Among the memories Bill Carpenter carried from the battles of Vietnam as a Special Forces sniper is a photograph taken from the body of a North Vietnamese officer. Carpenter, the St. Clairsville American Legion Veteran of the Month, reflects on this and other grim realities of war.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Bill Carpenter of Rayland has grim memories of the Vietnam War, where he and others were tasked with particularly dangerous missions during the brutal fight.

He was named the St. Clairsville American Legion’s Veteran of the Month for May.

Carpenter served from 1965-69 in the U.S. Army Special Forces.Carpenter was among the combatants of the Battle of Song Tau Cau River on May 15, 1967, when he and about 40 other soldiers were ambushed in the river valley by nearly 1,000 Viet Cong firing from fortified bunkers and tunnels.

“I’d already made my peace with God,” he said. “When you’ve got 800 of them and there’s 40 of you, you don’t really expect to come out of it. So many people got wounded and killed and helicopters shot down. I did what I had to do. We helped each other, and by the grace of God some of us came out of it.”

Carpenter was a member of the elite “Tiger Force,” initiated by Maj. David Hackworth as an outfit to “out-guerilla the guerillas.”

“We didn’t wear military uniforms, we wore camouflage uniforms, nothing with U.S. insignias on them, because a lot of the operations we were on, we weren’t supposed to be at. It was a classified project,” Carpenter said, adding they normally operated in six- to 10-man teams.

“We were looking for a prisoner of war camp where they were holding American prisoners. We never did find the Americans. We found some Vietnamese. We reduced, I think, 29 Vietnamese,” Carpenter said. He said they also targeted enemy supplies in that area.

“Where the battle mostly was fought at was along these river banks. A lot of big stones and trees and everything,” he said.

In 2016, helicopter pilot Chuck Kettles was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading a group of six helicopters to rescue the soldiers, and for going back for eight who were unaccounted for until the end.

“We told him, ‘Don’t come in here, you’ll never make it out,”” Carpenter said. “The one that finally took us out, he thought he had everybody because they said that’s all there is, and he’s already in the air heading back to the hospital. They said we’re still eight guys down, and he turned around and come back.

“They thought all the troops had been picked up. The rescue choppers were leaving and a call came on the radio, Chuck Kettles’, that there were still eight guys on the ground. He turned around and came back by himself without any gunship support or any other support, and as he was coming around to pick up these eight guys, a mortar round hit his chopper in the air,” Carpenter said.

“It threw one of my guys out of the chopper and he had the presence of mind to dive for the chopper in midair and wrap his arms and legs around the skid and hung on to it for about 15, 20 minutes ’til he made it back to the hospital.”

Three days after the battle, American forces attacked with B-52s.

“They came in with 60 of them,” Carpenter said. “It was amazing to see. They were coming in with waves of three at a time just plastering this valley, and then 30 minutes after they dropped the last bomb, we went in after the dust had settled. They came in with just regular jets and dropped napalm and stuff like that.

“They (Vietnamese) were still coming out of holes in the ground and caves, still wanting to fight. I felt bad for some of them. Blood was coming out of their ears and their eyes, but they wouldn’t surrender. We had no choice but to kill them.”

The memories have remained with him.

“That was by far the worst one,” he said. “You would be in an engagement every day, then you would go a week and never be in an engagement.”

As a sniper, Carpenter was ordered to take out high-ranking targets in the field. On one occasion while searching an officer’s body afterward, he found a photograph of the enemy combatant. Carpenter still has the picture.

“He just happened to have this on him. It’s kind of sad. There’s some Vietnamese writing on the back and I never really knew what it said until about 20 years ago. I have some Vietnamese friends out in Columbus,” Carpenter said.

The officer apparently intended to send the picture to a friend as a birthday gift.

“I’m not happy that I killed him, but had the situation been reversed he would have killed me,

guaranteed,” Carpenter said. “He was a North Vietnamese officer.”