Billion Dollar Bullet

By Jerry Bevers

This was a time when young men were being drafted into the army and dying at an alarming rate. The estimated life expectancy of a new lieutenant in the field was sixteen minutes. The worst years of the war were from 1968 to 1969. A total of 16,899 men died. It is easy to see why young men tried to stay out of the fighting, including me. In spite of that, I ended up very much in the fighting, earning two Bronze Star Medals, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Combat Infantry Badge and going from the lowest rank of private to captain in three years. Come along for the ride of a lifetime!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662486913

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Billion Dollar Bullet

Jerry Bevers

Copyright © 2022 Jerry Bevers

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-8686-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-8691-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Home Life

The Recruiters

Officer Candidate School

Hunger

First Assignment

Generals

Top Sergeant

Air Force Academy

Aggressor Platoon

Jungle School

Vietnam

Kit Carson/Chu Hoi

Rice…Serious Rice

The General

Rest and Recreation

LCLC

Snakes

Ricky

Second R&R

Second Tet

Ping-Pong

Home

Assignment

Prison

Sugar

Monterey

Inspections

Laguna Seca

Trouble at the Track

Decision Time

Just Another Day

Epilogue

About the Author

Introduction

Write about what you know, that's advice from long ago. I'm sure it is right. This book starts fifty years ago in a small southern Arizona town. If I had tried to write this back then, I probably would have been assaulted by anti-war protesters.

One thing the reader (hopefully lots and lots of you) can count on is I will do my best to not lie or even stretch the truth. I have no need to; these things actually happened to me, and those I will describe. Few real names will be used, but some interesting nicknames will entertain you.

My bona fides follow: At eighteen I joined the United States Army.

During basic training, I was given many tests. To do this I was often excluded from field training and put in classrooms. I kept passing those tests. It came to a point where I was told I could attend officer candidate school at Ft. Benning, Georgia, an infantry school.

I choose to take the challenge.

At nineteen years of age, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry. The year was 1967. By 1969, I had earned two bronze stars, the Army Commendation Medal and the Combat Infantry Badge. I had also been promoted to captain at the age of twenty-one.

The rest as they say is history.

Home Life

Iwas a poor high school student. I mean, I had pocket change. I was just making terrible grades. My dad said I had apathy; I looked it up, and he was right.

I thought (and still do) that the quality of teachers sent to a tiny town in a southwestern state in those days was less than stellar. Dad raised quarter horses as his hobby, so I was raised riding.

My mom's favorite story involving me, and a horse has to do with dad's early horse days. Dad could not yet afford a truck and horse trailer, so he boarded his horses at a stable. Dad belonged to a mounted search and rescue group at the county level. Dad wanted to ride with this group in the local parade thirty-six miles away from his corals. Naturally, he did not want to make that long ride himself, so he asked me, his fifteen-year-old son, to make the ride for him. I was to join the group from the coral and stay in line.

The horse dad wanted was named Pete or Pedro. He was a very large, seventeen hands, palomino horse. Pedro was raised wrong. All Pedro wanted was to run. Needless to say, he started trotting right from the start. I tried to hold him back but was soon passing the group of thirty riders one by one. By the time I reached the front Pete was starting to canter. Some old man at the front was yelling for me to stay in line. I hollered back to him that I could not hold Pete back as the horse broke into a light gallop. That was the last time I saw the group until they arrived in Tombstone that evening about three hours after my arrival.

We camped out that night on the outskirts of Tombstone. The next morning Dad rode with his group in the Helldorado Parade. Of course, the next thing to be done was to ride Pete back to the corals. My return ride home is the part my mom got such a kick out of. The San Pedro River, about halfway from Tombstone and the water is not deep, maybe a foot, but fifteen to twenty yards wide. We arrived at the San Pedro without incident until we were about ten feet into the river. Pete decides to lay down and roll like a huge dog. I had to jump off to keep from being rolled on and splashed into the river. This, of course, ended up with me completely soaked head to toe. Worse yet Pete's saddle was also soaked to the blanket. With seventeen miles to go, I knew I would be rubbed raw from my jeans and Pete's saddle. I could barely walk for a week because of the rash I suffered. I guess mom had a twisted sense of humor and found it very funny.

The rest of high school was boring. I played baseball as a pitcher and did better at that than making good grades. I was more interested in finding the next party.

In the background of the 1960s was the news of a war going on somewhere on the other side of the world. I remember in my senior year hearing Walter Cronkite on the five o'clock news saying that he had just returned from the war in Vietnam and in his opinion, we had no chance of winning the war. I didn't give that a second thought. What did I care about the war? It had nothing to do with me. It would not be long before it had everything to do with me.

I graduated toward the bottom of my class. Dad flat out told me that he would not be paying for any college. He was paying for my older brother's college. So when a friend, Larry, called me from California and asked if I would like to move there, I jumped at the chance. He was even willing to come to pick me up and take me back to Sacramento to live with his parents and look for work. Every young person in my tiny town would have jumped at the chance to move to California.

Larry arrived three days later with two of his friends, Mike, and John. Mike had one of those super cool 1964 1/2 Falcon with the 289 cubic inch V-8s and a Hurst 4 on the floor gear shifter. We stayed the night with my parents. In the morning when it was time to leave, my mom gave me a check for $35 and we hit the road.

The trip was thrilling, four eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds on the road free of care. We headed