“Most were tankers, which were like rolling atom bombs that could explode at any time. “We had 37 trucks in that convoy,” Carter remembers. Mallory pauses, then puts one hand to his face and says, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk anymore about that day, except to say that we got hit, and I did what I had to do.”įellow Army veteran Fred Carter, also assigned to the 359th, was there, too, driving the gun Jeep named Little Brutus alongside Mallory’s larger, armored truck namesake. There was the driver, which was me, then there was one radio operator and two weapons guys.” “I was driving the armored gun truck called Brutus,” he says, tears welling in his eyes as he remembers. 23, 1971, while driving an armored gun truck in one of these kill zones, Mallory showed the world what he was made of. The company protected military convoys of 5,000-gallon fuel tankers as they made their way 180 miles west to supply troops in Pleiku, through treacherously steep mountain passes littered with enemy kill zones.
The following year, he was in the jungles of Vietnam and assigned to the 359th Transportation Company.
I was scared all the time and I often cried.”īorn and raised in the Montpelier area of Virginia’s Hanover County at a time when schools were still segregated, Mallory graduated from the all-Black John M. “I was drafted when I was 20,” he says, “and when I first got to Vietnam, I could hear shooting right from the get-go. In the late afternoons, dissipating sun beams and whispering breezes coax twilight across the verdant meadows that surround his idyllic home.īut 50 years ago, Mallory was living 8,300 miles away in a concrete bunker near Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, where, instead of sunbeams and whispering breezes, the air was full of palatable fear and never-ending gunfire. Mallory, who recently received a Bronze Star Medal 50 years after saving the lives of two fellow soldiers, life in Mineral, Va., is good.
A Hero Gets His Due Virginia Vietnam veteran receives Bronze Star 50 years after saving two livesįor Army veteran Ronald L.
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