Vietnam Veteran's 9th Infantry Division, 6-31st | home
Special Interest
Delta Company 3rd Herd Reunion - Washington DC May 2009
David Hunt
Originally published as a special issue of Radical America, January-April, 1974, Volume 8, Number 1-2.
this links to the Gratitude Campaign website, please take a few minutes to watch
full length movie - it's less than 2 minutes
Jay Musson
Co. C, 6th Bn, 31st Inf, 9th Inf Div
Jay was recently featured in an article on Cleveland.com, entitled Road Scholars.
I have copied the article here - and provided a link to the orignal article, which will only be availabe through December 4th.
Photo by Peggy Turbett/The Plain Dealer
ROAD SCHOLARS
The license plate: SHOT4U
The car: 1999 Dodge Caravan.
The owner: Jay Musson, 58, accountant.
The reason: I am a Purple Heart Vietnam veteran. I went over April 1, 1968 - an appropriate day - and I served through March 1969.
I was a 20-year-old grunt with Charlie Company, 6th Battalion, 31st Infantry.
We were part of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta, south of placeSaigon. Our job was to patrol for bad guys. It was all about body count. That was the name of the game. Get out there and make contact.
Three weeks into our tour we walked into an ambush. It was over in about five seconds. Three of our guys killed and 12 wounded.
After that they shipped us up to placeSaigon for some house-to-house fighting. That lasted about a week. I got through it. Then I got dysentery from drinking paddy water.
I spent the rest of my time in placecountry-region Vietnam as a clerk, taking care of personnel matters. I was still in the Delta and we would get shelled at night. As I ran out to a bunker during one attack, a rocket went off about 40 feet to the right of me. Hit me in the knee of my left leg. That's how I got the Purple Heart. My knee's fine today, barely see the scar.
The plate's not so much about me as it is about letting people know that there are a lot of people like me out there. The way people act you wouldn't even know there was a war going on. I want them to recognize that there are people, anonymous people, all around them who have sacrificed themselves so that they can live as safely and comfortably as they do.
- Christopher Evans, Plain Dealer reporter
Photo from David L Golwitzer
David Golwitzer who served in Company B 6-31 in 1968-69
I arrived in country shortly after TET in 1968. As an “11B20” my initial assignment for about 6-7 months was as a Radio Operator for the Platoon Sergeant (Assigned to the Mortar platoon that never carried or used mortars, instead functioning as a rifle platoon.), later transferred to S-2 to help win over the “hearts and minds of the locals” moving about the countryside with a medic, a driver and a couple of Tiger scouts during the day while pulling regular “night time flyover” duty in a small fixed wing aircraft.
Lastly I was assigned by S-2 to a MACV group in Mytho as a radio operator (Literally out of the fat into the fire as I accompanied the MACV Advisor with the Vietnamese contingent instead of being with my own platoon.) before being shipped out to Scoffield Barracks in Hawaii in the first part of the Nixon troop reductions in 1969. As a result I only spent 10 months in country.
I have somehow managed to save a picture of myself posted in the Army Reporter in March 1969.
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