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Constable: Veteran returns to try to conquer Vietnam hill

When Army Cpl. Carl Robbins, his M60 machine gun blazing, first crawled his way up infamous Hill 875 in Vietnam in November 1967, his best friend was killed and two sniper bullets stopped him 100 yards short of the peak. This week, Robbins is taking on that notorious hill with nothing more than his younger brother and 50 years of emotional baggage.

“I always was taught that if you start something, you finish it,” says Robbins, now 70, remembering the day he called his family from a phone in a Philippines hospital to tell them he was seriously wounded. “I said, ‘Dad, I'm sorry. I didn't get to finish it.'”

Flying to Vietnam on Veterans Day, Robbins and his brother, Scott Robbins, 60, of Carpentersville, promise they'll reach the top and finish that mission.

“There probably will be a lot of tears on the way up,” says Scott Robbins, who, with his wife, Mary, orchestrated this trip a half-century in the making. “We're going to take a couple of beers. And we just might sit there for a while. He's been waiting 50 years to get to the top of that hill.”

Carl Robbins' assault on Hill 875 began on a Sunday morning, Nov. 19, 1967. “There were 2,000 NVA (members of the enemy North Vietnamese Army) and we couldn't see them, and 335 of us was going to go up there and take the hill,” he says of his 173rd Airborne Brigade. “When they said, ‘Move out,' we didn't hesitate.”

Crawling up the hill, Robbins discovered strands of black communication wire and hand rails made of bamboo, put in by the enemy waiting for them.

“You would crawl, shoot and move, shoot and move. You couldn't hear,” says the soldier, whose sergeant behind him tugged his pant leg to let him know which direction to fire as rocket-propelled grenades buzzed over their heads. They had been fighting for two days when Robbins and his best friend, 20-year-old Robert William Lindgren from Minneapolis, dug in for the night Nov. 21 as enemy mortars exploded around them.

“I could hear them getting closer and closer to our position. It was dark. But with the illumination of mortars going off, I could see smoke coming out of Lindgren's foxhole,” Robbins says, pausing to get a handle on his emotions. “I knew he was hurt. I crawled over to his foxhole and reached in and got nothing. I couldn't get him out. His head turned and his eyes looked at mine and I could just see his soul leaving his body. Dead. And I went back to my position. When the mortars stopped, I wanted him to come up that hill and he didn't come.”

The next afternoon, Robbins was crawling and duckwalking up the hill. Badly outnumbered, the order came to “fall back and regroup,” but Robbins and some of the soldiers near him didn't want to retreat. “I'm not falling back no more,” Robbins remembers thinking. “And we kept fighting.”

He was about 100 yards from the top when a bullet ripped through his upper left chest. A second bullet hit him in his lower right abdomen. “I knew the one in my chest came out the back,” remembers Robbins, who was bleeding heavily.

His sergeant patched up his front, and rolled him over. “Oh, my God, you're done,” the sergeant said, meaning that Robbins had to be airlifted to a hospital or he would die,

“I said to myself, ‘My war is over.' I was hurt that bad,” Robbins says. “There's 100 stories same as mine on the same hill.”

While many of his high school buddies were coming home from college to enjoy Thanksgiving with their families, Robbins struggled to stand and make his way to the helicopter landing spot. “I couldn't do it because it hurt too bad, so I crawled,” Robbins says.

Some of the wounded had been waiting for a day, but the most seriously wounded were airlifted out first. “I didn't sit long,” Robbins says.

He was treated at a hospital in Vietnam and sent for surgery in the Philippines.

“I woke up and Thanksgiving dinner was sitting there on that little stand next to my bed in the hospital,” remembers Robbins, who gnawed open a carton of milk with his teeth because he could only move one arm. “They gave me some medals and rattled off something, and the next thing I knew I was on an airplane going to Japan.”

He spent Christmas and New Year's in a hospital in Yokohama before finishing his Army service in Korea. When he came home for good, his father surprised him by picking him up at O'Hare International Airport. Having been awarded two Bronze Stars for his bravery and two Purple Hearts for his wounds, Robbins brought home a lifetime of memories.

“Dad, I want to tell you about the 173rd Airborne,” Robbins told his father. “And he said, ‘Son, I don't want to hear about the 173rd Airborne.'”

When they arrived at their home in Indiana, Scott Robbins noticed a change in the brother with whom he had shared a bedroom.

“His greeting to me was that he grabbed me by the hair and threw me on the ground,” remembers the younger Robbins, who now works as director of human resources for Central State Funds, a health care and pension fund in Rosemont. “He was just a lot meaner, no tolerance and no patience. He said, ‘No one's going to mess with me. I've seen it all,' and he had.“

The war changed the family dynamics. Carl Robbins married and divorced and now is father to a 22-year-old daughter, Sara, and a 24-year-old son, Robert, named in memory of his dead friend. Robbins lives in Lewisville, Indiana, and works as a corrections officer running the prison's sanitation shop at the New Castle Correctional Facility.

He never talked about the war with his father, Loran, a truck driver who was president of the local Teamsters union. His mom, Mickey, “was among many thousands of moms who were scared to death” during the war, Robbins says. His younger brother and sister weren't close with him for decades. That changed when Scott Robbins got divorced and Carl offered support. The brotherly bonds kept improving when Scott married a special-education teacher who became the first person to ask about the war.

“In his pole barn in his backyard, he had maps and his helmet,” says Mary Robbins, who teaches at Heineman Middle School in Algonquin. “I teach a Vietnam unit at the end of every year if I have eighth-graders. I started asking him questions.”

One day a package arrived for her. “He mailed me this big box with his medals and photographs,” says the teacher, who shared them with her class.

“I got some shrapnel across the arm and the face and they gave me a Purple Heart for it,” Robbins says of a battle four months before he was wounded again. “That's where my major got killed.”

He earned his first Bronze Star during the battle for Hill 823 (names indicated how many meters above sea level a hill was) on Nov. 3 and 4. “After a day's fighting, a chopper was coming in to bring medicine, ammunition, water and bring the wounded out,” Robbins says, noting it was dark and the helicopter pilot couldn't see where to land. “I got out of my foxhole in front of the chopper to guide the chopper.” The pilot put a spotlight on Robbins to see his directions, and the enemy opened fire. Robbins stood in the open, with the whoosh of the helicopter blades drowning out the sound of bullets whizzing past him.

“I saw a chopper that needed help, and I helped,” Robbins says.

“He's a hero,” Scott Robbins says of his older brother.

“At the time I thought I knew what I was getting into,” Carl Robbins says. “I knew in my heart that I was the best-trained soldier in the world and I wasn't going to die in Vietnam. That's how naive we were.”

After a few days of being wet and hot and picking leeches off his ankles, Robbins changed his thinking. He says that he always felt that he fought that war for the government of South Vietnam and the soldiers next to him.

“Our job was to go out into the jungle, hunt down the enemy and destroy them,” Robbins says.

That wasn't possible in one of his first combat missions, the battle for Hill 1338.

“They had us trapped, We could hear the North Viet Cong murder our wounded paratroopers,” Robbins says, noting that 44 of the 76 bodies they recovered later had been shot in the head at close range. “You pick up the dead and the wounded and suck it up. You're a paratrooper. Suck it up. And I've been sucking it up ever since.”

During this Vietnam trip the family refers to as the “Healing on the Hill,” Robbins might be able to let some of that emotion out.

“The regret that I have is I fell short of getting to the top of that hill. I could see the top, but I fell short,” Robbins says. “Now, I get to be a soldier for one more day and go back up and get to the top that hill. I'm going to have a lot of relief. I win.”

Shot in the chest and abdomen while trying to take Hill 875 in Vietnam on Nov. 22, 1967, Army Cpl. Carl Robbins waits for the helicopter that will take him for lifesaving medical care and out of Vietnam for good. This week, Robbins and his brother, Scott Robbins of Carpentersville, are heading back to Vietnam so Robbins can get to the top of that hill and finish his mission 50 years later. Courtesy of Carl Robbins
  Coming home from Vietnam with medals and lasting wounds, Carl Robbins, right, didn't talk about what he endured for decades. Then his brother and sister-in-law, Scott and his Mary Robbins of Carpentersville, started a conversation. Now the brothers are going back to Vietnam so the veteran can conquer Hill 875 where he was shot and his best friend died 50 years ago. John Starks/jstarks@dailyherald.com
Just 19 years old when he went to the Vietnam War as a member of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade, Carl Robbins was confident "I was going to go over and stop it." Fifty years later, Robbins and his brother, Scott Robbins of Carpentersville, are heading back to Vietnam so Robbins can get to the top of that hill where he was shot and almost died. Courtesy of Carl Robbins
Carl Robbins, right, and his little brother Scott shared a bedroom as kids. But after Carl Robbins came home from the war in Vietnam, they grew apart for decades. Now, the brothers are headed back to Vietnam so that Carl Robbins can reach the hill where he was shot twice and nearly died. Courtesy of Carl Robbins
  When Carl Robbins, center, came home from Army duty in Vietnam, he was told not to talk about the war. Decades passed until Mary Robbins, right, the wife of his brother, Scott Robbins, left, of Carpentersville, got him to open up. Now the brothers are returning to Vietnam so that Carl Robbins can accomplish his mission and reach the top of Hill 875 where he was shot twice and nearly died. John Starks/jstarks@dailyherald.com
Despite a 10-year age difference, Carl and Scott Robbins played together and shared a bedroom. Then the older brother fought in the war in Vietnam and that relationship changed. After years of not talking about the war, the brothers are traveling to Vietnam so that Carl Robbins can climb to the top of the hill where he was shot and his best friend was killed 50 years ago. Courtesy of Carl Robbins
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