Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  As the jets pulled away and the sun set, an angry red disk behind the roiling dark smoke clouds, a stray piece of hot metal whirred into Company B. It hit Doc Rogers right on the shoulder. The steady African American medic smiled broadly, thinking he’d gotten his “million dollar wound” and with it, hopefully, a ticket home to North Babylon, New York. He was the last American in Company B medically evacuated from the great fight on May 9.49

  FOR THE COST of eight killed and thirty-six wounded, plus three M113s trashed, 2-47th Infantry set its part of the cordon. When they swept the blackened wreckage of Xom Ong Loi after daylight on May 10, the battalion claimed 202 VC dead. But only 16 VC bodies turned up. The 2-47th picked up one confused, unarmed VC prisoner. Where did the rest of the Phu Loi II Battalion go? Who knew?

  Far more disturbing, U.S. riflemen found thirty-six South Vietnamese marine family members, all dead in their wrecked homes. It wasn’t clear who got them—vengeful VC with AKs, American artillery and air, or both. A few dozen more dazed, shell-shocked Vietnamese civilians, some injured, came out on Route 232. The Americans sent them east, out of the beaten zone.50

  After a day of unopposed searches and reorganization, to include taking aboard a lot of ammunition to replace the thousands of rounds so liberally expended on May 9, Captain Craig received new orders. At first light on May 11, Company B shifted to control of 3-39th Infantry for unfinished business more to the west on Route 232, past the Y-bridge. That big highway span crossed the canal, and at the outset of Mini-Tet, a VC assault team had blown a hole in the bridge deck. Most of two VC battalions (5th Nha Be and 506th) tried to take the big edifice, but couldn’t hold it. They pulled back and remained hunkered down in Xom Cau Mat, pretty much the same kind of place as the pulverized Xom Ong Loi. The leg infantry of 3-39th had the place surrounded but needed some oomph to finish the job. Company C of 2-47th was too beat up. So Company B, a bit less bloodied and with more operational M113s, got the job.51

  Craig ordered his men into action. They moved mounted to the big Y-bridge, an incongruously modern sight, seemingly transplanted intact from the Los Angeles freeway. Once west of the overpass, the riflemen dismounted, Chuck and Tom Hagel among them. Again, Route 232 stretched due west, devoid of movement. Left of the Americans, to the south, ran storefronts and houses, the now familiar mix of old French two-story buildings and newer single-floor structures. To the right, north, squatted another row of sheds and huts, with the canal bank just behind them. Different day, same story.

  The men of 5-60th Mech and some doughty South Vietnamese national police—a bolder section of White Mice than usually seen—held the west. The scheme called for 3-39th to push up from the south, with a 6-31st rifle company attached to block the north exits. Craig’s Company B drew the mission of forcing a defended dead-end street to the east.52 If not taken, the remnants of both VC battalions would probably escape that way. It fell to Captain Craig and his men, including Chuck and Tom Hagel, to prevent that.

  About 2 p.m., the company started south on the dead-end street. Craig, who’d been wounded twice in his previous service in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, didn’t like the look of things. His wife served in country as an army officer, too, a nurse at 3rd Field Hospital at Tan Son Nhut. Craig wanted to visit her, but not on a stretcher.53

  The Americans did not mess around. They knew the VC were there and waiting. It sure would have been smart to level the street with bombs, but the Saigon city fathers had again prevailed, and that wasn’t yet permitted on May 11. Every day required a renegotiation between the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. So this would be done the hard way.

  Chuck Hagel noted that in these “urban areas where the VC had gotten in” the opposition “had worked and changed their tactics.” Inside the city, the enemy hadn’t had time to set up booby traps or bury mines. So the guerrillas depended on direct fire, the old school.54 In Xom Cau Mat, Mr. Charles sought belt-to-belt contact, at least long enough so that the unengaged portion of the VC unit could escape and evade.

  The two lead tracks, almost abreast, went first, with no point team in front of them. Behind the hulking M113s walked the riflemen, bent slightly forward, stepping methodically from doorway to doorway. The lead .50 caliber gunners “reconned by fire,” which is to say that they opened up on anything that didn’t look right. Not much looked right. The big U.S. machine guns chugged away.

  The VC replied right away. In the two-lane (if that) side street, the cracks and snaps and snorting machine guns echoed and reechoed. One .50-caliber round hit a 55-gallon drum full of gasoline and it blew, bright and yellow. The shower of hot debris started a junked Renault car afire. The lead track passed right through the flames.

  Riflemen aimed at fleeting VC on the rooftops. Some guys later alleged they saw khaki uniformed hostiles, but if so, not for long. Americans fired at muzzle flashes, dust puffs, and any movement, known or guessed. As Tom Hagel later explained: “You had to watch every window, and every door, and if you saw something, shoot.”55 American riflemen stayed low. Men passed ammunition from the stopped tracks. The Company B soldiers ran through a lot of bullets that afternoon.

  About ten minutes into the firefight, a guerrilla nailed Captain Jim Craig, drilling a hole through his right lung, and thereby causing the dreaded sucking chest wound. Every breath bubbled up bloody froth on the company commander’s chest. If not treated soon, the buildup of blood in his chest cavity would suffocate the officer. With Doc Rogers gone, another medic took over. A few men carried Craig back to Route 320. Within a half hour, a medevac chopper took him and a few other wounded away.56 They all survived, and Craig saw his wife, too. At least that worked out okay.

  The company executive officer, Lieutenant Skip Johnson, took charge. He never got too excited. Even the raucous fusillade all around him didn’t rattle the young officer. Coolly sizing up the situation, Johnson halted the advance and told the lead APCs to back off about twenty yards. With fourteen more wounded, Johnson decided it was time to let the artillery, helicopters, and jet fighters go to work.

  They did.57

  For the rest of the afternoon, helicopters and fighter-bombers traded runs over the trapped foe. Once night fell, U.S. Army artillery took over. Xom Cau Mat burned, the red glow of flames masked by the endless, stinking smoke. That sick-sweet odor of roasting flesh sullied the night breeze every time another clutch of 105mm howitzer shells impacted.58 Maybe this is what Sergeant Charles Dean Hagel saw and smelt from his tail turret over Japan in that final terrible summer of 1945. If so, no wonder he never wanted to experience it again.

  At daybreak on May 12, Company B sent a platoon south to check out a smashed-up set of houses south and east of the dead-end street. A firefight developed. Again the Americans resorted to supporting arms. The artillery settled things.

  Unfortunately, 3-39th troops under fire also brought in artillery. One round fell well out of the predicted sheaf, blowing right on the dead-end street where Lieutenant Johnson was assembling his men to sweep south. Specialist 4 Antony P. Palumbo and PFC Philip M. Wooten both fell, as did two others. Palumbo died, but Wooten hung on long enough to see his brother, a soldier also serving in country, although not in 2-47th. Lieutenant Johnson got on the radio and told 3-39th’s artillery observers to cease fire.

  Eager to finish off the VC, and no doubt feeling the usual heat from Ewell at division, the 3-39th lieutenant colonel overruled Johnson. The senior commander demanded a repeat of the artillery fire mission. It was too bad about the stray projectile, but the 3-39th commander insisted. When his artillery forward observer officer refused, the lieutenant colonel fired him. Not that it mattered—during all the confusion, the VC stopped shooting.59 As usual, Charlie found a way out.

  THE FIGHTING ON May 12 ended Mini-Tet, although follow-on sweeps continued for a week. The 9th Infantry Division counted 39 Americans killed in action and 265 wounded in action, a battalion’s field strength lost. In return, the division chalked up 976 NVA/VC killed, 1
0 prisoners taken, and 253 civilians detained. In the Ewell calculus, the division achieved a 25 to 1 ratio of dead enemy to dead Americans. The general saw it and found it good, and he publicly praised the battle in south Saigon as “one of the biggest allied victories of the war.” 60

  Up at MACV, General Westmoreland agreed. Almost at the end of his fifty-four long months in country, the general found time to announce yet one more sterling success. Mini-Tet had been repulsed, “more nuisance than threat,” with 40,000 more North Vietnamese killed.61 That count pretty much matched the final toll assessed for the countrywide Tet Offensive back in January and February. Few bought it.

  For the umpteenth time, MACV’s numbers did not add up. Most of Mini-Tet happened in Saigon. Ewell, aggressive as hell and not averse to choosing the higher-end figures when filling in the ledger on dead foes, only accounted for one-fortieth of MACV’s total estimate of enemy fatalities. While there had been sharp encounters in the U.S. marine area near the Laos border and in Central Highlands as well, “the enemy accomplished nothing more in the north than mortar and rocket attacks,” in Westmoreland’s words.62 Even allowing for a coincident major operation by the 101st Airborne Division under way up north in the forbidding A Shau Valley, where and how did all those other tens of thousands of North Vietnamese die?

  The ones killed in Saigon also raised questions. The 9th Infantry Division’s battalions fought hard in the streets near the Y-bridge. In both Xom Ong Doi and Xom Cau Mat, combat proceeded at short range inside some of the tighter cordons achieved in the war. Post-action searches and tabulations were extensive. Yet the Americans only recovered 238 enemy rifles and pistols and forty-two mortars, RPG launchers, and machine guns. Moreover, the Phu Loi II Battalion, 5th Nha Be Battalion, and 506th Battalion all somehow survived the battle intact, passing like ghosts right through the formidable American encirclements.63 Skeptical journalists in Saigon and anti- war voices in America took note.

  Customary rationalizations ensued. Perhaps a great many weapons vanished in the general devastation, certainly possible given the 23,450 rounds of artillery used, not to mention the high volume of helicopter rockets, aerial bombs, and napalm pumped into the embattled pockets of resistance.64 U.S. intelligence analysts also observed that the NVA/VC had an excellent battlefield recovery program, ruthlessly policing up key gear. Maybe so. It sure seemed to be a convenient corollary to the standard shibboleth about Charlie dragging off his side’s bodies with an efficiency that would be the envy of any U.S. graves registration outfit. Or maybe less than half of the hostile dead carried arms. That would be quite a hazardous way to go to war, but it was possible.

  Such dubious accounting led invariably to other suspicions. South Vietnamese authorities and U.S. embassy personnel estimated the number of civilian casualties in south Saigon as anywhere from three hundred to three thousand, depending on who you asked. The 9th Infantry Division’s medical teams treated “many thousands” of civilians after the Saigon fighting, and MACV estimated that a quarter million residents of the city lost their dwellings, with 150,000 homes utterly destroyed. As a final gesture, designed to curb disease, the 9th Infantry Division sprayed insect-killing DDT (already known to have distressing side effects) all over what American officers termed “the entire disaster area.”65 Amen to that.

  When the fierce engagements happened in south Saigon, conveniently close to their downtown offices, American television, radio, and print journalists swarmed to almost every scene of the deadly action. In testimony to the hazards, six reporters perished trying to chronicle Mini-Tet. But they and their colleagues covered the story.66 The prevailing themes were destruction and death.

  Those kind of bleak thoughts occurred to at least one senior officer in country, too. Returning by air to his Tan Son Nhut headquarters after a meeting at II Field Force headquarters at Long Binh Post, deputy MACV commander General Creighton Abrams looked down past the Huey’s skid. In June, Abrams would take command from Westmoreland. He had a lot on his mind. Abrams said later:

  As I rode back in my helicopter after hearing how well we were doing, smoke was billowing up in Saigon, flames shooting up in the air. I have estimated that we can defend Saigon seven more times, and then we’re going to be faced with the embarrassment that there’s no city left. And I don’t know how we’re going to explain these nine successful defenses of Saigon, but no goddamn city.67

  The week of Mini-Tet saw more Americans killed than any other during the entire Vietnam War.68 To what end? For the remaining true believers, men like Ewell and Westmoreland, all that mattered was the scoreboard. But back home, with peace talks beginning and Lyndon Johnson neutered, it all looked like good money after bad, precious American blood down a rat hole. How many more lives, how many more Chuck or Tom Hagels, was this lost war worth?

  CHAPTER 8

  The River Blindness

  Airmobility, dig it, you weren’t going anywhere. It made you feel safe. It made you feel Omni, but it was only a stunt, technology.

  MICHAEL HERR, Dispatches1

  Nobody rioted when Bobby Kennedy was shot. No troops in 2-47th Infantry refused to go out on patrol. A gunman from the anxious present, the Cold War, killed John F. Kennedy. A shooter from the sordid past, the American Civil War, murdered Martin Luther King Jr. And now a face from the future, the shape of U.S. wars to come in the Middle East, cut down RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968. “It kind of broke everyone’s spirit,” Chuck Hagel remembered.2

  But he and the rest just kept going.

  It was almost like they were used to it, hardened to it, rendered numb at the rate of loss on both sides of the Pacific. The USS Pueblo, Tet, Khe Sanh, Hue; King’s killing, the anguished uprisings that burned American cities, Mini-Tet in Saigon, and now RFK’s assassination—it just ran on and on, a torrent of pain that bore them all relentlessly downstream, day after day, night after night. Robert Kennedy’s death rendered one more tick mark on the long list of things going to hell in 1968 America, one more body to count. And as any rifleman in country knew, there were always more bodies to count.

  After Mini-Tet, the VC did what they did best. They seeped into their Mekong Delta haunts, vanishing into midair like tendrils of smoke. Enemy advances, we retreat.

  Spurred by Major General Julian J. Ewell, the 9th Infantry Division pursued. It sounded decisive to talk of chasing the slippery Cong, but they defied following. The land itself—thick with undergrowth, swollen with shallow mud-choked waterways, and bereft of decent highways—conspired against the weary Americans. The weather went foul, the wet monsoon blowing ashore weeks late but full of fury. Rice paddies filled, the forest floors went sloppy, and the dirt roads turned to strips of mud. For M113s in 2-47th, most of the region became “no go” terrain.3 The tracks had to stay on the better roads. And Charlie knew exactly where those ran. He didn’t go there.

  Ewell did not back off. Driven by his will, 2-47th stayed at it. They took the roadways to dismount points, then pushed off into the lush vegetation, hunting Charlie. The intelligence people thought the VC battalions banged up in Mini-Tet moved to regroup, pulling into the villages and jungles of Long An Province, southwest of Saigon. Some 334,000 Vietnamese lived in Long An. And in the Maoist idiom, in this sea of humanity swam four enemy battalions. The Phu Loi II, 5th Nha Be, and 506th regrouped after Mini-Tet, integrating new arrivals from the north. An NVA outfit fresh off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the 294th, provided a shield for this rebuilding effort.4 When the 9th Infantry Division G-2 guys explained it in their clean office huts, it all made perfect sense, nice and crisp and neat, red dots precisely located in the green forested swaths on the map. Out in the wilds of Long An, finding the VC proved as difficult as ever. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Colonel John Tower’s men of the 2-47th stayed at it.

  Operations in Long An stretched the battalion. Camp Martin Cox at Bear Cat, east of Saigon, remained the 2-47th base, with headquarters, supply, and motor pool f
acilities. But Long An Province lay on the southwestern side of Saigon. To go there, 2-47th units had to traverse the South Vietnamese capital, a distance of fifty miles on dangerous highways and bypasses. And the battalion still had to carry out roadrunner duties to keep routes open, guard the key sites at distant Gia Ray, and keep VC rocket teams away from the division base camp at Bear Cat. The company, sometimes two, sent to Long An had to stay there for weeks. The company left behind had to carry out tasks that before Mini-Tet wore out the entire battalion. It ran the men ragged. And it took a toll.

  On May 27, Company C lost a ten-year veteran staff sergeant and a young corporal, both killed by a mine while trying to secure an engineer road-clearing team.5 The staff people at the division headquarters discounted these kinds of tasks—not good for running up the score. But the two men were just as dead as if they’d been killed storming the beach at Normandy on D-Day in 1944.

  Two days later, on a similar mission near Bear Cat, in the only too familiar jungle on the outskirts of the Binh Son rubber plantation, Chuck Hagel’s squad held a stretch of a small circular platoon perimeter, right on the edge of a small clearing. It was midday, a hot one, with the skies already clouding up for the afternoon monsoon rain. The humidity, as usual, matched the 90°-plus temperature. No VC had been seen for days. Sergeant First Class William Edward Smith moved slowly from soldier to soldier, making sure guys were drinking from their canteens. The rest of the day promised more walking, more looking, and not much finding.

  Hagel recalled: “We’d taken a water break. And they opened up on us as we were sitting there.” The Americans rolled prone and returned fire. As usual, nobody saw Charlie. But the AK bullets kept sizzling overhead. Hagel saw Smith shift position, probably to get the pig gunner going. “And I was just a couple of guys away from him,” Chuck Hagel said. “He was just coming up out of a tree, and a sniper shot him in the head.”6 The Americans drove off the VC. No enemy bodies turned up, just blood drops on the foliage.