He fought ‘two wars’: Vietnam and the war within

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of Vietnam War stories shared by Manatee County residents in conjunction with the PBS documentary “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

Danny McKee was a troposcatter radio operator in places such as Khe Sanh, Phu Bai and Chu Lai during the Vietnam War.

Yet his high-tech training, working with integrated circuitry and 16 channels of radio, fax and teletype as an Army Signal Corps member was of no help in finding a job when he came home.

McKee, 69, joined the Army in 1967 out of high school. He was trained to operate a tropospheric scatter radio, ideal for communicating long distances over Vietnam’s rugged terrain.

He was assigned to the 337th Signal Company in Da Nang in 1968. Upon his arrival in Da Nang, he saw the metal coffins of American war dead being loaded onto another plane.

His unit sent him and 15 others to Khe Sanh, which had recently been the scene of the most-famous siege of the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

“The chopper was flying real high, and then it dropped real fast to the runway. We all ran to cover. In late April or early May, the siege had been lifted,” McKee recalled for the Bradenton Herald. “But that doesn’t mean there was no incoming.”

At Khe Sanh, he found an extensive underground bunker system as well as a hot plate and refrigerator in his unit area – after all, his company needed electricity for those tropospheric radios.

RELATED: Palma Sola VFW post commander served with heroism in Vietnam

But other creature comforts were scarce.

“What water we had came in on cargo planes. They would slide the pallet off without landing,” he said.

“One time two 2 1/2 -ton trucks rolled by filled with dead Marines. It was not a very pretty sight,” McKee said.

In July 1968, American forces at Khe Sanh destroyed their base and evacuated the area.

McKee was part of a convoy led by a tank through terrain that had been carpet-bombed by the Americans to keep the Viet Cong at bay.

At Dong Ha, an American base five miles from the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam, McKee and the other Signal troops got showers, hot meals and new uniforms.

Witness to ‘2 wars’

In all, McKee spent 22 1/2 months in Vietnam and witnessed what he calls the “two wars.”

“There was the Vietnam War, and the war within,” McKee said. The American military began to fray with incidents of fragging, drug abuse and more.

What he saw in Vietnam and at home on TV when he took 30 days’ leave to visit his parents in North Port – particularly a “60 Minutes” report on the controversial Gulf of Tonkin incident – began to sour him on the war.

RELATED: Rome plow driver scarred by intense combat in Vietnam’s ‘Iron Triangle’

“The bottom line on Vietnam is that we should avoid foreign entanglements,” he said.

After the war, he tried unsuccessfully to get a job with a power or telecommunications company, and he eventually went to work with an irrigation company. He also worked for a golf course developer and learned to operate heavy equipment. Eventually, that paid off with a job with Manatee County government, lasting until 2011 when he retired.

He and his wife, Penny, have been married since 1998, and now live on a quiet road in East Manatee.

They met in a convenience store. She was on the way to visit her daughter in Australia. He had spent several R and R’s in Australia during the Vietnam War. They immediately found something to talk about, including the fact that she had protested the war while still a high school student.

“He talks about the war now more than he used to,” Penny McKee said. “He’s got a lot of time on his hands now.”

Danny McKee’s parting comments on the war relate to Khe Sanh.

“Hats off to the men who built it and to the men who survived it,” he said, “and especially to those who didn’t come home.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2017 at 2:12 PM with the headline "He fought ‘two wars’: Vietnam and the war within."