Vietnam veteran relates wartime experiences to honor soldiers

Two recently published books by a Vietnam veteran who is a part-time Whiting resident relate not only his experiences but those of other veterans during the war. Lou Pepi, who has lived part of the year in Whiting since 2011, interviewed nearly 125 veterans, and his books honor their lives, serving as a testament to their courage and heroism.
Pepi served for six months in Vietnam, having gone into the U.S. Army in March 1968 after being drafted. Following advanced infantry training, he ended up being sent for his tour in July 1969 when he was 20 years old. "A lot of my brothers there were 18 or 19. I was the old guy," he relates about how young the soldiers were.
On his first day in Vietnam, he was the "green guy," and his unit was being ferried across a river on Navy patrol boats. As the first boat approached the opposite shore, it hit a mine and the guys on the boat were "blown out of the water," with five bodies thrown into the water and one man dying, his body found two days later. "That was my first initiation" into the war, Pepi notes.
Once his unit was across the river, he was put on point, walking ahead of the rest of the unit through the hostile territory. "I was really scared," he says, and in his book, My Brothers Have My Back, he writes that just covering 600 yards "took an eternity to negotiate, and I expected a bullet in the chest at every turn. It had taken barely two days, but I had already resigned myself to the fact that there was no scenario that would allow me to survive this place. I was simply a dead man walking, and I was already reconciled to it. Somehow this caused a lessening of my anxiety, and I was relieved to come to terms with my certain fate."
Pepi was in a mechanized unit with the 5th Infantry Division that was sent up to the demilitarized zone (DMZ), the first line of defense against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). At the start of November there were lots of signs of the enemy in the area. During a battle from November 10 to 17, the entire battalion was fighting three to four battalions of the NVA, and "we were outnumbered 10 to 1." They were at Con Thien, Vietnamese for "Hill of Angels," which he notes in his book had lived up to its name over the years.
On November 12, his Alpha Company was airlifted out to a small night defensive perimeter of the fire base. During the night Pepi and his foxhole buddy saw the pith helmets of the North Vietnamese, and "at 2 in the morning we were hit. The enemy was on all sides, and part of the perimeter was overrun. We were outnumbered 20 to 1." Pepi and his buddy were firing their machine gun, and "the pith helmets went down" as North Vietnamese soldiers who were charging into the perimeter were hit. Pepi had a set of rosary beads that his grandmother had given him that he had placed around his neck. "They got wrapped over the belt of ammo and jammed the gun," and the ammo belt broke, so they both ducked down to retrieve the belt just as their gun got hit by a blast. "If the rosary beads hadn't been sucked into the machine gun, we wouldn't have ducked down and I wouldn't be talking with you right now. They saved my life," Pepi relates, adding that he had been spared from death three times in about 15 seconds.
Pepi's hand was the only part of him that was above the foxhole, and it got hit and was bleeding. As the night went on and "we were running out of ammo," a helicopter came to take out the wounded. A lieutenant told him he would be on the next flight out, but on its first flight the helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), although it did get away. "The lieutenant said I was going on the next one, and I said, 'No, I'm not.'"
In the morning, Pepi found that seven men in his unit, including his company commander, were dead and 54 were wounded. There were 224 dead North Vietnamese bodies around them, with a lot in the perimeter. Bloody drag marks indicated that many others had been dragged away by retreating North Vietnamese soldiers.
Pepi writes in his book that nearly every man on the ground shed some blood during the three days of fire fights, and hundreds of Purple Heart medals were awarded. Fifteen men in his unit ended up dying, "while the rest of us have asked for more than 45 years, 'Why them and not us?' This question has no answer, but we will continue to ask it, and this is why we will never forget them, nor will we let others forget."
But at the time there was little chance to ponder that question, for on November 30, again at Con Thien, Pepi was told to drive out of the fire base following another armored personnel carrier in order to help teach a new lieutenant how to register a perimeter by using preplanned artillery rounds. He was with three buddies who ended up getting hit by one of the "friendly fire" rounds that also blew him down. As Pepi clawed to get back to them, he grabbed "an empty boot with just a sock." That buddy had shrapnel through his eye socket "and died in my arms." Another one had shrapnel in his throat and died while in the helicopter that was evacuating him, and the pants were burned off the body of the third soldier, who ended up surviving. "It was my worst day over there," Pepi says. Several weeks later, he came home, in November 1969.
He writes in his book that it is hard to describe the emotions felt during battle. "You just cannot explain in words those feelings of the extreme chaos and the horrendous cacophony of battle. Bullets are crackling. Friendly and enemy mortars are exploding. Grenades, RPGs and satchel charges are detonating. High performance jet engines at treetop level are careening just above you and dropping napalm and 250-pound bombs on your wire. The concussion is so great that it feels like your body is being compressed to its bone-breaking limits," he relates. "The air is full of steel. There is the random shouting of those taking charge, muffled by the constant screaming of the wounded. Through that entire din, you can hear the unnerving sound of the NVA coming ? commanders blowing whistles to initiate sapper attacks and enemy forward observers shouting coordinates in high-pitched Asian dialect. I guess the closest thing to the sound of battle is probably silence in a vacuum - they are so far from each other on opposite sides of the sound spectrum that they actually meet on the other side."
His second book, A Day in Hell on the DMZ, tells the story of the final mission of the 5th Infantry, which was in support of the South Vietnamese Army as they went into Laos. The U.S. soldiers were to keep the route to the border open but not go into Laos. "It was a complete disaster," Pepi relates. "We couldn't support the South Vietnamese in Laos, and they were annihilated."
In the book Pepi also relates an incident that occurred on May 21, 1971, when the North Vietnamese were firing rockets at the 5th Infantry's fire base. Because the rockets were inaccurate, the North Vietnamese would be lucky if one out of 20 or 30 would hit in the base. One, though, did strike the recreational bunker where a lot of soldiers had gathered. "There were 63 in the bunker, and 30 were killed and 33 were buried." One of the soldiers he interviewed for the book told him that the men in the unit were a very tight group. The soldier told Pepi, "The strange thing was that we had just finished our last big operation out on the Laotian border, and we were getting ready to go home -- the whole unit. The South Vietnamese were taking over. We all had hope, and then this happened."

Dealing with PTSD
Because of his wartime experiences, Pepi says he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from time to time. He relates in that in the 1980s he started writing stories about a flawed individual who had issues and would go hunting and fishing. While he's hunting he experiences flashbacks and goes "into the deep canyon of PTSD," while the hunting and fishing make him feel better. "That flawed person was me. I didn't know I had PTSD. I was writing about PTSD without knowing it. There would be a dark period on each hunt, and other memories would pop up."
Pepi then started to meet with other Vietnam veterans and attending reunions. "I wanted write about what we went through, and I started interviewing them." For his first book, he interviewed 100 men and also did research in the National Archives. "It's a historical narrative," he says. Then for his second book he interviewed another 23 veterans and also read the memoir of an Alpha Company commander.
Of those he served with, Pepi says, "They're my best friends in the world right now. It was horrific over there, but I wouldn't trade my experience there or meeting those heroic men for anything in the world. It made me into the person I am today."
As for his time in the service, he says, "There was a lot of politics about the war, and the country was deeply divided. But we didn't care about politics. It was just about keeping alive and keeping your buddy next to you alive." He says that "99% of the American population still doesn't know the real story of Vietnam."
"I was drafted and thought I was doing my patriotic duty, and I did it." When veterans returned to the U.S., though, they were called "baby-killers" and spit upon. "I buried my experiences for decades. Nobody wanted to hear about it, and it ate at me."
"Writing the book freed me of that, and those I interviewed, it freed them as well." He notes that none of the veterans he interviewed had spoken about the war for a long time.
Pepi relates that recently one of his veteran friends called him after meeting a retired general who had been in the North Vietnamese Army. The general was working with the U.S. Institute of Peace to find both American and Vietnamese soldiers who are still missing in action. "I gave them the coordinates of the mass grave after the November 13 battle where 224 bodies were buried," and he says he may end up traveling to Vietnam to help the group find the location of the mass grave. Seeing the Vietnamese and the Americans now working together "is a good sign," he says.
As for Veterans Day, Pepi says, "It's nice to be recognized now. For a long time we weren't." Along with giving a book talk at the Porter Memorial Library in Machias at 6 p.m. on Veterans Day this year, the senior center in the town in Massachusetts where he lives for part of the year called him to see if he would be attending their Veterans Day breakfast.
Pepi notes that people will sometimes say, "Thank you for your service," and while civilians may not fully understand what soldiers who have served in combat have given of themselves and how they have been changed forever, such acknowledgements are appreciated. "It took a long time," he says of the recognition that Vietnam veterans are now finally receiving.