by Bing West
But the admiral did, and while still in his helicopter he dictated a letter to his aide to be sent to Mrs. McGowan. It was a warm note, expressing the attitude of a father, signed by a four-star admiral with a command of almost a million men. The sergeant himself had not written home in three months, and when the admiral’s letter arrived in a stark, official envelope, Mrs. McGowan feared the worst. She could not bring herself to read it. She called her sister, who lived nearby, and asked her to come over.
“Here,” she said, her hands trembling, “you open it. Something’s happened to Vinnie. I just know it.”
When her sister read her the letter, they both wept in relief and joy.
Soon afterward McGowan received a blistering note from his father for the anxiety he had caused his mother by not finding the time to write, when Admiral Sharp could.
The Marine generals who visited Binh Nghia were, of course, interested in the nature of the ground combat. Under severe criticism from the Army for wasting manpower in Combined Action Platoons, the Marine command wished to clearly demonstrate the wisdom of combined units. This they were never to do to their own satisfaction, let alone that of the U.S. Army. The combined units seemed too fragile, the American role too temporary, other demands for U.S. manpower too powerful.
Almost all the generals, whether American or Vietnamese, asked the question: What would you do if attacked by a battalion? To McGowan the question was foolish, since anyone surrounded during attack had no option but to fight back. He felt depressed by the question because it indicated there was no history of the fort, that no one knew the combined unit had twice fought a battalion, once failing and once driving their would-be attackers away. And he felt angered because the question implied that combined units working in villages were too vulnerable to be undertaken on a large scale. To McGowan this attitude showed that some of his senior commanders did not understand the nature of the war. There were not enough enemy battalions to be attacking the fort continuously. The Americans who lived in Binh Nghia had grown to understand that the Viet Cong could triumph only if the threat of such an attack cowed the small unit into leaving. The Americans at Fort Page were determined never to leave because of Viet Cong pressure. Partly this was a matter of personal pride, and partly it was a feeling of obligation to the PFs and to the villagers. But McGowan and his men could only vaguely explain to generals and ambassadors what they were doing or why they were proud of it.
The U.S. Army commanders who visited Binh Nghia showed marked reserve in listening to the briefings McGowan and Suong would deliver. They rarely asked a hard or critical question. Regardless of what they believed wrong with allowing Americans to live and work with the Vietnamese, they respected the efforts of the PFs and Marines in Binh Nghia and, with the innate courtesy of the military, would not think of criticizing a sergeant’s tactics in order to show disagreement with a general’s strategy. In fact, quite the opposite occurred.
During a September visit by General Harold K. Johnson, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, McGowan found himself being drawn out on a variety of subjects, ranging from his educational background (high school; no college) to his marital plans (none) to his career plans (none). Before leaving, Johnson offered him a commission as an officer in the United States Army. The sergeant thanked the general and declined the offer. It was not being an officer as opposed to an enlisted man that made him shun a military career. It was not the Army versus the Marines. He did not know what he wanted to do, but he wanted to keep on moving. When he left the village, he would leave military service altogether.
One visitor who did not fall into the easy briefing pattern was General Creighton Abrams. McGowan considered his visit a disaster. The general hopped out of his helicopter, strode into the fort, sat down in front of the briefing map, lit a cigar and fixed McGowan with a steady stare. With easy confidence, the sergeant commenced his routine briefing, describing the physical layout of the village, the nature of the enemy, the sort of contacts encountered. There were several points in the briefing where McGowan had learned to pause, inviting an obvious question from his visitors, one which allowed him to describe a pat anecdote praising either the PFs, the villagers or the Marines. McGowan would repeat this technique until he had said a good word for everyone and used up the fifteen minutes which marked the extent of most VIP visits.
With Abrams, the technique failed, and McGowan’s smugness turned to fear. At each pause in the briefing, Abrams said nothing but stared at McGowan intently. The sergeant felt himself growing nervous, stumbling over points and stuttering over words. The briefing ended on a lame note in less than eight minutes. Abrams got up, turned and strode back to his helicopter, having no more time to waste with a nervous, cocky, know-nothing sergeant. McGowan afterward was better able to sympathize with Suong, who stammered and stumbled when called upon to brief Vietnamese VIPs.
30
On August 13 the combined unit again arbitrarily extended its patrol boundaries to take care of what they considered to be a village responsibility. That afternoon Suong had asked McGowan to look after things for the evening; he, Trao, Lee and most of the other village officials were going to a big card game in Nuoc Man—a kilometer south from Binh Nghia across the paddies. Nuoc Man was a twisted congestion of ramshackle wooden, thatch and tin huts flung up on either side of Highway One. Stocked by the Koreans, it was a typical boomtown which catered to the American units. Business was brisk and boondock prices high: cold Cokes were 75 cents, bundles of laundry $1.50, girls $3. The Marines from Fort Page were charged the same prices as were the line units, an equality which they deeply resented, and out of hurt pride they shunned dealings with the town. Not by accident, the squatter town had sprung up at the bottom of a hill holding a U.S. battalion, and conditions within its dusty, claptrap borders were deemed so safe that soldiers on liberty were not allowed to carry rifles. MPs sauntered from bar-girl shack to bar-girl shack during the day to keep the peace. Although the town had been receiving desultory night sniper fire for a week, no one had paid much attention. Things were so comfortable many store owners had stopped giving a cut of their earnings to the VC.
That night McGowan had sent out his usual three patrols and, finding it too muggy indoors, had climbed on the roof of the machine-gun bunker to sleep. It was near midnight and he had just dozed off when Nuoc Man exploded.
The first fusillade came full and sharp in steady volume. Its lack of raggedness or swelling crescendo told McGowan a surprise attack had been pulled on the little PF outpost at the town. Next a few rounds smacked into the sandbags beneath him, and he ducked inside the bunker as Marines and PFs lurched from their sleeping quarters, expecting attack. The sentries strained to spot movement on the flat paddy lands to their west.
“It’s just stray incoming,” the radio sentry said. “They must be attacking the ville itself. Man, look at that.”
The horizon above Nuoc Man was dancing with fire as from all directions the Viet Cong lit and hurled kerosene-soaked rags into the timber town. Homemade gasoline bombs were bursting successively, their cascades of sparks and darts of flame mixing in the blackness with the trails of fire left by the streaming rags.
“Monitor battalion,” McGowan said, referring to the radio channel for the Army unit on the hill behind Nuoc Man.
“No traffic, Sarge,” the radio operator reported.
“What the hell! Try company.”
An infantry company sat on another hill east of the town, with one platoon outposting PF Hill. Still picking up no traffic, the sergeant broke radio silence and asked the company what was going on. Company replied that they didn’t know but were trying to find out.
Out of patience, McGowan grabbed the handset and yelled, “Don’t find out. Send people in there—those PFs need help.”
“Wait—out,” came the reply.
McGowan waited ten minutes while battalion and company talked undecidedly back and forth—then he broke in again.
“Captain,” he said, “if yo
u’re not going to do anything, I’ll take some men in. Those are my people in there. They need help—now.”
“Get off our net, Lima Six,” came the reply. “You have the wrong freq. That fight is outside your AO. I don’t have time to gab with you. Out.”
McGowan changed channels to the PF frequency and called the district headquarters at Binh Son, two miles down the road from Nuoc Man. He spoke to Volentine.
“Sir, Trao and Suong and half the honchos of Binh Nghia are in Nuoc Man. If they’re lost, it’s all over. Someone has to do something.”
“How many men do you have?”
“Enough.”
There were in the fort at that moment six Americans and eight PFs.
“Mac, we’ve lost touch with Nuoc Man,” Volentine said. “You go ahead and act on your best judgment. I’ll back you up.”
Most of the Marines were clamoring to go in. There was a firefight, and most of them liked to shoot. It wasn’t a time for stealth and movement; it was a time for firepower and rifle marksmanship. McGowan selected four Marines and two PFs. He dared not take more men lest one of the unit’s own patrols in Binh Nghia run into trouble and need a reaction force from the fort.
He radioed to the Army platoon on PF Hill.
“We’re coming west, around your hill in two minutes. Don’t shoot us. Out.”
Each man was carrying the combination weapon of the M-16 and grenade launcher, fifteen to twenty magazines, and four to eight grenades. They were ready to move as soon as McGowan put down the phone. The seven dogtrotted the quarter-mile down the road past PF Hill, talking loudly so they wouldn’t be shot. Still at a lope, they cut across the paddy dikes until they neared Highway One.
Everyone at the fort had agreed that the Viet Cong would set ambushes astride the road north and south of the town. So rather than run that gauntlet, the seven stopped short of the road, slid off the dikes and waded through the paddies parallel to the road until they were abreast of the center of the town. There they turned in, cut through a few backyards and stopped in the shadows at the edge of the main street.
The scene before them was one of chaos and terror. Many of the shacks which lined the road were blazing and the fire bathed the street in weird, flickering light. The alleyways and the walls of the buildings seemed to catch and echo the din of the screams and cries of people fleeing amidst the crash of timber, the furious crackling of the flames and the pop-pop-pop of small-arms ammunition cooking off. The families of the prostitutes, barkeepers and store owners were pouring past the seven riflemen, who could see the Viet Cong off to their left about a hundred yards down the road pitching torches and darting in and out of shacks.
At first the people kept running right by McGowan’s men, as though they didn’t—couldn’t—exist. Then an old lady stopped and pointed back down the street toward the Viet Cong and yelled something at them, the tone of which was: “Don’t just stand there gawking, do something!” Almost instantly the riflemen were surrounded by people, all pointing toward the Viet Cong and shouting, some pushing at the Marines, urging them into battle against the men who were burning their homes and businesses. Still McGowan hesitated, seeking assurance that he would not be trapped from the rear, finding it when Ho Chi, the Binh Nghia schoolteacher, elbowed his way through the crowd to say that all the Viet Cong were at the southern end of town.
McGowan’s men stepped out into the glare and stood abreast looking down the street. The crowd which had been around them a minute earlier was gone, having ducked into the alleys to avoid what they knew was coming. Intent on their torch work, the Viet Cong never looked back, probably under the reasonable assumption that they would not be attacked without warning from the center of the burning town.
The seven riflemen fired together, first with the grenade launchers, then with their rifles. The first volley was all theirs and they made the most of the surprise, firing as fast as they could change magazines. McGowan’s men had the initiative and they went in, moving by bounds to cover one another and firing their rifles in long bursts. They drew abreast of the cement house of Mr. Bun, a contractor working for the Army and, seeing two five-gallon gasoline cans sitting on the front porch, promptly broke into a run before the explosions went off. With the shacks blazing and crumbling on both sides of the road, the heat seared their faces and they ran faster, closing on the enemy.
The Viet Cong had a huge edge in numbers, but the flames kept them from spreading out and those who could shoot, being closest to the seven riflemen, were outmatched in firepower. Their return fire was scattered and ill-coordinated since their leader had to cope with uncertainty. Was he fighting just seven men, or was the rest of the American battalion drawing near, perhaps encircling him?
The Viet Cong pulled off, their main body plunging into the brush south of town while two stayed to hold back the attackers. But McGowan’s men were rolling with the momentum of battle, past an enemy soldier sprawled in the street, past yet another, and the two rear guards loosed but a few desultory bursts before the seven riflemen were on them, too, passing them, outflanking them, killing them and running on, plunging into the bush, and there in front of them, crossing a twisted railroad track, went the Viet Cong company. McGowan had the fleeting impression that he was looking at more than fifty in one bunch, but he had no time to count or shoot as the enemy stopped and turned, like a bear harried by a pack of small hounds, and McGowan and his men were falling flat with the bullets whipping around them. The seven of them lay there, panting for breath, knowing they were safe as long as they didn’t raise their heads high, knowing too that the enemy were scampering safely away, scattering bullets behind them like fistfuls of sand.
When the firing sputtered out, they turned around and walked to the tiny PF outpost at the edge of the town. They weren’t about to enter a dark ravine in pursuit of an enemy company, and without a radio they had no means of calling an artillery mission. Once the enemy were out of the town and away from the PF fort, McGowan’s men had no more interest in them.
Their concern was for their friends in the fort. The Viet Cong had surprised the PFs, most of whose leaders were drinking and playing high-stake poker at the bimonthly gathering. The enemy had surged through the wire and carried the fight into the bunkers. Mr. Lee, the census grievance taker, was killed by the blast from a hand grenade, his body shielding Trao, who was crouched beside him, and saving his life. Two PFs were killed and four wounded. The others had formed and held a ragged perimeter but had been unable to help the villagers, twelve of whom were killed.
McGowan found the Nuoc Man PF leader in critical condition, his buttocks ripped off. With his shirt the sergeant bound the massive wound, then grabbed the PF radio and called Binh Son. Captain Volentine in turn wasted no time calling the Army, and soon a platoon came trotting down the road to help.
The lieutenant in charge set about in a brusque manner to organize a defense when McGowan brought him up short by saying: “I don’t need you—now—Lieutenant; I need a medevac for this man. Where is it?”
The lieutenant took one look at the PF leader and hastily called his battalion.
The medevac was refused because the area was called “insecure.” So McGowan called Fort Page and Bac Si Khoi ran the full mile, bringing a bottle of intravenous fluid which he injected into the PF, but his condition did not improve. Khoi recommended they carry him to Fort Page, where he could care for him better. So those who had come from Binh Nghia returned that way.
Passing through the smoldering village, McGowan saw a girl who sold Cokes and other things to the soldiers standing outside her untouched hut. Those shacks on both sides of hers lay in ashes. In response to McGowan’s question, she said she had to make a living and stay alive, so she just paid her taxes to the VC regularly.
When the portaging party arrived at Fort Page, Khoi used two more bottles of fluid to keep the PF leader alive. At dawn a helicopter came in and lifted him out.
By then McGowan was in serious trouble. His temper rubb
ed raw by the night’s events, his messages to battalion from Fort Page in the early morning hours had been framed in ill-concealed disgust. The helicopter had not been dispatched during the night because Binh Nghia was not considered secure either—and because the wounded man was not an American.
The next morning the battalion commander went to the division commander and requested McGowan’s immediate relief for insubordination and refusal to obey orders, to wit: entering Nuoc Man after permission to do so had been denied. The division commander listened to the story, then blasted the colonel for his failure to act. The general said McGowan had been right and he wrong.
The battalion commander left Task Force headquarters and drove to Binh Nghia, bringing with him a case of cold beer. Taking McGowan aside, he apologized for his inaction the previous night. He thanked the sergeant “for pulling a slight victory out of what otherwise would have been defeat.”
Still peeved by the situation, McGowan asked why the colonel hadn’t acted. The officer replied he didn’t really know—the country and the people seemed strange and he wasn’t sure what his men could do, or would know how to do, in a situation like that. That answer McGowan could understand from his own days in an infantry battalion.
The seven riflemen from Fort Page had gone into Nuoc Man for Trao and Suong. They had had no use for the town or its people, who cheated and overcharged them. The town rebuilt quickly and was soon back to its normal corrupt practices. But afterward the PFs and Marines from Fort Page could not buy a Coke or a beer.
