AUSTIN — Today, Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chairwoman Dawn Buckingham, M.D., is proud to introduce the next installment of the series highlighting the VLB's Voices of Veterans oral history program. This week, we highlight the service of Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Lee Wilson who served in U.S. Army.
Born and raised in Killeen, Texas in 1936, Wilson said he was born before Fort Cavasos was built in Central Texas, instead he said, Killeen a stop along the Santa Fe Railroad.
"This was a very small farming community of about a thousand, twelve hundred people. We didn’t have any military connection at all at that time, of course. We had four cotton gins, and this was a cotton shipping center area," he remembered. "This town was actually built by the Santa Fe Railroad for that purpose, for shipping cotton out of here"
Wilson said he was a part of the Naval Reserves in Austin, Texas while he was in high school before graduating from Killeen in 1954.
"My senior year in high school I joined the Naval Reserve in Austin, Texas, 60 miles south of us. And I served in the United States Naval Reserve for eight years. Actually, only one year in the Navy, then I transferred to the Army ’cause they started an Army Reserve unit here in Killeen."
Wilson said following high school, he went to work at First National Bank as a bookkeeper in the vault. While he thought of going to college, he knew the financial burden was high and his parents wouldn't be able to afford it. He had family in Fort Worth and they told him he could, if he wanted to, live with them and attend Arlington State College.
"I never had heard of Arlington State College before and I didn’t even know what it was. So my mother and I took a trip up there and went out and stayed with my aunt there for a couple of days and went out to Arlington," Wilson explained. "It was a couple of miles out there off the highway which is now I-20, but in those days, it was just a regular road. But anyway, I decided right there that that’s where I wanted to go to school. It’s the first college campus I was ever on so I didn’t know what to compare it with. I just knew that in order to better myself and my social standing, so to speak, I needed to get an education if I possibly could."
Wilson said the first thing he did when he set foot on campus was head to the ROTC offices which would begin an award-winning illustrious career in the Armed forces. Wilson's military career would begin in Infantry Officers Basic course and Jump School at Fort Benning, Ga. before being assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, NC., serving as a Platoon Leader in Troop “A” 17th Cavalry.
In 1966 Wilson volunteered for combat duty and would go to Vietnam, ultimately serving three tours with the 5th Special Forces Airborne group, where he was the Commanding Officer Detachment A-503, MIKE Force, one of the most decorated active duty units in the U.S. Army. For reference, the 5th Special Forces Airborne group would later play a pivotal role in the early months of Operation Enduring Freedom.
"I was in a place where you could, somebody didn’t like who you were or why you were there, and they might do just about anything and often did," he said about his first impressions of Saigon. "My first assignment was routine in that nothing happened to us while we were processing through that detachment there in Saigon, and we boarded an aircraft three days later and were flown to Nha Trang for assignment."
One of Wilson's assignments was supporting Project Omega, a long-range reconnaissance unit with two rifle companies. Wilson explained that those two companies were the Company Omega and explained their role.
"When they deployed to the field, they would set up as perimeter security for the operational base as well as a reaction company in case the recon team got into something out there that they couldn’t handle," he explained. "They weren’t out there to handle any combat, they were out there to sneak and peek and look and report. And if they bumped into something that was bad, and they often did, then we were there to help ’em out."
Wilson, who shared so many stories of service in Vietnam, spent time talking about being asked to train his men for airborne infiltration at a site selected because they wanted to build a Special Forces camp there but it needed to be secured first. While they didn't know what was there because of the heavy vegetation, Wilson said they completed the jump with no causalities but he did get injured because he landed in trees, he said, weren't supposed to be there.
"They told me that the vegetation on the drop zone would be six inches to a meter high, and when we made this jump, it was in trees that they didn’t know were there, 100 feet tall a lot of it," he explained. "I was hurt myself on that jump. At 700 feet which is jump altitude in combat jumps, you don’t have time to do much more than check your canopy to make sure you have a parachute up there and then cut your bag loose."
Wilson also explained the moment of impact.
"My bag caught in a tree and just slammed me right down on top of a big tree stump that had been cut years ago by the French. I thought I had been impaled after the shock went away of the landing. I thought I was feeling moisture underneath my back and I couldn’t feel anything from my waist down. But what had happened, both my canteens had burst when I hit that tree stump," he explained. "I couldn’t move. I was laying there on this tree stump and I kept looking, trying to look straight down to see what was sticking up through me. I just was positive in my own mind that I had been impaled by something."
To listen to LTC Wilson tell his story, click the button below:
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Veterans can email VoicesofVeterans@glo.texas.gov to tell their stories. Please note that the Veteran must be a resident of Texas at the time of their interview.
Voices of Veterans is a state agency's first Veteran oral history program. It records the stories of Texas Veterans through their time in service and after returning home from combat.
The VLB records interviews with Veterans over the phone or in person. Their interviews are then permanently archived in the Office of Veterans Records at the GLO, where they join the historical documents of other Texas heroes such as Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Barret Travis.
Veterans' interviews are also available to researchers, historians, genealogists, and the public. These precious records inspire future generations and remind us of our Veterans' sacrifices.
To listen to the over 500 archived stories of Veterans documented through the GLO's Voices of Veterans oral history program, click the button below: