Unlike most combat battalions, who were hopping around the country chasing the bad guys, we were in a static location. As a result, I had relatively little to do in my new assignment, as the enemy units in our AO stayed the same, as did the terrain. So I had time on my hands. I established contact with the local Defense Intelligence Operation Coordination Center (DIOCC), which was the local office of the Phoenix program. It was headed up by a young Second Lieutenant, John Kelleher who controlled, to some degree, a dozen-plus thugs he had inherited or recruited, most of whom were VC defectors. He was somewhat of a smart ass but quite sharp and aggressive. His mission was to track down and eliminate, in one way or another, the VC province infrastructure. In our province, his success was primarily achieved by his young thugs moving around in the various villages and hamlets till they saw some of their former comrades and put the grab on them. He had his own informant network, and when agent reports predicted a movement of a VC unit which was too large for him to handle, he contacted me. I went to my colonel and requested a company of infantry to ambush the route of the VC element. Sometimes we scored, sometimes we didn’t. In any event, we were one of the few straight leg infantry combat battalions that got kills based on agent reports, and I even got a letter of commendation from James Dameron, who was the Phoenix Province Chief for setting up the ambushes.
I started developing my own wire diagram of the province VC infrastructure, and as time passed I developed an insight into how we were slowly gutting the VC organization—whacking a couple in an ambush here, another in a raid there. Our battalion, along with the ARVN units in the province, were getting a few more every month. It was simply a matter of flooding the province with nightly ambushes—like over 1,100 a month—and sooner or later Mr. Charles would stumble into one and get blown away. We could see the results as we soon realized that various VC leaders were wearing two hats—responsible for more than one area of operations. Inexperienced VC were forced to move up the chain of command. We were hurting them and hurting them bad. No macho SpecOps personnel or fancy Intel moves. Just simple, plain old plodding grunt work.
I also enjoyed the intel bit, especially interrogations, as I got to look inside the heads of the enemy.
However, my enthusiasm for such endeavors nearly ended in disaster. On one sunny, bucolic afternoon my driver, blond, curly haired Spec. 4 Randy Goldman, was driving me and a young recently captured POW from the Brigade Intel shop back to my headquarters at the Bn. TOC, me in the back, the prisoner in the front next to Goldman. I was lolligagging around, enjoying the scenery and greenery as we slowed to make a left turn near a small village. As we did so, the VC bolted.
My reaction was so automatic that I have no recollection of whether I had a round in the chamber of my M-16. I do remember, though, that as soon as you could say, “Stop!” I was running after him, rapidly squeezing off individual shots . . . aiming low . . . no spray and pray shit. I saw him tear into a deserted hooch where I picked up a blood trail. I had popped the little shit. He had run out the other side of the hooch. I moved in, did a “spray and pray” inside to discourage any potential problem makers, and tracked the VC out into a pasture where the little shit had the misfortune of running into a patrol of local ARVN soldiers. I had a rather heated argument with them as to who this slicky boy belonged to, and I guess my uncompromising yelling won out that day, as I had no intention of being hung from the yardarm if I did not return with the prisoner.
Obviously the old angel/gremlin was up to his tricks again in this escapade. I had been purposely aiming low—don’t ask me to try and evaluate my decision making in this case—and one bullet had gone through the sole of his right foot as he raised it while running. I could say I planned it that way, but that would piss off my angel/gremlin.
BROWN RETURNS TO SPECIAL FORCES
But this was all about to end, as in late ‘68 dame fortune turned from a fickle whore into a loving mistress. I found out that an old but not by any means close acquaintance, John Paul Vann, was operating out of CORD Headquarters in Bien Hoa, a few clicks up the road from our TOC in the water plant.
Colonel Wendell Fertig, who had been a major leader of the guerrilla opposition to the Japs in the Philippines during World War II, and had continued to serve as a consultant to the DOD or CIA regarding the communist insurgency in the islands for several years, had introduced me to John Paul Vann. I had met Fertig, who lived in Golden, Colorado, a hop, skip and jump from Boulder. My small publishing firm, Panther Publications, was not only publishing a few somewhat baroque books on unconventional warfare, but was retailing a wide range of titles on the subject by other publishers.
After reading his memoirs I called Fertig, told him of my interest in the field, and that I would like to visit. After a couple of meetings he introduced me to John Paul Vann, a former Lt. Colonel in Vietnam, who had resigned his Army commission as a protest over the way the war was being conducted in 1964. In 1963, he went public regarding the true state of the conflict—that the South Vietnamese were getting their asses handed to them by the VC—which went against the Army establishment’s line of official bullshit. When I met him, he was working for defense contractor Martin Marietta and he was angling to get back to the action in Nam. Now he was Deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development for III Corps, and based out of Bien Hoa.
Though we had met only a couple of times, I later contacted John Paul Vann and he invited me to breakfast at his home in Bien Hoa. He picked me up at 0700 at my TOC. After pleasantries, I got right to it. “John, I’ve got to get out of this leg outfit and back into Special Forces.” I explained how I got kicked out of SF and my assumptions as to why it occurred. He sympathized with me and said, “I’ll see what I can do.” And, bless him, he did. Shortly thereafter, I got a copy of a letter he had sent to Colonel Arron who was commander of the 5th Special Forces Group in Nam. He tooted my horn saying something to the effect that I was one of the Army’s leading counter-insurgency experts, etc., etc. This was rather embarrassing, but no way was I going to throw a wrench in the works and disillusion the good Colonel Arron and jeopardize my chances for getting transferred back to Special Forces.
Shortly thereafter, I got a transfer to the 5th Group. Getting an in-country transfer like this was highly unusual, but who was I to complain or contradict John Paul Vann, who eventually held the civilian rank equivalent to a Major General. I saw him only one other time, when I arranged for him to attend a demonstration of exotic small arms at the nearby ARVN Infantry School in South Vietnam in the fall of 1968. Also in attendance were high-ranking ARVN officers, U.S. military personnel and representatives from the CIA. After the demo John Paul Vann spent an hour with us busting caps and left in his helicopter. I never saw him again.
Yet if John Paul Vann had been running that war, and if the dickhead McNamara, his whiz kids and the politicians had played with themselves instead of the lives of our military and our allies, we would have won the war. As it was, John Paul Vann gets most of the credit for playing a decisive role in defeating the North Vietnamese by calling in B-52 strikes on the NVA armored columns during their March 1972 Easter offensive. He was a brilliant tactician and strategist who might have won the war in Nam if he had not died in an ill-timed chopper crash.
I never did find out who the unlucky Infantry Captain was who thought he was going to Special Forces and instead ended up assigned to a leg outfit in the First Division.
My good fortune continued when out of the blue, a TV crew from CBS showed up at our TOC. I noticed a familiar face. It belonged to a cameraman who had been filming the abortive Haitian invasion attempt in 1966. We did the “Hi, howdy,” bit and he informed me, “Guess who jetted over here on the same flight?” “Ok, who? Papa Doc?” I responded. “No, Mitch Werbell, III, with all of his goodies. He’s bunked up at the Astor Hotel on Tu Do Street.”
Werbell was one of the most if not the most flamboyant snake oil salesman I’ve run across in my nefarious career. Mitch had an unparallele
d gift of BS. He claimed his father was a Russian Cavalry Colonel in the Tsarist Army. Who knows? Over time, I learned to take everything he said with a grain of salt. If he said the sun was going to rise in the east in the morning, I would say, “Mitch, I’ll wait and see.” He often claimed he had been in the OSS in the Burma-China-India theatre during “WWII. I was suspicious of this until one weekend when I was visiting his semi-palatial farm and saw him and Lou Conien, a famous CIA operative who played a major role in the Diem assassination and then ran the DEA for several years, reminiscing about the big war as they looked at faded snap shots. Werbell and Conien were similar in the respect that with both of them one could never separate truth from fiction.
Only Werbell wasn’t selling snake oil, but something far more deadly— state of the art submachine guns, like the Ingrahm M-10 and M-11 as well as the then state-of-the-art Sionics suppressor or silencer to the U.S. military or at least trying to. I had first crossed paths briefly with Werbell in Miami in ‘66 when we were both dicking around during the attempt to overthrow Papa Doc Duvalier, I then started running into him when I was the OIC of the XVIII Airborne Corps AMC in the first half of “68 when he was attempting to peddle his wares to the Army stateside at the various Army marksmanship centers, such as Ft. Bragg and Ft. Benning.
As soon as I could bamboozle a jeep from my CO, I headed to Saigon and the Astor hotel. “Got some hot intel I got to pass on to the Intelligence Center in Saigon. Hush, hush you know.”
Well, anyhow, I got the jeep and linked up with Werbell, who took me and my driver out to a nearby French restaurant where I was introduced for the first time to French baguettes which were backed up by some sort of mystery meat which was passed off as steak. Plus, real, honest scotch which I hadn’t touched in four months.
Werbell, in turn introduced me to Connie Ito who was one of the Colt M-16 reps in Nam and Peyton McGruder, who was, though a civilian, a work unto himself. Peyton, a fine human being, had played a major role in engineering the B-26 bomber that became famous in WWII and was used in a number of unconventional conflicts for the next 20 some years, including the Bay of Pigs and S.E. Asia. Peyton had a villa on the outskirts of Saigon, which he made available to me when I was passing through.
Werbell lent me one of his suppressors for my M-16. During the first firefight I got into the new toy ended up rocketing down a few meters toward the enemy. I hadn’t screwed it on tight enough
BROWN GETS HIS A-TEAM . . . IN THE GARBAGE PIT OF III CORPS
I reported into 5th Special Forces Group, headquartered in Nha Trang, where I was assigned to Company A, headquartered in Bien Hoa, who in turn, assigned me to a B-Team located in Hon Quan, near An Loc. When I arrived, Lt. Colonel Michael Lanter, tall, lean, black-haired and pleasant, decided after looking at my personnel file to make me the B-Team S-i or personnel officer. I suppose that since I had a master’s degree he assumed that I was reasonably literate and could handle all the Team’s bullshit paperwork.
I bit my tongue for a couple of weeks, and in a letter to John Paul Vann, dated 18 February1969, wrote, “Dear John: My long sought after transfer to Special Forces finally has happened. However, if it is a blessing it cer-tainly is well disguised. I reported to the SFOB in Nha Trang on 24 January. I asked for IV Corps but was told SF was at full strength and therefore I was assigned to Company A, and later to Detachment B-33. I was promised an A-Team in about 4–6 weeks when in Bien Hoa but apparently my CO here has different ideas. If I don’t get some type of operational slot in the relatively near future, I should pick up my ball and bat, terminate with SF and ask for a “leg” outfit.
I continued: “It is both disgusting and frustrating to be placed continually in staff positions because of my educational background, writing and publishing experience. Furthermore, the war effort receives damn little benefit from my extensive (and expensive) training in unconventional warfare and counter-insurgency . . . “
Shortly after writing John Paul Vann, I confronted my boss, Colonel Lanter. “Colonel, with all due respect, I came up here to fight, not fill out forms. If I can’t get an A-Team and get some action then I might as well devolunteer from SF and go back to a leg outfit where I at least will get some trigger time.” He smiled and said, “We’ll, see.” Well, we saw all right. Shortly thereafter, he sent me out to A-334, commonly known throughout the B-Team as the “Garbage Pit of III Corps.” The previous team had a lot of problems and the team leader and several of the team were relieved and sent to some purgatory somewhere. I took over with a hand-picked crew of some of the most competent SF NCO’s around. And God knows I needed them, as our basic mission was to interdict the NVA’s LOC, or Lines of Communication, from their supply depots in Cambodia into South Vietnam.
Not only was Tong Le Chon a shithole, it was nonfunctional. There were gaps in the barbed wire that you could parade a marching band through. No trip flares, No claymores implanted. No minefields.
My Team Sergeant, Master Sergeant Jim Lyons, reminisced about his experiences at Tong Le Chon: “Upon my arrival at TLC, I set out to repair the defenses of the camp and the general police of the camp, i.e., putting in new wire barriers and claymores, picking up garbage lying around the inner and outer perimeter. Upon Captain Brown’s arrival, he immediately took charge of the situation, developing a crash program to upgrade the camp defensive positions. This included building new fighting positions, repairing existing bunkers, installing additional tons of wire and thousands of claymores and trip flares. At the time of his arrival we had no outer berm per se—except tin and some dirt that was pushed in front of it. We instituted a program whereby all the fighting positions were improved—in some cases cemented, overhead cover was installed, and the entire berm was revamped. The policing of the entire camp was improved at least one hundred percent.”
Lyons noted in an interview on 24 April 1999 that, “Detachment A-334 (Tong Le Chon) had been there for a long, long time but it had never been built into a fighting base. It was just wire strung around a bunch of sandbagged bunkers.”
So, confronted with this mess, I decided to lie. Now, I had promised myself that there was no way I was going to bullshit anybody when I got to Nam. I’d been around the rodeo arena a few times and knew there was no way that I was going to make the Army a career. So forget kissing up to and lying to some limp-dicked superior officer. But lie I did. The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) at that time called for half of my battalion of Civilian Irregular Defense Force (CIDG) to be out on operations at all times. Well, we can’t do that when I don’t have a camp that I can fight. So in went the phony operations reports, while my CIDG and my team constructed a reasonably impregnable fortress. As Lyons points out, we put in the requisite barriers of barbed wire, mines, claymores, flares, etc.
WHEN BROWN WAS KING AND MINISTER OF . . .
As an A-Team commander I found myself in what was to be, looking back on it, the most challenging, frustrating, yet rewarding period of not only my bizarre Army career but also my life. I was a “King,” albeit of a rather small kingdom. I was also the de facto Minister of Defense, Minister of Justice, Minister of the Treasury and Minister of Health, Education and Welfare. I was superintendent of roads and low-income housing—very low income housing. I mediated personal problems such as how to handle the marriage of a Buddhist nurse and a Catholic. I was ultimately responsible for the lives and safety of over 576 mercenaries, Vietnamese, Cambodians and tribesmen along with several hundred dependents.
Every day presented a new set of challenges, with Mr. Charles doing his best to contribute to our uncertainty. I knew when I took over the camp that I should keep a diary, even though it was forbidden. One got around such a restriction if one had a mind to by titling such a work a “Memo for Record” or a “Log.” But what with the responsibilities of my position, I simply just did not have the necessary self-discipline to do what I should have done. The only decent record of specifics are parts of letters that I sent to my then close friend, attorney and rodeo bud
dy, Robert Bruce Miller, who, for whatever reason, kept them.
One, dated 17 February 1969, reads as follows: “Yep, I’ve finally scored. I’ve got an A-Team about seven clicks from the Cambodian border. Most of the elephants, tigers and other wild life have left the area or have been eaten and been replaced by a much more dangerous animal whose initials are ‘NVA.’ I’ve got one of the most forlorn asshole camps of the world—but I’m almost the ‘king’ though the official policy is that I and my team are supposed to advise and assist rather than command. I’ve got 374 motley Cambodians (who are waiting for the right time to desert and get assistance in the overthrow of the present Cambodian government), Montagnards who are ready and willing to slit any Vietnamese throat,
North or South, and some shifty Vietnamese thugs who would stick it to anybody for a Piastre.
“Haven’t had a mortar attack in two days. Since we blew the back off the head of a VC mortar section leader three days ago. I didn’t, but one of my 15-year-old Montagnard mercenaries did the job. Now the only thing that keeps me awake sometimes is our firing H&I fire with the 4.2’s and 81mm mortars.”
OTHER THAN THAT, TODAY IS QUIET
On 7 April 1969, I wrote; “A busy day today. Old Charles tried to liven things up by firing a rocket into our camp but his aim was off by about 600 meters. Then, about 2100 hrs, a couple of clumsy NVA, who were trying to penetrate our defensive wire set off a trip flare. All our mercenaries on the south wall opened up with mortars, .30 and .50 caliber machine guns and their M-16’s. This is the third ground probe in three days so we’re expecting to get hit in the near future. Our concern was heightened after examining the documents on one of the KIA we got during one probe which stated he was a member of a Recon unit of the 7th NVA Division that recently got its ass kicked to our south. We speculate that they may hit us to regain some face.”
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 8
