Bruce Hoben, who became a first lieutenant in the Army, was drafted. When he found out he was drafted, he enlisted and went through training. When he left, he went to battle but not in Vietnam, though he was in the Vietnam War. He went to the Dominican Republic on a military plane, sitting on all his gear. The fighting took place in the first couple weeks. He had left his fiancé at home.
He was on the east bank of the Ozama River, outside the city, Santo Domingo. It was a nice day, few clouds, and Bruce Hoben and his unit waited to move into the city. The Republica Dominicana was clearly a third world country. When he would later walk through the streets, he would see children in dumpsters looking for food and if the only good reason to free the city was to give its people food and help, it would have been a good enough reason.
The Marines had crossed the river and gone around the city. Between the Army and Marines they had it surrounded and were just about ready to go in and take the city; when, in the distance, they heard the drum of the engines of a P-38 fighter plane. Without thinking, the soldiers around Bruce started to shoot at the plane as it passed, then repassed the city.
He thought to himself, no one knows if it’s friendly or an enemy. They just shot at it assuming.
The men around him were shooting with machine guns, handguns, whatever they could find. Then after what seemed like many minutes, somebody hit the plane squarely. It’s made that sound, he thought to himself, the same one you hear in every war movie where the plane stutters and goes down. It hit the city. Bang! Everyone around him cheered. Then something quite unexpected happened; he heard the people in the city cheering with them. A great sound! Those few awkward moments when the soldiers just decided that the best idea was to shoot were now justified by the cheering of the people in the city as the plane went down. It was the only plane that ever came. The soldiers knew the Dominican army had an air force, but that one plane was the only evidence of it that they saw the entire time.
Bruce Hoben never fired a shot in the Vietnam War, but he served his country to the best of his ability. He thought, “Why not?” After serving his country he went back home, to Connecticut, to see his fiancé but… that is another story!