by James Estep
“Nobody shoots at my Nungs, Lieutenant. Nobody! Understand!”
“Now simmer down, Chief,” I replied. “I mean nobody really shot at anybody, just fired the gun in the…”
“Bullshit! He threatened my Nungs!” he shouted testily, interrupting me. “And nobody threatens my Nungs. Nobody! I’ll have that bloody Danang cowboy of yours hung!”
“Okay, Chief, we’ll do it at sunrise. But right now, I think …”
“And I’ll tell you something else, Lieutenant,” he continued, again interrupting me. “I’m gonna report this incident to Colonel Aidorn forthwith, and I’m gonna use your name freely.”
Oh, to hell with it, I thought, losing my temper. “Mr. Gundy, I don’t give a good goddamn who you report what to, but it’s gonna be dark soon, and I suggest we get our people in some sort of defensive posture. And if we can’t do that, I’ll call Colonel Aldorn and ask him to extract you and your fucking Nungs forthwith!”
“Oh, yeah! Well, Lieutenant, let me tell you something.”
The incident was not handled with a lot of professionalism by either of us, and I felt bad about it—but then, I was only a second lieutenant. And second lieutenants are not schooled in joint and combined warfare, nor is tact one of their more notable character traits.
After tempers had cooled, we divided the camp, assigning each of the two forces a portion thereof. Nungs and strikers remained in this posture for the next week or so, avoiding each other as much as possible. In the meantime, Warrant Gundy and I went about our business, we too avoiding each other as much as possible.
Then intelligence indicators began to reveal that the threat in Son Ha District was dissipating, the enemy supposedly retiring to do battle elsewhere. Warrant Gundy and his Nungs returned to Danang, convinced that their intervention at Ha Thanh had been the pivotal factor behind the enemy’s decision to withdraw. Of course, we knew better. We knew Charlie was posed for an attack when the Mike force arrived. However, after observing our efforts at organizing a combined defense of the camp that afternoon, he had a good laugh and decided to move on. Why in the world should he waste his soldiers and ammunition on a camp that was about to self-destruct?
By mid-December only three of the original team remained at Ha Thanh—Jock Wamer, Ken Luden, and me. Christmas came and went and with it Sergeant Luden. Jock and I spent New Year’s Eve at the campsite, and then he departed. Three days later, on the next helicopter out, I left the Son Ha Valley, never to see it or its people again. But I think of them now and then—and dream of them often.
15. Fort Benning, Georgia: February 1966
I spent the next eighteen months as an instructor in platoon and company tactics at the U.S. Ar-ay’s Infantry School—watching our Army turn itself inside out. Overnight, the Army had turned its entire focus on Southeast Asia. Suddenly, no Army training post was complete without its media-oriented “Vietnam village.” Doctrine was revised, stressing its adaptability to an insurgency. Training curriculum was changed, deemphasizing subject matter the Army had held so near and dear since 1945—how to fight on the plains of Europe.
We in the school’s company operations department were charged with preparing young leaders, teaching them what cannot be taught, then sending them on their merry way and starting over again with the next class. It was not a thankless task, but a trying one of six-and seven-day weeks, of sixteen-and eighteen-hour days. Before very long, it got old.
One cold, sleety night on CP-77—a seventy-two-hour counter-guerrilla field exercise we’d walk different officer candidates through once, and more often, twice a week—one of my fellow instructors, the two of us having recently been promoted to captain, said, “Called branch today. Asked them to send me back to the Nam.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why? ‘Cause way I figure it, a man has to put in hours like this, he might as well put ‘em in where it’s warm and where he can kill someone a little bit.”
Made sense to me. I had “yellow fever.” And American infantrymen were in the fray now. Perhaps I could lead a company of them, perhaps a company in the First Air Cavalry. Hell, they were kicking Charlie’s ass up one side and down the other.
The next day, I called infantry branch.
16. The Cav Prelude to a Truce: 29 January 1968
It was a bright, sunny Monday, like most January days on the Bong Son plain. For Charlie Company, it was another day of business as usual the last day in the Year of the Goat to make a hit in the high country.
One Six and Three Six, headquarters section accompanying Three Six, sallied upward to establish their claymore ambushes on a mountain that reeked of the dead. Two Six, with a new lieutenant at its helm, worked the valley floor. Four Six, as was often the case, if for no other reason than to ensure that we had a secure LZ at our disposal, remained at last night’s NDP, napping the day away.
Lieutenant Halloway, wisely, chose to access the mountain’s main northsouth trail at a point farther north than usual so as to put the remains of most of Charlie Company’s previous victims to the south of us. He felt this was both tactically sound and gastronomically desirable, as it was nearly lunchtime. A short while later, we found an ideal ambush site, one in which the platoon could straddle a curve in the trail without being observed from the enemy side of either the north or south hit teams’ positions—and one in which the stench was at least bearable. Still, when the wind occasionally shifted, we got a healthy whiff of our more recent kills.
Lunch in the Nam, in the Cav, was as often as not ignored. We were authorized two meals of C rations per man per day, but with C&D in the morning and a hot A or B ration in the evening, most of us ate only portions of a meal during the day—whenever the mood struck us and we found ourselves in a posture to eat. “Sweet” Willie Dubray, however, was a three-meals-a-day man.
As we sat in wait midway between the two hit teams, Bob Halloway, Slim Brightly, and I idly talking of unimportant things, I casually watched Dubray—who was filling in for Anderson as my company RTO on this occasion—prepare his noonday fare. He first opened a couple of cans of crackers and then, using a Stateside “church key” can opener, poked several holes in the sides of the cans. In each of these makeshift stoves he placed a heat tablet and lit it, then he set a can of beans and wieners atop one and a can of porksausage patties atop the other.
While his meal was heating, he opened small tins of jelly and peanut butter and spread it on his crackers. Between mouthfuls, he alternately hummed and sang something about a young man named Billy Joe who had evidently jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge.
Blair, lying on his side a short distance away, gazed at Dubray throughout these preparations, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Chow time,” Dubray said in a low voice, removing the bubbling, greasy pork patties from atop the heat tab.
“Don’t do that, Willie,” Blair softly remarked. “Please just don’t do it.”
“Huh?” Dubray said.
“Willie, a sane and starving man doesn’t eat charlie-rat porksausage patties in the dead of night, in the cold of winter, much less at midday in the Nam when the temperature’s registering a hundred plus and the pungent fragrance of victories past are about us. Willie, that stuff’s nothing but grease, pure grease. It’ll kill you.”
Dubray looked at Blair uncomprehendingly a moment and then smiling and shoving the first of the pork patties in his mouth, said, “Shit, you ain’t gotta worry yourself ‘bout me, Blair. Ain’t nothing’s gonna make me sick.”
“I know that, Willie,” Blair responded quietly, almost as if to himself.
“It’s not your health that concerns me. It’s mine. And if you put one more of those greasy patties in your mouth, I’m gonna heave.”
Grinning, Willie said, “Well, you just stick to your fruit cocktail and peaches mixed with them teeny little old pound cakes and pass ‘long your patties to me. I mean all that there fruit ain’t no good for you, Blair, don’t stick to your ribs. My pappy, he say meat, tater
s and rice, that’s what’ll …”
“And did your pappy happen to have scurvy, Willie?” Blair asked, with a straight face.
Dubray looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and then, nonchalantly, said, “Naw. Had one when I was just a little fellow, but one of the wheels fell off, and Pappy, he never got ‘round to fixing …”
Blair just shook his head in resignation and rolled over to his other side, mumbling, “Cretins. I’m surrounded by cretins.”
I smiled and turned my attention back to Bob Halloway, who was somewhat frivolously discussing the strategical value of Secretary McNamara’s electronic “wall,” a barier designed to curtail the infiltration of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam.
“See, the way I see it,” he said, “we’re really over here because it serves our national interests. No other reason, right?”
Slim and I nodded.
“Mean, the domino theory and making the world safe for democracy are all well and good,” he continued, “but the bottom line is we’re here so as to keep ‘em off the shores of California, right? So why not just stretch the secretary’s electronic barrier from Seattle to San Diego and save ourselves all this travel time. Hell, maybe Charlie Company could screen the L.A. area.”
We smiled politely but said nothing.
“Seriously, sir,” he continued after a short pause, “what’s the answer?
I mean we just keep on killing ‘em, and they just keep on coming.”
“Beats the shit out of me, Bob.”
“Answer’s artillery!” Brightly blurted out. “Just put all the artillery in the fucking free world, hub to hub, up there on the ‘Z’ where McNamara wants to put his fence, and then start plowing ground northward. Complete your mission, then roll forward fifteen or twenty klicks and do it again. Keep going till you get to the Chinese border.”
“Red leg’s not the answer to all our problems, Slim,” I said. “We proved that the other night on the 506.”
“Yeah, what do you think happened, sir?” Halloway asked.
“Beats the shit out of me, Bob.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Brightly said. “Charlie moved, plain and simple. While we were cranking up the mission, and Baker’s squad was going for cover, Charlie picked it up and moved elsewhere. Unobserved fire. Can’t expect miracles from unobserved fire.”
“Well, what do you think they were doing just sitting there in the first place?” Halloway asked.
“How the fuck should I know?” Brightly answered. “Maybe they were getting ready for Tet. You know, been raising Cain here on the plain for the past year, and now they’re returning to the hills for a little rest and relaxation during the truce.”
“Hey, how long does the truce last, anyway?” Halloway asked.
“Depends on whose you’re talking about,” I replied. “Theirs is supposedly seven days; ours lasts only thirty-six hours beginning at 1800 hours tonight.”
“Think they’ll stick to it, sir?”
“Beats the shit out of me, Bob.”
It was an uneventful afternoon, and with its passing Charlie Company had failed to accomplish its primary mission, that of closing with and destroying the enemy. Our foe was simply not traveling the mountain that day, nor was he on the plain.
“Perhaps Charlie finally got to wherever he’s been heading the last couple months,” Lieutenant Brightly jokingly remarked.
Around three o’clock we decided to pack it up and begin journeying back toward the valley floor. I radioed Bill Norwalk, telling him to do the same. It was the time of day we liked most, when day’s work was over and we were moving effortlessly downhill toward our NDP, a hot meal, and a night’s rest instead of struggling upward into the unknown. But it was always more satisfying to be descending our mountain after a successful hit.
As we worked our way downward along yet another east-west trail, I took note of Three Six’s riflemen. As usual, they were moving as riflemen should move when in Indian country—with weapons at the ready, distances maintained, and a warrior’s silence. Still, there was a certain aura of laxness on this occasion. Perhaps it was the result of having made the up-down sally so many times before—routine is the greatest ally of laxness—or perhaps it was simply in anticipation of the pending truce.
Two Six had selected an NDP in relatively flat terrain a klick or so from the base of the mountain but a short distance from Daisy. As the company began its nightly ritual of digging holes, clearing fields of fire, and emplacing claymores and trip flares, its platoon leaders, attached FO, first sergeant, and I assembled for our evening parley.
Unlike my tete-a-tetes with the Bull, these sessions were usually brief affairs, restricted to the company’s business at hand—the platoon leaders had little time for casual conversation until after their defensive preparations were complete. We first shared any lessons learned on that day’s operation and then turned our attention to the next day’s activities. At the conclusion of our get-together, the platoon leaders would show me where they proposed to put their LPs and trick-ortreat sites that night, and I would routinely approve their recommendations without comment. Slim Brightly would then plot these locations on his map. On this occasion, talk immediately turned to the next day’s activities.
“Where we gonna do this train-fire stuff, sir?” Lieutenant Norwalk asked.
“What train fire?” I asked in return.
“I propose we set the range up on the west side of the perimeter,”
Lieutenant Halloway said. “Use the mountain as a backdrop. ‘Course there aren’t that many villagers around here anyway, so maybe …”
“What train fire?” I repeated.
“Not enough range,” Bill Norwalk said in response to Halloway’s suggestion, as if not hearing me. “If you’re gonna even approximate the firing tables, you’re gonna need at least …”
“What train fire, goddamn it!” I snapped, feigning anger.
Silence. All heads turned toward me, then to my first sergeant.
“Uh … hadn’t had a chance to get with you since you came off the hill, sir,” the Bull said. “Sorry. Anyway, this afternoon your XO called and informed us in passing that he couldn’t find any silhouette targets, so he’s gonna send us out some charlie-rat cases that his folk have done some painting on. Seems the old man wants us to use this downtime to ‘enhance our marksmanship abilities.’”
“Okay, understand. Thanks,” I said and then, turning to the others, asked, “Well, what about it? You all think we need a little marksmanship training?”
“Fuck no! … sir.”
“No way! Colonel ought to ask Chuck about our marksmanship abilities.”
“Didn’t know we had a choice, sir.”
“Don’t know if we do,” I said. “But let me try to get to the bottom of this.”
I got up and walked the few meters to where Blair and Anderson were digging the hole they would share that night.
“Blair, my good and faithful servant, would you be so kind as to go to our log push. I would speak to my XO.”
He made the frequency adjustment.
“Comanche Five, this is Comanche Six, over.”
“This is Five Alpha. Uh … the Five ain’t in the area right now. Can I assist? Over.”
“This is Six, Roger. What do you know about train-fire activities tomorrow?”
“Five Alpha, not much. The Lieutenant had us making up these targets this afternoon. Rumor is that the colonel wants you all to do a little target practice during the stand down.”
“This is Six. Okay. Thanks. Out.”
“Back to command, please,” I said to Blair. He again quickly changed the radio’s frequency.
“Arizona Three, this is Comanche Six. Over.”
“And this is Arizona Three, over.” I could hear the faint, familiar whump, whump of a Huey as Major Byson keyed his push to talk. He was airborne somewhere over Bong Son’s plain.
“This is Comanche Six. Is there some last-m
inute change to our marching orders for the truce? Uh … has the Six put out anything on marksmanship training, or some such?”
“Not that I know of. Six says it’s pretty much your call. You know his philosophy on that. Man on the ground and so forth. ‘Course, you’ve got to keep yourself in a strong defensive posture. I recommend aggressive defensive patrolling during the day and the same nature of ambushing at night. Copy?”
Just another rumor that somehow nearly became fact. Story’s old as the Army. Wonder how many operations have gone afoul—or succeeded—because of it.
I walked back to our assembled council.
“No train fire,” I reported. “We aggressively defensively patrol during the day and defensively ambush at night. In short, we do what must be done to protect our own, okay?”
“Sir, might you tell us the difference ‘tween defensive and offensive patrolling and trick-or-treating?” Bill Norwalk asked, smiling.
“I’ll tell you the difference, sir,” Sergeant Sullivan replied. “The difference is we do the same thing we do every other fucking day of the year, ‘cept we don’t hurt anybody, don’t shoot anybody, in the process. Jesus Christ, what a war.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself, Top,” I commented.
We wrapped up our session by planning those defensive precautions we’d undertake over the course of the next two days in order to “protect our own.” In the main, One Six and Two Six would screen our perimeter the next day, and if the truce held Three Six, augmented by Four Six, would do the same the following day.
