by James Estep
“Super,” I commented, as he paused briefly, before changing our conversation’s direction.
“But to hell with these war stories, sir. What I’m worried about right now is taking care of the troops. You know we ain’t had a hot since last night, and it’s pretty obvious, what with Three’s plans for an attack tomorrow, we ain’t gonna get a hot before tomorrow night. That means forty-eight hours without chow!”
“Well, not really without chow, Top,” I responded. “We did have C&D this morning and a charlie rat today, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s just one meal, sir. You know, C&D is nice, but it ain’t no meal. We need charlie rats in the morning. I mean shit, sir, to hell with battalion and their ‘class V only’ message; troops need class I! They’re getting hungry!”
Although I did not at the time recognize the signs—I would later—my first sergeant was starting to bristle over what he perceived as something less than unconstrained dedication on the part of our higher headquarters toward “taking care of the troops.” This is a somewhat common, and I’ve always thought healthy, perception among rifle company first sergeants.
“I mean fuck it, sir!” he continued, his self-induced anger intensifying. “Sometimes battalion’s philosophy ‘pears to be, ‘Fuck the troops; just feed ‘em beans and mark ‘em for duty’!”
“Well, Top, no one said we wouldn’t get a bird in the morning. You know, they just said they’re committed to troop lift tonight. But if you feel that strongly about it, why don’t I just call.”
“Shit, there ain’t no goddamn soldier in any fucking war ever suffered no more than snuffie here,” he went on as if not hearing me, his voice becoming perceptibly louder, “and all he asks in return is his mail and a hot meal now and then! And these goddamn chair-borne, barbecue-eating, cot-sleeping, maid-fucking, beer-drinking, son-of-abitching rear-echelon wimps put out that ‘class V only’ bullshit! I mean I’m passed, sir!”
And he was.
“Hey, Top, I’ll call the colonel and ask him to rescind that ammo only bullshit. I mean seriously, if we need C rations, I’m sure battalion will get ‘em to us at first.”
“No, sir,” he interrupted, now visibly upset. “Taking care of the troops is my job! That’s first sergeant business! I’m gonna get trains on the horn right now and tell them, not ask, tell them to get us charlie rats out here in the morning! And if they mention one fucking word ‘bout ‘class V only,’ I’m gonna call the colonel. I’m getting sick and goddamn tired of this bullshit!”
Resignedly, I replied, “Okay, Top,” as he angrily stomped off into the night.
He returned within ten minutes or so, looking a little disheartened.
“What say, Top? Time for me to get involved one on one with Colonel Lich?”
“Naw … uh … everything’s worked out,” he responded a bit timidly.
“Called trains, and they said they’d already planned to get us charlie rats and water at first light, just waiting for our head count … uh … I forgot to send it in, what with everything else going on.”
He paused momentarily, then added, “Said they’re gonna do everything possible to get us a hot breakfast out too—you know, if they can figure a way to backhaul the mermites.”
We looked at each other in silence a moment and then started laughing.
“You know, sir,” he said, smiling shyly, “you and me, we’re lucky as hell to be in the Fifth Cav! ‘Cause those other outfits, well I can tell you right now, their philosophy is, ‘Fuck the troops; just feed ‘em beans and mark ‘em for duty.” Right, Six?”
“Right, Top.”
“Comanche, this is Arizona Six. Give me some smoke on your right flank, okay? Over.” It was Colonel Lich, orbiting above us in his C&C.
“This is Comanche Six. Roger, wait,” I replied, then told Lieutenant MacCarty, via the company net, to pop smoke.
In a matter of seconds, Colonel Lich was back on the air. “This is Six.
Okay, I’ve got your yellow smoke. Now listen up; you’re moving too far ahead of Lean Apache. They’ve got something in some caves along the river slowing them down. I don’t want the two of you shooting each other, so ease it up a bit till I give you word to throttle forward again. Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Wilco.”
It had been an uncomfortable and, for the most part, sleepless night.
Although Vietnam’s days can be sweltering throughout the year, its January nights are often quite cool. And trying to sleep wrapped in only a thin poncho, lying in the middle of a rice paddy, with artillery rounds exploding half a mile away in a village that may be occupied by a battalion of armed enemy who will probably have an opportunity to shoot you when you attack them in the morning—well, all in all, these conditions simply aren’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. On the bright side, however, it didn’t rain.
But things looked better as dawn broke in the east, bringing in its wake a clear sunny morning devoid of fog. Things looked better still when the log bird arrived a short time later with C&D and our charlie rats—and 7.62-mm linked ammunition for One Six. Why the ammo? I asked myself. To the best of my knowledge we haven’t fired a round since last being resupplied a couple nights ago.
I asked the Bull about it, and he said he and Lieutenant Norwalk had jointly decided that since we were facing what might be an enemy battalion, it seemed neither illogical nor imprudent for the company’s reserve to carry along a little extra machine-gun ammo.
Well, I couldn’t argue with that.
“Besides, Six,” he added, a wily look in his eyes, “it was good insurance. Mean, if trains sent us out the bullets, they’d have little damn excuse for not putting some beans on the same bird, now, would they?”
And I couldn’t argue with that either.
Shortly after the log bird’s departure, we began moving toward the village. We were at its outskirts when Colonel Lich slowed us down so as to allow Alpha Company time to investigate their caves. So far the exercise had been an uneventful walk in the weeds.
“Lean Apache is sending to the old man, sir. You want to listen in?” Blair said, extending his handset.
Nodding my head, I took his extended handset and monitored Alpha Company’s transmission to Colonel Lich.
“Roger, got caves or shelters dug in the side of the riverbank. Must be most of the ville’s population in ‘em. They’re reluctant to come out, which I guess is understandable under the circumstances. Over.”
“This is Six. Any enemy intermingled with them?”
“This is Apache Six. Not sure, but I would guess not.”
“Okay, Apache, see if you can talk any of ‘em out. If not, leave ‘em alone, let’s get on with the op. Comanche’s ready to enter the village now … break. You got a Kit Carson with you? Over.”
“This is Apache Six. Affirmative.”
“This is Six. Well, put him on those villagers and see what he can find out … uh … then get back to me. Out.”
A “Kit Carson” was a VC or NVA defector who usually spoke some broken English. In talking to the villagers, he would try to find out if the enemy was still in their midst while concurrently soliciting information on the unit’s designation and order of battle, the number of casualties it might have suffered, how it was armed, whether morale was good or bad, and so on.
We entered Binh Loc 4 around 1000 hours; it was an anticlimactic event.
As the Bull had predicted, Charlie was gone before dawn.
However, he had left many a dead comrade behind when he departed—red leg and the fast movers had done their jobs well. Surprisingly, and happily, for it was something that worried many of us the night before, there were few civilian casualties. That was perhaps not so surprising.
Having obviously been through all of this before, the villagers had their caves and bunkers dug deep and knew how to get to them in a hurry.
One simply doesn’t survive in places like Binh Loc 4 without knowing such things.
So we c
ounted enemy kills reaped by death from the heavens instead of at our own hands. It was not a happy task—many of the bodies were horribly mutilated by the artillery and air strikes. Most, perhaps all, had died the night before and now, rigor mortis having set in, lay in the grotesque, distorted positions of those who suffer death suddenly and violently. They lay on their backs with arms extended, as if reaching for something, someone. They lay on their sides, glazed eyes open, stiffened in a fetal position. One clutched his weapon, an RPG (rocketpropelled grenade) launcher, as if his punishment would indeed be severe if he surrendered it, even in death. But surrender it he did, as did several others who had evidently been overlooked by their surviving comrades as they departed the village, evading us in the darkness of the night before.
After spending the rest of the morning and most of the early afternoon in these joyless duties, we departed Binh Loc 4 and later established an NDP to the north of it in the same general area ARVN had previously occupied.
Our log birds flew early, bringing with them our rucks (containing those comforting poncho liners), steaks and mashed potatoes, and one can of beer and one of coke per company head count. Such a small offering, as I think back on it, but that evening, north of Binh Loc 4, it was like Christmas. You could actually feel the company’s morale soar.
Sharing a beer with me, the Bull summed it up. “Like I say, Six, we’re lucky as hell to be in the Fifth Cav, ‘cause those other outfits’ attitude, most likely as not, is ‘fuck the troops; just feed ‘em beans.”
6. LZ Daisy and Points Beyond: January 1968
For the next week or so, we worked the area northwest of Binh Loc 4, discovering nary a trace of the elusive NVA battalion. Of course the question that those in Saigon, Honolulu, and Washington would have liked answered was not where the remnants of a single and now combat-ineffective battalion were, but why these forces were massing just days before Tet, the Chinese lunar new year. Where were they coming from, and why were they assembling in the populated coastal and piedmont areas, when the real threat was supposedly poised against the country’s hinterland, primarily against a remote Marine Corps outpost and its six thousand occupants at a place called Khe Sanh? In a matter of days, the questions would be answered. In Saigon, and throughout much of Vietnam, the answers would be punctuated in blood. And within a month, we would win the war’s greatest battle—and the war would be lost.
But tonight we settled into our NDP in the mountains surrounding Happy Valley. Major Byson radioed us a very informal warning order for the following day’s operation.
“Comanche Six, this is Arizona Three. I’ll be picking you up in the A.M. soon as the ground fog clears with four, plus two, plus two. Gonna put you in on LZ Daisy again. Uh … you seem to have pretty good hunting in that area. Conduct operations at your discretion and see what you can come up with … break. Higher is screaming for intel. Anything you come up with might be significant. You know, maps, documents, rumors amongst the villagers, POWs—anything we can pass to higher. Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Roger that, but be advised there’s not many villagers vicinity Daisy, over.”
“Understand. Just keep your eyes open and give your kills a good going-over.”
Our extraction from Happy Valley and air assault on LZ Daisy the following morning might well have been a company airmobile test conducted by the 11th Air Assault Division (the forerunner of the First Air Cav) at Fort Benning four years before—unopposed, uneventful, LZ green.
We had decided the night before that One Six and Three Six—Three Six with the command section in tow—would establish separate two-point claymore ambushes on the mountain west of Daisy, while Two Six would work the valley floor. As we prepared to depart the LZ in different directions, I pulled Lieutenant MacCarty aside, giving him an additional task to perform during his sweep of the valley.
“Hey, Mac, while you’re working the floor, I’d like you to find us a new NDP within a klick or so of the LZ. I just don’t feel comfortable setting up here so soon after our stay-behind.”
“Roger that, sir. I agree.”
“Think what we’ll do,” I continued, “is go ahead and set up here this evening, bring in chow and our rucks, and then, ‘bout time it starts to get dark, move to whatever site you select. That means you ought to be thinking ‘bout guides, okay?”
“Okay, and I’ll try to find something fairly close, since it’ll mean carrying our rucks, mermites, eighty-ones and their ammo.
“No problem on the eighty-ones, Mac. We won’t bring ‘em in tonight.
“Good idea,” he said, then commented, “hey, sir, you see our dead lieutenant over there?”
“What?” I said a bit frantically, momentarily not knowing to whom he was referring, then quickly realizing he was talking about the luckless NVA lieutenant we had killed in our “helicopterless” false extraction.
Smiling, I recalled a similar incident on the bridge when the Bull, during the course of one of Colonel Lich’s inspections, whispered in my ear, “Sir, we’re in trouble. The old man found a dead soldier in one of our bunkers.” I nearly went into shock! The Bull thought it absolutely hilarious that, having been in the Army ten years, I didn’t yet know that a “dead soldier,” in a soldier’s vernacular, was an empty liquor bottle.
Turning in the direction Mac was pointing, I noted the neatly packed mound of raw earth where someone, most likely his more fortunate comrades, had buried our lieutenant. I wonder what happened to our Cav patch.
Climbing the mountain’s eastern slope via the same trail we had used in setting up our first claymore ambush, we reached the main northsouth juncture within an hour or so of departing the LZ. One Six turned left to the south, while we began following the trail to the north. Within minutes, we were overwhelmed by the stench of rotting flesh—the haunting odor of our first claymore victims.
“Whew! They sure did ripen, didn’t they?” Anderson said, covering his nose with the sweat towel that RTOS, and many of the rest of us, wore about our necks like scarves.
“Yeah, isn’t it great, Andy!” Blair responded, gleefully. “Just another unique but integral part of our daily nature walks through this tropical paradise. But one of many memorable ingredients that will make up your ‘Vietnam experience’ as the years unfold. Savor it, my friend. For though many were called, few were.”
“Okay, let’s hold it down and keep moving,” I said. Then, turning to Blair and winking, I added, “And you better watch it, Blair; your college is showing again.”
My battalion RTO was one of those rare animals who had gone to college and still got drafted, and still ended up in the infantry, in the Nam.
After moving thirty minutes or so, our trail intersected with yet another well-traveled trail running generally southwest toward the mountain’s crest. We climbed upward astride this new route for perhaps another half hour before Lieutenant Halloway, finally, thankfully, found what he felt to be a good ambush site. He sent his claymore hit teams up and down the trail, and then we waited.
We waited and munched on charlie rats and napped, waited and whispered of or daydreamed about home, women, the Army, the war, families, and R&R. Combat, at least combat in the Nam, is mostly waiting, I thought to myself. Waiting in ambush, waiting for mail, for chow, for dawn, for insertion or extraction helicopters, for R&R—and most of all, waiting for that magic end-of-tour date when we’d put Vietnam and all the waiting behind us.
My thoughts were interrupted by a distant but loud explosion, followed immediately by the rhythmic rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of an M-60 machine gun.
“One Six got ‘em!” Blair whispered, gleaming.
Anderson, sitting on my right, quietly asked, “Want me to give em a call, sir?”
“No, not yet,” I responded. “They’re busy. Let ‘em sort it out.”
And again, I waited. Two minutes, three minutes, five minutes.
Anxious, then annoyed, and finally a little angry. Yeah, waiting really is the name of the game. But go
ddamn it, Norwalk should give me some indication of what’s happened.
We had talked of this before, and it was a problem at every level of command, because the Nam was a different kind of war. In previous wars, lines were drawn with platoons forward of companies, companies forward of battalions, and battalions forward of regiments. And commanders at each intervening level would anxiously, but usually tolerantly, await the results of any ongoing engagement, influencing its outcome with the resources they could bring to bear but relying on their subordinates to fight the battle at hand. In Vietnam, in contrast, a platoon leader frequently had every commander in the world directly over top of him in his C&C ship within moments of a single round having been fired in anger. From that vantage point, colonels and general officers too often tried to become squad leaders. Thankfully, that was rarely the case in the Cav. General Tolson, the division’s commander, believed firmly in letting his subordinates fight their own battles while ensuring that they had the entire division and all its resources behind them. Colonel Lich, a decorated veteran of our little Korean ado, who knew what it was like to fight the fight on the ground, adhered to the same philosophy.
However, commanders at all levels had one thing in common: when their soldiers got themselves into a fight, they wanted to know what was going on as soon as possible. Or as Colonel Lich had told me on the bridge,
“If you get into something, tell me. I can’t help you or prepare others to help you if you don’t. And don’t wait until you can consolidate an Infantry School-formatted situation report. Just give me what you got at the time and ‘more to follow.’” Charlie Company’s platoon leaders had been told the same.
“Six, this is One Six,” Norwalk said, his voice emanating from Anderson’s handset. “At one four two five hours local, engaged NVA at point of origin right two eight, up zero six. Three, say again three, NVA killed in action. One AK-47 and two SKS assault rifles captured in action. No friendly casualties. How copy?”
Good report. Clear, concise, and complete. Provides the who, what, where, when, and results. And the results were good, the claymore having proved once again to be the weapon of choice. Three dead, three weapons taken, none of us hurt. Good show! Bill Norwalk is a solid officer. Hell, they all are.
