MATTHEW BURNETTE, Staff Writer

Former Coffee County Agricultural Agent Dean Northcutt offered a glimpse into a recent trip he took back to a country that had a tremendous impact on his life.

He currently serves as an Elder at the New Union Church of Christ where he showed slides in the church sanctuary and told stories from a trek he and his wife Sharon, daughter Penny Burns and her husband Brad, took to Vietnam where Dean was stationed with the U. S. Army during the thick of the Vietnam War.

 “This trip that we took was something I’d always wanted to do for the last fifty plus years, and it came about by accident,” he explained.

Northcutt’s daughter, Penny, was on a trip in Scotland when in a restaurant she ran into a man wearing an Alabama sweatshirt.  After some conversation, the man explained to her that he guides tours in Vietnam for a company called Vietnam Battlefield Tours.

After the man returned to his home in Huntsville, Alabama, he came to Manchester and visited the Northcutts to explain how their tour could be accomplished.

After some deliberation with his wife about whether they could endure the 19-hour flight from Nashville to Vietnam, the two decided, along with their daughter Penny and son-in-law Brad, to make the trip.

The first stop they made in Vietnam was Saigon where Northcutt said he was surprised by the look of this modern city.

“My first reaction when we got into Saigon was ‘Wow! Where did this city come from?” When I was in Saigon in 1969, probably the tallest building I saw was about five stories tall,” he said. “When we got into Saigon, we found out it had 10 million people and maybe 7.5 million motorcycles flowing through the streets between vast number of skyscrapers, one 82 floors high.”

Due to the high cost of cars in Vietnam, most residents travel by motorcycle. Northcutt explained that motorcycle riders are adept to moving around pedestrians.

Though Vietnam is a Communist-controlled country, they have a Capitalist type economy where residents are allowed to own their own business. Northcutt noted that most of the people they met love Americans and want them to travel to their country.

“I thought the people were phenomenal,” he said. “That changed my perspective of Vietnam a lot.”

Northcutt admitted that his feelings about Vietnam weren’t good before the trip due to his experience in the war.

“In my mind this is what Vietnam was,” he explained. “It was a place of war. It was a place of people dying and being wounded. Things then just did not go well. That’s been on my mind for 57 years.”

Northcutt was in Vietnam from July 1968 to July 1969, nine months of which were spent in the jungle. He was a First Lieutenant and served as a Combat Infantry platoon leader and company commander with the 4^th Infantry Division’s First Brigade in Dak To. Dak To was an area where some of the fiercest fighting took place in the Central Highlands.

He said their tour group got to visit places where he hadn’t been before as well as some of the places where he was stationed and other places where he experienced battle.

They visited the Presidential Palace in Saigon which is now a museum, The Michelin Rubber Plantation, and Cu Chi where some tour members got to navigate through some Vietcong tunnels.

Among the destinations, a notable stop for Northcutt was the Mang Yang Pass between An Khe and Pleiku.  Bruce Stubbs, Northcutt’s friend from South Carolina, made the trip to Manchester to see Northcutt’s presentation. They had made an arduous journey through Mang Yang Pass in December, 1968.

“Bruce and I had the honor of walking down through this pass and up an adjoining mountain. In that one day we walked about 14 kilometers with full backpacks. It was the longest march I ever took while in the military,” he recalled. “On the nearby lower hill as we started climbing up this much higher mountain, we were ambushed by snipers who were shooting at us. We had to have helicopters gunships come in and relieve the pressure we were under due to the snipers.”

As their tour bus was traveling toward Mang Yang Pass, Northcutt said he recognized the mountain from five miles away even though he had never seen it from that particular view before.

In the most somber moment of the presentation, Northcutt showed a picture of Hill 851 where his company was subjected to a North Vietnamese ground assault just after dark and again around midnight. He called it one of the worst battles they got into.

“On that hill on September 4, 1968, we had seven Americans killed and 23 wounded in about 10 minutes. That’s the time when three guys in my platoon were killed, and that was a place I wanted to go back to see,” he remembered, holding back tears.

The three members of his platoon who were killed were Private First Class Geronimo Lopez Grijalva, Specialist 4th Class Robert Litterio and Corporal Bruce Greenwood.

Northcutt also spoke on some of the interesting people he met in Vietnam.

He recalled an instance where he met a Vietnamese soldier who rode up to their tour group on a motorcycle wearing an army jacket. He asked to take his photo to which the man agreed after removing his army jacket and combing his hair.

When he asked the man how old he was, he told him that he was 22 which is the age Northcutt was when he was in Vietnam.

“He was just as nice as he could be. We found that with nearly every Vietnamese person with whom we talked. They were just as kind as they could be,” he said.

He also spoke about meeting a lady who was one of the most decorated Viet Cong women in Vietnam. She was a spy and courier during the war for 16 years. She prepared a meal for the entire tour group and told the group that she held no animosity against any American.

“She said you were just doing what you were told to do, and she said I hope you don’t have animosity towards me because I was doing what I needed to, and most of them were that way,” he explained

After the last group of U.S. troops left, Vietnam has experienced roughly 50 years of peace after fighting for centuries with different countries. Many developers moved in and built large resorts along the coast.

Northcutt reiterated that most of the people they encountered enjoy having Americans visit and some even hope to visit the United States at some point, including his tour guide for his two-week trip, Mr. Fhi.

“Our guide’s goal in life is to come to the United States and see the Vietnam Memorial Wall and the Statue of Liberty. That’s the two things that he wanted to see most in America,” explained Northcutt. “They’re good people. We can’t change everything. We can’t please the world, but I think having served there during war time and having had this bad image of Vietnam for more than 50 years, I learned a lot… It was good for me.”