Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
5:08 | Daily life in an artillery battery involved dealing with an excess of gunpowder bags from the shells. Unfortunately for Bob Ballagh and his men, there was no excess of steak, ice cream or beer.
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Inspired by his father's service, Bob Ballagh excelled at West Point. When he graduated, he found out that due to a short-lived policy, he wouldn't be going to officer's basic training in his field of artillery. Fortunately, in his first deployment to Germany, he encountered a commander who made sure he received the training.
Bob Ballagh says nearly all of his West Point class wanted to go to Vietnam. "A good soldier runs to the sound of guns." Assigned to the 1st Cavalry field artillery, he was engaged in a major battle almost immediately at Pleiku.
To keep his artillery fire base from being mortared, Bob Ballagh relied on intelligence and pre-planning. Plotting all possible firing sites for the enemy allowed for a very fast response, sometimes even before the offending shell landed.
The artillery was moved north in anticipation of a battle and what a battle it turned out to be, the Tet offensive. It was a good reason to use new classified ammunition and Bob Ballagh's unit was the first to fire it. It was also during that operation that he received the Soldier's Medal for pulling soldiers to safety from a fire.
After a massive relief operation at Khe Sanh, Bob Ballagh was put in command of an artillery battery and right away began dealing with fallout from poor leadership. Two batteries were airlifted to the same spot and the battalion commander failed to deal with it.
The 1st Cavalry's artillery was highly mobile and used quick air assaults to move where they were needed. For some reason, says Bob Ballagh, a new commander increased the number of rounds each battery had to keep on hand and that slowed things down considerably.
The howitzers sat on base plates and rotated with hand cranks. Battery commander Bob Ballagh relates how his sergeants used a little negative reinforcement to make sure the soldiers started the rotation in the right direction.
Poor leadership from above kept confronting battery commander Bob Ballagh in Vietnam. This time, his battery was accused of friendly fire on a Marine base, even though it was far beyond the range of his guns.
Under his command in Vietnam, only one soldier was lost. Bob Ballagh felt badly about that, but was proud that was the only loss. After over one hundred air assaults, he returned home and advocated for a return to unit basis for deployments and was gratified when the Army changed the policy.
