Army Combat Correspondent Marvin Wolf at the Korean DMZ
![Marvin J. Wolf, combat correspondent, 1st Air Cav, An Khe ,1965- `66, had already served one tour of duty in Korea as an enlisted infrantryman before boarding his first Huey into the fray in Vietnam. On his way there, in the belly of a C-130 Hercules, the plane blew an engine and was forced to make an emergency landing on Iwo Jima, where some seven thousand U.S. Marines and 20,000 Japanese soldiers had lost their lives a short 20 years earlier in one of the most heralded battles of World War II.
While it certainly did not occur to Wolf at the time, he would admit later that there must have been a similarity between those young Marines about to face an uncertain life or death situation and that which he faced sitting on his flak jacket to protect, first and foremost, his life. Secondly, as he put it, his family jewels.
“Of course it never occurred to me at the time to make that comparison. I was focused on my own life. What I needed to do. I had a choice to make. Would I stay on this chopper? Would I panic? Was I going to stay on and fly in and out through the flak twice? Was I going to get off? Where would I be safer? Meanwhile my life is flashing before my eyes.”
Thinking about it now, Wolf is certain of the parallel nature of the experience. “They couldn’t get off until they hit the beach. There were bullets flying everywhere." Many Marines were draftees during World War II, so Wolf acknowledges the parallel.
On his first and every air assault, Wolf carried not only the combat gear borne of every soldier, but also the equipment of a combat correspondent: he carried three M-16 magazines, two in his belt and one locked and loaded. His ammo pouches held either film or extra camera bodies. However, the extra camera gear made toting an M-16, in his words, “A royal pain in the ass,” but obviously a necessary one. He relished the ability to carry a .38 he had brought with him to Vietnam. But one day that .38 got him in trouble.
“I was accosted by a Major who demanded my name and unit. It pissed him off that he had to carry a heavy .45.”
By the time Wolf got back to post, his CO, Major Charles Siler, had already been informed and took him aside and questioned him. But instead of a reprimand, Wolf got a trade. His CO offered up his own .45 in exchange for Wolf’s .38 and told him, “No one will question you now.’ He strapped on the .45 whenever he was on post and was tasked with such missions as writing about the ammunition arsenal or interviewing someone at the POL (Preservative, Oil, and Lubricant) Depot.
But when it came to air assaults, Wolf was glad to have had that M-16. “I was a lowly grunt and so it was the M-16, but a .45 in an air assault would have been worthless,” he admits. “I was trained as a rifleman and knew what to do.”
As Wolf looks back on it now, he shot way more photos than bullets and that does not bother him in the least.” I used to tell people that in Vietnam, I shot hundreds, usually at F-11 250.”
But all of that would enfold in the future. When he was airborne on that first chopper flight, Wolf didn’t think about the grunts he was flying with as he sat on his flak vest. He was, in his words, completely self- involved. He did, however, think about the pilots and how cool they were. On that day "a Huey 30 seconds in front of mine had been hit and exploded as it left the LZ. They'd seen their buddies roasted alive and to hear them talk they were saying, well if you go in this way, you’ll only have a few seconds to do this. I thought they were amazingly detached and cool.”
Wolf’s years in uniform gave him far more experience than most newbies in Vietnam. He knew his mission. “My job was just to take pictures, keep my head up, stay alive. It was no less challenging than any other job in a combat zone. It never dawned on me until that moment that people were going to be shooting at me even though I was holding a camera. I had volunteered to be there; had wanted to find a career in photojournalism. I had wanted to stand at history’s elbow as that first draft of history was being written. If I didn’t get off the chopper this time, I was never gonna get off the chopper."
Wolf said he understood it intellectually. He just didn’t get it in his gut until he jumped off that first Huey.
The soldiers around Wolf had the job of making sure that they killed the enemy before they themselves were killed. Wolf’s mission was to make sure that someone knew about it, he said.
Wolf’s contemporary, Pulitzer Prize winning AP photographer Eddie Adams, often talked about the camera as a weapon and how looking through the viewfinder he somehow felt protected. Wolf feels exactly the same today.
“By looking through the viewfinder there is now a barrier to you, everything else is just a distraction and an annoyance.”
During the entire time Wolf was in Vietnam, he made it a point to make good mental notes, though he says there's a lot he's probably forgotten. One thing he hasn't forgotten was the job that the 1st Cav did at An Khe.
When the Cav arrived, the North Vietnamese had infiltrated what Wolf called "very substantial forces into the Highlands. They seemed poised to cut South Vietnam in half. If, Wolf added, "you control the Central Highlands, you control the country, so if you can cut the country at its narrow waist, you can control it. And if the Americans could wrest control from the NVA, they could take the country back from the North Vietnamese Army division-sized main force units.
“ The Cav arrived. We went looking for the enemy. We found the enemy. We killed the enemy. By the time I left 15 months later, they were no longer a threat. There were still main force units out there, but they were holding. The enemy had depended in large part on the local population to feed them and treat them medically. We found the rice and weapons caches and we denied that to them.”
The NVA was also supplying and training the Viet Cong. In spite of that, the 1st Cav was able to break the back of the NVA and VC offensive in the Highlands. They were so effective that the Cav became Gen. Westmoreland’s mop up fire fighters. “You need a brigade? We can get there. You need an airlift? We can get there,” Wolf said, recalling too that the 1st Cav spearheaded the 1970 assault into Cambodia, though he was long home by then.
On more than one occasion before he rotated out, Wolf had to put down the camera and aim his M-16 even though he had limited ammo. “Once on a company-sized patrol, there was shooting everywhere. “My first instinct was to pick up my camera, but then I realized there was nothing to shoot at. Everybody was down on his belly or behind a tree. There were RPG explosions. It was time to fight. I don’t think I hit anybody. Seemed like an hour but it was probably ten minutes. They called an airstrike in on them and that was it. I went back to shooting pictures again. I never saw the enemy. Combat in the jungle is often just flashes. You just react on instinct.”
Ironically, the scariest experience he had in Vietnam did not involve combat at all. As he recalled it, he was inadvertently left behind on a mountain top in the middle of Indian country.
He was on a Huey headed from one forgotten place to another at night when the chopper he was aboard was diverted to a mountain top to medivac soldiers to a field hospital. That resulted in no room for the Army photographer: Wolf. He was told he would be picked up later. At that point, the acting First Sgt. told a corporal to find Wolf a place to bed down for the night.
The place Wolf had to plunk down in was several feet below an ambush site next to a trail with trip wire everywhere and in one of those very typical pouring Vietnam rains. Needless to say, he would get little sleep that night. If his leaking poncho weren’t enough, every so often, he was jarred awake by a battery of 105s firing. Troops in the battery were firing at locations where the Viet Cong had previously been spotted. At one point during the night, he heard a lot of scurrying around and choppers landing bringing in what he presumed to be ammo and food.
He finally nodded off to sleep and woke up at dawn with, much to his horror, not a solitary American around.
“Oh shit! What do I do?” Wolf remembers asking himself forty plus years later. He quickly scouted around and found some commo wire and pine crates that weapons and ammo were carried into an Area of Operations in. There were also some C rats (“Stuff you wouldn’t eat if they put a gun to your head”), bug spray (“You’d light it to cook the C rats”).
Just in case there were any “bad guys” in the neighborhood, Wolf climbed the tallest tree overlooking the LZ. At one point he heard voices down below. Just who they belonged to he never learned, which was probably a good thing in his estimation since odds were good that they belonged to the Viet Cong.
Taking stock of his available weaponry, in addition to his M-16, “I had carried a grenade since from the first day I got to Nam.” He then set about camouflaging himself the best he could. “I knew someone would come looking for me because I had called in from the field and told them I was coming back that afternoon.” What Wolf didn’t know though is just when that rescue might occur. Of the troops that had left him behind, he said, "Their noncoms counted noses, but I was nobody’s nose.”
By noon that day, Wolf deemed it safe to come down from the tree, though he never strayed directly into the LZ since he knew that could make him an instant target if VC were indeed in the area.
He took stock of his own belongs: a pocket knife, small Bowie knife, 1 meal of C Rats, iodine tablets, 60 rounds of ammo, a shelter half, two pairs of socks, one change of underwear, a flashlight and his cameras. “I decided to bury two cameras and keep one.” He also decided it would be a good idea to stay where he was for two more nights if necessary, and then try to walk out hoping he could make five miles a day in the mountains, making it a point to stay away from villages.
Quite fortunately for Wolf, his walkabout proved unnecessary. “About five o’clock in the afternoon, I heard a Huey hovering above. I ran to the middle of the LZ, took off my helmet so that they could see my fair hair. I also showed them my M-16 since it had been a common occurrence for captured GIs to lure helicopters into traps.” Wolf knew the sight of the rifle might calm a trigger-happy door gunner.
Wolf got a thumbs up signal from the helo pilot that he’d been spotted and he knew then that he had been saved. Half an hour later two Huey gunships strafed the edges of the LZ “firing like mad. A third chopper touched down and I threw myself into it head first.
“I was taken back to Brigade Headquarters. Of course, the Sgt. Major tore me a new asshole. ` It took three choppers that were needed elsewhere to save your sorry ass,’” he had screamed at Wolf.
Wolf had been saved, but the sheer force trauma of Vietnam was not over for him quite yet. His return to base camp required him to ride shotgun in a piston engine two-seater Hughes H-13 helicopter to Pleiku.
Midway through the journey, the pilot shouted at Wolf [there was no on board mics for communication in the H-13], “Look on the floor and see if you can see a Cotter pin.” [this Cotter pin secured the collective, or stick--which allows the helicopter to gain or lose altitude--to linkage under the floor]. Without that pin, Wolf and the pilot would have been destined to fly straight into a mountain on their flight up into the mountainous Central Highlands.
Wolf spotted the loose pin under the floorboards but was not able to retrieve it. Here is where that hand grenade that he had carried since his first day in Vietnam came into play. Wolf decided to remove the pin from his grenade and substitute it for the Cotter pin. Situation solved. Well, not exactly!
As Wolf held the spring of the grenade down, the Warrant Officer who was piloting the H-13 yelled for him to toss the grenade out the window.
“It’s not safe,” Wolf yelled back.
“I’ll go higher,” the pilot shot back.
“IT’S NOT SAFE!” Wolf emphasized as mightily as he could.
What the pilot was unaware of, but Wolf knew all too well, was that grenades have a five-second fuse, but that you could really only count on three seconds. And that they have a 15-yard lethal radius but can spew lethal fragments out to 50 yards. The H-13’s altitude would not have made a difference. If he’d have tossed that grenade out the window, the chopper would have either been blown to bits, or residual effects from the mid-air explosion could have hit the rotor blades or cut the fuel tank causing them to crash.
The way to throw a grenade out of a helicopter, said Wolf, is to put it in a water glass, which will hold down the arming striker and prevent the fuse from starting until the glass breaks. Then, if it were to hit a tree, it would explode after the helo is out of harm’s way. But they had no glass on that flight.
When the helicopter landed at Pleiku, Wolf, his hand still firmly on the spring, went in search of an officer. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, “Stay the fuck away from me! Stay the fuck away from me!” Wolf swears that soldiers all around him must have thought he was out of his mind. He finally found an officer who took him to a long-armed Kentucky sergeant who heaved the grenade high into the air above a ravine.
“I counted: one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, BOOM!”
So much for five-second fuses.
While Wolf was not the only Vietnam grunt who experienced the fear that an encroaching jungle full of Viet Cong cadres might have meant his demise, he felt different in other aspects. "I was young but a little different than all the guys that I served with...two or three years old than them. I had done three years, two months and one day in the infantry and had a very good idea of how you survive and prosper in the Army."
Wolf sees a marked difference between the people who served then vs. those who serve now. Today, says he, it's an All-Volunteer Army and , with the exception of those in the Officer Corps, the people who are volunteering are not people who got straight A's in school. The Army that I was in was a Draftee Army and you got people from all walks of life. It was a melting pot fairly representative of America. You had people from every state of the union and every economic stratus. Of course the smartest and best connected were able, if they chose to, to stay out of the Army. "The Karl Roves, Dick Cheneys and the likes of President George Bush, who found a niche in the National Guard.
"The guys I went to high school with at Fairfax High in Los Angeles weren't able to stay out of the service until the Vietnam War came along.
"If you had money, with a student deferment, you could avoid the draft until the end of the war."
Wolf was cut from a completely different cloth. The Army needed him to tell its Vietnam story, to be sure, but he needed the Army just as much. A history that he did not want to miss and a familial tendency towards short lives connected him with the Army for a lot longer than most. "I came from a long line of ancestors that didn't live past 50." He knew instinctively that the Vietnam War was going to be the defining moment of his generation. "Would I want to look back and miss this? The fact is I didn't have to go. I'd already served three years. I'd already fulfilled my reserve commitment. I was home free. I went back because I wanted to better myself. I didn't know how long the war would last. Who knew? What I thought was, here's a plan." It turned out to be an ill-conceived, cock-eyed plan in Wolf's estimation, but it worked.
Wolf went on to shoot photos and write stories that would, as his MOS required him to do, tell the Army's story in Vietnam. One such assignment took him to Qui Nhon where he was sent to cover a photo op with the late flamboyant, scarf-wearing Premier Nguyen Cao Ky and his wife Mai, the former stewardess for the country's national carrier, Air Vietnam. They both had come for a "Meet and Greet" of the Air Cav. "I was struck by how young he was and how attractive and lively his wife was," Wolf recalled. “I knew I was in the presence of a big shot. I’d never really been awed by big shots, but he was an important guy at a moment in history, and it never dawned on me that we would meet again and under separate circumstances.
Years later, Wolf would team up with Ky to write what was Ky's second book: Buddha's Child: My Fight to Save Vietnam. By total coincidence, a writer who lived in his West Los Angeles neighborhood relayed a message that “some Asian general with a name she couldn’t pronounce was looking for someone to help write his book, and it really wasn’t her cup of tea, would it be something I’d be interested in?”
At the time, Wolf never would have thought thirty or forty years hence, that what he went through as an Army combat correspondent would manifest itself in one published book about Vietnam with another on the auction block rich with his Army memoirs. “I made it a point as things happened to make mental notes. I’ve always had a pretty good memory.
The two also fought to get the book published. Twenty-six publishers turned the book down, Wolf thinks in part because they confused Ky with the corrupt (South Vietnamese President) Nguyen Van Thieu. He doesn’t know why but hazards the following guess: "The people running the publishing houses in New York during the war had served in the peace movement, gone to Canada, gotten umpteen deferments, gone to divinity school. This is not a knock on the whole New York liberal establishment, but that’s who these people were. As far as they were concerned, the whole South Vietnamese government was a bunch of corrupt crooks. Since Ky’s family name was Nguyen, just like Thieu’s, they figured they must be birds of a feather. There was a certain amount of guilt in the liberal establishment, and they didn't want anything to remind them of their own cowardice."
When Wolf got back from Vietnam, the story of the war was just beginning to unfold itself in cinematic terms. As luck would have it, while Wolf was stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia, John Wayne’s production company had pulled up to film The Green Berets, a film originally on the schedule of documentarian David L. Wolper, that was until the United States government deemed dialogue in the film classified relating to the Central Highlands and the Montagnard fighters, who embraced our cause and fought alongside U.S. troops in Vietnam. Wolf was then a 2nd Lt. working in the Public Information Office living in an apartment off post surrounded by neighbors who basically just ignored him. “I wasn’t a local guy. I was an Army guy who came and went in uniform. Nobody paid the least bit of attention to me.” His apartment was right across the street from where Wayne’s company were filming.
In his capacity as a PIO (Public Information Officer) at Ft. Benning, Wolf was often the go-to guy for the Public Affairs Office. In modern military terms, he was the “POC” (Person of Contact). “If they needed two hundred Asian girls between the ages of12 and 99 or a `mad minute’ (when an artillery company expends all of its ammo, five seconds of which usually ends up in the film).” At one point, John Wayne’s company approached the PAO for a high up vantage point overlooking scenes they were shooing in, what Wolf called a nearby antebellum plantation house, residue of a Civil War era estate. They also needed a place where the director, Wayne, and other staff could rest between takes. Wolf had just the place in mind: his apartment.
“I slept on the floor of my apartment. I gave the first assistant director my bed. Somebody else had my couch. While I was there, there was all this movement in and out of my apartment from neighbors who never paid him any mind before because he was not from there and was just a guy in uniform coming and going.. `Do you happen to have a cup of salt? Do you have a measuring cup? I’m fresh outa orange juice. Do you have any?’ Everybody wanted to come by and meet John Wayne because he was in and out of the apartment.”
Fast forward to 1977, ten years later, Wolf, who has continued to write about his Vietnam experience since the war in, among other publications, the Time-Life series on Vietnam, was checking out equipment at Cal’s Camera in Costa Mesa, California. He hadn’t noticed the tall man at the counter whose back was to Wolf. He came up and asked a salesgirl for his film. The lady behind the counter motioned with her eyes toward the gentleman now beside Wolf. It was John Wayne, who called nearby Newport Beach home until his death. When Wolf said hello to him, the Duke looked him right in the eyes and said, “Green Berets,” and walked out the door.
“What are the odds of that?” Wolf mused.
Major Charles T. Siler pins Marv Wolf with his second Air Medal
Marc P. Yablonka is a military journalist whose reportage has appeared in the U.S. Military's Stars and Stripes, Army Times, Air Force Times, American Veteran, Vietnam magazine, Airways, Military Heritage, Soldier of Fortune and many others. Marc is the author of Distant War: Recollections of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia

For more about Marvin Wolf’s photography, click on the photo.](YABLONKA-V7-SU-11_files/shapeimage_2.png)
Army Combat Correspondent Marvin Wolf at the Korean DMZ