Boots on the Ground: The history of Project Delta

by Carpenter, Stephen

  Major Shane Soldato was only with Project Delta for a short time. He is remembered fondly as a soldier’s soldier and a good leader. His first priority was always his men.

  The name of Shane Soldato is inscribed on Panel 10W, Line 88 of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

  The name of Larrie Landersheim is inscribed on Panel 10W, Line 86 of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial

  On June 4th, 1970 the 3rd Company, 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion was inserted to assess the damage from a B 52 strike. SFC Arno Voigt was the senior Ranger advisor. A Pink Team flying a mission with its regular crewman, not a Delta recon man, as an observer, strayed into the AO. They crested a hill at a high rate of speed and mistook the Rangers for enemy troops. They fired on 3rd Company killing SFC Arno Voigt, 2 Rangers and wounding 20 others. Arno Voigt was the last man killed in action while serving with Project Delta.

  The name of Arno Voigt is inscribed on Panel 9W, Line 13 of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

  Operation Delta Dagger was the last Reconnaissance operation of Project Delta. Included here is a recollection of DJ Taylor about his last mission which, as it turns out, was the last recon mission to inflict damage on the enemy.

  “In April 1970, Project Delta broke camp in Bunard, returned to Nha Trang for a brief stand-down, and then in May, the Project deployed to Quang Tri Province to set up an FOB outside the Special Forces Camp at Mai Loc and conduct Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols along the Laotian Border from the DMZ south to the Khe Sanh area.

  “Mai Loc was the northernmost Special Forces Camp in the Republic of Vietnam and was the proverbial ‘stone’s throw’ from North Vietnam. This had been the second time Project Delta had worked out of an FOB at Mai Loc, and we knew on arrival our recon missions were not going to be easy ones. There were just too many enemy units in the area for a recon team to expect to infiltrate undetected and remain undetected throughout a five-day recon patrol. Anytime a recon team went into the Khe Sanh/Lang Vei area, the team knew it was probably going to come out by emergency extraction after a fierce firefight with the enemy.

  “Soon after we arrived, my recon team received a mission briefing and was assigned a recon AO that with one look at the map promised to be one of the toughest recon missions I had run to date. My Recon AO lay right on the Laotian Border due south of the abandoned Special Forces Camp at Lang Vei, southwest of the abandoned Special Forces Camp/Marine Base at Khe Sanh, and just south of where Route 616 crossed the border from Laos into South Vietnam. Route 616 was a road that connected with the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and was used by the NVA to funnel troops and equipment into Quang Tri Province. This had been a well-traveled road, and Project Delta recon teams had reported truck traffic running up and down 616 on numerous occasions. We were going into a recon AO inside a “fishhook” formed by a turn in the Xe’ Pon River where the river delineated the Laotian Border, and the sheer rock Coroc cliffs rose up over 1,000 feet on the Laotian side of the river.

  “Just by looking at my recon AO on the map, I could see trouble written all over it. We were briefed that intelligence reports indicated this area held numerous small base camps and supply storage areas where supplies were offloaded from trucks crossing over from Laos and the Ho Chi Minh Trail using Route 616. Our EEI was to determine whether there were storage facilities (caches) in our recon AO, and if so, what type equipment or munitions were kept there? I knew right off this was going to be one very bad recon AO; it just couldn’t be any other way.

  “After the mission brief, I flew out with the FAC in an O-2 Skymaster to select my infiltration and exfiltration LZs and saw right away that this AO was just as bad as the map indicated. My AO was inside a turn in the river, with Laos on three of its four sides, and I could see from the numerous bomb craters throughout my AO that it had been heavily and recently bombed. In the center of my AO was a shallow valley with a small river running down its center that drained into the Xe’ Pon River right at the base of the Coroc Cliffs. I picked an Infiltration LZ in what appeared to be a large bomb crater made by three closely spaced 500-pound bombs and an exfiltration LZ near the Laotian Border directly under those Laotian cliffs. My infiltration LZ was well within the South Vietnam side of the border and my route of march would take us right up to the river and the Laotian Border to exfiltrate. I could tell from the air that wherever we moved in our AO, we would be under the watchful presence of those solid rock Coroc cliffs towering 1,000 feet above us.

  “The FAC VR (Visual Reconnaissance) confirmed it for me; this was going to be one tough recon mission. There was just too much enemy activity in the area for it to be otherwise. As this was an extremely hot area and I expected to be in contact as soon as we left our infiltration LZ, I requested a first light insertion and it was approved. My assistant team leader was still SSG William R. (Grit) Pomeroy Jr., and he and I spent the next day running the team through IA (immediate action) drills and practicing movement SOPs (Standing Operating Procedures). Then we test fired our weapons, packed up, briefed back, and the next morning we flew out for a first light insertion.

  “Our insertion helicopter had no problem settling in for a low hover in our three-bomb crater LZ, and we jumped out at about six feet above ground, ran into the wood line and assembled. To my surprise, we found a waist high bamboo fence inside the wood line, and I then realized my infiltration LZ was really a VC/NVA vegetable garden the U.S. Air Force had completely destroyed with three each 500 pound bombs.

  “As soon as we crossed the fence and moved fifty meters into the jungle, we found ourselves entering an abandoned NVA company sized base camp. The camp consisted of about ten above ground, thatched roof, log constructed huts that could house about ten men each. Underground bunkers had been dug alongside each building, but they had not been dug with the defense of the base camp in mind; the bunkers were only intended to provide overhead cover for the men who lived there. Having no defensive positions, this base camp wasn’t arranged like the base camps I had seen constructed by VC/NVA combat units, and I assumed it had been built to house laborers. A 500-pound bomb crater was in one corner of the base camp and had destroyed one of the huts, but other than that the base camp was undamaged. By the degree of weather related rot, mold, and the amount of underbrush grown up in the camp since the last time it had been cut, I estimated the camp had been abandoned for over six months, or about the time the 500 pound bomb had hit the camp. It was currently toward the end of I Corps’ Monsoon Season, and the camp appeared to have had no occupants during the entire rainy season.

  “There was a hard packed trail leaving the camp in a direction that would take it out of our AO and in the direction of Route 616 and another hard-packed trail leaving the camp toward the southwest. Both of these trails had had no traffic on them in quite some time, foliage had begun to grow across them and should have been cut back long ago. By the old cut-marks on the trails, I could tell the trails had not been maintained in well over six months.

  “ We paralleled the old, unused trail and followed it north until it departed our AO and found nothing, so we turned around, returned to the base camp, and then paralleled the old trail to the southwest. As I considered all trails to be danger areas, I was extremely uncomfortable paralleling enemy high-speed trails, even old ones that hadn’t been used in six months or more, but it had begun to look more and more as if we had just been dealt a dry hole.

  “As we followed the old trail to the southwest, we came upon trails breaking off to the right and to the left leading to cache’ areas where the enemy had built 10’X 20’ foot log platforms about 3’ off the ground to store equipment on top of and keep it off the ground. We found about twenty of these cache sites and they were all empty. It took us most of the first day to recon this cache site, and by the end of the day we were fairly sure “there were no VC/ NVA in that part of our AO, so the next morning we turned and started moving southwest in the direction of the Laotian Border and our extraction LZ.

  “On our second day in our recon AO,
we entered into a tropical rainforest covering the hills forming the northern side of the valley that ran through the center of our AO, and I intended to follow these hills until they ended at the Xe’ Pon River and the Laotian Border. After leaving the NVA cache site and entering into the rainforest, we saw no further sign of enemy activity. By the end of our second day, the four Vietnamese Army Special Forces (Luc Luong Dac Biet (LLDB) on my team were convinced we had been blessed with a dry hole and they went into full dry hole mode. Once LLDB became convinced they were in a dry hole, they became infected with what we called “the dry hole syndrome,” and once infected they couldn’t have been more relaxed and carefree if they had suddenly found themselves on a beach in Miami.

  “By the middle of the third day, we were over half way to our extraction LZ, the LLDB were having a good old time, laughing, joking, and smoking cigarettes. I tried to get them to straighten up and act right, follow our SOPs and get serious about what we were doing, but they weren’t having any of it. My LLDB counterpart would come back at me with, ‘Cam cau chi, Chung Si. Cam cau VC.’ (No sweat Sergeant, No Viet Cong.) I almost expected them to, at any time, sling arms, hold hands and start singing and skipping through the forest in carefree abandon.

  “By that time, I had been working with LLDB for several years and had come to understand they had a much different outlook on life than did most Americans. The Vietnamese equated caution with fear, and, to them, there was nothing wrong with showing caution/fear when it was necessary, but to show caution/fear when it was unnecessary was to be downright sissy.

  “After an American had observed LLDB in several tight situations, he would begin to understand that Vietnamese would put off getting concerned about the enemy until the very last possible minute or the last possible second in some cases. Then there were some LLDB who thought it was unmanly to even show any concern at all for the possibility of imminent contact with the enemy and believed this showed the world how brave they were. This ability to turn caution off and relax in the middle of a combat operation was probably a good thing if you were going to partake in a war that spanned many years as it had for the LLDB, but their timing had to be perfect or they would occasionally find themselves in very serious trouble.

  “When an LLDB got serious and showed agitation and concern about the enemy situation, you better pay attention and get prepared for the coming disaster, because it was frequently too late to do anything about what was going to happen. And if your LLDB counterpart ever turned to you with abject terror in his eyes and said, ‘Beaucoup VC,’ you always knew he wasn’t kidding, because there was one thing LLDB would never joke about and that was the VC.

  “There was a distinct cultural and psychological difference between how the LLDB and most U.S. Army Special Forces viewed the war. Most Americans would only spend one year in the war and would remain keyed up and on edge from the time they arrived until they departed. The American would leave country after one year with his nerves frazzled and would be a likely candidate for future PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but the LLDB were in the war for the duration and PTSD was not part of their culture. There were no touchy-feely “psychiatrists at their equivalent of the Veterans Administration, and there were no words for PTSD in the Vietnamese language.

  “I tried to remind myself these LLDB had been fighting the communists much longer than I had, they would be fighting communists long after I was ordered out of the country, and they needed to take their moments of rest and relaxation wherever and whenever they could find them, but I knew they had to be wrong about this AO being a dry hole. One look up at those Coroc cliffs would remind me it was just not possible to find a dry hole anywhere around there. The enemy had to be there, but where were they? That night the LLDB were laughing, joking, smoking cigarettes and grab-assing in the RON (remain overnight position), I still couldn’t get them to behave, and I just hoped they were right about this being a dry hole.

  “The morning of the fourth day we awoke to a peaceful morning in a peaceful forest, and we continued our pleasant stroll toward our exfiltration LZ, but the Coroc cliffs seemed to be looking down on us and laughing at our brazen foolishness. Later that morning, we came up to a stream flowing across our route of march that we had to cross. The stream had a steep bank on our side that dropped off about six feet down into the crystal clear running water below, was about twenty feet across and less than knee deep at its deepest. The opposite stream bank was a fern filled gentle slope that slowly rose up until it met thick vegetation about fifteen feet from the water’s edge. The stream flowed through triple canopy jungle, the sun never penetrated to the streambed, and we found ourselves peering down into the gloom below.

  “Streams were considered danger areas, and we had a well-choreographed and rehearsed SOP routine we used when crossing all danger areas. Danger areas were all roads, heavily used trails, clearings, and streams, or any place where contact with the enemy was likely and contained good fields of fire and observation the enemy could use against us. The primary purpose of our danger area SOPs was to move the team through the danger area as quickly and as securely as possible. We had used our SOP for stream crossings a thousand times before and could run it in our sleep if we had to.

  “We halted and went into a hasty defensive perimeter while we observed the stream for enemy activity. After I had observed across, up, and down the stream long enough to be fairly certain it was free of enemy activity, I sent the point man across. The point man slid down the bank into the water, rapidly crossed the stream, and as soon as he reached the wood line fifteen feet from the water’s edge on the opposite side of the stream, he dropped down and took up a security position straight ahead at twelve o’clock. As soon as the point man had dropped into position, without any prompting my LLDB counterpart slid down the bank, rapidly crossed the stream and dropped down into the ferns between the water’s edge and the wood line to take up a security position facing nine o’clock and downstream. I was glad to see the LLDB had not become so deep into the dry hole syndrome that they would goof off in a danger area, as I slid down the bank, rapidly crossed the stream, and dropped into my security position facing three o’clock and up stream. Then nothing further happened.

  “As soon as I had dropped into my position, Grit was to slide down the bank, rapidly cross the stream and take up a position providing security immediately behind me and facing five o’clock. Right behind Grit would come the assistant tail gunner who would take up a position to Grit’s right and provide security at seven o’clock. The tail gunner was to cross the stream, not stop but continue straight through the formation, take over as point man and continue forward. The assistant tail gunner would rise up from his seven o’clock position and follow the tail “gunner, now to become the assistant point man. I would rise from my three o’clock position and follow behind the new assistant point man with Grit rising and following right behind me. My LLDB counterpart and the previous point man would rise and follow behind Grit until we had moved a safe distance from the danger area then we would halt and reform in our regular movement order. Our danger area SOP was intended to move us through the danger area as quickly and securely as possible, and the stream crossing shouldn’t have taken us much more than sixty seconds. But Grit had not followed immediately behind me, and I lay there wondering why.

  “Out of my right side peripheral vision, I could see the opposite bank where I expected to see Grit slide down into the stream, then move across the stream and drop down behind me. But after lying there for several minutes there was no movement on the opposite bank, and I was becoming angrier and angrier the longer I lay there. What were they doing over there, taking a chow break or a nap? How could they have become so lax in their dry hole syndrome they would goof off in a danger area? But what had really irritated me was I thought Grit was now goofing off along with the LLDB.

  “To make matters worse, I was lying on top of a mound of wet ground about three feet above the stream on my right, and on my left was a smal
l three feet deep gully holding about six inches of stagnant water in its bottom, and the entire area was infested with land leeches. Land leeches didn’t live in the water, they lived on the damp ground near water, and like all leeches they lived on blood they sucked from passing animals. Land leeches were about the same size, color, shape and consistency of night crawlers or earthworms, and they moved like an inchworm moved by humping their backs straight up then pushing their heads forward. Land leeches sensed their prey by seismic vibrations in the soil that telegraphed the presence of their next meal. I could see several leeches inching their way toward me from the front, had to assume there were more approaching from my rear and both sides to say nothing of the ones I had dropped down on top of. If Grit and the two LLDB on the opposite bank had followed the SOP instead of whatever they were doing, I would have only lain there for ten or fifteen seconds before I was up and moving again and the leeches wouldn’t have been a problem. But as it was, I’d soon be covered from head to toe by those leeches, and it was only because Grit and those two LLDB on the opposite bank had decided to take a chow break, a nap, or whatever the hell they were doing instead of following the SOP. And I asked myself again, ‘Where in the hell was Grit?’