by James Estep
“Sounds like a solid policy to me, Top … uh … First Sergeant. Let’s continue it.”
“Okay. And you can call me Top, sir. That’s what snuffie calls me, ‘less I’m on his ass, then it’s First Sergeant. Behind my back, he calls me the Bull, or worse.”
The Bull spoke briefly of what he perceived to be his responsibilities in the boonies, which in the main related to the company’s administrative and logistical requirements. He also saw himself as the final enlisted authority on recommendations for awards, promotions, and disciplinary actions and, since he was the company’s senior NCO, felt that any NCO-related problem should go through him before it was brought to my attention. Finally, he monitored troop morale and oversaw the distribution of our mail. In sum, he was the unit’s field XO (executive officer) and, as I was soon to discover, a damn good one.
Agreeing with everything he said, I reminded him that he was also, as of that morning, the company air-movement officer.
He gazed at me with a perplexed look for a moment, then smiled and said,
“Oh, yeah, air-movement officer. And, sir …” he continued, a wily look in his eyes, “as you’ll probably soon learn, that’s the very least taxing of my many company chores.”
There was a brief lull in our conversation as I tried to discern some hidden meaning behind his remark. I was unable to do so.
Changing the subject, he commented, “That was a good hit on the mountain today. Company needed it.”
“Yeah, talked to Lieutenant Brightly first night on the bridge—or to be more accurate, he talked to me—and he said you’ve had some rotten luck lately.”
“Sir, I don’t believe in luck, but yeah, we’ve had some rotten luck lately! It ain’t snuffie’s fault, and I don’t give a simple fuck what the old man might think—it wasn’t the outgoing Six’s fault neither.
Just seems we were always in the wrong place at the right time or right place at the—shit, you know.”
He paused briefly, then added, “But even though I don’t believe in luck, the hit today was a good omen. Maybe it’s payback time for Charlie Company.”
“Hope so, Top, but like I told Brightly, I don’t believe in luck or omens.”
But perhaps I should have. I would later find my first sergeant possessed an uncanny ability to predict the company’s future based upon the outcome of events such as our encounter on the mountain that day.
“Understand you’re a mustang … uh … used to wear stripes,” he said, again redirecting the conversation’s course.
I nodded.
“That’s good. Ex-NCO usually makes a better officer, least ways better line officer. ‘Course we can’t ‘ford to lose our NCO’s to any source right now; war’s killing ‘em off too fast. Know that, sir?
Fucking backbone of the Army, and we’re killing ‘em off, or running ‘em out, faster than we can produce them! Army don’t realize it yet, but it will, and then it’ll be too goddamn late ‘cause it won’t no longer have a professional NCO corps to man its fighting units. Mark my words.”
“Hey, Top,” I replied, “we’ve fought bigger wars than this without destroying our NCO corps.”
“Yes, sir, but never by ourselves! Before we’ve always had the Reserves ‘long side of us, had our citizen soldiers taking up the slack. Shit, even in Korea we had ‘em sharing the … uh.”
He paused introspectively, then continued. “I tell you, sir, if you’re an NCO, grade E-5, -6, or -7, and carrying an eleven prefix [infantryman’s military occupational specialty], there ain’t no end to this war for you.
I mean this is where our infantry is, so you’re either gonna be here or getting ready to come back here till this thing’s over—and who the hell knows when that’s gonna be? Shit, it’s just simple mathematics; there’s only so many of us folk. Fact is, you’re gonna find yourself coming here more often, ‘cause your peers—what with them and their families understanding these mathematics—are retiring or just plain getting out ‘bout as fast as they can sign the papers. So, sooner or later, odds are … Well you know what snuffie says.”
“No, Top. What does snuffie say?”
“Says you can lead a horse to water, but if you do it too many times, Charlie’s gonna shoot his nuts off!”
I laughed. What my first sergeant foresaw as the demise of our infantry’s NCO corps in Indochina was a sore point with him, one he would return to time and again. With the passage of time, much of what he prophesied would come to pass.
“Also understand this is your third tour over here,” he continued, in another vein.
Again I nodded.
“Then we have something in common.”
“This your third tour, Top?”
“No, sir, my third war. And, by God, it’s my last one, too! Ain’t gonna make war no more; gonna go back to the States, get me some ROTC duty, and teach others how to do it.”
It was now dark, and we were carrying on our conversation in whispers just loud enough to be heard above the low rushing sound—a paltry constant static—emitted by the company’s radios. After talking a bit longer, mostly about the war, previous assignments, the Army in general—what was right and wrong about it—families, and snuffie, we made our way to our separate holes and tried to find a few short hours of comfort in a parcel of Vietnam’s freshly dug soil.
Later, wrapped in my poncho liner, I realized we had spent far more time philosophizing and simply shooting the bull than discussing company specifics. Our nightly ritual would continue in that vein, first reviewing the “state of the command” and then touching on virtually every subject under the stars. There was plenty of time for talking in the Nam.
With the exception of radio checks between us and battalion and between the platoons and their trick-or-treat sites and LPs, the night’s passage was uneventful.
At before morning nautical twilight (BMNT) the company stood to, LPs were pulled back into our perimeter, and just before first light we fired our “mad minute,” an exercise in which everyone on the NDP’s perimeter fired their weapons simultaneously at the highest sustained rate of fire, covering defensive sectors to their front. The primary purpose of this morning tactic was to dissuade an enemy force that might have penetrated our outer defenses during the night from initiating an attack at first light. As such, it was most appropriately used in densely vegetated areas where Charlie had the least difficulty positioning himself around the NDP under cover of darkness. In addition to this tactical practicality, the mad minute provided us an opportunity to test-fire our weapons.
As the sun rose over Bong Son’s plain, we repacked our rucks, stacking them on cargo nets left behind by the log bird, and washed and shaved.
In the Cav, you were always expected to shave even if there wasn’t enough water to wash.
Around eight o’clock the morning log bird arrived. After quickly dropping off our morning “C&D” (coffee and doughnuts, although the fare normally included other portable breakfast items such as fresh fruit, hard-boiled eggs, toast, milk or juice, and so on), the helicopter took on water cans and food containers from the previous night’s meal and then, hovering six to eight feet above the ground, had the cargo nets containing our rucks hooked beneath its underside. Once these were in place, the log bird lifted off en route back to the battalion’s trains area. Another day in sunny South Vietnam was under way.
Shortly thereafter, Three Six departed our NDP, traveling in a northerly direction. At approximately three klicks (kilometers) out, they would turn to the east, move in that direction for two or three klicks, and then turning south, move another six klicks before changing direction again, this time moving due west toward the mountains. In this fashion, they would sweep our outer perimeter at a distance of about three kilometers to the north, east, and south. In the meantime, One Six, as planned the night before, would test our claymore concept in the mountains on our NDP’s western flank. I, along with the rest of the command section, accompanied One Six as they departed the NDP.
Quickly discovering another, shorter access route up the mountain’s eastern slope, we reached our well-traveled northsouth trail within an hour or so of departing the valley floor. There we set up what was to become a pretty standard two-point, northsouth claymore ambush—an ambush in which one man armed with a claymore mine (the “hit” man), accompanied by a two-man M-60 machine-gun team, established a killing position on the trail to the north, while an identical three man team did the same to the south. The remainder of the platoon went into a tight perimeter defense across the trail midway between the two ambushes, thus prepared to reinforce either of the committed positions.
At each killing position, the hit man emplaced his claymore to the side of the trail, often securing it to the trunk of a large tree.
After covering the claymore with loose vegetation, the hit man moved down the trail, on the “friendly” side of the mine, a distance of fifteen or twenty meters and then concealed himself in a position from which he could electrically detonate the claymore upon observing an approaching enemy. The machine-gun team concealed themselves similarly, usually on the hit man’s uphill flank. Upon detonation of the claymore, they engaged the enemy with machine-gun fire, fixing him (denying him the ability to maneuver) until the rest of the platoon moved forward to reinforce the killing position.
Our weapon of choice was the M18A1 claymore mine. Weighing 3.5 pounds, it contained 700 hardened steel balls of 10.5 grams each, embedded in a horizontally convex face, behind which was a 1.5-pound layer of composition C-4 plastic explosive. When detonated, this plastic explosive hurled the steel pellets outward in a 60-degree arc, usually killing everything therein up to a distance of 100 meters. In other words, it produced a killing zone roughly equivalent to the area encompassed by an entire football field.
Ambushing an enemy is a lot like fishing: 98 percent waiting and 2 percent executing. Moreover, for every successful ambush, there are many others where the enemy never shows up. On this occasion, however, the gods of war were with us. Forty-five minutes or so after setting up our ambushes, two North Vietnamese regulars walked unsuspectingly into the north killing zone.
Whoom! The claymore exploded.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! The M-60 opened up as the claymore’s detonation echoed through the mountain’s draws.
Lieutenant Norwalk and I had been carrying on a lazy, whispered, somewhat disjointed conversation about families, kids, careers, women, or some such when the mine’s explosion shattered the noonday silence.
Accompanied by our RTOs and one of the lieutenant’s rifle squads, we moved rapidly to the ambush site.
“Lookie here, lookie here … holy shit!”
“Goddamn!”
“My man, this here is a fucking mess!”
“Sweet mother of God, that claymore’s bad!”
In unison, everyone uttered some comment of surprise, shock, or incredulity regarding the two very dead men at our feet.
Everyone except the hit man, a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old Pfc.
Apparently in shock, he just stood staring fixedly at the mess he had created. On activating the claymore’s electrical detonator, he had instantly solved our problem of wounded runaways—you cannot run when you have no legs.
Our hit man had obviously waited until the last possible moment before detonating the mine. The remains of the two enemy soldiers were less than ten feet from the base of the tree on which the claymore had been placed, a range at which the seven hundred steel pellets were concentrated horizontally in a pattern little greater than the width of the human body. This force had struck the lead man at midwaist, literally cutting him in half. Since the two men had been walking in file up a slight incline when hit, the mine’s force had slammed into the second man at a greater height, virtually decapitating him. It was not a pretty sight. Moving them off the trail, piece by piece, was like working with rag dolls inasmuch as the hundreds of steel pellets had essentially pulverized their bodies.
After cleaning up our mess, we moved the north killing position thirty or forty meters farther up the trail, leaving the south position in place. We waited, in vain, for another couple of hours, hoping that Charlie might once more fall victim to our devastating claymore ambush.
We used this ambush technique, with great success, on many occasions.
One might view this method of killing as excessively cruel or ugly, but there are several factors to consider: dead is dead, and it makes little difference to the deceased whether his demise is caused by a machine-gun bullet, napalm, or a claymore mine. Moreover, the ambush is one of war’s oldest tactics and in Vietnam was executed far more frequently by the enemy than by U.S. or South Vietnamese forces. Thirdly, the North Vietnamese soldiers who perished in our December ‘67 and January ‘68 claymore ambushes were then in the process of staging for their infamous Tet offensive, an operation in which the enemy committed monumental atrocities against a defenseless civilian populace, at times murdering entire families. Finally, the nature of war is excessively cruel and ugly.
Returning to our NDP later in the afternoon, we learned that Three Six, although discovering many enemy footprints, was still scoreless after completing its long trek on the valley’s floor. Because of this, and because of the flak they were catching from the rest of the company for being the only line platoon without a kill to its credit, Three Six’s soldiers were anxious to work the mountain the next day. But so were One Six and Two Six—success does indeed breed confidence.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately as things turned out, the operation was not to be. While waiting for the evening log bird, we received a warning order from battalion telling us to prepare for an airmobile extraction at 0900 hours the following morning to conduct an air assault approximately twelve klicks north of our present location.
The warning order was not greeted with wild fervor by the men of Charlie Company.
“Goddamn, isn’t that just like battalion. First time we’re in a locale where we’re getting good kills, and they move us,” MacCarty commented.
“Yeah, it’s that fucking S-2. He keeps his head up his ass,” someone else added, while others expressed themselves in a similar vein.
I assumed that battalion had a good reason for moving us, and I told Sergeant Sullivan, our “air-movement officer,” to organize the company for an airmobile extraction. Then I had an idea!
Turning to my assembled platoon leaders, I said, “Hey, we know Charlie’s around here, probably watching us right now. Seems to me a false extraction might be in order.” (In essence, a false extraction was a deceptive ploy in which only a portion of the unit actually got on the helicopters. Those remaining hid in ambush around the pickup zone, waiting for Charlie, who, seeing the helicopters take off, might very well visit the supposedly vacant pickup zone to scavenge anything usable or of an intelligence interest.)
The others looked at me for a few moments in uneasy silence before MacCarty and Bull Sullivan tactfully explained that such an operation wouldn’t work. “Naw … sir, false extractions worked back in ‘65, and maybe early ‘66, when the Cav first got over here. Don’t work now ‘cause it’s an old trick and Chuck knows all our old tricks,” MacCarty commented.
“Yeah, LT’s right, sir. Charlie’s always watching for a false extraction, and counting. If the numbers don’t add up when we get on the helicopters, he ain’t gonna go near our LZ,” Sergeant Sullivan added.
Made sense to me.
Putting the idea aside, we talked briefly about the next day’s air assault and subsequent search-and-destroy mission in our newly assigned operational area astride Binh Dinh’s Route 506. At the conclusion of this brief planning session, Bull Sullivan issued a clear, concise, and very condensed air-movement order, and I was confident the liftoff would be flawless. At this point, having completed company business, the conversation drifted to R&R and what the married men were going to inflict upon their wives when they met in Honolulu—“and the second thing I’m gonna do is kiss her and say, ‘Hello�
�”—and what our single soldiers were going to do to every sweet young thing they could lay their hands on in Bangkok, Sydney, Manila, or wherever. In the midst of these mutually shared fantasies, Blair received a change to the next day’s mission.
“Sir, helicopters’ve been scratched. Battalion says rest of the order stands; we walk in.” Mutually shared fantasies quickly turned to mutually shared groans.
Radioing battalion, I spoke with Major Byson, who confirmed that we had indeed lost our birds. He still wanted us to conduct the operation, pointing out that our new AO was less than twelve kilometers’ walking distance in fairly open terrain and therefore shouldn’t pose any great problem. He was right. And Slim Brightly had an idea.
“Now is the time to try a false extraction, sir,” he blurted out.
Lieutenant MacCarty, as usual, was the first to speak, “Slim, you can’t do a false extract without helicopters. See, you gotta have a platform upon which to be extracted ‘fore you can be falsly extracted! I mean, honestly, I’ve never heard it worked any other way.”
“No, Mac, and maybe Charlie hasn’t either,” Brightly replied. “I mean, like you say, he’s probably looking for false extracts with helicopters.
Maybe, just maybe, he’s not expecting a stay-behind if we move out of here on foot!”
MacCarty, Sullivan, and the other platoon leaders stood in silence for a moment, obviously mulling over the feasibility of such a proposal.
Then they all started talking at once.
“Yeah, might work. Must’ve been tried before, but not on my watch.”
“False extraction without helicopters! Shit, let’s do it.”
“Can’t hurt to try it, might get lucky.”
“Sure, couple squads could pull it off. Set up an L-shaped ambush from there to there. Cover the whole fucking NDP.”
“Right, and put a couple claymores over there, covering the open end of your L.”
Ideas, good ideas, were coming faster than we could assimilate them.
Within a very few minutes, however, we had jointly developed our basic plan.
