SP4 Henry “Hank” Dudek
U.S Army – Fire Direction Center
HQ, 2nd Battalion/17th Artillery/1st Cavalry
Ia Drang, Vietnam ’64-‘66
U.S Army – Fire Direction Center
HQ, 2nd Battalion/17th Artillery/1st Cavalry
Ia Drang, Vietnam ’64-‘66
Henry Dudek was born on October 24, 1941 in a hospital in Brooklyn, NY. Hank grew up on 224th St. in the Cambria Heights section of Queens in New York with his parents and his sister. He graduated from Andrew Jackson High School in 1959 and went to work for two neighborhood companies, Merkle Meats and then Duggan’s Bakery. Hank later landed a job with the New York Telephone Company as a Splicer’s Helper.
In February of 1964 Hank received his draft notice and reported to Whitehall Street Induction Center in lower Manhattan for processing. His next stop was Fort Dix for his Basic Training. Upon completion of Basic Training Hank received orders to Fort Sill in Oklahoma where he was assigned to the Headquarters Battery of the 2/17 Artillery. Hank was assigned to the FDC (Fire Direction Center) where he received on-the-job training as a computer operator. There he learned how to use a graphic firing stick (GFS) which Hank described as nothing more than a fancy slide rule. The Field Observer (FO) in the field would radio in a fire mission including the coordinates and distance to the target. Hank’s job was to calculate the amount of explosive charge required for the artillery shell to hit the target. This information was communicated back to the artillery.
In May of ’65 Hank’s unit received orders to “ship out to an undisclosed location in southeast Asia”. The men knew they were probably headed to Vietnam. Up to this point, the only U.S. presence in Vietnam were the secretive Special Forces Advisors. Hank would be part of the first “official” troops to arrive in Vietnam as part of President Johnson’s massive call up. As part of the preparation the soldiers received a battery of inoculations, a physical exam, and a dental exam. Hank learned he had four wisdom teeth and although they had not broken through his gums, the Army said they had to come out. If they did break through the gums in Vietnam and were extracted there, the likelihood of infection was too great. In the blink of an eye, the wisdom teeth were gone.
Hank was part of the advanced party, and he flew to Oakland, CA where he boarded a troop ship used in WWII, the General William H. Gordon. Hank and eventually the rest of the 2/17, along with 3,000+ other soldiers headed up the gangway and stowed their gear. “Everything was fine until we passed over the continental shelf off California. The ship began to rock and roll. Almost everyone became seasick. The bunks were six high and fortunately I was told get a high one because if you’re on a low one the conditions were unbearable.” Three weeks later they were in the Gulf of Quy Nhon, Vietnam, a coastal city in central Vietnam.
“It was a typical movie scene with men going over the side and climbing rope nets down to awaiting landing craft. The men hit the beach, but all was quiet. “Not what we expected. So, we dug foxholes and waited”. When it came time to eat the men opened some C-rations. As the men began eating “strange creatures started appearing”. A group of skeletal figures dressed in rags began to emerge. Hank described these people as having deformed faces, no noses, holes in their face, missing ears and eyes and a host of other deformities. The U.S Army had landed their troops in the middle of a leper colony. The men gave their food to the lepers. “They were so grateful, but we lost our appetite.”
Eventually the troops boarded trucks and headed inland toward the Central Highlands. The men of the 2/17thspent the first night at a civilian airport. They set up a perimeter and put out claymore mines. The night was quiet and uneventful but none of the men got much sleep. It was everyone’s first night in-country and almost everyone was on edge. The next morning, they broke camp and retrieved the claymore mines and found that during the night the enemy had snuck in and turned the claymore mines toward the U.S. troops. If the U.S troops detonated them, they would have exploded in the direction of the U.S. GI’s.
The 2/17th’s equipment took two weeks to be unloaded. During that period, they constructed pierced steel plank (PSP) landing pads for the 1st Calvary’s helicopters. After their equipment and artillery arrived, they set out for Bong Son to conducted fire missions. They returned to their base camp and then they headed south and spent a month “chasing the VC.” After numerous fire missions they were finding that the enemy was always just beyond the reach of their artillery. The U.S learned there were spies feeding information back to the enemy. The Americans “set up a dummy operation” and discovered a South Vietnamese Captain and Lieutenant assigned to their unit were providing information about U.S. troop movements and operations to the enemy. The spies were taken into custody and never seen again.
In November of ’65 Hank and his unit were on the coast and afforded time to swim and bathe in the South China Sea. Unexpectedly, his unit was moved inland near Pleiku in the Highlands. “We went from the coast, 120 degrees, to Pleiku. It was 60 degrees that night, a big difference between 120 and 60. The things you remember”. That night they began repositioning their howitzers toward the ridgeline of a box canyon. The next morning, a company of South Vietnamese Rangers working with Hank’s unit were sent into the valley to make contact with the 7th Calvary Air Mobile Division. Around 11am the men of the 2/17th received word that the Rangers would be returning because they forgot their rations. This didn’t sound right to Hank and his buddies.
An infantry company of the 7th Cavalry Air Mobile Division had been flown into the Ia Drang Valley to investigate rumors of VC activity in that area. Unknown to them, this was a staging area for a North Vietnamese regiment, and they walked into an ambush. The fighting was to expand into a multi-day battle, later to be known as The Battle of Ia Drang Valley. This was the first major combat engagement between U.S. ground forces and the North Vietnamese Army.
As the Rangers started to retreat, the hillside was overrun with North Vietnamese soldiers who had built tunnels around the canyon walls. They emerged from the tunnels and began chasing the South Vietnamese Rangers. “That’s when we opened up with the artillery”, Hank recalled. For 24 hours Hank’s unit fired non-stop at the North Vietnamese locations in conjunction with U.S. air support. “They were coming in and they were dropping napalm, they were dropping bombs, they were dropping everything. They were coming in from every direction.” Hank said the damage inflicted on the enemy was tremendous.
The next afternoon, they started to take a body count of the enemy dead. “They couldn’t figure out how to do it because there were arms and legs, scattered everywhere. So, they decided to count actual heads. It was the biggest body count ever in the Vietnam War.” They still had to extract the 7th Calvary who had taken terrible casualties. “Of about a couple of hundred that went into the valley, few were able to walk out themselves.” This battle was the basis for the book, We Were Soldiers Once….and Young and the movie We Were Soldiers.
Hank’s unit returned to their base camp after having been gone for a month. When they left, their camp had been a collection of tents and when they returned it had been built up with the wood from ammo boxes into semi-permanent structures. “The Army served us Thanksgiving dinner in an actual mess hall. Progress. Things were looking better for the troops.”
Hank managed to arrange for leave and planned to visit Bangkok starting on New Year’s Day. Before he could depart, he developed a terrible tooth ache on the day before New Year’s Eve. He visited the dentist and was told he had a cavity. “We don’t do fillings here we only pull teeth.” The dental unit lacked a dental chair, did not have proper dental instruments, and had no Novocain. Hank sat in a makeshift dental chair while they probed for the problem tooth. “The dentist pulled and he pulled, he had his knee on my chest, and the tooth broke. He had to cut the gum to get the remainder out”. Hank spent his New Year’s Eve sick and in pain. New Year’s Day he went back to learn from a different dentist some of the tooth had been left in his gum. This dentist completed the procedure. No Leave, no Bangkok, but the pain was gone.
“A week later I was back with the boys in Bong Son.” It was monsoon season, and the artillery pieces were stuck in the rice paddies and unable to move. When the 2/17 moved out they had to call in helicopters to lift the artillery out of the mud.
It was the end of January in 1966 and Hank’s ETS (End Termination of Service) was February. Hank was flown to Camp Carroll in Saigon for processing to head home. He boarded a flight from Tan Son Nhut headed for home. After several stops, they arrived in San Francisco and then headed to Oakland for out processing. “They walked us into the mess hall and they had everything and anything under the sun you could want to eat. They had steaks, they had ice cream, you name it.” Hank found he wasn’t very hungry because his stomach was so small from months of not eating much. It was a true case of his eyes being bigger than his stomach.
“I was home. I was so happy. People that met you that were your friends treated you royally. Other people that you didn’t know were calling you baby killer and things like that.” But Hank was home, and he was happy. He returned to work at the phone company, met Patricia Doyle and was married in 1967. 56 years later the couple has two sons and five grandchildren.
Hank, thank you for all the difficult times in the jungle serving your country 8,000 miles from home. Because of you, the rest of us didn’t have to.
In February of 1964 Hank received his draft notice and reported to Whitehall Street Induction Center in lower Manhattan for processing. His next stop was Fort Dix for his Basic Training. Upon completion of Basic Training Hank received orders to Fort Sill in Oklahoma where he was assigned to the Headquarters Battery of the 2/17 Artillery. Hank was assigned to the FDC (Fire Direction Center) where he received on-the-job training as a computer operator. There he learned how to use a graphic firing stick (GFS) which Hank described as nothing more than a fancy slide rule. The Field Observer (FO) in the field would radio in a fire mission including the coordinates and distance to the target. Hank’s job was to calculate the amount of explosive charge required for the artillery shell to hit the target. This information was communicated back to the artillery.
In May of ’65 Hank’s unit received orders to “ship out to an undisclosed location in southeast Asia”. The men knew they were probably headed to Vietnam. Up to this point, the only U.S. presence in Vietnam were the secretive Special Forces Advisors. Hank would be part of the first “official” troops to arrive in Vietnam as part of President Johnson’s massive call up. As part of the preparation the soldiers received a battery of inoculations, a physical exam, and a dental exam. Hank learned he had four wisdom teeth and although they had not broken through his gums, the Army said they had to come out. If they did break through the gums in Vietnam and were extracted there, the likelihood of infection was too great. In the blink of an eye, the wisdom teeth were gone.
Hank was part of the advanced party, and he flew to Oakland, CA where he boarded a troop ship used in WWII, the General William H. Gordon. Hank and eventually the rest of the 2/17, along with 3,000+ other soldiers headed up the gangway and stowed their gear. “Everything was fine until we passed over the continental shelf off California. The ship began to rock and roll. Almost everyone became seasick. The bunks were six high and fortunately I was told get a high one because if you’re on a low one the conditions were unbearable.” Three weeks later they were in the Gulf of Quy Nhon, Vietnam, a coastal city in central Vietnam.
“It was a typical movie scene with men going over the side and climbing rope nets down to awaiting landing craft. The men hit the beach, but all was quiet. “Not what we expected. So, we dug foxholes and waited”. When it came time to eat the men opened some C-rations. As the men began eating “strange creatures started appearing”. A group of skeletal figures dressed in rags began to emerge. Hank described these people as having deformed faces, no noses, holes in their face, missing ears and eyes and a host of other deformities. The U.S Army had landed their troops in the middle of a leper colony. The men gave their food to the lepers. “They were so grateful, but we lost our appetite.”
Eventually the troops boarded trucks and headed inland toward the Central Highlands. The men of the 2/17thspent the first night at a civilian airport. They set up a perimeter and put out claymore mines. The night was quiet and uneventful but none of the men got much sleep. It was everyone’s first night in-country and almost everyone was on edge. The next morning, they broke camp and retrieved the claymore mines and found that during the night the enemy had snuck in and turned the claymore mines toward the U.S. troops. If the U.S troops detonated them, they would have exploded in the direction of the U.S. GI’s.
The 2/17th’s equipment took two weeks to be unloaded. During that period, they constructed pierced steel plank (PSP) landing pads for the 1st Calvary’s helicopters. After their equipment and artillery arrived, they set out for Bong Son to conducted fire missions. They returned to their base camp and then they headed south and spent a month “chasing the VC.” After numerous fire missions they were finding that the enemy was always just beyond the reach of their artillery. The U.S learned there were spies feeding information back to the enemy. The Americans “set up a dummy operation” and discovered a South Vietnamese Captain and Lieutenant assigned to their unit were providing information about U.S. troop movements and operations to the enemy. The spies were taken into custody and never seen again.
In November of ’65 Hank and his unit were on the coast and afforded time to swim and bathe in the South China Sea. Unexpectedly, his unit was moved inland near Pleiku in the Highlands. “We went from the coast, 120 degrees, to Pleiku. It was 60 degrees that night, a big difference between 120 and 60. The things you remember”. That night they began repositioning their howitzers toward the ridgeline of a box canyon. The next morning, a company of South Vietnamese Rangers working with Hank’s unit were sent into the valley to make contact with the 7th Calvary Air Mobile Division. Around 11am the men of the 2/17th received word that the Rangers would be returning because they forgot their rations. This didn’t sound right to Hank and his buddies.
An infantry company of the 7th Cavalry Air Mobile Division had been flown into the Ia Drang Valley to investigate rumors of VC activity in that area. Unknown to them, this was a staging area for a North Vietnamese regiment, and they walked into an ambush. The fighting was to expand into a multi-day battle, later to be known as The Battle of Ia Drang Valley. This was the first major combat engagement between U.S. ground forces and the North Vietnamese Army.
As the Rangers started to retreat, the hillside was overrun with North Vietnamese soldiers who had built tunnels around the canyon walls. They emerged from the tunnels and began chasing the South Vietnamese Rangers. “That’s when we opened up with the artillery”, Hank recalled. For 24 hours Hank’s unit fired non-stop at the North Vietnamese locations in conjunction with U.S. air support. “They were coming in and they were dropping napalm, they were dropping bombs, they were dropping everything. They were coming in from every direction.” Hank said the damage inflicted on the enemy was tremendous.
The next afternoon, they started to take a body count of the enemy dead. “They couldn’t figure out how to do it because there were arms and legs, scattered everywhere. So, they decided to count actual heads. It was the biggest body count ever in the Vietnam War.” They still had to extract the 7th Calvary who had taken terrible casualties. “Of about a couple of hundred that went into the valley, few were able to walk out themselves.” This battle was the basis for the book, We Were Soldiers Once….and Young and the movie We Were Soldiers.
Hank’s unit returned to their base camp after having been gone for a month. When they left, their camp had been a collection of tents and when they returned it had been built up with the wood from ammo boxes into semi-permanent structures. “The Army served us Thanksgiving dinner in an actual mess hall. Progress. Things were looking better for the troops.”
Hank managed to arrange for leave and planned to visit Bangkok starting on New Year’s Day. Before he could depart, he developed a terrible tooth ache on the day before New Year’s Eve. He visited the dentist and was told he had a cavity. “We don’t do fillings here we only pull teeth.” The dental unit lacked a dental chair, did not have proper dental instruments, and had no Novocain. Hank sat in a makeshift dental chair while they probed for the problem tooth. “The dentist pulled and he pulled, he had his knee on my chest, and the tooth broke. He had to cut the gum to get the remainder out”. Hank spent his New Year’s Eve sick and in pain. New Year’s Day he went back to learn from a different dentist some of the tooth had been left in his gum. This dentist completed the procedure. No Leave, no Bangkok, but the pain was gone.
“A week later I was back with the boys in Bong Son.” It was monsoon season, and the artillery pieces were stuck in the rice paddies and unable to move. When the 2/17 moved out they had to call in helicopters to lift the artillery out of the mud.
It was the end of January in 1966 and Hank’s ETS (End Termination of Service) was February. Hank was flown to Camp Carroll in Saigon for processing to head home. He boarded a flight from Tan Son Nhut headed for home. After several stops, they arrived in San Francisco and then headed to Oakland for out processing. “They walked us into the mess hall and they had everything and anything under the sun you could want to eat. They had steaks, they had ice cream, you name it.” Hank found he wasn’t very hungry because his stomach was so small from months of not eating much. It was a true case of his eyes being bigger than his stomach.
“I was home. I was so happy. People that met you that were your friends treated you royally. Other people that you didn’t know were calling you baby killer and things like that.” But Hank was home, and he was happy. He returned to work at the phone company, met Patricia Doyle and was married in 1967. 56 years later the couple has two sons and five grandchildren.
Hank, thank you for all the difficult times in the jungle serving your country 8,000 miles from home. Because of you, the rest of us didn’t have to.