“Not since the bonus marchers stormed the Mall had there seemed such a clear and present danger to the Capital. The reason for the jittery saber rattling was the approach of a 40,000-man army of widely assorted U.S. resistance groups, descending on the Capital for a climactic weekend demonstration against the war in Vietnam.”

—Newsweek, October 30, 1967

8

Trouble at the Double Y

October 7-9, 1967

The Double Y appeared to me in a nightmare. I had a premonition that we would return to that place on different terms from those in our first visit. Although I realized we were fortunate to have made the first trip to study the terrain and approach routes along the canal banks, it did nothing to alleviate my dread of returning. We had previewed the storage and fighting bunkers and knew what possibilities awaited us from the beginning. We had experienced a rare opportunity to walk the battlefield before the battle commenced. No excuses.

We were alerted in the evening with a warning order to be ready to roll early the next morning. Before dawn on October 7, we rose, packed, cleaned and oiled our carbines, and prepared to move. The same old rickety, racketling trucks awaited us, and we climbed aboard without fanfare. I detected a more serious tone in the preparations for battle than I had in our previous operations. Storm clouds were developing, darker and more ominous than ever before. A warning siren was shrieking in my mind.

Our trucks rolled past the usual landmarks, the Seminary and Long Dinh Bridge, before they stopped on Highway 4 near LZ Springfield. We quietly assembled into a rudimentary formation. No helicopters were scheduled for the assault; therefore, we would walk into the zone. Sergeant Rich and I followed the 3d Company near Lieutenant Vanh, the company commander. Normally he ignored me, but this time he wanted me to stay close by his side. This was not to be a walk in the sun.

We crossed a small canal running parallel to the road and dispersed as we crossed two kilometers of open rice fields. Ahead of us stretched an old dirt road, cut by trenches in several places, denying it to vehicles but passable as a high-speed avenue for infantry on foot. On my map I identified the road as National Road 221. From my history studies I knew that this was the same route used by the Vietnamese on January 2, 1963, in the infamous battle of Ap Bac. John Paul Vann had advised the ARVN 7th Division then. In a major battle leading to greater U.S. involvement in the war, Vann had turned a military debacle into an international spectacle at these very coordinates. His troops had met the 261st Battalion of the Viet Cong main force head to head at this spot, and lost. The lesson of history enveloped me as we trudged through the fields.

Today Lieutenant Vanh spread his company out as I had learned to do in basic infantry training (I had never seen the Vietnamese follow the book before). Infantrymen advanced slowly and carefully with rifles off their shoulders and carried at the ready. The serious intent in their cold stares and body language was evidence that they expected trouble: I believed that they knew more than I did about what lay ahead. Interrogation of villagers was equally intense. Although no one shared any information with the Americans, the air was electrified.

Third Company progressed cautiously through the hamlet of Ap Bac 2 and continued north to Ap Bac 1. We walked carefully but quickly throughout the day, crossing semidry rice paddies that were laid out like one of my mother’s patchwork quilts. An hour and a half before darkness, we approached the final tree line before the Double Y. The company halted under the cover of trees one kilometer from the canal and waited while the rest of the battalion pulled itself on line facing the waterway. Stretched before us was open rice paddy up to the large trees along the canal line, parallel to our front. From our previous operation, we knew this canal line was covered with bunkers and ammunition cache sites, empty only a few weeks before. This time I believed Viet Cong were defending the bunkers.

In the center of the paddy before us sat a lone farmhouse surrounded by peasants gathering in their water buffalo for the evening. When our troops emerged from the trees an old woman screamed, and then yelled Choi Oy! “Oh my God!” at the top of her lungs. She continued to scream as she ran toward her house and the protective bunker inside. The entire scene immediately turned frantic. Her reaction to our appearance surprised me, but everyone who witnessed it knew exactly what it meant. She was directly between two armed infantry battalions destined to clash violently in this remote farmland.

Our infantry, arrayed on a broad front, marched forward across the open paddy directly toward the trees along the canal. We were totally exposed. (I recalled Pickett’s charge during the battle of Gettysburg. We were Pickett’s Confederate infantry moving against the dug-in Yankee infantry and artillery on Seminary Ridge.) This time the 514th Local Force Battalion was defending. We continued to move forward another hundred meters before an intense barrage of rifle fire erupted from the tree line, cutting through our ranks and stopping us in our tracks. The initial firing was more furious than I imagined possible.

Bullets thudded as they kicked mud and water around us. Others cracked near my head, forcing me to dive headfirst for cover behind a small dike in the exposed field. Sergeant Rich low-crawled beside me, and I could hear Bobby Hurst over Rich’s radio as he called Major Neely for air support.

Hurst took a moment from the radio to yell, “Taylor, stay low, but move as far forward as you can to mark our front lines with smoke grenades. I have gunships en route.”

“Roger!” I shouted over the noise. I waved to indicate I understood in case he could not hear me. I also wanted him to know where I was in the event air cover arrived.

I turned to Sergeant Rich and said, “Give me your radio and smoke grenades. I’ll leave my pack here. Wait for me.” Leaving him behind to cover my movements as much as possible, I crawled forward through the mud, trying to stay lower than the dikes.

By the time the gun ships were on station the radio was no longer working. I left it and moved ahead, staying behind the mud dikes as much as possible. I tossed smoke grenades ahead of me as mud and water continued to splatter from the strikes of bullets. I wondered whether what I was doing made any difference, but there was not much else I could do, so I continued to throw smoke grenades until I ran out. Darkness was closing in; smoke grenades would be useless soon, anyway.

I didn’t dare try to get back to Sergeant Rich in the remaining light, so I settled into the muddy rice field to wait for the cover of darkness. I was near enough to the canal to see helicopter gunships receiving heavy ground fire. I had no communications, but Lieutenant Kiem’s seriously wounded radioman lay near me, so I commandeered his PRC-10 set. Manually tuning this older, but working, radio, I connected to the battalion advisory frequency in time to hear Bobby Hurst give directions to the first flight of U.S. Air Force (USAF) F-4 Phantoms. He was speaking with the forward air controller, who had been able to get a fix on our position from my earlier smoke grenades. The F-4s dropped bombs and napalm until darkness made that impractical.

Air strikes blasted the canal line 500 meters to my front. The explosions of the 500-pound iron bombs were the most wonderful sounds I had ever heard. As the bombs crashed through the trees and exploded, they kicked up a spray of mud, dirt, and water that reached nearly to my position in the rice paddy. As napalm splashed into the trees, I heard the screams of burning men caught in the inferno. Fire turned darkness into light again and illuminated sights I did not want to see. Fortunately for the victims and me, that part was brief. Smoke mixed with the night to close the curtain on that awful scene.

As darkness fell over us VNAF Skyraiders relieved the Phantoms. I was pleasantly surprised by the skill of the Vietnamese pilots. The Skyraiders were fuel-efficient propeller-driven aircraft with a longer loiter time, enabling them to remain on station longer, as opposed to the Phantoms, which burned jet fuel at a phenomenal rate. Skyraiders flew slowly, but never very low. Their accuracy was amazing, and they carried a large payload of 250-pound iron bombs. When darkness was complete, the green tracers from Viet Cong rifles and machine guns streaked through the night toward the Skyraiders like fireworks. Some tracers were also spewed in our direction on the ground.

I overheard Bobby talking to the pilot of a USAF C-47 “Spooky” gunship that had joined the fight, replacing the bombers. The C-47 would be much more effective for close support in the darkness. As Spooky reported in, the Skyraiders sped homeward and a red stream of fire with its line of tracers, and awesome to see and hear, erupted immediately from its reliable minigun. Green tracers from the Viet Cong bunkers turned increasingly skyward. I used that opportunity to help ARVN medics drag our dead and wounded behind our front security lines. It was clear that we would remain in position all night, and we needed to consolidate our defenses.

In the mushy darkness I finally located Hurst, Rich, and Mendenhall at the edge of a pigpen near the lone farmhouse. Bobby was talking on the radio with the Spooky pilot. The pigpen smelled putrid, but that was the least of our concerns. I was glad Rich was with them because I didn’t relish retracing my steps in the dark to where I had left him. My rucksack was in the rice field somewhere, but I was in no mood to search for it. Fortunately, someone lent me a dead soldier’s poncho for cover during the long evening. I had been wet all day, and the poncho afforded some warmth in the chilly night.

We took turns talking on the radio to Spooky throughout the night. He concentrated continual fire into the canal line until daylight. We had attacked the 514th from the south, but no other forces had been deployed to trap that unit from any other direction. The 514th’s escape routes along the canals remained wide open. I believed it unlikely the enemy would escape north into the Plain of Reeds, because the trail could be easily followed. But, the concealed trails on each side of the canals were protected routes not threatened by our fires. Relatively dry rice paddies offered other excellent high-speed escape routes east or west, but not north in the swampy plains, or where we were holding in the south.

I shivered through the night. Finally the first rays of sun in the east blessed us with their warmth. In the new light we initiated a coordinated search of the canal line. I expected the Viet Cong battalion to have escaped, but I fully anticipated finding at least twenty dead VC soldiers in defensive positions. The canal lines had been blasted all night and appeared devastated on the ground. Bomb holes covered the area, trees were splintered and shattered, and large tracts of vegetation were incinerated. I couldn’t imagine anyone living through the devastation. Nevertheless, our search uncovered nothing—not one dead VC, no rifle, document, pack, or flag—nothing. I stood in awe of a unit that could recover every indication of its presence, in the pitch black of night, while under heavy fire from the sky and ground, and escape with no trace.

We had suffered eight dead soldiers and a dozen seriously wounded. Frankly we were lucky to have escaped with so few casualties. We had been totally exposed to the enemy rifle and machine gun fire during the initial outburst. Fortunately, the Viet Cong troops had fired too high in the initial outburst, and most of their bullets passed over our heads. Even so, most of our casualties had resulted from that first violent eruption. Our infantry did not maneuver under enemy fire; rather, it depended on air power to destroy the enemy force while returning fire from the cover of the paddy dikes.

Two U.S. Army helicopters were summoned to evacuate our wounded. As the first chopper lifted off, its propeller blast blew the ponchos off the bodies of the eight dead soldiers laid out on the ground side by side in their last military formation. The bodies were quickly covered again with ponchos and tied like holiday packages to be delivered home—prodigal sons returning home. Another chopper landed to remove the bodies. The detail of soldiers designated to load the precious cargo was too few and the pilot signaled us to hurry. Without any hesitation, I pitched in to help a small Vietnamese soldier lift one of the covered bodies. I was surprised at how heavy the small body had become and how its rigidity made it more awkward to handle.

As we struggled toward the helicopter the corpse began slipping from my grip. The poncho, wet from mud and blood, slid from my fingers. I grasped it to hang on, aghast as the body slid from the poncho and splashed headfirst into the mud of the rice paddy.

“Oh, my God!” I groaned in horror as I stared into the face of my friend, Lieutenant Kiem.

I had been a few meters behind him when the Viet Cong opened fire on our exposed ranks. In my own rush to cover I didn’t know he had been hit. Then I remembered taking the radio from his wounded radio operator.

Seeing Kiem like that was a weight that demanded my strength. Perhaps I should have been closer to Kiem during the battle, but battle was the biggest gamble in life. Then, while carrying my friend, I had dropped him into the mud. Weak from shock and exertion, I could no longer lift him at all. Soldiers gathered to help recover the bodies loaded Kiem on the helicopter.

As they shoved him into the chopper I staggered in the mud alongside. The blast of the rotors kept his face uncovered by the poncho. I saw Kiem’s open, lifeless eyes until the chopper lifted off. No, not just until then—still, forever. He returns to visit me every October. Kiem longed to go to the United States, and now he follows me here.

The rest of that day and the next we marched north into the Plain of Reeds, exactly the direction least likely for the 514th to have gone. I wondered whether that was precisely the reason we were going that way. Eagerness for battle had evaporated with the rising sun.

Indeed, we searched without finding anything except deep and fast-flowing streams concealed in a swamp of waist-deep alkaline water and bamboo reeds. Before the deepest streams we made poncho rafts to cross the swirling currents. Several times I pulled drowning soldiers from the water. I was never a great swimmer, but the distress on a drowning man’s face is compelling. And all of them looked like Kiem to me then; in every drowning face I saw him staring back. These I pulled out of the flood. Poor Kiem. If only I could pull him out of the grave.

After a thoroughly wasted day, helicopters lifted us to Binh Duc to recover and lick our wounds. During the flight I felt empty. Bobby was right when I complained about the sniper that helped me earn my combat infantry qualification—I had indeed encountered enough violence to satisfy me. I found other aspects of combat even more difficult, like death, futility, indignity, fear, loss of a friend. What else awaited the unsuspecting?

The black, black, dark black blood
Puddles up and hardens and mixes with the mud,
And returns to the earth, the humus of the earth,
And the stumpy, splintered trees shiver in their mirth.

Quite odd to the trees that the soldier stands alone
In a barren, blazoned field with boot upon a bone.
The hand of his enemy underneath his foot
And a watch in his pocket burnt and filled with soot.

The watch in his pocket, he drags out by the chain.
Then he turns it over and reads the words again:
“To Kiem, my pal.” A tear comes to his eye.
The soldier’s heart is broken: he saw his comrade die.

—Richard Taylor