62nd IPCT REUNION
August 7, 2010
A group of men who served alongside each other in the Vietnam War have gathered annually to swap stories, share memories and celebrate their friendship.
This weekend, 16 former combat trackers from the U.S. Army 62nd infantry platoon traveled from all over the country to meet in China Grove. The veterans and family members arrived on Thursday and Friday, and most of them planned to head back home today.
The location of the reunion changes each year, and this year retired Sgt. Dean Harwood, a China Grove resident, volunteered to host.
“These are guys that you spent a special time with in your life,” said Harwood, who served for a little over a year as a clerk in Vietnam. “Getting to talk with them is one thing, but actually getting to see and visit and party with them is another. It’s a thrill.”
In addition to throwing a party and cookout, Harwood decided to take the group to see the Price of Freedom Museum in China Grove on Saturday.
“This will be the first time that anybody but me in our unit has seen the museum, and they’re going to be astonished when they see it,” Harwood said. “It’s amazing for one man to put together what he has.”
Bobby Mault began the museum in a service station with an aviator’s hat and goggles. More and more people began to stop by and offer donated uniforms, photos, letters, propaganda posters and other memorabilia.
Two years ago, the museum moved into the former Patterson School. The collection is currently housed in the school’s cafeteria building, and Mault said he hopes to dedicate a classroom for each branch of the military.
As the veterans walked through the museum they marveled at the collection, nudging each other and pointing at the uniforms lining the walls.
“I’m impressed,” said retired Sgt. Estel Matt, of Lake Charles, La. “I’ve never seen this many uniforms from this many different eras and branches in my life.”
Matt, who served in Vietnam for two years, was the first of the soldiers to begin seeking out members of the 62nd infantry platoon.
He said he started looking when he got his first computer in 1997, and it took him two years to begin to find them. Gradually, others joined in on the search, and they have found 31 members so far.
The platoon was in existence from 1967 to 1972, and it consisted of 25 people at a time.
Asked why he began looking for members of his platoon, Matt’s voice wavered.
“I love every one of them,” he said. “The things we did together... I can’t explain it.”
They served as combat trackers, which could be an especially dangerous job.
“We had 400 trackers altogether in Vietnam from that time period,” Matt said. “Forty-one were killed and a little over 120 were wounded.”
The trackers typically worked in five-man teams. A visual tracker, like Matt, would scour the area for visible signs that someone had passed by. If there were no more signs, a dog tracker would watch carefully as his trained dog picked up the trail. A “cover” was assigned to each of these trackers to watch for attacks, and a team leader directed the operation.
“Our job was to find the enemy and re-establish contact,” Matt said. “When you were 20 years old, that sounded fun. When you’re 60, that’s crazy.”
The teams also went on missions to rescue prisoners of war and find lost infantrymen.
Master Sgt. Lawrence Burnell of Columbia, S.C., was another visual tracker who attended the reunion. He went on to serve a 22-year career before retiring from the Army.
Burnell explained that he was trained to track “ground signs” on the jungle floor and “top signs” in the trees. He said he could tell that someone had brushed against a tree by looking at which side of the leaves was visible.
“Another thing they taught us was that animals would not step on twigs or brush,” Burnell said. “That’s a way we could tell a person had been there — they would break things.”
Dog trackers like Charlie Hinely, of Georgia, were trained to watch tracking dogs — usually Labrador retrievers — for their alerts that danger was near. A particular dog might have perked its ears up after discovering a trap or grown tense when an enemy was close by.
Hinely said when the platoon’s annual reunions began, the men began freely talking about experiences in Vietnam they had never shared with anyone else.
“It was just like we had never been apart,” he said.
The veterans brought a number of items to add to Mault’s museum collection, including old memorabilia and photographs.
Retired Sgt. Bud “Doc” Walters, of Hershey, Pa., copied a photo of himself crouching with several of the platoon members in front of a makeshift basketball net in Vietnam. They are young — many of them were drafted at 18 or 19 years old — and smiling.
“Before this, I didn’t have a picture of me with any of them,” he said, running a finger along the faces in the photo.
Walters was a veterinary specialist who looked after the platoon’s dogs, both in camp and on missions. He went on to have a 23-year career in the Army medical corps.
Before joining the reunion for the first time this weekend, Walters attended a meeting of former combat trackers in Arlington, Va., and several members of the 62nd infantry platoon were there.
“When I got there, I remembered everybody,” he said. “It was like 40 years had vanished.”
Sgt. 1st Class Ronnie Eubanks, of Alabama, also hadn’t seen or heard from most of the men in four decades. He was a team leader with the platoon who retired from the Army after 22 years of service.
A soldier from an adjacent unit to Eubanks came to his workplace, and the two began to talk about who they knew in the platoon.
One soldier he mentioned called him less than a half an hour later, and several other calls followed in the next week.
“They were looking for me for years,” Eubanks said with a chuckle.
He said it felt good to reunite with them this weekend.
“It brings back things that I kind of put away in my mind, but I can talk to them about anything, because they know,” he said. “They understand.”
Contact Karissa Minn at 704-797-4222.