How Vietnam Taught Me to Hear an Incoming Rocket in My Sleep
This story is part of Brothers In Arms — my collection of firsthand military memories, Vietnam stories, veterans’ experiences, and the strange bits of Marine Corps life that never made it into the history books.
People sometimes say they sleep with one eye open.
It’s a metaphor for never completely letting your guard down. You’re resting, but part of you is still watching for trouble.
Vietnam taught me something similar.
I learned to sleep with one ear open.
And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.
In 1969, I was serving with the Marines of the 3rd Marine Division at Camp Red Devil, AKA Dong Ha Combat Base, not far from the DMZ.
Nighttime in Vietnam wasn’t quiet.
Not where we were.
The 155mm howitzers of the 6th Battalion, 33rd Artillery could shatter whatever passed for peace when they fired outgoing rounds into the night.
BOOM.
Then another.
BOOM.
When you’re new, a sound like that can practically launch you out of your rack.
But the strange thing about human beings is what we can get used to.
Eventually, I could sleep through it.
Like Living Next to an Airport
I’ve sometimes compared it to living next to an airport.
The first few nights, every airplane wakes you up.
After a while, your brain apparently decides:
That’s normal. Go back to sleep.
That’s what happened with the artillery.
The guns were enormously loud, but they were our guns.
Outgoing.
After enough nights, they became part of the background noise of Vietnam.
But there was another sound my brain never learned to ignore.
It was much quieter.
A faint sound somewhere in the distance.
Pop.
That could wake me up.
Because that one might be coming our way.
The Sound I Learned to Fear
The North Vietnamese regularly fired Soviet-designed 122mm rockets at American positions.
Early in my assignment near Dong Ha, I hadn’t yet learned to recognize them being launched.
What I remember most was what happened when one got close.
The sound grew rapidly until it seemed as though a commercial jet airliner was coming in for a landing right on top of your hooch.
That’s about the only comparison I can make that comes close.
Then somebody would scream:
“INCOMING!”
There were times in those early days when there wasn’t enough time to make it to the bunker just outside our hooch.
When that happened, there wasn’t much strategy involved.
You got flat.
As flat as you could possibly get.
And waited.
Fourteen Pounds of Explosive
The 122mm rockets used by North Vietnamese forces weren’t firecrackers.
A commonly used Soviet-designed 122mm rocket carried a warhead containing roughly 14 pounds of high explosive, surrounded by a steel casing capable of producing deadly fragmentation when it detonated.
But lying on the ground while one was coming in, I wasn’t thinking about kilograms of explosives or Soviet weapons engineering.
I was thinking:
Don’t let the shrapnel get me.
That’s it.
There isn’t a lot of profound philosophy going through your head when you’re waiting for an incoming rocket to hit.
You listen.
You wait.
And you hope.
Then, if you’re still there afterward, you get up.
Then Something Changed
After I’d been there awhile, I began noticing something.
I could hear the rockets before everyone started yelling “Incoming!”
Somewhere out in the mountains there would be that faint:
Pop.
It wasn’t particularly dramatic.
Compared with our artillery, it was almost nothing.
But I’d learned what it meant.
I could distinguish that sound from the outgoing artillery and the other noises around Camp Red Devil.
And apparently I could do it while I was asleep.
A 155mm howitzer could fire and I’d keep sleeping.
But let that little pop come from the wrong direction and somewhere inside my sleeping brain a switch flipped.
Wake up.
Move.
Bunker.
I would scramble out of the hooch and head for the shelter.
Sometimes before anybody had to tell me what was happening.
How Does a Sleeping Brain Do That?
Looking back more than fifty years later, this is the part that still fascinates me.
How could I sleep through artillery powerful enough to shake the night and wake up because of a faint noise miles away?
I don’t remember consciously teaching myself to do it.
There was no Marine Corps class called:
How to Identify Incoming Rockets While Sound Asleep 101.
My brain simply learned.
One sound meant:
Normal.
Another meant:
You might die.
Apparently that distinction was important enough that some part of me remained on duty even when the rest of me was asleep.
That’s what I mean when I say I learned to sleep with one ear open.
The Body Learns Before You Realize It
Combat teaches lessons you never signed up to learn.
Vietnam taught me that danger didn’t always come from the other side. Sometimes the worst moments came from our own weapons, something I wrote about in Friendly Fire: The Nicest Name for the Worst Day.
You notice where the bunkers are.
You notice where the exits are.
You notice which sounds belong and which ones don’t.
You learn that a sudden silence can sometimes be as important as a sudden noise.
Eventually you aren’t consciously analyzing everything.
You just react.
That can be useful in a war zone.
It can keep you alive.
The problem is that nobody tells your nervous system when the war is over.
When the War Comes Home
Years later, I would understand some of this differently.
We have a word for constantly scanning the environment for possible threats:
Hypervigilance.
It’s something many people living with PTSD know very well.
For me, it didn’t begin in a therapist’s office or in a VA pamphlet.
Some memories followed me home more directly than others, including the events I later wrote about in Ghosts in the Barracks.
It began in Vietnam.
It began with artillery.
It began with bunkers.
And it began with one tiny sound in the mountains that my brain decided was too important to ever sleep through.
Pop.
That’s one of the strange things about surviving a war.
You can leave Vietnam.
You can travel thousands of miles.
You can take off the uniform.
You can grow older.
You can build an entirely different life.
But somewhere deep inside your brain, a young Marine may still be standing watch.
Sleeping with one ear open.
The strange thing about danger is how quickly the brain learns which sounds matter. I learned to sleep through outgoing artillery, but the faint pop of an incoming rocket could wake me instantly.
If you served in a combat zone, was there a particular sound your brain learned to recognize as danger—even when you were asleep?
Incoming rockets, mortars, small-arms fire, aircraft, alarms—or even an unusual silence. Share what you remember in the comments. Sometimes a sound can bring back a memory more clearly than a photograph.
Continue Exploring
Boot Camp Didn’t Prepare Me for Vietnam
Boot camp taught me how to be a Marine. Vietnam taught me how much the training couldn’t prepare me for.
The Soundtrack of Vietnam: What We Really Listened To
Music was everywhere in Vietnam—but at night we kept the volume low enough to hear the incoming rockets.
Living With PTSD: A Marine Explains It
The danger eventually ended, but some of the habits my brain learned in Vietnam came home with me.
When Vietnam Finally Came Home
Leaving the war zone didn’t necessarily mean leaving the war behind.
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More firsthand Marine Corps memories, Vietnam stories, and experiences that stayed with me long after the war.
Respect the story. Respect the veteran. Every unit, every position, and every tour in Vietnam was different. If you remember incoming rockets, artillery, mortars, or life near the DMZ differently, share your experience. Different memories don’t make either veteran wrong. Add what you remember, challenge the history if necessary, but keep it civil.
This story reflects my personal memories of serving as a United States Marine in Vietnam in 1969, including my recollections of Camp Red Devil near Dong Ha, outgoing artillery, incoming rocket fire, and the sounds I learned to recognize while serving there.
These events happened more than five decades ago. Other veterans who served in the same area may remember particular sounds, locations, units, weapons, or events differently. Those differences are part of the nature of firsthand wartime memory.
My discussion of hypervigilance describes my own experience and how I came to understand it later in life. It is not intended to diagnose PTSD in other veterans or suggest that everyone who served in combat experienced the same thing.