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Vietnam DiariesThe Wrong TargetBy Ken Anderberg
As 2nd Lt. Ronald Rondem moved his platoon toward the tree line in Chu Lai Province just north of Saigon, the heat and tension were stifling. It was 1966 and Rondem was relatively new in-country and still had not seen any action. Expecting almost anything, Rondem first ordered fire on the tree line to roust any enemy troops before moving in with his men properly spread out. In front of him was his radio operator (RTO) and in front of him was one of his squad leaders.
"We didn't scare whoever was in there because we got ambushed about the time we hit the tree line," Rondem recalls of his first fire fight. "The squad leader was a very sharp looking young guy. He was the kind that stateside would probably win soldier of the month on a repeated basis."
The squad leader, however, made one mistake. He had placed a P-38 can opener on the front of his helmet in the helmet band. The P-38 is a small tin utensil that was roughly the size and shape of a lieutenant's insignia bar. "The first bullet in that whole fusillade was in the middle of his chest," Rondem remembers.
"To this day, I know that bullet was meant for me. When I was in the jungle, I wore a flak jacket. I did not look like a lieutenant, nor did I intend to look like a lieutenant. We were not required to wear our rank; we all figured our men knew who the lieutenant was, the enemy certainly did. The fact the RTO was in front of me at that point meant that the enemy thought the RTO was following this other guy, so they made him out as a lieutenant, and he got killed.
"I ended up crawling up and pulling him back, and he basically died in my arms," Rondem adds. "It took me several months before it really sunk in that that was why he had been shot."
Such experiences often haunt the memories of Vietnam veterans. They also tended to mold the strength of character of those who survived. Today, Rondem, the compensation manager for Colonial Pipeline Co. in Atlanta, says that, as a sworn officer and career military man, he was responsible for doing his duty without question, but, at the same time, admitting some ambivalence about the war.
The thinking has changed
"One of the things that is very interesting is that the current generation of military leaders - and you saw this real evident in Desert Storm - are so much in favor of 'If we are going to do it, let's do it right. Let's go in with all the firepower, all the troops, all the support. Let's not go in there and piecemeal the action.
"The thinking has changed at that level," Rondem contends of current military leaders such as Colin Powell and Wesley Clark. "What will happen when they retire, which will be in the next five to 10 years, when you get individuals in there who never experienced Vietnam, that to me is real scary."
The three-foot-high copy of the Declaration of Independence mounted on the wall is the first thing a visitor notices when entering Rondem's 27th floor office in Resurgens Plaza. It was presented to him by his first wife, in Puerto Rico, after he passed his U.S. citizenship test in 1966. A native of Oslo, Norway, he arrived in this country as an 11-year-old, processing through the New York City immigration center in June of 1955. He still remembers some of the sights as the ship he and his family sailed on reached their new home - the parachute drop at Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, pier 42. "I remember looking up at the West Side Highway and being amazed at how fast the cars were going," he says.
"My parents were looking for a new and better life," Rondem continues. His father, a bus driver, could not find regular work in New York and New Jersey, however, and moved the family to Manchester, N.H., three years later. After graduating from high school, he was accepted at college but decided instead to enlist in the Army, spending three years as a medic before returning to New Jersey to attend Rutgers University.
"I enjoyed the heck out of playing soccer," at Rutgers, he says, "but I didn't enjoy school too much." So he reenlisted, applied for officers candidate school, was sent to Puerto Rico, married, and was assigned to Ft. Devens, Mass., and then Camp Drum, N.Y., with the 196th Infantry Division. By August 1966, he was on his way to his first tour of duty in Vietnam.
The Army first assigned him to command an anti-tank platoon, with eight 106mm recoilless rifles. Trouble was, without enemy tanks to fire at, there was little use for the weapons. So, his unit generally provided perimeter defense and security at base camps and fire bases. Eventually, he and his unit were trained as infantry, and Rondem was sent north to the Da Nang area as a rifle platoon leader. "I came back in one piece," he says succinctly of the experience.
A second tour
"Our mission was to cut landing zones," he says of much of his second tour with the 101st Airborne out of Camp Evans north of Hue and only 30 miles from the DMZ. Clearing the dense jungle for helicopter landing zones in the Ashau Valley, home of the infamous Hamburger Hill battle, was not shore leave.
"When you cut LZs in the middle of the jungle, you don't do it quietly," Rondem explains. "After they dropped us off the first night, we would often have a fire fight. The next day, we would find the location they wanted an LZ, they flew helicopters in there and would drop chain saws to us. They weren't very quiet, either.
"Cutting through those hardwood trees with chain saws took forever, so we started using C4 explosives. It wasn't any quieter but it was a heck of a lot faster. But that got us even more attention. We would cut an LZ, move to another location, cut another LZ."
After three weeks, Rondem's company had dwindled from 140 men to only 43. "It wasn't all casualties," he says, "but my company was basically a platoon by the time we got back to the firebase. That was probably the worst mission I saw."
It was also when he earned the Silver Star for dodging enemy fire to retrieve the medic's bag and bring it to his unit's under-siege perimeter to help the wounded. "I had a fair amount of killed and wounded. By the beginning of the second tour, you become somewhat blase to the death, after you lose a few of your closest friends."
Rondem now is a human resources specialist, a skill he at least partially credits to his military experience. Those skills were honed at various companies in Texas after his graduation from the University of Texas-Arlington, including Owens Corning and British Petroleum. He joined Colonial in 1988, and is responsible for compensation, affirmative action, incentives and the drug program. Colonial is a $500 million company with 680 employees, 200 or so at the company's Atlanta headquarters. The firm, one of Georgia's 10 largest privately held, owns and manages a pipeline running from Houston to New York, transporting liquid refined petroleum products to customers along the route.
Now remarried, Rondem has two daughters and a granddaughter by his first marriage, and a 13-year-old son from the second. His wife, Debbie, is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, in charge of the selective service system in Georgia, and is director of student support services for the Forsyth County school system. He finally retired from the reserves in 1996, at the rank of full colonel, a relatively rare accomplishment for an OCS graduate and one that landed him in the OCS Hall of Fame at Fort Benning, Ga.
As to any impact Vietnam might have had on his career, Rondem does admit, "After you've seen the horrors of war, it puts a different perspective on a lot of things in your life. After all, what can they do to me? Send me to Vietnam?
"You learn to appreciate things that you otherwise might not have, like the ability to get into your car, or walk down to the local McDonalds or 7-Eleven at 8 o'clock at night - the freedom to do that at your chosen time."
Ronnie Rondem - Personal File
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