Exactly 40 years after the ambush, Lyon County resident Frank Sloat finally spoke face-to-face with the man who saved his life.
Thursday’s reunion was a little amazing for both Sloat and for Mike Rilley, who served with Sloat in Vietnam and carried him through enemy fire to a helicopter after Sloat’s was wounded in the leg.
“Man, I can’t even believe you’re alive!” Rilley said, according to Sloat’s wife, Joy. “I thought you were dead. When we turned you over, you didn’t look alive to me.”
Sloat first got back in touch with Rilley again a couple of years ago, when Jerry Gibson of Paradigm Digital Systems helped him look up his old unit.
“He went back to 1967, brought up my unit and asked ‘Do you know any of these guys?’” Sloat remembered. “I said, ‘Well, I know Mike, I know Chick ...’”
Gibson sent out some e-mails. The next day, the phone rang. It was Rilley, who now lived in Texas.
“Mike said ‘You still have a leg?’” Joy Sloat remembered. “He had never found out about what happened.”
Sloat did still have a leg. What he didn’t have were all the details of the attack. But after Thursday’s reunion, also joined on speakerphone by Peter “Chick” Ciccatelli, he finally had the whole story.
Man down
On March 15, 1967, Marine Sgt. Frank Sloat was leading a reconnaissance patrol. He and his men were scouting out a route that might work for an Aontos — a tracked vehicle armed with recoilless rifles whose name was Greek for “The Thing.”
The lieutenant who was supposed to lead the mission had gotten sick, leaving Sloat in charge. The unit set out about 6:15 a.m. About three and a half hours later, the men walked into an ambush.
“Our man on point got hit and they had us pinned down,” Sloat said.
They’d dealt with Viet Cong insurgents before. But this time the attackers were North Vietnamese army regulars. Worse, the North Vietnamese had drawn a “U” around the patrol, exposing them to fire from three sides.
“I called in an air strike and started to go to the front to find out how badly my point man was hit,” Sloat said. “That’s when I got hit. I went down.”
Sloat had been hit in the leg by a bullet from an AK-47. The bullet clipped his femoral artery.
Rescue
A corpsman packed Sloat’s wound with mud to keep him from bleeding to death. An evacuation helicopter tried to approach, but was driven off by gunfire, taking 52 hits before it got away.
The unit started pulling back. A soldier dragged Sloat along. That soldier made it 50 yards before being hit himself. Sloat was lying exposed on a dike in the midst of a firefight.
Another chopper finally approached, this time getting closer. As it did, Rilley — who was then 19 years old — came up to Sloat. A bone was sticking out of Sloat’s leg and Rilley said couldn’t even tell if his sergeant was alive.
No matter. Rilley picked Sloat up and carried him in his arms to the helicopter, somehow without getting hit himself. The chopper flew off with Sloat, who was eventually taken back to the U.S. and spent the next year in the hospital.
Rilley never saw Sloat again until last week. Until the e-mail, he never knew he had saved Sloat’s life.
He knows now.
Reunion
Sloat didn’t lose his leg, although it did become infected for a long time from the mud that had been packed into it. The Marines retired him after that. And that, it seemed, was that.
Until the e-mail. And the phone call. And Thursday’s reunion.
The three men talked long into the night Thursday. Rilley had actually gone back to Vietnam to see the place where the ambush happened. Sloat, perhaps understandably, had no desire to return. But he did want to see the others again.
Sloat, Rilley and Ciccatelli and their families plan to meet sometime next year in New York. All because of a chance conversation in a computer shop.
“Sometimes that’s the way things are,” Sloat said. “You start talking to people and they say ‘Maybe we can find something out.’”