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Simonson directed helicopters in Vietnam

‘I don’t regret doing the experience for my country’

Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
Roger Simonson, of Fort Dodge, who served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, displays an award he received from the Ministry of Defense in South Vietnam.

Roger Simonson and eight of his Army buddies decided in 1969 that they would volunteer to jump out of perfectly good airplanes.

”Nine of us decided we’d go for airborne,” the Fort Dodge man said.

Signing up for airborne training led to him becoming a paratrooper and pathfinder who was qualified to give instructions to Army helicopter pilots working with troops on the ground. He soon found himself traveling between firebases in the war zones of South Vietnam.

There, he helped seize a couple of large stashes of enemy supplies, including bicycles apparently intended for transporting gear to enemy fighters.

During his most nerve-wracking mission, he held a machine gun while crouching in the open doorway of a helicopter as it zoomed over enemy bunkers. The bunkers turned out to be empty.

Messenger photo by Chad Thompson
This certiificate was presented to Roger Simonson, of Fort Dodge, by the Ministry of Defense in South Vietnam in 1970. It indicates that he was awarded the Vietnamese Honor Jump Wings.

Soon after his tour of duty in South Vietnam ended, he arrived at Los Angeles International Airport in California, where he was harassed and spit upon until a security guard let him stay in a back room away from the public.

Simonson lost friends in South Vietnam. There are still things he finds difficult to talk about, and he generally doesn’t watch war movies. But he’s proud that he served.

”I don’t regret doing the experience for my country,” he said.

Simonson was living on his family’s farm near Badger and working for Farmland Industries in Eagle Grove when he was drafted in April 1969.

For basic training, he was sent to Fort Polk in Louisiana. Boot camp, he said, was every bit as tough as it looks in the movies. In one memorable incident, the new soldiers practiced wearing gas masks. A corporal named Horn was in charge of the supply room that day and he didn’t like the way the masks were cleaned, so he ordered the recruits to run around the base wearing the masks and yelling ”I’m a clown, Cpl. Horn.”

Submitted photo
Roger Simonson, of Fort Dodge, was training as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army in 1969 when this photo was taken.

”That was not fun,” Simonson said.

After eight weeks of basic training, he moved on to advanced infantry training, which was also done at Fort Polk.

The decision he and his buddies made sent him next to airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia.There, he strapped on a parachute and leaped from a plane for the first time.

”It’s kind of a fun experience until you realize what you just did,” he said, recalling the sensation of parachuting from a plane.

”You can see for miles and miles,” he added. ”It’s very quiet and peaceful up there.”

He made five parachute jumps during airborne training. Then he moved on to pathfinder school at Fort Benning. While being trained to do air traffic control for helicopters, he made five more parachute jumps.

When his training was done, he was assigned to the 11th Aviation Group, which was part of the 1st Cavalry Division. He arrived in South Vietnam in January 1970.

”I knew we were in trouble when we got there because we got on a bus that looked like a prison bus,” he said. ”It had mesh on the windows.”

Vietnamese civilians were yelling at them and making obscene gestures as the bus went by them, he recalled.

Simonson was initially sent to a camp called a firebase near the border of South Vietnam and Cambodia. There, the troops slept in holes covered by what looked like steel culverts. Each of those culverts was covered with between three and five layers of sandbags for protection from shrapnel and snipers’ bullets.

Helicopters were the main means of transportation in and out of a firebase, and Simonson was kept busy directing them.

”Every helicopter had to come through us,” he said.

Simonson moved to different firebases about every 30 days, but because he was needed to direct helicopter traffic, he rarely left the confines of one.

The discovery of a bicycle factory in the jungle led to his first venture away from a firebase. He said Vietnamese communists had set up a factory to build bicycles that they would use to travel on various trails. He said American troops took two days to dismantle the factory. Whatever could be moved was taken away, and that’s why Simonson was needed there.

”I was trained to rig stuff in a sling so the helicopters could pick it up,” he said.

After the first day of working at the bicycle factory, the American troops left it for the night and set up a camp nearby. Simonson dug a foxhole and after getting in, he pulled his poncho liner over the top of it. During the night, enemy troops snuck up on the camp. In response, the American commander called for artillery shells to be fired into the area. In the morning, Simonson found his poncho liner riddled with holes from shrapnel.

”They called in the artillery a little too close,” he said.

The next day, the troops returned to the bicycle factory. Simonson said they blew up what they couldn’t move.

Simonson later went on a similar mission after a cache of medical supplies was found in the jungle.

He turned 21 while in South Vietnam and for a birthday present he got to take a ride in the front seat of an AH-1 Cobra helicopter, which was a type of chopper bristling with weapons that was called a gunship.

On another occasion, he volunteered to go on a helicopter trip that he thought would consist of picking up and delivering mail.

When he arrived at the helicopter, he was handed a helmet that had a radio headset built into it. He thought that was neat. Then he was handed an M-60 machine gun. He asked why he was given that and was told that he had volunteered to be a door gunner on the mission, which had nothing to do with getting the mail. It was a mission to areas where the enemy was known to be lurking.

The chopper with Simonson aboard passed over enemy positions.

”We saw bunkers,” he said. ”We popped smoke. But there was no activity. The bunkers were empty.”

”That was one of the scariest things I did,” he added.

Simonson said he didn’t fire the machine gun near those bunkers, but he admitted to taking some potshots at an alligator as the chopper passed over a river on the way back to its base.

In December 1970, he was sent back to the United States and came home to Iowa. Technically, he was still in the Army in an inactive reserve status, but he never reported for active duty again. He was discharged in 1975.

For his service, Simonson was awarded the Air Medal and the Army Commendation Medal. He also received the Vietnamese Honor Jump Wings from the Ministry of Defense in South Vietnam.

He returned to his job at Farmland Industries. In 1989, he was hired by the Fort Dodge Public Works Department and worked there for 25 years before retiring.

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