The Reserve: TALES OF THE FIGHTING 413TH, THE TOUGHEST FINANCE UNIT IN VIETNAM!

By Ed St Amour

War stories are always about the fighters, the men and women on the frontline, the people putting their lives on the line for their country. But that is only half of the story. Without the support troops, an army would not last long at all.

This book is all about the actual and true adventures of the members of an Army finance unit. No blood and guts, no firefights, no heroic acts of bravery, just the insane happenings of one guy thrust into a unit he has no training for and how he and the rest of the reserve finance unit coped with the facts of being dropped into the middle of a war.

The book is easy to read. The stories are presented as individual happenings. Some are funny, some are informative, some are just bizarre; but in war, bizarre is many times the order of the day.

How does someone trained in military intelligence cope with existing in a finance unit? There is no compatibility of training or expertise. A finance unit does not have a lot of use for someone trained in image interpretation or interrogation. Military intelligence does not teach their people how to fill out DD213s, or is it 214s?

Laugh, learn, and look into the lives of some unique people that were put into a strange and surreal situation and how well they coped with their situation and invented solutions to their problems.

Enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638811947

Book preview

Chapter 1

WHO?

Union general William Tecumseh Sherman is credited with saying, War is hell. He may have made the greatest understatement of all time. War is worse than hell. In war, everyone is affected, not just the deserving. But even in war there can be those incidents that bring a smile to your lips, or a downright laugh-out-loud moment.

This is my story. It has taken me fifty years to finally sit down to write it, fifty years of remembering the remarkable experiences of being called to war and becoming a member of The Fighting 413th.

It has also taken me ten years to write and rewrite this account. Memory and life keeps getting in the way. It is 99.9 percent accurate.

Chapter 2

WHAT?

I’M GOING HOME!

Atlanta in 1968 is a great place and I can see that it is just about to explode in population and opportunity, but I don’t have the money to participate, and I can’t see the horizon! I know that doesn’t make sense, but east of the Mississippi is one big forest. You can’t see past the next tree. The west is wide open. You can see the horizon from almost anywhere. I’m strangely claustrophobic anywhere in the East. I want to go back to So Cal!

Don’t get me wrong, Atlanta has been great to me. I got married here, had a baby here, and have had jobs that have potential; but I still want to go home. I have convinced my wife that the change may help the health of our baby. Our daughter has been fighting leukemia for half her life, and that is hard to watch. She’s a fighter and has been nothing but a happy kid both in and out of her multiple hospital stays. Okay, justification. Guilty!

I signed up for the Army in 1962 for seven years of reserve duty; did my basic training at Fort Ord in northern California; and then trained in my specialty, Military Intelligence, at Fort Meade Maryland, home of all the spy stuff. I planned on returning to So Cal when I completed my training, but instead of going home I decided to see the world a bit first and moved to Atlanta. The choice was between Atlanta and Kansas City. I knew the owner of the Kansas City Star newspaper and was sure he would hire me. I didn’t know anybody in Atlanta, but based as much on weather as anything, I chose Atlanta.

To meet my Army requirements I joined a local reserve division, the 81st Infantry Division, and was assigned to the G-2 section, the military intelligence unit. The Army decided to decommission the division and I was put in a control group, centered in St. Louis. Since I was still technically in the Army, I phoned the control group and asked if it was okay with the Army if I moved back home and they said it was fine with them. As CYA backup, I also wrote them and received a letter from the commanding officer, a full-bird colonel, saying that I could move and that I was actually not subject to recall, which was good to know with the Vietnam War still going full force.

So the first step is to sell our home. It’s a nice home, not big but comfortable, and the home my wife was raised in, so she has been very happy living here. I have found a man that will buy it, a Mr. Ryan. That’s what he and his company does. He is coming over, and we’ll do the paperwork right here. That is very accommodating, very Southern.

The big day has arrived. The gentleman that is going to buy our home is due this afternoon, and I am excited. My wife seems happy too. I think she wants our daughter to get well so bad that she is willing to try anything, even moving to that strange place, Southern California. Mr. Ryan arrives and we sit down at the dining room table and go over the terms of the contract. Everything being agreeable to both parties, we sign all the documents. The home is sold!

I walk him to the front door and thank him again and wish him well as he walks down our front steps. As he goes, he nods a greeting to our mailman who is coming up the front steps at the same time. The mailman hands me some letters and has me sign for a registered letter. I don’t get registered letters every day and am instantly curious. What can this be? Have I won a prize in a contest I don’t remember entering?

I sit down and casually look at the envelope. It has strange markings on it. It has an official government heading. What can this unexpected letter be? Something else from the control group reconfirming my status? Nothing left to do but open it.

Greetings from the government. You are hereby ordered to report for active duty with the 413th Finance Unit located at Fort Benning, Georgia, to begin training for deployment to… WHO? WHAT? WHERE?

Chapter 3

NOW!

After several years of slowly suggesting that maybe she would like So Cal better than Atlanta, or at least we should give it a try, my wife had agreed to move. We were planning on how and when to make the move. Having been given a green light by the military (as a reservist I had to let them know where I was going to be living), we put our home up for sale.

So that’s when we found Mr. Ryan, the businessman that would buy our home. We signed, he left, and the mailman changed our lives forever. I am not kidding, the buyer and the mailman passed each other on the front steps. The timing of that passing is mind-blowing.

I opened the paperwork and found that I was to report to Fort Benning, Georgia, to a unit called the 413th Finance Section, Major Roland commanding.

Well, this obviously had to be a mistake. The Army had just told me I was ineligible to be recalled, why else would I have sold my home? I sat down to try and figure this out. The television was on and my wife was in the bathtub. Just then the news came on and said that the military had announced a call-up of reserve forces and that some of them were from the Atlanta area. I quickly turned down the volume so my wife would not hear about the recall and it would give me time to figure out how to get disengaged from this obvious mistake before she found out about it. She didn’t need the worry; our daughter’s health was worry enough.

Of course, she heard the announcement, heard me turn down the volume, put two and two together and came out of the bathroom. Being smart and creative, she called the local TV station and asked for the news desk. The phone picked up and a voice said, This is Tom Brokaw. Can I help you? Yep, that Tom Brokaw. He was the local anchor on an Atlanta network channel then. He told her that, yes, some local units and individuals had been recalled to active duty from the Atlanta area. Was there anything else he could do for her? After composing herself, talking to Tom Brokaw was a bit traumatic for her, she marched straight up to me and asked, Have you been recalled? So much for protecting her from worry! Of course I couldn’t lie. I said that I had but added that I had that letter from the Army stating that I was ineligible for recall. So it had to be some kind of mistake and I was sure that we could get it corrected. It would come to nothing, or so I hoped.

My wife, being a native Georgian, had some local political knowledge. She wrote our senator, Richard Russell, who was head of the Armed Forces Committee in the Senate. Who else would be better to reverse an obvious mistake like this than a United States senator? She got a written reply from the senator. His answer was something to the effect, Sorry young lady, but I am the senator that called up the reserves, and I surely can’t make an exception for one of my own. Oops!

The other Georgia senator, Herman Talmadge, said that he would submit a congressional order to examine the situation. I am still waiting for the results of that order to be forwarded to me. Since Senator Talmadge left office in 1981 and died in 2002, I hold out little hope.

After reading and rereading the recall notice, and long hours of discussion with my wife about what we could do to deal with the situation, we decided that Canada was not an option but fighting this was. We contacted Mr. Ryan and he, in a great show of patriotism, agreed to let my family stay in the home, now technically his, for as long as was needed. We just had to continue to make the mortgage payments. We could ask for no more from him; he was generous to a fault.

The date for me to report was in mid-May, and it was approaching rapidly. We got all our affairs in order. I had to quit my job. It was going to be impossible for me to continue my job from an Army fort or wherever I might be located. My office gave me a going-away party. Why did I get the impression that to them it was as much a wake as a party?

One thing that did seem fair was that the government said that an employer had to give you your job back when, and if, you returned from your recall-to-arms status. By the way, don’t always believe what you’re told, by anybody!

Well, the date came and I reported to the assigned location and my life as a member of the 413th Finance Section was about to begin. Finance? Did the Army forget that I was trained in military intelligence? They’re putting me in with a bunch of CLERKS? FINANCE? HELP!

Good-bye, wife. Good-bye, baby. Good-bye, life. Hello, Army!

Chapter 4

Welcome to the Army, Again

When I left the active reserve I was a private 1st class, E-3. E-3 is the designation of pay grade; private is the name of the rank. Enlisted pay grades may have multiple rank designations. An E-4 can be a corporal or a specialist 4. Both are the same pay grade, but the corporal technically has command rank over the specialist. The specialist ranks are generally support personnel, not combat troops. When I was assigned to the control group I was an E-3 private. I had earned a single stripe to wear on my uniform as a rank designator. I had stayed an E-3 for over four years now.

It was time to report for duty. I went to the local army fort and reported in. They put me, along with the other lucky lottery winners, on a bus to take us the hundred miles south, down to Fort Benning, Georgia, to begin our new lives.

The bus ride to Fort Benning was one hundred miles of silence. Everyone on the bus were civilians that had been called back to military service. It was a dark and gloomy day, that ride to Fort Benning, and that was just inside the bus. It was not a happy crew.

The bus finally arrived at Fort Benning and began driving around dropping off different groups of people at their new homes. As we drove around Fort Benning, I noticed a lot of people walking around with a rank designation that I had never seen before. It was a single stripe with a rocker arm below. Rocker arms had always indicated sergeants, E-6 and above. What was this strange new rank designator? I found out, it was me! Now a single stripe was an E-2 private. The rocker arm designated an E-3. I had been out of the Army so long that even my rank designator had changed. I was going to have a lot to relearn!

The bus dropped me and my paperwork off at my new unit, the 413th Finance Section. Yes, the 413th was a finance section, a bunch of clerks that paid the troops. Fighting 413th? You expected gunfire and combat stories of heroism and bravery? Not in this Army! The 413th fought all right; it just happened that the enemy was usually the Army, our Army, not some other Army, and the fighting was not done with weapons, just with wits.

The unit headquarters was located somewhere within part of a huge building complex of curved three-story high white barracks, right next to the jump-school training towers for the airborne troops. The buildings were massive and finding the section for the 413th took some time.

I finally found the 413th’s area and its headquarters offices and located the duty sergeant of the day, Sergeant Cook. I told him that I was reporting for duty. Sergeant Cook said that I had to report to the commanding officer, Major Roland. The major was in and agreed to see me immediately.

I entered his office and found a man sitting there that had a gentle face atop his six-foot frame. When he began speaking his voice matched, gentle and easygoing in a very Southern gentlemanly manner. Even with his major rank on his collar, which meant that he was probably making the military a career, he was not intimidating and gave me confidence to ask what I planned to ask of him.

Major Roland was the epitome of a Southern gentleman, even in his Army uniform. He gave me a short welcome to the unit speech and then said, I see that you are trained in military intelligence. Do you have any finance training?

No, sir, was my only response.

Well, private, we’ll see if we can’t find something for you to do around here. Sergeant Cook out front will give you your bunk and duty assignments. Is there anything else you need that I can help you with?

Army rules state that if you are an E-3, you get no allowance for having a family. If you are an E-5, you do get an allowance automatically. For an E-4 you must have at least four years in the Army to get the family allowance. I, can I say luckily all things considered, was an E-3 with over four years in the service. I qualified by time but not by grade for the family allowance.

With a wife and child at home I needed the family allowance. Small as it may be for an E-4, it was a lot better than nothing. With nothing to lose I answered his question by saying, Yes, sir, there is something you can do for me, you can make me an E-4, I boldly asked.

Major Roland’s shocked response was, Let’s see, you have been under my command now for a total of exactly twenty seconds and you ask for a promotion, is that correct?

Yes, sir, I answered.

Can you tell me why I should promote you, Private, he responded.

Yes, sir. I stood my ground. Sir, I’m an E-3 with over four years in the Army. I have a wife and a sick daughter. As you know, E-3s get no family allowance. E-4s over four do. I need the family allowance. That’s why I need the promotion, sir, I pled my case.

Again taken back, Major Roland