By: Garrett Mitchell, Staff Writer
garrett@thewoodrufftimes.com
Jim Rentz Arrived in Vietnam as a Small-Town Army Chaplain Whose Life Would Change in Ways That He Never Imagined Amid the Horror of War
Note: This is part one of a three-part special series for The Woodruff Times, featuring recollections and stories as told by Jim Rentz, Captain, US Army retired, and presents his story, unedited, and in his own words. These stories feature difficult subject matter and contain depictions of death and violence that may not be suitable for all readers. Discretion is advised.
Jungle of Doubt…
Vietnam was a world away from Jim Rentz’s small-town Baptist church in North Carolina.
As far away, it turns out, as heaven is from hell.
Jim Rentz was born and raised in Woodruff, a sports hero who played for legendary football coach Willie Varner, and who won four state championships between football and baseball between 1956 and 1959.
When he reached Quy Nhon, in central South Vietnam, on February 18, 1968, it was as if the world he left behind had vanished behind a veil of violence and bloodshed he had yet to comprehend.
Less than a year before, the young Army chaplain, commissioned as a captain, had been pastoring Hickory Mountain Baptist Church near tiny Silver City after finishing his seminary education. Now, his job was to minister to the wounded and dying and those souls who carried the burden of treating them.
Jim was prepared. He thought so, anyway.
“Well, I came from a long line of men who were military people, so I had that in my blood, explained Rentz, now 85. “As a minister, I wanted to minister to the troops. Deep down, I also wanted to be a missionary, so I figured if I got overseas, not only would I minister to the troops, but also to the people in that country.”
Jim entered active duty in January 1967. Eleven months later, in December, he received the call that changed his life, for better and worse, forever.
“I’d say around late December of 1967 I got orders to go to Vietnam and it really hit me hard,” he said. “It’s one thing to watch TV and know we are at war and hear my dad talk about it because he was a World War II veteran, but to think I, Jim Rentz, really am going to war, was something completely different.”
Captain Rentz had nothing to dwell on but his deepest thoughts and memories as the plane climbed out of Clark Air Force Base near Manila in the Philippines, which had been his final stop on the way to war. Between that moment and landing in South Vietnam, his mind harkened repeatedly back to his days as an athlete and to one very important lesson he had learned years earlier.
“I did play sports at Woodruff and played for Coach Varner and was on four state championship teams,” recalled the still sharp-minded Rentz. “Two football and two baseball. He instilled in me an ability to survive and fight hard for whatever I needed to do. I remember one axiom we said before football games was ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going’, so I just told myself I got to get going. I was bound and determined I was going to minister to my men. Especially when they were in the most danger.”
Into the Fire…
Landing in Vietnam carried with it a unique set of challenges that threw Jim Rentz into the firing line before the plane’s wheels even touched the ground at Bien Hoa Air Base.
The Tet Offensive, the Vietnam War’s bloodiest phase, had begun a month earlier in January 1968. Tied to the Vietnamese New Year, it was the Viet Cong’s ultimate plan to invade and seize South Vietnam as U.S. troops and resources strained to a breaking point.
“We got a message that the air base there was being mortared and they had to decide whether or not they were going to fly there,” recalls Rentz with stark clarity. “But we flew there, and we knew that there’s a chance that we would be mortared. When we got over Bien Hoa, the pilot said that he wanted us to close all the shades on the windows and he was going to fly as close as he could and just sort of dive down and come in.”
Thankfully, for the moment, tensions around Bien Hoa had cooled. It was only a temporary reprieve with the knowledge that time was of the essence.
“When we landed, a soldier got on (the plane), and the first thing he said was the condition is yellow,” Jim explained further. “Red meant hot, so we knew things had cooled down some. But they put us on a bus with wire mesh on the windows where a grenade couldn’t come in, and we were escorted by a jeep with a machine gun on top of it. They got us to where we were going to stay, and we waited on our assignments. It was a rude awakening. Immediately you were aware of how dangerous it was.”
Welcome to Quy Nhon…
Captain Rentz was assigned to the 84th Engineering Battalion, something he would come to be extremely grateful for. Once they reached Quy Nhon, however, Jim learned for the first time exactly how precarious the situation had become.
He learned to what lengths the North Vietnamese army’s guerrilla soldiers would go in order to breach the American base’s defenses.
“You immediately go into a survival mindset,” Rentz said. “I flew down to Quy Nhon from Bien Hoa Air Force Base and was assigned to the 84th Engineering Battalion. They had been hit a few times and lost some men with the Vietcong coming into the compound. They had this buffer on top of the mountain and we were down on the foot of the mountain.”
The notion of peace that Jim greatly values was shattered to pieces on arrival, and the nature of war was driven home to him with terrible force when he met his chaplain’s assistant for the first time and was handed a pistol with a blunt warning.
“My chaplain’s assistant came in and told me, hey, I’ve got this .45 pistol,” he flatly recalled. “I told him I was a non-combatant. He said the Vietcong doesn’t care about that. I recommend you take it and sleep with it under your pillow because the Vietcong got in the compound recently and killed people. So, I took it and was glad to have it.”
If the chaplain had landed in a proverbial hell, then the flames were about to find their way to his doorstep on the very first night in Quy Nhon in a way Rentz was not prepared for. In Vietnam, the middle of the night carried with it the ever-knowing reality that a nearby and unseen enemy wanted him and his men dead.
“I remember the first night I was there and all of a sudden, all hell broke loose,” said Jim, his voice taking on a more serious inflection. “There was gunfire all along the perimeter. I was up in the chapel getting things squared away, and it was probably about 50 yards away from the main entrance of the compound. I thought, I don’t want to be up here by myself so I laid on the floor and crawled out. I saw some dark figures come around, and I said if I was going to be here by myself, I was going to go down and get with everyone else, so I ran down and jumped over a berm.”
He continued, “There was a soldier there at an outdoor post who asked me, ‘Chaplain, what’s going on? I said, ’ We’re being hit. He kind of laughed and said they must not have told you. In an unannounced way, all of a sudden on the perimeter of the base, they would open fire to discourage from anyone sneaking up. I got some good-natured kidding after that, but it endeared me to the men.”
Within a matter of days, many of those men would be dead or wounded, and Chaplain Rentz would be forced to confront a level of evil that he could not fathom as the Tet Offensive raged around them.
Things were about to get far worse and test Jim’s faith to the breaking point.
