Positivity: Veteran reconnects with soldier who saved his life 40 years ago
Article published Feb 11, 2008
“I just wanted to tell a story about a friend of mine,” said retired U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Jimmie Ford. “He saved my life in Vietnam.”
Ford, 66, of Mountain Home, remembers the events vividly. He was 23 at the time. Many in the 25th Division lost their lives that day, early in the Vietnam War, when the unit walked right into a base of Viet Cong fighters and quickly found themselves surrounded. For more than 40 years, Ford’s rescuer may as well have been a ghost to him.
“The day was March 15, 1966. I was wounded, and so was that boy I’m trying to tell a story about,” Ford said. “He’s my hero.”
Ford finally contacted Sgt. 1st Class James White just a few weeks ago using information he found on the Internet. He’d never been able to thank the man for saving his life.
“We were in a firefight. We were coming to the landing zone. I was forward observer (a soldier who scouts ahead and directs air strikes). My R.T.O. (radio telephone operator) had got shot up pretty bad.”
Ford says he helped the soldier into a chopper and strapped the radio telephone on his own back so he could continue the mission alone.
“All of our sergeants, just about, were killed. I came to this little, narrow stream, about 15-20 feet across.”
Deciding he had to cross, Ford got on a log. In the middle of the creek, he came under machine gun fire.
“I jumped into that water. It was pretty deep, way over my head,” he said.
The gear he carried — the radio, his weapons, maybe 100-pounds of ammunition — was pulling him below the surface. What’s more, he’d already been shot, though he didn’t know it.
“I start shedding that stuff. Then I felt something poking me,” he said.
Trying to discover what it was, he grabbed a stick. At the other end of the stick was White, pulling Ford to the bank.
“He’s James White, but he’s a black guy,” Ford said. “That was the first thing I saw, was his name tag, ‘White,’ and … He pulled me out of the water and took off.”
White, 63, of Columbia, S.C., recalls the events, though he says some of it is not as clear after the passage of time. He was 20 at the time.
“He (Ford) had been hit by small arms fire, and he was lying in the creek” White said. “I went over and pulled him up.”
White says enemy fighters who had been waiting in tunnels and bunkers were crawling out of holes in the ground, some wearing no more than underwear and carrying no more than knives, others brandishing all kinds of guns. It was White’s last day of combat in the war, though Ford would remain in Vietnam until the end of that year.
“As we were moving forward, trying to move out of an ambush, I got hit on my left side,” White said. “They med-evac’ed me back to a hospital, and two weeks later they med-evac’ed me back to the U.S.”
As White was moving forward, Ford was looking for his commanding officer.
“I got back to my C.O.,” Ford said. “He looked at me, says, ‘Ford, did you get hit?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’
“‘You got blood coming out of your boot,’” Ford remembers his commanding officer as saying.
Ford says he had shrapnel in his ankle and was treated in Vietnam.
White says he was treated for another year at the Valley Forge Veterans Administration Hospital in Pennsylvania. He was lucky, he says, that the bullets that cut him up skirted around his ribs. The fight was so extreme that it took two days before the military could retrieve the bodies of all the fallen soldiers, after the shooting stopped, White says.
Ford says he never got to thank his hero during the war because White was taken back to the states so quickly. Only a few weeks ago, Ford found information about White on the Internet and contacted him.
“I said, ‘Remember pulling me out of the water?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah,’” Ford said.
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