Willie Young served four tours in Vietnam
After serving four tours in Vietnam and coming home to Ellijay, Willie Young began to think about the men he served with and felt a need to reconnect.
“I kept the addresses of most of the guys and got in touch with them, but a lot of them have died,” he said. “There’s maybe three guys left that I stay in touch with. I had a phone number for this one guy, Frank Herrera, but through the years I lost it. I couldn’t find him in the phone book either.”
Young and Herrera were deployed in Vietnam in the same Seabees unit — the construction wing of the Navy — on Young’s two middle tours. Young had taken an interesting path to get there on his first deployment. Raised in Greer, S.C., he came to Ellijay with his family in 1936 after his father found work at the Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Higdon in Fannin County.
“I went in the Navy in 1963, and after six years of enlistment, I decided to get out, said Young. “Later after I re-enlisted, I had a choice between Adak (Naval Air Station) in Alaska and Vietnam, and I chose to go to Vietnam.”
‘You’re looking at him!’
Young, 81, has relatives in Bakersfield, Calif., and while visiting there in 2010, he remembered Herrera was from Bakersfield. However, he was unable to locate his old pal. Then one day, serendipity intervened.
“I was in Bakersfield visiting some cousins and was wearing my Navy Seabees shirt in a restaurant and this guy says, ‘Seabees!’ out loud,” Young recalled. “I walked over to acknowledge him, and while I was over there, he said, ‘What battalion were you in?’ We shook hands and I said ‘MCB 3’ (Mobile Construction Battalion) and he said ‘I was too!’ I said what company and he said Delta. I said, ‘You were a steelworker, right? I was an EO (equipment operator).’
“I said, this guy Frank Herrera, I’ve been looking for him since 2010, he’s from Bakersfield, you ever run into him or do you remember him? He said, ‘You’re looking at him!’ I tell you what, I got all teared up, and his wife and some friends were over there having lunch. And we all come together and had lunch. Before I left, we had dinner together too. The last time I saw him was in 1967.”
Remembering on Memorial Day
As a member of both MCB 3 and MCB 8, Young helped build roads, put down construction pads for buildings and hacked out air strips for the Marines and Air Force. How safe were his units from enemy fire as they worked?
“It was usually a secure area, but not always,” he replied. “We worked continuously on Highway 1, from Chu Lai to Hue. The Marines would sweep the road every morning for mines, plus they had patrols out looking and night-vision binoculars to see the enemy. I was on detachment a lot because of my experience.”
One night a mortar barrage slammed into their position.
“We hit the foxholes, and the Marines had a ‘Kit Carson scout’ — a guy that came over from the North Vietnamese to our side as advisors because they could speak the language when we caught the enemy,” Young explained. “We got to missing him the next morning, and what happened was he got under a Caterpillar (bulldozer) because he thought that would be a safe place to get when the mortars started coming in. Lo and behold, when I moved that ‘dozer he was up under it dead. One (mortar) landed behind him and the shrapnel got him.”
On another occasion, Young was sitting in the barber’s chair getting a haircut when enemy fire hit.
“A mortar landed on a guy that had just laid his sea bag down on the volleyball court and it killed him,” he remembered. “He just had 30 minutes or an hour before he was supposed to fly out and go home. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him. There were so many more times that guys got killed they’re just too numerous to name.”
At times in the past, Young has counseled young men — and even his grandson — who have told him “I want to go in the Army and fight!”
“I tell them instead, why don’t you go into the Seabees and you can have a trade — they’ve got construction, mechanics, equipment operator, surveyors, builders, steel workers and plumbers,” he said. “So my daughter, son-in-law and grandson went to the Seabee Museum (at Port Hueneme, Calif., home of the West Coast Seabees) just the other day. And now he’s decided he wants to try and get into the Seabees.”
There’s no doubt Willie Young will stay in close contact with his grandson.