A Soldier’s Experience in Vietnam, Specialist 5 Harold “Light Bulb” Bryant

Most of the reports and memoirs by participants in the war in Vietnam have been written by white officers and white civilians. Yet in the early years of the war 14.5% of army troops were black. Little was known about these black soldiers-other than that they suffered heavy casualties-until Wallace Terry’s Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans appeared in 1984. The recollections of Mr. Bryant of East St. Louis, IL, a combat engineer with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam, are included in this book. Here Bryant describes his experiences in Vietnam and his first visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC.

I enlisted in the Army to stay out of the Marines. I had went to college for a semester at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. But the expenses had gotten too much for my family, so I went and got me a job at McDonnell Aircraft as a sheet-metal assembler. About 8 months later, two guys I went to high school with got drafted by the Marines. So I joined the Army so I could get a choice.

It was August of ’65. I was twenty…

I did my basic and my AIT at Ft. Leonardwood, MO. “Lost in the Woods, “ yeah. Trained for combat engineer to build bridges, mountain roads. But we didn’t build too many bridges. Did a lot of demolition work.

When I came to Vietnam, I thought we were helping another country to develop a nation. About 3 or 4 months later I found out that wasn’t the case. In high school and in the papers I had been hearing about Indochina, but I couldn’t find Indochina on the map. I didn’t know anything about the country, about the people. Those kinds of things I had to learn on myself while I was there.

We had a Vietnamese interpreter attached to us. I would always be asking him questions. He had told me this war in Vietnam had been going on for hundreds of years. Before the Americans, they had been fighting for hundreds of years against Chinese aggressors. I thought we had got into the beginning of the war. But I found out that we were just in another phase of their civil wars.

And we weren’t gaining any ground. We would fight for a hill all day, spend two days or two nights there, and then abandon the hill. Then maybe two, three months later, we would have to come back and retake the same piece of territory…

And they had a habit of exaggerating a body count. If we killed 7, by the time it would get back to base camp, it would have gotten to 28. Then by the time it got down to Westmoreland’s office in Saigon, it done went up to 54. And by the time it left from Saigon going to Washington, it had went up to about 125. To prove we were really out there doing our jobs, doing, really, more than what we were doing.

I remember a place called the AshuaValley. The 7th went in there and got cut up real bad. They had underestimated the enemy’s power. So they sent in the 9th, and we cleared the AshauValley out. All we was doing was making contact, letting the gunships know where they were, and then we would draw back. We had 25 gunships circling around, and jet strikes coming in to drop napalm. We did that all day, and the next day we didn’t receive any other fire.

Stars and Stripes said we had a body count of 260 something. But I don’t think it was true…

When I came to Washington to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I looked through the book and there were about 15 guys from my hometown who were killed. And 6 of them I knew.

But I looked up the memorial for James Plummer first.

Plummer was a black guy from Cincinnatti. We were the same age. 20. We were at CampAlpha together. That’s where they assign you when you first come to Nam…

He was my best friend.

One day we were at the airfield at the LZ. Plummer was out of the truck, over by the ammo dump. And the ammo dump received a mortar round. It blew him up.

It freaked me out. I mean that here I saw him, and 5 minutes later he’s instantaneously dead…

…I’ve talked to chaplains, talked to preachers about Vietnam. And no one could give me a satisfactory explanation of what happened overseas.

…I keep looking for the explanation.

I can’t find it. I can’t find it.