ELEVEN

WHEN I GOT back to Pleiku. I had some people to thank. I personally expressed my appreciation to the Air Force forward air controllers. Then I found the senior Air Force office at Pleiku and told him if it weren’t for his people obtaining and directing the air sorties I wouldn’t be there talking to him. Then I went to bed.

About midnight, Lt. Col. John A. Hemphill, the assistant operations officer of the 1st Cav, knocked on my door, “Charlie, they want to see you at the command post. The Cav’s ADC [assistant division commander] wants to talk to you.” When I got to the command trailer I was introduced to Brig. Gen. Richard Knowles, a great big tall fella. He had a problem. The 1st Cav was going to stage out of Plei Me and go on westward into the Ia Drang River Valley to find, fix, and defeat the NVA regiments that had just withdrawn. Lt. Col. John Stockton, who commanded the division’s recon squadron, had asked to have a rifle company from Harlow Clark’s 1st Brigade assigned to him to guard his parked helicopters. When Stockton ran into trouble near Duc Co, at a place called LZ Mary, he deployed this company in a combat operation. They were deeply engaged and now General Knowles was asking if there was anything Project DELTA could do to help them out.

While I was standing there General Knowles got Colonel Stockton on the radio. Knowles’s call sign was Longstreet and Stockton’s was Bullwhip Six. “Bullwhip Six, this is Longstreet. I do not appreciate that you took that rifle company and used it for a purpose other than the one you stated. I don’t appreciate it a bit. Now we have to mount an operation to get it out. What have you to say about this?” Bullwhip Six, Stockton, came back with some kind of bullshit. When he was done the general put the radio down, looked at me and said, “That’s what you call really telling him, isn’t it?” I looked at him and said, “Sir, if I was a general and an officer under my command disobeyed an order, as that colonel has, I would tell him to put his hat on backward and start marching in an eastward direction till he hit the China Sea. That’s what I would do.” Well, the general’s mouth fell open. John Hemphill told me later the general had not appreciated my thought. I felt, if this is the way the Cav’s going to operate, then I don’t want to fool with them. They made me nervous. I didn’t sleep anymore that night.

But, the choice wasn’t mine, and the Cav needed DELTA’s assistance for Operation Silver Bayonet in the Ia Drang Valley. Colonel McKean was running around wanting to know what we could do. At this time Major Tut informed me that his instructions were to stand down and prepare to go back to Nha Trang. He had been told by General Quang not to participate in anymore combat operations. The Vietnamese Rangers had run out of gas and were not going to do anything more.

General Westmoreland was in Pleiku and asked me what we could do to help the Cav. I told him I had four all-American teams back in Nha Trang we could deploy, but we needed his authority to use them. He said, “You got it!” That made my day. Now that Project DELTA could use all-American teams, I felt we’d taken another giant step forward.

Then there was the fight over who owned the helicopters that inserted DELTA’s teams. The Vietnamese Rangers had taken Khoi and their choppers back to Nha Trang, leaving me naked. I stated my requirements to the Cav and was told that Colonel Stockton’s helos would support DELTA, but that they would remain under his operational control. I became very hard-nosed over this point. I’d stood there and watched that general take crap from Stockton, so I wasn’t comfortable with Stockton. He took too many risks to suit me. I wanted to control all my own parts. The argument went all the way to Maj. Gen. Harry Kinnard, the division’s commander. The Cav finally agreed to attach the helicopters to me, but they didn’t like it. They didn’t like it at all. Stockton was very angry. But I got my way.

As things turned out, the Cav’s choppers weren’t much to brag about. Their pilots couldn’t find our LZs. They couldn’t come back, put a pin in a map, and say for sure that’s where they’d put a team. The first time they tried it they put the teams in twenty kilometers from where they were supposed to. We went out, found the teams, brought them back, and reinserted them the next day. This time the pilots were only ten kilometers off. It was just a damn mess. The teams on the ground, when I asked them if they wanted to be airlifted out, told me they’d rather walk out. It was just ludicrous. In fairness to these pilots, it has to be pointed out that they had recently arrived in country and Silver Bayonet was their first large operation.

When our part of the Ia Drang campaign was over, I didn’t even ask permission to leave—I just scrambled us up a couple of C-130s, loaded everybody up, and moved on back to Nha Trang. Later Colonel McKean told me the 1st Cav hadn’t been impressed with DELTA. We were too expensive and required too many of their assets. From that moment on, whenever I was around Colonel McKean he’d keep talking about the relationship between Project DELTA and the 1st Cav, “We gotta get this patched up.” I finally decided he was more concerned with the fact that maybe this general who commanded the 1st Cav, Harry Kinnard, might sit on one of his promotion boards.

Anyway, Plei Me was over and Project DELTA had done well. We could go anywhere now and people knew who we were. We were proud of ourselves. We had had a successful operation. We helped save the camp and had killed some bad guys.