Bob Davenport, a Wildwood local who served as the town’s police chief for more than a decade, spent just one of his 76 years of life in Vietnam. But the pesticides – Agent Orange most famous among them – used in the fog of war have shaped his entire life.

“I have had over 100 skin cancers cut out of my face, my head and my neck,” he told the Herald. “I have had three surgeries this year alone.”

Davenport was born and raised in Wildwood, where he attended Wildwood High School. He received his draft letter in May 1968. He was lurched into basic training at Fort Knox, in Kentucky, for nine weeks. There, he learned to handle the standard-issue M14 rifle, which added nearly 11 pounds to a soldiers’ field pack.

Davenport accepted his fate as an infantryman right away. “There were 162 guys in my basic training unit; 160 of them were sent to the infantry,” he said.

After basic training, troops were shipped out to Fort Polk, in Louisiana, for combat and field training. The hot, wet swamps of gator country paralleled Vietnam’s verdant jungles. Crude villages were built there in the swampy Louisiana woods.

At this massive training site, “Tiger Land,” Davenport learned how to identify even the smallest out-of-place sound in a forest, how to make camp and how to kill enemy infantry in the densest combat environment American soldiers had yet encountered.

Though he trained with a group of young men, he went to Vietnam alone. It would be at least a year until he knew if his new friends made it out of the war alive.

“As soon as I left McGuire Air Force Base, my clock started. I had to spend 365 days in Vietnam. A whole year,” Davenport said.

He was dropped off in South Vietnam, just outside Saigon. He was placed in a massive camp set up by the 90th Replacement Battalion. Quickly built housing, tents, mess halls, hangars and vehicle bays made this military base feel like a small town.

There, he received orders for the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, a still-active Army unit that was, at the time, one of the smallest infantry units in Vietnam.

Davenport said that this Brigade was ordered to protect the south side of Saigon. He and a platoon of soldiers were shipped via helicopter to “free kill” spots in this region, areas where it was OK to kill on-sight.

If Davenport or anyone on his platoon heard a sound they were trained to identify – the snap of a twig, the rustling of leaves – “you just turned and started shooting,” he said.

He remembers sleeping in muggy, impossibly bug-ridden kill areas when it was finally time to rest. He explained: “We would set up a nighttime camp, a little circle, and we would all break up into groups of three. Three guys would walk further out into the jungle from our camp to set up a position with claymore mines, and stayed there ready with grenades, weapons at the ready.”

There were few cooked meals in Vietnam. Davenport certainly didn’t get them. “We had to cook sea rations, which were packaged cans of food, pork and beans. We didn’t have enough security to heat our food most days,” he said.

Davenport did not brag about a kill count – he never admitted to taking a human life himself. Much of the conversation was about the terror of survival, and what it meant to endure the long-term health effects wrought by Agent Orange.

“My outlook was this: How can I stay alive? How can I protect myself and the guys I was with?” he said. “I hope that none of my kids, and my grandkids, will ever have to go through that.”

Davenport returned to the United States on March 18, 1969. “When I got out of the hangar, they put me out on the street and told me to find my own ride,” he said. He hailed a taxi and took the red-eye home to Philadelphia, where he was picked up by his parents.

That was the end of his year from hell, he said. He has battled health ailments nearly every day of his life since. His first day at the Wildwood Police Department was cut short by a bout of malaria – he was sent directly to the Elsmere VA Hospital for urgent treatment.

And the cancer treatments feel “endless,” he said. His face is marked by intense scarring from dozens of cancer procedures. During an especially invasive procedure, doctors opened his neck to remove 43 cancerous lymph nodes and a saliva gland.

Davenport spent nearly 30 years in the Wildwood Police Department. He was able to afford many of his treatments because of the “very good” health insurance offered there.

His goal when shipping out to Vietnam was just to stay alive, he said. In that sense, it was a mission accomplished.

Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 156.