Falls veteran served as radioman during Vietnam
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NEWTON FALLS -- When Robert Wujcik got drafted and decided to join the Navy, he wanted to be part of the Patrol Boat, River, or PBR.
Instead, he spent his year in Vietnam as a radioman, which likely saved his life.
"If I had been in one of those patrol boats going up and down the Saigon River, I probably would have been shot, or even killed," Wujcik, 72, said. "Someone was looking out for me."
Wujcik, a lifelong Newton Falls resident, graduated from Newton Falls High School in 1968 and was working at the Ravenna Arsenal (now Camp James A. Garfield) when he got his draft notice in June 1969. He took a train from downtown Warren to Cleveland for his physical and entered the Navy under the delayed entry program in August 1969. He attended boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Unit in Illinois and during the transititon between boot camp and being assigned to a unit, he was a member of the drill team and honor guard despite never having been in a marching band.
"They liked the way I marched," Wujcik said, laughing.
In December 1969, he received orders to go Radioman A school in Bainbridge, Md., where his unit learned how to set up a communications center. He had to learn Morse code and, in order to pass his training, he had to be able to send and receive a certain number of words per minute. The class also involved being put into a makeshift communications center where trainers would break things and he and his crew had to fix them.
"The messages would be garbled or missing altogether and we had to figure out what the problem was," Wujcik said.
Following radio school, Wujcik was sent to Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, and counter-insurgency training, which is where sailors learned how to evade capture and what to do if they were captured, how to escape, avoiding booby traps and firing range training. He said part of the training involved six groups of 10 sailors having to survive in the woods for a week, where they had to forage and hunt for food, as well as avoid enemy fire.
Wujcik said the trainers "captured" the trainees and put them in a makeshift POW camp, where they were questioned and underwent endurance tests.
"They would make us stack pine needles or rocks into piles and then knock the piles down so we'd have to start over. We were thrown in pits with garbage and had to do pushups in just our underwear," Wujcik recalled.
He said they also underwent "soft interrogation" drills, where they were asked to write a letter home without giving away any information about their location or mission, as well as "hard interrogation" drills where they were knocked to the ground and struck for not answering questions. On the final day of training, they were asked to salute the communist flag and the trainees rebelled and refused, but were ordered to do so. As the soldiers were about to salute, the trainers changed the flag to the U.S. flag, signifying their training was over.
Wujcik said on the way back from its weeklong training in Little Creek, Va., the unit stopped at a souvenir stand and the old woman who owned it wanted to know what all the young men were doing there.
"We were dirty and smelly from being in the woods, so we looked like vagrants. I told her we were all heading to Vietnam after going home for a few weeks for R&R and she said she would buy all of us dinner later that night. But we all wanted to get home, so we declined. She bought us all a bag of peanuts instead," Wujcik recalled.
After a few weeks in Newton Falls, Wujcik flew out of Travis Air Force Base in California to Vietnam in June 1970. He thought he was going to be part of Patrol Boat, River, but his orders sent him to the communications center in Saigon, where he worked 12-hour shifts with 24 hours off in between.
"Saigon smelled like garbage," he said. "I saw sandbags, barbed wire and people with guns. On my second day, I was on lookout on the roof and I counted the bullet holes in the concrete behind me and I thought 'what did I get myself into?' I was told if I saw anything strange to call it in. Well, everything was strange so I was calling every five minutes."
He was issued a military driver's license and received special clearance because part of his job was to pick up messages from the Army base and bring them back to the Navy base, which was about a 5-mile drive.
"Most people in Saigon were driving motorcycles or mopeds, and I was in a Chevy Suburban, so I stuck out like a sore thumb," Wujcik said.
He said he carried a 45-caliber pistol and his passenger carried a shotgun just in case they came under fire. He said he delivered messages to the admiral in the war room while battles were being fought and he saw pushpins in the maps on the wall to signify where the next attack might be.
Wujcik said another part of his duties was putting Morse code messages on microfiche so they could be accessed later. On the night shift, he and his unit burned bags of messages in a furnace pit and put the ashes in a galvanized trash can filled with water so they could not be read by the enemy.
After his year in Saigon, his unit got orders to go to Norfolk, Va., where it spent a year decommissioning two ships -- the USS Chukawan, a fleet oiler, and the USS Pawcatuck, a replenishment oil tanker. He was discharged in August 1973 and returned to work at the Ravenna Arsenal.
Wujcik met his wife, Kathleen, at a bar in town and they dated for eight months before getting married in July 1974. She graduated from Newton Falls High School two years after him, in 1970.
He and Kathleen, a retired teacher, have been involved in the Newton Falls Kiwanis Club since 2008, where they assist with the backpack program that provides food, as well as books, for students in the district. Wujcik also is a member of the Newton Falls American Legion Post 236, AMVETS and VFW.
Robert Wujcik
AGE: 72
RESIDENCE: Newton Falls
SERVICE BRANCH: Navy
MILITARY HONORS: Vietnam service and campaign medals
OCCUPATION: Retired from Ravenna Arsenal, antiques dealer since 1990
FAMILY: Wife, Kathy, of 48 years