As a newly-arrived Marine in Vietnam, Bill Craig was walking patrol with his mortar unit when they decided to stop for lunch at an old concrete bunker used by French forces.
“Myself and another squad leader and one of the staff sergeants were sitting on top of this bunker and some other guys were scattered around,” he recalled of their search-and-destroy missions into the jungle and rice paddies around Phu Bai. “So you had some stupid Marines sitting there eating C-rations out in the open, and I had my pack and M-14 (rifle) laid across my legs.”
Suddenly there was a loud “pop-pop-pop” from an enemy sniper’s rifle. Craig “felt something whiz by my head.”
“The guy had opened up from a ‘spider trap’ (hiding place),” he explained. “I grabbed my M-14 and dove off the left side of the bunker. The other squad leader dove to the right. By that time, the whole battalion was getting ready to unload (with weapons). But the sniper went right back into his hole and he was done. Thank the Lord, he didn’t hit anybody — and especially me, because it was the first time I’d been shot at. But that’s what happened from being stupid and making myself a target by sitting on top of that bunker!”
However, the staff sergeant cried out to Craig that he’d been shot.
“I said where? He said, ‘My leg!’ I felt something like blood and said what were you eating?” Craig asked. “He had heated up some beans with a heat tab and spilled it on his leg when the sniper started shooting. I said, ‘You’re good, Sarge, you’re good.’ He was sure he was wounded.”
Then the sarge asked him, “Craig, what happened to your rifle? Look at it.” There was a bullet hole through the stock of his M-14.
“So a round whizzed by my ear and another one went through my rifle stock and I said, ‘Thank you, God!’ But I was a celebrity of the whole battalion, and the commander came by and wanted to see my rifle stock,” he remembered.
Craig, a member of Marine Corps League Detachment 1280 that serves Ellijay and Jasper, was raised on the ‘Inner Banks’ of Edenton, N.C., and joined the Marine Corps fresh out of John A. Holmes High School in 1965. His father was a Marine in World War II and hailed from Georgia, where Bill returned after the war.
‘Culture shock’
Craig was asked his first impressions after being initially assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines combat infantry unit in Vietnam.
“It was like culture shock, and then the heat hits you in the face — that tropical heat,” he said. “And the smells. We went to areas where the Marines had been there for a year or more and they looked hard and tanned, and here we came a bunch of ‘green’ guys or ‘newbies.’ You begin to take notice of everything around you.”
In an area known as “The Dogpatch,” Marines were hit with mortars and random harassing fire from the Viet Cong.
“Naturally, it was kind of a shock,” Craig said. “You heard something coming in, and my whole squad was green, so we were getting in the bunker as quick as we could.”
After R & R in Thailand, he was transferred to 2nd Battalion 4th Marines — known as the ‘Second to None Magnificent Bastards’ going back to the unit’s reputation from World War II — and Craig was promoted to corporal.
While on patrol and heavily laden with mortar gear and ammo, he “felt something” on his right boot.
“We were walking around rice paddies and dikes and I was on point (in front), taking very slow steps and watching for things around me — making sure the rifle company wasn’t too far ahead of us,” he began. “It didn’t feel right, like anything I was familiar with. I froze, and called for my sergeant. He said what is it and I said I think I’m on a booby trap. He said don’t move, and I said don’t worry.”
After moving the other troops back a safe distance, his sergeant found a ‘ChiCom’ (Chinese Communist) grenade attached to a fishing line with a cork.
“I was terrified, obviously, so he reached down and was able to disengage it, reattach it and basically save my life. He threw it into the rice paddy and radioed the rifle company what had happened. I was more than relieved and had to change my skivvies (underwear),” he said with a chuckle. “All these thoughts came that I’m going to blow up into parts everywhere, and you think about the guys in the back. You don’t want your squad members to get hurt. That’s a memory I will never forget!”
‘Hit me really hard’
Later, Craig became a forward observer attached to a rifle company, where he located enemy troops and called in fire missions to the mortar unit.
“I was very fortunate to be paired with Sergeant Paul Foster, an artillery forward observer,” he pointed out. “He taught me a lot, and he was a great Marine. When I returned to the states, I learned he’d been killed in action and received the Medal of Honor for his actions.”
Once during monsoon season, he had to cross a rain-swollen stream and had a weird sensation.
“I thought what’s that in my crotch area and underneath my arms, and when I stripped I had leaches all over me,” he said. “I was trying to get them off with salt, heat from a lighter, anything! It was gross, but we all went through ordeals like that.”
Craig was also involved in “skirmishes” with enemy forces where his fellow Marines were wounded and killed.
“I remember seeing the body bags (for those killed in action) and the smells of death,” he recalled. Later, he got some “really bad news” after coming back from a second R & R trip, even though he told superiors he’d already been on one. Three guys who had been in his squad with the 26th Marines and two others were unloading mortar rounds into a firing pit when a bad one exploded, setting off the other rounds that “blew them to bits.”
“That hit me really hard, especially knowing three of them. I felt like I should have been there; I was experiencing that survivor’s guilt,” he shared.
Back home from Vietnam, Craig pursued a 34-year law enforcement career that included service with the Atlanta and Fulton County Police Departments, respectively, and the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office. However, he never had a call as close to the one where a bullet whizzed by his ear.