because you had to be able to see,” he says.

Being that close to enemy lines meant dodging bullets was a daily occurrence.

“You begin to do things without thinking about it,” he explains. “We had this ob- servation hole where you could see out the front. It had a cover on it, and one day I was having trouble seeing, so I got up on top to have a look around. My buddy says, ‘What are you doing up there, fool? You’re getting ready to get shot.’ So I hopped back down, and sure enough a whole blast of machine fire came across there.”

Applewhite was particularly fascinated by the psychological warfare the Chinese employed. Both the Chinese and the Americans used fliers to send messages to the other side, but they took very different approaches, he remembers.

“The Americans would give out leaflets saying that if they surrendered we’d give them safe passage,” he says. “The Chinese would leave leaflets saying things like, ‘What if someone is fooling around with your girl at home? Wouldn’t you rather be there with her?’

“It was totally different psychology. They were trying to get our morale down. They were working on our minds all the time.”

Applewhite’s division worked closely with the 65th Infantry Division from Puerto Rico, who he claims were “very nervous people” who made “excellent soldiers.”

“Because if they heard something they’d shoot at it or throw a hand grenade at it,” he recalls. “It was not uncommon to find a dead man on the wire out there the next morning.”

One day Applewhite went out with a team to scout for a new location. While driving along they discovered a road that wasn’t clearly marked on their map, so they decided to check it out.

“We drove about a quarter of a mile, and there was a clearing. There was a big farmhouse because it had been someone’s farm, although no one was there then,” he remembers. “We looked around and something told me, ‘You know, we might not ought to be here.’ So we left.”

The next day a platoon was ambushed in that exact clearing, and everyone was killed, Applewhite says. All these years he’s felt lucky.

“Luckily something told me to get out of there, and I did,” he concludes.

He learned a lot in Korea, he says, particularly about leadership, priorities and understanding people.

“It was educational for me to know how the world is.”

Clift U.S. Army World War II

Gilbert Clift, a resident at C. C. Young retirement community in East Dallas, should have been storming the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, when more than 130,000 Allies (which rose to 1 million by the end of the week) flooded into Western Europe.

But Clift was in a hospital in Paris, Texas, due to a training exercise gone terribly wrong.

During a live exercise at Camp Maxie, a mortar round fell short, killed one man and put a dozen others in the hospital, including Clift, who was injured by shrapnel that went through his boot and into his foot, where it remains to this day.

“No Purple Heart,” Clift says. “Training accidents don’t count.”

Although today he’s both anti-war and anti-gun, Clift believes World War II “was necessary, with Hitler being like he was,” he says. So as a freshman at Oklahoma A&M, Clift enlisted in the Army Reserve with the goal of taking ROTC and serving as a second lieutenant after he graduated with his engineering degree. However, the reserves were called up two weeks before the end of Clift’s freshman year.

He trained at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and then Camp Maxie, where the accident occurred. It took him out of field training for six weeks, but in September of 1944 he sailed to Britain. From there his division made its way through France and into Belgium, straight to the front lines.

“At the front line, in the trees, we could see across an open field to pill boxes and concrete tank traps,” he says. “This was my first view of where the enemy was.”

At times they’d see the German soldiers emerge from their shelters to play in the snow. Although they were instructed not to shoot at the soldiers, one of Clift’s buddies decided to see if he could hit one. He didn’t, but soon afterwards the German soldiers launched three artillery shells back at them.

“This was my first indication that this was just a game, and there were rules to be followed,” Clift recalls.

Most of the action happened when the night patrols crossed the field in an attempt to gather information, Clift explains. Because Clift wore glasses that reflected the light and had a tendency to cough frequently, he was never selected for that job.

“Lucky me,” he quips. “I was real lucky during the war.”

Although not lucky enough to miss the infamous Battle of the Bulge — the Third Reich’s last ditch effort to eject Allied forces from Europe, resulting in about 90,000 American casualties.

“You couldn’t tell which way the shells were going,” Clift remembers. “So I assumed we were shelling the Germans. I didn’t know they were shelling us.”

During the battle, while out scouting with another soldier, Clift was outnumbered by at least a dozen German soldiers. Clift slid into a foxhole and began shouting orders to his buddy, but he soon realized his friend had been shot and he was left fighting alone.

“The Germans were throwing concussion grenades at my position that sooner or later would get close to me,” he realized. “I thought of the only phrase I could recall in German and hollered out, ‘helfen sie mir!’” — help me.

“That was the end of my soldiering,” he says. “They removed my helmet, an indication that I was out of the game.”

They took him east into Germany and interrogated him in a farmhouse, al- by American troops instead of Russian troops.” though he claims they knew more about his outfit than he did. He traveled with them a little ways farther, and although food was scarce Clift insists he was in better shape as a prisoner of war than a soldier.

“At least I wasn’t getting shot at,” he points out.

Eventually they put him in a boxcar and sent him to Stalag 4B, a prison camp near Mahlberg, that contained more than 10,000 British soldiers, but he soon volunteered for a work detail that allowed him to leave the camp.

They sent him to Torgau, Germany, where he and other volunteers loaded barrels and filled craters left by bombs. They made their way into Zeitz to fill more craters, spending their nights in an old monastery in Moritzburg.

On Easter Sunday in 1945, they were allowed to take a shower and “get some sun in a grassy courtyard within the walls of the monastery,” he remembers.

Along the way, however, an American P-47 dropped a bomb on a nearby schoolhouse. Clift tried to take shelter under a wagon, but there was no way to hide from the debris of the blast. A piece of shrapnel sliced through his right side, just above the belt. With a makeshift bandage, he kept walking.

Two days later on April 15, an American tank liberated them and took the Germans captive.

“We knew something was afoot for this kind of treatment. Sure enough, on Friday the 13th of April, we walked from our room and headed west. We were walking to freedom, and our elderly guard… was hoping to be captured

Clift and the other now-freed POWs continued to the next town where they found a chow line and beds to sleep in. The next morning he went to a hospital, where they diagnosed him with malnutrition due to his dramatic drop in weight from 140 to 110 pounds.

They also looked at his wound and determined he’d get that Purple Heart after all. But more importantly, he got to go home.