Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
‘Tragedy at Chu Lai’
Author David Venditta’s book tells tale of an accidental death in Vietnam; he will speak at Chester County Library Jan. 31
David Venditta was 15 in 1969 when his cousin, Nicholas Venditti, lost his life during the Vietnam War.
Although they were cousins, as members of a large, Italian-American family growing up in different towns — Malvern for Nicky and Downingtown for David — they didn’t know each other well as kids, said David Venditta, 62.
“He was five years older,” said Venditta. “When you’re a kid, five years was like an adult to me. He was out of my league.”
Now Venditta, a former editor at The Morning Call in Allentown, has penned “Tragedy at Chu Lai,” a book about what happened to his cousin. It’s a story that took him on a 20-year odyssey of research, interviews and a journey to Vietnam to trace Nicky Venditti’s footsteps for the 11 days that he was overseas.
“I will never complain about the heat again,” joked Venditta, whose last name differs slightly from his late cousin’s due to the vagaries of Ellis Island.
“I knew that he had died soon after he had gone to Vietnam,” said Venditta. “His death was such a shock to everyone. He had just gotten over there. I always thought he died in combat.”
Then in 1994, Venditta was looking through some papers from the Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for his job at the newspaper. There was information on each of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, he said. So he decided to look up his cousin and was surprised to see his death listed as accidental.
“For the story I had to get to know this cousin I hardly knew.” — David Venditta
“I thought, ‘What was this about?’” Venditta said. The last time he saw Nicky Venditti was at a party for his cousin before he left for Army boot camp.
“For the story I had to get to know this cousin I hardly knew,” said Venditta. But in the course of writing the book, he’s learned a lot about him.
“I had to know who he was, the other part of the story,” said Venditta. “I had to find out what happened. It was hard to let go of it. It just kept pulling me in.”
Nicky Venditti was “kind of a working class kid. At Great Valley High he did enough to get by. He liked to race his car (a ’62 Impala) on the street. He liked practical jokes. He had no plans after high school but he wanted to make something of himself. He wanted to fly helicopters.”
When Venditta started his quest to learn more about his cousin, he called the Army Casualty Office near Washington, D.C., and spoke to an official who called him back a few hours later with some information. He learned that “Nicky was mortally wounded when the instructor in a class accidently set off a live grenade. How did this happen?”
Venditta thought that “as a newsperson,” it would take him a few months to do the research. Instead, “it took me 20 years to get this story.”
Written records about the incident did not exist so he turned to interviews with survivors, seeking out officers and enlisted men who were there. In the course of researching the book, Venditta spoke to more than 130 people.
Venditti, a helicopter pilot in the Americal Division, was at a required class in grenade safety during an orientation that was held in a cabin at LZ (Landing Zone) Bayonet just off the Chu Lia base when he was gravely injured.
“Everybody coming in had to sit through this class,” said Venditta. “For this class, they were trucked off the base to a landing zone, to a one-story building there. Nicky and three buddies sat up front at this table. There might have been 30 or 40 guys in the class.”
“The instructor had a schtick that he did with a real grenade,” said Venditta. “It was supposed to be disarmed. He pulls the pin and fumbles it. He says, ‘You have five seconds. What do you do?’ The guys don’t move. They know it wasn’t for real.” Only it was.
The grenade rolled under a table in the front of the room where Venditti was sitting with two other pilots where it exploded. One of the men was killed instantly. Venditti’s leg was amputated and he was sent to an evacuation hospital where he died five days later. The third man died two days after him. Others in the class were also injured but survived, said Venditta.
“I could not determine how many were injured, maybe a dozen according to a doctor (who treated them),” said Venditta. At 20 years old, Venditti “had his whole life ahead of him. What a waste.”
His aunt and uncle, Venditti’s parents, had kept “every scrap of paper,” said Venditta. They had gotten a telegram saying that their son was injured when a grenade went off by accident during instruction. Later a condolence letter came from Vendit-
ti’s unit commander.
“If they hadn’t had this stuff, I wouldn’t have been able to track it down,” said Venditta. Although the parents knew that their son had been killed in an accident, somehow stories arose that he died in combat and that’s what Venditta believed for years. Some thought that Venditti stepped on a mine after getting out of a helicopter. Others thought the Viet Cong threw a grenade
into his hooch, said Venditta.
Venditti was “a child of divorce. His parents (now deceased) broke up when he was in second grade at Malvern Elementary School,” Venditta said. “But I got a chance to talk to them (about their son).”
Eventually, Venditta learned the identity of the instructor who had dropped the live grenade and “came face to face with him.” That encounter is in the book. Venditta also talked to a former Army nurse “who tended to Nicky as he lay dying. She lives here, in my neighborhood
in Allentown.”
When Venditta was talking to his aunts and uncles about what happened in the war, he decided that it would be good to write about the experiences of ordinary people who had served in the military. Although not a veteran himself, he interviewed 100 veterans and wrote columns telling those stories that The Morning Call then re-published as a book in 2011. “Tragedy at Chu Lai” is Venditta’s first book through an independent publisher, McFarland & Co.
Venditta retired last year after 40 years as a
journalist, with 32 years at The Morning Call, where he was a content editor who helped reporters with their articles. Venditta and his wife, Mary, a retired graphic designer, still live in Allentown and he has two adult step-daughters.
Venditta will be speaking about his book at the Chester County Library, 450 Exton Square Parkway, Exton at 7 p.m. on Jan. 31. Registration is required. Please visit www. chescolibraries.org and click on “Events” to register. The book is available on Amazon: http://amzn. to/2iOcQ1A