“Gen-tle-men,” the instructor shouted. “Gen-tle-men.” He yelled again as the bird pulled from its dive and circled above them. “In the 101st, Cobras come in two basic configurations: ARA and Gunship. The Aerial Rocket Artillery Cobra carries seventy-six 2.75-inch rockets …” The instructor catalogued the aircrafts weaponry, each syllable of his speech in cadence. “Gen-tle-men, you use ARA against bunkers. You use gunships against enemy soldiers and mixed targets. This bird,” the instructor pointed up without taking his eyes from the class, “is a gunship. You treat it with respect. You activate it as follows.” The instructor brought a radio handset up before his face. He depressed the transmit bar. “Tomahawk Six Six, this is Trainer Five, fire mission. Over.”
An artillery act followed the air show. The students watched the receiving end of a barrage against the same scarred hillside. They called-in adjustments to the fire direction control center (FDC), raising and lowering the impactions, moving them left and right simply by speaking into a radio handset.
Still more weaponry classes followed. M-16 practice on a quick-fire reaction course was followed by a class on the M-33 fragmentation grenade and finally a class on claymore mines. At night they had a night-fire exercise under the illumination of artillery flares. Exhausted, Chelini and Ralston and the others marched back to their hootches. Temperatures during the day reached 109 degrees and the humidity hovered at 85 percent. On the morning march to the first range Chelini’s hands swelled, his arms turned white and his joints became stiff. He had been sure the heat would make him collapse. “We got a saying up here, Duke,” one cadre sneered when he protested moving. “Take two salt tablets and drive on.”
The second and third days classes dealt with the history and culture of Vietnam. The culture lecture was given by a chicano sergeant. “Gen’lemen. The priorities of Mister Nguyen are: one, family and food—that mama-san an tacos; two, village an hamlet—es su casa; tree, district an province. Country don count. Gen’le-men, Nguyen don care too much for ’is country. Papa-san, he like tree things; ’is Buddha, ’is rice and ’is water buff’lo. He give you mama-san and he give you baby-san daughter, but don you go fuck ’is water buff’lo and stay off ’is fuckin dikes. You gotta walk in the paddies then walk in the paddies. You gonna do that for two reason, Gen’le-men. One, you walk on the dikes an you break the dikes and papa-san get screaming pissed if you break ’is dikes; and two, if somebody gonna put a booby trap in your AO it gonna be on papa-san’s fuckin dikes cause everybody know that GI don like ta get ’is feet wet and he gonna walk on the dikes no matter what.”
Ralston elbowed Chelini and mumbled, “You oughta write home about this. The Americanization of Gookland.”
“Gentlemen,” another instructor informed them later that day, “due to the push into Cambodia and the strict controls inside the Republic, the NVA soldier is hurting for food. The rice-denial program has received wide support from all the villages in our AO, and the troops from the North have very little rice. The unofficial word is to expect a massive NVA drive into the coastal areas for food. Also, Gentlemen, the South Vietnamese are having a national election at the end of this month. We can expect the NVA to attempt to disrupt the peace of the populated areas.”
“This aint the army,” Ralston cracked to Chelini. “This is all yer dream and I wish to hell you’d wake up and let me out.”
“Sssh, Man,” Chelini hissed. “This is important.”
“Oh, Man, don’t give me that shit,” Ralston said. “Don’t let em get hold of your mind.”
On the fourth day of SERTS there was a class on rappelling. It was during this class that Chelini’s feelings about himself as a soldier in Vietnam finally solidified. The school had erected a fifty-foot tower with a simulated cliff face on one side and a helicopter skid hanging over the air at the top of the other. “Rappelling in the field, Gentlemen,” the instructor for this block of classes said, “is accomplished from helicopters and is used to insert troops where the jungle is too dense for a landing. This tactic has been borrowed from mountaineers and by the end of this class, Gentlemen, you will be qualified to jump out of a helicopter with nothing between you and the ground but the tail end of the rope you will be sliding down.…”
First you believe it, Chelini thought, then you don’t. Then you do again. First you think we should be here and then you think this is crazy and we’re ruining the country and then you think about the kids you’ve seen and how we keep the NVA out of the lowlands. He shook his head, cleared his mind, approached the tower and climbed the ladder to the small platform at the top. Ralston snapped more cynical comments but Chelini did not respond. As he stood on the helicopter skid fifty feet above the sandpit his heart pounded. The rappelling rope went through a Dring at his waist, around his side and over his shoulder. For one long second Chelini paused. Then slowly he leaned backward, feeling the rope take more and more of his weight, trying not to think of the long drop. As his body reached a 45° angle he closed his eyes and leaped backward, releasing twenty feet of line. He snapped the rope taut about him; the jute burned his gloved hands. His weight stretched the line but the system worked. He stopped ten feet off the ground, allowed more slack and descended.
“You snap the line on a bird like that, Troop,” the instructor cautioned him, “and you’ll flip the bird on top of you. You gotta be gentle.” His voice was tempered with approval.
“Wow, Dude,” Ralston quipped. “You gettin ta be a real gung-ho airborne-all-the-way-Sir soldier.” Chelini said nothing but smiled and turned from Ralston to take a second turn on the tower. “Dude,” Ralston called. “They gonna make a screaming bird out a you yet—a screaming yellow buzzard.”
Classes on the last day were concerned with NVA tactics and the Chieu Hoi or open arms program. For Chelini the very last class of SERTS was scary and sobering.
“The Hoi Chanhs, Gen-tle-men,” a senior instructor said, “are trained as scouts and interpreters. They work with platoons operating in areas from which they defected. In these areas they know the trails and cache sites. They know the booby-trap markers. They know the ambush sites. Gen-tle-men, a platoon with a Hoi Chanh or Kit Carson Scout is less vulnerable than it would be if it were out there on its own.
“We have with us today,” the instructor raised his voice and announced, “the Senior Kit Carson Scout of the 101st Airborne Division, Colonel Phan Trinh. Gen-tle-men, for twelve years prior to becoming a Hoi Chanh, Colonel Phan commanded a successful NVA sapper company.”
“Jesus!” Ralston snapped. “Look at that. A defective dink.”
Chelini listened intently as the instructor told Colonel Phan’s story. Phan Trinh’s father, who lived in a small village near Hanoi, was actively opposed to the war in the South. Allegedly he was incarcerated and then shot. The colonel’s sister and a brother were also killed, for according to tradition they came from corrupted blood and thus were or would be infected with the same thoughts as their father. Phan Trinh was warned by a close friend in a staff position that he was to be recalled to North Vietnam to be interrogated—to see if his blood contained the obsessions of his father. Instead of facing charges of being the son of a radical, Colonel Phan, with a heavy heart, knowing he would never again see his homeland, defected to the south by simply slipping through the wires at Camp Eagle at night and walking up to the Division Tactical Operations Center. There he waited for daylight then defected to the Assistant Division Commander.
For this class the students were instructed in the stringing of barbed wire and the installation of claymore mines, trip flares and rattles. The class was asked to construct a simulated perimeter defense. Chelini was one of six men chosen to build the position and he took extra care to make the wires taut and to keep the strands close to each other. In the wires they implanted trip flares and stone-can rattles. Behind the first set of tanglefoot and under a coil of concertina Chelini hid a claymore in a clump of grass. “That’ll get em,” he chuckled to the other volunteers.
A
fter the perimeter was completed Chelini and the class watched quietly. Phan approached the exterior of the newly laid position. He was clothed only in a loincloth. With him he carried a small pair of wire cutters, a dozen sachel charges, a blade of grass in his mouth and on a string around his neck a small flat piece of wood. He lay very still in the grass before the wire. Slowly he moved his left arm forward then his right leg, his right arm, then left leg. As he inched forward like a lizard Chelini watched in awe. If Ralston was talking Chelini did not hear. They could come in like that anytime, he thought.
Phan reached the first wire which was about two inches off the ground; he removed the blade of grass from his lips. Slowly, cautiously he stroked the area before the wire, then above the wire and finally as far past the wire as he could reach. He was satisfied there were no trip wires for flares. Again, very slowly he slithered over the wire, one arm, one leg at a time. He slithered into the heart of the entanglement. Phan went over the lowest wires and under the rest, never seeming to touch any, always keeping his body suspended only minutely off the earth by his fingers and toes. He was incredibly agile—almost liquid. As he flowed through the defensive concertina strands his sinuous muscles rippled. Between each movement he placed the flat piece of wood on the earth, placed an ear to it and listened for the movement of the defenders. When he found a trip wire with the blade of grass he moved his cutters—first checking the wire for tension to insure that some alert GI had not spring-loaded the trigger mechanism—and snipped the wire in two.
He proceeded through the emplacement until he came face-to-face with Chelini’s claymore mine. The sapper removed the electrical blasting cap from the mine, turned the mine around and aimed it at the audience. Once inside the perimeter he crawled to the instructor and placed his sachel charges carefully about and between the instructor’s feet. Finally like a serpent Phan slid back through the wire, re-arming the claymore on his way out. Once out of range he threw several stones into the perimeter.
“GENTLEMEN!” The instructor screamed. Chelini jumped. “MOVEMENT IN THE WIRE! BLOW YOUR CLAYMORES!… You will eliminate your own life-support systems by aerating your lungs and heart group with six hundred tiny holes. Gentlemen, a hand for the master.” There was a long round of applause.
Most men received their unit orders the last day of the SERTS training course and reported directly to their units of assignment. Will Ralston was sent to division headquarters as a supply clerk. On 12 August Chelini was returned to Phu Bai to obtain his unit assignment which had been intercepted and audited because of the earlier loss and delay of his records. The new mimeographed orders—DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, Headquarters 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile), APO San Francisco 96383—assigned James Vincent Chelini to Company A, 7th Battalion, 402d Infantry.
* A glossary of military acronyms and terms appears on page 571.
CHAPTER 2
EGAN
For a long time, long enough for the other passengers to move from sight, Daniel Egan stood by the landing strip. The warm air against his skin felt thick. The pervasive pollution of burning fuel oil and feces that came from bubbling waste cauldrons tended by motionless papa-sans clung to the sweat on his neck. I’m back, he said to himself. Unintelligible screeches from unseen children split in his ears. Back, he nodded. Back in Nam. There was a feeling of disgust in the pit of his stomach. It was not the air; it was something else. He grabbed his suitcase, swung it off the ground, up, over him then allowed the bag to crash down atop his head. He balanced the suitcase and began slowly ascending the slight incline toward the cluster of buildings. He heard a clashing of gears, mental gears grinding. “Fuckin place hasn’t changed,” he said softly. “Fuckin place never changes.”
He paced up the path slowly, the suitcase shading his head. Without altering his metered pace he produced a package of Ruby Queen Vietnamese cigarettes. The package was pale turquoise. On one side was a drawing of a family—the father wearing a helmet, the mother in a conical straw hat and the child bareheaded. On the other side there was a charging infantryman in silhouette. He removed a short fat cigarette with his lips and returned the pack to his pocket. The smell of the tobacco was harsh. With his right hand he took a book of OD moisture-resistant matches from another pocket, bent the cover back, rolled a match so the tip was on the striking surface and snapped his fingers to strike. He lit the cigarette and blew the match out. “Fuck it,” he whispered. “Don’t mean nothin.”
He continued his perfectly metered pace all the while scanning the installation before him, the path he walked on, the sides of the trail. Don’t nothin move, he snarled. Don’t nothin fuckin move. The thought felt good.
Egan had spent the preceding six days on R&R in Sydney, Australia. From King’s Cross he had returned to Phu Bai via Tan Son Nhut and Da Nang. In his new civilian clothes he felt clean and the Nam atmosphere disgusted him. Yet it was not the air. Nor was it the war. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “Drive on, Mick,” he whispered.
Daniel Egan was a thin man, five-ten but only 150 pounds. He had played football in college at 185 but he’d lost much of the bulk of a linebacker after he’d quit playing in his junior year. He’d lost twenty more pounds on the boonierat diet. What remained was bone and tight muscle, a shock of red hair on a head where freckles had sunburnt to large brown blotches and light blue eyes that seemed to say, “Don’t ask.”
In Sydney, with a bitchy little Sydneysider, he had discovered moments when the Nam was forgotten. There was nothing in Sydney to evoke thoughts of Nam. His thoughts there had been of other things and the only reminder of Vietnam had been himself.
He searched the trail automatically now, unconscious of the scrutinizing jerkiness of his eyes. At Sammy Lee’s Cheetah Room on Pitt Street he had found a lady. The moment had been awkward but then he had always had awkward moments with ladies. He smiled inwardly. How quickly he had adjusted to the civilized world. It had startled him each time he remembered the appropriate thing to say or to do. It was there, he thought, with her, that I got this feeling. But it wasn’t her. He started. Suddenly he realized he was searching the trail, searching for booby traps. The gears of his mind chattered, resisting for another moment, then meshing, changing. Healthy animal paranoia returned; he felt comfortable.
When Daniel Egan originally arrived in-country he did not understand what he was seeing. The contrast between Nam and the World did not seem immense. Now the contrast was numbing. He stared at the Nam around him. Much of it was beautiful. It had been a long time since he had seen the beauty. In February of ’69 as a new Shake’n’Bake sergeant, Egan had walked up this same path for his initial in-processing to the 101st. He had been apprehensive but he was determined to make a good showing of himself. At that time terrorist/sapper probes of the perimeter at Phu Bai and in the surrounding villages were not uncommon. Enemy rocket and mortar explosions bi-weekly disturbed Phu Bai life. By August 1970, with the ever-increasing effectiveness of the 101st and its Vietnamese counterpart, the 1st ARVN Infantry Division, Phu Bai was nearly totally secure. The last 122mm rocket had landed within its perimeter on 11 November 1969. Except for the grunts in from the line units, who were seldom without their M-16s, no one carried weapons. Phu Bai had become a casual post, a place where permanent personnel wore starched jungle fatigues and spit-shined jungle boots and worked an eight-to-five day.
As Egan approached the buildings of the personnel center he became aware of the ever-present thumping of unseen helicopters and then of the strange feeling in his gut.
He had first gone into the jungle in March of ’69 with Company C, 1st Battalion, 502d Infantry. It was the beginning of Operation Kentucky Jumper, an assault on NVA base camps and supply areas in the A Shau Valley. The first day with his unit his company was mortared and seven men were killed. The next day they were mortared again and he swore he’d never stay in the field. For thirty-three days his unit made regular contact, culminating with the Battle of Dong A Tay, Bloody Ridge, 26 April ’69, where nine
ty NVA soldiers were killed. US casualties had been reported only as “heavy” but Egan found 50 percent of his platoon no longer existed.
After Dong A Tay the battalion was extracted and moved to the rear for a brief stand-down and in typical guerilla style the NVA retaliated as hard and as fast as they could. In the middle of the first afternoon of relaxation Egan’s company area was hit by fifteen 122mm rockets and he came closer to getting blown away than when he was in the boonies. The rockets were indiscriminate, impersonal and impossible to stop once they were incoming. Egan and his friends low-crawled, scrambled, dove into the trenches. A man named Simpson, lying next to Egan in the trench, was hit by a stone ricocheting from the blast of a 122 exploding only feet away. The stone shattered Simpson’s left knee and the joint lubricating fluid reacted within his veins, clotting the blood. Within minutes Simpson was dead.
Egan freaked. He cussed out his company commander. He screamed at the battalion commander and he told the first sergeant he was going to scatter his shit to the wind.
Two days later he found himself back in the boonies, humping a ruck with Company B, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, and within ten days he was a squad leader on the Laotian side of the A Shau. Operation Apache Snow commenced. It took Egan up Hill 937, Dong Ap Bai, Hamburger Hill. That battle pitted one ARVN and three US battalions against the reinforced 29th NVA Regiment. The 29th was dug into the mountain’s crest. Enemy resistance was softened by a thousand tons of bombs and sixteen thousand rounds of artillery but the NVA tunnel and bunker complex was deeply buried and the final infantry sweep required bloody, close-in fighting.
With his platoon pinned down by intense automatic weapons fire Egan maneuvered his squad close to the enemy bunkers. Then under the suppressive fire of his fire teams he insanely charged the bunkers with fragmentation grenades. He destroyed two emplacements and killed four NVA soldiers. His thoughts began to slide backwards, to become primitive. His behavior became guided by a more fundamental code. Months later he was awarded a Bronze Star medal with V-device “for heroism in ground combat against a hostile force.” He spat at it.
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