By: Anna Wozniak
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
anna@thevillagereporter.com
The two inches of wet mud underneath Sgt. Schubert’s service poncho made it hard for him to settle in, but so did the adrenaline in his veins. The year was 1967, and Gene Schubert had just landed in Vietnam.
A third-generation American serviceman and Ohioan out of Defi-ance County, Gene had always wanted to live up to the standards handed down to him by his greatest role models, his grandparents, Howard and Pauline (Scherve) Osmon.
He was raised by his grandparents after his mother found herself widowed, remarried, and then her husband drafted the week after their honeymoon.
After attending college for a year, Gene joined seven other Defiance County youths in signing up for the draft to Vietnam, and that would change him forever.
“I was very lucky to be raised in a Christian home,” Gene shared, “and once I went into Vietnam, and we got to a place where we could gather ourselves, I got down on my knees and I looked up into the heavens, and I said, “God, I am yours. You want to take me? That’s fine. I understand. If not, please protect me,” and throughout my whole time in Vietnam, he protected me. Why he protected me, and not some others, I don’t know.”
It was after this prayer that Gene met his machine gunner and first ammo bearer, and this prayer would really be put to the test.
“The way it works is they have a machine gunner, and you have a first ammo bearer and a second ammo bearer. And in case of a firefight, the first ammo bearer is feeding the machine gun, the second ammo bearer is about 10 meters away so when they need those rounds, you’ve got him there to get to him where they’re close by,” Gene shared.
“That night, after we met, my machine gunner told me that I needed to pull guard duty, and he said, “I’m going to pull the first two hours, the first ammo bearer will pull the second two hours, you pull the third two hours, so go get yourself some sleep.”
“And I said, “where do you sleep?” He said, “you have a poncho, don’t you?” I said “yes.” “Just put it on the ground. That’s where you’re sleeping.”’
And that’s what he tried to do. So, there he was, his first night in Vietnam, trying to settle in, his poncho slowly sinking under the mud from his body weight, and his body buzzing with adrenaline as he tried to take what he would later term “the Jungle” in for the first time.
And then, something he would never forget. “All of a sudden, I heard a brat dot dot dot dot, and right next to me were 50 caliber machine gun holes in my poncho. It ran right next to me.”
He had later found out that it was friendly fire from a helicopter that had misidentified them as the “VC,” or “Vietcong.”
The next time he would claim his prayer worked was the very next morning, and his opponent would be nature itself.
After spending a long night in a wet foxhole, he wiped away the sleep in his eyes to load up for a “search and destroy mission.” The helicopter took them to a rice patty, where it hovered as they disembarked.
“My machine gunner jumps out, first ammo bearer jumps out after him, and then it’s my turn to jump out. It’s just hovering over the top of rice paddies full of water, and when I jumped out, I happened to catch the edge of a 500-pound bomb crater. Now, I’ve got my pack on, and with all that weight on me, I started going down the side and, I know I’m dead.”
“I’m grabbing, scraping my fingers trying to pull myself, and there’s no way. Luckily, God was watching over me. My machine gunner saw what my situation was, and just as my hand was going under the water, he grabbed me and started pulling, and I got out.”
First impressions mean something some-times, and Sgt. Schubert’s first impression of Vietnam was wholly indicative of the Hell he and his companions were to see throughout the next few months.
“In September of 1967, I was hit by an IED, which at that time we called Claymore Mines. I got hit in the back, but it was all superficial wounds. It wasn’t anything real serious, and I was again blessed.”
This incident would earn him a Purple Heart, before his own heart took a heavy blow.
His grandfather, who had been his main role model, had passed away, and his family had petitioned the Red Cross to allow him a Leave of Absence (LOA) to attend his funeral in January of 1968.
Sadly, Sgt. Schubert’s flight was a day late, and he missed the funeral, but he didn’t let that ruin his 30 days back in “the World,” as those in Vietnam referred to elsewhere as.
He had his eye on a girl he had met in high school, who hadn’t been allowed to date at the time.
Well, that wasn’t the case during his LOA, and he went to her parents’ house to ask them for permission to take their daughter, Barbara, on a date.
After the date, Gene told his brother, “I just met my wife, she just doesn’t know it yet.” Her parents, impressed with Gene, in-vited him to Barbara’s sister’s wedding to work as an usher, and the two fell in love.
Gene knew Barbara was young, and wasn’t sure what the future held, so he asked her to write to him every day, making up his mind that he would propose to her when he returned if she kept her word to do so. And everyday, the letters came.
They were the bright-est part of his days, when he and his company would go on missions into unsecured, enemy terri-tory.
He shared that they “would pull search and destroy missions during the day and ambushes at night. We would be out for three weeks in the jungle and then come back to our base camp, and then spend a day or two recuperating, until the beginning of Novem-ber of 1967.”
“We left to go out on our normal mission situation, or so we thought, and we didn’t see our base camp again until July of 1968.”
Most of this time was spent thwarting Vietcong forces in what is known as “the Iron Triangle” in Cambodia, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
This trail was used from 1959 until 1975. It was a network of inter-connected trails that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam used to transport supplies, weapons, and reinforcements through Laos and Cambodia to Vietcong forces.
It would be out here that Sgt. Schubert would experience what he can only explain as God’s grace twice more.
After a grueling day with a jungle walk last-ing 12 miles one way, and completing a “village seal,” where a village would be surrounded and searched for Vietcong, Sgt. Schubert woke up, and immediately called for the medic.
He was numb from the neck down, and the medic could see nothing wrong with him. They had to leave to go out on another mission, and so Gene was advised to rest the rest of the day.
At around 4:30 that afternoon, Gene began to return to normal. However, he would soon learn that one third of his platoon was to never return at all.
“Now, in my opinion, that was God protecting me,” Gene said of the event. Who knows what would have befallen him had he gone out on that mission.
In January of 1968, something called the Tet Offensive changed the tide of the Vietnam War.
The Tet Offensive, named after the new year’s celebration, rep-resented the collusion of Communist forces and their coordinated attacks.
It was during one of these such attacks that Gene experienced the loss of a companion that touched his heart the most.
“He should have never been there to begin with,” shared Sgt. Schubert, “I think had it been today, he would have been considered autistic, and so I took him under my wing. He followed directions pretty good, but there were just some things he couldn’t mentally come up with.”
“But in Vietnam, during that time with the draft, everybody got in. We had as many as some 350,000 to 400,000 troops…we had 6 million men that served.”
“That day, we had been in a firefight. And I got worried that I had to move my machine gun, because I had the fire-power, to another location and they needed me there right away.”
“So, I stood up, got my first ammo bearer, and Ray was still there with him like this,” he gestured as though he was positioned holding a gun up to one side while leaning over, “and I told him, “Berg, let’s go. Fly, Ray, c’mon, go!” He never moved.”
“So, I went over to get him because I thought maybe for some reason he couldn’t hear me, and a sniper had killed him, leaving only half of his face.”
They needed Gene’s machine, and he knew he had companions to help, and so he told his First Sergeant that Ray had been killed, and that they needed to get his body. “We don’t leave people behind,” Gene said sincerely.
“So, my First Sergeant went to go get the body, and the sniper shot him. Now, it killed him. Why that sniper never killed me, the actual machine gunner? I don’t know. Again, I think it was God that protected me.”
The attacks seen in the Tet Offensive differed from before because Northern Vietnamese / Vietcong allies targeted urban areas, raising the death toll for both the South Vietnamese and the American forces.
This strained the relationship America had with South Vietnam, as well as weakened sup-port for the war at home. President Johnson’s han-dling of the Vietnam War fell to a 35% approval rating, and Sgt. Schubert himself experienced the shift in the American perspective upon his arrival at the airport in San Francisco for Ray William Berg Jr’s funeral.
“And when I got in, there were all kinds of protesters. I got spit on, I got called a baby killer, and all kinds of bad names.”
When he flew back home, Barbara had come to pick him up with her father, who Gene had already asked for permission to propose from.
In the back seat of the Buick Wildcat, Barbara turned to Gene and asked, “what’s my surprise,” alluding to their last letters. It was then that Gene got on his knees and proposed, on her father’s condition, that Barbara graduate college.
Barbara graduated on Sunday, May 31, 1970, and became Mrs. Sgt. Gene Schubert on Saturday, June 6, 1970. She worked hard, as did Gene, to support their life together.
She did so teaching for Central Local Schools, and he by first honing his skills as a salesman, and second by becoming an independent manufacturer representative.
He ran a successful company before deciding to work for Schaffer Man-ufacturing Corporation, due to their commitment to their employees and like-minded morals.
Barbara, after fully retiring in 2016, convinced Gene to retire in 2021, and the couple have been enjoying their time together traveling, visiting with their sons Joseph and Scott, and being in love, sharing that they have “a very blessed life.”
He is proud that his boys are both in agriculture, as his family has farmed Northwestern Ohio for generations, with his ancestors arriving in the 1630s on the Putnam side and in the 1800s on the Schubert side.
This pride in family is apparent in everything Gene does, from the way he speaks about his loved ones to the fact that he has family heirlooms dating back to the 1800s, lovingly donated to the Historical Society of Put-nam County to increase accessibility for future generations.
“So, my grandfather was a wise man, and he taught me things that I tried to maintain and keep. One of the things he taught me was that generation, after gen-eration, after generation, you forget names. Names aren’t important.
“He said “your grandchildren, great grandkids, they won’t know me because I’ll be dead. And they don’t need to know me. But if you want to honor me, the values that I’m teaching you today, your character, your honesty, your love, your faith in God, if you can teach those things to your offspring, and they can teach it to their offspring, your families will be blessed, number one, and, number two, you honor me and honor all the generations before me,” and so that’s what we’ve tried to do.”
