Wounded in the Vietnam War
A Purple Heart changed Predmore’s life
By Amy Kyllo
STAFF WRITER
PREDMORE/EYOTA — On an early March day in 1971, two Sikorsky H-34 Kingbee helicopters loaded with Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group teams departed from Kon Tum, Vietnam, and began flying toward Duc Co Camp. Partway through their flight, they received a call that redirected them.
The helicopters became part of what was known as a Bright Light mission, the name for dangerous rescue and recovery missions.
On that Bright Light team was Minnesota-native U.S. Army Special Forces Sgt. Lawrence Predmore, flying toward a new mission that would change the trajectory of his life.
“Being crazy helps a lot (with being part of Studies and Observations Group),” said Predmore, who now practices veterinary medicine in Olmsted County. “Once you were in it, if you had a brain, you’d get out, but you didn’t want to get out because you didn’t want to leave the other guys.”
After 30 minutes of flying into Cambodia, the teams reached their new destination, a clearing where two men had emergency signaled an American pilot a few hours earlier.
“I got a call wondering if they were some of our people,” Predmore said. “I told him we didn’t have anybody out there at that time, but we had had (a Montagnard MACV-SOG) team that got ambushed about four days before that.”
Montagnard, meaning “inhabitant of the mountain” in French, refers to peoples of various indigenous groups from the highlands of southern and central Vietnam. The Montagnards were part of the MACV-SOG teams alongside Predmore and other Special Forces members.
As Predmore and his team arrived, the first helicopter was too heavily loaded to get in close enough for rescue.
“Our chopper went in because it was lightly loaded,” Predmore said. “We got one of the guys out. We didn’t see the second man at all.”
However, the man they came to rescue was not the only one waiting for their teams. Enemy forces had surrounded the clearing.
“They knew we’d be coming,” Predmore said.
As shots were exchanged, one bullet struck Predmore in his elbow.
“I’d like to catch the (man who shot me) and buy him a beer,” Predmore said. “What are the chances of (my wife and I) running into each other if I wouldn’t have got wounded? And he paid my way through vet school because, if you were 40% or more disabled, you got five years of school paid for by the government.”
Predmore had grown up in a military family, with veterans of the Civil War, World War I and World War II all finding a place in his lineage.
He enlisted in 1967.
“(It) seemed like a good idea at the time,” Predmore said. “The job was supposed to be to stop the expansion of the Communists, and we did slow them down.”
Before long, Predmore was in basic training in Fort Campbell near the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Next, he went for training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri before attending jump school at Fort Benning in Georgia. It was in jump school that Predmore passed a battery of tests and expressed interest in Special Forces.
Predmore went on to Special Forces trainings across the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico, attending military diving school, field problems and more.
By spring 1969, Predmore was on an operational team. Together, they attended scuba school, jungle warfare school in Panama and had three months of Vietnamese language training.
“We were almost always working with indigenous personnel, and they wanted you to have a rudimentary knowledge of the Vietnamese language,” Predmore said.
However, his training was only partially useful, because the indigenous Montagnard personnel did not all speak Vietnamese.
“We got along,” Predmore said. “We usually had an interpreter. They knew a little bit of English, and I knew a little bit of what they were talking about. (There was) a lot of hand signals.”
Predmore was stationed at the top-secret security clearance Forward Operating Base 2 also known as Command and Control Central in Kon Tum. There, Predmore estimates about 50-60 Americans worked on around a dozen teams doing reconnaissance work. A team generally consisted of two to five Americans and four to 12 indigenous Montagnard personnel.
“The ideal mission was if they didn’t ever know you were there,” Predmore said. “It depended on what area you drew for your mission. Some of them were known really hot targets. Some of them were pretty quiet.”
The Studies and Observations Group did missions in Cambodia, North Vietnam and Laos. Predmore’s work included monitoring the Ho Chi Minh Trail, tapping phone lines and more.
“It’s an experience you would never want to have missed,” Predmore said. “When you were doing it, a lot of times, you were absolutely terrified, but … you were going to keep going.”
One thing Predmore said his team was never successful at was capturing a prisoner of war for intelligence purposes.
“Your goal was to keep him alive and get all the information you could,” Predmore said. “But first, you had to catch him, and then, you had to control him until you got him to a landing zone, and then, you had to get him on the chopper and get him back. We were never able to accomplish it. Some of the other teams did.”
Predmore said over 95% of his missions were helicopter inserts. At the drop area, the soldiers would descend via a ladder or by rappelling.
The work was dangerous.
“There were very few people who made it through a year without getting a hole of some kind in them,” Predmore said.
Predmore was in Vietnam about a year and received a Purple Heart for his injury. However, because of the legalities of the mission, his personnel records state he was injured in a classified area of the Republic of Vietnam, not Cambodia.
Predmore was the only U.S. citizen on the Bright Light team that day, and he was supposed to have been dropped off in Vietnam because the U.S. troops were not supposed to go to Cambodia.
However, he decided to stay on the Bright Light team because the pilot they were communicating with who had seen the men signaling was an American, and Predmore wanted to ensure a native English speaker was on the mission.
“Henry Kissinger and (President Richard) Nixon were telling people we had absolutely no troops in Cambodia,” Predmore said. “In the late spring of ‘70, they quit letting Americans get on the ground in Cambodia. We were going into Laos. … We were launching Vietnamese teams into Cambodia, and it was one of those that got ambushed that we were going after when I got hit.”
Looking back, Predmore said he is grateful for the injury.
“(The enemy) did it perfect,” Predmore said. “He paralyzed my radial nerve, so my arm didn’t work. … If the chopper would have been going 6 inches slower, he’d have got me through the chest, if it had been going a little faster, he’d have missed me entirely.”
Predmore was discharged from the military in south Texas. Back in the U.S., Predmore met his future wife, Susan, in San Antonio, and they dated long distance for a while.
“I said, … ‘(We) can’t afford these long-distance calls, so we either get together or go our different ways,’” Susan said. “That’s how we got married.”
In the late ‘70s, Predmore graduated from veterinary school and started practicing. Today, he continues his home-based veterinary practice, doing predominantly small animal work.
By Amy Kyllo
STAFF WRITER
PREDMORE/EYOTA — On an early March day in 1971, two Sikorsky H-34 Kingbee helicopters loaded with Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group teams departed from Kon Tum, Vietnam, and began flying toward Duc Co Camp. Partway through their flight, they received a call that redirected them.
The helicopters became part of what was known as a Bright Light mission, the name for dangerous rescue and recovery missions.
On that Bright Light team was Minnesota-native U.S. Army Special Forces Sgt. Lawrence Predmore, flying toward a new mission that would change the trajectory of his life.
“Being crazy helps a lot (with being part of Studies and Observations Group),” said Predmore, who now practices veterinary medicine in Olmsted County. “Once you were in it, if you had a brain, you’d get out, but you didn’t want to get out because you didn’t want to leave the other guys.”
After 30 minutes of flying into Cambodia, the teams reached their new destination, a clearing where two men had emergency signaled an American pilot a few hours earlier.
“I got a call wondering if they were some of our people,” Predmore said. “I told him we didn’t have anybody out there at that time, but we had had (a Montagnard MACV-SOG) team that got ambushed about four days before that.”
Montagnard, meaning “inhabitant of the mountain” in French, refers to peoples of various indigenous groups from the highlands of southern and central Vietnam. The Montagnards were part of the MACV-SOG teams alongside Predmore and other Special Forces members.
As Predmore and his team arrived, the first helicopter was too heavily loaded to get in close enough for rescue.
“Our chopper went in because it was lightly loaded,” Predmore said. “We got one of the guys out. We didn’t see the second man at all.”
However, the man they came to rescue was not the only one waiting for their teams. Enemy forces had surrounded the clearing.
“They knew we’d be coming,” Predmore said.
As shots were exchanged, one bullet struck Predmore in his elbow.
“I’d like to catch the (man who shot me) and buy him a beer,” Predmore said. “What are the chances of (my wife and I) running into each other if I wouldn’t have got wounded? And he paid my way through vet school because, if you were 40% or more disabled, you got five years of school paid for by the government.”
Predmore had grown up in a military family, with veterans of the Civil War, World War I and World War II all finding a place in his lineage.
He enlisted in 1967.
“(It) seemed like a good idea at the time,” Predmore said. “The job was supposed to be to stop the expansion of the Communists, and we did slow them down.”
Before long, Predmore was in basic training in Fort Campbell near the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Next, he went for training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri before attending jump school at Fort Benning in Georgia. It was in jump school that Predmore passed a battery of tests and expressed interest in Special Forces.
Predmore went on to Special Forces trainings across the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico, attending military diving school, field problems and more.
By spring 1969, Predmore was on an operational team. Together, they attended scuba school, jungle warfare school in Panama and had three months of Vietnamese language training.
“We were almost always working with indigenous personnel, and they wanted you to have a rudimentary knowledge of the Vietnamese language,” Predmore said.
However, his training was only partially useful, because the indigenous Montagnard personnel did not all speak Vietnamese.
“We got along,” Predmore said. “We usually had an interpreter. They knew a little bit of English, and I knew a little bit of what they were talking about. (There was) a lot of hand signals.”
Predmore was stationed at the top-secret security clearance Forward Operating Base 2 also known as Command and Control Central in Kon Tum. There, Predmore estimates about 50-60 Americans worked on around a dozen teams doing reconnaissance work. A team generally consisted of two to five Americans and four to 12 indigenous Montagnard personnel.
“The ideal mission was if they didn’t ever know you were there,” Predmore said. “It depended on what area you drew for your mission. Some of them were known really hot targets. Some of them were pretty quiet.”
The Studies and Observations Group did missions in Cambodia, North Vietnam and Laos. Predmore’s work included monitoring the Ho Chi Minh Trail, tapping phone lines and more.
“It’s an experience you would never want to have missed,” Predmore said. “When you were doing it, a lot of times, you were absolutely terrified, but … you were going to keep going.”
One thing Predmore said his team was never successful at was capturing a prisoner of war for intelligence purposes.
“Your goal was to keep him alive and get all the information you could,” Predmore said. “But first, you had to catch him, and then, you had to control him until you got him to a landing zone, and then, you had to get him on the chopper and get him back. We were never able to accomplish it. Some of the other teams did.”
Predmore said over 95% of his missions were helicopter inserts. At the drop area, the soldiers would descend via a ladder or by rappelling.
The work was dangerous.
“There were very few people who made it through a year without getting a hole of some kind in them,” Predmore said.
Predmore was in Vietnam about a year and received a Purple Heart for his injury. However, because of the legalities of the mission, his personnel records state he was injured in a classified area of the Republic of Vietnam, not Cambodia.
Predmore was the only U.S. citizen on the Bright Light team that day, and he was supposed to have been dropped off in Vietnam because the U.S. troops were not supposed to go to Cambodia.
However, he decided to stay on the Bright Light team because the pilot they were communicating with who had seen the men signaling was an American, and Predmore wanted to ensure a native English speaker was on the mission.
“Henry Kissinger and (President Richard) Nixon were telling people we had absolutely no troops in Cambodia,” Predmore said. “In the late spring of ‘70, they quit letting Americans get on the ground in Cambodia. We were going into Laos. … We were launching Vietnamese teams into Cambodia, and it was one of those that got ambushed that we were going after when I got hit.”
Looking back, Predmore said he is grateful for the injury.
“(The enemy) did it perfect,” Predmore said. “He paralyzed my radial nerve, so my arm didn’t work. … If the chopper would have been going 6 inches slower, he’d have got me through the chest, if it had been going a little faster, he’d have missed me entirely.”
Predmore was discharged from the military in south Texas. Back in the U.S., Predmore met his future wife, Susan, in San Antonio, and they dated long distance for a while.
“I said, … ‘(We) can’t afford these long-distance calls, so we either get together or go our different ways,’” Susan said. “That’s how we got married.”
In the late ‘70s, Predmore graduated from veterinary school and started practicing. Today, he continues his home-based veterinary practice, doing predominantly small animal work.
