Two weeks later, however, Easter Sunday was anything but a day of peace and beauty, such as we normally associate with this holy day. It began in a manner that should have suggested a peaceful day but it wasn’t to be. A beautiful dawn with blue skies and pleasant temperatures greeted us, followed by an early morning Easter Sunday church service. The rough and very un-churchlike surroundings didn’t detract from the ceremony, and a priest who had made a special trip to spend the morning with us spoke of rebirth and better days. Following the service it was time to get back to the task at hand, however, which meant loading our rifles, pocketing a supply of hand grenades, putting on our flak jacket and backpack, and moving out. A process we called saddling up. There were no lilies to be picked that day, rather there were encounters with an enemy that only wanted to see us dead, no matter the day. That Easter ended with twelve men seriously wounded by mines, and two killed in ambushes.
Your flag is flying full,
At half mast for the matadors,
Who turned their backs to please the crowd, And all fell before the bull.
Black and white were the figures that recorded him, Black and white was the newsprint
he was mentioned in. Black and white was the question that so bothered him.
He never asked, he was taught not to ask, What was on his lips as they buried him.3
3Requiem for the Masses. By The Association, 1967. ©Warner Bros. Lyrics by Terry Kirkman. 5 Souvenirs of War
A Little Thing Called
Allen Brook
Another period indelibly burned into my memory was ten days in May, 1968 — especially May 25th. I remember the specific date because it was certainly one of my worst days there, and it was my sister’s wedding day back in Seattle. In subsequent years I came to the conclusion that this date would probably go down as the worst single day of my life — a strong statement to make but thus far it hasn’t been surpassed and I certainly can’t imagine the circumstances that would surpass that day — or in fact the entire 7 or 8 day period leading up to it.
0 Souvenirs of War A Little Thing Called AllenBrook 1 On May 17th parts of our battalion were taken by helicopter (twin-rotor CH-46 or 47 Chinooks) to an area about fifteen or twenty miles south of Da Nang called Go Noi Island — a low lying area where three rivers converged. A very large number of NVA had amassed there in recent weeks and a major offensive on their part was feared. Rumors had it that a few hundred NVA were there, but it turned out to be many more than that. (Intelligence was notoriously bad throughout this war). In a coordinated effort called Operation Allen Brook units of 3/27 and part of the 7th Marine Regiment were to go in and wipe out the NVA before they could attack Da Nang and other high priority targets. In the hours prior to leaving for Go Noi Island there was no hint of what lay in store for us. This was our first helicopter assault, and while flying low in large and slow helicopters over enemy countryside is a worrisome thing to do, it was also kind of exciting to finally do an aerial assault such as we had done in training several times. The real thing is somehow always very different than practice, however. We didn’t know that an entire NVA regiment and three VC battalions lay in wait for us. We also did not know that we were to be dropped in the middle an elaborate and overwhelming ambush that had been formed to welcome us upon our arrival.
India (I) Company of 3/27 went in first and got hit very hard with dozens killed and wounded in the first hours. We were sent in next and the first three Marines off the chopper (I was fourth) were immediately shot or hit with mortar shrapnel so I and others quickly loaded them back on, ducking bullets, and ran out to set up a perimeter. There is nothing in this world more frightening than a hot LZ (Landing Zone). It pretty much went downhill from that point. We were surrounded and taking fire from all sides, with mortars and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) crashing into the landing zone. Landing zones by their nature must be free of trees and other cover such as boulders, and I vividly remember having nothing but tall elephant grass for cover. (And to add insult to injury, elephant grass has extremely sharp edges which will cut skin like razors. Crawling through it caused its own problems.) The NVA had clearly fixed their mortars and rockets onto this position prior to our landing as the accuracy of their rounds was deadly.
We tried to link up with I Company, but found fierce resistance wherever we tried to go. We were being raked with machine gun fire and hit with mortars, and found that we were completely surrounded and heavily outnumbered with no exit available. We called in very close air and artillery support as a last resort. The bombs and artillery were falling almost on top of us, the NVA were that close. It speaks to the accuracy and training of the pilots and artillerymen that they could put bombs that close and yet not hit us. A few days later I watched a Phantom crash into the ground, however, as he completed a very low level bombing run.
(There were incidents where many Americans were killed by friendly fire. One incident later that year in the northern part of the country saw over a dozen killed when the spotter gave the wrong coordinates — he gave his unit’s coordinates, rather than the NVA’s.)
We slowly worked our way closer to I Company, carrying dead and wounded with us. It was impossible to even think about choppers landing again any time soon. We were completely on our own. We fought our way to an area that provided a little more cover in the way of some trees and tried to set up a defensive position. All the supplies we were going to have for many days were in our packs and pockets, or hanging around our necks. We were going to have to survive on one meal per day, and ammunition and water were already becoming very serious concerns.
It was not possible to do the normal aggressive actions such as patrols, as we were essentially trapped. I remember the first night when I was supposed to catch an hour or two of sleep being woke up by gunfire — I looked up and machine gun tracer bullets were flying directly over my face a scant few inches. (Every fifth bullet in machine gun ammo belts is a tracer, so you can see where the rounds are going; it makes what looks like a line through the air). I could feel the heat and the force of the bullets as they passed over. Had I jumped up when I woke up I would have been cut in half. After a few seconds the NVA gunner moved the gun a little and the bullets went elsewhere. I immediately crawled into the shallow foxhole I had hastily dug the evening before. We beat this and other attacks back. The next night a very large Chinese soldier snuck into our lines and it took three of us to subdue and capture him before he could kill anyone with the large knife he had in his hand.
The passage of an entire week changed little. It was still a very desperate situation. Every day of the operation was incredibly hot — I don’t think day time temperatures were ever below 110 degrees (according to sensitive medical thermometers). May 25th in particular was an extremely hot day. The thermometer that the corpsman carried said 113 degrees in the shade, and it was extremely muggy. We were running seriously low on water, food and ammunition. In fact, our water supply was essentially depleted.
We had carried all the dead to one location in the center of our position, trying to keep them in the shade. I vividly recall two neat long rows of body bags, and some of the dead just covered with whatever we could find when we ran out of body bags.
The heat and lack of water was a serious problem. I personally watched two 18 or 19 year old kids die of heat stroke. They just writhed and moaned in pain, with their brains basically boiling away. There was nothing we could do. I knew four Marines that died of heat stroke and dehydration.
There was an old bomb crater 50 or so yards from our position that had filled with filthy green scum-covered water. It was worse than a mud puddle in a barnyard. I got so desperate that I crawled over to the cra
Souvenirs of War A Little Thing Called AllenBrook 5 ter, brushed away the worst of the scum and dirt, and put water in my canteen. I dropped in a couple Iodine tablets and drank it. It was the most vile tasting, hot, and disgusting water you can imagine. As I drank I was being sickened by the smell of rotting corpses, th
ough I wasn’t sure where they were. I pushed back a large branch on the top of the water and saw two badly decomposing NVA corpses floating in the water a few feet from where I had filled my canteen. I had no choice; I moved to a spot in the bomb crater a little further away and refilled my canteen.
At one point during that week a Chinook was able to land to evacuate some wounded. We loaded it up in a hurry. I can see the picture in my mind clearly of the chopper lifting off, and at about 40 feet high being hit by an RPG. It exploded in flames and fell, burning bodies jumping or falling out as it descended. War is full of such ugly sights.
Medivac choppers were life-savers and their pilots
and crews were amazingly courageous men. It’s impossible to know how many soldiers survived despite serious injuries because they were able to be evacuated on a timely basis to a distant hospital. It was common for the enemy to wait until the choppers were just landing to spring ambushes on them and us. The chopper crews of course knew that but would always come in anyway no matter how dangerous the conditions. The aluminum skin of the choppers didn’t slow down a bullet in the least — the chopper crews had no more protection than we did out in the open, and they made bigger and better targets. On one occasion I was standing just a few feet away from a chopper that was being loaded, talking to the pilot on the radio — in fact we were looking at each other through the plexiglas of the chopper’s cockpit while talking over the radio. Suddenly an ambush was sprung and bullets ripped through the skin of the chopper from front to back. Several men standing near me were also hit. I saw a tracer round go through the chest of a Marine and exit from his back, still burning. He fell dead at my feet. The pilot hastily (as quickly as a huge helicopter can move) got the chopper airborne. I had no way of knowing what had happened inside the bird and how many men were hit, but fortunately the pilot hadn’t been.
Additional support in the form of other companies from 3/27 had been brought in as close as possible to help us and I Company. On the afternoon of the 25th we lined up and made yet one more classic suicide frontal assault against a heavily defended tree line where the NVA had set up strongly reinforced concrete bunkers and machine guns. We fought across a completely open field toward the tree line. Early in this advance the radioman was killed. In this instance the radioman may have been the random target of an NVA machinegunner, or the anonymous victim of artillery or a mortar; I don’t recall. But often the man carrying the radio was targeted because of his strategic importance. The persons near him were also targeted because it was assumed they were the officers in charge. Carrying the radio was a bit like putting a bullseye on your chest. I picked up the radio and put it on my back. Again, it saved my life.
We were about midway to the tree line when a mortar landed directly behind me. It knocked me off my feet and some shrapnel hit me in the neck. The radio was completely destroyed. Had I not had it on my back I would have been killed or suffered grievous spinal cord injury without question. (The PRC-25 radio was about three inches thick, a foot wide, and fifteen inches high, with a spare battery hooked to the bottom which provided another 2X10 inches of cover.)
A small piece of shrapnel ended up being left in the back of my neck. It moved outward toward the skin in the years after returning home and it has been pretty much an annoyance since — especially if I get a tension headache — then its presence in the neck muscle is obvious.
The fighting raged for the rest of the day, with very close air and artillery support again called in, including napalm drops so close that our own men were burned. We could feel the extreme heat of the napalm. Incredibly, the NVA came out of their deep reinforced bunkers after these bombardments and continued the fight. The tree line was eventually captured.
There was actually little to differentiate day one from day ten in this battle. The heat never relented, taking scores of heat related casualties as a result, and the enemy strength kept steady as fresh NVA reinforcements moved in to support them. On what I think was the third day of the operation we spent hours policing the battlefield while constantly being shot at by NVA snipers in trees all around us. We located dead and seriously wounded Marines throughout the hellish appearing battle site, moving them back behind our lines. We piled helmets, bloody flak jackets and mangled rifles into large piles — monuments to the heroism of those young men barely out of high school.
The glazed look — the so-called thousand yard stare — on the faces of combat veterans is very real. It comes from battles such as Go Noi Island. I vividly remember constantly telling myself at the time to erase those scenes, sounds, and actions from my mind at all cost or they would destroy me. I guess I succeeded. Over the years, however, I’ve looked down at my hands probably a hundred of times and wondered how these very hands could have done the things they did, and how could these very eyes have seen the things they saw. It seems that somehow new body parts should have replaced the old upon return to The World, just as new and untarnished clothes replaced the blood-soaked utilities worn in battle, and the blood and mud of battle is washed away.
I don’t mean to even come close to presenting a comprehensive account of this battle. Hopefully there are other books that go into the details that must be recorded for history on behalf of the men who were there. To make a very long story short, we finally got out of there with the help of relief companies from other Marine units, but not without taking many casualties. I recall that the highest-ranking person still in the field from I Company was a corporal. My company was also badly chewed up with many casualties.
At some later point I came across a very brief article in a military newspaper about Operation Allen Brook — I suspect it was the Stars and Stripes paper. I tore out the story that summarized all that was Operation Allen Brook and more than a week of incredible effort, heroism, and danger into one paragraph. I still have it. It reads: “The 3/27 Marines took over control of Allen Brook on May 18 and met the heaviest North Vietnamese resistance of the operation while sweeping into Cu Ban Village during the afternoon. As the battalion swept through elephant grass and into a tree line at the edge of the village, they were met by a hail of automatic weapons, rocket and mortar fire”. And that was just the first few minutes of ten days resembling hell. Gosh, that summary seems so sterile and almost Hollywood-like in its ability to describe combat actions without any of the blood, guts, fear, and pain that is the reality of such a scenario. In a later letter to a brother I described the second day of the operation as an almost unending firefight from dawn to dark, with so much smoke in the air it was hard to breathe.
Though we paid a high price Allen Brook was a military success. We broke the back of the local VC infrastructure and prevented a major offensive against highvalue targets. Over 600 NVA were killed that we knew of, while we suffered about 150 killed and 700 wounded. Some time later the Secretary of the Navy presented the Meritorious Unit Commendation to 3 / 27 for its deeds in Allen Brook for “…those qualities of valor and professional skill which were in keeping with the highest traditions of the Marine Corps.” It’s a hell of a hard way to earn an ‘at a boy’
During the period of spring and summer of 1968 there were several major battles in I-Corps involving Marines. The battle for the city of Hue, and the siege and near daily battles at the Marine base at Khe Sanh are perhaps the two best known. Marine bravery and heroism at Hue and Khe Sanh deserve to rate with the legendary days of the Corps. Those Marines faced tremendous odds from a numerically superior enemy that waged a no-holds-barred fight against the Marines and civilians alike. Atrocities committed by the VC and NVA in Hue were incredible. Thousands of civilians had been tortured and murdered and then dumped in mass graves that were found after Marines freed the
0 Souvenirs of War A Little Thing Called AllenBrook 1 city. Capture of the city involved weeks of vicious urban combat with progress measured in feet or yards, and house by house.
Marines at the Khe Sanh outpost lived through daily bombardments of rockets and artillery at a level that se
ems incomprehensible today. They were completely surrounded by an NVA force that greatly outnumbered the Marines and yet those young men went out beyond the fence and bunkers daily to confront this enemy and make the point that we would not be cowered by their presence or numerical superiority. With the miracles of modern technology millions of Americans were able to follow the siege of Khe Sanh on television news reports, making it an even more surreal experience for those in the bunkers as well as viewers watching film of the scene from the comforts of home.
And of course in the central and southern regions of South Vietnam Army and Navy fighting men were also bravely combating an invisible enemy in a hostile environment. Conditions were different depending on what part of the country one was assigned. In the Mekong River Delta, a sprawling area of half land and half water, the enemy was deeply entrenched and American soldiers and sailors ventured at great risk into that watery wilderness in boats and by trekking through swamps in an attempt to root him out. Because of their ability to simply disappear into the surrounding landscape and villages, Charlie had a major advantage over American forces that had to expose themselves in river patrol boats or helicopters in order to access land controlled by the VC. Ambushes and mines were commonplace, and the environment of the Delta region was as hostile a place as one will find on this planet. Soldiers in the Central Highlands fought an unending series of battles against a mixture of VC and NVA regulars whose numbers were constantly replenished by soldiers from North Vietnam streaming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. From the brutal and bloody Battle of Ia Drang to Hamburger Hill, young American men paid a high price attempting to keep that wild region out of North Vietnam’s control. It was the Battle of Ia Drang in the fall of 1965 that served as a hard slap in the face for the average American. With the death of nearly 250 soldiers and many more seriously wounded, the home front was forced to come to the realization that this was not just a police action or a war being waged solely by the South Vietnamese Army with American advisors looking on at a safe distance — it was a war in which American soldiers were going to die in large numbers.
Souvenirs of War Page 5
