Dennis Lietha was 19 when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. He spent 14 months in combat, after which he relived his time in Vietnam every minute of every day until 1998, when he started writing down his experiences. When he was finished he found he was finally able to stop the constant memories.

 

Today he willingly talks about his experiences in the Vietnam War and has given speeches on the subject to high school and college students. 

 

Lietha was drafted on Nov 11, 1968. He was flown to Fort Campbell, KY after Christmas that year for boot camp, and from there he was sent to Fort Knox for AIT (advanced individual training). He was trained for armored Calvary, driving light tanks and APCs (armored personnel carriers).

 

Although most of his fellow soldiers found boot camp difficult, Lietha actually found it to be a break from the chores he’d grown up with farming. He went from 128 to 165 pounds and got twice the amount of sleep than he was used to. On the farm he’d get up at three a.m. to milk cows; at boot camp he could sleep in until five.

 

Lietha was assigned to the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, D Troop 17 Calvary Unit. Although he never met him, the 199th was the same one Jan Scruggs, the man who conceived and designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., was out of. 

 

Arriving in Vietnam, Lietha was met with heat, high humidity and a pervasive, rotten stench. He was surprised at how tiny the people were. 

 

His unit was first sent to the rice paddies south of Saigon; within months they were moved north to the jungles where he spent the remainder of his tour.

 

The jungles were filled with deer, pigs, seven foot lizards, monkeys, 20 foot pythons, seven foot cobras, and wild boars. Lietha would hear tigers screaming at night and elephants trumpeting. With the exception of peacocks he rarely saw any birds, and assumed they’d been scared away.

 

He’d see rats as large as cottontail rabbits running across the rice fields. One morning he woke up in his tank to one chewing on his thumb. 

 

Red ants would hang in large clumps in the trees and fall off and bite en masse if the tree was bumped. Although Lietha never had a clump fall on him, he was bitten and said it burned worse than fire ants. He saw men stand up while under fire they were so desperate to get their clothes off when they were attacked by them.

 

The spider monkeys were also vicious. One of his unit’s duties was to guard the Rome plows that were used to clear vegetation after Agent Orange had stopped being used. The plows had protective rebar cages, and spider monkeys would get into the cages and attack the drivers with their needle-sharp teeth.

 

During the dry season from January to May rivers would dry up; during the wet season from June to December it would rain for weeks at a time, even when the sun was shining. 

 

Mosquitos were thick, so to protect from malaria everyone took a combination of pills; a large orange one on Mondays and a smaller white one the rest of the week. The first pill gave everyone terrible diarrhea.

 

Once Lietha’s entire unit became mired down in the mud. Because they weren’t in protective formation they worried they’d be attacked, however a tank retriever arrived in the morning to rescue them before that happened.

 

During the days Lietha’s unit would drive through the jungle on reconnaissance. They would also escort ammo and gun shipments and pull security for firebases, putting their tanks in a circle like wagon trains of the old west.

 

Although a lot of time was spent waiting, there was shooting going on constantly; 90% of Lietha’s tour was spent in combat, and he found it extremely stressful. He never knew what day it was. Most nights he got less than four hours of sleep. 

 

Water and food were a big deal as they’d often run short. The C rations they ate came from the SuperValu in Hopkins, MN. When Lietha first arrived in Vietnam the cans were stamped with the year 1944; by the time he left they’d reached 1970.

 

Their ammunition, too, was old, but had also caught up by the time his tour was up.

 

Along with supplies, eagerly awaited letters and cassette tapes from home were airdropped in. Lietha wrote letters and sent cassettes back to his family and now-wife Rita constantly, journaling everything he was doing and experiencing. To this day Rita Lietha has all his correspondence, still in their original envelopes and filed by the day they arrived.

 

Twice a year Lietha’s unit would get back to their brigade’s main base. To try to keep the soldiers from going into the clubs the base would set up girly shows and provide steaks and dumpsters full of beer. The soldiers, however, had been isolated in the jungle for six months and wanted to party, so after drinking all the beer they’d hit the clubs anyway.