8

At Travis Air Force Base, north of San Francisco, I met up by chance with a West Point classmate, John Snodgrass. We sat together on the long flight to Saigon. Our refueling point was Honolulu, where we passengers all tumbled out of the plane and did what we thought soldiers headed for war were supposed to do—went straight to a bar and fortified our courage with exotic tropical drinks. Two hours later we were loaded back into the plane. At takeoff there was a lot of shouting and joking, but before long the merriment gave way to loud snores. Our freshly starched khaki uniforms had long since wilted and wrinkled, and I couldn’t help but think that when we finally landed in Saigon, we wouldn’t look much like the razor-sharp, steely-eyed warriors we all thought we were.

Later, as the soldiers woke up, the cabin again filled with friendly banter and laughter. John had been specially trained to work with the Vietnamese, and now he took a couple of hours to fill me in on their culture. I asked dozens of questions. Suddenly somebody looking out a window said, “There’s land below,” and we knew we were over Vietnam. From then until we landed, the cabin was very, very quiet.

We were met at Tan Son Nhut airport outside Saigon by Army buses with wire mesh covering the windows. The mesh, we were told, was to prevent Vietcong from throwing grenades into the buses: the week before, they’d actually set off a bomb in the main terminal. About fifty of us officers filed through the building, where the floor was still strewn with broken glass and debris, and crowded into a hot wooden shack that had been hastily erected next door. There we received a briefing on the dos and don’ts of Vietnam—mostly don’ts: don’t congregate in large groups, don’t wander around Saigon alone at night, and so on. Then the buses took us downtown to the Hotel Majestic, where we were to stay pending our assignments. The hotel was a five-story white plaster building at the far end of Tu Do Street, right on the Saigon River; the river itself was wide and muddy with numerous sampans and lush vegetation along its banks. It looked like rivers I’d seen in National Geographic.

John had a list of Saigon’s best restaurants, and he and I planned to celebrate our arrival with a good dinner. But by the time evening came, jet lag was catching up with us, and we agreed to eat in the Majestic’s own rooftop dining area instead. We had just placed our orders when wham! there was a loud explosion below. John and I leaped up, while everybody else in the restaurant threw themselves to the floor. I asked the waiter, “What was that?”

He said simply, “VC.”

We peered over the edge of the roof as sirens started to wail. Directly across the street, moored to the riverbank, was a floating restaurant, and men and women, many of them bloody, were crowding across the gangplank that connected it to shore. Suddenly another explosion blasted them from the gangplank into the water. It was a carefully coordinated Vietcong attack: first the terrorists set off a bomb inside, and then, as panicked diners and employees tried to escape, they detonated an antipersonnel device called a Claymore mine that had been positioned to spray the gangplank with shrapnel. The death toll came to thirty-one and included nine Americans. When the waiter told us the name of the place—the My Canh—we realized with shock that it had been number one on our list of recommended restaurants. That was my welcome to Vietnam.

The next morning I barely avoided a different kind of disaster: I was handed a staff assignment that would have kept me in Saigon for my entire tour of duty, helping create mathematical computer models of the war. I threw myself on the mercy of a lieutenant colonel in the personnel office, pleading for a job in the field. At first he insisted none was available, but finally he relented and asked if I’d be willing to work with the 25th ARVN division. “ARVN” stood for “Army of the Republic of Vietnam”; the 25th was a South Vietnamese division that had seen several of its units nearly annihilated in fights with the VC. The division was notorious for running off in battle, leaving its U.S. advisors behind. I replied, “If that’s where the work is, that’s where I’ll go.” At least I wasn’t going to be stuck behind a desk.

The next day, I was at the central issue facility drawing my jungle boots and other gear when my old West Point roommate Leroy Suddath showed up in camouflage fatigues and a red beret, the uniform of the Vietnamese airborne and its advisors. “There you are!” he said. “Why didn’t you let me know when you got here? Come on. I’ll get you an interview with my boss.” Colonel Francis Naughton, the senior advisor of the Vietnamese Airborne Brigade, was a tall, lean, veteran paratrooper who didn’t seem particularly impressed that I’d gotten good grades at West Point and served in the 101st Airborne and in Berlin. But when I mentioned I’d learned French in high school, he brightened. “Great!” he said. “Not all the Vietnamese understand English, but most of them know French. How would you like a job with the airborne?” He made a call to cancel the job I’d begged for the day before and have me assigned as advisor to a newly formed “task force” of paratroopers. Thanks to Madame Maurette and the École Internationale, I’d landed one of the most coveted advisory assignments in Vietnam.

The Airborne Brigade was South Vietnam’s best and most cohesive fighting force, six battalions and five thousand men. The Saigon government used it, along with the Marine Brigade, as a “national reserve,” or all-purpose backup: whenever things went to hell in an important province in a battle involving the regular army, the airborne or marines would be sent to the rescue—and this happened often. Many of its officers and NCOs were tough old pros who had been fighting communists since before Dien Bien Phu. While they welcomed our presence and U.S. military aid, they never missed an opportunity to remind us that this was their war. On my very first night in the jungle, Captain Hop, the chief of operations for the task force I was assigned to, told me that he’d rather see his children dead than in the hands of the communists, and added without rancor, “You advisors come here and fight, but after a year you can go back to your peaceful homes. But this is our home and we’re fighting for our survival.”

Some of the airborne officers viewed America’s entry into the war with a kind of ironic detachment. One night, after I’d been in Vietnam several months, I was sharing a bottle of cognac with a task force commander named Major Hao. Suddenly he grinned and asked if I knew he was a Buddhist.

“Of course,” I said, puzzled.

“Well, when I am reincarnated, I want to come back as an American advisor. You have the perfect setup! When we win a battle, the advisor gets a medal. When we lose, the commander gets the blame.”

There were thirty-five of us attached to the Vietnamese airborne, and those based in Saigon shared a villa downtown called the Manor BOQ—“bachelor officers’ quarters.” On the third floor we had a bar and dining room, and we all chipped in to pay Gun, our Chinese cook, who fixed fantastic meals. We lived like soldiers of fortune: we’d go through harrowing experiences with our units in the field, but when the action ended we’d come back to Saigon, where there wasn’t much to do but party and stand by for the next crisis. The battalions would return to their bases at Tan Son Nhut airport or outside Saigon, rearming themselves and training new recruits, but their commanders were so skilled and experienced that they didn’t need our help. We remained on alert twenty-four hours a day, and when the call came for our units, we’d pack our rucksacks, hop in a jeep, race to airborne headquarters at Tan Son Nhut, and fly into battle. Once in the field we lived as Vietnamese: we ate what they ate, slept where they slept, wore the same uniform, and suffered the same hardships. We were much more involved with our Vietnamese counterparts than many of the U.S. advisors attached to regular units. They typically worked with the Vietnamese only by day; at night they usually returned to the relative safety of American compounds.

I came to Vietnam pumped up for battle, but the enemy I faced in my first outing, in mid-July, was the climate. We were assigned to open up and secure a stretch of Route 19, which was the main road running across Vietnam and through Pleiku, a provincial capital in the central highlands about 230 miles north of Saigon. It was commonly referred to as la rue sans joie (“street without joy”). From the air the terrain along the highway looked flat, but once under the triple-canopy vegetation, we encountered one huge ravine after another, coated with slippery mud. We had to probe each ravine to make sure it did not harbor Vietcong. We moved in single file, skidding down into dirty water at the bottom of each slope, then clawing our way up the other side. Huge elephant-eared plants held in the sweltering heat, mosquitoes whined in our ears, and bizarre-looking insects dropped on us from the jungle canopy.

I began to have doubts about how well suited I was to this work. I’d been told that Vietnamese soldiers lacked endurance, but I’d be halfway up a ravine, panting and drenched with sweat, and watch a scrawny paratrooper packing a hundred pounds of mortar ammunition on his back breeze by with a smile. One word I’d learned was nuoc (“water”). I’d turn and gasp, “Nuoc!” and my driver, Sergeant Hung, would struggle forward with an oversize canteen. Hung had served with the airborne since the days when it had been the French colonial parachute battalions. He thought he’d finally landed a soft job in the rear when he was assigned to be my driver—he didn’t realize that Vietnamese drivers were expected to accompany their advisors into the field, carrying their equipment. He and I had gotten off on the wrong foot because I’d insisted on bringing a huge, clumsy rucksack stuffed with regulation U.S. Army gear—a sleeping bag, a jungle hammock, multiple changes of clothing, and so on—and Hung had to carry it. (On my back, I carried a heavy radio, since my primary responsibility in battle was to serve as a one-man fire coordination center. Most of the firepower available to support our missions was American, so it was my job to call for artillery barrages, helicopter gunship attacks, and Air Force strikes if we needed them; make sure the pilots or gunners knew where we were; adjust their fire so it rained down on the enemy and not on us; and finally, coordinate the resupply and medevac helicopters during lulls in the fighting.) As we marched, Hung complained constantly in Vietnamese about the vast quantity of water I consumed—I later found out his nickname for me was “water buffalo”—and his buddies were cracking up.

The way the South Vietnamese airborne operated in the field was totally unlike anything I’d seen in the U.S. Army, and I found a lot to admire about it. For one thing, the Vietnamese ate better and more sensibly than U.S. troops. When we set out on a march, each man had live ducks and chickens tied to his belt, with their beaks taped so they couldn’t make noise. He also carried in his rucksack pork and beef from freshly slaughtered animals and cans of sardines, and wore across his chest a long brown fabric tube packed with rice. The staple was always rice, but you could gauge how long we’d been in the field by what was served with it for dinner: the first few days we ate pork; the next few days beef; then chicken and duck for several more days. At around the twenty-day mark, when the mission generally ended, we were down to the canned sardines; any longer than that, unless we were resupplied, we would eat only rice and whatever leafy vegetables we could forage from the jungle and boil. We ate sitting cross-legged on the ground around the communal rice bowl and meat dishes, which were seasoned with fermented fish oil called nuoc mam. It was standard lore among Americans in Saigon that nuoc mam tasted vile, but most of them had never tried it. I thought it was great!

By the end of that first twenty-five-mile march, which took fourteen hours, I was beginning to fit in. We set up our command post in the jungle above the highway and camped for several days, while a South Vietnamese engineer battalion repaired bridges the VC had damaged, and supply trucks began to roll. Sergeant Hung and I had long talks in pidgin French about our families, our countries, and most of all my equipment. Once I had promised to replace it with lighter, Vietnamese-style gear, he and I became friends. Toward the end of our operation, the engineers invited the airborne officers down for a bridge-blessing ceremony. We were each given a glass with a large belt of scotch. We then watched as the engineers slaughtered a pig and filled the glasses the rest of the way with blood, and then made a toast. My year in Tehran had taught me what was expected, so while the engineer battalion’s U.S. advisor wouldn’t touch his drink, I gulped mine down, toasting the completion of the bridge. My Vietnamese counterparts were surprised and pleased. They later told me that the engineer battalion commander had meant to embarrass the Americans present and that by my action I’d brought great credit to the airborne. Simply by drinking that toast of scotch and blood, I’d begun building ties that would prove vital in battle.

During the last week of July, we were ordered to carry out a mission for Major General Vinh Loc, the commander of II Corps of the South Vietnamese army, headquartered in Pleiku. Vinh Loc wanted us to drive the Vietcong away from a South Vietnamese special forces camp, Duc Co (which we pronounced “due koh”), that sat in the so-called 24th tactical zone at the western end of Route 19, where the road crossed into Cambodia. Duc Co had been established to prevent guerrillas from coming across the border, but the camp had been more or less under siege all summer and the guerrillas had gained the upper hand. Nobody knew how many enemy were in the camp’s vicinity, but the estimate was two VC battalions—about seven hundred men.

I was impressed when I saw the operation order: it was written in letter-perfect U.S. Army style by the Vietnamese commander of the 24th tactical zone (one of Vinh Loc’s subordinates) and his American advisors. They’d seemingly thought of everything—the order called for a twenty-minute air strike to drive back the enemy, then we were to make a mass helicopter landing in a field about seven miles northeast of Duc Co. An air strike was standard procedure before a helicopter assault, because helicopters are like ducks: easiest to shoot just as they get ready to land. So the last thing any helicopter-borne soldier wants is for the landing zone to be “hot,” or under fire, when he comes in. From the LZ we were to attack west on foot to the Cambodian border, then south in a wide arc around the camp. The order gave us an “air cap” of fighter-bombers, support from “all available artillery,” and, as our reserve, a battalion of Vietnamese rangers stationed at the airfield in Pleiku.

We had forty-eight hours to prepare our men. I spent the night helping the task force commander, Major Nghi (pronounced “knee”), plan the ground operation. The brother of a famous war hero, Nghi was a peculiar character who was horribly scarred from a training accident in which he had mistaken an incendiary grenade for a smoke grenade and set it off in his hand. While he briefed the troops the next morning, I went to the U.S. air section at Vinh Loc’s headquarters to double-check on the strike. But the guy at the desk gave me a blank stare and said, “We don’t know anything about an operation at Duc Co.” When I read him the order—twenty minutes of air strikes—he insisted they’d received no such request. “By the way,” he said, “if you’re going tomorrow, you won’t have any air, because we need forty-eight hours to line up the planes.”

I thought, “Holy smoke, I’d better get some artillery.” I went to the office of the fire-support coordinator, showed two guys there my order, and asked, “What artillery is in that area?” They laughed!

“Do you know what ‘available artillery’ is?” said one. “There’s one mortar tube inside the special forces camp.”

“Yeah, but don’t depend too much on that,” added his partner, “because they only have twenty rounds of ammunition left!” They were a regular comedy team.

It was standard procedure to reconnoiter the LZ with the helicopter flight leader who would command the air portion of the mission. We flew to Duc Co low-level all the way to keep from attracting enemy ground fire, and found out there was no LZ—there were too many trees. The staff officers had simply taken a map and picked a spot that looked like a clearing; but in the jungle, yesterday’s clearing is today’s forest. We found the nearest open field on the other side of Duc Co, about fifteen miles away.

I started to panic. The 24th tactical zone commander and his advisors had issued a textbook order, but apparently no one had bothered to see that it was carried out. When I got back to Pleiku, I stopped for a quick bite at the snack bar and, happily, ran into Captain Paul Leckinger, who was the advisor to the ranger battalion that was scheduled as our reserve, and whom I knew from Fort Benning. I told him how worried I was about the attack and said, “Well, at least you’ll be there if we need you.”

He gave me a funny look. “What are you talking about? My battalion has just come back from three weeks in the field. We sent them all home to their villages for a break. We couldn’t get them back together in less than three or four days.”

By now it was seven o’clock at night, and we were supposed to attack early the next morning. I went to find Major Nghi. Nghi’s eyes got wider and wider as I told him what I’d discovered. Nghi was not known as a great commander—a couple of my fellow advisors had warned that he owed his job to political connections—but he understood we were in bad shape. “What do you advise?” he asked.

“I advise that we not go! We need a forty-eight-hour delay to sort some of this out.” Nghi agreed. He notified his headquarters in Saigon, then reluctantly called General Vinh Loc.

As they talked on the phone, I could hear the general screaming at him all the way across the room. Nghi looked very unhappy as he hung up. He said we’d been ordered to a ten P.M. meeting at the general’s house and explained nervously that Vinh Loc was not only an important general, but also a Vietnamese prince who expected unquestioning obedience.

The general lived in a colonial mansion in downtown Pleiku. We were ushered into a large marble-floored hall, at the far end of which was a semicircular elevated platform. Vinh Loc was seated in the middle; next to him was his U.S. advisor, a full colonel; and along the semicircle was an array of Vietnamese generals and colonels and their U.S. advisors. It looked very much like a military tribunal. In front of the platform were two chairs—one for Nghi, one for Schwarzkopf.

Vinh Loc started off by demanding, in Vietnamese, “How dare you say you’re not going to attack tomorrow?” Major Nghi explained that he had requested the postponement on the recommendation of his American advisor. So Vinh Loc turned to his own advisor, the U.S. colonel, who turned to me: “Captain! How dare you tell them not to attack!”

I said, “Sir, we do not have air support, we do not have artillery support, we’ve had to switch to a completely new landing zone—which means we don’t have a ground tactical plan—and we don’t have a reserve.”

“For crying out loud, it’s just a couple of VC battalions! And what do you mean, you don’t have any air support? If you get in trouble, we’ll divert airplanes from someplace else. That’s the way we operate.”

I kept my voice as steady as I could. “And what about the air strike on the LZ before we go in?”

“You don’t need it. There’s nobody out there.”

“Sir, I just don’t consider that adequate air support.”

The colonel was seething. He narrowed his eyes, leaned forward, and said sarcastically, “Well, Captain, just what do you think would be adequate air support?”

I was pretty angry, too. “Sir, when it’s my ass out there on the ground, about a hundred B-52s circling overhead would be just barely adequate. Now, I’m willing to settle for something less, but I’m not willing to settle for nothing.”

I had only been in Vietnam a month and a half and had never been in combat. But I knew that what Vinh Loc and the colonel were pressuring us to do was wrong, and if I was really there to advise the Vietnamese, I had to tell the truth. The colonel went on and on, at one point calling me “an embarrassment to the United States of America.” But I held my ground. I understood that he and his subordinates had not seen battle in Vietnam, either—they were all rear headquarters types—and, moreover, that it had been their responsibility to see the operation order through. Finally he snapped, “Captain, you’re obviously not suited to this job. You’re relieved of your duties.”

“Sir, I’m sorry. You’re not in my chain of command. The only one who can relieve me is my senior advisor.”

In an absolute rage, he screamed, “Get me his senior advisor on the telephone!”

It was now 11:30 at night, but they somehow tracked down Colonel Naughton in Saigon. He listened to what we each had to say, then told the colonel, “I support Captain Schwarzkopf, and my Vietnamese counterpart here supports Major Nghi. All we ask is a forty-eight-hour delay.”

The next morning Colonel Naughton himself arrived, surveyed the situation, and declared I was right. As it turned out, we needed seventy-two hours to prepare the attack properly. The staff in Pleiku kept saying, “It’s only two battalions of VC, for crying out loud.” As far as they were concerned, H. Norman Schwarzkopf was the world’s biggest pain in the ass. But Naughton did one other classy thing: orders had come through to promote me to major, and he pinned on my new rank, on the spot.

On the night before the attack we camped in a huge field halfway between Pleiku and Duc Co. At dawn a massive flight of forty helicopters arrived. As I climbed on a ship with eleven Vietnamese soldiers, my mouth went completely dry—a sign of the adrenaline surging through my system. Soon we lifted off—and our helicopter clipped a tree, the only tree in the entire field, fluttered forward, and crashed into the jungle just off the end of the pickup zone. We were badly banged around but nobody was actually hurt, so we walked back to get a ride on the second lift. Meanwhile, the first lift had arrived at Duc Co—one of the refinements we’d made in the plan was to land on the airstrip right next to the camp—and despite the fact that we’d gotten our advance air strikes, the pilots radioed that they were under mortar fire. The LZ was hot. Now my mouth was really dry. As we flew in I could see a sunbaked red clay airstrip surrounded by jungle on three sides, with the camp in a clearing to the south.

Mortar rounds started falling around us as we landed, but no one was hit as we ran up a small incline and into the camp. Duc Co itself wasn’t much to look at—a triangular barbed-wire enclosure smaller than a football field. It had obviously taken a pounding. I could see craters and caved-in bunkers everywhere. An American second lieutenant was waiting for me. He introduced himself as the camp advisor—I don’t think I’d ever met a happier man. For weeks he’d been out here with fifty South Vietnamese, constantly getting reports that they were about to be overrun; we represented his salvation.

The next day we moved out of the gate on the north side of the camp and began our two-day sweep. The plan was still to work our way west to the Cambodian border, then turn south, and finally circle back to the west side of the camp. By midafternoon we’d covered ten or twelve miles across the same tough jungle terrain we’d encountered in our earlier operation along Route 19. Major Nghi and I walked with the 3rd Battalion, which had three advisors—First Lieutenant Chuck Gorder, a young ROTC graduate, up at the front of the 500-man column; Captain Mike Trinkle in the middle of the battalion with us; and Sergeant Vince Romano, a World War II and Korea veteran who worked the rear. Even farther back was the 8th Battalion, which had its own three-man advisory team headed by Captain George Livingston, Jr.

We were within a few miles of the Cambodian border when I heard firing up front. I radioed the lieutenant and said, “Gorder, what’s going on?”

“Sir, it’s VC!”

“Gorder, I know it’s VC. How many VC are there? What’s their disposition?”

“Sir, all I know is there’s a whole hell of a lot of them! We’re getting fire from all sides and we’re taking casualties!”

We returned fire and I called in some helicopter gunships that drove the attackers off. Finally we moved up to Gorder’s position at the edge of a clearing. Three paratroopers had been killed. Unlike some other South Vietnamese units, the airborne went to great lengths to return soldiers’ bodies to their families. Several soldiers carefully wrapped each dead man in a poncho; then they tied cords around the neck and ankles, suspended the bodies on poles, and prepared to carry them with us. But when a U.S. Army helicopter landed with the fresh ammunition I’d requested, the Vietnamese soldiers decided to load the corpses on the helicopter for the return flight to Pleiku. “No bodies!” the crew told them, and tried to push the bodies off while the pilot revved his blades. I ran over and climbed on the skid next to the pilot’s window. He was a captain. I shouted, “What’s going on?”

“We don’t take bodies in this helicopter. They get blood and shit all over the flight deck.”

“Hey, we’ve got to get these bodies out of here. If we don’t, we have to carry them.”

“I don’t give a shit. We ain’t takin’ bodies out.” If those had been dead Americans, I knew he wouldn’t have thought twice, and that burned me up.

“Let me tell you something, sport. Either you take those bodies or you stay here on the ground, because I’m not gonna get off this skid. If you take off, I’m gonna fall off this airplane and die. Are you willing to take responsibility for that? And second, if you try to take off, I’ll shoot your ass!” Either he didn’t realize I was bluffing, or the fact that I was a major focused his attention: they loaded the bodies on.

Without knowing it, I’d endeared myself forever to the South Vietnamese troops. They saw an American who cared enough about them to climb up on a helicopter skid and make the pilot accept their dead. Word went all the way back to Saigon and up to Brigadier General Du Quoc Dong, the airborne commander. For weeks after I returned to Saigon, American advisors came up and told me they’d heard about the incident from their South Vietnamese counterparts.

We reached the border, marked by a destroyed roadblock, and spent a couple of hours setting up for the night: arranging our forces in a roughly circular defensive perimeter, posting security, digging foxholes for protection from mortar fire, and planning fields of fire in the event of an attack. The night passed without incident, and the next morning we moved out. This time the 8th Battalion led, the 3rd brought up the rear, and our task force group walked right in the middle. We worked our way south along the border on overgrown jungle trails until around noon.

That’s when all hell broke loose. One minute the jungle was quiet. The next we were getting shot at from every direction. A bullet going by doesn’t make a bang; it makes a nasty little crack! which is actually a small-scale sonic boom. All around, I heard crack-crack-crack-crack, but the jungle was so dense we couldn’t see a damn thing. Then we heard a hollow thunk—the sound of a round being dropped into a mortar tube—and knew that round was heading toward us. There was no place to hide; the foliage along the trail was so thick that a man could lean against it and not fall. All we could do was stand and wait until wham! the round hit. Nobody panicked. I was struck by the paratroopers’ almost fatalistic coolness; they’d been under fire many times before. A mortar round would land, someone would mutter in Vietnamese, “That one was close,” and then we would move on as though nothing had happened.

But it was an endless, desperate afternoon; we had walked into a major concentration of enemy forces and they were waiting for us. We knew that if we failed to make it back to the special forces camp by nightfall, the enemy would maneuver into position to annihilate us that night or the next day. Five or six times that afternoon, whenever part of the task force got pinned down, I had to stop to call in air strikes, then wait to make sure the planes or helicopters accomplished their task. Major Nghi, desperate to get back to the safety of Duc Co, became increasingly impatient with me. Finally he and his staff simply left me behind. I waited for part of the 3rd Battalion to come up, ran into Sergeant Romano, and proceeded with him. He’d been through two wars, but looked grim. Every time automatic-weapon fire got close he’d look at me and say, “Holy shit.”

Half an hour later we came under fire from enemy troops blocking the trail ahead of us. I called for another air strike and popped a smoke grenade to mark our position.

“Okay, I see you,” said a pilot. “Where do you want it?”

“I need it about one hundred yards in front of me.”

“Jesus, one hundred yards—that’s awful close.”

“If it’s not that close it won’t do us any good.”

Romano was just ahead of me as the strike came in. We looked up and saw bombs that seemed to be falling straight at us. We panicked and started to run, but collided and fell down. The bombs sailed over our heads and landed in front, exactly as requested.

We finally got back to Duc Co at dark and I caught up with Major Nghi. He was with his staff, building a sandbag bunker. Before I could make an issue of the fact that he’d left me behind, I was confronted with a much more urgent problem. The 8th Battalion had made it back, but Mike Trinkle called on the radio, saying he and parts of the 3rd were still in the jungle, having trouble finding their way in. Meanwhile the troops in the camp, fearful of being overrun, were ready to shoot at anything that moved. I looked at Nghi. “Somebody’s got to find the 3rd Battalion and guide them in.” He just stared at me. “Don’t you have somebody you can send?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll go. Just make sure the camp doesn’t open fire on us.” He looked stunned. Apparently, he felt no obligation to go out, so he couldn’t understand why I did.

As I walked out the gate, I had the same odd sensation that I’d experienced for much of the afternoon: a dissociation from my actions. It was a kind of out-of-body experience, as though I stood watching at a safe remove while Schwarzkopf went back outside the perimeter, at the risk of being blown away. But there was nothing eerie or mystical about it. I was land of on automatic pilot.

I made my way alone west of the camp across a wide clearing, all the while talking to Trinkle on the radio. It was pitch black, so I fired a little red flare to help the men orient themselves. “I think I saw it,” Trinkle said. “Can you pop another?” The enemy was starting to shoot at me, but I did as he asked and moved on quickly. A couple of hundred yards farther into the jungle, I ran across soldiers from Trinkle’s unit and pointed them toward the camp. Finally Trinkle and I linked up and I led the way back in.

We were surrounded. In the space of two days, more than forty paratroopers had died and at least twice that number were seriously wounded. We radioed Pleiku and asked for medevac. “We’re sorry,” the response came back, “we can’t fly out there. Too risky.” Duc Co was in a basin, and airplanes trying to land had to come in over a high ridge where the enemy was dug in. But an Air Force pilot, Lieutenant Earl S. Van Eiweegen, heard about us that night in a Saigon bar and volunteered for the job. The next morning we carried our wounded on stretchers to the airstrip and waited.

The instant his two-engine C-123 turboprop appeared, the enemy opened fire. I didn’t think Van Eiweegen and his three-man crew would make it. By the time the airplane touched down, it had been shot full of holes and was leaking hydraulic fluid from three or four places. The crew tried to lower the tail ramp, but it wouldn’t go down. So we loaded the men on stretchers through the doors on both sides of the airplane as Van Eiweegen kept the props turning. Meanwhile the airstrip came under mortar attack. More people were hurt, and we threw them on the airplane, too. Van Eiweegen sat in the cockpit with his copilot, waiting patiently until I gave the signal. Then he turned the airplane around and took off over the same ridge, getting shot up some more. Even though the plane was seriously damaged, he bypassed Pleiku and took the wounded straight to Saigon, where he knew they’d receive more sophisticated care. His flight was the most heroic act I’d ever seen.

Meanwhile, we had no idea how big an enemy force had hemmed us in. We sent out patrols during the day, and no matter which direction they took, they came under fire. We had U.S. Air Force forward air controllers, affectionately called Red Barons, flying around in Cessna 0-1s, to help direct the air strikes. When one checked an area a few miles away, I heard him exclaim, “Jesus! The whole field moved!” He’d seen hundreds of enemy troops with branches tied to their backs as camouflage, running for cover before the bombers arrived.

Peter Arnett, at the time an AP reporter, was in Duc Co for the first three days of the siege. After shooting lots of film, he told me he wanted to leave to file his story. One of the South Vietnamese battalion commanders had been seriously wounded and I persuaded Pleiku to try a medevac flight at night. “You can come in with your lights off and the VC won’t see you,” I said.

To guide the helicopter in, Pleiku instructed me to position four men with flashlights at the corners of the landing pad. Holding one of those flashlights took nerve: a sniper might shoot you. I told Arnett, “Okay, if you want a ride, you have to hold one of these.” We brought the wounded man out to the landing zone and listened as the helicopter began its descent. Over the radio the pilot told us, “I can’t see your lights. How about shaking them so I can pick them up?” I called out that instruction to the others around the pad. A voice in the dark replied, “I don’t know about you guys, but my flashlight’s been shaking ever since we got out here.” That was Arnett. The helicopter landed safely and he was able to leave.

Each night we went to bed with the conviction that the camp would be overrun and we would be killed. I learned to sleep with one ear cocked, because I knew that at some point every night there would be a mortar barrage. The thunk of the rounds dropping into the mortar tubes was audible hundreds of yards away, and when I heard that sound I knew I had maybe eight seconds to make it to a foxhole. Many nights I’d find myself sprinting for my foxhole without quite knowing why, but sure enough, explosions would erupt all around. In the morning we would wake up with relief and the realization that we might make it after all.

As the days went by, conditions in the camp became grim. Early on, the mortars destroyed the water tank. Although there was a watering hole outside camp, the enemy knew about it; so when we needed water, we had to send a platoon to fight its way down and back. Food ran low, but when the airborne tried dropping fresh supplies, the planes stayed so high that the wind blew the parachutes outside the perimeter. We asked them to stop, because all they were doing was feeding the enemy. We were soon down to rice and salt. Sometimes Sergeant Hung would crawl out through the wire and come back with a certain kind of root he’d dig up in the jungle. It looked like a big turnip, and could be eaten raw, so we’d sit with our rice and pass the root back and forth, taking bites.

Finally, after about ten days, a task force of South Vietnamese marines arrived from the east to relieve us. The enemy, which had by now been identified as two full regiments of North Vietnamese regulars—several times as numerous and much better trained and equipped than the two Vietcong battalions we’d expected to fight—turned to ambush the marines before they reached the camp. A battle erupted and the marines forced the communists back to their sanctuary across the Cambodian border. Our daylight patrols stopped getting shot at, and planes were able to fly low enough to air-drop supplies.

A radio call came from a staff officer in Pleiku, and I was asked for an enemy body count. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I told him. “We didn’t stop to count, for crissakes. We were fighting through them trying to get back to the camp.”

“Well, give us your best estimate, because we’re required to report a number.”

I called the battalion advisors, who said things like, “I don’t have any idea. But my Vietnamese counterpart says maybe fifty.” I compiled those guesses and called Pleiku. “Look, I have an estimate. It’s one hundred and fifty. But I want you to understand that I have no confidence in that number. We pulled it out of a hat.” When the official report went in, it said, “Body Count: 150.” I felt like I’d been party to a bureaucratic sham.

Meanwhile, we had about twenty of our own corpses lying by the runway starting to putrefy and the medics were telling me we had to get them out for health reasons. U.S. Army helicopters from Pleiku were crisscrossing the sky above the camp, though still high up because they thought it was too risky to land. That made me crazy and for the first time I lost my temper in public. All the tension and fear of the last two weeks came boiling out and I got on the radio screaming, “You sons of bitches! We gotta get these fucking bodies out! Why won’t you come down and help us?” Naturally it was a violation of radio procedure to use profanity.

A helicopter finally did land—and out climbed Vinh Loc’s senior advisor, the colonel who’d wanted us to carry out our assault without support. “Who made that last radio transmission?” he demanded. The answer was obvious—I was the only person with a radio on his back—and I wasn’t about to take any crap from him. When he saw me he became very conciliatory, which was lucky for me because otherwise I’d probably have done something that would have gotten me in serious trouble. He said, “Major, I know that in the heat of battle you can get carried away, but you’ve got to maintain your self-control and not scream at people on the radio.”

“Goddammit, sir, I’ve got to get these bodies out of here.”

“Don’t worry. Well take care of it,” he said, and ordered two more helicopters in. We had to carry the bodies and load them on ourselves, because they reeked and the crews wouldn’t touch them. As we picked up one, a mixture of putrefying body fluids ran out of the poncho and over my arms. When we finished I washed and washed and washed, but the smell seemed impossible to get off.

The colonel had an unstated motive for landing in the camp. He’d evidently scheduled a major briefing at Duc Co to review the siege for a high-ranking general and needed to check out the facility. The next morning the colonel came back with his entire Pleiku staff. They descended on us wearing clean, starched uniforms and beautifully shined boots, carrying their map boards and overlays and easels and pointers. When they ousted the camp commander from his building to get ready for their briefing, I sat wondering, “How the hell do they know what happened at Duc Co? They weren’t here!”

Soon the sky filled with helicopters. Only one of them contained the general and his staff—the rest were full of reporters and cameramen, who walked into the camp and ignored us standing there dog-tired and filthy from two weeks of combat. They looked at us, through us, and away from us all at the same time. Then they went inside for their briefing.

Eventually the general and the colonel emerged. The colonel said to him, “Sir, this is Major Schwarzkopf, who was the senior advisor on the ground.” The general came over and recoiled a little because I hadn’t had a change of clothes in a week and had been handling bodies and stank. Meanwhile, the cameramen had followed and several reporters came up with microphones. “No, no,” the general said. “Please get the microphones out of here. I want to talk to this man.”

I’m not sure what I expected him to say. Maybe something like, “Are your men all right? How many people did you lose?” or “Good job—we’re proud of you.” Instead there was an awkward silence, and then he asked, “How’s the chow been?”

The chow? For chrissakes, I’d been eating rice and salt and raw jungle turnips that Sergeant Hung had risked his life to get! I was so stunned that all I could say was, “Uh, fine, sir.”

“Have you been getting your mail regularly?”

All my mail had been going to my headquarters in Saigon and I assumed it was okay. So I said, “Oh, yes, sir.”

“Good, good. Fine job, lad.” Lad? And with that he walked off. It was an obvious PR stunt. He’d waved off the microphones, but the cameras were still whirring away. At that moment I lost any respect I’d ever had for that general. The next night, back in New Jersey, the local TV station called my mother and told her that her son was going to be on the evening news. She watched the report, and until the day she died, she always spoke glowingly of the wonderful general she’d seen talking to her son in Vietnam and bucking up his morale.

I’d gone to Vietnam for God, country, and mom’s apple pie. But by September I was fighting for the freedom of my South Vietnamese companions and friends. We airborne advisors often provoked the scorn of other American advisors working in provincial towns like Pleiku and Kontum. They thought we were crazy to decline invitations to sleep inside their safe, air-conditioned compounds.

“No, I’m sorry,” I’d say. “We stay with our unit.”

“You what? You stay out there with the gooks?”

“Yeah, we stay out. And don’t call them ‘gooks.’ They are South Vietnamese military.”

“How do you know those little fuckers aren’t gonna walk off and leave you at night?”

“They won’t. We’re members of their unit!” And they never did. The other Americans’ disbelief was partly a rationalization for not exposing themselves to danger; but to be fair, some of the units to which they were assigned were not nearly as competent militarily as ours. I was confident staying with the airborne because I had no doubt about their ability to fight and their concern for my well-being.

I felt more fulfilled than I ever had before. I was glad to be in Vietnam and happy at my work, helping men I liked and respected fight for their country and their freedom.

But the war was already changing from a mainly regional conflict to a struggle between North Vietnam and the United States. On General Westmoreland’s recommendation, President Johnson was pouring in hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops—at least six divisions during my tour of duty alone—and all over South Vietnam, U.S. Army bulldozers and cement mixers and cranes were carving out roads and building command posts, airfields, helicopter pads, and logistical bases. Brand-new harbors were going in along the coast. While I wasn’t involved—it all seemed part of another war—the kind of fighting in which we engaged soon reflected this dramatic shift.

Hanoi’s answer to the mass influx of Americans was to increase its own force in the South. The North Vietnamese had never before sent large units into South Vietnam, and the guerrillas in the South generally avoided attacking large concentrations of U.S. or South Vietnamese troops. But in the late summer and autumn of 1965, Hanoi radically changed its tactics. Three army regiments—some seven thousand men—massed in the central highlands (we’d stumbled into two of these units at Duc Co, as they were crossing from Cambodia into South Vietnam). Their plan was to sweep down from the highlands onto the heavily populated coastal plains near Qui Nhon, thereby cutting the country in half. That attack was thwarted in mid-November, when the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) crushed a large part of the communist force along the Ia Drang River (pronounced “ee drang”), south of Duc Co. In what came to be known as the Ia Drang Valley campaign, helicopters were used for the first time to maneuver large American units in battle. It was a landmark in modern warfare and also a landmark for me, because it introduced me to the most brilliant tactical commander I’d ever known.

Colonel Ngo Quang Truong was General Dong’s chief of staff. He did not look like my idea of a military genius: only five feet seven, in his midforties, very skinny, with hunched shoulders and a head that seemed too big for his body. His face was pinched and intense, not at all handsome, and there was always a cigarette hanging from his lips. Yet he was revered by his officers and troops—and feared by those North Vietnamese commanders who knew of his ability. Any time a particularly tricky combat operation came up, Dong put him in command.

The airborne was alerted to prevent the North Vietnamese regiments defeated in the Ia Drang Valley from escaping back into Cambodia. I was half asleep in my room at the Manor BOQ after a big meal of curried chicken and beer when the call came to get out to the airport. Truong had assembled an unusually large task force of some two thousand troops to go to the Ia Drang the following morning, and had chosen me as his advisor.

We flew in transports to the red clay strip at Duc Co, my old stomping ground, then by chopper south to the river valley. From the minute we stepped off our helicopters we were involved in skirmishes and firefights. The valley was about twelve miles wide at the point where the Ia Drang flowed westward into Cambodia—and somewhere in those miles of dense jungle the main body of the enemy was on the move. We had landed to the north, and Truong ordered the battalions to cross the Ia Drang and take up positions along the Chu Pong Mountains, which formed a series of steep ridges to the south. It was fascinating to watch him operate. As we marched, he would stop to study the map, and every once in a while he’d indicate a position on the map and say, “I want you to fire artillery here.” I was skeptical at first, but called in the barrages; when we reached the areas we found bodies. Simply by visualizing the terrain and drawing on his experience fighting the enemy for fifteen years, Truong showed an uncanny ability to predict what they were going to do.

When we set up our command post that night, he opened his map, lit a cigarette, and outlined his battle plan. The strip of jungle between our position on the ridges and the river, he explained, made a natural corridor—the route the NVA would most likely take. He said, “At dawn we will send out one battalion and put it here, on our left, as a blocking force between the ridge and the river. Around eight o’clock tomorrow morning they will make a big enemy contact. Then I will send another battalion here, to our right. They will make contact at about eleven o’clock. I want you to have your artillery ready to fire into this area in front of us,” he said, “and then we will attack with our third and fourth battalions down toward the river. The enemy will then be trapped with the river to his back.”

I’d never heard anything like this at West Point. I was thinking, “What’s all this about eight o’clock and eleven o’clock? How can he schedule a battle that way?” But I also recognized the outline of his plan: Truong had reinvented the tactics Hannibal had used in 217 B.C. when he enveloped and annihilated the Roman legions on the banks of Lake Trasimene.

But, Truong added, we had a problem: the Vietnamese airborne had been called into this campaign because of high-level concern that American forces in pursuit of the enemy might otherwise venture too close to the Cambodian border. He said, “On your map, the Cambodian border is located here, ten kilometers east of where it appears on mine. In order to execute my plan, we must use my map rather than yours, because otherwise we cannot go around deeply enough to set up our first blocking force. So, Thieu-ta Schwarzkopf”—thieu-ta (pronounced “tia-tah”) is Vietnamese for “major”—“what do you advise?”

The prospect of letting an enemy escape into a sanctuary until he was strong enough to attack again galled me as much as it would any soldier. Some of these fellows were the same ones I’d run into four months earlier at Duc Co; I didn’t want to fight them again four months from now. So why should I assume that my map was more accurate than Truong’s?

“I advise that we use the boundary on your map.”

Long after he’d issued his attack orders, Truong sat smoking his cigarettes and studying the map. We went over the plan again and again late into the night, visualizing every step of the battle. At dawn we sent out the 3rd Battalion. They got into position and, sure enough, at eight o’clock they called and reported heavy contact. Truong sent the 5th Battalion to the right. At eleven o’clock they reported heavy contact. As Truong had predicted, in the jungle below us the enemy had run into the 3rd Battalion at the border and decided, “We can’t get out that way. We’ll double back.” That decision violated a basic principle of escape and evasion, which is to take the worst possible route in order to minimize the risk of encountering a waiting enemy. Had they climbed out of the valley up the Chu Pong Mountains, they might have gotten away. Instead they followed the low ground, as Truong had anticipated, and now we’d boxed them in. He looked at me and said, “Fire your artillery.” We shelled the area below us for a half hour. Then he ordered his two remaining battalions to attack down the hill; there was a hell of a lot of shooting as we followed them in.

Around one o’clock, Truong announced, “Okay. We’ll stop.” He picked a lovely little clearing, and we sat down with his staff and had lunch! Halfway through the meal, he put down his rice bowl and issued some commands on the radio. “What are you doing?” I asked. He’d ordered his men to search the battlefield for weapons: “We killed many enemy, and the ones we didn’t kill threw down their weapons and ran away.”

Now, he hadn’t seen a damn thing! All the action had been hidden by jungle. But we stayed in that clearing for the remainder of the day, and his troops brought in armful after armful of weapons and piled them in front of us. I was excited—we’d scored a decisive victory! But Truong just sat, smoking his cigarettes.

Working as closely as I did with the South Vietnamese airborne, I saw the influx of U.S. combat units partly through their eyes, and I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I welcomed the added firepower—the 1st Cavalry Division, for example, was wonderful at flying artillery into the jungle and starting to fire right away, which was what enabled our task force to operate as we did at the Ia Drang.

On the other hand, the Americanization of the war disturbed me. We were suddenly going in the wrong direction with the South Vietnamese. It was their country, their battle: eventually they would have to sustain it. I thought we should give them the skills, the confidence, and the equipment they needed, and encourage them to fight. Yet while our official position was that we were sending forces to help South Vietnam fight, the truth was that more and more battles were being fought exclusively by Americans, rather than by United States and South Vietnamese units working together. American officers began saying things like, “These guys can’t handle the war. None of them are fighters. None of them are worth a damn.” (The South Vietnamese Airborne and Marines continued to participate in combined operations with the Americans, but even we could see that supplies and equipment were harder to come by because American units had priority.)

We also tended to lose sight of the fact that we were in somebody else’s country. For example, shortly after its arrival the 1st Infantry Division, the famous Big Red One, took up positions north of Saigon and test-fired its artillery. That was standard defensive procedure, but in this case, it also meant dropping shells onto people’s rice paddies, which left the peasants terrified and offended.

As Washington abandoned the goals of the advisory effort, South Vietnamese soldiers—and their U.S. advisors—came to be treated as second-class citizens. One Sunday in November, I brought my counterpart into an American compound. He was a devout Catholic lieutenant colonel named Kha who had been to school in the United States and while there had discovered corn, which was impossible to find in Vietnam. I’d been eating out of his cooking pots for months, so when I heard that the officers’ club in Kontum, near where we were operating, served canned corn, I immediately invited Kha to lunch, along with a couple of his staff and a couple of my battalion advisors. We were all looking forward to the break in routine. At the gate of the compound I found myself arguing with a military policeman who insisted that Vietnamese were not allowed. I settled that quickly enough (rank), but Kha, who spoke perfect English, knew he was being insulted, and I was embarrassed for both of us. When we got to the officers’ club itself, a manager came over and informed us, “We don’t serve Vietnamese.” Again I settled the matter (size), but throughout the meal my stomach was in knots. I invited Kha to meals after that, but he always politely declined.

Certainly I was not the only American in Vietnam who was impressed by our hosts and sympathetic toward them: there were many others like me who lived with the South Vietnamese, fought by their sides, and learned to regard them with great respect. But we were definitely in the minority. The majority of Americans in Vietnam fell into two groups: members of purely American headquarters and combat units who had no contact at all with the South Vietnamese military, and members of the U.S. advisory detachment who had no direct South Vietnamese counterparts and spent most of their time in offices with other Americans. Since they didn’t know any South Vietnamese, they believed the stories that the South Vietnamese couldn’t fight. Our senior commanders might have been able to set matters straight, but they too had a distorted view: there was no shortage of corrupt and incompetent Vietnamese officers at high levels, and while they were not the majority in the South Vietnamese military, they were the ones our leaders saw regularly.

Throughout the winter of 1965 we worked at a harrowing pace. As a task force advisor, I saw twice as much combat as advisors at the battalion level: the battalions took turns going into action, while task force commanders were almost constantly engaged. The communists had stepped up their attacks against the South Vietnamese army, and airborne units were constantly being plunged into extreme situations. In one operation our casualty rate was more than fifty percent. Over those six months, I fought in six major operations, and the constant exposure to jungle conditions took its toll. I had to be hospitalized twice, once in Nha Trang for malaria and once in Qui Nhon for amoebic dysentery. I was exhausted.

In late January the action shifted to the Bong Son plains, a roughly forty-mile stretch of coastal lowlands north of Qui Nhon that the VC had dominated for years. The South Vietnamese Airborne, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division, and American and South Vietnamese marines were sweeping the area in a coordinated maneuver to reclaim it. Under Lieutenant Colonel Kha, we had been in battle for a week—taking a lot of casualties as we attacked across open rice paddies into villages honeycombed with VC tunnels and bunkers. Everybody was jumpy. Then Kha received devastating news from Saigon, 180 miles to the south, where his family lived. A helicopter gunship parked at Tan Son Nhut air base had accidentally fired a rocket that had flown across the city, gone through a window of Kha’s house, and exploded, killing his eight-year-old daughter. Kha had endured years of war courageously, but when he learned of her death, he broke. He went back to Saigon, and although he remained in the military, he never fought again.

Losing Kha rattled the entire task force, and as we sat for a day in the grim little village we’d just taken, I felt terribly uneasy. Matters grew worse when the airborne medics became very agitated, talking and waving their arms. I went to see what was wrong. They showed me a half dozen emaciated bodies that had been dragged from a Vietcong tunnel, and said that these men had died of cholera. I suddenly was a boy back in Tehran, where cholera was greatly feared, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

That same afternoon I was summoned to Bong Son to meet with Colonel Truong, whom General Dong had wisely sent to take command of the task force. We were to pursue a Vietcong force that was trying to slip away from the coast, westward to the An Lao Valley, long a communist stronghold. The enemy were thought to be in a particular hamlet, and Truong said we would mount an assault the following day, using the task force reinforced with ten armored personnel carriers. Again he pored over his maps late into the night. He’d turn on occasion and say something like: “Look at the terrain here. If we go in from this direction, we run the risk of the enemy being here. What do you think?”

He was still at it when I rolled up in my quilted poncho liner on the ground in the command tent and fell asleep. That night I had a dream. Someone was chasing me through the locker rooms at West Point. I raced down long hallways, one after another, until I came to a dead end. I cringed against the tile wall and whoever had been chasing me whispered, “We are going to wound you.” Not “We are going to kill you,” but “We are going to wound you.” I woke up in a cold sweat. Then I thought, “What a dumb dream,” and went back to sleep.

The next morning the armored personnel carriers arrived, and Truong said laughingly, “You’ve got it easy today. We’ll put our command post in this personnel carrier, and you won’t have to walk.” The APCs were designed so that the top could be opened and troops riding inside could look out, but the Vietnamese were short and had difficulty seeing over the sides. So they’d put down wooden ammunition boxes to raise the level of the floor. My height now became a real disadvantage: standing on those ammo crates, I was exposed nearly to my waist.

The village looked like an island of trees and underbrush in the middle of open rice paddies. Our intelligence had been accurate: the Vietcong were present in great numbers and our battalions came under heavy fire. As we maneuvered forward in the APC, I noticed a tree line on our left. I said to one of the officers, “I sure hope somebody’s cleared those trees.” He assured me someone had, but as we drew parallel, a machine gun opened fire. Suddenly the air around me was going crack, crack, crack and I saw my left arm jerk—I was hit. I squatted down, bleeding heavily. My cheek and eyebrow and eyelid were all lacerated by fragments from bullets that had splattered against the armor plate, and my left eye swelled shut.

Somebody silenced the machine gun. I was in a little bit of shock as a medic bandaged me up. I pried open my eye to make sure I could still see. “Hey, I’m all right,” I thought, even though the wounds hurt like hell. Truong squatted beside me and said, “My friend, if you would like, I will turn the personnel carrier around, and we will go back and get you a medevac. But I don’t want to do that. We’re in the position we need to be in, and I need your help.”

I told him I’d stay. The Vietcong had pinned down our men in the rice paddies and Truong wanted artillery and air strikes to cover our advance. This was standard procedure: the air strike would come first—planes would drop napalm, then bombs, and finally make a couple of strafing runs with their 20-mm Gatling guns; after the planes got out of the way, the artillery would fire; finally, the infantry would charge. But despite all the impressive firepower, we weren’t making much progress. The VC would hide in their tunnels during the shelling, and the lulls in between gave them time to pop back into position to fire on us again.

The attack I outlined for Truong was designed to give the VC no opportunity to shoot back. It began with an air strike, but I told the pilots, “Give me your napalm and give me your bombs, but don’t make strafing runs. The instant you finish bombing, let me know so we can fire our artillery.” I said to the artillery officer, “I want fifteen minutes of artillery falling on top of the village after that. But when you finish, I don’t want those guns quiet. I want you to shift your fire to the open area behind the village, so we cut off their route of escape.” Meanwhile I had helicopter gunships waiting behind our forces, and told them, “The instant the artillery shifts, I want you coming in, straight over our heads, firing to our front directly into the village.” And, I said to Truong, “At that instant, we should order the armored personnel carriers to attack, firing their 50-caliber machine guns. The APCs will advance under the gunships and we’ll take the village.” Truong agreed.

So that’s what we did. Firing continuously we rolled into the village. It was a rout. We killed many VC, and when the paratroopers found the body of one very high ranking officer, they slung it on a long pole and paraded it around triumphantly.

We set up a command post in a hut that was, somehow, still standing, and I took some painkillers and rested. Pretty soon Truong walked in, chuckling and shaking his head. “Thieu-ta lives a charmed life,” he said, repeating what he’d just heard the troops say.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Go outside and look at the personnel carrier.”

I walked outside to where a bunch of sergeants were pointing to a row of bullet marks three inches below the top edge of the armor plate. The sergeants were saying, “Look, the VC aimed right at him and he only got hit by fragments!” I didn’t feel too good about it—if that machine gunner had raised his barrel a single millimeter he’d have cut me in half.

The weather had turned nasty, slowing down the medevac helicopters, and it was night before my turn came. I waited in pouring rain, contemplating the destruction we’d wrought. Trees lay twisted on top of each other in grotesque shapes, flames burned in the background, and as the helicopter came in, its floodlight shined down through sheets of rain flickering with the light of the fires. That surreal scene made me remember my dream. I wondered what I’d do if I dreamed it again, especially if this time the guy in the hallway said, “We are going to kill you.”

I fought one more major battle after Bong Son; by then I’d been awarded two Silver Stars and three Bronze Stars, fought in seven major operations, and survived being shot up once and afflicted by tropical diseases twice. But by the middle of March, when I’d been in Vietnam nine months, our new senior advisor, Colonel Jim Bartholomees, decided I’d seen enough combat. He called me in and said, “You’ve got three months left on your tour, but I don’t want you in the field anymore. I want you to stay in Saigon.”

I was bone tired and didn’t argue. I spent the spring at the Vietnamese airborne division headquarters at Tan Son Nhut air base, still many levels below where major decisions concerning the conduct of the war were being made. While I might have moved from my worm’s-eye view, I was now at a bug’s-eye view. Never, during my tour of duty, would I have a sparrow’s-eye view, much less an eagle’s. I saw a lot of Truong and helped manage the expansion of the brigade into a full division.

Saigon itself had been transformed. When I’d arrived the summer before, the city had still been the pearl of the Orient—a quiet place of acacia trees, sidewalk cafes, and a gracious, relaxed pace. Americans were everywhere, but they fit in, and many had close friends among the Vietnamese. I seldom saw anybody in the street dressed for battle. Soldiers would wear khaki uniforms with short-sleeved shirts, or if they did wear battle fatigues, the clothes were clean and starched. The city had its red light district, called Tu Do Street, but even that was fairly subdued, and there were plenty of bars where you could go for female company with no expectation of sex. I’d often wander into such places with my buddies. While we drank our beers, the bar girls would sit with us, sipping tea that was billed to us as whiskey, which was how we paid for their company. We’d joke with them, play gin rummy and tic-tac-toe, and eventually get up and leave.

But in the spring of 1966, less than a year after my arrival, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge complained to U.S. troop leaders about the “Dodge City atmosphere” their men had created on Tu Do Street. I’d now take a walk there at night and watch trucks roar in from the boonies, drop their tailgates, and deposit troops in filthy jungle fatigues. Pretty soon those guys would be staggering around the streets, swigging bottles of Ba Muoi Ba and La Rue, the local beers, and brawling. Tu Do Street wasn’t fun anymore. And the pearl of the Orient had turned into a bawdy house.

I wanted no part of that scene. I did stay close to the other airborne advisors, but for the most part I was immersed in Vietnamese life. I had a girlfriend named Loan (pronounced “lo-ahn”), a beautiful young woman from a Catholic family in Hue whose father was a professor at the university. My favorite night spot was the Arc-en-Ciel, an establishment that was half fancy nightclub and half Chinese restaurant. It had once been popular with the French Foreign Legion; now the nightclub was filled with American diplomats and reporters, while the restaurant was crowded with Chinese and Vietnamese. I spent my time in the restaurant.

Saigon was still dangerous, with occasional bombings downtown and a lot of violence on the outskirts. That spring the Buddhists rioted and we were ordered to stay home. The only problem was that the main temple was just up the street, and demonstrators clashed with the police right outside our front gate. We breathed tear gas for a week.

I took advantage of my time in the rear to make parachute jumps with the Vietnamese every chance I could. By summer I’d earned my U.S. Master Parachute Wings; I’d also completed three free-fall jumps to qualify for South Vietnamese Jumpmaster Wings, a badge rarely awarded to Americans. (I never liked leaping from aircraft without the reassurance of a static line, but my earning those wings was important to Colonel Truong.)

I was happier than I’d ever been and didn’t want to leave. But when I wrote to the Department of the Army requesting an extension of my tour, it was denied, and I got a blistering note from the head of my department at West Point, saying in effect, “What do you think you’re doing? Have you forgotten you gave your word that you’d come back here after a year? West Point put you through graduate school so you could teach. For the next two years, you are ours.” I had to admit he was right.

The morning I left, when I said good-bye to Sergeant Hung, his eyes filled with tears. I’d never seen a Vietnamese soldier cry. I gave him my pistol, a gesture that violated about a hundred U.S. directives against fraternization with the Vietnamese, but I didn’t care. When I arrived at the airport, part of the airborne was being sent into battle north of Hue. Truong was already on the battlefield. As my plane rolled down the runway, the Americans around me cheered, but I had a lump in my throat. Out the window I could see my paratroopers being loaded onto C-130s. It hurt leaving the men I’d fought with. I felt as if I were abandoning them.