3

So You Want
to Go to Vietnam?

MIKE DOWNS, THE commander of Foxtrot Company,10 had worked hard to lead men in combat. He had come to the marines out of Holy Cross College, and at twenty-seven, like most marine officers, he did not want to be left out of a fight. Without combat experience he could not hope to compete for advancement.

Downs had ticked all the right boxes—leading a rifle platoon and a weapons platoon; serving as an assistant battalion operations officer; commanding a rifle company in the quiet regions of Okinawa and Camp Pendleton; attending Amphibious Warfare School in Virginia—but after finishing that he was assigned, not to Vietnam, but to another posting in Okinawa. A kindly superior enrolled him in a recon replacement course back at Pendleton so that he would be unable to report to Okinawa as scheduled. This would effectively cancel that posting, and his reassignment, he was told, would probably be to lead a company in Vietnam. But when he had completed the course—useful training in land navigation and coordination of artillery and air support—he was told by a sergeant that he had once more been bypassed for a combat post. He was assigned again to a job in Okinawa.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Downs said. “I came out here for this recon replacement officers’ course to get out of an Okinawa posting. I have been to Okinawa. Did that. I want to go to Vietnam.”

The sergeant considered this for a moment.

“So you want to go to Vietnam, sir?”

“Yeah.”

The sergeant said Downs would have to go to Okinawa first, but promised to work things out so when he arrived, he would be given a change of assignment to Vietnam. And he was as good as his word. When Downs and a planeload of other marines arrived in Okinawa they were given a short administrative briefing, then the captain was summoned by an administrative sergeant, who by the sad look on his face thought he was delivering bad news.

“Your orders have been modified, sir. You are now going to the First Marine Division in Vietnam.”

Downs had done all the right things when he took over Fox Company in the fall of 1967. He had gotten all his officers and a few senior noncoms together and told them they knew more about fighting in Vietnam than he did, and that he was going to lean on them heavily for advice. Grunts were always wary of new commanders. They tended to arrive young and fit and eager—and Downs was all those things—qualities that could mean hard work and real danger.

By early 1968, Downs was an old hand. His company was pulled off an active battlefield south of Phu Bai on Wednesday, January 31, just as it was about to help wipe out a trapped NVA battalion. Downs’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham,11 had expertly maneuvered one of his companies, Hotel, in a clash that forced an NVA battalion to retreat. Looking at his map, Cheatham saw they were moving toward the Truoi River, which was too deep and wide for them to ford or swim. The river wound its way in a generally northeastern direction from the spectacular green peaks and waterfalls of the Bach Ma Forest to the South China Sea roughly midway between Hue and Da Nang. Directly ahead of Cheatham’s position the river switched back west, which meant if he moved his men fast enough to block them, the entire enemy force would be trapped. Bottling up an entire battalion was too good to be true.

He brought up Downs’s Fox Company to help Hotel pin the enemy against the river, and deployed his Echo Company to secure their flank. The NVA battalion was pinned. Cheatham’s young company captains felt they were getting a master class in infantry maneuvers. They would now close in and finish the NVA battalion off. The colonel had given them a rare clean shot at an enemy that had been chipping away at them for months with booby traps, mortars, and small ambushes. The marines had far superior firepower, which they rarely got a chance to use. Fighting the VC and the NVA had been like trying to swat a gnat with a sledgehammer. Now they had the enemy cornered. A battalion! Except—then they didn’t.

Cheatham was ordered to pull back. He was informed that his fourth company, Chuck Meadows’s Golf, had been sent into Hue, and the Task Force X-Ray commanders at Phu Bai wanted to send two more of his companies there, immediately. This would effectively foil the colonel’s crushing blow. Cheatham was livid, and got on the radio—his call sign was Rockmat Six—to make that clear.

“Do you realize what we’ve got here!” he argued, fuming. “We have got them!”

“Don’t worry, Rockmat Six,” came the response. “Where you are going there are more of them than you can count.”12

His officers were shocked and disappointed, and Cheatham was crestfallen. He would later growl, “Somewhere out there is an NVA battalion commander who will be talking for the rest of his life about the dumbest son-of-a-bitch he ever fought against.”

Fox Company would proceed directly to Phu Bai, and then the next day on into Hue to join Golf. Hotel would move off to a bridge over Highway 1 and be picked up and driven north the next day. Cheatham was ordered to leave Echo Company behind to do what it could against the larger enemy force.

Trucks arrived and Downs’s men were taken north to Phu Bai. They had left their packs behind earlier that morning—food, ammo, dry socks, personal effects, which would be sorely missed in the coming weeks. Private Ronald Frasier would always remember seeing his pack lined up with the others in perfect parade order at the edge of the field. They would never see them again.

Fox spent one night at Phu Bai, and early the next morning—­Thursday, February 1­—the company, was off to Hue. Downs was told his company would be flown up to the MACV compound for an operation that should last about a day. Air strikes and artillery were out. The city was considered an important historic site, and if anybody was going to start blowing things up it would have to be the ARVN. His men could use the weapons they carried: rifles and machine guns. They were to secure the compound, rescue some of the Americans hiding in the city, and then return. Downs passed the word to his platoon leaders.

“Get your gear,” Platoon Sergeant Paul Tinson told the men. “You’re going up to Hue City to bail out Golf Company. They hit the shit up there. Just take your flak jackets and some gear because we’ll be back for dinner.”13

They gathered ammo and one can of C rations for the side pocket of their fatigues and assembled that morning on the tarmac, where they would board Sea Knight helicopters14 for the twenty-minute flight. It would take a series of flights to move them all. On each, the men were lined against both sides of the aircraft, sitting on their helmets to protect their vitals from rounds that might punch up through the floor. As they moved over the city, the choppers hovered high, waiting for the suppressing fire below to start, then swooped in low and fast bearing northwest over the Van Duong River, then hard left where it met the Huong. At that point they banked sideways. On one of the flights, a loud metallic whang! whang! whang! sounded as rounds poked through the walls. One marine dived for the deck. The shooting abruptly stopped, and as the chopper leveled off the other men laughed at him.

“What the hell are y’all laughing at?” he asked. “I just beat y’all to it, is all.”15

The small-arms fire was sporadic, but it spooked everyone. One of the choppers carried a load of journalists, some of whom got off when it landed. The other reporters, to Downs’s amusement, stayed right where they were for the return flight to Phu Bai.

Kyoichi Sawada and Mike Morrow were two who got off. Sawada was famous; he had won a Pulitzer Prize two years earlier for his photos from Vietnam. Morrow was a complete amateur. He had effectively stumbled into the battle, a tall, skinny kid with a thick unruly mop of chestnut hair who wore black horn-rims. He had been at Dartmouth College studying the history of Chinese-American diplomacy and trying to learn Chinese when he had wangled himself a summer abroad in Taiwan. When the summer was over, he wanted to stay. He felt his Chinese skills were improving, and he got permission from his professor to remain there a while longer before returning to complete his undergraduate studies. But Morrow had overstayed. A year later, still in Taiwan, he learned he had lost his student status. His parents sent him a ticket home, but he knew that without his college deferment he would likely be drafted.

Morrow didn’t know how he felt about the war, but, being immersed in Asian studies, he was fascinated by what was happening in Vietnam. There was a big difference between being curious and being committed. He was not against the war, but neither did he believe in it enough to fight. The truth, he reasoned, was that he didn’t know enough to have an opinion. So, on impulse, he had traded his ticket home for a ticket to Saigon, and had flown there the previous summer on a tourist visa with sixty dollars in his pocket. He was petrified. He had the name of a friend’s uncle who lived in Cho Lon, but he didn’t know where that was or how to get there. At the airport in Saigon he found his English got him further than his Chinese. He said he intended to work as a journalist, and was put on a bus to the Caravelle Hotel, where most American reporters stayed. It was getting dark when he arrived, and he didn’t know how safe it was to be on Saigon’s streets at night, so he went in. He asked how much it cost for one night. The charge was thirty-five dollars, which was more than half of his funds, but he was desperate, so he took the room. He didn’t dare spend anything more, so he didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep either. Early in the morning he remembered the name of a Baltimore Sun correspondent, Bob Erlandson, for whom he had worked as a translator in Taiwan. He looked up Erlandson’s Saigon address and found that it was, of all things, at the Caravelle Hotel. So he called him on the hotel phone.

“Come on down,” Erlandson said. “Have breakfast with us.”

Morrow walked immediately down to the reporter’s room and knocked on the door.

“Come on in,” Erlandson shouted. There was coffee on the table.

The Sun reporter helped orient the kid. He took him to the UPI office, which gave him a letter of introduction. It said he was an official UPI stringer. The wire service gave him free film in return for a promise to bring pictures to them first. If they took anything, they’d pay ten dollars. Then he wrote to the Dartmouth Daily News, a paper in Hanover, New Hampshire. He offered to send it occasional letters from Vietnam if it would send him, on official Daily News stationery, a letter identifying him as its correspondent. The paper wrote back. With those two letters he had been able to get a press pass from the MACV, which gave him the same access to military transport enjoyed by all the professional reporters. Because he could speak Chinese, he wrote several stories about Cho Lon, a Chinese enclave, where he went to stay with his friend’s uncle. These were published in the Washington Post, and just like that he was legit, stringing for a number of American newspapers. Morrow had been in the Mekong delta aboard a navy patrol boat when it was sunk by enemy fire, and had to be fished out of the river. So he had seen a few things by the time he landed in Hue.

But he hadn’t seen anything like Hue. He arrived with no idea anything newsworthy was happening. He had gotten stuck at an air base in Quang Tri the day before trying to hitch a ride into the city to spend the holidays with some IVS friends, among them Dr. Marjorie Nelson and Sandra Johnson. On the tarmac there, out of nowhere, a machine-gun round dropped right in front of him and rolled to his feet. It had apparently traveled a great distance before falling. It was still warm when he stooped to pick it up. You know, he thought, that was kind of good luck. He slipped it into his pocket. He managed to get on a chopper to Phu Bai, and when he got off he saw Sawada—whom he recognized and admired—boarding a helicopter with Downs’s company. He asked where they were going.

“We’re going to Hue,” Sawada said.

He asked the platoon sergeant if he could get on, too, and was waved aboard. He was shocked when they landed under fire.

Gene Roberts also came in on one of the Sea Knights along with more of Downs’s men, and he ran off into the shooting with them, quickly covering the two blocks to the compound.

Most of the marines were amazed to find themselves in a city. All they had seen of Vietnam were air bases, rice paddies, and jungle. Here were tall buildings, wide paved streets, cars and trucks parked against curbs, parks, bars, restaurants, fine and spacious homes. They didn’t have time to look around. They moved with choreographed discipline, forming a big circle around the chopper to provide suppressing fire, and when it rose they sprinted across Doc Lao Park and Le Loi Street and lined up against a building. Rounds snapped around them, bounced off the pavement with a whining crack and exploded into the wall, spraying small clouds of stone powder that filled their noses and mouths and stung their eyes.

While they waited, Dan Carter saw a photographer point a camera at him. Just as his group was ordered to move down to the compound, he turned to the camera—maybe his parents would see him!—and tripped. His helmet and weapon went flying. He collected himself and tried to catch up. There was a tank on the street outside the compound gate, and as he ducked under its gun, it fired, nearly knocking him out with the concussion. His ears ringing, he staggered a few steps backward.

A crewman in the tank turret looked down at him and apologized.

“If you want, you can go in now,” he said.16