North Charleston resident Harvey Jones recently returned from Southeast Asia, disappointed he couldn’t revisit three war sites in the former South Vietnam that he saw as a private with the U.S. Army in the late 1960s.
Vũng Tàu’s pristine beaches with crystal-clear blue water are among Jones’s positive war-time memories.
He chuckled recently as he explained how his flat feet earned him a reprieve from infantry patrols in the jungles surrounding the U.S. Army post at Long Binh when a former Citadel student, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, led U.S. forces in Vietnam.
Then his eyes widened when he remembered Cam Ranh Bay where he hunkered in a bunker fearful of North Vietnam’s country-wide bombardments during the Tet Offensive.
After one year in South Vietnam, Jones returned to Charleston feeling guilty he fought against the North Vietnamese, who he said were “people who did absolutely nothing to me. Being there was not by choice, and harming these people in any way bugged me,” he recalled. “When I went back, I didn’t have that feeling of guilt anymore.”
Charged with rioting
Vietnam’s capital, Ho Chi Minh City, which was once called Saigon when Vietnam was a divided country, looks like New York City on steroids, said Jones, a former paramedic with the Mount Pleasant Fire Department.
“I was extremely elated to see the country has recovered as well as it has after we did all that we did to it,” said Jones, who traveled with his wife, daughter and two of his brothers-in-law.
North and South Vietnam were unified after the 19-year conflict ended in 1975 when American forces hastily evacuated Saigon. The war claimed slightly more than 58,000 American lives, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center.
Sources estimate the death toll among South and North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians ranged from 970,000 to 3 million people. The figure does not include hundreds of thousands killed in neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
Jones arrived in South Vietnam in the mid-summer of 1967, about two years after America overtly entered the war. Some of the most intense fighting occurred in 1968 during the Tet Offensive, according to Defense Department records.
Jones tried to follow in his father’s military footsteps in 1965 when he attempted to join the U.S. Navy. He said he hoped that by joining the Navy, he could dodge Vietnam’s killing fields. He was denied, however, because he was charged in 1963 with inciting a riot in Charleston.
“I am fine, Dr. King”
Jones was part of the youth movement led by the Rev. Benjamin Glover at Emanuel AME Church and other Charleston ministers. They protested against segregated lunch counters along King Street and Whites-only public accommodations, like the city-owned swimming pool.
Jones walked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during a 1963 protest march when a White man emerged from a King Street bar and threw a beer on Jones. King saw what happened. Jones said King told him: “‘Son, don’t do anything. If you feel that you have to do something, go back to the church.”’ Jones said he replied: “I am fine, Dr. King. I am fine.”
A few days later as the protest intensified, Jones and others were among an estimated 100 people who were arrested outside The New and Courier’s building on Columbus Street when rocks and bottles were hurled at police officers and firefighters. That building was demolished last month to make way for a new residential and commercial space.
Jones said people who were not part of the peaceful demonstration threw the bricks and bottles that triggered a melee. He said he spent 11 days in jail. He and others were charged with rioting, but Jones said he was not prosecuted. After a meeting with then-Charleston Mayor J. Palmer Gaillard Jr., the charge against him was dropped, Jones recalled. Shortly after that, the 20-year-old Jones was drafted in the Army and sent to Vietnam.
Jones believes he was labeled a “trouble maker,” and he was sent to war. Jones lashed out at the draft board clerk in Charleston. Jones said he told her: “You think that you are going to send me to Vietnam, and I am going to get killed. Let me tell you this, the first thing I am going to do when I get back from Vietnam, I am coming to see you, and I am going to show you I am not going to die.”
Feeling like God
After Jones arrived in Vietnam, he was briefly assigned to the 1st First Calvary Division. While on patrol, his feet swelled. Doctors cut his boots to remove them, Jones said. Doctors diagnosed him with flat feet, and they pondered how he passed the army’s physical exam, Jones added.
For the remainder of his time in Vietnam, Jones was a supply clerk at Cam Ranh Bay, a job that gave him power. He decided who received office supplies, ammunition, weapons and vehicles.
Holding up his right hand, Jones said he quickly realized that as a low-ranking soldier “in charge of a self-service supply store, I had the power of God in this hand with a pen.”
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