Vietnam Veteran

Near sixty years ago, Michael Heaney, a former platoon leader, witnessed the men under his command gunned down in an ambush by North Vietnamese soldiers. It was a firefight so fierce that it has been chronicled in military history books.

From Michael’s SPI recording:

“Then came a very fateful day: May 16, 1966. We had just gotten another new company commander. He wanted to take the company out on sort of a shakedown cruise—an operation that wasn’t regarded as too dangerous, too dicey, where he could learn all of our names, something about each platoon, each platoon leader. So the operation we drew was to go out to a nearby hillside—it was about ten miles from the division base camp, above a valley that had been getting some mortar fire every night on this little village. Our intelligence said, well, there’s probably a VC insurgent unit with a mortar, setting up every night and just lobbing mortars down on this village. We want you, Captain Coleman, and your company to march up—land below the ridge, we’ll helicopter you in to a landing zone—and you can march up to the top of the ridge and scare them away. So he said fine. And that’s all the intelligence we got.

What intelligence missed, and we had no idea of, [was that] there were several regiments of North Vietnamese regular-army soldiers on their own form of kind of R&R, up in this mountainous region—remote, uninhabited, steep-sided hills.”

Michael Heaney, Vietnam Veteran

by Michael Heaney

Click on the links below for Lesson Plans, Project Ideas, and Additional Resources.

Michael Heaney Transcript

PROJECTS

DOUG ANDERSON and MICHAEL HEANEY Veterans Oral History Project

Grade Level: High School

Social Studies, English Language Arts