It was a drive-by grenade near Saigon

  • Published
  • By Nick Stubbs
  • 6th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  Staff Sgt. Jerry Kmieciak and Senior Airman Mike Donovan were walking along the side of a road in a town in the Mekong Delta region, Nov. 17, 1968, when the explosion threw them to the ground.

Their bodies fed by adrenaline and their brains rapidly accessing the stored lessons of their training and all their experiences in Vietnam, they both thought they were under a mortar attack.

Dazed, they scrambled behind a nearby wall, awaiting the next shells to explode. They didn't come.

Both men, whose job it was to arm F-100 jets at Binh Thuy Air Base, soon realized the motor scooter carrying two Vietnamese had tossed a grenade.

"When it (the scooter) went by I saw out of the corner of my eye something roll by, but I thought it was a rock or something," said Mr. Kmieciak. "We figured out later that it was a grenade."

The two injured men looked each other over, Airman Donovan telling his sergeant that blood was gushing from his head.

"I didn't know until he told me," said Mr. Kmieciak. "There was so much going on."
Within moments there was even more going on. A U.S. officer nearby was shooting his .45 pistol into the air to try and get everyone in the area to stop in their tracks. South
Vietnamese police officers were firing their carbines into the air for the same purpose.

The two injured men were then scooped up by some Vietnamese and rushed to a nearby medical center. Mr. Kmieciak remembers being laid on a table in a dirty operating room, Airman Donovan on the next table over. They were alone.

"It was getting dark and looking up I could see stars through a hole that had been blown through the ceiling," said Mr. Kmieciak. "I remember Mike was screaming, 'don't let them put a needle in me; don't let them touch us' because he didn't know who had us and if we could trust them."

Mr. Kmieciak was dizzy and near passing out, but recalls mustering all his strength to slide off the table and lift Airman Donovan up.

"I said, 'I'm not going to die here,' and pulled myself together," said Mr. Kmieciak .

The two struggled out of the building and down the outside steps toward the street when U.S. Soldiers drove up in jeeps and quickly rushed them to the 3rd Army hospital in Saigon.

Shrapnel was removed from Mr. Kmieciak's head and shoulder, while Airman Donovan's stomach wounds were treated.

Mr. Kmieciak spent three or four days at the hospital recovering before heading back to Binh Thuy.

"A week later they told me to put on some clean fatigues, that I was going to get a Purple Heart in an hour," recalled Mr. Kmieciak. "They gave me a medal, but there was no paperwork."

Mr. Kmieciak finished up his service, left the Air Force and in all the years since assumed his record reflected a Purple Heart awarded for his injuries until he discovered otherwise in 2005.

"I would encourage anyone who was in the military to get their medical records, even if they don't think they need them," said Mr. Kmieciak. "You never know when they will come in handy."