by James Estep
They were gone just as quickly, clearing the trees on the far side of the LZ, gaining altitude and airspeed as they did so.
Within a matter of another very few seconds, Two Six had secured the LZ.
They accomplished this by establishing defensive positions around its perimeter using a clock system to appropriate sectors of responsibility.
In other words, an imaginary face of a clock was superimposed over the LZ, twelve o’clock being the direction of inbound flight—that is, the nose of the lead helicopter was pointing at twelve o’clock. Upon disembarking, each of the platoon’s three rifle squads was responsible for securing and defending a twenty-minute portion of this circle, or one-third of the LZ. After the remainder of the company landed, the perimeter would be extended outward, a twenty-minute portion of it being allocated to each of the company’s line platoons.
This system of assigning initial defensive responsibilities was standard practice in securing a night defensive position (NDP), LZ, and other perimeter-oriented defenses. And inasmuch as there were few linear fronts in the Nam, the perimeter—circle the wagons—was virtually the only defense used.
“Arizona Three, this is Comanche Six. Lima Zulu is green. I say again, LZ green. Over,” I said, radioing Major Byson and informing him that the landing zone was secure.
Orbiting above us in the battalion C&C ship (command-and-control helicopter—a Huey outfitted with extensive communications assets), he replied, almost nonchalantly, “Okay, Comanche, I’ll be out of here soon as I get your hooks in. Good luck and good hunting in the high country. Out.”
The Chinooks landed in trail, discharging the rest of the company. As they descended, and again when they ascended, we turned our backs to them, bracing ourselves against the violent downdraft created by their rotary blades spinning at near full pitch. In the meantime, the Cobra gunships continued to circle the LZ, protecting the Chinooks until they had lifted off and were out of harm’s way. Our eight helicopters quickly became but mere specks on the eastern horizon—and Charlie Company was on its own.
If our elusive foe was to be found on this bright December day, we assumed we would find him in the mountains west of Daisy. With this in mind, I had initially toyed with the idea of sending the company’s three rifle platoons into the mountains on separate routes in order to cover as much of our opponent’s lair as possible. However, this suggestion, when offered the night before, was not met with wild enthusiasm by some of the company’s more cautious men, who felt it to be too risky.
Others of us thought this was but manifestation of the “Charlie’s everywhere” syndrome. However, I did feel that our first operation, a
“shakedown,” so to speak, should risk little while hopefully building confidence among our rank and file. Therefore, we had decided to work the mountains with two platoons on a single route while the remainder of the company, Weapons and 3d Platoon, searched the valley floor, seeking both Charlie and a good location for an NDP.
Leaving Lieutenant Halloway in charge below, we began our foray into Byson’s high country ten minutes or so after our helicopters departed.
Movement was difficult from the start. Barely nine-thirty in the morning, the heat and humidity were already unbearable, and within a matter of minutes, our sweat-soaked jungle fatigues had transformed themselves to a darker shade of green.
Following one of several narrow trails leading from the valley’s lowlying rice paddies into the lightly vegetated foothills and then, the ascent becoming decidedly steeper, up the eastern side of the mountain, we climbed … hour after exhausting hour. Finally, nearing the mountain’s crest, we paused, noting that our trail had leveled off somewhat and now seemed to run generally parallel to the mountain’s face in a northsouth direction. We also noted it was well, and recently, traveled.
“Fresh hoofprints, sir,” Lieutenant MacCarty whispered, pointing at the telltale footprints in a portion of the trail wetted by the mountain’s runoff. “These aren’t VC, they’re NVA, and a lot of ‘em!”
“Yeah,” I whispered in return, “and most of them seem to be moving the same way, north to south.”
Cautiously, we continued moving north along the narrow trail. And, I observed with satisfaction, we were moving as men ought to move in such a situation. Proper distances were maintained, there was no talking or horseplay, and weapons were kept at the ready, trained on both sides of the trail. These soldiers of Charlie Company were quite obviously professionals who knew what they were doing and were deadly serious about doing it. I was impressed.
Twenty meters or so to our front, a single point man led the column, followed by his squad leader and a two-man M-60 machine-gun team.
Lieutenant MacCarty and his RTO were behind the machine-gun team, with me and my two RTOs trailing him. Lieutenant Norwalk and his 1st Platoon trailed Two Six.
Not at all the way we taught it at Benning, I thought to myself. But, like Al Fallow says, There’s the way it’s taught and the way it’s done.
Yet it made sense in this kind of war, in this kind of terrain. We knew that if we found Charlie it would in all likelihood be by means of a frontal meeting engagement; in other words, the two of us would just run into each other. If that should happen, it was important that we have two assets well forward: firepower and leadership. Few things are more frustrating to a commander than finding himself midway in a column moving through dense vegetation when a firefight suddenly erupts a hundred meters and two platoons to his front.
Bam!Bam!Bam!
Three ear-shattering rifle shots from the point man’s M-16 abruptly interrupted my philosophical wanderings concerning small-unit tactics in a jungle environment.
Everyone dived to the ground, training their weapons on the thick foliage flanking the trail but holding their fire.
Simultaneously the point man yelled, “I got that dink sonofabitch, know I got him!”
MacCarty and I ran forward to find our point man grinning excitedly, and perhaps a bit nervously. In his hand he held a Chinese SKS carbine, now legally his as a war trophy.
“I got him, LT! You ain’t believing it! Fucker’s just bopping along like he ain’t got a care in the world. Had his weapon shoulder slung, fucking sloppy. But I got him, got him dead in the chest, sir, I mean blew him away! The mother ain’t gonna go far.”
Sure enough, we had a good blood trail. Leaving the rest of the column in a hasty trail-watch defense, we cautiously followed the blood markings north, accompanied by MacCarty’s leading rifle squad. Within a matter of minutes we found our quarry wedged between two fallen trees about fifteen feet off the trail. Although it was obviously a painful task, he was busily trying to conceal himself with whatever vegetation he could grasp.
Our point man was right. He had hit his foe dead center in the chest, collapsing a lung and producing a hole in his back the size of a baseball. Gazing up at us, the wounded soldier’s eyes reflected a dead certainty that regardless of how lucky he might have been in surviving his initial encounter with Charlie Company, the coup de grace was to be administered momentarily.
Taking the extended handset from Specialist Anderson, my company RTO, I told Lieutenant Norwalk to bring the rest of the column forward.
Upon its arrival moments later, “Doc” Heard, our company medic, went to work doing what he could to patch up our wounded captive. As he did so, I reported our contact to battalion, requesting a dust off (aerial medical evacuation) for our prisoner. Overhearing me, Heard yelled out that the man could not survive the trip down the mountain and would have to be picked up in place.
This meant the dust-off helicopter would have to hover over us, using a jungle penetrator to retrieve the wounded soldier. This procedure would in turn reveal our location on the mountain to anyone who might be watching. And some of Charlie Company’s rank and file looked upon this with disfavor.
Pulling me aside, Lieutenant MacCarty said, “Sir, you can’t do this, not to save one fucking gook. Hell, leave him here for his own to find
, or if he’s gotta be evac’d, let’s take him back down the mountain. He buys the farm en route, to hell with it; we did what we could.”
“Perhaps, but higher ain’t gonna get much intel out of a dead man, right? Besides, hooking him to that penetrator won’t take but a matter of minutes, and we’ll be long gone before anyone watching has a chance to react.”
Seeing that he was unsatisfied with my response, I added, “Hey, Mac, it’ll be all right. And anyway, we don’t have any choice. I mean we just don’t leave enemy wounded to die. It’s not the way the game is played.”
He looked at me a moment and then, a bit cuttingly, said, “This is not a game, Captain!”
“I know that, Mac. Poor choice of words. Now let’s just get the guy out of here. We’ll talk about all of this later.”
But we never did.
The medevac was uneventful. We moved our wounded prisoner fifty meters or so back down the trail to a point where we felt the jungle penetrator (basically a steel shaft with retractable arms upon which an evacuee was seated and secured) could most easily access the forest’s thick canopy.
Hearing the helicopter overhead, we marked our position with colored smoke and minutes later had our captive tied to the penetrator, which had been lowered to us by means of a retrievable steel cable.
As the prisoner was being hoisted upward, one of our soldiers gave a thumbs up to the crew chief aboard the helicopter. Our wounded prisoner, evidently believing the gesture was meant for him, weakly returned the thumbs up and briefly smiled at us below.
Mac’s wrong, I thought silently. In many ways it is a game, a competitive sport, the ultimate of man’s competitive follies.
Later that night we learned our captive had died en route to an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) hospital in Qui Nhon.
Perhaps it was just as well; he wouldn’t have lasted long in an ARVN hospital.
Working our way down the mountain on a different route of regress, we ended up on the valley floor about a half a mile from where we’d started our climb that morning. With the company again consolidated, we set up our NDP a short distance from Daisy, which was where 3d and Weapons Platoons had waited out most of their day uneventfully.
In the Nam there were generally two schools of thought on the establishment of NDPS. The first, and I suppose most prevalent, embraced a policy of getting into the NDP as early as possible so as to have sufficient daylight for optimal defensive preparations—in other words, plenty of time to clear fields of fire, dig fortifications, set up claymores and trip flares, send out listening posts and ambush patrols, and so on and so forth. In my mind, the drawback to this line of thinking was twofold: first, time spent preparing an NDP was time not spent looking for Charlie, and finding and destroying Charlie was the only reason the American infantryman had for being in Vietnam. Second, the longer a unit spent organizing its defenses, the longer the enemy had to ready himself for an attack.
We of Charlie Company were proponents of the second school, believing it best to enter our NDP late in the day, thereby reducing the enemy’s ability to react to our choice of site. Charlie was good, but he was slow and needed time to prepare his attacks. However, to further confuse our enemy, we would sometimes enter our NDP early in the evening, set up a hasty defense, bring in the log bird, and then after dark move a kilometer or so to a second NDP at a previously selected location.
On my first evening with the company in the boonies, we established our defenses in generally the same manner we would throughout my tenure.
Each of the three rifle platoons assumed responsibility for a third of the perimeter’s periphery. Within their assigned sectors, the platoon’s soldiers prepared two-or three-man fighting positions, to the front—or enemy side—of which they cleared fields of fire, set out trip flares, and, between the trip flares and fighting positions, emplaced command-detonated claymore mines. In addition to manning this defensive trace encompassing one-third of the company’s perimeter, each of the platoons normally established a listening post (LP) on the enemy’s side of the trip flares and a squad or fire-team ambush astride a likely enemy avenue of approach at some greater distance. In the Cav these ambushes were traditionally, and quasi officially, referred to as “trick-or-treat” sites.
Weapons Platoon located itself centrally within our defensive circle, manning their guns (one or two 81-mm mortars) when we opted to bring them forward on the evening log bird, acting as the company’s reserve when we did not.
We in the headquarters section would usually collocate ourselves with Weapons Platoon or one of the line platoon’s command posts (CPs).
Viewing the company’s perimeter from above, it rarely depicted a circle; more commonly it looked like an irregular, deflated football.
The nature of the terrain we defended, of course, mainly determined the perimeter’s outline.
After we established our defensive positions for the night and while we waited for the log bird to bring in our rucks (rucksacks) and a “hot” (meal), the talk turned to the day’s action on the mountain. Two Six’s point man related his “kill” to anyone willing to listen, and, as killing the enemy was a somewhat unique experience in Charlie Company, virtually everyone was willing to listen.
“Yeah, man, oughta seen ‘em rounds hit the dink. Ping! Ping! Ping! I mean blew him away! See, he’s just bopping along like he owns the fucking mountain, and ‘barn!” I put a hole in his chest what you can see daylight through. Dink looks at me, sorta surprised like, and …”
“Shit, we know you waxed him, Lean Man,” one of the point man’s onlooking listeners said, interrupting him, “but if you hit him all that good, why the fuck you have to chase him a mile or so up the trail ‘fore you found him ‘bout to bury himself, huh?”
The point man, smiling, responded by comparing his kill to a species of snake indigenous to his native Georgia mountains. “Well, see, these dinks, they different from us. They sorta like them timber rattlers back home. You can cut the heads off of ‘em, but they keep on wiggling and crawling ‘cause they don’t die till the sun sets. These dinks here, they the same way. Fuck, they so used to doing things at night, they ain’t never learned how to die ‘cept in the dark.”
“Bullshit!”
“Ain’t no bullshit, man! No matter how many caps you pop, gotta chase Chuck till sundown. ‘Cause they night people. Why you think their eyes look like.”
But it was no joking matter. I was concerned about our enemy’s ability to elude us after suffering such a serious, indeed, mortal, gunshot wound—a wound that would have stopped most of us dead in our tracks.
And this man was not atypical. Recalling previous experiences with our foe and countless accounts from other combat participants, it seemed to me you had to literally shoot his legs out from under him to stop him in place. After thinking about this for a while, I decided that the claymore mine was perhaps the weapon to do just that.
But I was also concerned about the manner in which we had initiated the engagement, in effect by just running into our enemy. Moving up and down such a well-traveled trail seeking Charlie seemed to make little sense, and it could be dangerous. Inasmuch as we could access the main northsouth trail from any of several ascending routes on the valley floor, it seemed wiser to interdict it in ambush at different points and wait for our enemy to come to us.
With these thoughts in mind, I assembled Charlie Company’s platoon leaders to discuss the next day’s operation. The offshoot of this parley was that Two Six, having had its moment of glory, would man the company’s base, conducting screening patrols around its perimeter, while Three Six worked the valley floor in a broad sweep looking for signs of enemy movement between the sparsely populated plain and supposedly uninhabited mountains to the west. One Six would return to the mountain and test our daylight trick-or-treat concept.
Shortly after breaking up our little war conference, the evening log bird arrived and off-loaded ammunition and water.
Tactical situation and
weather permitting, deployed Cav units were resupplied nightly, ammunition being the first priority of resupply, water the second, rations the third, and comfort items (our rucks) the last.
Normally the evening log bird flew two sorties, carrying ammo and water on the first and next day’s C rations, a hot meal (A or B rations), and sling-loaded rucksacks on the second. The rucks were backhauled to battalion trains each morning, relieving us of the requirement of carrying them during the day, which in turn put us pretty much on an even par with our lightly encumbered and highly mobile enemy. Lacking the airmobile assets organic to the Cav, other U.S. infantry divisions could ill afford to embrace this policy; hence, their soldiers were normally burdened with forty-to sixty-pound rucksacks, day and night.
Such loads restricted foot mobility, frequently produced heat casualties, and could limit fighting effectiveness in a fast-moving tactical encounter.
However, there were many nights in the Cav that the log bird didn’t fly because of adverse weather or other higher priority airmobile contingencies. On these occasions we usually spent a cold and hungry night in our NDP.
As darkness approached, Sergeant Sullivan moseyed over to where I sat nursing a final cup of battalion’s fresh coffee, a brew that was ever so much better than the standard Cration instant issue. Pulling up a discarded mermite can (a small field food container) and sitting upon it, he said, “Let’s parley, sir.”
“Good idea, First Sergeant. We really didn’t have a chance to do a lot of talking on the bridge. Uh … my fault. I apologize.”
“No problem, sir. Hell, we were both busy back there, but … me and the outgoing Six, we always tried to find a few minutes each evening to sorta rehash what happened that day and what’s on tap for the next.”
