Irving Rice; totally legit

AverageNCO sends us this article that was published in the Uniontown, Pennsylvania Herald-Standard about this totally legit and awesome Irving Rice who was a mechanic in the Air Force in Vietnam. Rice wasn’t your average Air Force mechanic, though, according to the reporter. His tour of Vietnam was jam-packed with action and high adventure;

Not long after arriving in Vietnam in 1970, the newly minted G.I. from Point Marion saw man’s brutality up close. Rice said he was in a restaurant with a friend when he saw two Vietnamese men sitting at a table nearby. Rice said he didn’t know why, but he thought he might be in danger, so he and his friend left the restaurant.

“I don’t think this looks right,” he said. “As soon as we got out the door, police drug them and beat (them to death). I was about six feet away watching it.”

[…]

“I heard some woman holler,” he said. “I wondered what was going in there, so I went in this back door. A Viet Cong soldier had a knife. I wrestled him from the door, grabbed and held him in an arm lock, swung him around and then let him go. And then he went through a big glass window. … I got out of there – I saved that woman’s life. When I got back to my unit, I said if that’s the worst that happens to me, that’s OK. I can do this. That’s alright.”

[…]

“I saw a little Vietnamese boy crying,” Rice said with a faraway look in his eyes. “I decided to go down to check this out, to see if he is in trouble. I wanted to see if there is anything wrong. Little did I know that that one little trip down there would change my life forever. I had no clue there was a Viet Cong unit down there.”

Rice said it was dark when he was ambushed. The soldiers beat him up and he passed out.

“When I came to, I was in severe pain,” he said. “I was bleeding. I was lying on a cot in a jail cell. I didn’t know what to think, but I knew I had to get out of there.”

Rice said the jail cell was not very big, maybe 10 feet by 8 feet and had a wooden door. By Rice’s estimate, he was probably there more than eight hours.

“I knew I had to move,” he said. “I was hurt, but I finally got up. I went across the room, across the jail cell. I then ran as fast as I could, kicked the wooden door. I fell back. I was hurt, but I got out.”

Rice said he was able to crawl onto the building’s roof where he saw barbed wire everywhere. The young soldier knew he was far from safe.

“As soon as I got on top of that building, I heard pow, pow, pow, zing, right past my head,” he said. “I thought, ‘they are shooting at me,’ so I started rolling.”

Rice said he rolled off the roof and fell maybe six feet. He crawled to a cemetery, rolled over a stone wall and into the woods.

“I laid down there,” he said. “I said this is where I’m going to die. I didn’t want to die at the hands of the Viet Cong soldiers. I didn’t know what kind of injuries I had. There was so much pain in my legs. I laid there and thought, this is it.”

Rice remembers hearing a jeep before he was spotted by American soldiers. The soldiers picked him up and told him what was happening.

“The guys said, ‘You are the lucky one,’” he said. “I said, ‘I don’t feel so lucky.’ They said, ‘There was a big battle last night. We did a room to room search. We found other American soldiers, but they all had their throats cut.’”

Yeah, it all sounds totally legit doesn’t it? He even avoided getting his name listed in the Department of Defense POW/MIA list. The reporter seems pretty excited that Irving was finally able to reveal his harrowing experiences after 40 years. But I think Irving should have waited another 40 years to recount that bullshit. Or the reporter could have spent five minutes to verify the stories.

Category: Dumbass Bullshit