CUE: A Hard Day's Night, THE BEATLES
I stared out into the night, and the blackness stared back at me. Another midnight found me exhausted and aching from the day's exertions in a land that posted temperatures of 115 degrees as a daily occurrence. Our 2nd Platoon had drawn ambush patrol duty for the third night in a row, and the fatigue was beginning to show in everyone concerned. As I leaned back against the rice dike and tried to peer into the darkness behind us, I could see only the shadows of what I knew to be the tree line, which was some one hundred yards behind us. Nothing seemed to move out there in the darkness. Nothing but those strange, night wiggles in your vision, which fool us all into seeing things that are simply not there. I would be awake for two hours if I could take that, then I would wake Lester and he would watch for two hours. After that, we would switch off until dawn as best we could. Whoever was in the best shape would take the final watch, which is the most critical time. With the coming of the dawn also came the most dangerous hour. In the early light, men often do not see what is coming at them and can be more easily overcome.
By February 1970, C Company, 1st Battalion of the 5th Mechanized Infantry, was terribly shorthanded. December and January had taken their toll on the troop roster, and now the company was so undermanned that the same men were going out on ambush patrol night after night. Exhaustion was beginning to cause mistakes, and the mistakes were costing lives. Two nights before, an ambush patrol from the 3rd Platoon had all fallen asleep, allowing the VC to walk into their midst. When the enemy was discovered, close firing took American as well as enemy lives. Now, in the gloom, I sat rubbing my eyes and trying to stay awake long enough to give Lester a little time to sleep. He needed the rest, and I needed him to do the same for me.
The radio hissed and I took the handset and pressed it to my ear.
“Alpha Papa One, Alpha Papa One. This is Romeo Niner Five. I need a sit rep, over.” The company would call us once every hour to ask for a situation report, using the cryptic radio language of the army.
I reached for the corner of the green blanket on which I was lying and covered my head with it. I pressed the button on the side of the handset and whispered a response over the static-filled airways.
“This is Alpha Papa One. I have negative sit rep at this time, over.”
The sound of squelch hissed, and I pressed the handset hard against my ear to diminish the noise.
“Romeo Niner Five, I read negative sit rep, over.”
I pressed the send button and once again whispered into the mouthpiece.
“Alpha Papa One, roger.”
The radio fell silent. I pulled the blanket from my head and leaned back against the dike, laying the handset of the radio next to my head so I could hear any transmission immediately. The routine was all very by the book but calming nonetheless. Someone was out there in the dark, asking if everything was all right. They would be there, ready to help if the situation report was anything more than negative. It was comforting to know that wherever you went, or however bad the situation got, you were not alone as long as the PRC-25 radio kept working.
The radio was, indeed, the link to everything in Vietnam. The platoons carried the PRC-25 as a portable communications device that could reach the company and in some instances beyond that. Even when soldiers were in trouble and found their communications cut off, they could always reach the radio relay station on the fabled Black Virgin Mountain, called Nui Ba Den. It rose three thousand seven hundred feet on the edge of a flat plain and looked very much like a coffee pot on a pool table. Many battles had been fought to secure the top of the mountain so the 25th Infantry Division could place its radio relay up there. By early 1970, it was pretty much secure, although the soldier legend was that it had been overrun three times by troops of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Three times the entire complement of American troops up there were slaughtered. I never thought much about these stories until my last months in Vietnam, when I was assigned to—yep, you got it—Nui Ba Den.
I shifted position to peer over the rice dike, taking the starlight scope in my hands and switching it on. At the touching of my index finger to the power switch, a tiny electrical whine alerted me that the scope was on, and I looked through it. The world in the scope appeared as a montage of lime green Jell-O. The starlight scope was designed as a night-penetrating device long before the night-vision wonders of today. The starlight scope merely amplified available light, which was minimal at best, and made a green facsimile on the lens. It was big and heavy and generally useless, but we carried the thing anyway. I suppose any help is better than none when you are trying to see gremlins out there in the darkness. It was the carrying part that made us want to leave the thing behind.
The troops assigned ambush duty out of mechanized infantry companies did not have to carry food and all the things straight leg troops, or regular infantry, had to lug on walker missions. After all, we were the “Mech,” and usually had the company circled up somewhere near us like a big, armored wagon train. What we did take with us, on those night jaunts, was only what was needed to wage battle. Each of us carried a weapon and about thirty magazines, two Claymore mines, twelve hand grenades, two hundred extra rounds for the machine gun, two star cluster flares, water, a rolled up army blanket, and sometimes the starlight scope or the radio. If you had personal weapons like a knife or a pistol, it added to the weight. When you consider eleven or so guys armed in such a manner and you add a machine gun and a grenade launcher or two, it is a pretty formidable group.
The ambush patrols were sent out to prearranged spots to intercept enemy troop movements under the cover of darkness. Army intelligence discovered where such enemy activity was most likely to occur and had infantry companies dispatch nine- or eleven-man ambush patrols to intercept the enemy. Experience would teach us that such interception was not always the best course of action.
At around 3:00 a.m., the clouds opened and the moon splashed a silver light across the dry, defunct rice fields. I was leaning back against the dike, sleepily surveying the open country behind us, when I felt something strike my right shoulder. I turned to see what it was and found an unfired bullet lying on the ground beside me. I felt the small thump on my shoulder again, and this time caught the round in my hand as it fell. I looked to my right and saw Oscar Solis waving at me. He had been throwing bullets at me to silently get my attention without moving from his position. I shrugged my shoulders and he pointed out across the rice field, then he held up both his hands opening and closing his fingers three times. It was a night signal indicating thirty men out in front of us. My hair stood on end and I hugged the ground, gently shaking Lester awake.
As we peered over the dike, we could plainly see the dark line of men moving slowly along the distant tree line. We could see them clearly in the moonlight, and we could see that Oscar had been mistaken. Everyone was now awake and silently counting. Thirty became forty, forty became fifty, and fifty grew into a nebulous number that filled us all with dread. We were nine, and just across the flat distance of the dead rice fields were who knew how many.
Clements was in charge of the ambush patrol that night. He crawled into a position between Lester and me and took the handset of the radio. In hushed tones he began to give direction and coordinates to the company, which would be passed along to the artillery. A moment or so elapsed and then Clements was talking directly to the artillery forward observer. With only a correction or two, everything was set and the word went down the line.
“Get low, boys.”
The distinctive freight train sound of huge explosive shells going overhead caused us all to press our faces hard into the muddy earth and pray that the artillery boys were on the mark. The explosions tore the earth and split the night with ragged flashes of light. The screams of men crawled into our ears and made us shiver while the ground shook as if being stomped on by giants. Clements looked over the dike and adjusted fire via the radio. The second barrage seemed even louder than the first, and then there was silence.
Within a minute or two the air was lighted by artillery flares, and we looked across the distance with trepidation. We all knew what would come next. We would have to rise and walk across that open space and see what damage had been done. We would have to go where the remainder of a large group of enemy soldiers may have been hiding and waiting. All nine of us would have to do that.
Clements rose to stand on top of the rice dike and motion for us to get up. His shadow, cast by the light of the flickering artillery flare, seemed to dance on the dried ground before us. The image undulated like something out of a gruesome ballet. As we crossed the distance to the trees, I kept thinking, “I should have stayed in school. I should have stayed in school. I really should have stayed in school.”