Shot down in Cambodia, one soldier walked barefoot to safety

Tony Karreci as photographed during his service in Viet Nam. Photo courtesy of Tony Karreci

ST. LOUIS • Slithering through an irrigation ditch, the lost soldier looked up into the sky he’d been shot out of and saw fireflies. He followed them.

The move forward marked the beginning of a journey for a GI whose UH-1 helicopter crash landed earlier that day, May 2, 1970, in Cambodia with eight people on board. They were lucky the chopper, which was in flames, didn’t explode. But soon after the initial attack, new threats emerged: getting shot on the ground or captured.

Some of the soldiers scattered through the elephant grass. A few others ran through a rice paddy toward the jungle.

Soon, three of them were killed, including Rodney Griffin,whose remains were recently identified and returned to mid-Missouri 45 years after his death. Hundreds gathered at Centralia High School a week ago to pay respects and recall a tragedy some had long forgotten.

But others have never stopped living with the incident.

Four on board the chopper that day were taken as prisoners of war.

Only Pvt. Tony Karreci — a high school dropout who enlisted in the Army to get his life on track — remained undetected. He had been deployed just long enough to go through jungle survival training and get started as a door gunner in the 229th Aviation Battalion, 1st Air Cavalry Division.

Unarmed and in hiding under a bush by the irrigation ditch, he said the enemy blew right past him. His portrayal of battle quickly went from abstract to real.

“I was an 18-year-old kid who had no idea what war was about,” Karreci, now 63, said by telephone from Arizona. “It hit me that these guys wanted to kill me.”

Once it was dark, he laid low in the murky water and crawled until he saw the fireflies.

“To me they seemed like flares,” said Karreci. “I was probably in a state of shock to some extent. When I saw that, I got out of the water. That’s when I realized I was covered in leeches.”

He ripped them off and then, oddly, ditched his wet combat boots. He thought they’d slow him down, a lesson he learned out of necessity as a child of Italian immigrants. He grew up on a ranch near the Snake River in rural Idaho, where his father was a field hand.

Young Karreci used to run wild, often barefoot, to prolong the life of his shoes.

“It was one of those things that was probably fortunate,” he said. “I didn’t leave any tracks, just footprints.”

BAREFOOT MARCH

The anniversary of his three-day barefoot trek to safety coincides with a controversial time in history when protesters at Kent State University marched against President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Karreci’s chopper was one of many used as a workhorse to move U.S. troops and supplies in and out of there.

Karreci said there was even a sense of excitement among soldiers because they intercepted caches of weapons being used to resupply the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. On the ground the first night after he was shot down, he unwittingly found himself in a village with huts on stilts that seemed abandoned, perhaps because of the recent invasion.

But he didn’t linger.

“The only thing I did was keep moving,” he said.

He tried to stay away from roads. He hid from workers in a rice paddy.

Desperate for fluids, he sucked water off leaves and drank from the bottom of a deep bomb crater.

The second and final night, he got caught in a swamp so thick with reeds that the only way he could get through it was by falling face-forward. Artillery fire, possibly lured by the noise, exploded around him.

He hunkered down, and eventually slept in the swamp. He dreamed of being rescued by a helicopter. He awoke May 4, 1970, to the same dismal surroundings, but later that day would see a large U.S. helicopter flying low. He walked toward it and discovered a temporary base being built next to a rubber plantation.

Activity on the base slowly stopped as Karreci approached it. His feet were torn up and wouldn’t fit into boots. His face was crisscrossed with fine cuts. Other than a pineapple he had discovered and cut open with his dog tags, he hadn’t eaten.

“I actually wasn’t all that hungry,” he said. “The whole time I was probably more scared than anything.

“I wanted a cigarette real bad.”

Later, when trying to retrace his route, Karreci learned he likely had been walking in circles when he came across the base.

‘I FELT GUILT’

Karreci flew again. He made sure to pack extra flares, weapons and food. He had another particularly close call as a door gunner, but it was on base, when injuries from a mortar attack sent him home a few months later.

After Vietnam, Karreci settled into the Phoenix area. He finished a GED, took college courses and worked for Motorola.

His father told him that he thought the war messed him up. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He built dirt mounds in his front yard to take cover behind. And he became addicted to alcohol.

Sober for 27 years, he has been married to his second wife for 30 years. Last week, he made a regular trip to help patients at a detox center. Sometimes he reverts to his war experiences at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

“We go through life and experience stuff,” he said. “We can either dwell on what happened and use it as an excuse to abuse alcohol, drugs, squander your life — self-pity is what that is — or pick yourself up and start moving forward.”

Still, even Karreci’s voice cracked when asked about the seven others on the downed chopper with him back in 1970. He was new to the crew then and didn’t know them well. He didn’t know the names of the four passengers until after he got back to safety.

Over the decades, though, he said he always thought about the three soldiers whose remains weren’t found until recently. He was aware two of the prisoners of war died in captivity. He hasn’t spoken with the two who returned alive after nearly three years in captivity.

“I feel guilt because I made it out, and they didn’t,” Karreci said. “What could I say to those guys?”

Co-pilot Daniel F. Maslowski, currently of Charleston, S.C., and crew chief Fred Crowson, of Pensacola, Fla., went on to have full careers in the military. Now in their mid-60s, they gather for annual reunions with friends they met as POWs in Cambodia.

They said they’d like to hear the story about how Karreci found his own way home in the jungle.

“He had to figure out the best direction,” said Maslowski. “I give him all the credit in the world.”