CUE: Fortunate Son, CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL
The black smoke rising just ahead of us gave dark testimony to what we were heading for. Company A, 1st of the 5th, was engaged with a sizable enemy force. I knew this because the chatter in my headset painted the picture pretty well. The men who were engaged in the fight had stumbled into a unit of the North Vietnamese Army, not guerrilla forces. These were well-equipped professional soldiers, and based on the fury of the fight they were putting up, their numbers seemed to be superior. Our Alpha Company had been looking for them and found exactly what it was after.
The Vietnamese commander had caught the tracks strung out in line and had lured them into a horseshoe-shaped attack. This was a textbook maneuver and was working exactly as it had been designed. The troops of Alpha Company were fighting desperately to extricate themselves from a deadly situation, and we were speeding to their aide with all dispatch. The outcome of such a firefight was already determined by the strength of numbers. The Americans could simply pour in more and more men and equipment as they became available. It was an old tactic. It was how Ulysses S. Grant won battle after battle during the War between the States, yet such victories were pretty hard on the first troops into the fray. Alpha Company was the first, and reports of its losses came through the headset to me as we came within sight of the battle. As we stopped and waited for the rest of our company to draw up into the line of attack, the tracks of Alpha Company began to withdraw. They moved past us in broken order, with the line troops walking beside the vehicles. On top were laid the bodies of the killed and wounded. The first sergeant of Alpha Company was among the dead. There was something ominous in that. First sergeants were men who had survived long enough to reach that exalted rank by living through many such engagements, often in multiple wars. As the track bearing his dead body passed by us, I had a sinking feeling. It was an ill omen.
The good news was that the enemy fighters were already engaged and unable to redeploy their positions. We knew where they were. The bad news was that the only way to get at them and keep them from escaping into the Vietnamese countryside was to keep them engaged until air support showed up to cut off their way out. This meant we had to go right back in where Alpha Company had taken such a pounding. We had to go in there and either overrun them or keep them busy until the jets showed up. This was a new kind of war to me. Everything I had been a part of up to this time had happened on ambush patrols at night or in flurried attacks against obviously inferior forces. Now we were evenly matched and heading into something altogether new.
Captain Meilstrup had dismounted from the command track and was engaged in a deep conversation with the commander of Alpha Company. They poured over the map of the area, and both pointed back at the still-smoldering battleground. I noticed that our first sergeant, Sergeant Strain, walked over to the command track of Alpha Company. The body of its first sergeant was laid out over the trim vane and was covered with a green army blanket. Sergeant Strain looked under the blanket for a moment, then turned and walked back to stand at the side of Captain Meilstrup. He did not look back at the blanket-covered corpse again. Months later and quite by accident, I learned that the two first sergeants had known each other for years and had served in the same combat unit in the Korean conflict. I would come to understand completely the sudden detachment from one who had been a comrade in arms.
Meilstrup climbed aboard the command track and took the headset from me. He gave terse orders of movement to the platoon leaders, and we started making our way right back into the hornets’ nest that had so banged up Alpha Company. I checked the .50-caliber machine gun to make sure it was ready to go. I moved boxes of ammunition closer to me so I could reload with less effort, then I gripped the handles of the gun with sweating fingers. This was different. We knew the North Vietnamese were about to unload on us, yet we kept moving forward. We had to engage them and keep them from breaking up piecemeal and retreating across the river into Cambodia. Our mortar tracks began to fire rounds behind the enemy lines to keep them from moving in that direction, and on we pressed, toward the front of their line.
We moved steadily, relentlessly toward the wood line in what seemed to be a slow-motion take in a movie, and then the blunt sound of a small explosion broke the silence. The time warp seemed to shift into high gear, and men and tracks moved faster, pressing the attack. My position as gunner on the command track usually left me as a nonshooting observer because our people were often in my line of fire. This time, as the line of battle spread out, I found myself in a clear area, and I pressed the butterfly trigger on the big machine gun. The fact that I could shoot back immediately settled my tension to a controllable level of battle nervousness. I was once more a fighting member of C Company. In retrospect, it seems kind of silly, but I have to say it made me feel better.
The fighting was heavy for about twenty minutes, then the enemy gave way. Our tracks overwhelmed their positions, and they simply melted away. As the last shots were being fired, I saw two men bearing a blanket-shrouded stretcher toward us. The body they carried was heavy, but they lifted the stretcher high and slid it onto the flat deck behind my gunner's hatch. It would be our duty to carry the corpse back to the resupply point, where it would be sent back to graves registration in the rear. Captain Meilstrup was still directing the mop-up action using my headset. He looked over his shoulder at the shrouded stretcher and asked me to see who it was. This meant I was to check the dog tags. This was not a usual part of my duty as the gunner. In fact, I can only remember having to do this one other time, in another country. It was during a similar heated engagement across the Mekong River in Cambodia. On that day, as the stretcher was lifted into place on the deck of the track, I reached behind me and pulled up the edge of the blanket. The face underneath the green wool was devoid of expression and stared back at me with sightless eyes. It was Oscar Solis.
It dawns on me now that after I replaced the dirty green wool of the army blanket over his lifeless face, I did not allow myself conscious thoughts of him for almost thirty years, when I saw his name on a granite memorial to fallen Texas veterans. It was an intense moment, filled with all the emotion I could not afford on that hot day in 1970. I have often wondered how many such moments the veterans of multiple wars, like 1st Sergeant Strain, must have gone through.