CUE: Somebody to Love, JEFFERSON AIRPLANE
The blades of the helicopter made that flat, slapping noise that became the signature sound bite for the Vietnam War. It was something we all took for granted at the time. The helicopter was the main manner of transport for supplies and replacements to those of us who lived in the field. For the straight leg units, it was the taxicab to battle. But on this particular day, the sounds of the slapping prop and the wind that bit at our faces was something rare. We were being airlifted for a walker mission, which was a bit out of character.
We had moved the entire company to a place near a low group of mountains that were within spitting distance of the Cambodian border. After the tracks circled up, the word went around that men were being picked for a walking mission. That was not good news to anyone. We were principally cavalry troops and were used to going out at night for a short walk and a long ambush patrol, but the thought of walking for days and carrying everything on our backs was not a pleasant one. It was too close to what we had all been trained for, back in the world, and we all thought we had put that kind of foolishness behind us when we were assigned to a mechanized unit. Obviously we were wrong about that. In fact, we were slowly but surely becoming aware of the fact that much of what we had been told by the powers that be in the US Army simply could not be counted on. This mission would not do anything to dispel those thoughts.
As the lots were cast and most of the 2nd Platoon was picked to go on this mysterious jaunt, an officer we had never seen came to inform us of new ground rules for this chess game. We were told that we were simply to go where the lieutenant would lead us and quietly observe any movements of the enemy we might happen to see. We were not to make contact of any kind if possible, and if we were forced into a combat situation, we were to break off as soon as possible and make our escape. We were not to take anything personal, such as letters from home, which might give any more information about us than the cryptic notations that were stamped on our dog tags. At this point, those of us who had been around for a while began to squirm a bit.
After the unknown officer with the bad news left us, we gathered around Lieutenant Phillips and began to ask all sorts of questions, which he couldn't answer. All we knew was that we were going to be flown to parts unknown and dumped out to wander around and look for hostiles whom we were forbidden to fight with. We were troubled by the fact that the maps given to Phillips were of an amazingly small area and had no indication as to latitude or longitude, which could have given us some idea of the location.
And so there we were, loaded up on Huey choppers, flying along to parts unknown, and carrying a heck of a lot of combat equipment we were ordered not to use.
As the choppers began to lose altitude, we could make out a rather large river below us and realized that a huge section of the riverbank was on fire, with smoke billowing up into the atmosphere. Cobra gunships were prepping the landing zone with rockets and fire from their miniguns. This was a five-barreled Gatling gun that delivered three thousand rounds per minute on the chosen target. To have the Cobra team as a backup in combat was a blessing. On this day, each of us looked at the column of smoke rising in the air and secretly wished the Cobras had found some other place to play. They were advertising our landings to every enemy soldier in the area.
The choppers began to stage for landing, and we began to prepare to disembark the helicopters as they hit the ground. This was usually a very smooth and very quick operation, however this time the ground was covered in thick, smoldering ashes from the fires that had been set by the Cobra gunships. As the helicopters reached the ground, the downdraft of their blades sent up a black dust storm of microscopic ash particles that obscured all vision and blinded everyone who jumped from the helicopters to the ground. We made our way out of this maelstrom by grabbing onto the pack of the man in front of us and trying not to breathe in any more of the fouled air than necessary.
How the chopper pilots kept from hitting other helicopters or flying straight into the ground is still a mystery to me. They had to be as blind as the rest of us, but they kept coming and going, until the sound of their props faded in the distance and the cloud of black ash began to dissipate. We squatted on the hot ground, shifting from one foot to the other, trying to keep from being burned by the still-glowing embers, which stretched as far as we could see. I have yet to understand why the higher-ups decided to smoke the ground of our landing zone like that. I am sure there was a military reason for it, but to the eyes of a simple soldier, all it did was waste ammunition and let everyone within miles know something was going on at that particular spot. There was another consequence.
As the choppers departed and we began making our way through the burned landscape, we found that the heat of Vietnam was intensified by the smoldering ground under our feet. This was no trivial thing. We were lugging heavy rucksacks loaded with all the food and ammunition we might need for the next three days or so. It was a load that added to our distress at the heat and was particularly overpowering to the new guys who had not been in-country very long. We began to lose them to the heat before we could make it to the river.
There was one new kid who was simply not well chosen for the infantry. He was extremely young and terribly fair skinned. He was so pale that his hair seemed almost white. To make matters worse, he had only been with the company for a couple of days, so he hadn't really had much chance to accustom himself to the heat in the field. Sadly, it caught up to him while we were making our way through the smoldering ground on our way to places unknown. His eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, right there on the black ash.
The medic came up the line to look at him and told Lieutenant Phillips that the boy would not make it through the next few days. The only choice we had was to call back one of the choppers for a medical dustoff.
Lester and I were picked to carry the kid back to a clear spot where the helicopter could come in and pick him up. As we reached the clearing, Lester threw out a red smoke canister to mark our position, and the aircraft began to descend. The closer the helicopter got to the scorched earth, the more it kicked the powdery ash into the air. Soon there was a black hurricane surrounding us, making it impossible to keep our eyes open, much less see. We were blind, crouching in the swirling ash, holding the limp body of the pale kid.
We started trying to pick our way forward, inching through the thick ash cloud, using the sound of the helicopter's prop as a heading. The closer we got, the harder the ash seemed to hit us, until our faces and arms were stinging from the blinding assault. Suddenly, two hands reached out of the swirling ash and grabbed my arm. The door gunner from the medevac chopper had walked out into the ash storm and was guiding us in. He was wearing a flight helmet equipped with an eye shield, and he looked like an alien from a spaceship. When we got to the helicopter and loaded the kid, the gunner turned to us and made signs that we should lie flat on the ground. We did so as the helicopter blades picked up their rhythm, and soon the storm of ash got even worse. Our ears and noses were filled with black particles as the helicopter blades bit into the air and began to lift the machine into the sky. The shock of the prop wash beat our clothes and forced the ash under our eyelids, pummeling us until the craft had enough altitude to pitch forward and be gone.
Lester and I lay in the ash until we could see once more. The ground was almost hot enough to burn through our clothes, so we got to our feet. Spitting and swearing, we began to retrace our steps back to where we had left the others. We were covered in soot, and when we made our way to the river, we washed our faces. Then we joined the others in considering how and where to cross the water.
The river crossing took about half an hour, and then we were once again on our way through the rambling forest. The quiet was not unlike the stillness we had known in other parts of the III Corps area, but there was something different about it. One of the things we noticed was that there was never a sound beyond that of a natural wooded area. We had become accustomed to the sounds of Vietnam. There were often aircraft high overhead, or even the sounds of artillery in the distance. There were the spattering sounds of Chinook helicopters on their way to resupply some unit, and sometimes even the high-pitched engines of the artillery spotter planes that cruised for hours over some places. Sound traveled a long way, in the quiet that was often Vietnam, but it was rare that a whole day produced none of the sounds of a military campaign in full swing. In this place, as we made our way through the trees and bushes, there were only the sounds of the forest.
An hour or so into this walk in the sun, the point element breaking the trail signaled for us to get down, and we all went into combat mode. Lieutenant Phillips came back to the end of the line, where Lester and I were lying in the grass. “I think we have a trail,” he whispered. “Why don't you come take a look?”
It took me a moment to realize that he was talking to me. I had forgotten the Davy Crockett reputation that my bogus pace count had gained me back in the Michelin rubber plantation. I looked at Lester, who nodded his head and then looked away. I will never be sure how he kept from laughing out loud, but he managed to stay silent.
I followed Phillips up to the front of the line, where he showed me several footprints that looked as if they had been made before the morning dew. I had grown up in the ranch country of west Texas and knew a few rudimentary things about nature and tracking. I knew that men walking made the grass lie down in the direction they were going. I knew that dew drops in a footprint meant that it had been made before the early morning hours. I knew that deeper heel prints meant that the maker was hauling a heavy load, but when I saw these footprints, I knew we were looking at something altogether different.
There was a steady line of clear tracks that were made by smaller feet but of different sizes. The men who made these tracks were all wearing the same type of rubber-soled shoes. Off to the right of the footprints were small tire tracks, probably made by bicycle tires that had dug deeply into the soft ground. It didn't take Davy Crockett to read this sign. It meant we had crossed the trail of the regular North Vietnamese Army. The local VC would not have all been wearing the same shoes, and the bicycles meant these guys were probably carrying more equipment than they could lug on their backs, so the bikes became equipment haulers. Added together, these discoveries meant there was a large regular army unit somewhere in the area, and these guys were part of their supply unit.
Phillips came forward and kneeled beside me. He wrote with his finger in the damp earth, forming the letters N V A, and then a question mark. I nodded and checked the Thompson to see if it was cocked. Somehow the stakes had gotten a bit higher with our discovery. We stayed there a moment while Phillips made some notes on the map he carried, then we silently made our way back to the rest of the group. Phillips motioned for us to move out, and we began to make our way through the shaded growth of the forest once more. This time we moved in absolute silence, using GI sign language when communication was necessary. We realized we were in the enemy's backyard. The only question seemed to be, where was this backyard?
That night we came to a spot on the top of the cut bank of a small creek. Someone had been there ahead of us. We knew this because there were already foxholes and two-man fighting positions dug there. From the looks of things, they had not been used for some time, but we found old mackerel cans and some trash left behind. That meant whoever had been there had stayed long enough to make a trash pile. The fact that there were no C-ration cans in the refuse told us that this had not been an American camp. It also told us that whoever had been there was not at all nervous about anyone knowing about their presence. This was not the usual routine of the Viet Cong, who survived by stealth. Whoever had been at that place was guarding it for some reason, and they were not trying to hide from anybody.
As soldiers tend to do, we began quietly talking among ourselves about the situation. There was something odd about the whole mission. There were plenty of leg units in the 25th Division. Why pull a bunch of mechanized troops off their tracks and send them on a walker mission? Why all the secrecy about the maps? We had never before been given maps showing only the immediate area. Why were we not engaging in regular radio traffic with the company? We were making contact only twice a day, and they were not calling us at all. We had come across signs of the enemy but done nothing about it. We had not even called in the discovery. When I talked quietly with Lester about it, his opinion was based on the distance traveled and the river we had crossed. In a flat, whispered tone that bore no emotion at all, Lester theorized that we were no longer in the Republic of South Vietnam. By his calculations, we were eleven men wandering around in Cambodia.
I don't think I slept much that night. I kept going over and over the thought that the US Army had picked me up and dropped me into another country. If it was so, then we were invaders in a nation in which we had no status as a protecting force, no other troops to back us up, and no allies. If we were in Cambodia, then we were in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the stomping ground of the North Vietnamese Army. My mind kept going over these possibilities and pressing me with a question: What were we supposed to be doing in Cambodia? I had no clue.
The next day we made wide circular sweeps in three directions. During one of these arcs, we stopped to take a break. Everybody took off his equipment and stretched out. I was going to catch a nap when Lieutenant Phillips came over to get me. He wanted to check out a noise he had heard just ahead of us in the thick woods. I grumbled a bit and then got up, taking only the tommy gun, a bag of magazines, and a few hand grenades with me. I was still kind of sleepy as I walked beside Phillips along a slender trail that wound through the trees. Oscar Solis and Dennis Kinney walked just behind the lieutenant and me. I stepped off the trail, remembering that it wasn't a really good idea to travel along trails in strange country. The whole group did the same, and we began to meander through the trees. It seemed Phillips had no real heading in mind as we moved along. We stopped periodically, listening for the odd noise and moving along again, until we found ourselves frozen in our tracks by the unmistakable hiss of a shortwave radio being tuned. We stood stock-still in the trees while the sound came to us on the breeze. It was clear as a bell, and then it was gone.
We stood for the longest time, holding our breath and straining to hear any hint of the mysterious sound, but it never came again. Finally, Phillips shrugged and then whispered to me, “OK. Better take us back in.”
I was completely stunned. I had been following him. I thought he had been taking us somewhere in particular and I was just walking sleepily along with him. Suddenly it was startlingly clear that Phillips had been under the delusion that I was leading the group. He was so wrong, but I had to admit that I had come to understand the meandering route we had been taking. I took several deep breaths and tried to gather myself, hoping I could remember even a little of the path we had taken. The forest ground was covered in shadow and a thick blanket of fallen leaves, and I was the first to realize that my finding our trail back to the place where the others were hiding and waiting for us was a pretty slim prospect.
I turned us around and began walking in the general direction whence we had come. If we were truly in Cambodia, we couldn't risk any sound or calling out for a heading. We had left the camp without taking a radio with us, so that kind of communication was not possible. If we missed the rest of the guys, we could walk all the way to the Mekong River before I actually knew where we were. The farther we walked, the more I was sure that I had no idea where the others were waiting for us, and I felt my ill-gotten Davy Crockett reputation melting away with every step.
When I had walked far enough that even I knew we should have come across someone, I stopped, leaned against a tree, and tried to think of some way to tell Lieutenant Phillips that Davy Crockett was lost. The others sat down for a break and seemed completely calm in the thought that I was leading them home through the forest primeval. At that moment, I saw a motion through the trees about fifty yards to my right. It was a miracle. Through the low-hanging limbs of the trees, I could just catch sight of a familiar face. Larry Grubbs had stood up and was stretching his muscles. Then I saw Lester move into my sight line. The whole group was roughly fifty yards or so to my right, and I could see them through the leaves and limbs of the Cambodian woods. They both sat back down and were gone from my sight, but I knew where they were. It had been a chance moment that saved the lot of us. Had we not stopped, and had I not looked to my right at just that moment, we could have walked on past them and been a footnote in history today.
I made a wide circle through the brush, with Phillips and the rest walking behind me. We went into the camp from the rear, and all was well. Phillips came to me and said he had become a little disoriented out there. He confessed that when I made the turn in the woods, he had checked his compass and was about to ask me what I was doing, when we walked into the other guys. “I was worried,” he said, and patted me on the back. “But I should have known better.” I don't think he had any idea how close he came to being listed among the missing.
Our odd mission lasted only three days. At the end of that time, Phillips made some notation in a little book he carried and scribbled on the portion of the map that showed where we had been, and we started back. We never saw anyone. We didn't fire a shot. When we got back to the tracks, the whole group of us went to Phillips and asked him where we had been. He looked at us for a long moment and then looked at the ground. “I really don't know,” was his choked reply. I think it was the only time he ever lied to us. I think it bothered him more than he realized to do so.
In early May, we crossed the Mekong River into Cambodia as the spearhead of a general invasion along that border. The move was announced by President Richard Nixon and observed by the viewing public on network newscasts. For most of the world, it was a new chapter in the saga of the war in Southeast Asia, but for eleven of us from the 2nd Platoon of C Company, 1st of the 5th (Mech), it was a move over familiar ground.