Comanche Six: Company Commander in Vietnam

by James Estep

  But then abruptly he stopped laughing and, in a serious vein, said,

  “Gentlemen, the unfunny part of this tale is that we lost, the Army lost, what might otherwise have been a good soldier to a goddamn Communist whore!”

  After a brief pause, he continued. “But that’s neither here nor there.

  Hell, story’s old as the Army itself and ain’t anything you can really do ‘bout it. Young man leaves the farm, goes overseas, and falls in love with the first hooker he puts it to, which, likely as not, is also the first broad he ever put it to. Anyway, our Romeo falls in love with this sweet young thing from the ville last time the battalion pulled base security—shit, nearly a year ago now. Well, falling in love’s okay, but when it comes time to go back to the boonies, Romeo decides he’s gonna stay in the ville with his true love … uh … you know the story, first love, can’t live without her, Charlie might get him if he goes back, so on and so forth. So the battalion returns to the boonies and reports young Romeo AWOL. And next day the MPs go down to the ville, police him up, and return him to the rear detachment [the battalion’s residual force at An Khe], where he’s restricted to quarters till his company can be informed of his apprehension.”

  “Meanwhile, his true love returns to her family in Qui Nhon with matrimony on her mind. Well, Romeo, knowing that, decides to

  “unrestrict” himself. So he just walks out of camp, boards a gook bus, and goes to Qui Nhon. A week or so later, the MPs find him there, pick him up, and bring him back to An Khe a second time.”

  “Now the rear detachment commander—that’s your predecessor, sir,” he said, looking at me, “what with being just a bit embarrassed ‘bout his first disappearance, puts a guard with a loaded forty-five on Romeo and initiates an Article 32.” (Article 32 of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice provides for a pretrial investigation of serious allegations to determine whether or not the alleged offense should be referred for court-martial.)

  “That same evening, the guard, feeling he needs a short break for a beer at the Black Horse, handcuffs Romeo to his bunk and takes leave.”

  The sergeant major paused briefly to collect his thoughts and mix himself another drink. Several of us followed suit.

  “Now, as you might guess,” he continued, again looking at me, “when the guard returned, both Romeo and the bunk were gone! Damn, now I think of it, we never did find that cot. Well anyway, the MPs now know where to find young Romeo, so they quickly police him up in Qui Nhon and bring him back here a third time. Needless to say, the RDC is pissed!” (The RDC was the rear detachment commander.)

  “So he decides to send Romeo to LBJ.” (Cooper was not, in this context, referring to our commander in chief, Lyndon Baines Johnson; he was referring to the U.S. Army’s correctional facility in Vietnam located at Long Binh, which snuffies called Long Binh Jail or simply LBJ.) “So the RDC calls Battalion Forward and starts to set the wheels in motion for pretrial confinement. Well, Romeo’s company commander hears about this and says, ‘No way! Ain’t no goddamn AWOL of mine gonna sit on his lazy ass at LBJ, safe and sound eating three hots a day, while the rest of us suffer out here. You put young Romeo on the next log bird flying, and he can pull his pretrial here in the boonies!” Which, when you think of it, made a lot of sense.”

  “Guess so,” I offered. “Mean, if he’s in the field with his company, he can hardly wander off to Qui Nhon at will.”

  “Exactly!” Cooper responded. “Especially the area his company was then working, up there in the mountains west of Happy Valley. I mean it was Indian country, Charlie’s playground, the fucking jungle miles from nobody and nothing!”

  Again he paused briefly, much as a comedian might just before the punch line, and noting the smirks on the faces of my fellow officers, I sensed we were nearing that point in the sergeant major’s tale.

  “So,” he said, starting to laugh, “young Romeo goes back to the boonies on the evening log bird out of LZ English. Goes back to his platoon and the lieutenant puts him in a two-man fighting position for the night—you know, one up, one down” (meaning one man awake while the other sleeps).

  “Well, when the company stands to at first light, Romeo’s gone! Weapon, rucksack, and Romeo—gone!”

  This still is not the punch line. They’re laughing, but with restraint.

  There’s more to come.

  “Now Romeo’s commander has no choice but to report him as an MIA,”

  Cooper continued. “You know, give the guy and his family the benefit of the doubt, ‘cause he’s probably dead now, and if he ain’t, at best, he’ll turn up as a returned POW when this thing’s finally over.”

  After a brief pause, he smiled and said, “Next night the MPs stumble across Romeo at his girlfriend’s hutch in Qui Nhon! ‘Course they pick him up and return him to An Khe for a fourth and final time.”

  Punch line!

  After the laughter died down, the sergeant major wrapped up his saga of Romeo in a quasi-serious tone.

  “So like I say, last I heard Romeo was at LBJ pending court-martial. By now he’s probably making little ones out of big ones at Leavenworth. But you know, the Army shouldn’t have sent young Romeo off to jail. Should have sent him back to the States and had him set up an escape-and-evasion course—teach pilots and other high-risk wieners how to evade Charlie should they get caught in the ‘badlands.” I mean, can you even imagine somebody just walking out of a company perimeter like that, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the jungle, and working his way through forty or fifty miles of Indian country to Qui Nhon! Shit, true love knows no bounds!”

  “I don’t know, Top,” a somewhat aged but trim and deeply tanned first lieutenant from Bravo Company remarked. “I mean all a guy’s gotta do is make it down to Highway Nineteen, go east to Highway One, and follow it on in to Qui Nhon. Hell, your Romeo probably hitched a ride with the first deuce-and-a-half traveling Nineteen the morning after he left the company, knowing the snuffie driving it ain’t gonna say a word ‘bout picking him up.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant Russell,” Cooper responded, “if you think it’s nothing more than a fucking walk in the woods, why don’t you just try it next time Bravo’s working Happy Valley? I’ll clear it with the old man, see to it that you get your picture in Stars and Stripes, and then we’ll send you back to Benning to teach E&E!”

  Russell just smiled in return, apparently satisfied that he had, to some small degree, dampened the grandeur of the sergeant major’s tale. I later learned there was nothing vindictive in this; Cooper and Russell, himself a senior NCO before acquiring a commission, had known each other

  “since Christ was a corporal” and merely enjoyed being in near-constant verbal discord. I was also told that if Cooper appeared to be winning one of their frequent altercations, Russell delighted in taking that opportunity to remind him, regardless of what they might have been arguing about, that first lieutenants out rank sergeant majors which is something I couldn’t conceive any lieutenant suggesting to any sergeant major! However, still later that evening, after the conversation had turned from the exploits of Romeo to the prerogatives of rank, and cocktailing had gone from social grace to competitive sport, I witnessed Lieutenant Russell do just that.

  “Now don’t get me wrong, Top,” he said in a somewhat slurred yet subtly antagonizing voice. “Mean, you’ve done pretty good for yourself. Hell, battalion sergeant major’s a pretty weighty position, pretty weighty indeed. Still, you ain’t no officer and never will be, and ‘course that means every officer in the battalion—whole fucking Army, matter of fact—outranks you. But … uh … you being a professional NCO and all, I’m sure you understand that.”

  The sergeant major, sitting across the table from Russell, was steaming.

  First of all, he obviously didn’t like being referred to as “Top,” a pseudonym normally reserved for a company’s first sergeant, not the battalion’s command sergeant major—and of course Russell knew that.

  Secondly, he wasn�
��t too excited about the gist of Russell’s comments concerning the Army’s rank structure.

  “Listen, asshole.”

  “That’s Lieutenant Asshole, sir, to you, Top,” Russell interjected, smiling antagonistically, drunkenly.

  “As you wish, Lieutenant Asshole, sir!” Cooper defiantly replied while getting, a bit uncertainly, to his feet. “I know goddamn well you’re playing with my mind, sir, but the simple fucking truth is you couldn’t make eight!” (Russell had been a sergeant first class E-7 before being commissioned. If he had remained in the ranks, his next promotion would have been to the grade of E-8.) “Couldn’t hack it as a first sergeant of a line company, so you decided to play candidate at Benning’s school for boys and by some miracle or administrative error got a ‘butter bar’ out of it.”

  “And butter bars also outrank sergeant majors, Top,” Russell said, trying with little success to stand so as to be on an even keel with Cooper.

  “Well, Lieutenant, sir! I’ll let you in on a little secret. I could’ve done the same thing; any NCO worth his goddamn salt could’ve. But you see, we prefer soldiering for a living! We like to think our next promotion is gonna be based on our ability to soldier, not how long and how brown our fucking noses are! Still, if I had wanted to, I could’ve been twice the officer you’ll ever be!”

  “Oh, yeah! Well, let me just challenge you then, Top. If you really think you’d make twice the officer I am, well, why don’t you just put yourself in for a direct commission … hummmm?” Lieutenant Russell pushed himself from the sergeant major’s table, at which he and several of us were sitting, in a final valiant attempt to get to his feet. He failed and fell backwards in his chair, his head striking the hutch’s concrete floor with a dull thud.

  Somewhat unsteadily but still firmly on his feet, Cooper worked his way around the table, looked down at Russell—who had apparently decided the floor was as good a place as any to spend the rest of the night—and said, “Well, Russ, I may do just that. Yes, sir, I may just do that very thing.”

  And he did.

  It was not so very long after the sergeant major’s cocktail party, while Bravo Company was on perimeter security at LZ English, that First Lieutenant Russell got a message ordering him to report to Captain Cooper at battalion headquarters forthwith. Allegedly, Russell’s only comment was, “Oh, shit. And I’m gonna have to salute him, too.”

  Captain Cooper, of course, did not long remain with the Fifth Cavalry.

  For reasons I’ve never been quite able to discern, the Army takes a dim view of its former NCO’s serving as officers in the same unit from which they were commissioned. Soon after becoming a captain, exSergeant Major Cooper was transferred to the division’s only mechanized battalion, there to assume command of a mechanized rifle company.

  And one bright and sunny day shortly thereafter, while Captain Cooper was standing in the turret atop his M-113 armored personnel carrier, a north Vietnamese sniper got lucky and put an AK-47 round right through the center of our ex-sergeant major’s chest.

  The battalion rotated back to the boonies, relieved of its Camp Radcliff security mission by the unit next in line for a stand down. I remained behind at An Khe.

  S-1 is the unit’s adjutant. He is responsible for those administrative functions associated with promotions and reductions, pay, awards and decorations, law, discipline and order, troop morale (in Vietnam, one of the more demanding of his duties), and troop safety (another somewhat taxing aspect of his responsibilities in combat). In short, his duties are many and varied—and boring. I was not terribly excited about my new job.

  Fortunately, my PSNCO (personnel services NCO, the S-1’s principal enlisted assistant) liked his job, did it well, and knew more about my job than I could ever hope to learn. Hence, we soon developed a great working relationship; I stayed out of his way, spending much of my time forward with our troops, while he minded the store.

  During these staff visits with the battalion’s line companies, I listened to our soldiers’ various S-1-related problems, trying to resolve them.

  Rarely, however, did these complaints revolve around traditional military personnel issues such as pay, awards, or similar administrative shortcomings. More often, they centered on their mail. Mail, mail, mail! It was precious, and if it was not received regularly, snuffie was convinced the Army’s postal services were at fault. Regrettably, this was seldom the case; it was usually the fault of the sender.

  To understand something of the infantryman’s war in Vietnam, one must first know of his extraordinary desire, his unparalleled need, for letters from home—letters that were, in many respects, his only tangible link with the sanity of his existence on this planet.

  Frequently kept in the top of his helmet liner, they were read and reread until memorized, folded and refolded until Vietnam’s harsh climate reduced them to little more than confetti.

  Of course mail from home has been important to all soldiers in all wars, but I believe it never before meant quite so much as it did to the American infantryman in Vietnam. The reason is that seldom before has an American soldier been asked to make such a profound change in his life—a condemned man’s transition from freedom to incarceration pales in comparison.

  Snuffy usually arrived in his unit via an early morning or late evening helicopter sortie as an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old replacement. At this juncture he probably realized his chances of dying in the Nam were, statistically, greater than those of any other man in the unit he had just joined because he would remain in harm’s way longest—the others were all “shorter” and would rotate home before he would. From this point on, with the possible exception of a seven-day rest-andrecuperation (R&R) leave (probably spent somewhere else in Asia), he would live each day of the next year in the surreal, virtually indescribable existence of the “boonie rat.”

  He would dig a hole each night and, if he were lucky and things remained quiet, sleep half a night in it; he might dig three hundred or more such holes before completing his tour. He would stand to before dawn each morning because, centuries before his birth, great tacticians had concluded that this was the time he’s most vulnerable to attack.

  With no attack forthcoming, he would eat his cold C rations; shave and wash out of his helmet, when water was available; and then clean his weapon—a daily ritual he could, and often did, perform in total darkness. Then he would walk the mountains, the jungles, the plains, and the paddies of Vietnam seeking Charlie. At night, after swallowing his nauseating daily malaria pill and digging a new hole in a different location, he would mark another day off his “short-timer’s” calendar.

  He would rarely bathe because bathing facilities were rarely available, would wear no underwear because underwear rotted, would reek of the unwashed but would be unaware of it because everyone around him smelled the same. When it rained, he would get chillingly soaked and pray for the drying rays of the sun, and when the sun appeared, he would sweat mightily and pray for the cooling comfort of a tropical shower.

  During his twelve-month tour as a boonie rat, there would be no movies, no television, no radio, and no Bob Hope—these were reserved for those serving in rear-echelon assignments. He would read the Stars and Stripes when those of the rear echelon remembered to send it out on the evening log bird, on those evenings the log bird flew.

  Human nature being what it is, he would try to make friends upon joining his unit but would often find others reluctant to befriend him, the reality of infantry combat being what it is. He would eventually find a close friend only to lose him through rotation, evacuation, or death. He would then be reluctant to befriend others.

  He would live this day-in, day-out existence of denial and repetition, of heat, sweat, cold, mud, dust, boredom, and at times stark terror, until he was wounded, was killed, or completed his tour. Before that happened, he would very likely kill a fellow human being on at least one occasion. He would undergo all of this while his country was at peace and his more fortunate civilian count
erpart was reaping the benefits of a prosperous nation ten thousand miles and another world away.

  His only anchor to his past, to the reality that that world still existed, was through those letters from home.

  And too many of those letters were eventually stamped “Search.”

  “Sir, the reason they’re on your desk is ‘cause existing regulations dictate that an officer, normally the unit’s S-1, review all Search mail before returning it to the division AG,” my ever technically astute PSNCO explained.

  “But why do we stamp them Search?” I replied. “Why not KIA, like you see in the movies? What the hell we searching for anyway?”

  “Sir, we’re not searching for anything. I mean Search doesn’t mean search. It merely means the service member is dead, killed in action.

  You know, sort of a code word. Uh … guess it’s kind of a morale thing; the Army just doesn’t want a bunch of letters out there with KIA stamped all over them. Shit, somebody might think we’re at war!”

  “Okay. Understand. Now what happens to it after we verify the man is indeed dead … I mean ‘searched’?”

  “Beats me, sir. I don’t know if they return it to the sender, forward it to the next of kin, shit-can it, or what. We just send it back to division AG stamped Search.”

  So, along with my other duties, I reviewed our Search mail, comparing the names of addressees with those listed on our rosters of battle losses. It was a depressing chore, especially with Christmas of ‘67 rapidly approaching, bringing in its wake holiday greeting cards marked Search.

  Understandably, mail addressed to the most recent of our fallen was usually from the victim’s immediate family—a father’s or mother’s letter to their son, a wife’s letter to her husband. Of course, mail of this nature was nearly always postmarked before the soldier was killed, and by the time it crossed my desk, the father or mother knew they no longer had a son, or wife a husband. However, I was surprised at the number of letters addressed to soldiers who had died weeks or even months before. These were from friends (or I suppose other acquaintances) who were evidently disassociated from the victim’s family and therefore not encompassed in the Army’s casualty notification process—perhaps a fellow trainee during basic, an old school churn, a girl he might have met at Fort Benning, Jackson, Polk, or Dix. Search!