With a deafening crack, Vietnam veteran E. Paige Lanier pulled the lanyard on an M777 howitzer, sending a shell soaring over the prairie at Fort Carson’s vast training grounds south of Colorado Springs. On that sunny fall day, Command Sgt. Maj. Rob McGinnis introduced Lanier to the crowd gather ed for a demonstration of new technology as invaluable to the artillery regiment.  “He keeps us rooted in our history and he keeps us bonded together,” McGinnis said. “We love him.” Former Army Capt. Lanier, 85, helped symbolically close the door on old communications technology that day. But he is a constant presence around the 2nd Battalion, 77th Field Artillery on Fort Carson, visiting a few times a month. At a recent change of command ceremony, he sat in the front row, his red hat a stark contrast in a sea of camouflage.  “The 2-77 is just his home,” said Capt. Sophia Suri, who helps Lanier as a board member of the regiment’s association. When troops were returning home from war in the Middle East, Lanier and a group of about 10 volunteers helped ensure they were greeted with pizza parties, challenge coins and free rides home. He made sure those welcomes replaced divorce attorneys representing unhappy spouses and taxi drivers wanting to charge exorbitant fees. The volunteers essentially ran the lawyers off base, he recalled.  Some Vietnam veterans were spat upon or had red substances thrown on them by protesters. While it never happened to Lanier personally, he said some of his friends faced the angry reception, and the group wanted to make sure returning soldiers never experienced anything similar.  “These are my family,” he said during an interview at his home in December, several months after firing the artillery on base. While Lanier has lived in Colorado Springs since 1972, his Virginia accent came through as he reflected on years of volunteer work with Fort Carson soldiers and his time as a young officer in Vietnam.  E. Paige Lanier, who was an artilleryman in the battle of Suoi Tre in Vietnam, watches an exercise with Capt. Sophia Suri, as the artillerymen with the 2nd Battalion, 77th Field Artillery Regiment test new computer systems down range Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025, at Fort Carson. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock) Winning against the odds  Sharing his stories from Vietnam with younger soldiers is also part of his mission on base.  In early December, Lanier told the story of the Battle Soui Tre to Fort Carson soldiers, as a featured speaker during a celebration of the 4th Infantry Division’s 108th birthday.  Lanier’s first deployment to Vietnam, as a first lieutenant, in 1966 and ’67, came at a time when the U.S. was trying to capture Viet Cong leadership near Cambodia, as part of an offensive called Operation Junction City.  As part of that push, the Army established a base for artillery to provide support to ground troops near the abandoned village of Soui Tre.  “I think they put us out there for bait, because they wanted the enemy to attack us,” Lanier said. The Viet Cong likely thought they could overrun the American troops, but the U.S. soldiers beat them despite running out of ammunition at one point, he said.  The battle started in the early morning of March 21, 1967, when the Viet Cong started a heavy mortar attack followed by a ground assault with troops descending on them from the north, east and south, according to an official Army account recommending the units in the battle for a presidential unit citation. The account estimated 2,500 Viet Cong attacked.  The situation was so critical howitzers were lowered “to fire directly into the waves of advancing enemy soldiers,” the account said.  The artillerymen fired beehive rounds into the soldiers filled with nails with fins on the end instead of a flat head, Lanier said.  The beehive rounds would pin a soldier’s rifle to their body and people to trees, he said, and contributed to the high death toll. The official record said 647 killed Viet Cong soldiers, but Lanier knows it was much higher because the defeated troops took the bodies of their fellow soldiers with them and as they retreated, American jets fired on them.  As a young munitions officer at the time, Lanier collected the rounds from the munitions depot and received 18 extra rounds of the beehive munition that his commanding officer ordered him to issue to the guns anyway, providing more firepower to the 77th Artillery Regiment crews.  During the fighting, the artillery crews cannibalized destroyed howitzers to keep damaged ones firing. When they ran out of ammunition, they grabbed rifles and kept firing on the enemy, Lanier said. Cooks, clerks and others also jumped in to help, the official record said.  As U.S. soldiers ran out of ammunition, they started using weapons and ammunition from dead or wounded Viet Cong soldiers, according to the official record. The infantrymen ran out of bullets after being issued double their normal supply, he said.  During the fighting, personnel carriers and tanks arrived with additional weapons, Lanier said, and the Americans carried the day, with about 33 soldiers killed and 187 wounded.  During the battle, Lanier was less than two miles away, charged with manning small arms and thousands of high-explosive rounds for the artillery. Lanier and his team got lucky and weren’t discovered by the enemy fighters during the battle.  In other engagements, though, Lanier was tasked with calling artillery fire and he had no problem giving the order, he recalled.  “If we got one round fired at us, I would have artillery in the air,” he said. After enlisting in 1960 and then attending Officer Candidate School, Lanier had considered making the military a career. He came from a family history of service.  Among the eight brothers in his family, six had served in the military, two in World War II, two in Korea and two in Vietnam, including Lanier.  But he got frustrated with the lower standards for soldiers introduced by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “They couldn’t read, they couldn’t write, they couldn’t march,” he recalled.  So he left and went into business for himself as a traveling salesman representing auto part manufacturers, a career he loved and worked in for 42 years.  Work on Fort Carson In 2007, when the 2nd Battalion, 77th Field Artillery Regiment moved back to Fort Carson from Fort Hood, Lanier got involved with the regiment’s association and organized a reunion after making friends with the battalion’s commander.  During the reunion, the Vietnam veterans helped train the soldiers on air-lifting artillery with helicopters, he said.    For some, Lanier is a living reminder of the regiment’s legacy. He also provides a personal connection to the soldiers of the past and an understanding of who they are and what they went through, said Capt. Suri, who has met other older artillerymen through the association.  Through those former soldiers she said she has learned about dedication to community.  “Your service is not restricted to your time in active duty,” she said.  While Lanier is moving a little slower than he used to after a fall, he has no plans to stop volunteering with the artillerymen or telling their story. And he expects artillery will be relevant long into the future because it always has been.  “Artillery has been a backbone of the military forever,” he said.  While the artillery shell he fired in September could be his last, he said that sunny day, he is not ruling out the possibility of another invitation from his friends at the 2nd Battalion to fire a big gun. ...read more read less