by Dennis Foley
While Hollister and Shaw supervised all of the training, Captain Michaelson took care of the replacement problem by recruiting new team members from the Brigade’s three infantry battalions. He was even able to root out a machine gunner from the Military Police company. His training was even tougher with the kidding he took from the LRPs about being an ex-MP.
On the third day of training Hollister was called in from the firing range to meet the two new lieutenants who had volunteered to spend the second half of their tours with the LRPs. Lieutenant Virgil was a former weapons platoon leader, an ROTC grad who had gone to the Citadel and was a graduate of Airborne and Ranger schools. His enthusiasm for the LRPs was enhanced by the fact that he and Lucas had been roommates back in jump school. Hollister liked him immediately.
Lieutenant Rogers had been a rifle platoon leader and, like Hollister, volunteered for the LRPs to avoid a job as the Civic Actions officer in his old battalion. He would be the only black officer in the detachment.
Captain Michaelson had already delivered his welcoming pitch, so he turned them over to Hollister to get them oriented and quickly integrated into training. Rogers would take over the first platoon, and Virgil would eventually replace Hollister.
Hollister welcomed the duo and started to run down a list of things that they still needed to do to get fully aboard. The complexities of in-processing into any unit were a necessary evil, but the nonstandard nature of the LRP Detachment made things that much more complicated. Before a man could go to the field he had to have the right equipment; his mail had to be forwarded to him; he needed to make sure Finance knew were he was; he had to fill out endless pieces of paper; and most of all, he needed a rack.
Hollister turned to Bernard, who was answering most of the questions. “Anyone put any thought into where we are going to put these folks?”
Bernard made a face; Hollister knew he wasn’t going to like his answer. “Sir, all we have is your hooch. But I sent a runner over to Supply to get another cot.”
“Well, that’s sure gonna be tight.”
Easy piped up from across the room. “Sir, we’re working on scrounging some construction materials to see if we can’t make your place a little larger.”
“Thank you, Top. I hope we can do something before we kill each other in there.”
“I’m on the case, Lieutenant,” Easy said, cranking the ringer on the side of his field phone, the receiver cradled in the crook of his neck.
“I’ll take ’em with me now. If you are finished with them,” Hollister said to Captain Michaelson.
“There’s a shitload of things to do. So take charge of these two and move ’em out. I’ll catch up with you all at chow.”
The three lieutenants saluted Captain Michaelson and left.
Michaelson turned around and started for his office. He caught a small expression of disapproval on Easy’s face. “Problem, Top?”
“Oh, nothin’, sir. Just this damn paperwork.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Michaelson said.
“No sir—I was just thinking about the day Lieutenant Lucas signed in.”
Michaelson knew what Easy meant. He too was hoping that Virgil and Rogers would have a better tour than Lucas’s had been. “I’m sure that you can be some help to them.”
“Yessir. I’ll do what I can,” Easy said, shuffling paperwork—his eyes locked on to Michaelson’s. “Hope I’m better at it this time.”
Training picked up momentum, and the necessary assignments were made. The old-timers in the platoons were still tentative around the two new officers—feeling them out. And the replacements had been assigned to the vacancies in the shorted teams.
The entire detachment spent the few available days relearning demolitions, weapons, fire support, immediate action drills, rappeling, map reading, prisoner handling, and a healthy ration of cross-training. Each night one team went out on a mock mission with at least one extra NCO from the detachment staff and one of the experienced officers acting as evaluators.
During the patrols the evaluators simulated actions or casualties and rotated lower ranking LRPs into leadership positions. They all knew that leadership in depth might prevent the kind of disaster that had happened to the lost team.
The hours were very long for all, but Hollister seemed to be driven, getting by on very little sleep and trying to be involved in every bit of the training. Captain Michaelson watched but didn’t interfere. He had been around long enough to know that Hollister could gauge the difference between pushing hard and taking on too much. He was more than satisfied with Hollister’s performance and the high quality of the training that the teams were getting.
The choppers settled onto the LRP pad and disgorged two teams, one from each platoon, that had been out on heavy ambush patrol followed by a downed-chopper security simulation. Hollister and Captain Shaw had gone along as evaluators. As the teams cleared the pad for the mess hall and cold beer, the two officers compared notes.
“What do you think, sir?”
Captain Shaw dumped his rucksack onto the pad and put his rifle across the top of it. He pulled out his notes. “I’ve got plenty of things to cover on these two missions, but most of them I can roll into a general after-mission debriefing. I just have one that needs attention. It’s Theodore. PFC, isn’t he?”
“Yessir. He’s in Sergeant Camacho’s team. Problem?”
“Well, on the move he is pretty good. He doesn’t let anything get by him. He moves well and he’s a damn good map reader. I killed the team leader and the APL on one leg of the hump and made him the acting patrol leader. He was organized and knew the mission cold. The transition was smooth and his leadership skills are pretty good for a PFC.”
“So? What’s the problem?”
“It’s nighttime. I watched him. He doesn’t sleep and he’s as shaky as they come. I think he’s spooked. I think he’s tryin’ real hard to cover for it.”
Hollister knew what Shaw was talking about. He had seen some of that too, but tried to convince himself that Theodore would snap out of it. He took a pack of cigarettes and noticed the spots of light brown paddy water between the pack and the cellophane wrapper. Sticking his index finger into the hole, he found the single remaining cigarette and pulled it out. It was water-stained along its full length and was still a little soggy.
Captain Shaw pulled out a pack and offered a cigarette to Hollister. “You want to cut him loose and send him back to a rifle company?”
“I don’t know yet. He’s a good kid. Let me have a little more time with him. I’ll see if I can fix it.”
Shaw slapped Hollister on the shoulder and picked up his gear. “Well, it’s your call. I don’t need to tell you what kinda trouble a spooked team member can be. Anyway, I’m going to get a cold one and see what my in-box looks like. My job doesn’t go out in the boonies with me. It just waits back here to ambush me.”
Shaw walked toward Operations. On the way he passed Bernard, who saluted then broke into a double-time till he reached Hollister. “It’s official. You are now a short-timer, sir.”
“What?”
Smiling, Bernard handed Hollister a piece of official-looking correspondence. “It’s your alert orders, sir. You’re going back to Benning. Benning School for Boys.”
“Benning? No shit?” Hollister said as he read the alert message. “I’m assigned to the Ranger Department. Hot shit! I was sweating out something like recruiting duty or ROTC or some damn basic training post.” He smiled and folded the page.
Bernard looked down at Hollister’s rucksack and web gear lying on the pad. “Yeah, well, you better get yourself a new issue of boonie gear, sir. That old stuff of yours’ll never make it through Ranger School.”
The thought of endless hours of patrolling with Ranger students cooled Hollister’s mood, but he had always liked Benning in spite of the demanding training. Then he wondered how Susan would like Benning. It was one hell of a long way from a BA at Amherst to Columbus, Georgi
a.
A shower, some coffee, and a clean uniform, and Hollister got a weak second wind. He was beginning to burn out. He had been working hard and long. And he had lost more weight, and the circles under his eyes were more pronounced, but for the few minutes he had after the shower, his major concern was getting caught up on his correspondence. He was several letters behind Susan and owed his parents and two of his cousins some news.
He sat down at his field desk and tried to start a letter to Susan, but the sight of Lucas’s name tape and Ly’s picture triggered thoughts of Theodore. Shaw was right, Theodore might spook and jeopardize the safety of his team. But he knew that if he sent him back to a rifle company, he was sure that the shame would never leave Theodore.
He tried to put it out of his mind long enough to get to his letter, but just couldn’t get into writing. He felt guilty about it, but he just had to do something about Theodore.
He cranked his field phone to see if Davis was over at the Operations tent.
Staff Sergeant Davis met Hollister on the steps behind the mess hall. Hollister waited for Davis to get a cup of coffee before they got down to business, finalizing the new team assignments. Captain Michaelson and the first sergeant would approve the NCO assignments.
“Got one other problem.”
Davis knew without waiting. “Theodore?”
“Yeah,” Hollister said. “He’s a hard worker and he has a good attitude, but he’s a little rattled—and that’s what’s worrying me. What do you think?”
“Well, sir, I think he’s spooked because of One-three’s losses. He’s okay during the day, but at night he gets time to think about it.”
“No shit.” Hollister laughed a little. “That sounds like every one of us.”
“I don’t want to lose him. We just oughta lay more shit on him. If he’s busier, he’ll get more confidence and he’ll outgrow it.”
“I can’t take the chance of him acting crazy and getting someone else’s root in a ringer,” Hollister said.
“Make him an RTO. He’ll be close to one of us and busy all the time.”
“What if he chokes up on a team leader in the bush?”
“Make him your RTO, sir.”
The light went on for Hollister. “Bingo. Great idea!”
Davis smiled broadly.
Three days later the officers and senior NCOs assembled in Operations for a warning order—the stand down was over.
Captain Michaelson entered and all stood. At the wobbly podium in front of the group he took out his notes and motioned to Sergeant Marrietta.
Marrietta brought over an acetate overlay and pinned it to the operations map, aligning the tick marks on the overlay with the appropriate grid coordinate intersections on the map.
Across the top of the overlay the words OPERATION MARK TWAIN had been written in grease pencil block letters. The name only served to distinguish it from previous operations.
“Let me give you all a quick-and-dirty about this operation first and then I’ll go over the details of the actual warning order,” Captain Michaelson said. He then took off his wristwatch and laid it on the podium so he could keep track of time.
Marrietta handed out a stack of tracing paper overlays to the platoon leaders, the pilots, artillery, and Air Force representatives assembled in the tent.
“Seems like the VC have been getting wise to us and are getting ambush smart. The Brigade has been saturating the entire rice bowl with so many ambushes that the VC can’t move in and out at night to do their business. They can’t get the rice they need and they have had to come up with a new wrinkle.” Captain Michaelson stopped talking long enough to take some aerial photos from Marrietta and hold them up.
“The VC have decided to get off the roads and trails and start using the large streams in the valley to move. Up till now, no one has been setting ambushes along the streams because there didn’t seem to be enough traffic on them at night.
“We’ve been making the stupid assumption that the distances were too great for the VC to make the trips from the high ground to the valley floor by water during any one night. That was wrong.
“Take a look at these. You’ll see that they show small boat and sampan movement at night.” Michaelson handed the stack of photos to the team leader sitting in the front row, to start them around.
“A rifle platoon found small boats turned upside down, weighted and sunk under the overhanging brush along a stream bank. Seems like the VC are moving as far as they can at night, sinking the boats in the daytime, and hiding somewhere till it’s dark again. Then they refloat the boats and continue their missions.
“Pretty slick idea, but we’re going to put a stop to this—right now!”
Michaelson pulled a collapsible pointer out of his shirt pocket, extended it and tapped the tip to the lime-green areas of the map. “The Brigade’s mission is to saturate the roads and trails in the rice bowl with ambushes to make things look like business as usual. But we will take our teams into the foothills and set up several ambushes on the streams flowing from the high ground.
“Now, details. First, the friendly situation …”
Hollister took notes through the warning order, getting the information he needed to prepare for the ambush patrols. The single item in the order that disturbed him was the lack of time. Time to get ready, time to get the patrol order, and time to give his patrol order and conduct the briefbacks.
The LRP detachment AO was divided up between the two platoons. They had seventy-two hours to prep and have one team on the ground per platoon. After that, fresh teams would rotate into each platoon AO every five days.
That meant a team would spend five days on the ground, come back and stand down for two days, and then prep for three days to go back in.
Michaelson explained that the two new platoon leaders—Virgil and Rogers—would go along as patrol members on their first two patrols, assistant patrol leaders on their third, and then would lead their own patrols on the fourth time in. They would also go with a different LRP team each time out.
Since they would be setting up on stream banks, it was generally assumed that most positions near the banks would be on low ground and unsatisfactory. So the teams adjusted their loads and their routines to set up mechanical ambushes.
Five-man patrols would go in, find the right spot on a stream bank, and install an elaborate array of demolitions under the waterline. Finishing the setup, the teams would move to a vantage point above and away from the killing zone—on higher, more defensible terrain. Then, keeping the ambush site under observation, they would remotely detonate the explosives once VC boats moved into the killing zones.
Since a water ambush was unlikely to lead to captured weapons and equipment, it was decided that there would be no sweeps of the killing zones after executing the ambushes. There was little payoff for a team to sweep the stream bank for items that were either sunk or drifting downstream.
For the time being Hollister would oversee the operations of his old platoon—the second—and Captain Shaw would supervise the first platoon.
Captain Michaelson, true to his promise to break Hollister in on some of the other duties normally handled by Captain Shaw, tasked Hollister with handling the coordination between the Americans and the South Vietnamese. That meant Hollister had to go to the Province Headquarters to explain the LRP operation and get the specific Vietnamese Rules of Engagement.
Rules of Engagement were becoming complicated sets of instructions that told the Americans when they could shoot, at what, and after what coordination or permission. They ranged from free fire zones to firing only when fired upon and when positive ID could be made of enemy forces, including the identification of the enemy weapons that were being fired. Every American pilot and ground pounder hated the complex cover-your-ass rules. But it all belonged to the Vietnamese and they called the shots.
Hollister coordinated with Sergeant Marrietta to get a chopper to go to the Province Headquarters in An Hoa city. In the
meantime he had to get maps of the area, the latest intelligence reports, meteorological data, aerial photos, Signal Operating Instructions, fire support overlays, adjacent unit information, radio frequencies … and the list went on.
Hollister decided that it was time to tell Theodore that he would be his new radio-telephone operator. Then he would give Theodore some of the tasks to accomplish. Hollister smiled to himself. Theodore hadn’t seen busy yet.
CHAPTER 16
HOLLISTER WALKED INTO THE mess hall to get a cup of coffee to take to his hooch. While he was filling his cup he heard the distinctive, gravelly voice of First Sergeant Easy.
“Sergeant Davis tells me that you got some troubles with young Mr. Theodore, Lieutenant. Anything I can help you with?”
“Yeah, a little. But it’s nothing that I can’t handle.”
Easy got a cup and fished a cigar out of his pocket. He pointed it at Hollister. “Would you like one?”
Hollister shook his head. “Cigarettes are bad enough. Those things’ll really kill you.”
“It’s Vietnam’ll kill you, Lieutenant. Cigars just make the dying here a little bit more dignified.”
“I’d just as soon go out without any dignity. Morning runs are hard enough without smoking those things.”
“Sure y’don’t want me to find another job for Theodore? I got some special details that I can put him on. You know that motivation is a specialty of mine, if you need the service.”
“No. I’m going to be floating from platoon leader to patrol leader, and from what the Old Man tells me, I’ll be getting a little Operations officer experience thrown in. I need an RTO who can also act as gofer. I’ll use Theodore for that. Maybe that’ll give him a little more self-confidence and settle him down some.”