The Eagle Grove man jumped in the cab and started to drive away when a chunk of a mortar round shattered the windshield on the passenger side. If someone would have been sitting in the passenger seat, they would have been killed or injured.

But Bliss got away unharmed. It was a close call for the Army mechanic whose military service also took him to West Germany and posts in the United States.

Bliss has lived in Eagle Grove since 1971, but he is a native of Illinois. He grew up on a farm near Carthage, Illinois, where his family raised corn, soybeans, hay and pigs. He dropped out of school at 14 when his father died, but later earned his GED.

When a lot of other young men in the area got drafted, he enlisted in the Army. He was inducted into the service on June 18, 1968, and was sent to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri for basic training.

-Messenger photo by Bill Shea
Army veteran Ronald Bliss, of Eagle Grove, was stationed in South Vietnam, West Germany and a couple of bases in the United States between 1968 and 1971.

Basic training, he said, “really wasn’t that difficult.” He was in good shape from working on the farm and had already honed his marksmanship skills by hunting.

After his basic training was complete, he stayed at that post for training as a wheeled vehicle mechanic.

He was then sent to Bad Kissgen in West Germany, where he was assigned to a maintenance unit that was part of the 3rd Infantry Division. His father, Elden Bliss, had been a member of the 3rd Infantry Division during World War II.

He was then sent back to the United States and was soon dispatched to South Vietnam. He was promoted to sergeant and placed in charge of a motor pool in the 69th Signal Battalion. He said a motor pool is essentially a fleet of military vehicles. His fleet consisted of 5-ton trucks, 2 1/2 ton trucks, pickups, Jeeps and ambulances. These were all parked outside at Tan Son Nhut Air Base north of Saigon. According to Bliss, there was a big tarp set up that the mechanics would park vehicles under to work on.

The soldiers lived in barracks made of tin that had sandbags piled up three or four feet high all around them to absorb shrapnel from mortar rounds.There were also bunkers where the soldiers could take cover when mortar rounds started hitting.

“The Vietnamese loved to mortar that place,” Bliss said.

“The first one was there before you knew what was going on,” he said of the incoming explosives. “Then you went to the bunkers.”

After the attacks, the soldiers went into the jungle surrounding the base to look for the enemies who fired the mortars.

“You’d catch them and turn them over to the MPs,” he said.

Theft by Vietnamese civilians was another problem the troops dealt with. Bliss said whenever the soldiers were transporting supplies in the trucks, people would try to climb in and steal things. A soldier had to sit in the back to protect the supplies. According to Bliss, Army truck drivers tried to avoid coming to a full stop to prevent people from jumping on the vehicles.

“When you came to a stop sign, you never stopped, you just slowed down,” he said.

He left South Vietnam on Aug. 31, 1970, and flew to San Francisco, California.

“It wasn’t pretty when you landed in California,” he said.

He said there were people lining the fences at the airport throwing things at the returning troops and spitting on them.

He was then sent to Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. But the unit there really didn’t need the services of a mechanic and Bliss wanted to spend the remaining months of his Army service closer to home in the Midwest. Someone suggested that he go to the Pentagon and request to have his orders changed. So the sergeant walked into the highest headquarters of the United States military and asked to have his orders changed. The first person he talked to was a corporal whom he recalled was downright obnoxious. He next talked to a captain who was less obnoxious. Finally, he talked to a colonel who was pretty nice. The colonel assigned him to Fort Riley, Kansas.

He served in Kansas for about four months before being discharged. He then moved to Eagle Grove,where he first worked for a John Deere dealership. He then worked for Umthun Trucking for 25 years and for Gold Eagle Cooperative for 22 years before retiring.