Battles brought more than bruises

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing — these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.

— Tim O’Brien,

“The Things They Carried”

John Sheehan’s job was to find trouble.

And he was good at it.

Sheehan was a “LURP,” a special forces scout tasked with scouring the South Vietnamese jungle, usually with a group of four or five of his fellow Green Berets, to look for the enemy.

“I figure 95 percent of the time, I’d get up, have some breakfast, tear down a bunker, put on my rough sack and start walking,” Sheehan said.

“About 5 percent of the time …. well, that was when the s–t hit the fan,” Sheehan recalled.

Sheehan, whose call to serve included four tours in Vietnam and another tour in Iraq more than 30 years later, will deliver the keynote address at Memorial Day services 11 a.m. Monday at Iola’s Highland Cemetery.

Sheehan, 71, reflected upon his military service during a recent conversation with the Register.

THE SKIRMISHES were many; too many to count.

If he had to guess, Sheehan pegged the number at about 50.

The number of enemy killed?

“I’d say probably 40 at least,” Sheehan replied, but again, the number is hard to be too specific, when Claymore mines are exploding and machine guns rattle off bursts of firepower.

“They were all a matter of self-preservation,” he said.

Sheehan’s tours in Vietnam totaled 38 months, from 1966 to 1972, and included one of the hardest-fought bloodiest battles of the war, the infamous Battle of Dak To in November 1967.

“As far as people dying, the worst had to be Dak To,” he said.

There, Americans and North Vietnamese fought for days on end to secure Hill 875 in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. The Americans ultimately prevailed, only to walk off the hill two days later.

But there was a tougher day for Sheehan, “and there was never a shot fired.”

He elaborates.

Sheehan and his small band of LRRPS (pronounced “lurps” — long-range reconnaissance patrol) had found a small riverbank on which to camp one night in the dense jungle.