Memories of former Texas Tech TE Lou Breuer still fresh for teammates, squad mates

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Memories of former Texas Tech TE Lou Breuer still fresh for teammates, squad mates

Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal · Lubbock Avalanche-Journal

Tue, Aug 2, 2022 ·

10 min read

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It's a good feeling, to know you tried and got away with it, flirted with death. ... However, I believe firmly that everybody comes over here with a sack full of luck. ... Oh, God, have I stretched it. Anyway, you keep reaching into that little magic bag and pulling it out. Everybody comes over with a bag, some with a little more luck than others. Only trouble is, you never know when it's going to run out. Never know.

1st Lt. Lou Breuer, spring of 1972, South Vietnam

On a long sidewalk that runs through the Sumner County Veterans Park in Gallatin, Tennessee, Lou Breuer is remembered with a square paver bearing his name, his military rank and unit, where he died and when.

The park's Wall of Honor pays tribute to those who served, its Memorial Monument to those who gave their lives. In front of a separate, supporters' wall is the checkerboard of sidewalk squares.

Many of the names are familiar to someone in Sumner County, because the park was conceived as a way to honor local men and women. Former Texas Tech football player Lou Breuer had no connection to Gallatin, and the cities he called home were nowhere near Tennessee.

"I wanted to do something to honor him," said Mike Bair, president of chapter 240 of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

Bair, a retired U.S. Army captain, served with Breuer, a first lieutenant, in the last few months of 1971 and the first few of 1972 in the Quang Tri province of then-South Vietnam. Both flew the Bell AH-1G Cobra gunship helicopter.

During conversations in Bair's hooch, Breuer would take the powdered orange beverage Tang, mix it with tea, and they'd heat it over Bair's one-burner hot plate.

"As funny as that beverage sounds," Bair said, "it tasted pretty good. And we would have conversations. I was a married guy with two small children, and Lou asked questions about my family.

"I took it that he was quite curious about what it was like to be a father, because we talked about that a fair amount. I guess he was looking forward to that point in his own life, which is tragic that he didn't ever have that opportunity."

Breuer was on his third tour of duty in Vietnam when an enemy soldier, using a shoulder-held SAM-7 missile, shot down the Cobra Breuer was piloting on June 20, 1972. Chief warrant officer Dave Townsend, Breuer's co-pilot and gunner, also died.

The incident happened near An Loc, a city that was the focal point of a major battle of the Vietnam War that spring and summer.

When someone marvels that Bair knew Breuer for only half a year 50 years ago, yet still feels a profound loss, Bair says, "He was that kind of a guy. You get to where you love people and really care about them and look up to them. And I think probably most anybody that Lou knew would be in that category if they had any time at all to spend around him."

We knew it was going to be bad. Matter of fact, I didn't think I would come back. Basically, because I knew that out of our team of two Cobras and a little loach, if somebody got shot down we'd all die trying to get him out. Hell of a thought, really. Just couldn't leave the guy down there and everybody knew it.

It was kind of like talking to somebody before you know you were going to die. So many came up with that funny look in their eye, maybe a tear or two, and shake your hand, look at you like they ain't ever going to see you again. (Expletive) After about two hours of this, I knew what my chances were anyway — slim, very, very slim. Somebody had to try. That's the way I look at it. Damn, if I was down there on the ground, I'd hope somebody would do it for me.

On the last Saturday night of June 1972, on an Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, Joe Love sat playing bridge with the woman to whom he was married at the time and another couple. The nearby television was turned to the Coaches All-America Game, where star college seniors from the 1971 football campaign were playing what was then regarded as the kickoff event for the season to come.

Lubbock hosted the game each June from 1970 to 1976, but a pall hung over the 1972 game at Jones Stadium, for the local crowd, anyway. Lou Breuer, a Texas Tech letterman from 1966-68, a man who started each of his last 25 games in a Red Raiders' uniform, had died four days before in Vietnam.

Come halftime at Jones Stadium, they paid tribute to him.

That's how Mike Bair, then a civilian living on Long Island, New York, found out.

That's how Joe Love found out, too.

"I almost fell out of my chair, you know what I mean?," Love said. "It was a shock, because I thought an awful lot of Lou. ... He was the kind of guy that people gravitated to."

Love and Breuer had been teammates at Richardson High School. One day in practice, Love and another kid were doing a good job throwing double-team blocks on Breuer. The assistant coach running the drill was so impressed that he called over the head coach and told them to do it again.

"And immediately, Lou's intensity went up about a quantum leap," Love said, "and we didn't have near the success with the head coach watching as we had had up to that point. When I saw that about Lou Breuer, that was one of the first things that came to my memory. Lou was one of those guys that he stepped up when he was needed to step up."

Love is 75 years old now, living in Chesapeake, Virginia. He retired from Langley Air Force Base in 1990 as a lieutenant colonel. When a reporter emailed Love recently seeking his recollections of Breuer, Love stopped to reflect on his high-school teammate and two college roommates who also were shot down in Vietnam.

"I think of the years I spent flying and never had a shot fired at me in anger," Love said. "It's one of those things where you go, 'Why him and not me?' "

A call went out we had a downed bird. Jumped in my airplane, went screaming back out there. One of our loaches has been shot down. And everybody's expended except the guy I'd been flying with. He'd got off the ground before me. He went straight out to where it was and started circling real low over the rubber trees looking for this guy. Started taking fire. Took a couple of hits. Hell, I got down there with him. Seemed like the safest place to be, flying circles, real tight circles around it, about hitting the rotor blades in the rubber trees, it was so low.

On Southwest Conference football fields from 1972 to 1992, Grant Teaff made a name for himself coaching Baylor to 128 victories and eight bowl games, including an out-of-nowhere SWC title in 1974.

From 1966 to 1968, Teaff worked as a Texas Tech assistant under JT King.

He was Lou Breuer's position coach.

"It's hard to describe a young man at that age that was the kind of person that he was," Teaff said. "He was clean as a hound's tooth, one of those kind of guys that you never had to worry about him being in condition. You never had to worry about him getting in any kind of problem or trouble. He was a wonderful, wonderful young man to coach, and he was a very, very good football player."

Louis Karl Breuer IV was born March 22, 1946 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the city in which he spent his first 13 years. After his family moved to Texas, he went to Richardson High School and graduated in 1964.

Then it was on to Texas Tech, where Breuer broke into the starting lineup midway through the 1966 season. Charles Evans, a younger tight end but 6-foot-5, 235 and full of promise, was good enough to be drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1970.

In the summer before the '68 season, Breuer approached offensive line coach John Conley and hit him with some dry wit: "Coach, I've got the answer to your offensive tackle problem. I think Evans is your man."

Evans stayed at tight end — and ultimately played in the Coaches All-America Game in 1970 — but Breuer remained a starter for the duration of his career.

The Red Raiders' seniors of 1968 earned a distinction that, among Tech players, is theirs alone. They beat then-mighty Arkansas back to back in 1966 and 1967 and beat Texas back to back in 1967 and 1968.

Their starting tight end, listed at 6-foot-2 and anywhere from 203 to 220 pounds, was known more for dependability and toughness than for his speed. He reportedly clocked 4.9 seconds in the 40-yard sprint. Yet, in 1967, Lou Breuer was on the receiving end of Tech's longest pass play of the season.

In a 31-29 victory against Baylor that year, he caught a short pass from Joe Matulich, sidestepped a defender and took off. By the time the Bears caught him, he was 51 yards downfield.

"Bullet Bob" Breuer, one of the Red Raiders cracked, a joking reference to "Bullet Bob" Hayes, the Dallas Cowboys wide receiver who'd been an Olympic gold-medal sprinter.

"I could outrun Lou. I was a tackle," said Jim Arnold, another Tech teammate. "If he dodged somebody, it was a minute to remember, because he was not that flashy kind of guy."

The Red Raiders ranked third in the nation in rushing in 1967, though. Blocking was part of Breuer's value.

Just ask Jim Moylan, a co-captain on the Red Raiders' 1968 team. The brawny lineman from Eastland learned to keep his head on a swivel for Breuer during practice.

"Playing defensive tackle against him, you definitely wanted to know where he was at all times," Moylan said. "The boy was not afraid of contact."

Among Breuer's closest friends with the Red Raiders were teammates who doubled as fraternity brothers in Phi Gamma Delta, aka the Fijis: defensive tackle Bill Adams from Hobbs, New Mexico; offensive tackles Mike Patterson from Winters and Arnold from San Antonio Alamo Heights; and safety-rover Eddy Windom from McLean.

Adams and Breuer spent 3 1/2 years as roommates at 111 Bledsoe Hall, and then Patterson roomed with him.

Adams, Breuer and Windom spent 14-hour days one summer working on a pipeline crew in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

"The first week we were up there," Windom said, "we couldn't work because it rained so much and we wore our Tech jerseys around that we took with us, and everybody would help us buy a hamburger or beer or something. That's when (former Tech star) Donny Anderson was really popular in Green Bay."

One thing about Lou Breuer, his Tech teammates agreed. He liked to have fun.

"He was a competitor in every sense of the word," Moylan said. "But let me tell you what: He had a good time when he was at Tech, too. He enjoyed his stay."

Soon enough, though, real life interceded. The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam peaked in the years from 1967 through 1969.

"We were playing and trying to stay eligible and trying to stay draft-free, if you will," said Matulich, the Red Raiders' quarterback. "Trying to stay in school as long as we could and that type of thing."

Matulich and his fiancee, a Monterey graduate he'd met at Tech, were planning their wedding for Dec. 27, 1969. This December, he and Beth will celebrate their 53rd anniversary.

But their future was unclear as their wedding date approached. On Dec. 1, 1969, the U.S. Selective Service System conducted its first draft lottery since 1942.

"I told my fiancee, 'If I get drafted here, we're probably going to put this marriage thing off,' " Matulich said. "That was one of those trying times. You didn't know what was getting ready to happen. It would have been a change in plans and all that kind of stuff."

The lower a man's draft lottery number, the more likely it was that he would be sent to Vietnam.

Matulich remembers sitting anxiously in his car, listening to the lottery on radio.

"I still remember the number. Yeah, I was number 278," he said, citing the number that corresponded to his May 18 birthdate.

When Matulich was a Tech freshman, the first two guys he remembers meeting in Bledsoe Hall were Adams and Breuer.

A few years later, Breuer was headed into the war. Even before he went into the military, Breuer already had a pilot's license. After training stateside, he was deployed to Vietnam in September 1971. Having come into a Ford Falcon not long before, he tried to hand over use and caretaking of his bronze-colored convertible to a teammate.

"He was fixing to ship out," Patterson said, "and he said, 'I want you to take care of my car for me.' I said, 'Lou, I can't do that. You take that car and leave it with your mom and dad in Richardson.' And I guess that's what he did."

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a series of three stories on Lou Breuer, a former Texas Tech player who died in Vietnam.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Memories still fresh for Lou Breuer's Texas Tech football teammates

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