by Morris Ray
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By 1968, Alton “Moose” Monroe had more time under his belt in Vietnam than the majority of men serving. He’d first been assigned in 1963 as part of a split Special Forces A-Team, as an advisor under auspicious CIA control. From 1963 to 1969 he served several more tours with Project Delta, his stints punctuated by short trips back to the States and an assignment with SOG. Moose was highly respected in his field; a real Delta icon.
Following an operation near Hue, where Delta sustained substantial losses, Monroe was inserted as the One One for a recon mission in the Plei Trap Valley. For this operation, Delta established a FOB in Kontum. Staff Sergeant Larry P. Bartlett, a close friend of Monroe’s, was designated the One Zero, while a FNG was included as the third American on the six-man recon team. Monroe remembers Bartlett as a handsome man—tall, lean, with an infectious laugh that showed a lot of teeth, each “about a foot long.”
“I wouldn’t say Larry was tight, exactly,” Monroe recalled with affection. “He just refused to spend money. The only thing he’d ever spend a dime on was a box of them cheap cigars he always smoked. But he was one hell of a guy.”
The first day out they paused beside a trail when suddenly a guy in black pajamas ambled by, saw them lurking nearby and took off running. Intuitively, Monroe didn’t think he was VC, only a local rice farmer, but believed he might have information they could use. Larry Bartlett decided to catch him and let the VN recon guys question him.
“Now you’ve got to understand,” Monroe said, “Larry was 6’ 3” tall and very athletic. Bartlett took out after that little guy, and he left Larry in the dust, like he was standing still. All our indigenous guys got a real kick out of it.”
No additional contact was made during the first two days. On the third, Bartlett, who’d been running point, held them up; he’d come across a small campsite with several huts stuffed with freshly harvested rice. Although the huts seemed unoccupied, the VC must have been watching it from nearby. As the team moved out, they began to receive fire. During the initial volley, Bartlett was hit in the face; the impact blew away most of his lower jaw.
A running gunfight ensued with the larger VC force in hot pursuit. As Monroe attempted to get the team and his wounded friend back to a suitable LZ for extraction, he was stymied by the rugged terrain and dense jungle. Eventually, he was forced to call a halt and asked the recovery helicopter to lower a jungle penetrator for extraction. Monroe, the first to set boots on the ground and the last to leave, managed to get them all onto the hovering helicopter.
A jungle penetrator retrieving a fully loaded six-man recon team is a slow and tenacious process. The chopper first lowers the hoist—it descends much too slowly—a man snaps in and then, as if dawdling, it is retrieved; the process is repeated until all are aboard. Maintaining a hover in a mountainous down-draft for a prolonged period is an extremely difficult task for any pilot; the task can easily deteriorate to a ride from hell with poor weather, blowing wind, too dense or too tall trees for the hoist to reach, or if the aircraft receives enemy gunfire.
Monroe watched as the last man ascended, fretful about the enemy creeping closer. As the last to hook into the hoist, he waited, intently listening as the chopper revved, struggling to lift him out. It was evident the space was too narrow, and the trees much too tall for the chopper to gain enough lift. Loaded down with the other five team members and its crew, the chopper was being pulled downward; its blades began to clip tree limbs. Monroe immediately cut himself loose, allowing the chopper to lift off. It was a selfless act by a brave man; he was alone.
Monroe knew the enemy would be converging on the site, so he moved out quickly while trying to raise another chopper on the radio. Luckily, one had been nearby. It came immediately and dropped its hoist, lifting him out. Climbing over the ledge, a grinning SSG Sewell Brown offered a helping hand.
“Man, they say that other chopper lost about three feet of its rotor blades against those trees. You were lucky, Moose!”
“How’s Larry?” It was the first thing he asked.
Bartlett was so seriously wounded that he had to be medivaced to the States. A year later, during his next tour, Monroe ran into him again in the Delta Club. He was on his way “up north,” to run recon for SOG. Bartlett departed for his first SOG mission soon afterward.
Larry Bartlett and SGT Richard A. Thomas are listed on the Army’s roles as KIA during a classified recon SOG mission.
A recently extracted recon team. SSG Sewell Brown (left) and SFC Larry Bartlett (third from left) with three unidentified VN recon men. During his next mission, Bartlett was seriously wounded. He was evacuated to the States for medical treatment and then returned for another tour. He was KIA during an SOG classified mission. (Photo courtesy of Maurice Brakeman)
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Operation War Bonnet in the An Hoa river basin lasted until mid-November 1968. BS/v medals were awarded to MSG Minor B. Pylant, MSG Richard S. Sorrells, SFC Jerry L. Nelson (second award) and SGT Bobby D. Warden. It was during War Bonnet that one of the most dare-devil examples of flying ability occurred. A 281st AHC helicopter pilot, CWO Donald Torrini, would extract SFC Jerry Nelson and his team from the jaws of death. The Delta men quickly concluded that if another unit had been supporting Nelson’s team that day, they doubted if any other pilot would’ve taken such drastic measures to extract them.41
Nelson had been the One Zero on a six-man “snatch” mission. With his mission to capture a POW for enemy intelligence, he jumped at his first opportunity the second day out. Quietly lying near a highly trafficked trail, he and his team members first noted groups of two and three men, periodically passing at regular intervals. He whispered to wait until the next group passed, then to “Go for it.”
Settling into an improved ambush spot, he placed his team in position and waited, his team unaware the next group coming was a fifteen-man security element for a much larger NVA unit that followed. After a brief altercation, described as the customary claymore mine popping, shooting, stabbing, kicking and grenade chunking, the team had their man, eliminating the enemy’s point element in the process.
Some Delta Recon vets still get quite a kick describing Nelson’s POW snatch technique. “He’d try his level best to kill everyone, and then check bodies for the least wounded survivor.” Nothing subtle— usually one was still alive. Despite this unorthodox technique, Nelson was normally the one selected for these missions.
Good news—the men had their POW; bad news—they’d awakened a very pissed-off company of crack NVA troops who were breathing down their necks as they dragged their wounded prisoner toward the extraction LZ. The news got worse. The team soon realized these were elite NVA troops chasing them because of the manner in which they reacted quickly, with a force to cut them off around their flank. This would block the team’s only route to the designated extraction site and make it inevitable that Nelson’s point man would eventually make contact with them. Once that occurred, the team knew they were in serious trouble. Blocked to the front by an encircling element, with the main force crushing behind from the rear, they had little choice as to the direction they knew they had to take. The enemy’s pincher strategy was forcing them further from the LZ and toward the river; they would be trapped.
As the team reached the riverbank, Nelson discovered they were backed against a seventy-five meter-wide obstacle, too deep to ford. With each man weighed down by weapons, and a wounded prisoner on their hands, the river would be too swift to swim. Quickly surveying their situation, he concluded the tall triple-layer canopy wouldn’t permit either a McGuire Rig or a rope ladder to reach. Their alternatives were rapidly dwindling. The enemy, bent on revenge and far superior in numbers, closed in for the kill. Radio communication had been virtually impossible during their hurried trek due to the dense jungle cover. From the riverbank, Nelson frantically searched for an area where he could obtain a “shiny” fix from the “Sheriff.”
Chief Warrant Officer (CWO) Torrini, ca
ll sign, “Sheriff,” was standing by, waiting for Nelson’s call to come get them. Descending to make the recovery, it quickly became apparent there was insufficient room to maneuver through the tree cover; still, Torrini used his rotor blades to try to chop back the trees enough to shoot through. Of course, chopper blades weren’t designed for this kind of treatment and the attempt failed, but he had to take some drastic measures if he hoped to get the besieged team out of this predicament.
By then, Nelson and his team were viciously fighting for their lives against an NVA force bent on their annihilation. One of the recon men cried out that he’d been hit, but Nelson didn’t know who, and he was too busy to find out. Shifting his weight slightly to the right of the tree he was using for cover, he fired off a short burst from his CAR-15; two NVA soldiers crawling toward him to get within hand-grenade range were stopped in their tracks.
It was a fact—if something positive didn’t happen soon, his team would be history. Most had already been wounded. With their backs against the river, extraction appeared impossible. With the enemy too close to call in tactical air support for napalm or fragmentation bombs, their situation was bleak. They resigned themselves to making the enemy’s assault as costly as possible. Unbeknownst to them, above the treetops, the Sheriff had not given up.
While Torrini hovered over the team’s position, trying to get low enough to extract them, he noticed some dense trees hanging over each side of the river bank that had created a tunnel of sorts. There just might be enough space beneath them for his helicopter to narrowly fit. Torrini traversed the river under intense enemy fire, searching for an opening large enough to fit his helicopter. He finally found one suitable about 500 meters down river from Nelson’s team; without hesitation, he plunged toward it. The co-pilot, crew chief and door gunner all held their collective breaths as Torrini steadily lowered his chopper through the small opening. Although several rounds tore through the thinskinned fuselage, he never once looked away from his task, intent on watching the tree branches a few feet from his rotating blades. One slight mishap, and his bird and crew would end up in the churning waters.
Coming under increasingly heavy fire, the door gunners leaped to their guns, quickly answering the enemy’s fire. The door gunner’s M-60s rattled non-stop, their rounds churning the mud near three enemy soldiers as they crumpled to the ground. Three more NVA soldiers scrambled to set up an automatic weapon on the riverbank, but the chattering M-60s unleashed their fury again, killing them all. Torrini remained calm as if they weren’t even under attack. Protecting the craft from the enemy was his crew’s job—flying was his. Without forewarning, they punched through the hole, skimming the water. Torrini’s skids were in the water as he flew under the low-lying branches, the rotor blades barely clearing the overhead limbs.
Nelson, nearly resigned to their fate, couldn’t believe it! A helicopter emerging from the river, hovering right behind him, its skids submerged in the swift current. It set so low that its troop deck was awash in the fast-moving flow; its M-60s devastating the enemy’s frontal attack. Holding steady, as if he pulled off these feats everyday, Torrini edged his craft closer to the muddy bank, his blades literally chewing bark from the trees. The chopper’s M-60s continued to lay killing fire barely a foot over their heads. The team waded, then swam the short distance to the chopper and climbed in with their POW in tow.
Once the team was aboard, Torrini had to contend with another problem; he couldn’t turn the chopper around. He had to back the heavily loaded helicopter out, hovering partially submerged, to return through the opening he previously had entered. By then, the gunships had arrived and were making repeated runs, blanketing the entire area with covering fire. Determined NVA soldiers along the riverbank were met by a killing fire from these, the door-gunners and from Nelson’s recon team. By the time they reached the hole in the trees where the chopper had entered, the door gunners and Nelson’s team had expended all their ammo.
The helicopter was badly shot up, with the rotor blades, transmission and engine so heavily damaged, Torrini concluded he’d never make it back to Phu Bai. Finding a suitable location in a rice paddy, he carefully set his battered chopper down, transferred his crew and Nelson’s recon team to another helicopter, and then watched sadly as the brave little bird was destroyed. For the team and its crew, it felt as if one of their fellow soldiers had died. Remarkably, it was the only U.S. casualty of the day.
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D.J. Taylor summed up the experiences of Delta Recon when he said, “Who among us will ever forget being shot out of the hole, climbing fragile rope ladders, or being extracted by McGuire Rig as an extraction helicopter labored to gain attitude...while we dangled helplessly by those thin lifelines? Or hanging 120 feet below a helicopter traveling more than sixty knots per hour, watching a 281st Charlie model gunships come at us, its mini-guns blazing and thinking, ‘Oh my God! He doesn’t see us down here,’ then noticing the tracers whizzing past under our feet, impacting on the LZ we’d just departed. By then, he would’ve passed under us so close that we couldn’t resist an urge to lift our feet to give him room. Those 281st gunships would continue making passes beneath us until we were at a safe altitude, well away from the hot LZ. If an enemy hoped to take a shot at us, he had to first dodge bullets from those beautiful, awesome little ships. While we were hanging helpless, unable to defend ourselves, those 281st pilots would position themselves between us and those who’d do us harm. No soldier could ask for more.”
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Operation Alamo, in support of the 5th ARVN Division in the Song Be River area, began June 1968. On 12 September 1968, Recon Team 7, consisting of SSG Lamberto Guitron, SSG Sherman Paddock and four VNSF, located an NVA security element. The team stealthily made their way inside the enemy’s perimeter, where they discovered a large weapons and ammunition cache. Withdrawing to a safer location, they called in their find, and the BDA Platoon was inserted the following day to exploit the discovery.
It soon became evident the cache was too large and too well defended for the BDA Platoon to seize, so a Ranger company was inserted on 14 September to reinforce the BDA Platoon. The security force left by NVA had no intention of letting such a large stockpile slip away without a struggle. They put up a fierce fight in an effort to save their cache, and it wasn’t long before all three Ranger companies of the 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion had joined in the fray. After a short but violent battle, the Rangers pushed the enemy force back and began to move the stockpile of weapons and munitions to a nearby LZ where it was sling-loaded onto a CH-47 Chinook helicopter and flown back to Quan Loi.
As the Rangers continued to push the NVA security element farther back, they found even more stockpiled ammo; the cache was proving to be much larger than anyone had originally thought. To make matters worse, there seemed to be an increasing number of NVA and VC arriving to engage in the fight. After an estimated one-tenth of the ammunition was removed, and yet another large, booby-trapped ammo bunker discovered, the decision was made to destroy the remainder of the ammo in place. The cache was rigged to explode, and the Rangers pulled back. After the initial blasts, air strikes were called in to complete the destruction, resulting in numerous undetected ammo bunkers going up in smoke.
Up to that time, the Song Be discovery was the largest ammunition cache seizure of the war. The Project Delta S-2 believed the ammo had not come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but had been delivered to a port in Cambodia and trucked across the border. Why the NVA had not left it in Cambodia where it would have been relatively safe remained a mystery.
This was only one-tenth of the NVA ammo cache found by Recon Team 7 near Song Be River, 1968. (Photo courtesy D.J. Taylor)
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Five Purple Hearts resulted from Operation Alamo: SGT John P. Burdish, SSG Sherman A. Paddock, SGT David F. Ryder, SSG Laurence A. Young and Stephen J. Viglietta. Both SFC Jerry L. Nelson and Kenneth C. Wagner won a BSMV, while SFC Arthur F. Garcia was awarded the ACMV.
TWENTY-TWO
“You’re Fired!”
WITH MORE THAN THREE YEARS IN DELTA behind him, Jim Tolbert seemed to be almost a permanent fixture around Nha Trang. A fine soldier, he’d served on a Special Forces “A” Team, been a Ranger Advisor and had even spent some time on the headquarters staff. Tolbert was a tough guy, but he’d much rather strum his guitar and sing ballads than fight the VC. He sang his country and folk music with a strong mellow voice and a cutting sense of humor.
