PENNSYLVANIA NATIONAL GUARD’S 56TH STRYKER BRIGADE COMBAT TEAM

Generations at war

Soldier’s battles span from Vietnam to Iraq

Chris Rosenblum

He turned 19 in the tropics and 59 in a desert. Neither birthday was especially memorable — except that each time, people wanted to kill him.

Submitted Photo

Randy Diehl when he served in Vietnam. Submitted Photo

View larger

• Memories of those who served

Forty years after Randy Diehl fought in Vietnam, he tackled his second war. As a sergeant first class, the Sinking Valley resident served in Iraq this year with the Pennsylvania National Guard’s 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, returning home last month.

If he needed a reminder of time’s passage, one came while talking to a fresh-faced soldier at the Joint Coordination Center under his command. Diehl knew a guy back home with the same last name. Yeah, the kid said, that’s my grandfather.

His pap had joined the Penn State police in 1972, the same year Diehl started with the State College Police Department.

“This was his grandson working for me in Iraq as one of my guards,” Diehl said. “That was a little strange.”

The thing is, Diehl didn’t have to go.

In spring 2008, with deployment in the air, he held a golden ticket — enough years to retire from the National Guard without a day overseas. A pension, to join the one from 29 years as a policeman, was his for the taking.

Friends urged him to stay. So did his three grown daughters. He already had done his duty, they argued.

His wife, Kay, wanted him home. But she also knew he would kick himself for not going, and told him so. She spoke the truth.

In the end, Diehl thought of his friends, some of whom he had trained since their teenage years. He had led scout and reconnaissance platoons in the 2nd Battalion of the 112th Regiment. He had even done some recruiting.

How could he say goodbye, leave everyone to track down insurgents while he went hunting with one of his hand-built muzzleloaders?

“I felt it was deserting them,” he said. “And I just couldn’t do it.”

Dodging dangers

By 1968, not many teenagers were rushing to join the Army like the Warriors Mark farm boy.

Diehl enlisted straight out of Tyrone High School, following in the footsteps of his father, a buck sergeant in Europe during World War II.

That fall, Spc. Diehl trained to be a small arms repairman. Almost all his class went to Vietnam. In March 1969, he wound up at Camp Evans, a large base on the northern coast near Hue, with the 175th Maintenance Company.

Plywood hooches sheltered him from choking dust and the monsoons’ relentless sheets. He spent his days inspecting and servicing the rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers used in the heavy fighting to the west in the A Shau Valley.

“It was pretty busy,” Diehl said. “A lot of weapons came through our shop.”

Periodically, Diehl’s company made house calls.

Into the valley they flew, choppered to remote jungle outposts that made Camp Evans seem like the Waldorf Astoria. At places like Firebase Charlie Brown, Diehl replaced sights and barrels surrounded by little more than sandbagged bunkers and tents clinging to muddy hilltops.

On one hop, he almost died — from his own clumsiness. Sitting in the Huey’s open door, his feet dangling over the skids, he lost his balance taking photos.

“I started to fall out and I reached back and grabbed the back of the pilot’s seat,” he said.

For adrenaline, though, the Mother’s Day attack took the prize.

Barrages were common, but on this 1969 night, Camp Evans fended off a ground assault. Diehl found himself in a perimeter bunker, shooting grenades into the darkness as fast as they could be tossed to him. Mortar rounds, some duds, sailed in.

“I could hear them hitting the ground around us,” he said. “They didn’t detonate; they just buried in the ground.”

After a couple of hours, the attack stopped. Outside the wire, a C-47 gunship circled over retreating North Vietnamese troops, tracers corkscrewing down. Diehl battled shock.

“While it was going on, there wasn’t any problem,” he said. “After it was over, and it got quiet, then it was a little scary.”

Continuing to serve

He finished his tour in March 1970, but the Army wasn’t through with him yet.

Before his discharge the next year, he worked as an armorer and range instructor. He also trained in law enforcement, his eye set on becoming a policeman.

State College gave him the chance, ending a nine-month job search. He turned in his badge in 2001.

A decade earlier, when Desert Storm flared, he picked up soldiering again.

He was weeks shy of 40, almost too old. Still, the National Guard recruiter was encouraging. Diehl could return at his old rank of sergeant, if he passed the physical. He did, having stayed in shape, and ended up with the predecessor of today’s Charlie Company based in Tyrone and Bellefonte.

“I did like the Army,” Diehl said. “If I hadn’t been on the police force, I would have had a career in the Army.”

As the years passed and his hair grayed, he sharpened his infantry skills, leading men half his age. He deployed last year as a senior operations noncommissioned officer with confidence.

But more than once, he questioned his judgment.

Running gunnery ranges 20 hours a day during fall training at Camp Shelby, Miss., left his 58-year-old bones aching. One night, he directed a lost Stryker convoy to a range in a driving rainstorm.

“When I got a chance to sleep, the only place I had to lie down was in the back of my Humvee, in a wet uniform,” he said. “That was a lousy day.”

Life with Headquarters Company didn’t improve much outside Camp Liberty in Iraq.

The first three months, he worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, before the schedules eased a bit. His center coordinated patrols between coalition forces and Iraqi police, and held detainees. In addition to 20 soldiers, Diehl commanded six Iraqi interpreters and two local women who searched female prisoners.

As if they weren’t enough to keep track of, Diehl also had National Guard quick-response teams setting up in his compound for raids. And always, the complex security system — 10 cameras on guard towers, an infrared camera with a range of three miles atop a 107-foot tower — required constant attention.

“We only had Starlight scopes in Vietnam, and they didn’t work half the time,” Diehl said.

More than the stray rocket or two that fell occasionally, suicide car bombers posed a huge threat. Just down the road from the center, one veered toward a Stryker platoon. At the last second, a bus got in the way. The explosion killed seven Iraqis and wounded two Americans.

Diehl imagined trucks crashing through his gate, bombers darting in, and the nightmare scenarios pushed him. He looks back on the tour, and he is certain: The nine months were harder than his year in Vietnam.

“I did my job and things like that then, but I had nobody to take care of,” he said.

Now, he no longer worries about a platoon’s safety.

Those days are over. He’s finally retired, in charge of nothing but the remote control, free to build rifles or take a hunting trip this fall to Nebraska. No more fatigue, no more strain: All he’ll have are lasting friendships, the soldiers of his final war.

“I’ll go visit,” he said. “I’ll go see them now and then.”

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.