Every night when you’re sleepin’ Charlie Cong comes a’creepin’.
TIM O’BRIEN
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home1
The most pivotal battle in the summer of 1968 didn’t occur in the Mekong Delta, the Central Highlands, or the A Shau Valley. No, the big one happened on August 28, 1968, in Grant Park, in the city of Chicago. Not one U.S. citizen died. But because a bunch of enraged American police officers beat the hell out of a number of outraged American protestors, everybody lost. Repercussions rippled into the headquarters in Saigon, the politburo in Hanoi, and the glacial peace talks in Paris. Over time, slowly but surely, the fateful consequences made it all the way down to 2-47th Infantry, busy running roads and setting ambushes in the monsoon-soaked backcountry of Long An Province. The Johnson administration’s shell-shocked reaction to the January 1968 Tet Offensive ensured the United States would not win the war. One hot, bloody night in Chicago did much to chart the course to final American defeat.2
In embattled Chicago, as nearly ten thousand unruly young dissidents milled in the streets, the fractious Democratic Party nominated their candidate for the 1968 election, Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey (HHH) of Minnesota, a well-known liberal trapped in the giant shadow of LBJ. Johnson sneered that he had Hubert’s “pecker in my pocket.” So it appeared. Regardless of his strong personal misgivings, Humphrey accepted LBJ’s war policy right along with the Democratic Party’s bid for president.3 Johnson’s bankrupt Vietnam strategy hung around Humphrey’s neck like the rotting carcass of an albatross.
Beaming HHH, the self-described “Happy Warrior,” gave his acceptance speech as shrewd dissidents goaded the police outside the Hilton Hotel. Like the North Vietnamese generals planning Tet and Mini-Tet, the chief Chicago activists were willing to trade their blood (well, a bit of it) for maximum psychological impact. Chanting “The whole world’s watching,” the peaceniks and a smattering (a very small one at that) of Black Panthers pelted the Chicago police officers with taunts, insults, profanities, and obscenities. Next came food, garbage, plastic bags of urine, and even feces. Sticks, rocks, bricks, and cement chunks followed.4 The police held their line, but the taut lawmen, many of them military veterans, chafed and leaned forward.
No communist propagandist in Hanoi could have better arranged matters. Of course, they had nothing to do with it. This violent showdown sprang right from the broken heart of the American nation. Having endured enough gabbing, jabbing, and grabbing, Chicago’s men in blue went into action. Squads of helmeted police officers waded into the mob. Truncheons rose and fell. The crowd broke apart. Some supposed ringleaders ended up in paddy wagons. A lot of people on Michigan Avenue found their faces bloodied and their hands cuffed. Members of the news media felt the blows, too. Later, investigators reported 192 law officers hurt, 425 injured demonstrators, and 668 arrests. Tear gas drifted into the posh lobby of the Hilton.5
The so-called police riot appalled and horrified average Americans. The country seemed to be coming unglued. Angry and self-righteous, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley chose to meet the press. He strode to the podium like Westmoreland in the U.S. embassy courtyard after Tet. It turned out about as poorly. In a malapropism that said it all, Daley summarized: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”6
Beyond the debacle in Chicago, other candidates made their case. For the Republicans, Richard Nixon led the ticket. He’d come out of the gate running well, courtesy of a well-organized, traditional convention held in relatively sedate Miami, Florida. The “new Nixon” certainly surprised many, maybe even himself. To many Americans, the old Nixon, “Tricky Dick,” conjured up memories of shiftiness, Red-baiting, and defeats in the 1960 presidential contest and the 1962 California gubernatorial election. But for 1968, he did his homework, big time, as only he could. Character questions aside, nobody doubted Nixon’s brainpower or will. The reinvented Nixon put his finger directly on the twin, intertwined problems of the day: disorder at home and failure in Vietnam.7 By simply acknowledging both impressions—something Humphrey could hardly do without parroting the discredited LBJ or breaking with him in public, both unthinkable—Nixon had done enough. Solutions were left purposely vague.
To deal with the campus uprisings and urban unrest, Nixon borrowed the phrase “law and order” from George Wallace. As his running mate, Nixon chose a tough figure from the April Baltimore riot, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland.8 And he left it undefined beyond that. Race wasn’t addressed, and by not saying much there, he said a lot. The implication came through. Forget Great Society handouts or reconciliation. Lower the boom on longhairs and arsonists, white, black, brown, whatever. Period.
As for Vietnam, Nixon also played coy. Speaking to audiences, he emphasized the need for a new strategy. The doves heard withdrawal. The hawks heard victory. And all opposed to LBJ’s approach, a majority of Americans by mid-1968, understood that Nixon intended to proceed differently. When he talked in public, Nixon tapped his breast pocket, as if the Vietnam plan rested right there.9 Indeed it did. The pocket was empty.
The third candidate for president left no doubts where he stood. George Wallace wanted to turn back the clock, before hippies, before urban insurrections, and before no-win conflicts in small third-world countries. Wallace didn’t bother with policy prescriptions. He threw out the red meat, telling free-loving, foul-mouthed youngsters he had two four-letter words for them: “work” and “soap.” “We need some meanness,” he thundered, and he wasn’t advocating material want. His downscale white audiences, urban ethnics and rural old stock, ate it up. Pollsters estimated that Wallace might earn 20 percent of the vote, carry up to ten states, and throw the election into the House of Representatives.10 Now that could sure bring on a constitutional crisis, and then… well, who knew? Race versus race. Class versus class. Young versus old. Doves versus hawks. The visceral hatred hung out there like a pallid specter, just past the fingertips. And nobody could make it go away.
IN VIETNAM THOSE busy enough lost track of the social insanity back home. From glances at the Stars and Stripes and snatches of bulletins caught on Armed Forces Radio, both Hagel brothers knew things in the United States had gotten pretty bad. But after the horrendous spring rioting and the King and Kennedy assassinations, the rest amounted to more of the same, additional blows to an already punch-drunk national psyche. The street brawl in Chicago made far less of an impact in the ranks of 2-47th Infantry. Soldiers in country knew and they didn’t know. After all, the Hagels and the rest had their own concerns, not least among them staying alive.
Still, news garnered some interest. In the months heading toward the November election back in America, Specialist 4 Chuck Hagel found time to wager a case of beer with First Sergeant Martin Garcia, tough, smart, and glib. From East Texas and “all the way with LBJ,” Garcia dismissed Nixon as “washed up” and “a has-been.” The regular army NCO went with Humphrey. Chuck bet that the Republican would win.11 Neither thought anything of George Wallace. The fiery Alabama populist didn’t have many followers among lifers or conscripts.
WHILE THE STORM CLOUDS built up over Chicago in late July, the Hagels went to Honolulu, Hawaii. There the brothers enjoyed five days of rest and recreation. In theory, they should have already gotten a week off at the Vung Tau center in country. But combat operations took priority, and the trip didn’t happen.
That said, the battalion’s leadership made sure soldiers went on their out of country R&R. As Chuck said, “Once you were on the manifest, you were there.” Although 2-47th stayed active, the two Hagels departed on schedule. Tom was still healing up from his shrapnel wounds suffered on July 3. But he felt good enough to board an airliner with his brother and go to Hawaii.12
In Honolulu, the brothers met mother Betty, brothers Mike and Jim, and their five aunts, too. “They’d all told their husbands that America would not win the war unless they went to Hawaii and made sure that Chuck and Tom had the kind of support they needed,” Chuck joked.13 For five days, all present enjoyed the amenities of a beachfront hotel. They forgot about the war.
At least they tried to do so. The aunts enjoyed Hawaii. The brothers, both the duo from Vietnam as well as Mike and Jim, soaked up the sun and luxuriated in the surf and sand in the lee of Diamondhead. But Betty noticed something. She kept it to herself—why ruin the vacation? But it gnawed at her.
“I had five sisters,” she recalled, “and none of their sons were in.” Betty knew nobody else from Columbus whose sons deployed to Vietnam, other than the Enquists, whose son Arthur John paid the full freight as a scout sergeant in 2-47th Infantry. But what about the rest of the young men of Columbus, Nebraska? As far as Betty could tell, they didn’t go. She knew no other mothers with a son in combat, let alone two. This sure wasn’t World War II, all for one and one for all. This one came down to hooray for me and the hell with you. Those young men who avoided the draft might get some sidelong looks in Nebraska towns. But their mothers slept soundly every night. Betty told herself something she couldn’t yet tell her soldier sons: “I hated the war.”14
The plane cabin on the ride back to Vietnam was as silent as the tomb.
CHUCK AND TOM returned to find First Sergeant Garcia with orders in his hand. They had been supposed to go to the Reliable Academy for NCOs back in June. But then had come the split-base Bear Cat–Long An missions, followed by the jitterbug operations, the major July 3 firefights, and then R&R. The Hagels had been acting NCOs, and good ones, for months. The first sergeant wanted to promote them to real sergeants. But that required two weeks of training at division. Off they went.15
The course mixed classroom lectures with practical exercises. “There wasn’t much they were going to teach us about jungle warfare,” Chuck commented. The division apparently agreed. Most of the course focused on the stuff the brothers and the other young combat veterans did not learn under fire: traditions of the service, key regulations, how to resolve personnel issues for subordinates, how the supply system functioned, and the “big picture” of the division’s structure and function in country. Said differently, the NCO academy taught the Hagels how the army should run.16 Practice in Vietnam sure deviated a lot from theory. And there was a message there, all right.
The brothers later joked that they finished first and second in the course. They certainly performed well enough. Promotion, though, necessitated another step, and not an easy one. Within a week after returning, Chuck cleaned himself up and went before a board of senior NCOs headed by Sergeant Major James W. Beam, the august, forbidding long-term professional who served as the battalion commander’s strong right arm. After reporting to the board, Chuck froze completely. An acting NCO who faced down Charlie daily found his throat dried up as he looked at that lineup of craggy old senior sergeants. After being allowed to regroup, Chuck nailed it. He typically excelled at public speaking, going all the way back to Nebraska days. But not this time, a good reminder for a new sergeant about to go back out on patrol. Take nothing for granted.
A week later, Tom sailed right through his interview. Naturally skeptical, and increasingly disgruntled with both the war and the army fighting it, Tom found himself considerably less overawed by the highly experienced panel. Both men became sergeants, Chuck a week ahead of Tom.17 Age mattered, even in the army.
While the Hagels went to relax in Hawaii and then went on to learn the fundamental ways of the army at the NCO academy, the war went on. At MACV, General Abrams took command. A superb tank commander from World War II, praised by General George S. Patton himself, Abrams came across as the anti-Westmoreland: rumpled, candid, and unimpressed by himself or others.18 He knew on June 11, 1968, the day he took over, that there’d be no more major influxes of U.S. troops, and no real attempt to change the downward trajectory of the American war effort. The Chicago fiasco only underlined that trend. The next significant troop movements would be outbound, regardless of whether Humphrey or Nixon won the U.S. presidency. Wallace’s ravings were ignored.
Perceptive and wise behind his cigar and blunt speech, Abrams shouldered the unwelcome task of losing the Vietnam War as slowly as possible, perhaps salvaging something resembling a draw. He ratcheted back large-scale operations and emphasized day-to-day patrolling. After the excesses of Mini-Tet, Abrams also personally approved use of airstrikes and artillery in cities; he didn’t okay these measures too often. MACV’s maneuver battalions still hunted Charlie—it’s what they did, and a new four-star in Saigon didn’t alter the army’s innate tendencies tracing all the way back to slaying redcoats and tracking Plains Indians. But breaking down into lesser elements did something to meter the pain on South Vietnam’s civil communities. And the small-unit approach might just reduce U.S. casualties, a humane act in a faltering war.19
The NVA and their VC affiliates backed off, too. They’d been beaten up badly in Tet, Mini-Tet, Khe Sanh, Hue, A Shau, and all the rest, not anywhere near the astronomical totals pronounced in Westmoreland’s final days, but crippling losses nonetheless. Time to bring in recruits, reorganize, reequip, and retrain surely made sense.20 And like Chuck and Tom Hagel, the elderly men in Hanoi also read the newspapers. Divided, impatient America in the 1960s paralleled the path of fractured, distracted colonial France in the 1950s. The MACV battalions would be leaving, maybe not in months, but certainly in years, and not many of those either. The U.S. military knew it, and Charlie knew it. So the communists checked the guerrilla handbook. Enemy halts, we harass.
Westmoreland to Abrams marked an adjustment at the MACV level. In the 9th Infantry Division, Major General Julian J. Ewell changed nothing. Rather, he doubled down. Abrams wanted more small-unit operations? Good enough. Jitterbugging filled the bill. A variant, called “checkerboard,” put out individual rifle squads to make contact. Another idea, “night hunter,” used armed helicopters to troll across suspected VC strongholds in darkness. The choppers tried to draw fire. In all of these methods, when the opposition showed himself, the Americans unloaded a world of hurt. Ewell demanded day patrols and night ambushes, “constant pressure,” “tremendous pressure,” “excruciating pressure.”21
Ewell weighed 2-47th Infantry and found the battalion wanting. Sure, 2-47th did great things in Tet and Mini-Tet, roaring into action in and around the built-up districts of Saigon. But how much more of that looked likely? The 9th Infantry Division’s campaign now focused on the wet, overgrown Mekong Delta, an area distinctly lacking in roads. Tower, Van Deusen, and now Scovel—it didn’t matter who commanded. The mech guys lacked some indefinable “it.” It’s one reason the general happily traded out 5-60th Mech for a leg battalion, suitably renumbered to keep the 9th Infantry Division’s books straight. Paratrooper Ewell saw the M113s as the problem. Reliance on tracks curbed the battalion’s mentality. They didn’t like to leave their “horses” behind, and weren’t as able when they did. Not that it mattered. When Ewell ran the numbers—and he did so daily—it made little difference. On M113s, on helicopters, and on foot, 2-47th just could not close the deal with Charlie Cong.22 So Ewell quit asking them to do so.
With the 9th Infantry Division concentrating its forces in the upper Mekong Delta, and moving its main base camp from Bear Cat to Dong Tam southwest of Saigon, it fell to 2-47th to escort the many heavily laden supply truck convoys carrying key equipment and supplies through Saigon down to the new site. The Black Panther battalion also inherited the mundane duty of handing over Camp Martin Cox to the Royal Thai Army. Come September 9, 2-47th relocated permanently and completely into Long An Province.23
There, Ewell assigned the battalion not to a combat brigade, but to the Division Support Command (DISCOM), the service support guys. The supply and maintenance people used 2-47th to secure Dong Tam Base Camp (Bear Cat revisited) and to run the roads, notably Route 4. Emblematic of DISCOM’s rather humdrum sense of itself, 2-47th inherited not some inspirationally named ongoing operation but a routine effort called Kudzu, after the fast-growing nuisance weed found splayed all over roadsides in the American south.24 From the division’s fast, hard-hitting reaction force to gate guards, berm squatters, and truck protectors—how low the mighty had fallen.
For their new role, 2-47th occupied the former 5-60th Infantry camp at Binh Phuoc. That put them just east of the vital Route 4 and within a few miles of the division’s main base at Dong Tam. The troops immediately rechristened their new digs “Been Fucked,” which about summarized the prevailing view of the battalion’s unglamorous realignment under supervision of the herbivores of DISCOM.25 The DISCOM commander worked with Lieutenant Colonel Scovel to figure out the right mix of roadrunning, fence bunker guards, day patrols, and night ambushes to protect Dong Tam and Route 4. As much as they could, 2-47th adopted the approved Ewell tactics: jitterbug, checkerboard, and night hunter. Rueful troops characterized all of these schemes more bluntly: “bait.”26
AS A TRUSTED, experienced NCO, finally wearing the stripes he’d earned many times over, Chuck Hagel drew one of the first night ambushes in the new area. When out at night near the Binh Son rubber groves, 2-47th preferred to go in squad or even platoon strength. This one, though, followed Ewell’s new dictates. Chuck took only three other riflemen. And a radio—to call down the heavens if Charlie showed up.
Night operations in Vietnam juxtaposed each side’s essential ways of war. The guerrillas learned to love darkness. Rightly fearing ubiquitous U.S. jets and helicopters, necessity compelled Charlie to move, resupply, and try to attack in the black hours, which hobbled the pitiless Yankee airpower. To do anything at all, the NVA and VC had to go by night. Habit built experience, and repetition honed skills. Nutritionists argued that the American diet, strong on vitamin A, gave U.S. troops an advantage in seeing things in low light.27 That may well have been. But in terms of learning by doing, all the edge went to Mr. Charles. If he wanted to live, let alone win, he had no other option. That’s why night belonged to Charlie.
For their part, the Americans turned to their preferred solutions. Technologies, some experimental, others tried and true, proliferated: night vision scopes, infrared detectors, ground radars, and people sniffers all played parts. With the high-speed gear humming along, the U.S. then used numbers, dozens and dozens of small foot patrols, to flood the zone. Men with radios linked together orbiting aircraft, ground patrols, and artillery ready to fire.28 When working as advertised, each night saw the upper Mekong Delta arrayed like a pinball machine, with scores of well-positioned ambushes as bumpers, armed helicopters as flappers, and artillery and airstrikes ready to tilt the table in MACV’s direction. Every time Charlie rolled through, he hit something. Then the whole thing lit up, ding-ding-ding, and the scoreboard rang up, body after body. Goodbye, Charlie Cong. Game over.
Well, so went the idea. But it depended on quality ambush work. Picking soldiers for a night patrol drew on those army-preferred alpha male talents Chuck had shown since day one at Fort Bliss. At this phase of the war, with duties onerous and repetitive, contacts infrequent, and way too much alcohol and marijuana available, privates found ways out of missions. Going out in the dark required stealth. So irresponsible soldiers drank too much, or smoked too much, and then bellowed or giggled or screamed like banshees. Those guys could not be used.29
Sometimes Chuck and Tom resorted to their fists to tame such miscreants. One time, Chuck pulled a big soldier away who had belted a smaller man. In the ensuing fisticuffs, they crashed through a screen door. But Chuck prevailed. When it came to that, Tom did too. Bigger and smarter still counted for a lot in the world of aggressive young males.30 By the book, the two sergeants should have written up the misbehaving privates. In Vietnam, though, threatening someone with minor punishments such as the loss of his meager pay or his nonexistent liberty went nowhere. Court-martial took forever to arrange and in the end, more than a few riflemen preferred the secure austerity of Long Binh Jail (three hots and a cot) to the filth and fear of war on foot. So a hard belt to the head sufficed. The officers and senior NCOs made sure not to be around.
Whacking a belligerent, a smart-ass, or a loafer only took it so far. Most guys straightened up and played the game. The outright slackers… well, you didn’t want them outside the wire with you. The war’s hard truth applied. In the end, men volunteered to fight. Chuck knew the reliable ones. He chose three for the night ambush.
The men tied down their gear to dampen any metal-on-metal rattles or squeaks. Each soldier carried his M16 rifle and the usual twenty magazines, each of twenty 5.56mm M16 rounds. They didn’t bring all the extra ammunition and additional water typical for daylight missions. And they certainly left behind their ungainly flak vests. Hagel intended to move handily this night.
Along with his rifle, each man carried two M18A1 Claymore mines, wicked little curved rectangular plates made up of 3.5 pounds of C4 explosive and seven hundred packed steel ball bearings. The mine could be rigged with a trip line, but more often was detonated using an electrical hand-switch, which troops called the clacker, attached by a hundred-foot wire. Squeeze the clacker—“command detonation” in army-speak—and the Claymore, like its Scottish blade namesake, cut quite a swath from about one to six feet above ground level. In open ground, the deadly BBs might zip out fifty yards.31 In thick jungle, ten would be a miracle. But that would work. The Claymores gave Hagel’s team a lot of options.
One capability not available, the five-pound AN/PVS-2 starlight scope, gathered ambient light from the moon, stars, distant man-made illumination, or even bioluminescence. The battery-powered starlight scope could be mounted on a rifle or carried like a telescope. When you looked through it, akin to peering through a toilet paper tube, you saw a narrow circle of the world lit in shades of green. The imagery resembled what you saw when you opened your eyes underwater in a pond rich with algae. Stateside technical engineers estimated a soldier could detect an enemy figure out to four hundred yards.32 Of course, in Vietnamese underbrush at night, seeing anything four hundred yards away seemed pretty unlikely. The AN/PVS-2 wasn’t much. But compared to inky nothing, it made a difference. Decades later, the U.S. military made wide use of many such devices to see, drive, fly, and shoot at night. Hagel’s men could have used a starlight scope. But they didn’t get one. These gizmos were hard to come by in 2-47th. The few on hand went to the battalion scouts and snipers.
As the leader, Chuck shouldered the PRC-25 backpack radio, the 23.5-pound lifeline to higher headquarters, supporting firepower, medevac, and help.33 In essence, the entire ambush revolved around placing a pair of eyeballs and a working radio near Charlie. Everything else—the other three riflemen, the Claymores, the careful preparations—existed to make that single event happen. If it did, the 9th Infantry Division’s constant pressure notched another night success. If not, okay. Coming back in one piece might be nice, too.
The battalion’s intelligence section pinpointed a supposed VC trail for Hagel’s team to watch. It didn’t seem promising. The intel guys predicted a hundred out of every ten enemy routes. Hagel figured this one would go like most—slip out at 10 p.m., work into position, routine radio check-ins, no action, pick up, return around six after sunup, and lose a night’s sleep. Thanks to Ewell’s constant pressure mantra, the next day would see work as usual. Plus, night belonged to Charlie. What the hell. But Chuck Hagel cut no corners. That’s why the officers and senior NCOs trusted him.
The foursome filed out of the wire in complete blackness. No moon shone. Just as well. It concealed the team, and staying hidden equaled staying alive. Lieutenant colonels and majors up at division headquarters joked about live bait.34 The bait weren’t laughing.
Hagel led, navigating and walking point. Before he left, Hagel planned his route on a map, working around the edges of cultivated fields. He kept the team off trails, but he also avoided going with the machete to hew out a path cross-country. At night, that kind of raucous movement sounded like an elephant walk. The officers back at Binh Phuoc discouraged it; they worried about scaring off Charlie. Hagel thought a lot more about the risks of attracting the VC. No sense doing so. He skirted woodlines, staying just inside the trees. Experience paid off. Within an hour and a half, after a final thirty yards or so of slowly working through vines and branches, the team found the designated trail.
It looked like it had once been a lane in a rubber plantation. Looking right and left, Hagel saw straight rows of trees. Thank the French, he figured. With practiced hands, the men set up their Claymore mines, snuggling each against the base of a tree. The army helpfully printed “front toward enemy” in raised letters on the convex side. Well, okay. To keep it idiot proof, and accommodate some of that ever-brewing battlefield entropy, Hagel learned long ago to put Claymores on the likely bad guy side of a wooden tree trunk. That way, if Charlie turned the weapons around (and the sneaky VC did that), you shredded some timber, not your head and shoulders.35
The quartet then backed off, paying out the thin electrical wires. Soldiers allowed the requisite fifteen yards and added a few more. Better safe than sorry. From that far back, prone in the thick vegetation, the team could hear anything on the trail but only barely see it. Hagel gathered the clackers right in front of his arms. He faced the trail, a dark smudge almost seen twenty yards away. The sergeant arranged his men boot to boot. From above, had anyone been looking down from the jungle canopy, the riflemen formed a cross, feet in, heads out. With the radio receiver tight to his ear, Hagel okayed the other guys to sleep—no snoring.36 He’d nudge them if something happened.
The black-plastic radio handset looked like a six-inch-long doll’s telephone. It received as long as the battery remained viable and the sender tuned to the proper frequency. The handset transmitted when you pressed a rubber-covered bar on the side. To avoid yabbering—sound really carried at night—sergeants learned to push the transmit bar to send a message. When depressed, even if no words were said, a rush of white noise followed. The military called it breaking squelch.
Once every thirty minutes, on the half hour and top of the hour, Hagel pressed once. That told the base camp all remained quiet and well, no VC, no trouble. At any time, two quick pushes meant “danger nearby.” Three announced “coming in, don’t shoot.” Four equaled “pinned down, unable to move, hostiles all around.”37 Chuck Hagel hoped very much for a one-push night.
Every thirty minutes, Hagel broke squelch. His head drooped some, but he did not sleep. The trio with him seemed to doze. But not the sergeant. He’d seen what happened when everyone bagged out. Get too comfortable and Mr. Charles might very well help you sleep forever.
The minutes crawled. Midnight. Thirty minutes after. One a.m. One-thirty. Nothing. Various critters, mostly insects, whirred and chirrupped and snapped. Fat warm drops fell now and then, leftovers from the day’s monsoon shower.
Two a.m.
And then, a faint clang.
Clang.
It sounded like a cowbell in a Nebraska pasture. Hagel instantly alerted.
The team leader didn’t wake his mates. He feared a startled reaction, a panicked gunshot, and then…
The clang became regular, and close, maybe a wobbling wheel on some kind of larger crew-served weapon. Charlie owned big machine guns, mortars, and rocket launchers with wheels.38 Hagel thought he heard footfalls, too. He certainly smelled something, or someone. A lot of someones—way more than four.
In the movies, Hagel might have hollered “Geronimo!,” blown the Claymores, and come up with his M16 blazing: very exciting, highly exuberant, and most certainly terminal. But the young sergeant knew enough to realize that such a gesture probably defined futility. The enemy might not be in front of the Claymores. And how many VC were there? Had any enemy flankers spread out?
Hagel waited some more. When the clangs and swishing and odors got really close, he squinted through the lower leaves. Was that a shadow on the trail? Charlie?
The sergeant slowly, very slowly, rolled over and up, facing his three belly-down mates. He tapped each in turn, fingers on a boot, firm but silent. As he did so, he placed a hand over each man’s mouth—gently, a gesture, not a threat. No need to get the guys all cranky. Hagel made his intentions clear. Don’t talk.
Out on the trail, half-heard whispers carried through the still air.39 The metallic tone rang softly, rhythmic, deliberate, possibly a stripped tire going around. Steady shuffling noises grew louder. Someone out there—some VC—just barely coughed.
Hagel touched each of his men. Then the sergeant slid slowly to his belly, M16 in hand. The riflemen figured it out. They, too, flattened onto their stomachs. Chuck slowly, very slowly, crawled away from the trail. Like a human snake, left hand extended to graze the foot of the man in front, the quartet wriggled through the brush. They carried their rifles resting on their right hands, muzzles up out of the dirt. They left the Claymores behind, clackers, wires, and all the rest.40
Hagel made a quick but conscious decision to abandon the PRC-25 radio. He just couldn’t figure out how to heft it back onto his back, or drag it like a boat anchor, without rustling so much foliage that they’d hear it all the way up in Hanoi. The choice greatly aided the foursome’s concealment.41 But it also ensured mission failure—no artillery, helicopters, or air support. And no medevac, reinforcements, or transmissions to get back through the U.S. barbed wire without getting blown into the next province. Military schools often feature classroom debates on life and death decisions. That night, Chuck Hagel made one.
Once they slithered for over an hour, a hundred yards or more by Hagel’s guess, the team stopped in a thicket. The four men sat up back to back, rifles facing out. Nobody slept, or even thought about sleeping. The Americans waited for the sun. Once it became light, Charlie would be long gone. More importantly, in daytime the U.S. guys manning the firebase berm asked questions before opening fire. Chuck Hagel just had to hope the radio watch at Binh Phuoc didn’t do something dumb, like send out a reaction force or vector helicopters overhead. People sniffers didn’t discriminate all that well between U.S. and VC bodies.
The sun came up not long after six-thirty. Charlie’s march column seemed long gone, its noises disappearing more than an hour before the first graying of dawn. Hagel and his wrung-out, stiff soldiers stood up and stretched. Taking point, he led them back to the ambush site. The sergeant checked the map coordinates carefully. He saw the impressions made by his team, and the markings on the trail that many people and something on tires had passed. But no radio, no Claymores—all had been taken. Hagel’s knee trembled uncontrollably as he looked at the spot. As he put it: “Everything was gone.”42
When the tired quartet came into the U.S. base that morning, the officers asked questions. Weak NCOs at times “sandbagged” patrols, going out a few hundred yards and sacking out while pretending to be in the assigned ambush site. Chuck Hagel, though, wasn’t that kind of sergeant. He’d made his decision and that was that. And to their credit, the 2-47th chain of command deferred to the tactical leader. The senior people were disappointed. But they didn’t second-guess, at least in Hagel’s presence. The intel guys at battalion tried to determine which VC outfit Hagel’s men encountered. Naturally, they had no idea.43
The experienced NCOs and officers, the ones who had been out and about with Charlie enough times to matter, knew the deal. Any night ambush had three possible outcomes. If the pinball machine lit and rang, the VC died by the gross and the Americans walked home in triumph. That hardly ever happened, but when it did, it made all the dry holes seem worthwhile. Second, nothing happened and everybody came home tired—the usual result. Third, something very bad occurred.44 Hagel and his men achieved a version of number two. Not the best, they thought, but not the worst.
The worst came not long afterward. Up at division, Ewell and his brain trust tweaked the knobs and directed larger ambush elements. The general thought it encouraged his infantrymen to stand their ground and take more risk.45 On the night of October 3–4 outside Binh Phuoc, a reinforced Company B rifle squad, eleven strong, moved out to a night ambush position. They followed a good route and got into their site without any trouble. The first few radio checks came in loud and clear: one push.
Then nothing.46
All that long night at Binh Phuoc, nobody on duty heard any distant gunfire. Maybe the radio failed. The heat and humidity chewed through batteries, and it had been especially warm and muggy. Perhaps the squad ran into a larger VC force, took a page from Chuck Hagel’s experience, and just laid low. The company commander worried. Well he should. At sunrise, Company B sent out a mounted reaction force, two platoons and the company headquarters. Chuck and Tom Hagel rolled out with this force. The M113s roared to the vicinity of the ambush location.
On the side of a rice paddy off Route 4, three bedraggled figures appeared. PFC Eddie Bivens and PFC John Hodges stood together, both hit, but upright, helping each other. Near them, Sergeant Charles N. Peace, the squad leader, leaned into a tree. He’d also been wounded. With his good arm he waved a strobe light, the perfect means to attract a medevac chopper in darkness. But it was broad daylight. Peace’s eyes had that thousand-yard stare.47 Not good at all.
Mr. Charles made a house call on the U.S. ambush. Eight men lay scattered in the trees, shot to death: PFC Robert J. Bergeron, PFC George M. Clayton Jr., PFC Daniel J. Czajak, PFC Donald R. Gise, PFC Gary G. La Chapelle, Corporal Charles N. Schall, PFC John P. Stepp, and Specialist 4 Danny Williams. In all of that bloody year of 1968, Company B, 2-47th Infantry never suffered a worse blow.48 All the company could do was to pick up the pieces.
The company and battalion officers and senior NCOs tried to put together what transpired. They never could. Possibly the men conked out, run ragged by too many daily iterations of jitterbug and checkerboard and too many nightly ambushes. Or it could be they ran the patrol to standard, and Mr. Charles got lucky. Peace, Bivens, and Hodges offered nothing. What could they say? For the rest of their lives, they’d see those final muzzle flashes. And they’d wonder why they lived, and eight died.
The Hagel brothers had rolled the same dice day after day and night after night. After five Purple Hearts between them, they knew that war, like football, was a game of inches. God or fate or a cosmic random number generator—it mattered not. You could do everything right and lean forward at the wrong instant, or peek around a blind corner, or zig when you should have zagged, and then: “The Secretary of the Army regrets to inform you…”49 That same awful October 4, Chuck Hagel marked his twenty-second birthday. He didn’t feel much like celebrating.
THE REST OF October didn’t go much better for 2-47th Infantry. Both Hagels stayed out in the field, doing their bit to generate Ewell’s constant pressure. The smart guys at DISCOM and Lieutenant Colonel Scovel came up with a brainstorm that placed six ambush patrols out in contested ground every night. By the end of October, the battalion’s exertions ran off most VC mortar and rocket crews, sparing the Dong Tam Base Camp, and thus accomplishing one important goal of Operation Kudzu. Division accounting teams recorded 120 VC killed and 26 captured, but only eighteen individual weapons taken (a disturbing discrepancy shrugged aside), plus twenty-six “structures” destroyed. To do all this cost 2-47th Infantry another seven American lives on top of the eight from October 4 and another soldier lost back in August, a total of sixteen killed in action. The battalion sustained 255 wounded.50 Once more, 2-47th Infantry basically traded its entire field strength to hold Charlie at bay for a couple months. In some MACV circles, that evidently counted as a win.
And speaking of winning, the 1968 presidential campaign limped to its finish line. George Wallace faded into the background, irate to the end. In a salute to his wartime B-29 service, on October 3, Wallace tagged General Curtis LeMay as his number two. It turned out to be a disaster. As a political candidate, LeMay came across as a bellicose crackpot, opining that “there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.”51 Hiroshima or Hanoi—for the old air force general, a target was a target and a weapon was a weapon. Bombs away. That kind of loose talk might go over fine in an air force bomber crew’s ready room. But it scared the hell out of middle-class families in America. LeMay managed the seemingly impossible feat of making George Wallace sound reasonable by comparison. But not reasonable enough.
In the end, Wallace carried five southern states and almost 10 million votes, about 13.5 percent. Most observers thought he damaged the already staggering Humphrey. Even with that, and allowing for the mess in Chicago, Nixon barely edged HHH. The Republican prevailed by a half million, although that narrow popular vote translated to a decent 301 electoral votes.52 Thus Dick Nixon would have his chance to ride the tiger.
First Sergeant Martin Garcia duly delivered a case of Budweiser beer to Sergeant Chuck Hagel. By election day, November 5, Chuck had been given a cushy job in the base camp, running the small enlisted men’s club. He didn’t go to the field anymore. That violated both the letter and the spirit of Julian J. Ewell’s draconic dictates to put every rifleman in the bush. But Garcia just did it.53 He thought it was right. And in the infantry, the word of the first sergeant is final.
Chuck had a month to go. Tom had three. Even though he arrived only six weeks behind his brother, the younger Hagel had to extend two weeks to be sure he could get out as soon as he made it home. The army let draftees leave the service if they had 150 days or less left in service. When Chuck departed on December 4, he’d make it just under that five-month wire. But Tom needed an extra two weeks in Vietnam to be sure.54 It seemed crazy. Yet in the words of the troops in country: there it is.
Chuck considered extending to stay with Tom. But his brother refused to permit it. He stood up to his fellow sergeant in no uncertain terms. “No,” Tom said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Our mother is expecting you home. You need to do that. I’ll be fine.”55 So Chuck left on schedule.
But Tom Hagel would not be fine.