Man of Steele: Farmer gains forever friends while serving his country

PRINCETON, Ill. — For soldiers fighting the war in Vietnam, home was where you dug it.

“You would dig a hole and get in it,” said Greg Steele, who spent 10 months in Vietnam as a member of the U.S. Army. “I came from the prairie, not a wooded area, so I had a lot to learn about what to do.”

By the time Steele was a high school junior, he had made the decision to join the military.

“Both of my parents were in the service during World War II, and I felt responsibility to our country,” he said.

“Military service was very positive in my mother and dad’s life — dad met my mother in Europe, and they got married in Europe,” he said about his parents, Harold and Margery Steele.

Harold Steele was under the command of Colonel Yarborough, who became General Yarborough.

“Colonel Yarborough was given the responsibility by President Kennedy to put together the Green Berets,” the son said. “Mr. Yarborough was at our farm a couple of times, so he was very close with my dad.”

Steele graduated from high school in 1966 and took a few agricultural classes at Iowa State University while farming with his dad near Dover in north-central Illinois.

“I made the decision in fourth grade to be a farmer,” he said.

On May 20, 1968, Steele was drafted into the Army and went to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri before going to Fort Ord, located on the Monterey Bay in California.

“I had never seen the ocean in my life,” he noted.

There were about 200 in the company, and one morning when they were assembled, the soldiers were asked who wanted to go to NCO school.

“That meant going to Fort Benning in Georgia and being trained as a squad leader,” Steele said. “Twenty of us put our hand up.”

When he got to Georgia, Steele was assigned to the same barracks as his dad when he was in World War II training.

“It was super good training — not just for military, but good training for any leader, farm business or community activity,” he said about the 13-week program.

On May 20, 1969, Steele was sent to Cam Rahn Bay in Vietnam and then the Central Highlands.

“I was assigned to the Charlie Company 4th Infantry Division, and within two hours somebody told me the Charlie Company got wiped out that morning,” he recalled.

“When we got there, I walked up to a guy who looked like he had some authority, and he told me I was going to be the squad leader — first squad, first platoon,” he said. “He told me to pick out five men and that would be my squad.”

“I didn’t know anything, and that man had been there two hours before I got there,” said Steele, who was 22 years old. “So, I picked out five guys, shook their hands and most of them were 18 or 19 years old.”

During the 10 months, Steele had four company commanders.

“Lieutenant Rick Rhoades was a fourth-generation West Point graduate,” he said. “He stayed in the military until a few years ago and retired as a colonel.”

Out in the jungle, Steele got his squad of five guys in the trees, and single-engine propeller planes were dropping bombs on the enemy down below them.

“The bombers had their cockpits open and they would wave at us and we would wave back,” he said. “It was crazy, and they did round after round.”

During the battle, Steele’s platoon leader stood up and said, “I’ve been shot.”

“That was my first official duty, to get the lieutenant out of the open and in the trees for protection,” the soldier said. “After I got up to help him, a round hit right where I had been laying.”

Later, Steele read that the enemy lost about 300 men in that battle.

“It was not a good day for the North Vietnamese,” he said.

The next day, the U.S. soldiers walked and walked through the jungle.

“And then about 40 feet ahead of me was a Montagnard man, and they were the people that lived off the land,” Steele explained.

“He had a water buffalo with a bell around its neck that was carved out of wood,” he said. “Inside was a piece of wire attached to a nail with a piece of ammo casing for the clanger. I think it was a casing from an AK-47.”

Chinook helicopters were used to move the soldiers to new locations.

“Six of us could get on, plus the crew of four, which included the pilot, copilot and two door gunners,” Steele said. “Two of us were on each side with our legs hanging out, and you hung on.”

“I wasn’t scared until the day we were going up to the top of a mountain and we had to go corkscrew up,” he said. “My butt slid and I grabbed the seat and pulled myself back in. I never rode again without hanging onto a seat.”

When the soldiers were moved to the fire base, there were bunkers and some hot food, but no showers.

“We bathed in the creeks, and we got clean clothes about every three weeks,” Steele said. “We got shirts and pants and we tried to latch onto a couple pairs of socks and you slept in your clothes with your boots on.”

The packs the soldiers carried weighed 60 to 80 pounds, and that included their ammo, water and food.

“We mostly had C-rations, but we also got LRPF — long-range patrol food, which was dried and you put some warm water with it, and it was pretty tasty,” Steele said. “It was the Cadillac, and everything was cooked with C-4.”

Engineers had access to C-4.

“When the engineers were away from their bunker, we took all the product we could find because they could get more C-4 and we could not,” Steele said.

C-4 was also in claymore mines.

“If things got really bad, and a couple of times it did, we would disassemble a claymore mine and take the C-4 so that everybody had something to cook with,” the soldier said. “They next morning you’d call and ask for 10 more mines, so you found ways to survive.”

On Friday, March 13, Steele woke up sick.

“My platoon sergeant, Larry Granfor, that we called Granny, said I should go to the rear,” he said. “Granny is one of the most fantastic leaders I have ever known.”

Steele was taken to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital to get checked out.

“It took six years before it was determined I had malaria,” he said. “I used to get sick about every 30 days, for about 30 hours, but now for many years I haven’t had any trouble.”

In October of 1969, a friend encouraged Steele to enroll at Southern Illinois University; however, the university could not find his ACT scores.

On a Wednesday, Steele found out that the Army gives the ACT test once a year, and it was on the upcoming Saturday.

“I flew to the Air Force base in South Vietnam, and after I took my ACT test, I was accepted to SIU by academic probation,” he said.

“I left Vietnam, and three days after I got home, I was in Carbondale going to school in the spring of 1970, a couple of weeks after the Kent State event.”

Steele was at SIU for about six weeks when he was walking to an ag class and saw that the chancellor’s home had been burned down.

“When I got back to my dormitory, there was barbed wire between the buildings,” Steele said.

“I called my dad and said I think I can be home in a couple of days to plant corn,” he said. “They canceled classes the next day, and then school was canceled, so I went home and planted corn.”

In July, Steele’s dad asked him if he was going back to school, and his answer was, “Absolutely not.”

In addition to growing crops, Steele raised pigs.

“We had a farrow-to-finish operation, and we produced about 20,000 pigs per year,” he said.

In 1975, Steele met his future wife, Sandra.

“During Pork Days in Princeton, I was at Wise Guys with my girlfriends and Greg walked in and sat down in a chair beside me and we started talking,” she reminisced. “He asked me out, and we started dating.”

Sandra taught special education and kindergarten for 37 years.

“When I retired, I therapy-trained our Labradoodle, and he and I went to school and listened to kids read,” she said. “We did that up until two years ago.”

“Agriculture has been really good to me and our whole family,” said Steele, who retired from farming in 2002.

He learned a lot about treating people right while he was in the Army.

“People cared so much about each other,” he said. “And we are still caring 56 years later.”

About 10 members of Steele’s platoon get together every three to four years.

“There is a lot of love in our platoon,” he said.

“It is interesting to watch as someone who was not involved in the military,” his wife added. “Because when they get together, it is like they saw each other yesterday.”