In 1966, 21-year-old Jeff “Peff” Eick was piloting a Huey gunship near the Cambodian border when he was radioed to rescue an infantry platoon pinned down by Viet Cong.
Two other Army gunships had already attempted the rescue and been driven off by heavy fire.
Eick set down in the hot landing zone and waited an eternity for the platoon to scramble aboard under the machinegun spray of his door gunners.
Once clear of the area, the young pilot turned in his seat to ask the infantrymen if they were okay. But the only words he could get out of his mouth were “J.J?”
“Hey pal, what are you doing here?” John Joseph answered.
The story was recalled by Joseph when he served as master of ceremonies at Eick’s induction into the Hermosa Beach Surfers Walk of fame in 2008.
Before being sent to Vietnam, Eick surfed for the Dewey Weber team and Joseph for the rival Jacobs team. The helicopter encounter was the first and last time the two Hermosa Beach surfers saw each other in Vietnam.
Eick served two tours in Vietnam before returning home, where he became an El Segundo firefighter, Realtor, developer and family man with two daughters. But surfing and Vietnam would continue to inform his life.
He remains a regular at El Porto and owns a home at Rocky Point on the North Shore of Hawaii. He’s also a regular volunteer with the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation, which teaches surfing to the Wounded Warrior Battalion at Camp Pendleton.
Eick recently released a music video on YouTube of a song he wrote as a tribute to the Wounded Warrior Battalion.
“My original idea was for the song to relate how the Wounded Warriors are your sons and daughters. But then I realized soldiers are soldiers forever. It’s the kind of job that changes you,” Eick said.
The song is titled “Sons and Daughters.” The chorus reads:
We’re your sons and your daughters
We’re your mothers and fathers
Soldiers forever more
You send us to battle
But you leave us to grapple
With the horrors of fighting a war.
As the song evolved, Eick said, the verses became more personal. “I thought how Vietnam impacted the beginning of my life, the gauntlet of returning from Vietnam and all the different issues that came up,” he said.
One of the song’s strongest images recalls the greeting he received on his return.
Out of the Army
Back in the world
A hero’s welcome no more
My old friend Dewey says
Thanks for your service
Take any board in the store.
The final verses bring the song back to the reason Eick began writing it.
“When we work with the vets at Camp Pendleton they’re more than willing to talk to me. We all have in common what went on.”
We ride some waves
We talk some stories
Put combat out of their heads
If just for a few hours
We can help them to deal
With the dreams, the fight and the dead.
After two years polishing the lyrics with help from his daughter Carrie, a Manhattan Beach elementary school teacher, Eick and his longtime guitar teacher Pat Dietz recorded the song at Rick Wenzel’s Ardent Audio Productions in Torrance. Dietz laid down the acoustic lead guitar for Eick’s gravelly, ‘60s folk-era vocals.
A short time later, Eick played the song for fellow Manhattan Beach surfer Warren Kushner, a video director whose clients include Aflac, Land Rover and Match.com. Kushner wanted to shoot a video for the song.
Kushner’s high definition video interweaves Eick singing and playing guitar on the beach at the Manhattan pier with archival footage of the Vietnam War and Eick’s personal Vietnam photos. The photos include Eick laying on a sandbag barricade playing guitar, his crashed Huey and his crew “back in my hooch, drinking my whiskey, singing ‘Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.’”
The patch on his fatigues matches the emblem on his Huey — a skull and crossbones and the word Buccaneer.
Marci Klein of Forever Memories in Redondo added Wounded Warrior Battalion photos from Afghanistan to the video.
The first public showing of the “Sons and Daughters” video was last month at the Jimmy Miller Memorial Surf Festival awards dinner. Eick received a standing ovation. B
