Mike Morehead of Pilot Rock survived 21 gun battles on a United States Navy monitor in the Vietnam War.
“Our deal was to be able to idle down and exchange fire and show them what fire power was all about,” Morehead recalled.
Morehead, 71, was a radio operator on the floating tank that was the Monitor M-6, but like the other five crew members he trained to do everything from engine work to firing the big 105-mm howitzer on the boat’s bow. While U.S. river patrol boats were about 32 feet long, swift and maneuverable, the monitors were 60 feet long and packed tons of armor to hold off enemy fire and even rocket propelled grenades. Morehead said the smaller boat were fast and fun to ride, but the M-6 could not even buck the tide.
“Nobody wanted to ride this,” he said. “This was made to intimidate.”
Morehead and his fellow crewman intimidated time and again on the waters of the Mekong Delta near Cambodia. He said he called his brothers in arms on Sunday because it was Veterans Day.
“I’m really close with those guys,” he said.
Morehead and two friends in 1965 went to Seattle to join the Marines, he said, but his urine sample contained too much of the protein albumin.
“They classified me 4F,” he said.
That worked to his benefit. Employers were eager to hand jobs to men not bound for the military. Morehead got on at the Pilot Rock mill as a saw filer keeping the
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