by Orr Kelly
Jay was in charge of the boats. He was senior to me but he did what I wanted because he was in support. He ran one or two LSSCs and the big Mike boat. Inside also were five or seven guys, SEALs from my platoon manning the weapons.
We were tooling downstream and all of a sudden I got this baaaad feeling.
I said, “Bubba, I think we better get out of here.”
He said, “Yeah.”
The boat was going downstream and we were closest to the right bank, maybe twenty meters away. I was sitting on the starboard [right] side of the boat, Brewton was sitting on the port side. Our backs were against the windscreen. Down behind us, as I said, was Prout on the radio and giving orders to his coxswain.
The other SEALs were behind us. So, I got the bad feeling. We agreed to get out of there. I turned.
Bubba turned around and said to Jay, “Jay, let’s get out of here!”
The coxswain eased up the throttle a little bit. I said, “No!”
I turned to Jay and I said, “Jay, floor it! Let’s get out of here right now!”
And so we did and the boat surged forward for about five yards and came to pretty much a halt. The reason for that was, there had been a lot of artillery firing upstream from us and a lot of broken branches had fallen in the water and this Jacuzzi pump [propelling the boat] had sucked up some leaves and stuff and it had to be cleared. The intake had been clogged.
And right around then we heard this big bang and I looked down. Maybe I heard something, but it was below the conscious level of hearing. I heard something on my right. All of a sudden a rocket round went off from the riverbank about twenty meters from us. And it hit in the water between us and the bank of the river. A B-40 or an RPG-7 going off at night when your night vision is really in there is an impressive sight.
I remember hearing this loud noise and seeing this thing coming toward us. And when it hit the water, it was this big red-orange flash going into the water and it went right down into the water. I felt a little tugging at my shoulder. At that time we were trying to get the boat to go faster. So I turned to my right. I was carrying a shotgun. I emptied the shotgun in the direction where the RPG had come from. And after hearing the RPG go off, the shotgun, which is normally a pretty loud weapon, sounded like a kid’s popgun.
That was the only return fire. The blast of this thing had kind of knocked everybody overboard and had blown the belt out of the feeder tray of the M60s. All the guys in the boat were in kind of disarray. One guy, [ADJ3 Alvin F.] McCoy, he was on the M60, took a piece of shrapnel right in the gut. A couple of guys were almost blown out of the boat, just kind of hanging on the back of the boat.
We kept slowly going downstream but we were still in the ambush zone. They fired another round. At the time, I thought it went over us. I heard the initial bang of the thing but I didn’t hear when it went off. So I thought it was a dud or it had gone over us. And then we were gone. We went on downstream. We got everybody accounted for, we called in some helicopters to strafe the place where the shots had come from.
Then I said to Burwell, who was a corpsman, I said, “Hey, Bo, take a look at my shoulder, I think something might have happened to me.”
He said, “Yeah, boss, I think something happened to you. I think we better get you out of here.”
We pulled into a little place and they medevaced me. I got my shoulder all ripped up by a piece of RPG where the RPG had hit the water and a piece had flown up into the boat. It tore my jacket all to pieces and I’ve got a scar on my shoulder this long from it. But I didn’t feel it at the time.
I was in the 3d Field Hospital and the guys came up to visit me. And I said, “Whatever happened to the second round? Was it a dud?”
And they said, “No, boss, you’ve got to come back and take a look at the boat when you get back.”
What happened was, the second RPG had hit the boat about four inches above the waterline, directly amidship and it hadn’t gone off. We would have all been wiped out if that had gone off. That boat was armored, but it was light armor, ceramic armor. It would have just killed everybody. You would have written off a SEAL squad and a boat.
I reckon the VC or the NVA or whatever they were were in such a rush they forgot to take out the safety pin when they fired at us.
The standing joke between myself and Brewton really got solidified. The first time I’d gotten shot up was a week or so before this. On that op, if I hadn’t been where I was, Brewton would have been hit. If the bullets hadn’t gotten me, they would have gotten Brewton. And on this one, where the first RPG came from, if it hadn’t hit my shoulder—I was like this, looking over my right shoulder. If it hadn’t hit me here, Brewton, who was sitting on my left looking at the trajectory of that RPG fragment after it hit the water—it would have hit him right in the head. It would have taken his head off.
He just laughed about that and I just laughed about it, too, because we were both alive and more or less well.
I used to say, “Hey, Bubba, you’ve been lucky so far but when you get back to the States and I’m not there to protect you, a safe’s going to fall on you. Or you’re going to get hit by a truck or something like that.”
And he’d just give me that big old Alabama grin and he’d just laugh about it.
My joke with Bubba was about him getting wounded if I wasn’t there. My serious problem with Bubba was that Bubba made an assumption that would turn out to be fatal: that he would always make contact on his terms.
I said, “Hey, Bubba, we’re not the only people who do the ambushing. We could get unlucky. They could nail us one of these times.”
He said, “Nah, it’ll never happen.”
I noticed that he had a tendency after setting an ambush at night or doing his patrol, when it came time to extract, he would be kind of casual about it, to be brutally honest about it. He would assume that having been in that area and knowing what was going on around him, that there could not be anybody there that he did not know of. And so he was free to just walk on out and basically administratively go to the helo LZ [landing zone] or whatever.
I said, “Hey, Bubba, this is bad tactics.”
Bubba was one of these guys you couldn’t tell him anything. He was from Mobile, Alabama, and went to the University of Alabama. He was a cross-country runner. He had been a cheerleader down there.
He was a great guy. He was big. He was tough. He was good looking, brave, smart, had lots of initiative. He was just a great guy. He was my Ranger buddy. I loved this man. But he had this … I couldn’t get it through his head that this was bad tactics.
Woolard, Brewton, and Burwell finished their tour with the 3d Platoon in December 1968. In the fall of 1969, they were all back in Vietnam. Woolard was commander of the 3d Platoon in the Camau area at the southern tip of Vietnam. Burwell returned with Woolard for his fourth tour in Vietnam as medical corpsman. Brewton could have remained in Little Creek and waited for the opportunity to return to Vietnam as a platoon commander. Instead, he chose to return sooner as assistant to Lt. A. Y. Bryson, commander of the 10th Platoon. He was again operating out of Nha Be in the delta region between Saigon and the South China Sea. Woolard continues his account:
What happened on his second tour was he was out on what I think was a platoon-sized patrol and they ended up in a base camp after having set up all night in an area. They were moving toward their extraction point in the morning and walked into a base camp and got shot up. This happened Thanksgiving Day, 1969, and he died of wounds 11 January 1970. That’s the short version.
A slightly longer version is: This happened in the T-10 area near Nha Be where he had been on his first tour. So he was back there with Bryson working out of Nha Be again. I was down at Camau, 150–200 miles away. I would occasionally get up to Nha Be.
I remember the day before Brewton got wounded, one of the other platoon commanders—at that time there were three SEAL Team TWO platoons located in Nha Be—a friend of mine named Doug Ellis, said, “Hey Rick, glad you’re her
e. You know Bubba. We’ve got to talk to him about going up to 3d Field [hospital in Saigon] and getting some medical attention because he’s got some sort of infection in his body. He’s got this boil on his nose and it hasn’t gone away. He’s got an ulcerated leg from where a hot shell casing burned him during a boat ambush a couple of weeks before and that’s not getting any better. We’ve got to get him to go get some medical attention.”
I went and talked to Bubba. As I said before, Brewton is one of these guys you couldn’t tell him anything if he didn’t want to hear it. We tried to talk him into it, going up to the 3d Field Hospital.
He said, “Hey, look, I’m two-thirds of the way through my tour. I’m going to go back, I’m going to marry Cheryl. I’m going to get out of the navy soon. I mean, it’s almost over. I don’t have time for that. I’ll do it later on. I’m not going to bother.”
He wouldn’t reconsider. That was the night before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Day, he got up in the morning early. I saw him leaving. I guess it was the night before. I saw him leaving. That’s the last time I ever saw him when he was in decent shape.
In 1969, Robert P. Clark was thirty-four years old, an E-6 and the senior enlisted man in the 10th Platoon of SEAL Team TWO. He was also the platoon’s medical corpsman. The other SEALs called him Doc. He had been through the navy’s most advanced schools for medical corpsmen and had served for four years with marine units at sea before becoming a frogman. But never, in his long career as a corpsman, had he actually treated a wounded man in combat—until the afternoon of 24 November 1969. This is Clark’s account of the day John Brewton was fatally wounded:
I was on the operation the day John was shot. John had a staph infection in his nose. We said he shouldn’t be out operating. But John was one of these guys who wanted to be out operating all the time. He was a good young operator. He just wouldn’t stay out of that dirty, muddy crap.
We were operating in the Rung Sat Special Zone. It seems like the whole platoon was there that day. Usually I operated with my squad. Usually Brewton was with the other squad. So this was a joint operation.
We had been on an op where we had been given some intelligence. We set up an ambush. Nothing happened and basically we were extracting from the ambush when we walked into what was probably a Viet Cong base camp. We were going through water anywhere from knee deep to thigh deep and the next thing we know the shooting started. They were shooting from an enclosed bunker and just kind of spraying the area.
Not only did Brewton get shot, but Bob Christopher [EN2 Robert D. Christopher], one of our machine gunners, who I believe was on point at the time, was shot through the head and some of his fingers were blown off. He was also shot through the thigh.
Because I was the medic in the platoon, I was on rear security. We were leaving the ambush point, all going in a line. We had found an old abandoned sampan, looked it over. We got a little further and that’s when the action started.
When the firing started, I was behind. Everybody has a field of fire. Everybody went their own way.
The next thing I remember hearing is, “Hey, Doc, get up here!”
I charged through everybody to get up … That’s when I found Christopher facedown, shot. Brewton is over here to the right. He might have been shot first.
I got to Christopher. I thought he was dead. I found him lying facedown in the water. He had returned fire until he had taken all of these wounds. I thought he was dead. I heard him gasp.
I turned him over. I got another corpsman who was on the op with us to come over and keep him afloat basically laying in water until I could get the serum albumin, which I carried in a little pouch on my back. I got an IV started in him. I got people to come up to return fire. We were taking fire at this time, too.
I got [Lt.] A. Y. Bryson, who was the officer in charge, to call in a medevac.
I got a dressing on his head. I think the bullet went in and came around and came out his jaw. I used to carry an ace bandage and what I did was I took the ace bandage and wrapped the fingers that were just kind of hanging there. I wrapped them in ace bandages.
Then I noticed a lot of red, which was blood, down in his lower extremities. I didn’t even know he was shot in the leg. It was the femoral artery. I saw he was bleeding real bad. So I real quick got a tourniquet on that to stop it and then put a pressure dressing on that.
Brewton was hit, too. We had another chief hospital corpsman on this op with us, from another platoon. I’m not even sure why he was on this op with us. His name was [HMC Erasmo] Riojas. He was—I guess he just went out in the field to go out. While I was working with Christopher, he was working with Brewton.
I was so involved with Christopher, just to keep him alive, to keep his head above water. And of course the rest of the squad was returning fire. There was a pretty good firefight there for a while.
It’s funny. Once I started treating Christopher—I know there were two guys, one on each side of me. A guy named [SH2 James J.] Folman was on one side. I think [AO2 Thomas H.] Tom Keith was on the other side. They were suppressing fire. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember hearing anything. It was going on all this time. There were people in the bunker. They were shooting at us and we were shooting at them. I just don’t remember any of that. I shut it out. I had a job to do and that was to save this guy’s life.
Up to this time had you had experience in combat as a medic?
Not in a combat situation. This was actually my first time I had to do anything like that.
Did you have to move?
Actually, they came right down through the canopy to get us. I thought moving Christopher, anyone, we might kill ’em. I don’t remember whether it was a medevac or a Sea Wolf that came down and got us out.
Were you under fire during the medevac?
No. We had suppressed all the fire so they could come down and get us out.
I remember I rode the helo back. My officer in charge told me, when we put the guys in the helicopter, Bryson said, “Doc, you go with them to make sure they’re all right.”
Christopher, because of the serum albumin I’d given him, he was starting to come around. He was having a lot of pain and he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t give him any morphine because of his head wound. I was basically just trying to keep him quiet and hold him down until we got to Saigon.
You flew right to the hospital?
I don’t remember whether we went directly to Saigon or one of those MASH-like units on the outside. They ended up at the hospital in Saigon.
Our base wasn’t that far from Saigon. We could go in on a daily basis to see how they were doing.
What was the quality of medical care?
The hospital in Saigon seemed almost like a hospital here in the States. We felt once we could get them to a hospital, they had the best chance they could. It was getting them from that environment. A lot of times when you were operating and you had a casualty, you had to call for a medevac and the medevac had to get there and they had to come in and pick up the wounded and take them out. Well, of course it takes time. In this case, from the time they were shot, it was probably a good hour from the time we actually took fire until we got them to a hospital.
Did Christopher survive?
Yes. I saw him at one of our UDT/SEAL reunions a while back.
But Brewton died?
Once John got shot, he’s lying in all this dirty, muddy water. We saved his life and got him to the hospital. They put him on these massive doses of antibiotics. But it was an almost irreversible kind of thing. He wasn’t getting better and then his kidneys shut down. Eventually, he just died. I think it was the infection from the wounds plus the staph infection he already had.
Woolard visited Brewton a number of times in the hospital. His account continues:
They initially misdiagnosed him. They thought he had malaria in one hospital and then they sent him to 3d Field Hospital. I can tell you my impression of 3d Field Hosp
ital. I had to have myself kidnapped from there by my platoon. I just wasn’t getting good treatment.
They thought he had malaria and then—he had been shot three or four times, more times than they thought he had, as it turned out. They ended up having to take off part of his leg, and then they had to take it off higher, and finally they took it off up here [indicating near the hip].
When they did that, they found out he had another bullet lodged in him they didn’t even know about. He just got worse and worse and finally died. Every time we got up to see him he looked worse. If they had x-rayed him thoroughly and found that other bullet, that was the source of the infection. He had something else [infection] on top of that that he had had earlier.
His fiancée came over. Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. was commander, naval forces Vietnam. He took good care of Cheryl Kurit, who was Brewton’s fiancée, put her up in his personal trailer. When it became apparent he was going to die, she came over and his father as well. Zumwalt took really good care of them. He personally presented him with his Purple Heart in the hospital.
After Admiral Zumwalt became chief of naval operations, he changed the name of an FF-1086 [class fast frigate] from whatever it was going to be to Brewton in honor of Bubba.
Burwell also visited Brewton in the hospital. His account continues:
We went up to the hospital to see him. My understanding was John had some kind of a staph infection and when his body got weakened by the wound, the staph spread more quickly. I knew he had some very bad infection. In fact, the day we went to see him, the day before he died, you’d have to get real close to him and talk to him. His hearing was just about gone. And his breath was almost like urine. His kidneys had just about quit functioning. John was quite a man.
Years later, I was in Alameda when a ship came to bring the bones of the unknown, that they were going to put in Arlington. Right across from the vessel I was working on at Alameda Naval Air Station, sometime in the night, in slipped the ship that was carrying these remains. And it was the USS Brewton.