“I’m taking off all my buttons tonight,” Tony responded.
Only that one shot and the sniper di di’d out of the AO. What we figured was the commie VC made some old guy shoot at us, or else they would gut his wife or first-born. Probably he didn’t actually want to hit anyone because then things got serious and we would have to kill somebody.
Next day, a couple of guys in Hotel Company triggered a booby trap in one of the villes. Typical set-up with a trip wire attached to a live grenade slid into a discarded C-rat can. Stumbling into the wire jerked the grenade free, released the spoon and—Boom! The injured Marines were medevac’d out to the sick bay on Princeton waiting off the coast. Rumor had it that one of them may have died. Rumors also circulated that some other guys in Echo or Foxtrot were killed in an ambush.
Rumors always made the rounds in a big outfit in which contact between men outside their own units was limited. Nights in the cemetery, each company held its own sector inside the rock wall perimeter and communicated with each other primarily through the CP—the Command Post.
“If we had an FM/AM radio,” Tony commented, “we could listen to Saigon Sally and find out what’s really going on.”
We had sometimes tuned in to Sally while aboard the Ogden. Sally played good rock ’n’ roll, interspersed with patter such as, “Marines of the 3rd Division, be aware that the Peoples’ Republic of Vietnam does not want you here. Colonel Earl Delong, this message is for you: Your men will all die as they died before. . . .”
That girl did her research.
“What we should do,” I proposed, “is kick ass, take names, get this over with, and go home.”
“You tell ’em, Private Maras. I’m sure they’ll listen to you.”
Supported by Golf Company, Hotel returned to the booby trapped village that had wounded our guys. Golf maneuvered to the back side of the settlement to sit on our duffs as the anvil while Hotel moved in as a hammer from the other side to drive any resident rats out to us. Lieutenant Mac placed Tony and me behind a rock pile in the center of the ambush line where our machine gun could cover the entire breadth of the village. So far, residents seemed unaware of our presence.
We watched as some gook emerged yawning from his hut, totally unaware of our presence. Gook. A strange word. Marines in previous wars had had their own terms to designate the enemy: In WWII, it was Japs for the Japanese and Krauts for Germans. In Korea, the enemy was known as chinks. For us, we learned gook in boot camp. It became part of the way young Marines in combat thought and spoke. It dehumanized the Vietnamese and made it easier for us to kill them. In return, the Vietnamese called us round eyes or whatever for the same reason.
The villager walked off a few paces from his hut and took a leak on Vietnam.
“That’s how I feel,” Tony approved. “Piss on Vietnam.”
“Good morning, Vietnam,” I whispered back.
So far in this strange war, I had been shot at once. Well, maybe I had been shot at; that wasn’t confirmed since the dude with the ancient 50-cal hadn’t hit anyone and boogied out immediately afterwards. Neither Tony nor I had yet fired a round in anger. The Pig, we joked, was still a virgin. As were we. That could all end in a baptism of fire within the next few minutes.
I gave an involuntary start at the sudden crack of a rifle shot from Hotel’s side of the hamlet. This was a fair-sized town laid out along a small creek on one side, with rice paddies on the other side, and backed by a low range of hills. On Golf’s end lay the Buddhist cemetery. On Hotel’s end, an old stone Catholic Church marked the edge of habitation.
As Hotel had spread out in combat formation and entered the ville, the rifle shot had snapped from one of the huts beyond the church. Hotel’s Weapons Platoon led by Sergeant Ed Crawford found itself directly in the line of fire and went immediately to ground. Sergeant Crawford, a combat veteran of Korea, instinctively noted the source of the assault.
Ed was in his forties, which made him old in the eyes of nineteen-year-olds like me. He might even have been a grampa. Naturally soft-spoken with a laid-back disposition, he was a big man thick of shoulder and thin of hair with wise brown eyes and a rock jaw like that on any classic Marine recruiting poster. He had been previously wounded in combat a total of three times in Korea. After Korea, he went off active duty but remained in the Marine Corps Reserves, became a police officer in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, married, and started raising three kids.
When the Marine Corps requested veterans return for active duty in Vietnam, Ed took a two-year leave of absence from the police department and shipped off to his third war. To the grunts of 2/3, Ed would always be Big Ed Crawford. I was fortunate enough to be one of the newbies Ed befriended and took under his wing during “Vietnam training” on Okinawa.
Marine rules of engagement (ROE) prohibited employing automatic weapons or explosives on buildings in a populated area unless we received intense fire from them. More shots rang out from the sniper’s hooch as Hotel blew forward through the village. That did it for Ed. He was old school from a previous no-holds-barred war. Two or three rifle shots in his mind constituted “intense fire.” He snatched a 3.5 launcher from his rocket man—and the hut went up in a ball of flame.
Hotel Company’s commander, Captain Ray Madonna, was furious. “Crawford, what in the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re not supposed to do that.”
“Cap, that cocksucker was trying to kill my boys. As far as I’m concerned, automatic fire was coming from that hooch. Show me the order in writing where I’m not supposed to blow him up and I’ll adhere to it.”
Echoes from the explosion were still rebounding through the village when all hell broke loose from around the old Catholic Church, which a hive of VC was apparently using as a sanctuary. From where Golf waited as anvil, it sounded like a real fight brewing. For us newbies, it would be our first real battle. We were eager to get in on it.
Then, something unexpected happened. PRC-77 radios began chattering all over the AO. I heard some of it since heavy weapons teams with machine guns and rocket launchers were required to stay close under the personal control of platoon leaders.
“Halt what you’re doing!” blasted from the radio. It was the old man’s voice—Colonel Pappy Delong himself. “Return to the CP area. We’re moving out ASAP.”
Astonished Golf and Hotel commanders jumped on their radios in protest, neglecting call signs and radio protocol in their intensity to transmit their circumstances. “We’re under fire. We have an enemy element trapped inside a church—”
“Negative! Negative! Break contact immediately. Roger that?”
What kind of war was this? Right in the middle of an action and we’re being pulled out.
Gooks at the church must have thought they were hot shit, standing off a battalion of Marines and driving it off. I glanced back at the village as a plume of smoke from Crawford’s burning hut rose into the air and our two companies assembled out of small arms range to road-march on the double back to where we came from. We could only assume something really big had come down to draw us away from a fight we could have won.
Suddenly, all the old military drill about “stand around and wait” no longer applied. Before Jack Spratt could eat no fat, flocks of helicopters—CH-46 Sea Knights and smaller Sikorsky UH-34s—jerked us up and out of the cemetery and delivered the entire BLT to the airfield at Phu Bai. There, C-130s and C-123s waited with dropped ramps and props turning to deliver us to a place called Khe Sanh.
“Where the fuck is Khe Sanh?” Tony wondered.
What we were hearing was that some Marines were getting their asses kicked at Khe Sanh. BLT 2/3 was being sent in like the cavalry to save the day. In short order, in a frantic rush, Tony and I found ourselves stashed in web seating as our Marine-packed C-123 climbed into the sky and barreled north at thirty thousand feet. To help settle an anxious stomach, I twisted around to peer out the little window behind us. L
ike a tourist taking his first dry-mouthed airplane flight. Below, as far as I could see, green rolling mountains glimmered beneath the startling blue of the morning sky.
“Tony, look at how pretty this country is from the air.”
Appearances could be deceiving, as we were to subsequently discover.
The Air Force crew chief, wearing a flight suit and a revolver belt strapped around his waist, hung onto a strap at the rear of the plane near its closed ramp. He stood spread-legged to balance himself against the sway and jolt of the fast-moving aircraft.
“Listen up, Marines!” he shouted. “As soon as this tailgate opens, I’ll tell you to exit the aircraft. I will point in the direction I want you to go. Run to the stack of boxes you’ll see off the side of the runway. Do you hear me?”
With that, the C-123 rolled over on one wing in a steep descent, leaving my gut at thirty thousand feet as the aircraft corkscrewed toward earth. It leveled out at the last minute and touched down hot on steel matting that planked the dirt runway. The ramp dropped even before the airplane came to a stop. For some reason, these Air Force guys were in a rush to get out of here. The crew chief waved his arms frantically and bellowed above the roar of reverse engines and air brakes.
“People, get the fuck off my airplane! Right the fuck now!”
I charged down the ramp carrying the Pig machine gun with a heavy pack on my back, Tony right on my ass and me on the ass of the guy in front of me.
“Damn it, people! Your other right!” the crew chief bellowed.
The airplane started to move again before the last Marine boot hit the ground. Tony and I stampeded with the others of Golf Company to a stack of boxes by the runway, which turned out to be crates of ammo and munitions.
From what I saw of it, Khe Sanh Combat Base more resembled an inner-city ghetto than a military installation. Or a rodent warren of bunkers, bunny holes, and trenches, most of it underground. Construction consisted primarily of sand bags, with everything bagged from the chow hall where you ate and the head where you took a crap to Charlie Med that patched you back together if you got shot up or took artillery shrapnel. Mud was the principal color. Even the steel sheeting on the runway was sinking into mud.
From the rush to get here I half-expected maybe the Alamo or the Battle of San Juan Hill. Instead, everything appeared deathly quiet. No signs or sounds of fighting. Anticlimactic. Like when we stormed Red Beach and found only a gull waiting for us. Except, here, even the gull was missing.
“Hey, you Marines! Get over here. We got chow waiting.”
A big tarp provided shade for a long table laden with hot cans of Coca-Cola and piles of sandwiches, each made up of two pieces of white bread and a slice of bologna with a pickle on the side. A thin patina of red dust covered sandwiches, table, Cokes, and the weary-looking Marine mess cooks. Tony picked up a sandwich and attempted, unsuccessfully, to blow off dust. He shrugged and gave up.
“Maras, I got a feeling about this,” he said, with no effort to conceal his sarcasm. “Something bad happens every time the Marine Corps feeds us this good.”
Chapter Four
Saddle Up
Elements of the hard-luck 9th Marine Regiment occupied the rat warren of trenches, holes, and bunkers that comprised the Khe Sanh Combat Base. In its nickname, “the Walking Dead,” the 9th displayed not only a certain blatant defiance but also the reason for its description as “hard luck.” It had been the first outfit to come ashore in South Vietnam in March 1965 to conduct open land combat against the communist insurgency inspired and supported by North Vietnam. Until then, the war had been by proxy with the United States aiding the South while China and the Soviet Union supplied the communist North. For the past two years, the 9th had slogged all over I Corps accumulating casualties and adding to its reputation as the Walking Dead.
The newbies of 2/3 got our first look at these fabled warriors when several of them showed up with a forklift to transfer the boxes of munitions stacked by the runway to the ammo bunker. They bore that gaunt, mangy look of survivors, older than they should be and world-wise as they hustled about ignoring the cherry-cheeked FNGs—Fucking New Guys—who stared as though we had suddenly been slapped upside the head with a dose of reality. With my newly issued combat gear, I felt a bit envious of how tough and adapted these guys appeared.
“Holy Shinola!” Private Ronnie Boggs gasped. “Slap my tender cheeks and call me ‘Boot Camp.’”
Tony Leyba seemed at a loss for words, a rare occasion. Besides, his mouth was full of bread and bologna. He chewed and swallowed before he finally got out, “I knew there had to be a catch when they fed us first thing we got here. Look at these guys. It’s like they’re here but nobody’s home.”
Colonel Pappy Delong and his battalion command element had flown in ahead of the rest of 2/3 to set up a communications/command network in one of the bunkers. The companies arrived one after the other on planes screaming in with power, dumping their human cargo, and screaming out again. Sergeant Crawford and Hotel Company exited the next plane behind Golf’s and took their places around the field tables loaded with sandwiches and Cokes. As an old battle-scarred vet, Big Ed had a way of taking charge wherever he appeared. He considered the entire Marine Corps, not just Hotel and its Weapons Platoon, as “my boys.” He ambled over to where I, Tony, Rainey, Kilgore, and several other “boys” were munching bologna and trying to look nonchalant as we struggled to make sense of things.
“What’s going on, Sergeant?” I asked him. If anyone knew anything, Ed would.
He indicated several green peaks rising as part of a major hill mass about four klicks (kilometers) or so northwest of the runway. A small aircraft circled high above the hills, a single-engine Cessna referred to as a “Bird Dog” because it functioned as an observer to gather intel and as a pointer of targets in coordinated air and artillery strikes.
“The One-Niner needs our help up there on Hill 861,” Big Ed said, designating it with a thick finger that slowly swept past to identify its neighboring peaks, 881 North and 881 South.
Hills were numbered militarily according to their height measured in meters. Farther north, Hill 1015 rose above the others in this sector of the rugged Annamite Range. It was known as Tiger Tooth Mountain because of its shape. Right now the green hills appeared quiet and peaceful. But suddenly I experienced a spooky premonition that we Marines were about to come face-to-face with whatever terror lurked up there waiting for us. I might have been even more unnerved had I known at the time the military history of the region.
Khe Sanh, in the far northwestern corner of South Vietnam, lay fifteen miles from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that divided North and South Vietnam and about seven miles from Laos. In August 1962 while the war was still an “insurgency,” US Army Special Forces constructed a combat base on Route 9 at the site of an old French fort and dirt airstrip, the purpose of which was to train and incorporate local Montagnard tribesmen into a Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) to protect the local population and keep watch on North Vietnamese infiltrators. The Green Beret camp occupied a long, narrow plateau at the bottom of a bowl dominated by three hills—861, 881S, and 881N—that provided any enemy a perfect overlook, staging area, and artillery platform. Perhaps in hindsight the Berets might have selected a more secure location.
Nearby Laos afforded North Vietnamese communists their principal avenue of infiltration into the South. The Ho Chi Minh Trail—actually a network of trails—snaked out of North Vietnam to funnel communist troops and supplies into large, safe base camps in Laos and then on into South Vietnam. Tree canopies up to sixty feet in height, dense elephant grass, and bamboo thickets concealed the trails from the air.
In September 1966, Green Beret and Montagnard patrols discovered signs of increased NVA activity in the Northern provinces—freshly constructed base camps, cleared trails, rice bags, and other discarded equipment. In early October, 1st Bat
talion, 3rd Marines moved in to occupy the Khe Sanh Combat Base, the objective being to secure the old French airstrip, conduct surveillance and counter-infiltration operations, and, through superior US firepower, block the NVA’s route west to Quang Tri City and the heavily populated coastal regions and make it costly for large enemy forces to advance into South Vietnam.
Increased enemy presence in the area confirmed what US Intelligence suspected—that the ruling North Vietnamese Lao Dong Politburo had concluded the time had come to “bleed [the Americans] without mercy [and] force the U.S. to accept defeat” in the same way legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.
This site of the French humiliation, Dien Bien Phu, lay west of Khe Sanh in the far northwestern corner of South Vietnam, along the border between the two Vietnams. As the Americans were doing now at Khe Sanh, the French in their occupation of the country after World War II established an armed outpost at Dien Bien Phu to interdict communist forces.
In early 1954, Giap’s communist Viet Minh, as they were then called, methodically encircled the French stronghold and bombarded it from the heights while reducing the outpost in human wave attacks and choking off French ground and aerial resupply with antiaircraft fire and ambushes. The doomed outpost held out for nearly two months before it surrendered on 7 May 1954; the French subsequently withdrew their forces and went home.
Since the strategy worked against the French, General Giap, who was still in the insurgency business, now assumed it would work against the Americans.
In late 1966 and early 1967, under cover of heavy winter fog that shrouded the Khe Sanh region, the NVA began moving an entire regiment into the hill complex, where its soldiers proceeded to build a maze of heavily reinforced bunkers and artillery positions. Elephants were used to drag in heavy cannon. General Giap’s plan of battle was to seize Khe Sanh and use it as a firebase for his 175s to pound “Leatherneck Square,” that line of Marine fire bases along the DMZ.
Blood in the Hills Page 3