When Maurice Ramon graduated from Waco High School in 1967, he couldn’t wait to get to Vietnam.
“I was so afraid the war was going to be over,” Ramon said recently from the China Spring home he shares with wife, Carla, whose father was a career Air Force man. They met and married shortly after his final tour in Vietnam and have six daughters, 13 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
“I was just a real patriot 7— apple pie, Chevrolets, the whole thing. Still am. My dad and all my uncles served in World War II. But my parents made me wait until I graduated,” Ramon said.
Ramon grew up in Waco’s La Cayados neighborhood near Second Street. “Everything in Waco was very segregated then,” he said. “There were large groups of Mexicans in different neighborhoods. I remember Sandtown, and White City. Everybody was poor. So we didn’t know we were poor. I had nine brothers and sisters; no running water; no gas; one string light. We burned wood in the winter. We were a very close family.”
Ramon worked throughout his high school years on the Distributive Education program which allowed him to take only core classes and have his hours on the job count as elective credits. “I worked at B.J.’s grocery store on 18th off Alexander. I was flunking out. They gave me a D-minus instead of an F in English so I could graduate before I went into the military.”
Top-secret clearance
Once in the Army, however, his assessment test scores helped him to be immediately recruited into intelligence work and he was given crypto and top-secret clearances.
One day, a sergeant told him: “ ‘Ramon, let me tell you about an elite part of the Army, where we get our orders from the NSA. We’re in the Army, but outside the Army.’ I’m thinking I’m going to be a spy, and work out of embassies all over the world. He said I’d wear civilian clothes. I was sold. I shook his hand.”
He was then told it required a four-year enlistment, instead of three years. “I was hesitant, but I signed,” Ramon said. He became part of the ASA (Army Security Agency) and after training, he was sent to Vietnam.
Upon landing, he felt his first pangs of worry. “I thought, ‘hey, I don’t want to be here, I think I’d rather be home,’ ” he recalled, laughing.
Ramon was assigned to the 25th Infantry’s 372nd radio research company at Cu Chi. “They gave me a choice, and I said I wanted to be where the action was. The guys all laughed and said, ‘We’ve got Juan Wayne here.’ I laughed with them, and I got what I wanted.”
Decoding chatter, dodging bullets
His compound was under constant mortar fire. “In the 372nd, our motto was ‘In god we trust – all others we monitor,’ and that included our own soldiers. At first they’d be arrogant because we were lower-ranked, but when we presented a list of their violations, they’d change pretty quickly, because they knew their sloppiness could cause casualties and get them punished by higher-ups. Most of our work, though, was monitoring the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong,” he said.
Ramon and his comrades intercepted coded radio chatter, broke codes and sent out encrypted messages to their own men. They called in artillery and air strikes and for ground troops to ambush the enemy. “It was interesting work, being a cryptologist, a little like reading somebody else’s mail. And we could see the bigger picture. Everyone thought we were losing during Tet in 1968, but we had them beat so bad. We could’ve kicked them all the way to Hanoi,” he said.
Following his first tour in Vietnam, Ramon was stationed in Fort Hood and then Okinawa before returning to his unit in Vietnam for a final tour. He said the brotherhood bond between fellow soldiers is unlike anything. “It’s hard to say, but it’s almost like a highlight of your life. It’s just like family.”
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