CUE: No Time, THE GUESS WHO
Christmas 1969 was going to be different. Even the newest of the new guys could tell that. Since I had reached Vietnam in early December, I hadn't really given it much thought, because I figured I would be sent right away to a combat unit and would have other things on my mind by Christmas Eve. As it turned out, the route to the war had a turn or two in it.
After arriving at Bien Hoa that hot December day, we were hauled, by night, to Long Binh base camp. It was a spooky trip for those of us who were new in-country. Buses pulled up and we were shuffled on, only to notice that there was chicken wire over all the windows. When I asked about that, the driver replied that it kept the hand grenades out. I think it was about this time in my Vietnam experience that I stopped asking very many questions. The answers were entirely too disturbing.
We started out on the dark roads not really knowing what to expect. I suppose I expected to be taken to some small outpost in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by barbed wire and populated by hollow-eyed men in dirty green fatigues. That would come, but not yet.
Long Binh base camp was the third-largest military installation in the world. It was roughly the size of a small American city. The place had paved roads and electric lights and was the hub of comings and goings in South Vietnam. I was astounded that we had never even heard of the place. It certainly proved to be teeming with activity.
The group I was thrown in with was sent to the 90th Replacement Battalion. From there, thousands of men were dispatched to divisional base camps every day. In fact, there were formations six times a day in which line numbers were called out and the matching men shuffled off to find their place in the war. I assumed that I would be there only a matter of hours, but that was not to be my fate. When dawn came after that first long night, a sergeant came into the replacement barracks and called out everyone who was an Eleven Bravo. Here was the separation of the infantry in its purest form. A number of us looked about and stepped forward. We were marched to another barracks and informed that we were to serve as bunker guards at the replacement detachment. At this my heart gained a bit of undeserved hope. If we were to be bunker guards at Long Binh, it meant we would not be sent out into the fray with a line unit. My hopes were soon deflated when we were told this was only temporary duty. We would be held at the replacement detachment for a sufficient amount of time to gather a new complement of fresh infantry faces to sit in the perimeter bunkers of Long Binh. Then we would be sent on to whichever combat unit needed replacements.
The time seemed to drag while we were on bunker guard. In fact, we had a rather odd schedule. We were on guard for six hours, then off for six hours, then on again. It served to exhaust and disorient most of us. I am not sure how long we stayed there, but my number was eventually called, and I was shipped to the 25th Infantry Division, at Cu Chi base camp. I would enter the war a bit late, but enter I would.
I remember the flight to Cu Chi as being amazingly short. We were loaded onto a C-130 airplane, which seemed to take off, rise up a little, and then land again—which is exactly what it did. Cu Chi and Long Binh are only about forty miles apart. We had been told we were going to the base camp of the 25th Division. In our minds, we all saw that deserted military outpost, surrounded by barbed wire and mines, that we had all imagined as the base camp in Vietnam. When the ramp of the plane dropped, we discovered Cu Chi was not as big as Long Binh, but it wasn't a frontier outpost either. It had huge runways, paved roads, and brick buildings. It was the nerve center of the 25th Division, and it took us a little by surprise.
We were loaded onto trucks and hauled off to the replacement depot, which had a sign on the roof bearing the image of Santa Claus dressed in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and riding a surfboard. I had forgotten it was almost Christmas.
Time in the replacement depot was short and to the point. We were processed in and then separated out. Those of us who were blessed to bear the Eleven Bravo stigma were sent to “charm school.” This was a short orientation on the local customs and what new threats were being found out there where the action was. At the culmination of the course, we were taken on a night ambush patrol somewhere outside the wire, just to get our feet wet. The ambush patrol to which I was assigned was uneventful, but two nights later, a charm school ambush patrol ran into a group of VC, and two of the new guys were killed in the fight.
When charm school was concluded, we were sent to a large gathering of wide-eyed new guys in the local amphitheater, which was built for the Bob Hope Christmas Show. We were all crowded into the area and handed sheets of paper with names and units listed on them. I received the paper and ran my finger down the list until I found my name and serial number. Beside my name was written “C Company 1/5 inf(M).” My first question was about the “(M).” I had never seen a military notation like that. It was of primary interest to me because it seemed to be where I was going. Someone bent over and whispered into my ear that it meant I was being assigned to a mechanized company. I was still in the dark until another brave soul explained that it was a cavalry unit, which rode into battle on APCs. I had seen the armored personnel carriers only once in training, but the thought of not having to walk all the time sounded pretty good to me.
We all sat down in the shade of that pavilion and waited. As I looked around I saw a familiar face. It was Rick Morris, who had been in my infantry training platoon at Fort Ord. I walked over to him and asked what his assignment was on the sheet. He grimaced and said he had been assigned to the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry. This was a unit known as the 2nd Wolf Hounds. The 1st Battalion of the 27th Infantry was, naturally, known as the 1st Wolf Hounds. Both units were legendary for combat bravado. Their unit motto was No Fear on Earth. This seemed pretty ridiculous to me, but then again, I was a devout coward and counted my lucky stars that I had been assigned elsewhere. Rick Morris expressed grim feelings about his assignment and was, in all likelihood, looking at a year of pretty rough duty, when the gods of fortune smiled at him.
While we were sitting there and bemoaning our fates, a first lieutenant in really clean fatigues walked up to Rick and said, “Aren't you Erik Morris?” Rick looked puzzled and said he was. Then the lieutenant explained that he had once worked for Rick's mother in California. He asked Rick what he was doing there, and Morris held up his unit assignment paper and said he was going to fight the war. The young officer scrutinized Rick for a moment and then said, “Maybe not.” The lieutenant took Morris by the arm, and the two of them disappeared into the crowd.
I did not see Rick Morris again until my last few days in Vietnam. I encountered him in a snack bar in Cu Chi. It seems he had spent the whole year running the 25th Division snack bar. He had never been outside the wire and never fired a shot in anger. Rick Morris was saved from the life of a straight leg soldier in the 2nd Wolf Hounds by a chance encounter on the very day he was to be sent to a combat unit. All I could think of when I learned of this was that this must be proof there is a God.
Trucks began pulling up to the amphitheater, and calls went out for men who were assigned to this unit and that unit to climb aboard. I kept looking at the sheet in my hand and at the “1/5 inf (M)” next to my name. The crowd around me got smaller and smaller until there were only two of us left in the entire enclosure. I looked across the empty space at the only other GI left with a white paper in his hand. He looked back, and we started to move toward the middle. His name was George Bradley. He was stout and sweating from the heat and just as confused as I was. When we compared assignments, it became curiously evident that we were the only two guys in the 25th Division who were going to the 1st Battalion of the 5th Infantry (Mechanized) on that hot December day. Bradley and I sat down and waited. Just about the time we were contemplating desertion, a beat-up three-quarter-ton truck zoomed up and slid to a stop on the gravel. A tall, tanned sergeant in a bush hat and really faded fatigues got out and looked at Bradley and me.
“You men going to the 1st of the 5th?”
His voice was amazingly deep and matched his towering height. We both nodded in mute obedience and watched as he dropped the tailgate of the truck and motioned for us to get in. Once we were aboard, it was evident from the aroma that this vehicle was generally used to haul garbage. It seemed oddly appropriate at the time.
The 1st of the 5th had a small area reserved for it on the edge of the Cu Chi base camp. It included a small number of screened-in buildings surrounded by sandbags and mortar boxes filled with earth. The truth is that I don't know much more about it than that. Bradley and I spent one night there before being shipped out to C Company. Mechanized companies did not have barracks or even a place in the base camps. They lived and fought beyond the wire, like a great camp of armed nomads. At least that's how it was with C Company. I can count the times I saw a base camp on my fingers.
The next morning, Bradley and I were sent to the C Company orderly room. This was a semiscreened-in building from which the company clerk ran the entire war, or at least he seemed to think so. Actually, the role of the first sergeant and his company clerk cannot be underestimated in any war. Vietnam and C Company were no exception. These two men were the only ones in the entire outfit who knew where everything and everyone was at any given moment. It is a job that gets little praise but is terribly necessary. If an outfit gets a good clerk, it often protects and even spoils him in ways that would curl a general's hair. It should be said here that any general worth his salt had done the same thing for his clerk when he was a company commander. If he didn't, then he had hell to pay getting things done.
As Bradley and I entered the orderly room, we were greeted by Rosengarden, the company clerk. Everyone called him Rosie. We were signed into the company roster and given two beat-up M-16 rifles, which we began to clean so they would be combat ready. As we were sitting on the floor of the orderly room, scrubbing out the bores of those two tired weapons, I looked up and noticed a filing cabinet across the room from us. It had three drawers clearly marked with white cards that read “KIA,” “WIA,” and “MIA.” I nudged Bradley and nodded in the direction of the filing cabinets. He took in the meanings of the letters on the white cards and then returned to his cleaning, without showing any emotion. I'm glad he didn't look at me. He might have seen the terror growing in my eyes.
Suddenly a breeze began to blow through the screen wire, and the slapping sounds of helicopter blades could be heard landing just outside. Rosie laid his body across his desk to hold down the loose papers scattered there. The door opened and in walked a tall man wearing no shirt and dripping blood from a compression bandage on his left arm. I noticed the blood spots on the concrete floor, which followed him as he walked to Rosengarden's desk and picked up the field telephone. He spun the crank on the phone and waited until a voice on the other end answered. Rosie asked him about a man named Murphy, to which the shirtless man replied, “Murphy's got the million-dollar wound.”
A few terse words were spoken into the handset of the field telephone, and then the shirtless man turned on his heel and started for the door. The red spots splashing on the floor followed him.
“I'm going to the 12th Evac.”
His voice had a smoky resonance to it, which struck me as amazingly calm as he walked out the door. I remembered the same tone in my father's voice when he was younger and in the Marine Corps.
The sound of the chopper blades picked up into a faster slapping cadence and then was suddenly gone. When silence again filled the orderly room, Rosengarden turned to us. He must have seen the confusion in our eyes, for without any real reason he said, “That was your company commander.” My stomach rolled over a time or two, and I thought, “Oh My God! They're shooting the company commanders. What in heaven's name are they going to do to me?”
Two guys came into the orderly room sporting brand new haircuts and jungle fatigues that were faded from use but fresh from the laundry. Their tanned faces told us they had spent much time in the open, and the flat, emotionless look in their eyes was a hint of things to come. They were Charlie Dunn and Jeff Hannah, two members of the 2nd Platoon who had been in the base camp for whatever reasons and were returning to the company. Bradley and I would look back on this day and our meeting with Dunn and Hannah as lucky, for we would go with them to the company and then to the 2nd Platoon. That, in itself, was a bit of good fortune we would come to appreciate.
We were loaded into a 548 resupply vehicle for the ride out to meet the company. The 548 is somewhat like an overgrown pickup truck on tracks. The ride to the edge of the base camp was dusty and uneventful, but it was a prelude to the tightening of our stomach muscles as we drove through the barbed-wire gates and swung out onto the blacktop of the highway. We were suddenly beyond the protection of the wire and surrounded by the people of Vietnam. They were everywhere, selling all sorts of wares from thatch-roofed stalls along the roadside and riding the ever-present motor scooters. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the fact that they really did wear those traditional pointy, wide-brimmed, straw hats.
As we entered the village of Cu Chi, I had my first true wartime awakening. There was a Vietnamese traffic cop directing traffic at an intersection. As we drew closer to him, I could see that he was standing with one foot on a body that was missing its head. I am not sure what effect that had on me, but the next sight sobered me quite a bit. As we moved forward, one vehicle at a time, I noticed that I could see a man staring at me, just over the little Vietnamese truck that was parked in the lane beside us. His gaze was intent, never wavering in the slightest. I tried not to stare back, but when I noticed that he seemed to have stalks of long grass clenched between his teeth, I simply could not help it. When the vehicle next to us finally moved forward, I came to realize that what I was looking at was the severed head from the body in the middle of the intersection. It was stuck on a spike, atop a garden wall. I must have turned a little green, because Charlie Dunn leaned over to me and quietly said, “They do that to prove that they are winning the war. It's kind of like a recruiting poster.” Dunn was being kind to a new guy, but he wasn't fooled at all. He knew I was scared green, and he had the good manners not to say so. Hannah was not so empathetic. He looked first at me and then at Bradley before taking a long drag off his cigarette.
The first stop on our journey into the war was Fire Support Base Devin. Now this was exactly what I had pictured in my premonitions of the war. It was a small camp, surrounded by a circle of piled-up earth and coils of barbed wire, housing two large cannon and a few scared men who lived underground and peered out at the world through the ports of sandbag bunkers. What I didn't know was that we were bound for a war that had no fixed fortifications or permanent bunkers. Our home would be wherever we happened to circle up each afternoon, and our nights would be spent in forests, rice paddies, and rubber plantations. The eyes that peered out from the sandbagged bunkers of Fire Support Base Devin would watch us come and go many times during the next year. They would watch in silent understanding of the fact that some of us might not be back the next time.
We left Fire Support Base Devin in the 548 and started a trek along a narrow dirt road that led through small farming villages and ghost towns. We seemed to be getting farther and farther from any form of civilization. I kept wondering why there was no form of combat escort with us. It didn't seem to bother Dunn or Hannah. In fact, I don't think I saw them even look around us during most of the trip. When we turned off the slender dirt road and took off across completely open ground, I became a bit more than just worried. I saw Dunn reach down and pick up his M-16, cradling it across his lap. It was not until this very moment that it dawned on me that I didn't have any bullets. Bradley and I had been issued a couple of tired M-16s and one magazine apiece. We were given no rounds of ammunition. As the 548 sped across the open ground toward a distant tree line, I remember thinking that this was a hell of a way to enter the war.
When we reached the very center of that open and abandoned space, the 548 suddenly stopped. The driver began throwing red mailbags over the side, and Hannah and Dunn jumped out. Bradley and I looked at each other and followed suit. We tossed our duffel bags to the ground and jumped after them. It's a good thing we jumped when we did, for before we hit the ground, the 548 was in motion, cutting a hard left in the muddy ground and beating a fast retreat back to where it had come from. The four of us stood alone and completely exposed in the middle of South Vietnam. I was terrified, Bradley was a bit irritated, and Hannah stretched out on the mailbags to take a nap. He and Dunn both seemed unperturbed that we had been abandoned by the US Army in the middle of a war zone. I was, however, aghast at the situation and was about to make my nervousness obvious when an odd sound began to chip through the wall of panic that surrounded me.
The sound was something like a combination of deep-throated mechanical rumblings accompanied by a chorus of really high-pitched chain saws. The others heard it too. Hannah sat up and pointed at the nearest wood line, where the trees seemed to hide the growing din. Then, as if suddenly flung from the depths of the forest, a line of armored personnel carriers burst out of the tree line and raced across the open ground toward our position. It was my first time seeing the spectacle of the mechanized forces in full array, and it was impressive. There were twenty-seven tracks in all, counting combat platoons, a mortar platoon, the angel track for the medics, and the command track. On this day, the company was also home base for two M-60 tanks, which were pretty impressive in themselves.
The tracks broke from the tree line in a single file but soon scattered into platoon-sized units and sped across the open ground four abreast. The earth trembled at their approach, and I could feel, as well as hear, the power of their engines as they reached the place where the four of us stood. As if by silent command, they began to move in a wide arc until we found ourselves surrounded by large, olive-green machines that belched diesel smoke and kicked up dust. Bradley and I stood in dumb amazement as the tracks sped around us and took their positions in a huge defensive circle, not unlike that of a wagon train, but with each track facing out.
The men aboard the iron monsters appeared to be a diverse group. They were deeply tanned and covered with dust, a fact that became more evident as many of them removed their sunglasses, exposing skin that was not powdered with trail dirt. It seemed that almost the whole outfit wore either sunglasses or goggles. It was an affectation that made them look rakish and hid from view the tired eyes behind those dark lenses. There seemed to be no standard uniform. Most were dressed in faded jungle fatigues, but many wore olive-drab T-shirts, and some had no shirts on at all. They jumped from the tracks and began the many tasks necessary to turn the circle of APCs into a night defensive position, or laager site. Each man seemed to know what was expected of him and moved from task to task without direction.
The first sergeant was standing a few yards from us next to the command track. He spoke to several young lieutenants and then turned his attention to the mailbags and the new guys. He stepped over to us and stuck out his hand. Eager to make a good impression, I shook it, and the older man looked at me and shook his head.
“That's real friendly son, but what I really need are your orders.”
I blushed and fumbled in my duffel bag for the sheaf of papers that I had carried out from the orderly room. I handed them over and he glanced at them.
“Sweatmon. That's you?”
I nodded.
“What do they call you?”
“Stoney.”
The older man looked at me and then back at the paper. “It says here, Robert B.”
I swallowed and shifted my feet. “That's right.”
He looked up at me and then off at the army of men who were sweating to put the laager site in order.
“I suppose there's a story behind that, but I don't have time for it. All right Robert B. that they call Stoney, do your job, keep your nose clean, and your ass down. We'll get along.”
The first sergeant stepped past me and reached for Bradley's papers. He looked down at them for a moment and then back to size Bradley up a bit.
“Bradley,…George, is it?”
Bradley squared his shoulders and spoke with a steady voice. “That's right.”
“All right, George Bradley, what do they call you?”
Bradley cut his eyes at me and replied in a voice that had a slight edge to it, “George Bradley.”
The first sergeant smiled and looked back down at the papers in his hand. “Refreshing,” he quipped. “You two go with Dunn to the 2nd Platoon. Welcome to C Company.”
The two of us followed Charlie Dunn over to the place where the 2nd Platoon had parked its tracks. In the dim reaches of my memory, I don't think Dunn ever looked at us. He simply stopped by the Two Four track, dropped Bradley off, and moved on, leading me to the Two Zero track. This would be my home in the months to come. The men who rode Two Zero would become my closest associates, yet on this first day, none of them seemed to pay me much mind. As the months wore on, I would come to understand this detachment. It was a natural reaction to new guys. It was not meant personally or as any kind of insult. It was simply a part of the natural insulation that must surround the infantry soldier. It was a fundamental fact of war, but on that first day, it made me feel very much alone.
As the sun set that first night, I climbed on top of the Two Zero track to look around and take in my situation. I had finally come to the place I had been anticipating. I was in the infantry, in a war zone, a long way from any civilization. I was wearing the uniform of my country and carrying a weapon, and I would be expected to use it. As the dark enveloped me, I was completely aware that if I was lucky, I had a year of this to go through.
As I stood there in the gloom atop the track, Dunn climbed up and sat down in the gunner's hatch. He lit a cigarette and leaned back, observing the darkness before us. “You might as well sit down,” he said in his quiet, calm voice. “It's going to be a long war, and you won't make such a good target.” I sat down on the hand grenade case next to the gunner's hatch. It was a place that would become mine as time went by, but on this night it was an uncomfortable seat in the middle of an uncomfortable war, and I remember wishing that I was anywhere else but there.
I am reminded that there is an ancient warning that tells us to be careful what we wish for.