In the middle of the night, one of the guys crawled over to Rick, shook him, and whispered:
“Sergeant Duggan! Sergeant Duggan! Where’s the Starlight scope?”
Starlight scopes provided a soldier night vision by amplifying moonlight, available starlight, and even sky glow up to thirty thousand times. They were expensive—I think each one cost the army about two grand—and often only one soldier in a squad might have one.
Rick mumbled unintelligibly, and the GI whispered urgently:
“Sergeant Duggan, please wake up! We need the Starlight scope!”
“You guys are always seeing things,” Rick mumbled, and he turned over. “Lemme sleep.”
“No, you don’t understand, sir!” the GI half-whispered, half-yelled. “We have movement on the perimeter!”
Rick snapped awake and hurriedly got out the scope. The GI took it and hoisted it onto his shoulder—it was a heavy thing for Rick to carry around all the time—and peered through it toward the jungle.
Rick whispered to me, “The NVA are out there, moving around.”
He tried to make light of it, like, oh, it’s no problem, it happens every night. He tried to reassure me by saying, “They’re probably just passing by. But if they try to overrun us, and we have to pull back, boogie back to our line.” He pointed into the darkness behind us across an open field. “Yeah, boogie back over there. Don’t worry, Chick, I’ll tell you when,” he said. “And take this.”
Rick handed me an M79—a grenade launcher—the only other weapon he had besides his rifle. So now it seemed the NVA were crawling by us or, worse yet, up to us. They were not on my list of guys to find. I was wondering if my visit might have been a dumb thing to do.
The guy with the scope looked where they thought they saw movement.
“It’s NVA,” he confirmed.
Rick told the radio operator to call back inside the base perimeter to request illumination.
Within a minute, Bop! Whizzz! We heard the flares leave the mortar and fly through the sky. But instead of it going over us and lighting up the sky above the enemy, the first one landed right on top of us: Bop! Thank God it never exploded, or it might have lit up our location.
The next one went farther and burst overhead and lit up at least four NVA soldiers in their shallow helmets at the edge of the jungle.
“There they are,” said Rick.
The NVA started firing machine guns. Our guys returned fire. I kept really low in that hootch, and I was getting ready to run across that field. The firefight went on and on.
After a while, things went quiet. The GI with the Starlight scope looked through it again.
“Nothing moving,” he said.
“You all right, man?” Rick asked me. He looked worried.
“Yeah, I’m okay, thanks,” I said. I have to admit, I was shaken. Everybody was up and on alert for the rest of the night, no doubt praying for daybreak. Finally, dawn came, and Rick and his squad headed out with rifles drawn on the jungle. After a few minutes, they returned and picked me up. I don’t know what they saw out there, but we ambled back inside the base perimeter in silence. They were preoccupied; there was no conversation and no drama. They’d already seen a lot of action in First Cav, and Rick would see a lot more: 153 combat assaults in all. The month before, he had been in a Central Highlands firefight that lasted six days. An entire North Vietnamese regiment had surrounded them, soldiers armed with Russian and Chinese machine guns that shot a thousand rounds per minute. Rick’s company of a hundred soldiers lost twenty-five men, including his platoon commander. My friend had suffered a shrapnel wound during the battle; it was treated in the field. Now he and his buddies were up near the DMZ at the Ben Hai River, right up against the border of North Vietnam.
I tried to keep things normal. “What’s for breakfast?” I asked Rick.
Unfortunately, his answer was C-rations: one can of lima beans and another of meatballs. He handed me a P-38 can opener—so named because the small, simple tool took thirty-eight turns for it to open a can. Rick also gave me a metal canteen cup with an instant coffee packet so that I could heat up some water and add it. Fine dining, Vietnam style.
While I ate, German shepherd and Doberman guard dogs came up to me, barking. Dogs always barked at me in Vietnam because I stood out; everyone else was in camouflage. I didn’t blame them. They were doing what they had been trained to do. The dogs thought I was the enemy.
Rick’s pack must have weighed sixty pounds, yet he carried around every letter his mother and grandmother had written to him, as well as every issue of the Inwood Newsletter, which a team of seven young women in the neighborhood sent out monthly to all the local guys serving in Vietnam. The newsletters told who got engaged to whom, which softball team was in first place, poems like “Loving a Soldier,” bar-naming contests, and calls for essays on topics such as “All Roads Lead to Inwood.” They reported that the Inwood contingent in the annual May 1 Loyalty Day parade down Fifth Avenue had six hundred people in it. Reading one edition, I could see the Colonel was up to his old tricks. He “wanted to send you a bottle of scotch, but it wouldn’t fit in the envelope,” the ladies wrote. Instead, he’d soaked dozens of bar coasters in booze and had them included with the newsletter along with instructions to “apply it to your tongue every two hours.”
Inside the fence, more officers were around. So now I had to explain to the army what I was doing there. I did, and each would give me a “Yeah, right” scowl and go on to his business. They assumed I was an agent on some sort of undercover mission. Back then, there was no way for them to check on that kind of stuff out in the field.
I wasn’t important enough to be reported to Saigon. And they were more than a little preoccupied. They announced to the men that they would be moving out the next day to the A Shau Valley west of Hue in Thua Thien Province in South Vietnam. It was a key strategic point for the North Vietnamese army because it was close to the border with Laos, where the NVA threaded down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, named for their president and revolutionary leader, with artillery, weapons, ammo, and other supplies, bursting out into South Vietnam to do battle with our troops. The two long, narrow countries—like California, but smaller—shared a 1,300-mile border and it was porous—ditto farther south along the trail in Cambodia.
US forces hadn’t been to the A Shau Valley since 1966, when four battalions of the North Vietnamese army—at least two thousand soldiers—surrounded a Special Forces camp guarded by about two hundred South Vietnamese civilian irregulars, a small company of Montagnards, and seventeen members of the army’s elite Special Forces, known more commonly then as the Green Berets. All seventeen Green Berets were casualties, with five killed and twelve wounded, including 2014 Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Major Bennie G. Adkins, who suffered eighteen wounds while being the last American to defend the camp. What a shit show that was.
Rick and his squad took the news without complaint. They simply went out on patrol, carrying their M16 automatic rifles, and I went with them. We hiked for quite a ways, and, luckily, didn’t encounter any more visitors. There were steppes of rice paddies in an iridescent, parakeet shade of green. I commented to Rick, “This looks like Ireland.” It was hot, and we stopped for a minute under a tree to sip water from a canteen. I was about to sit down on a boulder when Rick blurted out, “No, Chick! Don’t sit on that! That’s a baked pile of elephant shit! The NVA use elephants to carry their artillery!”
Here we were fighting soldiers who were half starved, using methods Hannibal had employed two thousand years before, and they were giving us a run for our money. President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were making similar observations in the White House. It would all come out after McNamara quit a month later and LBJ refused to run for reelection the month after that. They quit, but they left our troops behind.
We didn’t encounter anybody out there, so we returned to the base perimeter, and Rick and his squad made their report. I was standing near the radio operator, who had to lug around the huge piece of equipment—and he was with the translator—an American of Vietnamese descent who had enlisted. A young GI sat on the ground next to him listening. Over the radio came voices speaking Vietnamese.
The younger GI said, “Who the hell is that?”
The translator answered, “It’s the NVA.”
“Well, what are they saying?” the kid asked nervously.
“They’re talking about supplies.”
The kid became irate, yelling, “What the hell are they doing on our radio?!”
“It’s not our radio, man,” the translator snapped. “It’s the airwaves, you know?—the air that we share—so shut up so I can hear where they’re headed with the damn elephants!”
Duggan and the other guys were cleaning their guns and repairing their boots and otherwise preparing to head into the unknown. Then we were back to sitting around telling more stories. Suddenly Rick asked me, “Did you really bring beer? Because I think it would be right on time about now.”
I reached into my pack and pulled out all the cans I had except for two and passed them out.
“Here,” I said. “Have a warm one.”
They popped the cans open and, to a man, closed their eyes as they took their first sip of beer in a while. Maybe they saw their girlfriends. Or a beach back home.
“Mmmm. Warm, but good,” sighed Rick.
We told more stories into the night, and then, since other soldiers were on ambush patrol, we all fell asleep right there in the field. Rick used his helmet for a pillow.
Come dawn, we were awakened by choppers, dogs barking, and a cacophony of bird calls. There was already a lot of activity inside the perimeter, and we all got up. At least there hadn’t been any attacks during the night.
Rick took me aside and said intently, “Listen, Chick, we’re moving out today. And you can’t come with us. You don’t want to come with us, trust me. Let’s be serious here. You can’t be the company mascot.”
He was right, of course. I couldn’t help them in what they had to do, though I wished I could. I was worried about them. But I had to find the other guys on my list and catch up with my ship, and I was running out of time.
“We’ve got to find you a chopper,” my friend said.
I said good-bye to the other GIs and wished them luck. I hoped I had brought them some. Rick and I walked to the landing strip, where a big Boeing CH-47 Chinook landed. They were taking a lot of equipment and a jeep off it.
Rick approached a warrant officer and asked, “Do you by any chance have a chopper leaving here and going south?”
“This one’s leaving as soon as we empty it, but it’s headed east, to the Quang Tri Airfield.”
Rick turned to me. “Beggars can’t be choosy, Chick.”
“Thanks, man,” I said. “It’s a start. Don’t worry.”
We went to the pilot, who was in the chopper, and Rick told him, “I’ve got a civilian here, and I gotta get him outta here pronto. Can you give him a ride?”
The pilot said, “Sure,” and waved to me to jump on.
“Well, I guess this is it,” Rick said. “I don’t mean to give you the bum’s rush, man. The fact that you showed up is, like, Whoa, there are actually people back home who care about us!”
We shook hands, and I said a little prayer for him in my head. I waved at him from the door and yelled over the chopper’s din, “Okay, Rick! I’ll see ya back in the neighborhood!” Rick laughed and gave me a thumbs-up as the Chinook took off.