SEVEN SEVEN Peterson was transferred out of the company to take over the battalion reconnaissance (recon) platoon when we returned from the field. Expected to be the eyes and ears of the battalion, roaming in the front and on the flanks during conventional field operations, the recon platoon had been heretofore in Vietnam no more than battalion staff security, and the colonel wanted more aggressive leadership. I hated to see Pete go. He was my best friend and I wanted him at my side in battle. Pete, however, was eager to get out of the mortars and into a maneuver element. Plus he wanted to work directly for Colonel Haldane. So I was happy for him, but sad to see him go. I thought about the insurance policy, remembering that I hadn’t ever sent in the change-of-beneficiary form. I looked for it, couldn’t find it, and then let it go. Helping Pete move his gear over to battalion, I started to mention the insurance, but I was embarrassed and told myself I just had to find the form or write the company for another.
During the next battalion operation, Pete’s first as recon platoon leader, we went across a large river to the west of our base camp and broke down into platoon-size units. Battalion staff officers, assigned to spotter helicopters, looked for signs of VC fleeing in front of the platoons.
From their elevated vantage the spotters could not see men moving on the ground as well as they could see trails, villages, and clearings. They had never served on the ground themselves and did not realize how difficult it was to move through the jungle. Sometimes we faced swamps and deep crevices beneath the jungle canopies, so the observers often miscalculated the time it would take us to move through a particular area.
“Okay, Red Cap Twigs Alpha November Six, you, ah, you, ah, are where? Throw smoke?” Pause. “Okay, I got it. What are you doing there, you’re supposed to be another klick ahead. They’re waiting on you up there.”
Down below, Bratcher would say, “I think I am going to shoot that REMF, next chance. Next opportunity I have at that clean, good-smelling, staff shithead, he’s dead.”
Ayers and Beck, stinking from their sweat, would be out of breath from breaking trail in the dense jungle, and we’d hear the helicopter way off in the distance. The staff officer would come back on the radio telling us to double-time to meet up with the other men. Once Moubry told Duckett’s unit that they were off line. Duckett ignored him and soon thereafter called Woolley with a request to stop for the night. His men were exhausted. He invited Moubry to come down with some supplies, such as cold beer.
For the most part we were not successful in initiating contact with the VC during that operation. We did have one encounter, however, when Bratcher was at the head of our column. The platoon was walking down a trail. We often avoided trails because of the chance of mines and ambushes. Breaking new trails through the jungle was safer, but we had been beside the path earlier in the day and we were not going to stay on it for long. As he was looking down for trip lines, Bratcher almost ran into a couple of VC who were coming in our direction around a bend in the trail. He dropped to one knee, but by the time he got his rifle to his shoulder and fired, the VC were gone. Beck was running after them when I ordered him back.
Although we were unsuccessful in finding the VC during the day, they came at us at night, probing our positions. As we lay in a tight perimeter, tired and wanting to sleep, they crawled in and threw grenades or sniped at us. They also tried to steal our claymore mines; however, we planted trip flares around them so if a VC slipped in to steal them, the flares went off. One night a work detail of VC crawled along the perimeter, figured out how the trip flares were planted, and stole the flares and the mines. The next night, McCoy planted flares beneath the claymores. At midnight he heard movement out by the claymores just moments before a flare went off. One of his men squeezed off the detonator. In the morning McCoy guessed that there had been three VC, but it was hard to tell from the bits of flesh blown over the area.
My platoon suffered no casualties in the operation. Duckett was not so lucky.
Duckett was a stern taskmaster. He told his men he expected them to get out there and fight. He pushed hard at the enemy whenever we had contact, and he was the last platoon leader to call in dust-offs (medevacs) for his wounded. That was different from some of the other platoon leaders. When we took casualties, some platoon leaders stopped everything to look after their wounded; Duckett’s first job always was to kill VC. Duckett did not wear socks or underwear, so his early weeks in Vietnam were painful. But after a short time his feet and crotch toughened up and he felt no discomfort from the lack of underclothing. He also wore a flak jacket he had picked up from a cavalry friend. Because he was Duckett, people did not question this. Most of us would not have worn a flak jacket if they were available; they were heavy and wore down the body. But Duckett got used to his flak jacket and never left base camp without it. Eventually it saved his life.
Early in the operation he and his platoon deployed some distance from the company in an area north of a village thought to be sympathetic to the VC. After dark he posted a two-man listening post (LP) among some rubber trees halfway between the village and the thicket where the platoon had dug in. Soon the listening post reported hearing movement to their right. In a low whisper, they suggested that a small group of people might be moving from the village toward Duckett’s position. Duckett alerted the platoon, and everyone waited quietly.
A light rain began to fall. Suddenly out of the dark, a shot zinged in.
As the men tensed, Duckett’s platoon sergeant hissed loudly, “Don’t fire.” He thought that other VC might be waiting in front for the muzzle flashes to give away their positions.
He was right. The VC in front, soon tired of waiting, began firing at the platoon. Duckett called for mortar flares as his men returned the fire. Illumination rounds burst over the rubber trees and the VC pulled back. Within minutes the listening post reported the VC running back toward the village.
Everything was quiet until early morning when the two men at the listening post reported hearing movement all around—the VC had returned. Duckett told them to calm down; it could be the rain dripping off the trees. They did not acknowledge his call but quickly, breathlessly reported seeing men maneuvering directly at their position. Before Duckett could answer, he heard small-arms fire to his front. The listening post yelled into the radio that they were pulling back to the platoon.
Duckett called down the line to his men, “Get ready, the LP is coming in. VC in the front. Be careful, don’t shoot the LP!”
The men lay silently in their holes as they scanned the jungle toward the rubber trees. Duckett, who shared a foxhole with his RTO, ducked into the hole, called for more flares over the radio, and drew his .45-caliber pistol. As he came back up, he aimed it over the top and took a deep breath. Woolley came on the radio and asked about the situation. Duckett bent down into the hole again to talk with Woolley.
The RTO saw movement in the front. He pulled the pin on his grenade. Footfalls came closer in the dark. Forms began to take shape into men, running headlong toward them. The RTO pulled back his arm to throw the grenade, then he saw the distinctive steel pots on the heads of the men and yelled down the line, “LP coming in. Don’t fire! Don’t fire!”
The men from the LP were running as fast as they could in the dark.
A shot ran out behind them, the round whistling over their heads. Another round zinged through the jungle. The men lunged toward the hole as Duckett came up after talking with Woolley. He barely avoided a head-on collision.
The radio operator, the grenade still in his hand, ducked into the hole. As more rounds from the pursuing VC passed overhead, the two men landed on top of the RTO, the grenade was knocked from his hand, and it fell into the hole. The radio operator tried to get out of the hole and became frantic, but the LP men forced him downward as they desperately sought cover from the enemy fire. The two men, also excited, continued to worm their way into the hole.
Duckett was trapped on the side of the hole. As the three men wrestled beside him, he fired his .45 into the dark, toward the VC.
The radio operator and one of the men from the LP were blown apart. The other man from the LP had shrapnel wounds over most of his body. Duckett was covered with bits of clothing, web gear, and flesh, but his flak jacket had protected him. Although he was not wounded, he was blinded by the blast and could not hear anything except a ringing in his ears. By morning he had regained his sight but had lost the hearing in his right ear.
Duckett and the wounded LP man were evacuated, along with the remains of the other two men. After a night at the field clearing station, Duckett was sent to a U.S. Army hospital in Japan.
When we returned from the operation, Sp4. Burke, who carried one of Colonel Haldane’s radios, sought me out. He said that he had heard, although he could not confirm it firsthand, that an oil painting of a nude had arrived at division headquarters in Di An. It was from Senator Javits’s office in Washington, D.C., and was addressed to the unidentified 1st Infantry Division field officer who had built a bar in the jungle. A division support officer, an REMF, had it in his office, but he was not, as far as Burke knew, making any effort to find the intended owner. I thanked Burke and went looking for Captain Woolley, who had not been pleased when I asked Senator Javits for the painting. He might not approve any effort on my part to retrieve it. I found Woolley behind his desk in the company headquarters tent and asked him for a day’s leave to go down to Di An on a personal matter of some importance. He smiled. I smiled.
“And?” he asked.
“And what, sir?” I replied.
“What is the personal matter?” he asked, not smiling as much as he had.
“I’d rather not say, sir, exactly, other than to say it is important to me.”
Woolley gazed intently at me for a moment or two and then said, “Okay, but this better not have any blow-back. You understand me?”
At Di An I first went to the post office and talked with the NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge), who remembered the package. He’d sent it to G-4 (logistics). The NCOIC was there, in fact, when the officer opened it. “Damned nice piece of work,” he told me.
I thanked him and went to the logistics Quonset hut. I was clearly aware of the difference in my appearance from that of the staff people whom I encountered along the way. My fatigues were worn, and I had a strange tan—my forehead was white from wearing my steel pot, but my cheeks were ruddy and showed briar scratches.
As I made my way toward the rear of the Quonset hut, I looked into each office as I went, sometimes interrupting conversations and work activities. Finally, in a major’s office I spied an oil painting of a nude woman, looking out a window from behind a curtain, as if she were waiting for someone to come home. I was staring at the painting when the major looked up from his paperwork at me, then at the painting and back at me.
“Senator Javits?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon,” the major said.
“Did that painting come from Senator Javits to an unidentified 1st Infantry Division field officer?” I asked as I walked into the room.
“Who are you?” asked the major.
“That officer,” I said.
There was a pause. Then the major asked, “How am I supposed to know that?”
“I just told you, that’s how you know. Last month, Senator Javits visited our position at Phuoc Vinh—I’m with the 1st of the 28th—and I asked him for a picture of a nude. That one. So I’m here to pick it up.”
“No, you’re not,” said the major, leaning back in his chair. “You are going to have to get me some proof from your battalion commander or someone who can verify the fact that Senator Javits was sending you a painting. How am I supposed to know this is actually meant for you? Maybe you’ve just heard it’s here and are trying to talk me out of it. I’ve got a responsibility here.”
My first thought was that I didn’t know how Woolley or Haldane would react. But then I thought, that isn’t the point; this REMF major is a horse’s ass, sitting here in an air-conditioned office with my painting hanging on his wall.
“Major,” I said, “I don’t know about your responsibilities, but I know that’s my painting and that I’ve only got one day down here. I’m a little hurt you don’t want to help me with this.”
The major continued to lean back in his chair; I wasn’t going to win any war of words. Without thinking it through, I changed tone and said, “So listen here. I’m just going to take my painting off your fucking wall and if you so much as touch me, I’m going to hurt you. And I’m still going to take it.”
With that, I walked over, took the painting off the wall, and left. The major did, in fact, file a report which eventually reached Woolley, saying that I had threatened him and stolen a painting off the wall of his office. By the time the letter arrived, the painting was a fixture behind our bar and the story of how it came to be there was part of Alpha Company folklore. Woolley destroyed the letter.
Ernst returned from an operation in December with what was diagnosed as dengue fever. Over the next few days he became gaunt and tired easily, but he did not go on sick call. Some “dingy fever” wasn’t manly enough to call him out of the field. He’d leave if the medic said he had typhoid fever—but not “dingy.” “Get outa here,” he said. “It’s just Jimbo and me to help the good captain.” Peterson and Duckett were both gone.
He had in his platoon a young man who never stopped talking. And he was funny. Shortly after picking up the dengue bug, Ernst and his platoon were on patrol south of Phuoc Vinh. He and the comic were walking close together when the platoon was ambushed. A bullet hit Ray in the hand. The young man was splattered with shrapnel. They had to be moved several kilometers to a clearing for a medevac. Wounded in dozens of places, the young man walked most of the way out. He was lying by a tree when the medevac helicopter arrived. A corpsman walked up with a bandage in his hand but paused because the man had so many wounds. “Just put a bandage on me anywhere,” the young man said. “You’re bound to cover a wound.” As the corpsman worked, the youngster borrowed a cigarette from someone standing by and lit it himself. Exhaling, he asked the corpsman, “You know the names of any nurses in the hospital where we’re going?”
Ernst, on the other hand, had to be carried on a makeshift stretcher all the way from the ambush site to the open field. He was in great pain. Eyes sunken from the dengue fever, his hand torn open, he looked like a corpse. He was a good man, popular with his men. They knew that he was leaving them, and they feared he would have to have his hand amputated. As the corpsmen were carrying Ernst to the helicopter, several of his men grabbed the sides of the stretcher. When they lifted the stretcher to put him inside the helicopter, it came apart and Ernst fell through it to the ground. He landed on his head.
The youngster, already on board, said, “Not necessarily the helping hand the lieutenant was looking for.”
Ernst was finally righted and put on the helicopter. With his good hand, he gave a thumbs-up to his men. He was eventually evacuated back to the States and we never saw him again.
For a short while I was the only platoon leader left in the company and then a new second lieutenant, “Brad Arthur” [alias], arrived. Woolley gave him Ernst’s platoon. Arthur was loud. When some other replacements whom he knew dropped by, he repeated the stories he had heard about Ernst’s medevac, but with the wrong emphasis, I thought. He hadn’t earned his spurs yet and didn’t have the right to laugh.
The new M-16 assault rifles arrived and, like Arthur, they did not make a good first impression. I had handled guns all my life, but I instantly disliked that light aluminum and plastic toy with its designer lines. It didn’t feel right, made silly little sounds when a round was chambered, had no recoil when it was fired, didn’t come up naturally to the shoulder, and had a handle on the top. For what? It made sighting awkward. I told the men I didn’t know about this thing that looked like it was made by Mattel. Didn’t look like the kind of gun that would win wars. Didn’t want any of my men holding it by the handle, like a woman’s pocketbook.
I told Bratcher I was keeping my shotgun. He nodded and asked when I had last fired it. I figured about three or four weeks before. Bratcher said that he had noticed a lot of rain and wondered how waterproof that gun was, how well it might be able to handle, say, firing all seven rounds without jamming.
Newsome, my RTO, had covered it with oil, and I had cleaned it religiously every time we returned from an operation. It seemed to be in good shape.
On Bratcher’s suggestion, however, we took it down to the perimeter. Standing on top of Spencer’s bunker, I put it to my shoulder and fired. The gun jammed after one round. I tried to clear it and heard something break inside. The bolt stopped working altogether. Bratcher looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I tore the gun down as much as I could and found several pieces, weakened by rust, broken or bent from firing that one shot.
“Not many spare parts around here for a Stateside rabbit gun,” Bratcher said.
I threw the shotgun and the parts into the minefield, then went back to the company armorer and drew an M-16. I tried to like it, but the more I handled it the cheaper it felt. Where was the wood, the weight? Sure, we could carry three times more ammo, but everyone would fire the thing on full automatic and no one would aim. It was not a woodsman’s gun.
And the magazines? The guns might be high-tech, but those magazines were mass produced and cheap. The spring wires were smaller than coat hangers. I could bend them with my finger.
I raged against those M-16s and the magazines, but no one listened seriously.
So I resigned myself to life with the M-16. Like everyone else, I put twenty rounds in each magazine, as we had been told to do, and then one more for Mother. If we squeezed down tight on that thin wire spring, we could get twenty-one rounds in. For many people that last bullet was a tragic mistake because the springs in the early-version magazines rusted together. Also, because they were so light, men taped two, sometimes three magazines together so they would be at the ready in a firefight. This extra weight on the light latch that held in the magazines caused the magazines to droop just enough to cause misfires. Plus, the guns were not hardy and would not function with any dirt in the workings. And there was a lot of dirt in the jungle. We had to give up the durable M-14 and got a light, faster, cheaper replacement. Initially we certainly suffered more from its disadvantages than we gained from its lighter weight and higher speed.
At about that time, Mother and Daddy sent me wire spectacles and a commode seat. I had asked for the latter item because the company latrine had uncomfortable holes cut in flat wood. I took great pride in my ass, I told my friends. The civilized man looked after his toilet facilities. It was what separated us from the animals that crapped in the jungle. Woolley said he wondered about me sometimes—the bar, the toilet seat. He wondered if I was queer.
I kept the toilet seat near the bar and took it with me on each visit to the latrine. No one made any catcalls. That might have been because I usually carried the toilet seat in one hand and a .45 in the other.
One day I was walking down the company street toward the latrine with the commode seat. I saw Spencer sitting in front of his tent. He looked at me and the seat and then smiled. I tried to look ahead and ignore him. I was wishing I had my .45. As I walked in front of Spencer, he followed me with his smile. I passed by.
“I can’t think of a damned thing to say, Lieutenant. Goddamned I’m trying hard and I can’t.”
Just before Christmas, Jim Newsome, my RTO since Fort Riley days, rotated back to the States. I went down to his tent to say good-bye. I picked up his PRC-25 radio and walked over to Spencer. Bratcher, Castro, and Rome were standing by the entrance to the tent.
“No sir, goddamned, no sir, goddammit, no. I ain’t carrying no fucking radio. I ain’t. I don’t have to.” He appealed to Bratcher, “Tell him, Platoon Sergeant.”
“I don’t care what you think about this thing, Spencer. Get the freqs and call signs you need from Newsome before he leaves.” I had a half smile on my face, but my eyes were serious.
Spencer looked at me and said, “Ah, shit.”
Initially I had thought about making De Leon my RTO, but as we became more experienced in the field it became apparent that Spencer, in addition to being bright, was very cool under fire. And, I could not explain it, this black youngster from a northern ghetto, and I, a white man from a small southern town, were in sync together in the jungle. Bratcher and I had uncommonly good rapport, but he was usually at the rear of the platoon file during operations. Beck and Spencer were, for whatever reason, always near me when things were happening. Beck’s attitude was to go get ’em. Don’t matter ’bout nothing. Get’ em. Spencer had just as much courage, but he was more deliberate. He would always hesitate a moment before acting. For all of my initial concern that he would be disruptive and hard to control, he was effective in combat. Plus, he was smart and I liked him. So he was my RTO.
Woolley initially questioned this selection because often the RTO spoke for the platoon leader, and Spencer was known to be irascible. Plus his thick inner-city diction was initially hard for most of the other white college-boy RTOs to understand. But in short order Woolley, and the other RTOs, realized that Spencer always knew what he was talking about. And when he spoke for me, he always got it right.
We stayed in the base camp from shortly before Christmas through New Year’s. Each night different platoons were sent out on ambush patrols. Woolley told Arthur that he had the patrol for Christmas Eve night.
I told the captain how much I appreciated that. “I’ll be able to spend Christmas in camp, probably because I’m your favorite, been around the longest.”
“Nope,” Woolley said. “It’s because I want you on patrol New Year’s Eve. If there is any man I want out away from the base camp New Year’s Eve parties, it is Red Cap Twigs Alpha November Six, the proprietor of the Company A bar.”
Christmas was pleasant. The company cook made a wonderful holiday meal. We cut down a small shrub for a Christmas tree and put homemade ornaments on it. On Christmas Eve, Peterson, McCoy, Dunn, and I opened presents together. Just like home, we opened them in turn, one at a time, so that we could comment on each gift and stretch out the evening.
On New Year’s Eve, I was lying on my belly in the jungle by a bridge south of town. Around midnight the soldiers on the perimeter of the base camp behind us began firing tracers in the air. I started singing “Auld Lang Syne” softly and the men on both sides of me joined in. With the tracers still going off in the distance our voices carried over the water and into the village on the other side. The locals must have wondered.
Ten days later, Colonel Haldane and his staff went to division headquarters to receive new operational orders. They left in the morning and we expected them back by early afternoon; the trip had never taken more than a couple of hours. They didn’t return until after sundown, and all officers and top NCOs were called to the operations tent at 2100.
Colonel Haldane began by saying that during the twelve weeks we had been in-country, we had learned how to fight in the jungle, had engaged elements of every VC unit operating north of Saigon, and disrupted their ability to control the territory. We had also taken casualties, and we had lost men to disease and through termination of service. Only 50 percent of the men who had left Fort Riley for Vietnam were still with us, but we had received replacements. We were still an effective fighting organization.
“Operation Crimp will launch in three days. It will test our ability to live up to the 1st Infantry Division tradition,” Haldane said. “We are going to attack an area the VC and North Vietnamese have controlled for decades. It is the Ho Bo woods north of the town of Cu Chi. It is where the Ho Chi Minh trail ends inside South Vietnam. We will be up against hard-core Viet Cong combat units supported by local villagers. The VC own this territory. The only significant South Vietnamese military presence in the area is inside the town of Cu Chi. Turn the first bend in the road west of town and you are in territory of the VC’s 7th Cu Chi Battalion, a unit that has never lost a battle. We know from the French that their tactics are to bend away from frontal attacks but slap back on the sides and attack from the rear. They do not run away. They fight. Our mission is to attack the center of the area, secure a base, and clear it from the inside out. Once we have pacified the area, the 25th Division, presently en route to Vietnam, will move in and control it.”
The plan was to move by Caribou airplanes from our base camp to Phu Loi, a staging area some distance east of the operational zone. On 7 January 1966, we would conduct a helicopter assault into Landing Zone (LZ) Jack in the middle of the Ho Bo woods. The landing zone area would be prepped by artillery and then Air Force fast movers (jet airplanes) and finally Air Force prop-driven slow movers. Leading the troop-carrying helicopters (“slicks”) would be helicopter gunships. 1st/16th Battalion would go in first. We would be in the second wave. My platoon was to be in the third, fourth, and fifth helicopters of the second lift into the LZ.
The briefing went on until midnight. We picked up new map sheets on the way out.
As we walked back to the company area, Bratcher said, “It looks like we got ourselves an operation here. We’re going to get after them Commie bastards, rather than just hanging out the way we been doing, acting a lot like bait. You want to do business, go where the customers are. Am I right or what?”
The following morning we loaded onto the ugly Caribous for the short flight to the staging area. Dunn’s company had already arrived there and had set up poncho shelters at the end of the runway, near where Alpha Company was assigned. The next day more units came in. Helicopters and planes were flying overhead constantly. Round rubber bladders of aviation fuel were positioned at the end of the runway. Fresh ammunition, medical supplies, and batteries arrived. The whole assembly area was alive with activity.
Before dusk Dunn and I went over to an old building built by French plantation owners. A basketball hoop was attached to the back of the building and someone had found a basketball. We joined a half-court game and wore our fatigue pants, combat boots, and T-shirts. Dunn played basketball the same way his father had probably played no-faceguard football for the Green Bay Packers. Very tough. One guy, who was much quicker than Dunn, was driving around him when Dunn hooked him around the neck, throwing him to the ground. He was angry and getting up in a hurry when Bob pushed him down again. Dunn moved quickly to stand over him and said, “Get up, asshole, and I’ll knock your fucking head off.”
I grabbed Dunn and said, “Hey man, save it for tomorrow. That’s a good guy. You gotta know the difference. This is just a game.”