Those Thrilling Yarns of Yesteryear: Thoughts and Memories

By Carl "Bud" Paepcke

In this first of a series of thrilling stories, the author candidly expresses his personal thoughts and relates his vivid memories about many of his life experiences as a child, as a Marine in Vietnam, and as an FBI agent fighting to protect our country against evil. This former G-man also tells some fascinating tales about the members of his own family, and he is not afraid to speak about his faith as a Christian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639855636

Book preview

Chapter 1

A Leap from Certain Death

It was early 1967 in Da Nang, Republic of Vietnam. Orders had been received by the 7th Engineer Battalion to do whatever was necessary to prepare for a major expansion of the Da Nang airstrip. Following those orders should have been a simple matter of taking down two barbed wire fences and restringing them on a redesignated airstrip perimeter. However, between the two fences, someone had appropriately planted a minefield in an effort to keep enemy ground forces from easily overrunning the airstrip. The engineers would have to remove that minefield first before any other work could be done by anyone.

The minefield reportedly contained numerous small, mostly plastic M14 blast antipersonnel mines and numerous M16 bounding (Bouncing Betty) antipersonnel mines. M14 mines were only designed to injure and disable an enemy soldier by, perhaps, blowing off part of a foot as one attempted to enter the perimeter, whereas the M16 was designed to kill all enemy soldiers within a thirty-five-feet radius of its second bouncing blast of steel shrapnel, which would take place about two or four feet off the ground. Although land mines were always dangerous military hardware, the removal of this minefield should not have proved to be that difficult. Since proper military procedure had always been to chart minefields as mines were laid, the engineers could have followed such a chart and quickly located and removed or destroyed all the mines with relative ease. Unfortunately, the engineers were to have no such luck in Da Nang! The minefield around the Da Nang airstrip had either never been charted, or the chart had been misplaced or completely lost.

The 7th Engineer Battalion took the job of removing the mines very seriously. Realizing the potential danger to the lives of their Marines, some of the battalion’s officers and NCOs devised a plan to destroy the mines without having any personnel actually expose themselves to the mines in the field. A heavy, open-bottomed large metal box with tank bogie wheels mounted inside on uneven axles was designed and built by the battalion. A tank would safely push this unique mine killer through the field, and as this killer moved, the wheels would alternately strike the ground, setting off each of the mines in its path. After the killer had safely blown up all the mines, the airstrip expansion could quickly follow. It was certainly a great idea, but of course, theory did not always produce the desired practical results.

When the killer was pushed into a large section of the field, several of the mines were detonated, and no one was hurt. But most of the mines were only disturbed and were unfortunately buried deeper in the ground, many lying on their sides, leaving them even more sensitive and much more dangerous. The killer had done part of the job, but it had also inadvertently made conditions in the field a whole lot worse for the engineers.

The minefield still had to be completely cleared before any airstrip expansion could take place, but it became obvious that the clearing process would now have to be done the old-fashioned way: by individual Marines carefully probing for the mines on their hands and knees. An intensive training schedule was organized in order to familiarize all pertinent personnel with the two antipersonnel mines before they began their very tedious work. The Marines of the 7th Engineer Battalion had a very slow and nerve-racking job to do, but no complaints were ever heard from any of the young men assigned this duty.

Initially, the responsibility for clearing the minefield was given to the 3rd Platoon of the battalion’s Charlie Company. Their platoon leader was a very inexperienced young lieutenant named Henry. Lieutenant Hank was well aware of the destructiveness of the mines and, particularly, that of the Bouncing Betty. In an effort to help protect his Marines from injury and, hopefully, to at least prevent any of their deaths, Hank and one of his sergeants gathered various items of protective clothing and head gear for his Marines to wear at all times in the minefield. Of course, like the mine killer plan, these good intentions were also found to be impractical. After the first hour of work in the incomparable heat and humidity of Vietnam, it became very clear to everyone, including Hank, that most of the protective gear was totally unusable by the platoon.

Nevertheless, a squad of the 3rd Platoon began its job of tirelessly and meticulously probing the field inch by inch with handheld metal probes, locating and marking every mine in their path. After each section of the field was completely probed and the mines located, an explosive charge was placed on each mine. The charges were tied together and then electronically detonated from a remote bunker, destroying the mines in place. This death-defying routine continued for weeks, and as careful as the 3rd Platoon was about carrying out its duty, two Marine heroes were unfortunately injured anyway. One accidentally stepped on a small M14 mine, requiring the amputation of his foot. Another touched and detonated an M14 mine with his probe because it had been buried sideways in the ground. This Marine suffered damage to his hand, but due to a surgical miracle, he did not lose the use of that hand. Such was the eminent danger willingly accepted on a daily basis by each of the 3rd Platoon Marines performing their duties in the minefield.

As was his daily routine as the platoon leader, Hank would make the rounds of his Marines’ various jobsites to observe the construction or demolition work being done in the Da Nang area. He certainly never thought that following this routine was very dangerous when compared with the duties of a Marine infantry officer on patrol, and he considered himself quite fortunate to be able to comfortably travel around Da Nang in a chauffeured jeep. Part of his day was usually spent visiting the minefield site and observing the on-site training and the progress of the mine-clearing work.

One dry but overcast day, he arrived at the minefield site and received a verbal report on the project’s progress from one of his squad leaders, Sergeant Bruce Flash Gordon, who was directing the work there. Gordon pointed out to Hank where numerous mines in a section of the field had been located, which were now marked for demolition later. After listening to Gordon’s thorough report, a proud and satisfied Hank began to stroll around the jobsite, attempting to get a closer look at the progress.

Suddenly, Hank heard the voice of Sergeant Gordon shouting very clear commands in his direction. Lieutenant, stop where you are! Don’t move! You’re standing in an area of the minefield we haven’t cleared yet! As everyone knows, a Marine sergeant can easily make himself heard, and Sergeant Gordon had Hank’s undivided attention. Apparently, the 3rd Platoon had just taken down one of the fences of another section of the field in order to begin probing and clearing it. Hank quickly realized that he was not supposed to be where he was.

Obeying the sergeant’s commands, Hank froze where he stood and began to carefully survey his surroundings. He could immediately see the close proximity of numerous Bouncing Betty mines. Three metal prongs from each of several M16 mines were visibly protruding from the ground all around him and immediately convinced Hank that he was indeed in the middle of a minefield. He then looked down at his feet. One of his boots was resting on top of an empty canister, which was still buried in the ground but no longer containing a mine. That Bouncing Betty had obviously been detonated in the past, either by the mine killer or perhaps when an unlucky animal darted through field. If the earlier detonation had not occurred, Hank knew that he would surely have set off a couple of explosions with his boot.

After he made a thorough inspection of his position, he knew there was only one thing he could do. He must carefully turn around in place and leap out of the field. He had never really considered himself much of an athlete, although he had played a little soccer in college, but if an Olympic medal had been at stake that day in Da Nang, Hank would surely have won the gold medal in the broad jump competition. He knew he had only one chance for life. When he thought he was ready, both of his feet rose high above the ground, and he miraculously flew over all the mines and safely reached the edge of the field.

The dangerous incident was over, but the humbling experience would stay with him forever. Had the canister at his feet contained a live mine, Hank would surely have detonated it. That detonation would have killed him and other Marines in his vicinity. He came close to death and realized that God had to have been closely watching over him and had saved his life. He allowed the canister to be empty, and He allowed Sergeant Gordon to be Hank’s earthly guardian angel who stopped Hank just at the right time.

Had Hank continued walking farther into the field, other mines would have awaited him to provide him with certain death. Perhaps it had been one of the Lord’s angels who assisted Hank with his seemingly impossible athletic feat, and one could definitely say that he flew on angels’ wings that day and had been saved from his own blind stupidity.

One final fact needs to be added to this death-defying story. Lieutenant Hank was actually Carl Henry Robert Bud Paepcke, who lived to tell the story of the patient courage of his platoon’s Marines, of the timely heroism of Sergeant Bruce Flash Gordon, and of his own miraculous leap from certain death. The Lord had certainly been gracious to him!

Lieutenant Hank and Sergeant Gordon

(Author’s Note: Though Staff Sergeant Bruce Flash Gordon visited me in late 1967 at my residence in Jacksonville, North Carolina, I lost contact with him over the years. After I wrote this story, I wanted to share it with him and made several unsuccessful attempts to find him in order to do so. Finally, in 2013, I found his Massachusetts telephone number and put in a call. His wife, Marge, answered the phone and regretfully informed me that Flash had died two years before from a cancer that was most likely the result of his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Though saddened by the news of the death of the man who had saved my life, I proceeded to establish an online friendship with his widow, his son, his two daughters, and his Marine brother-in-law, with whom I shared the story, along with pictures I had taken of Flash when we were together in Vietnam. They had never seen those pictures before. I thought that was a great ending to this story, but there was more. In 2016, Flash’s brother-in-law invited me to a family reunion in Woodstock, Georgia, where I was surprised to be treated like I was somebody special by Flash’s widow and other family members and friends. It was a humbling experience for me.)

Chapter 2

Driving with Irving

Ed O’Connor walked into the agents’ squad room and very deliberately approached my desk. Bud, the boss wants to see you right away, he said. O’Connor, a balding New York Irishman who spoke with a strong New York City accent, was my squad supervisor, and I liked him very much. He was a good man with many years of valuable investigative experience in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. He always looked out for the men on his squad and was completely honest and helpful in all his dealings with them. For that, his agents also respected him. However, on this occasion, O’Connor gave me no indication of why the boss wanted to see me, and that was a reason for some concern for me on this Friday morning in June.

No agent relished being summoned by the boss, particularly a new agent, and I was definitely a new agent, having only been out in the field for about seven months. I had successfully completed my fifteen weeks of FBI training at Washington, DC, and Quantico, Virginia, the previous October and had reported in at the field office in Albany, New York, in early November 1968. Not only was I a new agent, but I was also in my first office of assignment and was still learning my new investigative trade. My lovely wife, Fran, and I had weathered the 1969 Albany winter with its record cold temperatures and extremely deep snowfalls, but I now wondered if I could also weather this meeting with the boss.

The boss was Leo Conroy, the SAC (Special Agent in Charge) of the Albany Division, which geographically included most of the eastern part of upstate New York and all of the state of Vermont. I had been in Conroy’s office on other occasions, and some of those occasions had not been very pleasant, because I had been there to explain why I had done something that had either displeased Conroy or the Bureau. I had heard from older agents that if you wanted to keep out of trouble, it was best to try to stay out of the limelight; but since entering the Bureau, I had not always been successful in that endeavor.

Even though I never intended to make waves, I had inadvertently succeeded at various times in drawing attention to myself. Just two months after getting to New York, I wrecked a bureau car while doing investigative work on a road trip in Syracuse. When it was decided that the accident was my fault, Director Hoover required me to pay for the damages to the car. He even sent me one of those dreaded epistles known as a letter of censure, wherein he admonished me for my carelessness in handling bureau property. At the time I was being summoned to Conroy’s office, the government was still withholding fifty dollars a month from my paycheck, and that financial burden was to continue for over a year. What had I done now that interested the SAC? I would soon find out.

As I entered Conroy’s office, I expected the worst, but Conroy seemed to be in a good mood, with a smile on his face, so I began to relax a little and to think that I was not in trouble after all. Then Conroy truly surprised me by explaining that he had selected me to handle a very special mission for Director Hoover. According to Conroy, the government’s annual judicial conference was being held that very week in Manchester, Vermont, and most of the nation’s federal judges at all levels, including the nine justices from the Supreme Court, would be at that conference.

Apparently, one of the judges at the conference was a close friend of the Director, and Mr. Hoover had just telephoned Conroy with a request. The judge was required to leave the conference early, and Mr. Hoover wanted Conroy to send an agent to securely transport him from the conference to the Albany airport the following morning. Requests from Mr. Hoover were always received like commands, so Conroy was obligated to quickly act on the Director’s request.

I was told the judge’s name, with which I was personally unfamiliar, and then I was given instructions as to when and where I was to meet the judge in Vermont. Conroy gave me the keys to his bureau car, a brand-new 1969 Plymouth Fury, and then authorized me to take it home that night. I knew that this was definitely a special assignment, because agents were not allowed to take bureau cars to their residences in 1969. A relaxation of that cardinal rule was made after Mr. Hoover’s death in 1972 by Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, the father of an agent with whom I would later serve in Georgia.

I enthusiastically accepted my mission from Conroy, drove the car home, got to bed early, and was on the road before daybreak the next morning. After about a two-hour drive, I arrived at a quaint convention lodge in Manchester well before the appointed time. Waiting outside the lodge entrance with a shiny black limousine was Tom Kelly, a handsome older agent with whom I was acquainted at the Albany office. Tom, a US Air Force veteran, was one of the agents who had taken a special interest in me when I first arrived in the Albany office and had helped me acclimatize to FBI life. He explained that like me, he was also on a mission that morning.

It was his assignment to protect and drive US Attorney General John Mitchell from the conference to the Albany airport. While the attorney general would eventually get caught up in the FBI’s Watergate investigation, Tom would eventually rise in prominence in the FBI and be appointed Deputy Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after those two agencies began to share supervisory personnel in the 1980s. After no contact for over twenty years, Tom and I would meet again briefly in Georgia at a law enforcement conference and immediately recognize each other from those early days in New York.

I waited patiently with Tom outside, and eventually, the judge came out of the convention lodge and introduced himself to us. He was a pleasant, soft-spoken, studious-looking man who was short in stature and wore dark-rimmed glasses. I had not yet met any federal judges by that time in my career and really didn’t know what to expect, but I loaded the judge’s luggage into the trunk of the bureau car and waited for further instructions. Since it was still too early to leave for Albany, the judge suggested that Tom and I join him for coffee. Therefore, the three of us got into the front seat of the attorney general’s limousine and drove to a nearby coffee shop in Manchester, where we had a friendly chat and enjoyed a little breakfast at the counter. When we finished, Tom drove us back to the convention lodge.

After saying his goodbyes to other members of the federal judiciary, the judge told me that he was ready to start the journey to Albany. I knew that my job was to make sure that the judge was safely delivered and on time for his flight back to New York City, so I got behind the wheel and carefully pulled away from the lodge. The judge, who seated himself on the passenger side of the car’s front seat, began to chat with me. As we cruised down the two-lane highway that wound through the beautiful Vermont countryside, we freely conversed about various subjects, and I found the judge to be very personable. He then surprised me by saying that he had heard that I had a talent for comedy. Apparently, the SAC had mentioned to the judge that I could perform comedy monologues and might agree to do a monologue for him on our trip to Albany.

The judge was certainly not aware that I had been a ten-year-old in Alabama when I first heard Andy Griffith perform What It Was, Was Football on a 45 RPM record, and I began my development as an amateur comedian. I listened to the record repeatedly and became able to almost perfectly mimic Griffith’s comedy sketch. Through the encouragement of my father, I began to perform the football routine at family gatherings in Alabama and Ohio, where I enjoyed easily drawing laughter from my relatives. As I grew older, I learned the routines of other comedians, became quite comfortable performing comedy onstage before large audiences, and would eventually even write my own comedy roast material for law enforcement retirements.

Of course, anytime someone wanted to hear me do comedy, I was always glad to oblige, and I quickly began to perform for the judge as we drove along that country road. The judge seemed to be pleased with the football routine and asked me to continue with others. The comedy made the journey fun for me and the judge, and the time passed very quickly.

At last, we arrived at the Albany airport. The judge told me that he was sure he could liven up the dull annual judicial conferences by having me perform some of my comedy routines there, and he promised to ask Mr. Hoover if he would allow me to attend the next conference for that very purpose. Since I enjoyed working any audience with comedy, I told the judge I would be honored to attend provided Mr. Hoover approved my appearance. I then assisted the judge with his luggage and accompanied him into the airport terminal, where we bid each other farewell. For me, it had been a very pleasant day in the company of a very pleasant gentleman.

I later received a thank-you note from the judge through the SAC but was never asked to perform at any judicial conferences. If the judge actually made an attempt to arrange for such a performance, then perhaps Mr. Hoover did not approve and never allowed it to take place. After all, I knew that FBI agents were not supposed to be funny, for their job was certainly a serious one. Nevertheless, I did eventually learn that the judge I had driven from Manchester to Albany was a very famous man.

The thank-you note was signed, Irving R. Kaufman, United States Circuit Judge. As it turned out, this soft-spoken, unassuming man whose name was unfamiliar to me at the time had been the presiding US District Judge in the 1952 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In that trial, the Rosenbergs were convicted of passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, and their highly publicized trial was the culmination of the most notable national security investigation in FBI history until decades later. The judge had dutifully sentenced the Rosenbergs to die in the electric chair, and they were accordingly executed.

President Harry Truman had appointed Judge Kaufman to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1949, and President John Kennedy had appointed Judge Kaufman to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to chair a commission of other noteworthy Americans to investigate organized crime; and in 1987, he received the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom. Judge Kaufman died in 1992 at the age of eighty-one.

That seemingly uneventful drive to Albany from Vermont had been quite enjoyable for me as I carried out my special mission for Mr. Hoover. However, my realization of how special that drive really was did not occur until I learned about the judge’s prominent legal status and notable historical stature. That unusual journey, during which I continuously performed comedy for an audience of one, will live on in my memory forever. Unquestionably, it was a great honor for me, as a young G-man, to drive with Irving that day in Vermont, but perhaps it was also an equally unusual but pleasant experience for Judge Kaufman, who was probably never again placed in a position to be so comically entertained by the FBI.

(Author’s Note: While waiting with my wife, Judy, at Dr. Ron Hudson’s office in Columbus, Georgia, in 2018, Judy noticed an article in the Smithsonian and brought it to my attention. It was about the female code breakers who helped the FBI obtain the evidence that convicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The classified program to decipher Soviet spy codes had its own code name: Venona. It was declassified in 1995, and after that time, the public learned the identities of the code breakers.

According to that article, ninety-nine-year-old Angeline Nanni was at that time the only living code breaker from Venona. Until the declassification, even her family members did not know how she served our nation, and she certainly never talked about her government job to them. However, during the closing days of the Obama administration, the Rosenberg sons attempted to exonerate their parents, and some nephews of Nanni’s were discussing that situation in her presence and expressing sympathy for the Rosenberg cause. Their aunt Angie suddenly spoke up and said, Oh, honey, they can’t [be exonerated]. We had them. They were guilty. After saying those few words about her important work, she simply walked away.

The declassification of Venona also disclosed that Special Agent Robert J. Lamphere was the FBI’s liaison with these special code breakers. I remembered Bob Lamphere when we served together in the FBI’s Baltimore Division. I was a young agent in Wilmington, Delaware, while Bob was a more seasoned agent in Annapolis, Maryland, but I did not become aware that Bob had previously done such special work for our nation until I read about it in that magazine.)

Chapter 3

The Man on the Beach

When the United States Marine Corps was organized at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia in 1775, their mission was to disembark from warships, to land on enemy-controlled territory, and to successfully engage and subdue the enemy. That military concept is known as amphibious warfare, and although Marines have been called upon to adapt to our country’s wartime needs and accept variations of that concept