Texas assistant attorney general still struggles with Vietnam conflict

September 19, 2007
By Bill Sontag
Feature Writer

I am an American fighting man. I serve in the force which guards my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.

I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.

-- U.S. Military Code of Conduct, 1955

He’s not out of the jungle yet, but if you’re looking for outward signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, disfiguring scars, or dysfunctional behavior, you’ll need to look past Rolando Menchaca.

The 60-year-old child support attorney, head of the local Texas Attorney General’s Office, is a facile conversationalist, avid student of world history, quick-witted, and imbued with great humor which he shares relentlessly. No “thousand-yard stare” here. But Menchaca harbors dark memories of Indochina which – rarely voiced – rekindle terrors he’d pay good money to forget.

In Eagle Pass, on the sunny side of another war, Menchaca’s parents greeted him as a New Year’s gift at twenty minutes past midnight, 1947. As tradition would have it, his mother, Aurora, ran the house and home, and his dad held down many jobs. But Menchaca best remembers his father, José or “Pepe,” as a Mexican folk tradition musician.

“He played trumpet, and he played in trios, bandas, mariachis, and he was even licensed to perform in Mexico. At Club Victoria in Piedras Negras, across the Rio Bravo – Rio Grande – from Eagle Pass, he once played for [1950s crooner] Perry Como, and around Texas he played for governors. Dolph Briscoe, Mark White, William “Bill Clements, and, oh, yes, John Connally,” Menchaca reminisced, Saturday (Aug. 18).

A push-me-pull-you combination of the 1960s Eagle Pass Draft Board and Menchaca’s determination to get a solid education drove him to enlist in the U.S. Army. “When I was in high school, in 1964, the Vietnam War was starting – it was called a ‘conflict,’ but let me tell you, it was war – and everybody was getting drafted. So I went for my physical, and then went to the recruiter and enlisted.” With the enlistment, Menchaca knew he would get three years of G.I. Bill educational support, with the draft, only two.

Basic training began at Fort Leonardwood, Mo., historically nicknamed “Fort Lost-in-the-Woods by most graduates. “And sure enough, I could not have deserted, because I could never find my way out of there,” Menchaca joked. Two things he recalls as take-away messages from basic training. “I learned to keep my mouth shut, and kept it that way,” a reference to the importance of discretion. “But also, there was where I learned to be a patriot. The code said, ‘I am an American fighting man, and I’m willing to lay down my life…’”

Orders sent Menchaca next to Fort Devens for Morse Code signal training and interception, followed by ten days of “jungle training” in mid-winter Massachusetts snow and ice. Escape and evasion from capture by “enemy” aggressors – Hawaiian and Japanese-American “Green Berets” Special Forces had real meaning, including what Menchaca calls “real torture” if you were caught in the frantic climax of the 10-day exercise.

Menchaca and a buddy – Oklahoman Bill Hartman – intended to make the dash to avoid capture, touching base at two checkpoints, solo, but scrambled through drifts of snow together to set a course record. “But many didn’t make it, and were tortured so they’d know what it would be like. I saw broken noses, broken legs, cuts and bruises,” Menchaca said.

“By the time I got out of basic, we were ready to go to Vietnam and kill everybody … Well, the enemy, anyway,” Menchaca said. He was told he wouldn’t be on his first tour in Vietnam very long. “They said peace talks had already started in Paris.” In April 1968, he arrived “in country” at Bien Hoa Air Base, near the southeast tip of Vietnam, close to the South China Sea, he learned more. “When I found out they were just talking about the configuration of the table over there, I said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m going to be here for awhile.’”

From Bien Hoa to Long Binh, edging closer to his unit assignment, Menchaca ended up – briefly – in the Ambassador Hotel, Saigon. “Ah, yes, ‘The Pearl of the Orient,’” he sighed. “We were supposed to be special, but when I was in training we were told, ‘If you see anyone in black pajamas, kill them. Well, we laughed because 90 percent of Saigon was in black pajamas.”

In the seaside city of Nha Trang, now a developing resort boasting Korean, French, Italian and Tex-Mex restaurants, Menchaca bought a .45-caliber automatic pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition for self defense. “Then I felt much more secure because I was ‘packing heat,’” he said with a chuckle.

Finally, encamped in tents at Pleiku Air Base in Vietnam’s central highlands where his unit provided security for the U.S. Air Force installation, he was assigned an M-14 rifle and carried an M-79 grenade launcher whenever he could find one available. Menchaca’s first brush with death from enemy fire still releases a comic odor from memory. Leaving a latrine a bit early, out of boredom with the reading material he had carried along, a 4.2-inch M2 mortar round made a direct hit on the pit toilet. Menchaca was only yards away. Knocked to the ground, but uninjured, he was nonetheless swathed in feces and urine. “Man, it stunk like you can’t believe!” Menchaca roared.

Later, still at Pleiku, his unit came under mortar attack, and men scrambled for protection below an earthen berm. A soldier nearby Menchaca’s position was felled by a mortar round, but stood and said, “Man, I thought I’d bought it!” Menchaca noticed a lot of blood pouring from the man’s back, drenching the ground around him. “I told him, ‘Get down, you’re hit,’ and he laid face down, and I saw that his back was blown off, his spine completely exposed, and big pieces of it missing.” Choking back tears, Menchaca truncated his narrative here: “He died, of course, but I never could understand how he could stand up and speak to me.”

Menchaca participated in jungle patrols with 10-12 men. “About three or four days before we’d go out on patrol, we’d start eating nothing but Vietnamese food, and we wouldn’t bathe, used no cologne, so it was hoped that we’d smell like Vietnamese. These patrols were ordered to specifically not engage with the enemy. Try to get their strength, whatever you could to come back and report, but do not engage.

“But some of these NCOICs [non-commissioned officers-in-charge) lived by a motto – ‘Zap a zip a day’ – and we were told, ‘Look, we’re here to kill ‘Cong,’” Menchaca said. In October 1968, his patrol leader heard the approaching footfall of enemy troops, and gave a quick hand signal for his soldiers to disperse, hopefully disappearing into the jungle’s dense foliage. But Menchaca was on a footbridge over a stream. Not wanting to create noise on the bridge, he nimbly vaulted over the bridge, grasping for and securing the bottom of four handrails. Despite banging his knees hard against the bridge’s decking, there Menchaca hung while the Viet Cong shuffled listlessly over the bridge.

His head, shoulders and trembling hands should have been visible to the enemy, but night darkness helped conceal him. Breathing as shallowly as possible, struggling against the pain of his battered legs, wrists and straining muscles, Menchaca counted footsteps above him. One, two, ten, 25 … a total of 38 enemy guerrillas passed in about ten minutes. “For me, it felt more life half an hour, and I was dying every minute of it,” Menchaca said. He waited a few minutes more, and when he could hear nothing on the trail, Menchaca dropped about 20 feet to the stream below.

After a month at Pleiku, he was next assigned to a base camp in the An Khe Pass along a critical mountain highway corridor, noted for Viet Cong ambushes and subsequent extensive defoliation with chemical agents to reduce the risks of guerilla attacks. Movie nights were the key source of entertainment in the remote base, and Menchaca has always been an ardent film buff. One evening Menchaca decided to attend a midnight showing of “The Green Berets,” a new film starring John Wayne, David Janssen and Jim Hutton.

“On the way, I heard mortar rounds off in the distance, and gave the usual alert, screaming ‘Incoming!’” Menchaca said. “We took 150 rounds that night, and my theory is that the ‘Cong knew we were watching ‘The Green Berets,’ and wanted us to know that John Wayne was not going to be able to come and save us.” Deaths were inflicted on the base that night, but none in Menchaca’s unit.

But on another movie night, Menchaca and his buddies watched Julie Andrews starring in the Rodgers and Hammerstein production of “The Sound of Music,” and ten mortar rounds were lobbed into camp. One landed close by and shrapnel from it tore off part of Menchaca’s upper lip.

Menchaca’s reputation for skilled target identification, marking distant enemy Morse Code sources, advanced – “Because they said I was doing a good job” – as did his military grade and pay with his next set of orders. At Nha Trang again, Specialist 4th Class Menchaca was assigned to the 144th Aviation Company of the 224th Aviation Battalion, 509th Radio Research Group. The mission of this unit was airborne radio direction-finding and transmitted code interception and decryption. Menchaca flew aboard the RU-8D Beechcraft “Seminole,” usually in a trio of fixed-wing aircraft capturing radio signals, among 30 in the fleet of the 144th.

“We used them to track the enemy. And we were unarmed except for our sidearms and rifles, just the pilot, co-pilot and me,” Menchaca recalled. Often, the signal technicians flew directly over enemy targets during the four-to-five-hour sorties. “Normally, then, we’d call in air strikes, but sometimes the commander would want to attack with ground forces if he felt the enemy were in small scattered groups.”

Everything he related to LIVE! was in his first Vietnam tour, but Menchaca was in the midst of his fourth one-year tour in Vietnam when he was finally discharged. At home, he was presented the Vietnam Service Medal, an American Service Medal and the Air Medal. No purple heart, no bronze or silver stars. “And when we were ‘in country’ most of us really didn’t want them. Medals were unlucky.” Insignia, too. “I was in the Army Intelligence Service, but we never wore insignia that said that,” Menchaca said.

His thoughts on his and this nation’s Vietnam experience: “I’m one of those who believed we should never have been in Vietnam … We too often go into countries and say, ‘I’m the messiah, and you need to do things my way. And, invariably, they say, ‘O.K., give me the money and we’ll do it your way.”

Menchaca reflected briefly on Ho Chi Minh, president, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1946-1969, who once warned France and the United States, “You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." Menchaca said, “When you get involved in a country that’s been dominated for 2,000 years, waiting another 150 years to re-unite your country that’s been so divided means absolutely nothing.”

“I feel we should have just cut our losses, and gotten out of there as quickly as possible. But I also knew that I was an American fighting man, and I had orders to follow,” Menchaca said.