Lieutenant Colonel Floyd B. Lyerla

Floyd Byerl Lyerla, a small and spirited man of seventy-four years of age, enthusiastically describes the unique experiences of his. Seated in the living room of his home, he gives account after account of experiences in his everyday life as well as his twenty-three year service to our nation in the United States Army and Navy. During his military career, he served in the Korean War and Vietnam Conflict in the Army. After achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, Floyd retired from the Army at the age of forty-one. A devoted husband and father of two, Floyd and his wife, Donna, reside in Pittsburg. He is currently the president of the Pittsburg Archaelogical Association, a group he helped start and organize. He is quick and witty and always has some joke or prank up his sleeve. Lyerla is also a man of great honor and courage, risking his life many times to uphold everything our great country, the United States represents.

[I was born] on a farm near Spring River, three miles east of Crestline—[in] Cherokee County in November of 1928. [My parents’ names were] Floyd and Lilia Lyerla. One of the first things I did after I was born was nurse a strange woman. I had medical problems, and for some reason my mother couldn’t get me to nurse; and there was a neighbor lady who had had a daughter about the same time I was born, who stopped by to see how mother was doing. She asked mother, she said, “Well, hand him to me and I’ll see if I can get him to nurse.” That’s kinda an unusual occurrence for for a newborn baby to start out life nursing somebody else’s mother.

I could write a whole book just on things we did as kids, course I had three older brothers one older sister. Going from the eldest to the youngest, there was Dean, Dale, Vaunda, and Billy Bob. I was the baby. Yeah, we did all kinds of things. Anywhere from being run over by a tractor, to running across the top of Spring River Bridge, to stealing the neighbor’s boat with a couple other guys and going down the river and pulling a Huckleberry Finn. And there were other kids that I was acquainted with in that area, that attended the same little one-room school. [There was] one teacher teaching all eight grades. And she was very young, she just got out of normal training at Pittsburg, up here; and back then, I think they only had to have two years of college before they could go out and actually start teaching. So some of the teachers by the time I got in the eight grade, the teachers were only about four or five years older than me, maybe six. But, one teacher had to teach all eight grades, and today they would think that’s terrible. No way anybody could get educated that way. And yet none of the kids that went through my class with me turned out to be dummies. Back then they called it Stone School District 31, now it’s known as Spencer School.

Probably the most comical experience was something I pulled on my dad when I was a kid. Course we lived on a farm that faced Crestline, and back then, [when] I was a kid growing up, we didn’t have toilets in the house. They were outside. And when dad was county commissioner, we got a new one installed. It was a two-holer.

But anyway my dad had a habit every morning, first thing he did was head for the outhouse. And I knew this. One spring I had been out one day, and I had killed a great, big water moccasin. So late that night, after my folks had gone to bed, I stepped outside and I went to the outhouse and I curled that water moccasin up in the corner [of] the outhouse there, and stuck its head out underneath the last rack where he (dad) couldn’t see that I had shot it right behind the head, you know. It looked just as live as it could be. Then I went to bed. The next morning I heard dad’s feet hit the floor, I slept on what you would call a sun porch, and he came through he and mother’s bedroom, across the front room, and across the sun porch and out the back door and headed for the outhouse. I went and got mom.

I said, “Mom, come on, hurry up! Come on!”

“What’s going on?” She was still in bed.

“Come on. Hurry up. You’re going to see something funny.”

So we went out there, and we was standing there looking out the window. I said, “Watch down over by the garage.”

Well, we had a garage that was between us and the outhouse, so you actually couldn’t see the outhouse through the garage. But [through] the window, you could see the door swing open or anybody go out or come in. We was standing there watching and all of a sudden, woo there it is! He yelled, and here come dad with his britches down, trying to run pulling his britches up at the same time. This was on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning; and Dick Maddock and his wife, and I think he had one or two other kids with him, had come down to see about a cow or something that dad was going to sell. And they just happened to drive up in the yard (ha ha) when dad was out there trying to pull his britches up. I went running outside innocent like an angel, you know, and [said], “What’s the matter, dad? What’s wrong?”

And he, “There a big snake in the house. Get me a rake, get me a hoe!”

I went in the garage and I got a shovel or hoe or something. I took it out and handed it to him. Then I headed for the back timber ’cause I knew the minute he hit that snake, he’d realize it was already dead, you know, ’cause there wouldn’t be no wiggle or nothing. My dad, he wasn’t very happy, I should say, about me for a while. I waited several hours before I tried to slip back to the house.

Well, I went into the Navy right after I got out of high school in 1946. I was seventeen. I went to boot training in San Diego, and then I went to yeoman school. Then after yeomen school, I shipped out for, I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I wound up in Pearl Harbor, of all places in 1947. After I been a yeoman for a while, they sent me back to the States to attend a Naval Justice school at Port Hueneme. So actually, I became specialized in legal activities of the Navy: courts and boards, court marshals, boards of investigation, deck courts, all kinds of stuff having to do with legal work. I stayed in Pearl Harbor most of my Navy time. The last seven months I was on a seagoing tug that operated out of San Pedro. I was the only yeoman on board so I took care of the records and did all kinds of administrative work on that seagoing tug. We’d go out to sea and we’d let out a big sled, like a pear, behind us that had a huge sail up on it. We’d tow that thing while other ships, sometimes they were so far away I couldn’t see ‘em, but battleships and cruisers and so forth would get their target practice firing on that big sea sled we were towing behind us with a sail up on it for a target. [Target towing] was our main duty.

One afternoon I was asleep on my hammock on board the sea going tug and there was an explosion woke me up. I wasn’t sure at first if I was just dreaming or it really happened. I jumped in my dungarees and started checking around. Come to find out we had had an explosion on board and there was a minor fire taking place. I ran out on the fan tail and there was a, they had cut a big hole in the metal deck of the fan tail, so they could remove parts during the maintenance overhaul we were undergoing. They were passing stuff out up through the hole that might possible catch on fire. Getting it away from the fire before the fire could get to it and put it out. They picked up a big old crate, and I grabbed it and took a few steps and threw it over the side rail onto the dock. Didn’t think much of it; and after it was all over with, the chief petty officer that had been there when this had taken place remembered seeing me grab this big crate of stuff coming up out of that hole and then throwing it over the side rail of the ship onto the dock. He took me out to the dock where this crate was sitting, and said, “Yeoman Lyerla, let me see you lift that up.”

And I said, “Chief you gotta be crazy.”

He said, “No, see if you could lift that up.”

It was all I could do to budge one end, and he said I had. I don’t remember doing it, but he said I had. So these stories about your adrenaline making you do strange things, there must be some truth behind it.

Then I came to Pittsburg. Combat was all over with when I was in the Navy. First combat I got into was when I came back out of the service, and started school in Pittsburg. Met a red-haired gal, and man. Oh man! The combat started! I was working towards getting a college degree. I was gonna play football and get a degree and chase girls; but found I couldn’t keep up on all three so I gave up football first, and then almost gave up getting my lessons. I joined a fraternity, Phi Sigma Epsilon, and we had a sister sorority know as the Tri Sigs. We were on a what you call a runout with the fraternity and the sorority, and we’d gone to a little place south of Joplin called Wimpie’s. I had taken a date when I went down there; and we was sitting in there and I just happened to notice what appeared to be a blonde in the dull light in there sitting there at the end of the table. All by her lonesome. The next day at college when I was walking across the campus, I happened to see her a short distance away walking in the opposite direction on the other path. I thought her name was Dorothy, so I hollered at her, and she totally ignored me. I thought, “Boy she’s stuck up.” So I just went on my way. Later I found out that her name wasn’t Dorothy, it was Donna. So I called and apologized. Before the conversation was over with, why she just decided that she had to see me again. So I made a, made a date to go to the movies together.

I joined the Army Reserve unit at about that time, and was attending reserve training here at Pittsburg while I was going to college. The Korean War got pretty hot, and they called the whole unit to active duty. Went to Fort Leonardwood, and then to Mineral Wells, Texas to Wolters Air Force Base. [I] was in the 835th Engineer Aviation Battalion, and I was a corporal in the battalion when Donna and I got married. We were married the fourth of August, 1951.

Shortly after we got married I made sergeant, and shortly after that I went to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Not too long after that, I got, finally got approval to go to OCS, [Officer Training School]; and so she went back home to stay with her parents. Then I was sent to Europe. To Austria. And after I’d been over there for about five months, got settled down, Donna got to join me. When I was in Austria, I was in the 11th AAA Battalion, Automatic Weapons Self-Propelled. Most of my time originally was spent as platoon leader or assistant platoon leader. I started out assistant platoon leader, then become platoon leader. In my platoon we had four full-track vehicles that mounted dual forties. Forty-millimeter guns and four half-tracks, armored half-tracks that mounted quad fifties or four fifty caliber machine guns. The forty millimeter guns could put out 120 rounds per minute each and the fifty caliber machine guns could put out 500 rounds per minute each. We were for air defense really, to shoot down low flying enemy aircraft. That was the purpose of the unit. This type of arms had been very successful in Korea in direct support of infantry in ground warfare. The infantry loved to have them around; they’d chew up a hillside right quickly.

I was in air defense first up in Boston and then I went to Austria. The war was going on the whole time. After I [had] been in Austria for a while, I got special training in communications. Then I became the battalion communications, officer and I spent the rest of my tour as the battalion communications officer.

I was stationed in the Chicago air defense. In the unit I went to up there was a ninety-millimeter unit again, but we also operated a sector A.A.O.C, anti-aircraft operations center, which had Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missiles in it also. A big portion of the sector of air defense at Chicago included Nineties, Nikes, and Hercules. I was the communications officer of the battalion and also was the adjutant for a period of time.

Then from there I got orders to go back to Fort Bliss where I’d gone through OCS. So I went down there to go through a triple A and SAN Anti-aircraft artillery surface air missile. When I completed that training, I was assigned at staff and faculty at Fort Bliss. After a couple years at staff and faculty, I got orders to go to Korea. [In] Korea I joined the 7th Infantry Division Artillery where I spent thirteen months as the communications officer.

Not a whole lot happened in Korea when I was there ’cause all the fighting was already over with. We were just there to help the South Koreans in case the North Koreans got feisty again, which they didn’t at that time. It was really bad duty ’cause men had to be away from their families, and since we weren’t involved in anything, the time went so slow.

Let’s see, come back from Korea, was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, near Lawton, Oklahoma. I’d been down there about a year, I guess, on staff and faculty at the artillery school when I got approval to go on the army bootstrap program to the municipal home university to complete my degree. We went to Omaha where I finished my degree program. Then when I finished that, went back to Fort Sill again, back to my job in the staff and faculty where they put me in the research and analysis division. Then I stayed in the research and analysis division till I got orders to go join the 11th Air Assault Division in Fort Benning, Georgia. I learned a lot of things while I was doing it, that came in handy to me later on, especially when I went into the 11th Air Assault Division, ‘cause it was just a paperwork division, it didn’t exist actually. It started out just as a small nucleus originally, we didn’t have a full division. It built up from small units, and kept growing by stages until we did become a full division. During that period, I had to design and plan the communications for our entire division artillery.

One of our assistant division commanders, General Wright, headed up just a small group called the advanced liaison party to go to Vietnam and they had representatives from all the different major units. I was to represent the artillery. We went out and met, contacted these other units, and we started looking for a spot for our division to move into. We eventually picked a spot, and started gettin’ things organized and the regular advanced party of a thousand men showed up. Eventually, we built up to a division of roughly sixteen thousand men in the central highlands, about halfway between Quihon and Pleiku, just a little area called An Khe.

One night we came under a mortar attack, and they put out an order that none of our aircraft, especially our helicopters, try to take off as long as we had mortars incoming. But we had men on a nearby big high hill where we set up our main signal complex communications center. We were about to run out of ammunition and be overrun, and their company commander came in and told us says,

“Major Lyerla says that if I can’t get ammunition up to those men they’re going to be overrun. Not only will they be killed, but our whole communication complex be wiped out. Both would be a disaster.”

And I asked him if wanted to take off, even though it had been ordered by General Wright not to. The word had been put out. And he said he had a friend he thought would, and I said,

“Ok. Well, get the ammunition and take it up to them.” And I said, “You realize what you’re flying into?”

Then that pilot both took their lives into their hands, and they both of them were married, too. Both of them went under fire in the helicopter and ’course they didn’t get shot down, neither one of them got hit. After that, after they got out of the craft and got the ammunition out, we were able to hold off the Viet Cong and save the installation. And we only had, I think we had two, two or three men killed and about five or six wounded.

I had one other, next closest encounter. That was when I had to go up to Phu Cat, take a jeep. I was supposed to fly up ’cause it wasn’t safe to go by roads or none of the so-called roads were secure. I was supposed to fly up to Phu Cat at the first light ’cause they were having problems communicating. It was a poor position up there. Come first light, why, the weather was socked in; none of the helicopters could fly. The last order I’d gotten from the bird colonel, the Division Artillery commander was he wanted me up there. So I got a jeep, and was gonna go by myself, and another major came up and said he wanted to go with me. I didn’t let my driver go ’cause when I was in Vietnam, I didn’t let anybody drive. I drove myself if I had to drive. We got sniper fire one time on the way up. Had to bypass a bullet. That was a tough route. But the funny part of it is,I got back they had a Green Beret encampment right across from our division there at An Khe, I had gotten to know a lot of them early on when we first got there before the whole division had came in. I stopped back by their encampment just to say hello to them. [It was] about dinner time, was eatin’ dinner with ’em and one of the captains asked me, said,

“You say you been somewhere, Major?”

I said, “Yeah, we just came in Phu Cat.”

And he said, “Well, how’d you come in?” said, “I didn’t hear no helicopter land.” I said, “We weren’t in any helicopter.” I said, “We couldn’t go. We had to leave early this morning, and we went up by jeep and came back by jeep.” He said, “What? Man, I wouldn’t go up there with a platoon of tanks.” And he was a Green Beret.

We had a problem in Vietnam. The Government was controlled by Rhee and his party, and they were Catholic. But the majority religion is South Vietnam is Buddhist. The Buddhists and the Catholics really didn’t hit it off. And they was always giving each other blows. One day I had to fly from our central highlands position down to Saigon to attend the frequency allocation conference. I didn’t realize the Buddhists had an uprising going on, and I flew into Tonsanu Airport and got me a Vietnamese taxi to take me downtown to where we was having this meeting. Once we got off of the air field and into the civilian area, right away, I knew there was something wrong. And then pretty soon, it became quite obvious that there was a lot wrong. ’Cause they had the streets barricaded. They was burning tires. Some of the Buddhists even burned themselves. Self-emolation in protest. And they didn’t like Americans because Americans were backing the Rhee government. I was by myself with this taxi with this Vietnamese driver that we couldn’t communicate with one another other than the fact I said the name of the hotel, and it was a Vietnamese name so he knew where I wanted to go. All I had was him at the wheel, in the front seat and I was in the back seat with a forty-five pistol and eight rounds of ammunition. To this day, I don’t know how I got through that one alive. How he got me through there. We’d be completely blocked off from a street, and he’d get that thing turned around before anybody could get to us and get the doors to open. We’d take off down an alley, and start in another way. He delivered me where I wanted to go in one piece. I always figured I probably came the closest to gettin’ it that day than when the mortars were comin’ in.

The first time I got a chance to go down to the river to take a bath, why, I never did go back again to the river to take a bath. ‘Cause I got out and had leeches all over me. After that, I didn’t take a bath until the rain would come. Was strange when it would start raining. You’d see a bunch of nude bodies out there with their soap washin’ in the rain. That was before the nurses got there. Once the nurses got there, female nurses, we couldn’t do that anymore. So we, we eventually built up duckwales and built up our own private shower systems that were kind of rudimentary.

I only took one (R&R). I went to Vietnam in December of ’65. Then Hong Kong… and Kowloon. Hong Kong is on an island, and Kowloon is directly across on the mainland. I decided that I wanted to be able to say I saw Red China. So I took off first day after we got there, and I wound up back in the sticks in the middle of nowhere. Nobody could speak any English; and of course, I couldn’t speak Mandarin or anything else coming close. Come to find out what was happening, there was always a need for fresh water in the territory there, of Hong Kong and Kowloon. So they decided to build a big, huge dam across an inlet that went into a big salt water bay. They was going to build this big, huge dam across there. It was such a humongous undertaking that they had construction companies in there from England and Norway, and Sweden. But anyway, I’d run into one of these Limies over there workin’ on that. He walked me up to a little club house like they had over there for construction workers, and went inside and I was visiting with him and some of the others. Had a drink of one of their particular dark brews and I said, “I wanna be able to see a part of Red China. That’s why I am way back here by myself.” Said, “How much farther I gotta go to see Red, be able to see Red China?” And he pointed to a window.

He said, “Look right over to that window, and look through that window and you’re lookin’ at Red China.” About an eighth of a mile from the window there was a big fence, you know, but behind that everything was Red China. I always thought after that how stupid! If any Communist back in that area had realized that here was an American major with the First Cavalry Division, had access to top secret documents, and was a kryptocontrol officer for the division that knew all the codes and everything, I probably wouldn’t have ever made it back.

Well, back when I left Vietnam, this lieutenant colonel I’d wound up working for, Binladi-- a competitor earlier on in our career-- thanked me for doing a good job and told me he put me in for the bronze star. After I’d been back to Fort Benning from Vietnam, the list for promotion from major to lieutenant colonel came out, and I wasn’t on it. I was within the date of rank period where I would have been considered. So I wrote a letter to find out why I wasn’t on it, and I found out why. What he’d done to me, he’d actually done the opposite of what he told me he was doing. He really hurt me with what he wrote about me. But I wrote a letter to this general I had worked for when we first went over. The one that headed up our advanced liaison party, General Wright, who had personal knowledge of me. When he found out about what happened, he wrote a letter to the chief of personnel at Washington, D.C. Sent me a copy of it. A few days later I was promoted. I went in to see my full colonel when I found out I’d been passed over and why. Colonel Horn liked me too, he’d selected me over another officer who worked for him. And he said, “Floyd”. He says, “ It’s been my experience that once this happens, no one has ever beat it. Never got this bad report removed and got promoted.” But when General Wright got in the act, it did happen immediately.

I got assigned to staff and faculty in the infantry school at Fort Benning. Stayed there about three years. I was a division chief in one of the instructional departments. The main thing we taught was radar repair. Communications equipment repair. That’s when we adopted Brett, November 1968.

Just before I got transferred to Redstone Arsenal, well, I got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. The position I was in only called for major and I had written up a new job description for a position getting a change to lieutenant colonel-- ‘cause they wanted me to stay there. My full colonel, who later become general, had asked me to do it. He wanted to do it. And it came back approved, but in the meantime, I had orders for color down transfer. About the same time I was getting approval to change it to lieutenant colonel position. When I was up at Redstone Arsenal, I was assigned to ABM, Anti-ballistic Missile System Project. I’d had some little bit of exposure to other people who collected and had a little idea about it.

[I retired in] 1970. I was in the Army for twenty-years [and in the Navy] three years.

[After I retired] one afternoon I was out on my motorcycle, actually looking to try to find a place where I might find some fossils to take Kellye where she could collect fossils for a science project. Well, I didn’t know if I’d find any trilobytes down there, hoped to; figured I’d find something. I was out riding in kind of a country road on my motorcycle, and I came up on a little creek with a sign that said, “Indian Creek.” I thought, “Well I wonder why they call this ’Indian Creek’.” And I went a short distance after I crossed the creek, and there was another gravel road that turned to the left and kind of paralleled the creek. I was riding down it, and slowed down, just to (the) left there was some timbers. In one area I happened to see down the timbers kinda clear enough, I could see there was an open area-- a path leading back to the open area. So, I rode my motorcycle back through it; and sure enough, there was an area back there where some guy was farming. He had plowed it, and it had rained; but he hadn’t planted anything yet. I stopped my motorcycle and out of curiosity, I hadn’t hardly gotten off of my motorcycle, I found a broken arrowhead almost before I stopped my motorcycle. I got to looking around and found some other stuff. That’s when I got started. [I collect] everything made by stone-age man: spears, arrowheads, knives, tomahawks, drills, metates, manos, crude axes, cells, chisels…

We stayed here [in Pittsburg] one year only; one year and then we went back down there [to Columbus, Georgia] in ’71. We stayed there until ’76 when we moved back to Columbus, Kansas. From Columbus, Georgia to Columbus, Kansas. [We lived] down there in Columbus till ’90, and we moved up here to Pittsburg in ’90; and have lived here ever since.

There was an archaeologist, a graduate archaeologist, from Missouri that had contacted Dr. Hensley over here at [PSU]. He had an area over there that he wanted to do some archaeological work in, and wanted to know if there was some people over here that would like to assist-- lookin’ for diggers was what he was doing. I don’t know how Hensley heard about me; but anyway, Dr. Hensley contacted me. He brought this archaeologist over and the three of us visited. I told him, yeah, I try to help him get a society started. They elected me the president the first year, and then re-elected me the second year. We meet once a month, and we always have a little bit of a business meeting. We limit that as much as we can, and that normally doesn’t take very long. We discuss current events and stuff that’s just happened in the field of archaeology. Interesting things that have come up recently. Then we have our program. These programs are planned, and people know three or four months in advance who’s going to give a program on what. Then, weather permitting and when we can find a place that might be worthwhile, we actually go out and dig. Our goal is to find a real good overhang or cave that has not been exploited yet, that we could spend a great deal of time in.

*Text in brackets were used by the editor to facilitate understanding.

This oral history was researched and prepared by Valerie Graham. January 2003.