A Radio in the Vietnam War Saved His Life: A Veteran’s Day Story

By Michael Gold

Giuseppe (Joseph) Tanzi was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1967, when the Vietnam War “was in full force,” he said.

Joseph, a first-generation Italian immigrant, arrived in America in 1959, had just gotten married and worked in a supermarket in Brooklyn when he got the call to serve at 23 years old.

We met at the Hawthorne Executive Diner, scheduling time in between Joe’s crossing guard work at Westlake High School.

His Army company was based next to the Mekong River, enduring eternally humid air. At Christmas time, “the temperature was in the 100s,” Joe said. The landscape featured rice paddies, rivers, dikes and mud.

He was assigned to the Army’s mobile riverine force and volunteered to be a radio operator.

The men boarded Armored Troop Carriers, called Tango boats, to go on patrol. Joe weighed himself one day to figure out his weight with the equipment.

“I was carrying 60 pounds of equipment, rifle, grenades, C-rations and a heavy radio with batteries,” he said.

The boats were equipped with machine guns, grenade launchers and a cannon. Each boat had a ramp that lowered when the men had to get off and search an area for the enemy.

“Sometimes our guys got hit by enemy fire while we were in the boats,” Joe said. “We lost a couple of footmen (soldiers).”

The patrols disembarked from the boats, often in darkness, and would then spend three to five days patrolling in the field.

“Some men used to misplace their footing and end up under the ramp and they drowned,” Joe said. “All hands tried to look for them. Those poor guys stayed underneath (the water).”

One time the men traveled in helicopters, “looking for a big Viet Cong battalion.”

The helicopters “got to the top of the trees and all hell broke loose,” he said. “It’s the first time I saw the faces (of the Viet Cong), the rifles, the machine guns shooting at us.

“My lieutenant got hit and he fell backwards, and I saw a pool of blood. I saw I was hit also. I got shot in the arm and there were five bullets in my radio, so we lost communication. The bullets would have hit me in the back, but the radio blocked it.”

An officer called in Air Force jets, which “bombed the hell out of the place,” Joe said. “That’s a very good example of what war looks like.”

Joe recovered, then was sent back into the field. Eleven months into his one-year tour, his unit was out on patrol “almost every night.”

His wife had given birth five months before.

“The thought of having a baby girl, will I see her, will I meet her?” Joe wondered.

On patrol for four days, they were all wet, surrounded by jungle, mud, rice paddies and rivers. They were in a field, with a dike. All looked quiet.

A booby trap in the dike exploded.

“I was thrown about 10 feet against a tree.”

Joe’s arm was dangling from his body. Two men were killed. Joe’s captain had a hole in his throat.

Even though Joe had a torn-up arm, he said, “I grabbed the captain and tapped his neck and somehow got a little air to help him breathe.”

Red ants, which had been in the tree above him, were shaken loose by the explosion.

“They fell on me from the trees and the red ants were sucking the blood in my wound.”

When rescue helicopters showed up, Joe tried to walk over to get onboard, but fell down.

“I had shrapnel in both legs. The guys carried me,” he said.

The wounded were taken to a Saigon hospital, then flown to Japan.

“I found myself all bandaged up. I was told I was screaming and yelling and cursing at night because of the pain,” Joe said. “A nurse threatened me with court-martial if I didn’t stop screaming.”

Joe underwent physical therapy to recover full use of his arm. He was sent to New Jersey’s Fort Dix, got a high school diploma and, upon discharge, got a job with IBM, where he worked for 37 years.

Best of all, he got to see his little girl.

“My coming home and meeting my daughter was unbelievable.” He said he knew while in Vietnam “I had to come home and meet her and take care of her and that’s why I survived.”

Joe didn’t talk about how he earned two Bronze Stars “for meritorious achievement in ground operations against hostile forces,” a number of Army commendations and eight other medals, but he did show me in our diner booth the case containing the medals.

“I mourn people that never came back,” Joe said while reflecting on the war. “I feel deeply for all their families. We sacrificed all those years. We’re proud of being Vietnam veterans.”

Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, the Hartford Courant, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.