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By Al Zdon
John Novack spent nine months in Vietnam early in the war.
"I don't remember one day during that time when we weren't getting shot at or we were
shooting at something. Not one day.
"The Marine Corps was in survival mode in those days, and a lot of us didn't survive."
Novack was born in 1939 near the Grain Belt Brewery in Northeast
Minneapolis. His father was drafted into the Army during World War II, and the family moved up to Fridley in 1941. Novack grew up there.
"My dad was a tough old guy. He used to beat the hell out of
us. He told my brother and I not to go swimming one day in 1956, so, of course, we did. My brother drowned. I was the older brother, so I was in charge.
"When I got home, my mother told me to leave.
She said my dad was going to kill me. She said go, and I was gone. I never came home again."
With the help of his mother's signature, Novack was able to join the Marine Corps at age 17. He went to
boot camp in California and then joined the Fifth Marines. "We were training all the time. I loved it. I was a hard-core Marine."
His early adventures in the Corps brought him to Lebanon in 1958, but
too late for the action there. Later, he was stationed aboard a Marine landing ship in the Mediterranean and he had a chance to see Egypt and the pyramids.
Novack left the 5th Marines and joined the
4th Marines in Hawaii as part of a underwater demolition team. "I really wanted to learn how to swim well. It was because that was how I had lost my brother."
In the First Force Recon, Novack and his
team mainly served aboard submarines that would put them and their rubber boats ashore for demolition or to prepare a beach for landings. They also did considerable diving in Pearl Harbor to find World
War II munitions that were unexploded.
"One day we were diving and I guess we were too close to the USS Arizona. A friend of mine came up with a coffee cup and brought it ashore. He didn't think
anything about it. They kicked him out of the Corps with a dishonorable discharge."
By the end of his duty with the First Force Recon, Novack had accomplished his goal of becoming a proficient
swimmer. "I was no Tarzan, but I was pretty good."
In 1960, he volunteered to be a drill sergeant at Camp Pendleton in California, and it turned out to be the one assignment in his 11 years in the
Corps he failed at. "To be successful, you had to live two lives. You had to be a normal person and you had to be a complete asshole. Guys would practice in the mirror to put on the fiercest face they
could just to scare the recruits, and then they would scream in their faces. I just couldn't do it."
Novack was reassigned to National City, south of San Diego, as a military policeman. His failure as
a DI should not be understood as an indicator that he was soft. "You have to realize that we were trained by the World War II guys and by the Korean guys who had been at the Chosin Reservoir. They were
nothing but kickass Marines. They were very, very tough Marines, and they made us just like them."
It was during his time in National City that he got into serious trouble for the only time in his
Marine Corps career. "They were having some kind of ceremony and they were using the holiday flag, the biggest flag they ever used. I was off duty, and I wanted to see them retiring the colors, so I
climbed a tree. I wanted to see that holiday flag. Well, I fell out of the tree, and they arrested me for disrespecting the colors. I lost my PFC stripes and I got 30 days in the clinker. I had to start
my Marine Corps career all over again."
When Castro took over Cuba, the Marines' job was to protect the naval base at Guantanamo Bay. "I told them I wanted to go down there and kick Fidel Castro's
ass, and they assigned me to the perimeter duty at Guantanamo."
The Marines guarded the fence, laid minefields, and watched the Cuban National Guard on the other side, mainly comprised of women
soldiers. "Sometimes they would come up on the bunkers and sun themselves naked. The Marines liked to observe that. It was one of the benefits of that duty."
In 1964, he returned home on leave to
Minnesota for his father's funeral. It was the first time he had gone home since his brother's death. He had never spoken to his father in those seven years.
His next career stop was at Quantico in
Virginia where he taught officers and FBI agents how to shoot a rifle. Novack had qualified as an expert marksman every year he was in the Corps.
During his time at Quantico, he was on the Marine
sharpshooting team. "My best effort was at a meet at Camp Perry, Ohio, where I got 247 out of 250."
But the war in Vietnam, just heating up at that point, ended Novack's domestic duties in the summer
of 1965. "I shipped out through Okinawa to Da Nang. I was in C Company, First Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment."
Novack, who had nine years of service as a Marine by this time, was made a squad leader
as soon as he arrived in Vietnam. "They knew I had map reading skills, so they put me right to work. I never had a day of rest after that."
They took away his beloved M-1 rifle, and, as a squad
leader, he carried instead a .45 pistol. He later added an M-79 grenade launcher to his arsenal and carried that for the rest of his tour.
"Every day was a different search and destroy mission.
Every day we'd go out to a different position. We would search out enemy positions and try to destroy them. They usually saw us coming, and they would try to engage you first and try to get the upper
hand.
"We'd rarely used the trails. We'd just walk through the water with the shit up to our knees. That way we didn't leave a trace. The trails were covered with booby traps if Charlie was
around.
"I never remember going to the same place twice. I remember Hill 81, Hill 87, 29, 369, 370… But you know how the jungle is. You blow something up and it just grows back again."
One of
his favorite stops for the night, if it could be arranged, was to bed down in a cemetery. "They had these big flat horizontal tombstones that you could lay on top of. It got you out of the damp, and the
tombstones could protect your ass from the incoming. When I'd call in my position – the Marines always wanted to know exactly where you were – and told them I was in a cemetery again, they'd
say: 'Novack, you're going to get planted in one of those cemeteries.' "
Water was a problem. "I drank from a stream just once, and I had dysentery for a week. We used to eat the cucumbers the local
people grew if we could get them. But then the VC found out about that and sometimes put strychnine in the cucumbers. The armored vehicles would come out and bring us water sometimes."
On a mission,
Novack could call in air or artillery support or even tanks. "I could call in the Navy if I wanted to, but I never did. They were right off the coast."
He recalled one incident early on. "We were at
Hill 81. On top of it was what we called the French Fort, although there was only one wall left of it. The Viet Cong were holding the fort. We tried to dislodge them, but we couldn't, so I called in a
tank."
The tank arrived and Novack talked to the crew by using a radio-phone in the back of the tank. The tank's gunner told Novack he couldn't see the target. "I told him to put his gun in neutral so
I could move it. So I lined it up on the target and I told him to wait until I got away from the gun. I was only a few feet away when they fired. The muzzle blast just knocked me down. I was bleeding
from my left ear. I couldn't hear a thing for two hours."
One day, Novack's squad was moving "from point A to point B" and was going through a small Vietnamese town, or ville.
"Suddenly a grenade
went off. I could hear my guys yelling, 'The ——ing bitch fragged us. This Vietnamese woman, a very attractive woman, was selling black market Coca-colas to the men. She had pulled out a
grenade and threw it into a group of my guys.
"I was about 60 or 70 yards down from where it was happening, and she came running right by me. The guys were yelling to stop her. As she got up to me,
she smiled, and her teeth were all black. She looked like a monster. I pulled out my .45 and killed her. I shot her right in the chest."
Determining who was the enemy in the Vietnamese countryside was
sometimes very difficult. "We were moving on, but I decided to booby trap her body. I took a hand grenade and pulled the pin and put it under her body. We the left the ville, and about five or six
minutes later, we heard the grenade go off."
Being a squad leader meant making zero mistakes in the field, which Novack learned the hard way. "It was getting dark one day, and I called the guys
together so I could talk to them. One of the guys asked, and I told them, yeah, the smoking lamp was lit."
A few minutes later a rocket, apparently zeroed in on a glowing cigarette, came in and hit
the M60 (machine gun) position. "I got fragged in the left leg. I lost four Marines in that incident. There were no more smoking lamps after that."
It was Novack's second Purple Heart. The first had
come when a sniper ripped a round through Novack's helmet while he was relieving himself.
Though the leg was badly torn up, he chose not to go back to the aid station. "The corpsman just wrapped it
up. He said, 'Are you going to make it, sergeant?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm going to make it.' I had sort of a walking cast that lasted about a day, and then I just kept using tape and band aids until it
healed up." The leg still has a jagged scar along the ankle.
Another time on patrol, with the unit of 21 men strung out in a line, the last man told Novack that he was pretty sure they were being
followed. "We went to the top of a hill where we could see Charlie coming down the trail, but he couldn't see us. The VC gathered around a hut we had passed.
"I told the men to get in a line, shoulder
to shoulder, facing the enemy. I told them to lock and load. I said, 'Ready on the left?' and then "Ready on the right?' and then I told them to commence firing. In about 15 seconds the hut had
disappeared.
"We went down the hill and looked around, and we counted seven dead, and six of them were VC. The other one had red hair. We found out later that we had shot a Russian advisor. That
didn't happen very often."
Novack said the overwhelming firepower of the Americans was a blessing. "This track would come out to us in the field, drop its backend, the guys would all dive in and
unload the ammo and whatever else we were getting, the backend would go up, and the track would be gone. He never even shut his motor off.
"They knew we were out there raising hell out there, and they
wanted to keep us resupplied so we could keep raising hell.
"When it came time for me to order supplies, I'd always order the four B's. That was beans, bullets, bandages and booze. We'd get cases of
Jack Daniels and that helped a lot."
On one occasion, Novack radioed in that he had used 7,000 rounds that day and needed more ammunition. "The supply guy said, 'What the hell did you shoot with
7,000 rounds?' I told him, 'Oh, a couple of monkeys and some trees.' We weren't shy about using our firepower.
"And while I'm speaking about arms, I want to say this: The M-16 was a horseshit piece of
weaponry. When I first tried it out in Vietnam, I ran off a 20-round clip at a water buffalo that was only a few hundred yards away. I never hit it once. My philosophy after that was for the guys to use
'full auto.' Why shoot at something with one bullet when you can shoot it with 20?"
Novack earned a reputation, he found out later, as an aggressive leader. "When we went out, the squad was set except
for the machine gunners. We'd have to go to the CP to get one, and then out they'd come. I was told by two different squad leaders to watch my back. They said, 'These guys (the machine gunners) don't
want to go with you. You're too hard core as a Marine. You're old time, and they don't like it.' I suppose he meant that there were some guys who would rather take me out than go into the jungle with me.
I gave it one day's thought, then never thought about it again. What can you do?"
Novack didn't like the enemy, but he had respect for some of its soldiers. "One time I was reading a map with this guy
when all of a sudden I noticed this meat across my arm. It was the other guy's tongue. I called in a med-evac, and when it got there, the sniper shot the chopper pilot. So he got the guy next to me, and
he got the pilot, but he didn't get me. How'd that happen? I don't believe we ever got that guy."
Already a lean and mean Marine, Novack dropped to 130 lbs. during his time in Vietnam. His clothing
consisted of boots, pants and a flak jacket. There was no insignia anywhere. "The only mark of rank was on the back of the helmets. Otherwise the men just knew who was in charge. They knew us by our
mannerisms or what we were armed with."
Novack's final mission, assigned by the commanding officer, was to check out a red-brick church. "The CO told us to take that position, and so through the rice
paddy we went. It was just dead silence out there. There were no people, no birds, no nothing. All you could hear was the grunting and swearing of Marines.
"Once we got to the church, they opened up
on us. The machine gunner was the first to get hit. I ran up to his machine gun and tried to reload it, and I got shot in the right leg. I picked up the machine gun and yelled, 'Semper fi, you mother
————s' and started shooting. That was when I lost my left arm. It was just ripped open from elbow to hand, like a piece of meat. I dropped the machine gun.
"I called out to the
radio man to get some help, but the radio operator was dead. I got on the radio myself and called for help. They fired rockets at us again and I got hit again. This time I got fragged all up my back and
down my hips. I thought, 'Okay, I'm out.'
The enemy, who were probably North Vietnamese regulars, overran the Marine position, but the Marines came back and recaptured the church.
"They took us
wounded to a hot landing zone which was being hit by rocket fire. I was knocked out the third time I was hit, so I don't remember this, but they told me later that I was hit again when I was at the
landing zone. Personally, I don't know."
Novack later learned that his route over the next several days included a hospital ship off the coast, Clark Air Force Base, Taiwan, Alameda Naval Air Station,
and finally the Great Lakes Naval Hospital.
He never regained consciousness until he was at Great Lakes. "I opened my eyes and there was a nurse saying to me, 'Sergeant, sergeant?' I said, 'Am I in
heaven? You're the prettiest thing I've ever seen, so I must be in heaven.
"I asked her to let her hair down for me so I could see it, and the next day she did. But it was only a morale booster thing.
I mean, she was an officer and I was just a grunt."
After a spell in the hospital, Novack had Marine visitors. "They come up to me and said, 'Sergeant, we can't use you anymore. We'll find you a nice
government job and you'll be set the rest of your life.'
"I cried when they told me that. I just cried. I told them I wanted to go back and kill more Charlie, but they told me I didn't have to
anymore."
Looking back, Novack can see the blessing in his war wounds. "I would have stayed in Vietnam until I was killed. I was one of those kind of Marines."
Novack spent a year on medical leave
at his mother's house, recuperating. He later did get his government job, "counting bullets" at the army ammunition plant in Arden Hills. Later, he got a job with the U.S. Postal Service where he finally
retired after 21 years. He still volunteers with the noted Vietnam Veterans rifle squad from Anoka.
He was given an 85 percent disability after his retirement. "I can't use my left arm at all, and I
don't have any feeling in my legs." The rating is now being raised to 100 percent.
Novack married his wife, Marlene, in 1968 and they have two sons and three grandchildren. They live in Coon
Rapids.
He said his life has been good since the trauma of his service. "I've got to say one thing, and I know it's cutting against the grain, but I don't believe in PTSD. If soldiers are trained
properly, I don't believe they'll have any problem later. I think the real problem these days is in the training."
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