GySgt. Andrew Boyko
U.S Marine Corps – Fire Team Leader
3rd Battalion/27th Marines/India Company
1st Battalion/27th Marines
Hue City, Go Noi Island, Vietnam
1965-1969 and 1975-1982
U.S Marine Corps – Fire Team Leader
3rd Battalion/27th Marines/India Company
1st Battalion/27th Marines
Hue City, Go Noi Island, Vietnam
1965-1969 and 1975-1982
“Oh Lord, look down onto us and help this man who just turned to dust. Help him, Oh Lord, and hear us this day, for the man who dies was J.F.K.” Andrew Boyko, 16 years old
Andrew Boyko was born in a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp in Gunzburg, Germany in January 1947. Andy’ parents were fleeing the Ukraine to avoid the Russian Occupation after WWII and found their way to the DP camp in Gunzburg. After two years his father connected with someone in the United States that would sponsor the family and the Boyko’s entered the United States and settled in Buffalo, New York. “My grandmother and two Aunts ended up in Canada. My grandfather ended up in South America. They just wanted to get out of Europe”.
Andy grew up in a tough neighborhood in Buffalo. “I grew up in a ghetto…across (the street) lived a Russian, next door to me lived the Polish”. Everyone was forced to join a gang, if for no other reason, than to have protection from other gangs. “I started a gang. You had to be part of a gang, or you got your but kicked on a regular basis. Since my opposing gang lived only a couple of houses down, I had to have some defense. We did what we had to do to survive”.
Andy attended South Park High School, and he clearly remembers the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. “They announced over the loudspeaker that the President was killed. I remember my teacher, he just grasped his chest, his head down and started crying. I came home and I don’t know why, I never did this before in my life, all of a sudden word started coming to my mind…and I started jotting them down. When I finished, I looked at it, and it was a poem”. More on this later.
In 1964 Andy graduated from South Park High School and enrolled at the University of Buffalo. By October he knew college wasn’t for him and he joined the Marine Corps. “I thought if I joined the Marines, that’s gotta be the toughest outfit. So that would make a man out of me. I would prove to myself if I was a man or not”.
Andy headed to Parris Island for bootcamp. “I remember my Drill Instructors. They all looked like hard asses. They’d yell and scream and beat you up. In my time when I went through bootcamp we were hit. Physically smacked. They’d hit you during the day. They’d hit you at night, you know, your good night kiss so to speak”. Andy completed bootcamp on January 25th, 1965, and headed to Camp LeJune for Infantry Training. “I loved ITR because you shot any weapon and every weapon… rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenades, anything that is useable against the enemy”. Andy then went to Quantico, Virgina for Ordinance School. There he learned about explosives, bombs, grenades, rockets, small arms and more. Andy loved this training, and his Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) was Ammunition Technician. “I like blowing things up”.
Andy deployed for his first tour in Vietnam by ship and made port in Okinawa for what was supposed to be a short stop before continuing on to Da Nang. There was a need for someone to work in the mess hall for a month, and Andy was selected. 30 days later he arrived in Vietnam in August 1965 as part of ASP-1 based near Hill 327 just west of Da Nang. Their mission was to set up an ammo dump. This was early on in the war, and the Marines were among the first fighting troops to arrive. It was so early in the war there was no military infrastructure. “All we had was tents with mud floors. We had to dig our own foxholes. We had to do our own perimeter guard”. All the while they were trying to build a bunker and set up the ammo dump. The first night the Marines went out on patrol. No time to acclimate to the surroundings. They would conduct patrols and set up ambushes and guard the perimeter. “The enemy could be anywhere and everywhere”.
There have been very significant advances in battlefield technology in the 30 years since Andy’s first deployment. “The body armor they have today will stop a rifle round. You could take our flak jacket and shove a bayonet through it. Same thing with the helmet. Bullets would go through our helmet. They have Kevlar now” which is far stronger material. Andy also talked about the introduction of Starlight Scopes which were a precursor to Night Vision Goggles. “You looked through the scope, and it was a green haze. You could actually see movement or activity at night. You didn’t have to have a moon. You didn’t need anything”.
Andy was assigned to a machine gun nest one night and while looking through the Starlight Scope he could see movement. He could see sappers making their way toward Andy’s machine gun nest to throw explosive charges into their position. He radioed the Sargent of the Guard and received permission to shoot. They took one last look through the Starlight Scope to remember the location of the sappers and on the count of three, three M16 rifles and an M60 machine gun let loose. “We shot so much all we could see was dust. We had to wait for the dust to settle before we could check it out. Three dead sappers. Thank God for Starlight, I’m here today to talk about it. Those guys were after us”.
Two months before his deployment was scheduled to end, he was sent to Red Beach to be part of a security platoon. “There I had to go in front of our lines to detect enemy movement. It was a listening post. I was supposed to report enemy activity”. On one occasion Andy found himself in enemy territory and in front of a group of Navy Seabees back behind in the American lines. They saw Andy but thought he was the enemy and launched, what Andy thought was a mortar. “I remember hearing the round leave the tube…you can follow it in your minds eye. It was coming down on me, and I thought I was dead. Fortunately, it was an illumination round. Andy decided to stay still because he had no way to communicate that he was a friendly. “I crawled out of there. Holy cow! That was the only time I got into trouble”. Andy was fortunate that there was not intense fighting near him. “Mostly sniper fire and booby traps”.
Andy completed his deployment and returned to Camp Pendelton in California in September 1966. Andy was told he would have two years of stateside duty before he might return to Vietnam. “I figured, two years and I am gonna be out of here in a matter of months”. “Well Tet broke out in 1968, and they said you’re going back”.
Andy arrived for his second tour in February 1968 just after the Tet Offensive began. The Tet Offensive began on January 30th, 1968, during the Lunar New Year Holiday. The North Vietnamese Army and the communist guerilla group, the Viet Cong, launched 70,000 fighters in coordinated attacks throughout multiple cities in South Vietnam. The U.S and South Vietnamese troops were caught by surprise. In previous years the fighting dropped off during the Lunar New Year celebration. In 1968 the combined enemy forces used the element of surprise to launch their attack.
The enemy had early victories, but the U.S. rallied and when Tet ended in early April of 1968 the enemy had been badly beaten. They failed to hold any ground initially captured, the Viet Cong infrastructure was completely destroyed and although the U.S. and the South Vietnamese armies sustained heavy casualties, the enemy had staggering losses numbering in the thousands of soldiers.
Although it was a clear military victory for the U.S., Tet marked a turning point in the war. Back in the states, the images on the nightly news of numerous dead and injured U.S. soldiers turned the tide of public support. The anti-war protests put tremendous pressure on President Lyndon Johnson, and he ultimately chose to begin pulling back support for the South Vietnamese. Tet was the beginning of the end of the war.
Andy and his squad were involved in Operation Allenbrook and the Battle of Hue City. The Battle of Hue City was of strategic and cultural importance. Hue, roughly 100 miles from the border with North Vietnam, was the former Imperial Capital and held centuries of cultural and religion traditions. The city was on the banks of the Perfume River which gave it significant military importance. As part of the Tet Offensive the North Vietnames Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) launched an attack on Hue City on January 31st, 1968. Unlike jungle warfare which predominated the war up until this point, Hue City was the site of intense and bloody urban combat. The Citadel was a massive walled complex in the heart of Hue City that was captured early on by the NVA when they over ran the city against little resistance from the U.S. and ARVN forces that were caught by surprise.
For the next several weeks there was fierce fighting, in many cases door to door combat, to retake the city from the NVA. By March 3rd the U.S. Marines had retaken the city. The NVA suffered massive casualties but the media reporting back in the United States turned the support of the American public against the war. In particular, Walter Cronkite, the respected anchor of the CBS Evening News who had recently returned from Hue City cast doubt on the ability of the U.S. to win the war.
“We were in it all the time. You’d have a couple of days in between gunfights. We couldn’t get into the Citadel because the bridge got blown out”. Andy and his squad set up camp along the Perfume River and would go out and get into gun fights on a daily basis. The fighting was so intense Andy recalls picking up ammunition resupplies every day. Each day he would pick up five days worth of ammo and by the next day they used the entire supply.
While on Operation Allenbrook on Go Noi Island, when a firefight got really tough the troops were happy to see the arrival of Puff the Magic Dragon, also known as an AC 130 gunship. The guns in this aircraft were very powerful. They were able to shoot off thousands of rounds per minute. On the ground you couldn’t hear the individual bullets only a roar. From his foxhole at night Andy recalled seeing a red streak in the sky followed by the roar. That was the welcome sight and sound of an AC 130.
Booby traps and mines were a problem. Andy was the demolition man and was often told to clear an area of mines and booby traps. Andy lost a man who fell into a booby trap, and he learned quickly how to identify them so he wouldn’t lose another Marine. He showed the men how to test the sand with a rifle butt and carefully move the sand aside to expose the bomb or the entrance to a pit of punji sticks.
“In our engagements we did kill a lot of NVA soldiers”. The NVA did not value human life and were willing to trade the lives of their soldiers to outlast the Americans.
“There are times I didn’t think I would make it out alive. I didn’t expect to come home”.
After seven months Andy returned to the states and was discharged. Andy was out of the military for seven years when he was contacted by a Marine Captain who asked him to come back. ‘These guys have no idea what combat is, and I think you can help. I need you to come back and start a Recon Unit”. He came back as a Marine Reservist as part of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment to start a Recon Group. The Recon group is responsible patrolling and gathering intelligence and bringing it back to be analyzed by the intelligence group.
Andy was living in Orange California, and his reserve unit was in Encino. This was a big commute, and he stated looking for something closer. He learned there was an opening for an armorer in El Toro and the group picked him up. The group in El Toro had helicopters equipped with 50 caliber machine guns. Andy needed to learn that weapon and they sent him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland for school. Andy really enjoyed his time in the reserves and stayed in until 1982.
Outside of the Marine Corps Andy has been a jack of all trades. He has been a chauffeur, a computer operator for a bank, a tractor trailer driver, a computer technician and a rail inspector for JB Hunt. After some medical issues Andy retired.
Andy’s first reunion for his unit with 3/27 was in Mars Hill, North Carolina in1991. Andy fell in love with western North Carolina. Later, Andy had a friend living in Buffalo who also had a home in Hendersonville, North Carolina. His friend was not going to retire for two years and invited Andy to use his home for an extended period. Andy took him up on his offer and fell in love with the outdoors culture and bought a home in nearby Pisgah Forest, North Carolina.
These days Gunny Boyko volunteers for the Sheriff’s Department as a firearms instructor, assistant range master and operations Lieutenant for the volunteers. “I’m loving every minute of it”. He lives the mantra, “Once a Marine, always a Marine”.
Earlier in this story it was briefly mentioned that Andy ran home after JFK was assassinated and wrote a poem. He was 16 years old at the time. Andy continued to write poetry through his first tour in Vietnam. “I was sitting in a foxhole and all of a sudden words started coming to my mind. I started jotting them down on toilet paper covers and C-Ration boxes”. He has published these poems in a book titled, Before The Wall.
Andy, thank you, for your service and sacrifices in one of the most intense periods of the Vietnam War. God bless the Starlight Scope.
“To buy back their lives I would give it all. To be with my brothers before the wall”. Before the Wall by Andrew Boyko
Andrew Boyko was born in a Displaced Persons (DP) Camp in Gunzburg, Germany in January 1947. Andy’ parents were fleeing the Ukraine to avoid the Russian Occupation after WWII and found their way to the DP camp in Gunzburg. After two years his father connected with someone in the United States that would sponsor the family and the Boyko’s entered the United States and settled in Buffalo, New York. “My grandmother and two Aunts ended up in Canada. My grandfather ended up in South America. They just wanted to get out of Europe”.
Andy grew up in a tough neighborhood in Buffalo. “I grew up in a ghetto…across (the street) lived a Russian, next door to me lived the Polish”. Everyone was forced to join a gang, if for no other reason, than to have protection from other gangs. “I started a gang. You had to be part of a gang, or you got your but kicked on a regular basis. Since my opposing gang lived only a couple of houses down, I had to have some defense. We did what we had to do to survive”.
Andy attended South Park High School, and he clearly remembers the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. “They announced over the loudspeaker that the President was killed. I remember my teacher, he just grasped his chest, his head down and started crying. I came home and I don’t know why, I never did this before in my life, all of a sudden word started coming to my mind…and I started jotting them down. When I finished, I looked at it, and it was a poem”. More on this later.
In 1964 Andy graduated from South Park High School and enrolled at the University of Buffalo. By October he knew college wasn’t for him and he joined the Marine Corps. “I thought if I joined the Marines, that’s gotta be the toughest outfit. So that would make a man out of me. I would prove to myself if I was a man or not”.
Andy headed to Parris Island for bootcamp. “I remember my Drill Instructors. They all looked like hard asses. They’d yell and scream and beat you up. In my time when I went through bootcamp we were hit. Physically smacked. They’d hit you during the day. They’d hit you at night, you know, your good night kiss so to speak”. Andy completed bootcamp on January 25th, 1965, and headed to Camp LeJune for Infantry Training. “I loved ITR because you shot any weapon and every weapon… rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenades, anything that is useable against the enemy”. Andy then went to Quantico, Virgina for Ordinance School. There he learned about explosives, bombs, grenades, rockets, small arms and more. Andy loved this training, and his Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) was Ammunition Technician. “I like blowing things up”.
Andy deployed for his first tour in Vietnam by ship and made port in Okinawa for what was supposed to be a short stop before continuing on to Da Nang. There was a need for someone to work in the mess hall for a month, and Andy was selected. 30 days later he arrived in Vietnam in August 1965 as part of ASP-1 based near Hill 327 just west of Da Nang. Their mission was to set up an ammo dump. This was early on in the war, and the Marines were among the first fighting troops to arrive. It was so early in the war there was no military infrastructure. “All we had was tents with mud floors. We had to dig our own foxholes. We had to do our own perimeter guard”. All the while they were trying to build a bunker and set up the ammo dump. The first night the Marines went out on patrol. No time to acclimate to the surroundings. They would conduct patrols and set up ambushes and guard the perimeter. “The enemy could be anywhere and everywhere”.
There have been very significant advances in battlefield technology in the 30 years since Andy’s first deployment. “The body armor they have today will stop a rifle round. You could take our flak jacket and shove a bayonet through it. Same thing with the helmet. Bullets would go through our helmet. They have Kevlar now” which is far stronger material. Andy also talked about the introduction of Starlight Scopes which were a precursor to Night Vision Goggles. “You looked through the scope, and it was a green haze. You could actually see movement or activity at night. You didn’t have to have a moon. You didn’t need anything”.
Andy was assigned to a machine gun nest one night and while looking through the Starlight Scope he could see movement. He could see sappers making their way toward Andy’s machine gun nest to throw explosive charges into their position. He radioed the Sargent of the Guard and received permission to shoot. They took one last look through the Starlight Scope to remember the location of the sappers and on the count of three, three M16 rifles and an M60 machine gun let loose. “We shot so much all we could see was dust. We had to wait for the dust to settle before we could check it out. Three dead sappers. Thank God for Starlight, I’m here today to talk about it. Those guys were after us”.
Two months before his deployment was scheduled to end, he was sent to Red Beach to be part of a security platoon. “There I had to go in front of our lines to detect enemy movement. It was a listening post. I was supposed to report enemy activity”. On one occasion Andy found himself in enemy territory and in front of a group of Navy Seabees back behind in the American lines. They saw Andy but thought he was the enemy and launched, what Andy thought was a mortar. “I remember hearing the round leave the tube…you can follow it in your minds eye. It was coming down on me, and I thought I was dead. Fortunately, it was an illumination round. Andy decided to stay still because he had no way to communicate that he was a friendly. “I crawled out of there. Holy cow! That was the only time I got into trouble”. Andy was fortunate that there was not intense fighting near him. “Mostly sniper fire and booby traps”.
Andy completed his deployment and returned to Camp Pendelton in California in September 1966. Andy was told he would have two years of stateside duty before he might return to Vietnam. “I figured, two years and I am gonna be out of here in a matter of months”. “Well Tet broke out in 1968, and they said you’re going back”.
Andy arrived for his second tour in February 1968 just after the Tet Offensive began. The Tet Offensive began on January 30th, 1968, during the Lunar New Year Holiday. The North Vietnamese Army and the communist guerilla group, the Viet Cong, launched 70,000 fighters in coordinated attacks throughout multiple cities in South Vietnam. The U.S and South Vietnamese troops were caught by surprise. In previous years the fighting dropped off during the Lunar New Year celebration. In 1968 the combined enemy forces used the element of surprise to launch their attack.
The enemy had early victories, but the U.S. rallied and when Tet ended in early April of 1968 the enemy had been badly beaten. They failed to hold any ground initially captured, the Viet Cong infrastructure was completely destroyed and although the U.S. and the South Vietnamese armies sustained heavy casualties, the enemy had staggering losses numbering in the thousands of soldiers.
Although it was a clear military victory for the U.S., Tet marked a turning point in the war. Back in the states, the images on the nightly news of numerous dead and injured U.S. soldiers turned the tide of public support. The anti-war protests put tremendous pressure on President Lyndon Johnson, and he ultimately chose to begin pulling back support for the South Vietnamese. Tet was the beginning of the end of the war.
Andy and his squad were involved in Operation Allenbrook and the Battle of Hue City. The Battle of Hue City was of strategic and cultural importance. Hue, roughly 100 miles from the border with North Vietnam, was the former Imperial Capital and held centuries of cultural and religion traditions. The city was on the banks of the Perfume River which gave it significant military importance. As part of the Tet Offensive the North Vietnames Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC) launched an attack on Hue City on January 31st, 1968. Unlike jungle warfare which predominated the war up until this point, Hue City was the site of intense and bloody urban combat. The Citadel was a massive walled complex in the heart of Hue City that was captured early on by the NVA when they over ran the city against little resistance from the U.S. and ARVN forces that were caught by surprise.
For the next several weeks there was fierce fighting, in many cases door to door combat, to retake the city from the NVA. By March 3rd the U.S. Marines had retaken the city. The NVA suffered massive casualties but the media reporting back in the United States turned the support of the American public against the war. In particular, Walter Cronkite, the respected anchor of the CBS Evening News who had recently returned from Hue City cast doubt on the ability of the U.S. to win the war.
“We were in it all the time. You’d have a couple of days in between gunfights. We couldn’t get into the Citadel because the bridge got blown out”. Andy and his squad set up camp along the Perfume River and would go out and get into gun fights on a daily basis. The fighting was so intense Andy recalls picking up ammunition resupplies every day. Each day he would pick up five days worth of ammo and by the next day they used the entire supply.
While on Operation Allenbrook on Go Noi Island, when a firefight got really tough the troops were happy to see the arrival of Puff the Magic Dragon, also known as an AC 130 gunship. The guns in this aircraft were very powerful. They were able to shoot off thousands of rounds per minute. On the ground you couldn’t hear the individual bullets only a roar. From his foxhole at night Andy recalled seeing a red streak in the sky followed by the roar. That was the welcome sight and sound of an AC 130.
Booby traps and mines were a problem. Andy was the demolition man and was often told to clear an area of mines and booby traps. Andy lost a man who fell into a booby trap, and he learned quickly how to identify them so he wouldn’t lose another Marine. He showed the men how to test the sand with a rifle butt and carefully move the sand aside to expose the bomb or the entrance to a pit of punji sticks.
“In our engagements we did kill a lot of NVA soldiers”. The NVA did not value human life and were willing to trade the lives of their soldiers to outlast the Americans.
“There are times I didn’t think I would make it out alive. I didn’t expect to come home”.
After seven months Andy returned to the states and was discharged. Andy was out of the military for seven years when he was contacted by a Marine Captain who asked him to come back. ‘These guys have no idea what combat is, and I think you can help. I need you to come back and start a Recon Unit”. He came back as a Marine Reservist as part of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marine Regiment to start a Recon Group. The Recon group is responsible patrolling and gathering intelligence and bringing it back to be analyzed by the intelligence group.
Andy was living in Orange California, and his reserve unit was in Encino. This was a big commute, and he stated looking for something closer. He learned there was an opening for an armorer in El Toro and the group picked him up. The group in El Toro had helicopters equipped with 50 caliber machine guns. Andy needed to learn that weapon and they sent him to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland for school. Andy really enjoyed his time in the reserves and stayed in until 1982.
Outside of the Marine Corps Andy has been a jack of all trades. He has been a chauffeur, a computer operator for a bank, a tractor trailer driver, a computer technician and a rail inspector for JB Hunt. After some medical issues Andy retired.
Andy’s first reunion for his unit with 3/27 was in Mars Hill, North Carolina in1991. Andy fell in love with western North Carolina. Later, Andy had a friend living in Buffalo who also had a home in Hendersonville, North Carolina. His friend was not going to retire for two years and invited Andy to use his home for an extended period. Andy took him up on his offer and fell in love with the outdoors culture and bought a home in nearby Pisgah Forest, North Carolina.
These days Gunny Boyko volunteers for the Sheriff’s Department as a firearms instructor, assistant range master and operations Lieutenant for the volunteers. “I’m loving every minute of it”. He lives the mantra, “Once a Marine, always a Marine”.
Earlier in this story it was briefly mentioned that Andy ran home after JFK was assassinated and wrote a poem. He was 16 years old at the time. Andy continued to write poetry through his first tour in Vietnam. “I was sitting in a foxhole and all of a sudden words started coming to my mind. I started jotting them down on toilet paper covers and C-Ration boxes”. He has published these poems in a book titled, Before The Wall.
Andy, thank you, for your service and sacrifices in one of the most intense periods of the Vietnam War. God bless the Starlight Scope.
“To buy back their lives I would give it all. To be with my brothers before the wall”. Before the Wall by Andrew Boyko