by James Estep
“Well, know how many troops we’ve stopped in the past six months? One! And I’m not so sure he wasn’t just some poor Katu tribesman who got caught napping. Know how many arms and supplies we’ve quote, interdicted?”
I shook my head.
“None! Zero! Know why? ‘Cause of that fucking jungle out there. See, the concept is—and I’m sure one of Nha Trang’s little Napoleons told you this—we ‘aggressively’ patrol the area between us and the camps at Kham Duc and Ta Ko. Bullshit! If you took off overland today, you wouldn’t reach either of ‘em ‘fore Christmas. You measure a day’s walking in that jungle in meters, not klicks.”
He paused, evidently collecting his thoughts, then continued, “And what about your strike force? See, the concept was to recruit the force from the indigenous Montagnard population, in our case, the Katu. Well, sir, I ain’t never seen a Katu, much less recruited one. ‘Cause the Katu, he’s not like your Rhade or Jarai ‘sign-me-up-for-a-can-of-rock-salt’ Montagnard you got down south. He don’t want nothing to do with nobody. Oh, he’s out there, out there in that jungle. We run ‘cross one of his hutches every now and then, but he’s never at home. Don’t have them tribal, you know, communitylike instincts other ‘Yards have. Usually it’s just him and his family, maybe two, three families, always on the move.”
He paused, again as if he had lost his train of thought. Then he said,
“Anyway, there’s no way we’re gonna enlist the Katu in our border surveillance program, right?”
“Suppose not,” I replied.
“so Danang’s mayor,” he went on as if not hearing me, “him having his own problems with an overpopulated prison system, says, ‘Hey, you looking for aggressive, tough young fighters for your strike force? I got ‘em by the truckload.” And that, sir, is your strike force.” He motioned toward an adjacent area of the camp where several of these soldiers were moving about in the late afternoon sun, two of them engaged in a heated argument over what appeared to be a can of Del Monte peaches.
“Pickpockets, petty thieves, beggars … shit, rapists and murderers for all I know. Perfect place for ‘em. They can’t desert; there’s no place to go.”
“Well, can they fight?” I asked. “I mean, are they good soldiers?”
“No on the latter, and beats the shit out of me on the former. Like I said, we ain’t seen a lot of fighting. But on the other hand, guess maybe the answer’s yes, ‘cause they shoot one another every now and then. Uh … mostly as a result of gambling arguments. They play a lot of cards—not much else to do with their pay what with there being no village, or women, or booze, or anything else ‘round here to spend it on. And you can’t let ‘em go back to Danang on leave to spend it. Shit, you’d never see ‘em again.”
And once again he paused, staring at the distant horizon as if hypnotized by the sun’s setting over the Laotian mountains to the west of us.
Sonofabitch! I thought to myself. Maybe he wasn’t kidding. Maybe this hilltop does play on a man’s mind.
“So,” he said abruptly, as if coming out of a trance. “Uh … let’s see, I’ve briefed you on your mission and the troops you have available to accomplish your mission. Now, let’s talk of logistics and how we resupply those troops as they go about failing to accomplish their impossible mission. See, the concept was to build an airstrip and then airland everything you needed to keep the camp going. You know, a little Dien Bien Phu. So Danang airdropped a bulldozer and road grader in and built us an airstrip.” He gestured to our front at the dirt runway that ran the length of the camp from east to west.
“Know how many planes we’ve had land on it, Lieutenant?”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head.
“One! Know how many planes have taken off from it?”
“One?”
“Nope, none!” he answered, directing my attention to a heavily sandbagged bunker, protruding from one end of which was the nose section of a two-engine CV-2B Caribou. Above the aircraft’s windshield, affixed to the sandbagged roof covering the wingless, tailless fuselage, was a neatly painted sign: HAMMOND HOUSE Presented to the United States of America by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia. “See, Lieutenant, only trouble with our airstrip is it ain’t very long, and, since they tried to cut it out of the top of the hill here, it’s eight or ten feet lower on each end than it is in the middle. Air Force came out, surveyed it, and said, ‘Hell no, we ain’t gonna land no fixed-wing on it.” Which, when you think of it, I guess is understandable. Our pilots are a bit leery of landing fixed-wing aircraft on runways with a fucking hill in the middle of ‘em!”
Then, smiling a bit peculiarly, he said, “Not so with the Aussies. Hell, no! If you don’t know it yet, Lieutenant—and you don’t—you’ll learn it very damn soon ‘cause you got two of ‘em attached to your team here. Anything an American can’t do, an Australian can. And anything we can do, they can do better. Uh … think, they’ve never forgiven us for saving their cookies in World War II.”
He paused and then, a bit sheepishly, apologetically said, “Hell, shouldn’t talk like that. Both our Aussies are with the Special Air Service, super soldiers and likable people, kind of folk you like to have around you in a place like this. Like I say, I’ve just been out here too fucking long.”
I nodded understandingly.
“Anyway,” he continued, “the Australians have an aviation contingent flying out of Danang. So they come out here after the Air Force survey and say, ‘Sure, mate, we can put a Caribou in here in a flash. Nothing to it.” Well, couple days later, we’re all sitting out here waiting for the first plane to land at ARO. And ‘course our two Aussies ain’t missing this opportunity to rub our noses in the dirt a little.”
He started laughing. “Damn, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Plane comes in from the east, circles the camp a couple times, then approaches the strip from the west. And the ‘Kipper’—he’s one of your attached Aussies—says ‘Now you Yanks gonna see a bit of flying skill.’
And we did. Plane hits perfectly, looks like it’s slowing, but then goes over that hill in the middle of the runway, and, shit, all of a sudden it’s airborne again! Comes back down on the far side, bounces a couple times, and then just keeps on going … off the end of the strip, through the wire, and into the fucking jungle, shedding pieces of itself ‘long the way. Didn’t phase the ‘Kip’ at all! Plane finally comes to a stop, and he says, ‘What say, mates? You ever saw a Yank what could land a plane and clear fields of fire at the same time?’” We both laughed, he in recalling the incident, and I in envisioning it.
“Pilot’s name was Hammond,” he said, wiping at his eyes. “He and the crew walked away from their Caribou laughing. Said they wanted to do their takeoff in a helicopter. So now it’s our alternate command post, leastways the fuselage is. Used the wings and tail sections for revetment.
“Well, sir,” he said soberly, “that about wraps up my orientation of your new home for the next year. I’m sure my boss is giving your boss a similar pitch, ‘though I’ll bet it’s not quite so … uh … open minded. Now you’ll probably want to be getting with our XO so as to figure up a fair price for the team rations we have on hand.”
He strolled off toward the team house, undoubtedly having more important tasks to perform than explaining the pitfalls of ARO to a “butter-bar” lieutenant. I remained atop the bunker, spending a few additional minutes in the fading light, assessing our new home.
ARO sat atop an elongated, east-west ridge with its useless airstrip running the length of it. Actually, it was more three camps than one, with separate fortified positions at each end and midway along the airstrip on its northern side. A zigzag trench network (reminiscent of World War I trench systems), intermittently strongpointed with covered fighting positions and crew-served weapons bunkers, surrounded each of the three encampments. Forward, or on the enemy side, of these entrenchments, the camp’s occupants had emplaced wire barriers composed of alternating runs of triple concertina, doubl
e-apron fence, and “tanglefoot,” which, without going into a lengthy explanation, were merely three different techniques of employing barbed wire. On the enemy’s side of the wire, at a distance of fifty meters or so, the jungle encircled the entire hilltop.
One of ARO’s three strike-force companies, the best of the three according to Grimshaw, occupied the fortified position on the eastern end of the airstrip; the other two were encamped on the western end. Each of these companies was composed of eighty to a hundred “strikers” armed with light-infantry weapons of World War II vintage. Although the mainstay of this arsenal was the .30caliber M-1 carbine, some strikers were armed with the M3A1 “grease” or M1A1 Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun, the .30caliber M1918A2 Browning automatic rifle, or, in rare cases, the M-1 rifle. Their crew serves consisted of the.30caliber M1919A6 machine gun, the 60-mm mortar, and the 57-mm recoilless rifle.
Our team and a Nung force of perhaps twenty-five men resided in the camp’s center fortification, about midway between the two strike force contingents. This position was dominated at its highest point by an above/belowground communications bunker, on top of which was a sandbagged observation post. From this vantage point, I could survey the entire hilltop, noting as I did so the other facilities composing our part of ARO. These included a combination cookshack and team house—a clapboard, tin-roofed structure in which the team ate and spent most of its leisure time; a small underground dispensary, which our senior medic, Sergeant Morgan, would soon relocate to the more spacious, dryer, and less rat-infested Hammond house; our sleeping, fighting bunkers, located at various points on the trench network; two 81-mm mortar pits and adjacent ammunition bunkers; and, on the northern side of the hill and lower on its crest, the Nung encampment from which the Nung force would rush to our aid should the Viet Cong attack ARO.
The Nung was a mercenary, a holdover from an earlier era in which the CIA, then controlling Special Forces operations in Vietnam, had hired these clansmen to protect U.S. team members from the Viet Cong or from their own strike force if it should turn upon them. He was a Vietnamese nationalist of Chinese origin who considered himself only Chinese, and understandably so inasmuch as he spoke Chinese, was of pure Chinese genesis, and, like the Montagnard, passionately hated the ethnic Vietnamese.
A loyal and ferocious fighter, the Nung would and often did unselfishly surrender his life on behalf of the Special Forces soldier he was paid to protect. But, as we would soon learn, because of his dislike of the Vietnamese, he was not always an asset in what we were trying to accomplish.
In any event, I decided there was scant likelihood this mercenary force would ever be called upon to protect us during an attack, since after listening to what Grimshaw had to say about ARO, I was convinced that the probability of such an attack was microscopic. Here on this barren hilltop we were sustaining a force of some three hundred men, but it was a force in limbo—a force that was inflicting absolutely no damage on the enemy yet was costly to maintain. Charlie was an astute tactician.
I doubted he had any interest in running us out of ARO and seeing us employed in a more meaningful role elsewhere.
As the sun fell behind the Laotian mountains, I put aside my thoughts on the enemy’s philosophy regarding our border surveillance program at ARO and returned to the team house, there to discuss the fair market value of a case of canned wieners with the outgoing team’s executive officer.
12. Toward the River Boung: March 1965
Within days of our arrival at ARO, Captain Peterson, our detachment commander; Sergeant Matis, the team sergeant; and Sergeant Morgan, with a small contingent of Nungs and one strike-force company in tow, departed camp on the team’s first long-range patrol. It was a ten-day venture that, not surprisingly, turned out to be little more than a walk in the weeds. Or, as observed by Captain Peterson, “A great physical conditioning exercise, but probably of little significance as far as the war’s final outcome is concerned.”
Sergeant Wamer, the team’s assistant operations sergeant, and I accompanied the next foray of this sort. It too was an exercise in futility, providing information of no great consequence other than the discoveries that Vietnam’s jungle leeches could penetrate the smallest of openings in our clothing and that the Army-issue insect repellent was without question the most effective defense against them. We literally bathed ourselves in it.
We tried to keep at least one such patrol on the move constantly, screening our area of responsibility as best we could. With two or three team members accompanying each of these operations, any of the twelve of us would return to the bush on every third or fourth patrol.
On rare occasions, we greatly expanded our area of influence on these excursions by inserting our force via helicopters. In early March, Sgt. Ken Luden, our senior demolitions sergeant, Australian Warrant Officer Kipler (the “Kipper,” or simply “Kip”), and I found ourselves involved in such a venture. And everything that could conceivably go wrong did.
“I’ve overflown your LZ and see no great problem,” Yankee Papa’s flight leader said, as we squatted in a circle on ARO’s runway.
Assigned to the Marine Corps 163d Aviation Battalion flying out of Danang, he was briefing us and his pilots on our pending assault. Six of his cumbersome H-34 helicopters, sequentially numbered YP-1, -2, -3, and so on, were lined up on the strip behind us.
“‘Course it’s awful damn small,” he continued, “but shit, finding a clearing bigger than a backyard garden in these mountains is like witnessing the second coming of Christ. See it as a two-ship LZ, so we should have you down in three quick touch-and-goes.” Then, turning from us to his pilots, he said, “Now we don’t know what’s out there, so we’re gonna go in hot!”
Great! I thought to myself. That means an LZ prep, those Marine F-4Cs from Danang, gunships firing rockets, maybe even a little …
“That means your gunners are firing when you go in to set down. And I don’t want to hear any gripes ‘bout cleaning guns when we get back to the house.”
Door gunners! That’s it? That’s going in hot? No fast movers, no red leg, no gunships? Just helicopter door gunners spraying 7.62 around with their M-60s? Sonofabitch!
“Okay, that’s it, then,” he said, concluding our joint air-ground prebrief. “Load time is 0855, takeoff at 0900.”
Having conducted our airmobile insert without incident, by nine-thirty we were moving generally in an easterly, northeasterly direction about twenty klicks from ARO. The operation was to be a tento fourteenday foray during which we hoped to reach the Song (river) Boung, travel it west, then reenter ARO from the north. Accompanied by twelve Nungs and one company of strikers (which had fielded a force of approximately sixty men), there were about seventy-five of us fighting our way through the jungle on this the first day of an ill-fated mission.
In the late afternoon, shortly before dusk, we began searching for an acceptable RON (remain overnight—a position identical to an NDP, RON merely being the acronym in vogue in early ‘65). As we approached a small clearing that descended downward from the side of the mountain on which we were making our way, the patrol abruptly halted.
Moments later Luden approached the Kipper and me from the front of the column, saying, “Point man stepped in a pungi trap, sir. One of the spikes went all the way through his right foot; he isn’t gonna walk much further.”
Shit! I thought. If we hadn’t come in by helicopter, if we weren’t so far from home base, we could send him and fifteen or so strikers back to camp. We obviously can’t carry him around with us for the next two weeks. That leaves only two options: dust off or scratch the op and return to ARO. Funny how we never really think of these things when we’re planning these excursions. Always kind of assume we won’t have wounded. Or if we do, they’ll be walking wounded. Got to get a dust off, can’t scrap the operation on day one.
“Gonna be hard to get ‘em to fly a dust off,” Ken commented, as if reading my thoughts. “If it were one of us, it’d be different. But you know how
they feel about dusting off one of the little people.”
He was right. Vietnamese wounded, paramilitary or otherwise, were supposed to use ARVN medical evacuation resources, not U.S. And there was a far greater likelihood of the tooth fairy flying into this jungle and whisking away our wounded soldier than of ARVN doing SO.
Suddenly, while pondering our dilemma, we heard the familiar sound of an H-34 in the distance. It was evidently flying toward us from the southwest.
“H-34. Probably flying a milk run out of Kham Duc en route to Danang,”
Kipler said. “What do you think, Skip? Think they might make a pickup?”
“Can’t hurt to try, Kip,” I replied. “We got their push, Ken?”
“Yeah, should be the same one we used on the insert this morning.”
Luden quickly located our PRC-10 radio, a little-used communications asset, since we depended primarily on a CIA-issued, singleside-band HTI radio for most of our communication needs. However, the HT-1 would not net with the Marine Corps helicopter.
“Uh … Yankee Papa, this is Roaring Tiger,” I said, after Ken had calibrated and affixed the proper frequency to the Korean-vintage radio.
Silence.
“Yankee Papa, this is Roaring Tiger, over.”
Then, after another brief pause, the H-34 pilot responded, “Roaring Tiger, this is Yankee Papa. Don’t recognize call sign or push. Authenticate. Over.”
Shit, we don’t have their CEOI. How the hell can I authenticate?
“This is Roaring Tiger. Uh … don’t have your go codes, but Yankee Papa inserted us this area, this morning.” Then, concluding that a slight compromise in radio security was a minor price to pay for getting the wounded striker out of our hair, I added, “We’re the Special Forces element out of ARO. Got one wounded, and our op can’t go any farther unless we get him out of here. Over.”
“Roger, Roaring Tiger, that’s good enough for me. Let me take a look at your Lima Zulu and see what we can do. Can you pop smoke? Go.”
