Quote · The Shawn Ryan Show
#317 Johnnie Clark - Surviving One of the Deadliest Jobs During the Vietnam War
Where this was said
Troy Bridge: Fire, Sacrifice, and an Unrecognized Hero
At 1:03:55 · chapter starts 58:00
Troy Bridge is Clark's first real taste of sustained combat. The bridge, a former rail trestle on Highway 1, was the lifeline of North-South supply movement and a perpetual NVA target. The night attack comes with over 400 enemy soldiers; doped-up suicide sappers strap themselves to the structure and blow it, killing the machine gun team on the center span while the men below are still alive. Big Red fires without ceasing throughout the assault, drawing every enemy weapon onto his position. Corporals Tedesco and Rosalie — who had come only to say farewell before their flight home the next day — are killed trying to reach the men trapped on the broken bridge. None of them receive recognition. It takes readers of Guns Up!, a congressman, and a 30-year wait before Big Red gets a posthumous Bronze Star — a medal Clark calls far beneath what he deserved [1] — Johnnie Clark "Big Red fired relentlessly as 400+ NVA stormed Troy Bridge, keeping machine gun positions alive while the bridge was blown up beneath him. …" 56:10 .
Tracer rounds — one in every five bullets fired from an M60 — created a visible laser beam pointing straight back to the gunner. Every enemy army was trained to knock out the machine gun first, meaning you had roughly 7 to 10 seconds of sustained fire before you were dead. Clark arrived to learn every gunner in the 5th Marines had already been killed or wounded.
