‘Kenny, you got hit’

When Ken Esplan landed in Quang TrI province in Vietnam in July 1969, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Sitting at a table, assigning newly arrived soldiers to their posts, was his next-door neighbor from Blooming Prairie.
“He was just typing away, with two fingers, and didn’t look up when I got to the table,” Esplan said. “He goes, ‘name?’ and I said, ‘I’m Ken Esplan from Blooming Prairie. Do you know me, you little…?’ It was quite a reunion.”
It got even better.
“He put me in a security platoon, where nobody actually knew what they did,” Esplan said. In fact, his neighbor told him, “they just sit around and drink beer all day because nobody in the platoon knows what to do, either.”
But also new to the platoon: A new lieutenant, who decided the men would do recon during the day and set up ambushes at night. Eventually, the soldiers were sent to a fire suppression base, where they would shoot into the hills in an attempt to turn back the Viet Cong.
“That was about four miles from the DMZ; definitely no man’s land,” Esplan said. The Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone was the area around the former border between North and South Vietnam.
During their two-week assignment there, Esplan and his squad had guard duty every third night, but April 10, 1970, was a night off.
“We were sitting on top of our bunker, having a beer,” Esplan said, “when a mortar shell landed right behind us; blew all four of us off the bunker.”
In the chaos that followed, Esplan’s ears were ringing and his head was spinning. He also had a 6- to 8-inch portion of the shell “sticking out of the fatty part of my back, but I didn’t know it. We got into the bunker and got on the machine guns.”
Inside the bunker, his best friend saw the injury.
“He said, ‘Kenny, you got hit.’ And I said, ‘no, I didn’t.’ And he says, ‘you got shrapnel in your back.’”
Esplan paused, sitting with his emotions. He’s done his work, seeing therapists and confronting the PTSD he was diagnosed with after the war. Still, the strength of the memories sometimes surprises him.
After a few moments, he continued.
“The medic didn’t want to pull it out there; I was medevacked out the next morning, back to Quang Tri,” Esplan said.
The hospital unit was seeing heavy casualties; a doctor asked Esplan if they could treat him without taking him to surgery – and without any anesthetic.
“I thought I might get a few days off, but they pulled it out, put in eight or 10 stitches, and sent me back out that afternoon,” he said. He was away from his platoon for less than a day.
He was also the only one wounded; his best friend lost a front tooth – “it was so smooth it looked like a dentist removed it,” Esplan said. The mortar had landed beside an armored personnel carrier parked near their bunker, likely saving them all from much more serious injury.
And that was it – for about a month.
Then, during what Esplan called “an impromptu roll call, I guess,” the platoon leader handed him a Purple Heart.
He doesn’t discuss it much, though it’s gotten easier with time and counseling.
“I’m proud of it,” Esplan began, and the emotions stepped in again. He took a deep breath, then finished his sentence.
“I’m proud of it, but it brings up bad times, too,” he said. “There’s not really a way to talk about it. It’s not brought up very well; most people don’t understand (the war) or know much about it.”
Esplan was honorably discharged from the Army in August 1970. He was 22 years old.
In his platoon of between 18 and 22 men, nine didn’t make it home alive.
He and a friend who had also served in Vietnam returned to the country a few years ago.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Esplan said. “Hanoi was the same; still very dirty, backward …”
They traveled south to visit the places where they’d slept in the dirt, in the jungle, half-submerged in water and worse. It was beautiful, he said, “but there were some very beautiful places when I was there” during his service.
“I’ve always liked the (Vietnamese) people,” Esplan said. “I felt sorry for them. They had to work both sides to stay alive and saw things nobody should see.”
His recent visit left him feeling “a bit better; they’re doing pretty well.”
Esplan said his family didn’t know about his injury until well after the fact. He’d requested ahead of time that his parents not be notified if he sustained a survivable injury.
“I’d written a letter to my buddy after that,” and word soon got around Blooming Prairie – and to Esplan’s mother.
“She wrote me, said, ‘what happened? How come I didn’t hear about it?’ She wasn’t very happy about that,” he said
He appreciates the effort now underway to make his hometown a Purple Heart City, but admits he doesn’t know much about it.
“I assume they want to honor those in the military, those who sacrificed, but …”
Though he was wounded in combat, under fire, Esplan said there really was no “safe” service.
“I was out in the jungle, but there were other (jobs) where guys were just as likely to get hurt as I was.”