Sergeant Lyons received an almost identical proposition. As he recounts it: “Major Long and Lieutenant Colonel Murray arrived at Tong Le Chon after the POW was captured. I met Lieutenant ColonelMurray at the airstrip. Lieutenant ColonelMurray came up to me in the jeep and I got out. He took me aside and asked, ‘How is your body count coming this month?’ I told him we hadn’t gotten anyone and he said, ‘Well, you have one POW out there. If he was to try to get away tonight, and you people were to shoot him, you would get a body count for it.’ I immediately thought Lieutenant ColonelMurray was joking, and I said to him, ‘Sir, you must be kidding.’ He replied, ‘No, if the man should try to escape and you were to kill him you would get credit for a body count.’ I said, ‘Sir, I don’t want any part of what you’re talking about. If you want anything from me, I will be up at the team house.’ And I got in my jeep and left.”
The next morning I rousted out the Vietnamese Special Forces intell sergeant, got the prisoner, my intell sergeant, Sfc Fletcher Blocksum, a raw-boned redhead WWII and Korean vet from Texas, and my interpreter and went down into the CONEX which served as our communications center. I conducted the questioning about his family. After a few innocuous queries, I got to the meat of what I was after. This youngster claimed he had been impressed into service by the VC, which was not all that unusual. I was stern in my questioning but not threatening. For a while, that is.
“Nguyen,” I asked, “what did you do with the VC unit you were with?” “Oh, Duy Uy, I provide security for my team when they go to village to propagandize, collect taxes and rice.” A few more unimportant questions, like what the food was like, etc. Then I casually asked, “Did you ever carry a gun?” “No, no,” he shook his head vigorously. “Never carry gun.”After more insignificant questions, I let out the clincher. “Well, Nguyen, when you were providing security for your unit, how did you warn of the approach of the Americans or South Vietnamese?” “I fired my carbine in the air three times.” Gotcha! “All right, you lying piece of shit,” I yelled in his ear as I hovered over him. “I’ve caught you lying and you better damn well tell the truth or I’ll turn you over to the Montagnards.” He quivered and I started on him. After an hour, I had elicited intelligence of incredible value, easily worth the elimination of a battalion of VC. Spilling his guts, he gave me a list of the names of the VC in small infrastructure units in the area, the location of mines and booby traps, weapons caches, etc. I was in hog heaven. A big score for the good guys!
Sgt. Lyons documented the episode:
“Captain Brown continued his interrogation of the POW, and the man agreed to go back to the area he had been taken from to point out meeting places and quarters of VC and NVA and to identify VC infrastructure per-sonnel. A couple of days later, however, we were told that the individual had tried to escape and the airport outpost had to shoot him. We were not notified of the incident until the next morning; and when we asked where the body was, they said they had already buried it. Later the Intelligence Sergeant of the VNSF admitted that they had received orders from the VNSF B-Team that the man was to be executed.”
The next morning, in choppers, Lt. Colonel Murray with his toad-like counterpart showed up. I barrel-assed down to the chopper pad to gloat over the invaluable intel I had wormed out of the POW. After enthusiastically detailing the info developed from the VC, there was a toe-in-the-sand type of embarrassed silence. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Do you know the prisoner was killed trying to escape from the camp last night?”Once again, I damn near went into terminal shock. I have no recollection what I said, if anything. Murray and the toad departed and went up to the camp team house to discuss the situation with the rest of the team. I was in a white-hot rage due to the fact that this was nothing less than cold-blooded murder. So, the question was, “Why?”
There were a number of factors that led me to believe that he was killed because he knew too much; that Murray and Long ordered him liquidated because, since he was spilling his guts, he might well implicate the Vietnamese Special Forces collaborating with the VC. I figured the kid was part of a commo-liason unit in the Province. Therefore, he might well have known the nature and scope of the contact between the LLDB in TLC and the B-Team and the Province VC. My theory was based on the fact that when my patrol picked up the kid, he was wearing a clean, short-sleeved khaki shirt and shorts; he had a recent haircut; his exposed body extremities were clean and without sores or scratches; he had clean paper money in his pocket. Now, there was no way that he had been living on a long-term basis in the primitive camp he led us into which had no running water and only rickety lean-to’s covered with torn plastic ground clothes.
Sergeant Lyons recollects, “One night we had Captain Long over to the team house drinking. Captain Long got pretty drunk and admitted in front of Sergeant Blocksum and me that he had been told by the B-Team that this man would be executed. He did not give the names of the individuals who told him this. I made a statement for the record at the time, and it was put on file in the safe in the intelligence folder.”
This is another one of the funny instances to show that whenever something happened, Captain Long was not available. He was visiting the B-Team on the night the POW was shot.
Sergeant Lyons continued: “I have been in the Special Forces for approximately sixteen years. I have had a number of team leaders, good and bad, but Captain Brown was the best team leader I ever had, bar none. This individual will listen to anything anyone has to suggest and will evaluate and judge it on its own merits. As to Lieutenant Colonel Murray’s remarks on Captain Brown’s efficiency report, which Captain Brown showed to me, some of the things stated can be summed up as being true, but it is a one-sided story. Reports were repeatedly made to Lieutenant Colonel Murray concerning the VNSF corruption and lack of aggressiveness. Such reports were consistently ignored. Lieutenant Colonel Murray would suggest that an individual do something which was almost suicidal; Captain Brown repeatedly opposed these hair-brained schemes.
“I can quote three separate examples: During the six months I was at TLC, Lt.Col. Murray repeatedly tried to get us to go to the Fishhook area, where even U.S. troops with gunships would not go. On one occasion, Lieutenant Colonel Murray took me to the Fishhook area and dropped me off with 100 CIDG in an area which was known to be a VC cache and supply area for the entire 5th NVA Division. Murray sent us, with 100 CIDG and one interpreter, into this area to look for a division. Another time he sent me to a firebase with two other Americans and three Vietnamese to look for a battalion. It was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission, yet we had no artillery or air support on call. I interpreted this to be a death mission. If we had been killed in making contact I am sure Lieutenant ColonelMurray would have thought only about the body count he got out of it. On one other occasion, Lieutenant Colonel Murray sent me, with only 120 CIDG, into a known VC-infested area where there had been no American units operating for two weeks because of the activity there. He picked me up by vehicle after that operation and dropped me off in another area, approximately 15 kilometers from our camp, to recon back to the A-Team. I was going through the First Division Tactical Area Of Responsibility (TAOR). Murray failed to notify anyone of my presence there. I was spotted by a FAC that was flying in the area. By chance he happened to call my A-Team and ask if we had anybody in the area. I happened to be monitoring on the radio and overheard him. The FAC was in the process of calling in 175mm artillery on us from Quan Loy.
“These are only a few of the examples of the mistakes Lieutenant Colonel Murray made while he was in command of B-33,” Lyons wrote. “In my personal opinion, which is only the opinion of a Sergeant Major, Lieutenant Colonel Murray is not Special Forces material. He is not a competent individual capable of commanding in such an operation as we had in Vietnam.”
Over a couple of beers in 1999, when I asked Lyons why he didn’t get along with Murray, he meditated a bit and said:
“Because I think Murray was trying to make a name for himself a
t everybody else’s expense . . . I don’t know if you were still there or you had already been medevaced when he sent me and two other individuals out to one firebase west of camp. I don’t know where it was but we had to leave at midnight and he gave us a time that we were to arrive on station and then we had to RON there that night. And we didn’t go. We went and looked and there was nothing there and we backed off . . . I wasn’t remaining there because I thought the guy was crazy,” Lyons said.
I asked Lyons, “Why did he want you to do it?”
Lyons replied, “I don’t know. I never did know what he wanted me to do. He gave me grid coordinates that were supposedly the location of an enemy base camp and we were supposed to go and verify that. I had said, ‘I’ll send somebody out’ and he said, ‘No, I want you to personally go.’ I had made him mad about a month before. We had gone on a mission and ran out of water and couldn’t find any—they didn’t bring us any. I made the decision to walk out back to the B detachment and he was going to have me court martialed for this. He read me my rights and everything.
“Since we didn’t have water I decided to come in. He said he had Intel that it was being occupied by the VC. That is when I got sprayed with Agent Orange. They sprayed all over us.”
I asked, “Any after effects?”
He chuckled, “Well, prostate cancer and bladder cancer . . . both at the same time. I beat them both though. It’s been nearly two years and I’m supposedly cancer free. The VA declared me 100% disabled. I laugh all the way to the bank every month.” (Command Sergeant Major Lyons died in 2008.)
I could expect no assistance in dealing with this apparent murder and unraveling the mystery from the B-Team for obvious reasons. It was pointless to go to the USAID Province advisor, who was located in Hon Quan, as I was told he was one of Murray’s West Point classmates. After a couple of weeks, I was able to get to Saigon accompanied by my team medic, Robert Bernard, where I looked up my CIA contact, briefed him on the situation and asked for his advice. “Look, Brown, this kind of shit happens all the time over here. In any case, there’s nothing I can do about it since we do not have a CIA presence up where you are located. Sorry about that.” So, that was where the case rested until I could find some excuse to get up to a higher headquarters to file a formal complaint.
CAPTAIN LONG TRIES TO GET ME WHACKED . . .
A couple of weeks later, on 7 May 1969, I got my trip to higher headquarters, though not in the manner I expected or chose. The monsoon season was beginning and the day opened overcast with a light, persistent drizzle. About1400hrs, I was in the team house when I got a call on the radio from my counterpart, the omnipresent Dai Uy Long. “Dai Uy, you come down to end of runway . . . see rockets.”
We had a battalion of the 1st Division that had been located in a temporary base about 200 yards to the west of TLC, which was moving out by C-130’s using our airstrip. Mr. Charles took exception to this and decided incoming and outgoing planes were targets too juicy to pass up. Every day, he was dropping 82mm mortar rounds on and around the airstrip, inflicting one or two casualties. It got so annoying that every time a plane landed or took off, we had to have fast movers overhead to keep the bad guys’ heads down. I decided to humor the little shit and hopped in my jeep to go down and see his blasted rockets. Sure enough, in front of the grinning Captain Long and his little band of sycophants, there were two 107mm rockets on crossed bamboo stalks pointing straight down the runway. Then Long said, “Dai Uy, go up to camp, get camera . . . take pictures.” “OK, you little shit,” I thought, “all in the interest of good counterpart relations.”
I wheeled into camp, went into my hooch for my Cannon SLR camera, and then into the team house when the first round landed inside our perimeter. . . . More followed . . . 82mm rounds and 107mm rockets . . . we started taking casualties with the first round . . . while in the team house we were in touch with our CIDG company that had just left a couple of hours earlier on an operation. Sonny Elrod, my commo sergeant, told us they could hear the rounds flying overhead. We looked at the 1:50,000 topographical map and drew an azimuth from our camp to our unit in the field and off the map; we then identified all open areas 100 yards on each side of the azimuth as possible bad guy firing positions out to the maximum range of 82mm mortars which is about 3,200 meters. We had two 105 howitzers, manned by South Vietnamese artillerymen, who were already firing, who knows at what. I will give them credit, however, as they were loading and firing in their gun pits while all of the rest of us kept out of harm’s way in our bunkers.
We had the eight-digit coordinates of suspected enemy firing positions, but how to get them to the ARVN artillery? We had no direct commo with them and it wouldn’t have mattered anyhow since we had at that particular time no interpreters inside the perimeter, nor did any of my team speak Vietnamese. There was only one way to get the info to the arty. . . . Someone would have to run the info over. Though the ARVN could not speak English, they could read and understand map coordinates, and that was where they were to fire. “Who wants to volunteer to run these coordinates over to the artillery?” I asked. The silence was deafening except for the rounds continuing to fall in the camp perimeter raining death and destruction.
“No volunteers? Well, gentlemen, I’ll do it myself.” And with that, I burst out the door, rockets and mortar rounds be damned, and set a new record for a 50-yard dash as I legged it over to the ARVN firing pits and gave them the coordinates. They nodded their heads enthusiastically, cranked in the necessary changes to adjust elevation and windage on the coordinates I provided, and started firing away. I waited while they fired a couple of rounds, looked around—for what I don’t know—and started dashing back to the team house the way I came. About 25 yards later I suddenly found myself on the ground. . . I was unconscious . . . don’t know how long . . . got hit right next to the camp dispensary. . . . I felt for all my limbs. . . they were all there. . . so were my cojones, and I could see. I groped my way along the side of the dispensary and staggered into the charnel house that the dispensary had become. . . the dead, the dying, the wounded. . . . blood streaming from a number of holes, most noticeably from my face.
Sfc. Robert Bernard, nicknamed “Bac si,” or Vietnamese for medic, looked at me, checked me for sucking chest wounds, slapped pressure bandages on the most bloody of the 14 places I had been hit, and told me, “You’ve got no problem. . . . get out of here.” I stepped over a withered mama-san who had half her brains exposed, and sprinted another 20 yards to the team house as the shit still continued to impact. We all figured this was a softening up process for a full-scale ground assault on the camp as soon as it got dark. I turned command of the camp over to my rock-like dependable Team Sergeant, Jim Lyons. Trying to play hero, or as Lyons said, “stupid!” once in the day was enough. Shock took me flat out of the fight.
I FINALLY GET TO HIGHER HEADQUARTERS . . .
The next few hours were a blur . . . in and out of consciousness . . . helped into a medevac chopper. . . . Off-loaded into some sort of forward-based medical facility where they stabilized you so you would, hopefully, live until they got you to a major field hospital. I blurred my way onto the gur-ney and into surgery about 0200hrs . . . freezing . . . I swear they put ice water in with the intravenous medication . . . woke up about 0700 or 0800hrs . . . looked around and saw two of my team members sitting by my bedside. I had sent them to Bien Hoa to trade the Air Force a bunch of captured AK’s for cases of steaks and buckets of ice cream, and they had followed the attack by monitoring the radio traffic between Tong Le Chon and SF headquarters in Nha Trang. There was no ground attack; why we never found out.
My head cleared and I told them, “I want to get out of here, now!” Whether I muttered or screamed, I have no recollection. “You can’t do that,” Sonny Elrod objected. You just came out of surgery. That’s insane.” But white-hot rage had returned and I was not to be denied. “Listen, go get me a uniform and boots and help me out of this shroud,” I demanded. Reluctantly they took
off and returned with an out-of-the-box, brand new set of jungle fatigues and a pair of boots. Obviously, no hospital staff were around and we sneaky-peted out of the hospital. “Take me to Company C Team Headquarters,” I directed them. Next thing I remember I was standing in front of the A-Team commander.
I don’t recollect what he said, if anything, just that I was yelling how Captain Long was a VC; that he tried to get my team and me killed. Lt. Col. James Lillard, as I recollect, was calm and listened until I ran out of volume. I knew he knew what had happened. And I must have been a sight coming out of the hospital bed four or five hours after surgery, looking like the Bride of Chucky or a Frankenstein without the plugs in my neck . . . a dozen plus sutures holding together the wounds on my face and mouth. In any event, I stalked out, struggled into the jeep and rode back to the hospital where I had them drop me off at what I thought was the hospital entrance. Wrong again. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t have my team members take me back inside because I didn’t want them to get in trouble. I was lost. My medication was wearing off and, damn it, I started to cry. That I remember. How I got back to my bed is another mystery, as are any comments about my actions from the hospital staff.
The next day, one of the surgeons told me they were going to ship my sorry ass to Japan to a convalescent hospital. “Wait a minute,” I said, “you’ve got me all patched up. I don’t want to go to Japan. I want to go back to my camp.” After a “discussion” we compromised and he agreed to send me to the convalescent hospital at Cam Ranh Bay for two weeks. Why they didn’t send me there in the first place . . . another mystery. While awaiting transfer, I reflected on the whole sorry incident and puzzled as to why I had failed to insist on seeing the body of the executed VC. And I haven’t figured that one out either. Just plain dumb.
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 10
