‘No one will know what happened to me’
Because he had spent time in electronics school in St. Petersburg, Fla., Jim Kilburn was assigned to a radar unit within an artillery brigade when he arrived in Vietnam. He and a friend had joined the U.S. Army together in 1968. Kilburn has visited Ellijay in the past, and agreed to tell his story with Friday, March 29, being National Vietnam War Veterans Day. He is named after an uncle, Jim Gilbert, who family members say died on the Bataan Death March in World War II.
Although a Sunshine State native who was acclimated to subtropical heat, basic training at Fort Polk, La., was a higher level of humidity.
“It was so hot ambulances accompanied the forced marches and runs,” Kilburn recalled. “Some guys fell out and we never saw them again — I don’t know if they got to go home or died or what.”
Because of his schooling and initial high test scores, his superiors wanted to make him a second lieutenant right off the bat. However, even with the inducement of better pay, word had gotten out.
“Other guys who’d served over there told me not to accept the rank because of the high casualty rate,” said Kilburn, so he turned it down. His next stop was radar school at Fort Monmouth, N.J., for 30 weeks.
“It was an obsolete radar set built for the Korean War,” he said of training equipment. “It had nothing to do with the electronics that I knew; it was more like a television set from the ‘50s — all tubes. Everybody in our class went to Vietnam except one guy who went to Germany, and we told him he must have known a politician!”
Kilburn landed at Cam Ranh Bay on his 21st birthday. Soon he was in Chu Lai “on the beach” and was assigned to the 252nd Radar Detachment within the Americal Division. In his operation headquarters, Kilburn would coordinate “high-burst missions” so the artillery would cause greater casualties among enemy troops.
“You do an optical at the radar set looking through the little telescope, and then you do an electronic thing on the radar set,” he said of getting ‘zeroed in’ on the target. “Our guys loved what we did, because (their missions) were within our range.”
One day when some soldiers were relaxing in their “hooch” (quarters), the commanding officer sent word he wanted unit members to assemble in their uniforms.
“So we’re all standing out there, and he (the commanding officer) goes through his spiel and gives me a Bronze Star,” Kilburn said. “I didn’t see that coming! So I guess I was doing a good job. But he never recorded it, so it’s not on my DD214 (honorable discharge document). An officer called me up on the radio one day and said we got a confirmed 54 kills on one of my launches. It didn’t make me feel that great. These (enemy) guys could have all been just sitting around, and now they’re all dead.”
Kilburn actually extended his tour in Vietnam an extra half-year.
“I was from Florida, and orders came down that I was going to be an instructor at Fort Lewis, Washington. I would have to wear a dress uniform and teach the same thing day after day after day — I didn’t want to do that. And that would be for a year. So I extended to stay in Vietnam for six more months to get out early,” he explained. “I went home before I went back to Vietnam, and every day Jon (his younger brother) would ask, ‘Are you leaving today?’ I’d say, ‘Nah, tomorrow.’
“Well, I was late getting back. I had to go to the colonel’s office who was over our unit, and he told me he oughta court-martial me for being late. And I had to open my mouth — I told him, ‘Well, the way I look at it, sir, you’re lucky I came back at all.’ That didn’t go over big. He said to get my (butt) out to the hill before I lose my temper!”
A risky flight
Soon a warrant officer told Kilburn he was going to have to replace a wounded soldier at Kham Duc, but he believed he was being punished for his brazenness toward the colonel. He had four hours to pack his gear and be at the airport in Chu Lai. His new warrant officer went to the flight desk and announced they needed to go to Kham Duc.
“When they told him there were no flights going there except a plane full of artillery explosives (military regulations forbade passengers), I said, ‘See, we can’t go.’ The warrant officer said we will be on that flight, but on the manifest (document) we won’t be on that flight,” said Kilburn. “I just thought to myself, if anything happens no one will know what happened to me because I won’t be on that flight (technically).”
Immediately he remembered a movie that had been shown in boot camp where a soldier would see a plane flying over and take a pot shot at it.
“And I remember thinking, ‘That’s all it’s gonna take (to blow up the plane)!’” he said. “But we landed OK at Kham Duc. We lived in a hole in the ground where we operated the radar set, and everybody slept on pallets.”
Once while on KP (kitchen police) duty, Kilburn was told he would have to accompany a “deuce-and-a-half” (2.5-ton truck) full of garbage to a dumping area.
“I thought, boy, this is going to be fun,” he said. “But the driver of the truck said don’t worry about it, you won’t have to touch a thing. We got there and the (native) people climbed all over that truck, taking the food out. The old ladies — the mama-sans — were on the ground putting their piles together, and I felt sorry for these people. They had to eat our garbage.”
There were dangers to his work.
“We would try to pick up the incoming 122 millimeter rockets that the enemy would use in the mountains,” Kilburn noted. “They would put them on bamboo stakes with some kind of timed fuse, but most of them went over our head because they were trying to hit the airport. Every once in a while one would land pretty close. Everybody else would go in their bunker, but we would get on top of our bunker to look for smoke (where they hit).”
One day, Kilburn was joking around with a young Vietnamese boy and told him that GIs had just landed a rocket on the moon.
“He held his hands in a small circle and told me I was ‘dinky dow’ (crazy), moon only this big,” he said with a laugh.
His family in Florida — including his brother Jon, who has lived in Ellijay for years — were understandably concerned for his safety.
“My dad was an avid news watcher, so we sat there at the dinner table watching the Vietnam War on TV,” Jon Kilburn remembers. “I would be looking at everybody around the table and thinking, am I going to see my brother again? One day I was on my bicycle and saw an airport bus coming down the street and wondered if it was Jim. I rode out to the front yard and it was him. I was so happy he’d made it back.”