We weep at Agent Orange, laugh at reporter

A Vet's Story -- Part II
We weep at Agent Orange, laugh at reporter


By Randy Hollifield

As told to daughter Landdis

Published: January 17, 2010

Editor's note: This is the second of a three-part, first-person story about Randy Hollifield's experiences in the Vietnam War and at a recent reunion. Randy told the story to his daughter, Landdis, who wrote this account. Randy hopes to bring the Traveling Vietnam War Memorial to McDowell County. In part one of this story, which appeared Friday, Randy told of arriving in Vietnam on his first wedding anniversary and also his first day at the reunion decades later.

The next day's events started out the same way. Breakfast was served and then we all gathered back together to share more stories. Eventually those stories led to us talking about something we had all seemed to avoid up to this point -- what Agent Orange had done to so many Vietnam veterans. Agent Orange was a chemical that was used in Vietnam to kill plants and foliage so that the enemy could be more clearly detected. It was commonly applied to large areas of land via tanker plane, and Camp Carroll received some of the heaviest concentrations of the chemical during the Vietnam War.


It was about a reporter who had arrived at the Gio Linh Firebase during late March 1967. He had arrived by Huey chopper and seemed very out of place among us soldiers. He was lanky, soft spoken and redheaded. He was a war correspondent on his first assignment, and he wanted to see what was happening firsthand. As usual, at dark our camp began to get fired on by incoming artillery and mortar rounds. The attack that night was especially heavy with more than 750 rounds coming in intermittently all night. Needless to say this young reporter was ready to get the heck out of Dodge by daybreak.

He had seen all he needed to see and was ready to head any place south. It was obvious the young reporter had alternative reasons for leaving other than to file his story. We told him just to stay a while and see what was really going on. We helped him send his story through a secure communication system, giving him no excuse to leave so fast. Little did we know that the redheaded reporter who had filed his first story from a Fire Direction Control Bunker would go on to be ABC anchorman Ted Koppel. The story had lightened the mood and ended the evening on a happy note. We had all laughed remembering back to that day when the reporter had arrived. No one would have realized that this scared young man would one day be an anchor on a major network.
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We weep at Agent Orange, laugh at reporter