Before Doug Gray was known as the voice behind Marshall Tucker Band hits “Can’t You See,” “Heard It In a Love Song,” and “Fire On the Mountain,” he was United States Army Sergeant E-5 Gray and served in Vietnam.
Gray was in the military from July 1968 through February 1970.
In honor of Veteran’s Day, Gray shared some of his memories. Gray remembers he rode a bus with 30 or 40 other young soldiers to Fort Jackson in South Carolina. But he admits he wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen.
“I didn’t know that I was going to get woke up the next morning with the bugle call and had to wake up and run outside and stand in formation,” he said. “I’d never stood in formation in my life. I never had learned to march, never had to learn anything like that.”
He joked he was in the Fat Boy Platoon when he was at Fort Jackson and spent eight weeks in basic training and broke bones in his foot.
From there, he went to Oklahoma to join the armory division. He knew they shot rockets and thought it was going to be a terrible job. It was going to be loud. He was getting close to being shipped out and was excited. Gray’s orders came in for Vietnam, and he went home to see his parents in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Then he got orders to go to California, which he said was a “whole different learning experience.”
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“I thought it was going to be real cool to be out there, but it was the same regime type of thing that you get up in the morning, and you go do this, and you train there, and they taught me a little bit about typing, and they taught me a little bit about how to handle people and stuff like that,” he said.
Doug Gray was Unprepared for Military Life
He learned one of his friends, who joined the military a month before he did, stepped on a landmine and died before Gray arrived in Vietnam. Gray was able to go home one more time before he shipped out, and his mother was scared after the death of his friend.
“She said, ‘I don’t think I want you to go back,’” she said. “I said, ‘Mom, I ain’t got any choice. I’m committed now.’ And being committed meant that I had a duty to fulfill.”
Once in Vietnam, the army stationed Gray in Bein Hoa near Saigon. He was close enough to hear bombs going off. Sometimes, he can still hear them. He joined the motor pool to take supplies to the field. Gray made sergeant when his unit suffered 40 deaths on the same day.
“You got to have somebody in charge,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared for that. I don’t like the fact that I am in charge. And I like that everybody works together. So my platoon and my guys all worked together, which made it easier because they knew me for about four weeks or something like that. The First Sergeant said, ‘Well, I know you from South Carolina, so you got to be tough.’ He says, ‘You’re going to have to grow up real quick.’ And I went, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do?’”
His friend’s wife would send cookies, and Gray was happy to eat the crumbs. His job was handling the petroleum out of Saigon Bay.
“We tried to make the best of it,” Gray said. “We did really good, and I created a lot of friends that I stayed with for a long time. Most of ’em are passed now.”
Doug Gray’s Compound in Vietnam Came Under Attack
Gray remembers their compound coming under attack and using crank phones to communicate.
“We still ended up being put in a position where I wasn’t happy about being there,” he said. “One day, I had to be a guard. The next day, I was watching people or carrying people back who were trying to go awol. I had a lot of different duties over there because I made the rank so fast. You didn’t worry about getting paid. That’s not what you thought about because pay went home to Mom and Dad.”
Gray called Vietnam “a whole different world” and a “dream you didn’t want to live in.”
“I couldn’t wait to get back and play music,” he said.
And that’s what he did.
(Photo supplied by Doug Gray)
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