Kenneth ‘Burgy’ Burmeister: ‘I was lucky as can be’

By Lauren Jones, Honor Flight Chicago Veteran Interview Volunteer

Ken “Burgy” Burmeister was 19-years-old when he moved up his draft number in August 1969 to choose service in the Army, following in his father’s footsteps. His father had been drafted in 1942 during World War II and remained stateside during his service. Having grown up on a farm, his father was skilled at driving tractors, which led to his assignment in tanks, where he excelled. He spent most of his Army service as an instructor at Fort Ord in California.

“I grew up hearing stories about Fort Ord and how beautiful it was,” Ken recalls. “So after completing basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, I was sent to Fort Ord for infantry training. I was actually stationed in the same barracks my dad had been in during WWII. And, it really was beautiful—you could smell and hear the ocean.”

Being from the Evergreen Park suburb of Chicago, Ken admits he was a bit naive and still had some growing up to do. He shares a memorable experience during his time in California: “In late October 1969, about eight of us got a bus pass and headed to San Francisco to check out Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the hippie movement. You have to imagine, we were these 19-year-old guys in shiny army shoes, jeans, t-shirts, and short haircuts, walking around surrounded by people with wild hair and colorful clothes. We stood out like a sore thumb.

“But everyone was incredibly kind. A few people talked to us about the war, but it was all civil. It was such a polarized time, and this was a pretty cool experience. I was a hard-hat type who didn’t really like hippies, and yet one of my best friends, who I met in basic training, had been a hippie before joining the service. That trip opened my eyes. It was an epiphany, and I’m glad I had that moment.”

The reality of Vietnam

Ken left training as an M-60 machine gunner and was deployed with the 199th Infantry Brigade in Vietnam, operating in the rugged terrain northeast of Saigon. “I’m unique in that I mainly served in the mountains and heavy jungle,” he shares. “Only saw a couple of rice paddies.”

The M-60 machine gun alone weighed over 20 pounds, and Ken also had to carry 500 to 600 rounds of ammunition. During the dry season, he’d lug 12 quarts of water and three days’ worth of food in the scorching 100° heat, with 100% humidity. “We’d rotate between small bases,” Ken explains. “You’d be out in the field for 12 to 15 days, then come back to the base to guard for three or four days. But even then, you still did daytime patrols, nighttime guard duty, and filled sandbags. We had a 55-gallon drum for bathing—the conditions were so dirty.”

As for sleeping in the field, Ken recalls: “When we were on patrol, you’d lay your army poncho on the ground as your bed. It was like 4×4 feet with a hole in the middle, and you’d use the poncho liner as a light blanket. That’s what we slept on, with the bugs and leeches crawling around.”

Ken describes his encounters with the jungle’s insects with a mix of awe and disgust. “The bugs were incredible,” he describes. “There were centipedes that stretched nearly a foot long and were poisonous. Then there were these massive spiders that would spin webs between trees that were ten feet apart. Their bodies were the size of your thumb! They weren’t aggressive, but man, they were huge.”

One memorable encounter happened during a break in the field. “I sat down against a tree to eat my c-ration, and I heard this munching sound. I looked up and saw a spider eating a grasshopper! I grabbed a stick and hit it, and you could actually hear it hit the ground—it was that big!”

Ken laughs as he recounts another spider-related moment from his early days in Vietnam. “I had just arrived at an artillery base, and was pretty scared. I was on watch, when all of a sudden, this huge spider dropped down right in front of me. I hate spiders, so I grabbed the first thing I could find—a flare—and swung at it. But I missed! So the spider swung back toward me, and I screamed. Couldn’t help it. The whole platoon jumped up like, ‘What’s going on!?’ When I told them it was just a spider, they laughed and said, ‘Oh, FNG!’. It took a while to live that one down.”

The randomness of survival

“We got ambushed multiple times out there. I was with my good friend Spencer when he got killed. I dragged him back and tried to revive him, but we got overrun. The Vietnamese came through, and I had to lay there, pretending to be dead, covered in blood. I could feel my heart pounding as I watched one of them, only 20 feet away, staring right at me. My arm had gone numb from lying there, so I had my pistol ready in case he made a move. But luckily, he didn’t. I heard someone holler later, asking if anyone alive was still up there. That’s when a cobra gunship flew in for a run, and I made my escape.

“By then, I knew my friend was gone. You don’t learn in first aid how to really know when someone is dead, and I wasn’t going to leave him if there was any chance. It’s something that stays with you forever. I was very, very lucky that day.

“A couple of days after that ambush, we were riding with tanks that had come to our rescue. I was sitting on the front of one of the tanks when I jumped down to avoid the exhaust fumes blowing in my face from the vehicle ahead. I ran up to that vehicle, and as soon as I left my spot, one of my buddies sat down right where I had been. Almost immediately, we got ambushed again, and a bunch of guys got hit. The guy who took my spot was one of them.

“Turns out, he took a bullet to the testicles—one was shot clean off. And believe it or not, a couple of weeks later, he was back with us. They cauterized the wound, stitched him up, and the doctor told him, ‘You only need one’,” Ken cringes and laughs. “And the crazy part is he ended up having a couple of kids! So, I guess the doctor was right. We had to laugh at that.

“This whole experience really messed with my faith. I started wondering if something was keeping me alive. There was another time I almost volunteered to get on a helicopter to help kick out ammunition, but another guy said he’d do it since it was his company. That helicopter got shot down, and everyone onboard was killed. You could see it coming, the way they were trying to get back. I couldn’t shake the feeling—why wasn’t it me? I walked away with just a few scratches, nothing serious.

“I was lucky as can be.” 

Widening the War

Ken spent his first eight months in Vietnam’s rugged, mountainous terrain with the 199th Infantry Brigade. In May 1970, his battalion was assigned to the 1st Air Cavalry Division for the Cambodian incursion in the Fishhook area. “Boy, was my mom mad at President Nixon for widening the war!” he recalls. “She even wrote him a letter about it.”

Things quickly turned dangerous despite initially feeling secure. “We landed in a small clearing with two companies—over 100 guys—and I thought we were in a good spot,” Ken says. “But my buddy told me, ‘I’ll see you at 3:00 for the ground attack.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but you could hear shooting just 200 feet away on the other side of the perimeter. I thought it was just a mad minute, but no—we had a huge shootout. A lot of guys didn’t make it.”

Ken fought in Cambodia’s battle for LZ Brown, where they found ashes of war material and intense fighting around LZ Brown and LZ Myron. He served in the same unit as his hometown friend, Jim Brask, who was a radio telephone operator. The two men were separated, and each feared the worst. Ken heard Jim’s unit lost many radio operators, while Jim heard Ken’s company lost several gunners. “We even heard the ambush where those radio guys got killed,” Ken remembers. “We planned to come up over the hill behind the Vietnamese, but it was too dark. I felt pretty crappy about that.” He continues, a couple of weeks later, Jim’s company relieved ours. We crossed paths on a narrow jungle trail, and when we saw each other, we just hugged like crazy! It was such a relief. Everyone else was looking at us like, ‘What’s going on?!’”

Ken’s assistant gunner, Vaughn Bartley, also became a close friend during this time. In one horrific firefight, Vaughn was shot 13 times—part of his jaw blown off, and a leg hit, along with the crease in his neck. When Ken returned to the perimeter, Vaughn lay among the wounded. As Ken gathered ammo for the machine guns, he did something that would haunt him for over 50 years. “I stepped over him,” he says quietly. “I knew it was Vaughn, but I didn’t reach down or touch his shoulder. He saved my life that day, and I should’ve comforted him.”

When a rescue helicopter arrived, a wire rope lifted Vaughn, who was laying on a gurney. At about 30 feet up, Vaughn fell off the gurney and plummeted back to the ground. Scrambling, the team secured him again as the helicopter came under fire. The pilot ordered them to cut the cable, but the medics refused. Against all odds, Vaughn made it back to the U.S. and survived.

The two reconnected years later on Facebook. In August 2024, Ken and Vaughn met at a car event in Ohio. They stayed up talking through the night, and Ken finally summoned the courage to bring up the night Vaughn was injured. “I still felt so guilty,” Ken says. “But Vaughn remembered it all—he knew I’d stepped over him, but he couldn’t talk because his tongue had been nearly severed. He told me it was fine, and suddenly, the weight lifted off my shoulders.” Vaughn is even trying to track down the medics who refused to cut the cable that day to thank them. “It’s a smaller world than you think,” Ken adds.

When Ken’s unit rotated out of Cambodia, he was reassigned to the 101st Airborne Division, despite not being jump qualified, because they were so short-staffed. This took him north, closer to Phu Bai and Da Nang. “I saw a lot of the northern part of the country,” Ken recalls. “The mountains were taller, but the jungle was just as dense. It was cooler, especially in the fall, but we still only had poncho liners, so we froze at night. When the monsoon hit, three of us would sleep on one liner, and the only time you got warm was when you were the guy in the middle during guard duty.”

Coming home

Ken returned to the U.S. on December 7th, 1970, a month earlier than expected. “In the service, they tell you, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear, and only half of what you see,’” he laughs. When the plane touched down in Fort Lewis, Washington, the whole flight erupted in cheers.

Afterward, Ken was stationed at Fort Knox, KY, for the remainder of his service. “Morale was low, and they didn’t need infantry guys stateside,” he recalls. He was excited to learn firefighting skills, thinking it would be useful in civilian life. “But instead of learning to be a fireman, they handed me a shovel and had me shoveling coal to keep the furnaces running.” The work was grueling and disheartening. “They treated us like we were being punished. It was a 24/7 operation, shoveling coal through winter. When spring came, they shut the furnaces down, and we were sent to mow the grass,” Ken says. “We were lumped in with guys who had gone AWOL. I’ve never understood it.”

Ken recalls one incident involving a small refrigerator another soldier had left him. “The sergeant tried to take it, but I wasn’t going to let him. We argued, and he sent me to the captain for reprimand,” Ken says. “Turns out, the captain was a helicopter pilot in charge of everything, and instead of punishing me, he asked if I wanted to drive a company truck. So, that’s how I spent the rest of my time there.”

Ken was honorably discharged in August of 1971. He received the National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Combat Infantryman’s Badge, Air Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal w/60 Device; Army Commendation Medal, Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Bronze Star, Good Conduct Medal, and a Silver Star.

Just a month later, in September 1971, Ken married Roberta, a woman he’d known since they were in first grade at a local parochial school. “She planned everything!” he laughs. “I wasn’t letting him get away!” she returns. He credits her with helping him get through his time in Vietnam. “She was my rock through it all. Wrote me almost every day and sent care packages.” He emphasizes, “She’s more of a veteran than I am! She’s the one who should be on the Honor Flight.”

The 199th Light Infantry Brigade

The 199th Light Infantry Brigade has always been a close-knit group, and Ken has cherished attending their annual reunions, which have taken place every year since 1983. He’s made it to most of them. What started in Washington, DC, has now expanded to different cities across the U.S. Each year, Ken is humbled when they read the names of the 757 men from the 199th who were killed in action. He chuckles when he talks about how their motto has evolved from “Light, Swift & Accurate” to “Kinda Heavy, Sorta Slow & Close Enough,” a testament to the humor and camaraderie they still share.

Ken’s unit is featured in a 2006 book, Raiding the Sanctuary: Redcatchers in Cambodia, May 12th – June 25th, 1970, written by Robert J. Gouge, whose father served with Ken. Ken believes he took the photo that’s on the cover and says the book is pretty accurate. “I didn’t even know about the book,” he admits, until he got an unexpected call from the family of Spencer, a fellow soldier he had dragged to safety during an ambush while pretending to be dead. Spencer’s family wanted to know the true story of his death, as the Army had left many details vague. “They read the book and tracked me down,” Ken recalls. He learned that Spencer’s wife had even joined the Army as a nurse, hoping to be sent to Vietnam to uncover the truth about her husband’s fate.

“When they asked if I would tell them, I said, ‘Are you sure you want to know?’ They did, and I told them everything.” But sharing those memories opened up a Pandora’s box for Ken. “It brought back bad dreams, bad memories, and that’s when I knew I had to seek help.”

Since then, Ken has made mental health care a priority. He’s been regularly seeing a therapist once a week, and he credits it with making a huge difference in his life. “I’m so glad I sought help,” he says.

Thank you, Ken, for your dedication and service. We hope you enjoy your flight!