Praying for Slack
A Marine Corps Tank
Commander in Vietnam
Robert E. Peavey
To those who answered their country's call. Heroes, all.
Contents
Acknowledgments 9
Preface 11
Chapter 1 How It All Began 15
Chapter 2 Crossing the Pond 39
Chapter 3 The Debut 55
Chapter 4 Welcome to Eye Corps 71
Chapter 5 First Rites 79
Chapter 6 Time 97
Chapter 7 Allen Brook 109
Chapter 8 Angels Flying Too Close to the Ground 139
Chapter 9 Friendly Fire 149
Chapter 10 Not So Tough 185
Chapter 11 Movin' North 203
Chapter 12 The Night the War Was Lost 223
Chapter 13 Life's Certain Flavor 231
Chapter 14 The Steel Ghost 241
Chapter 15 Apricots 247
Chapter 16 With the Doggies on the DMZ 255
Chapter 17 Tiger! 263
Chapter 18 Twenty-nine and a Wake-up 271
Chapter 19 "Too Short for This Shit" 283
Maps
Map 1 The Four Military Corps Areas of South Vietnam 72
Map 2 Operation Allen Brook, May 7-20,1968 114
Map 3 Northern I Corps 202
Acknowledgments
bile struggling to write this book, I used (and in some cases, abused) several friends and relatives. As the last person anyone ever expected to attempt such a project, I sought help and advice from anyone who would read the countless drafts, rewrites ... and re-rewrites.
My best source of encouragement was my wife, Alica, who had faith when I doubted my abilities and kept me motivated to continue. My sons, Ian and Douglas, were both kind, but Doug pointed out the missing ingredient in an early manuscript by asking, "Dad, I read what you did. But I don't know how it felt."
Friends like Mark Anderson and Dean Kirby kept me on track and were of great help keeping me within grammatical bounds. My cousin, William Cocchi, also a good sounding board, helped me evaluate things from a nonmilitary perspective and keep terms understandable for all. Tom Flanagan will always be a friend for the fine maps he created for me.
And there's nothing like finding people who were there! The miracle of the Internet has put me in touch with countless veterans who I served with. Bob Embesi, Gary Gibson, and Tim Mayte in particular helped recall the details. After Bob read a short story of mine he suggested someone had to recount Operation Allen Brook, which had gone untold for thirty years.
Most important of all was the one person who kept giving me the positive feedback and support I needed through draft after draft: my mother. Without her and the letters of mine she had kept for thirty years, this book would have been impossible.
Thanks for the fireman boots, the bottles of Scotch, the dozens of care packages, and the endless letters that you sent during what was an equally horrible year for any mother.
You will never know what they meant to me.
Preface
riting a book about one Marine's Vietnam experience was never my intent. What you are about to read was originally written in the form of several short stories. As I put the stories to paper, a hidden and suppressed anger surfaced within me. Writing, I found, was a catharsis for thirty years of pent-up frustration I had not previously been aware of.
After two years of work on these various stories, I saw that they could be strung together in roughly chronological order. I asked two close friends, both Vietnam-era Marine tank commanders, to take a look at what I had written and was surprised by their reaction. They encouraged me to turn the stories into the book that you now hold.
This, then, is a chronicle of experiences ranging from the humorous to the tragic. I wrestled with the dilemma of including derogatory slang words like "gooks" and "dinks", because the words we used aren't politically correct by today's standards. Nevertheless, those are the phrases and the language used by the men who fought that war. For me to change them to anything else would be unrealistic; doing so wouldn't honestly represent who we were or what we felt. It would not give you a true flavor of the men and our war. They are terms I left in Vietnam and don't represent who I am today.
The process of writing put my feelings in perspective. I was able to weigh and assess my anger, and deal with it constructively. More importantly, I realized just how very lucky I was to come out alive.
-Atlanta, 2004
"No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now."
Richard M. Nixon, 1985
Chapter 1
How It All Began
t was a pitch-black night on the northernmost outpost in all of South Vietnam. The breeze off the ocean brought with it a chill that went right through me as I stood my watch. That's funny, I thought; this place can be so goddamned hot, and here I am shivering. The chill running through me was probably due more to the adrenaline pumping through my veins than the weather. I had no idea what to expect as I nervously scanned the sand dunes that lay before my tank. It was November 2, 1968, the first night after the bombing halt, LBJ's presidential order restricting offensive action against North Vietnam.
I was peering into the night for any signs or sounds of movement, scanning the dunes directly to the west and the China Sea two hundred meters directly behind me. As tank commander, I had the night's first watch-another ordinary watch, on an all but ordinary night, for Charlie now enjoyed unrestricted access into the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), which lay just five hundred meters to the north of us.
It was close to midnight, near the end of my watch. Even today, I don't know what made me turn my head. Maybe it was a sixth sense, some kind of premonition.
Something tickled my consciousness and caused me to look to the northeast, almost over my right shoulder, toward the darkened North Vietnam coastline.
Out of the corner of my eye, something caught my attention. That's when I saw them. I picked up my binoculars and focused on them. "Motherfucker!" I said, half out loud, to no one in particular.
"You see something, TC?" asked Bob Steele, my loader, who always referred to me by the abbreviated title for tank commander. He had been trying to sleep on the back of the tank, above the engine.
"Yep. And you ain't gonna believe it!"
What I saw-so faint and so far off, several miles north of the DMZ-was so bizarre and so fantastic that I couldn't believe my eyes at first.
Coming toward me, straight down the coastline, was a long line of lights. Since the war had started, no one had witnessed anything like this. Moving lights were the last thing you expected to see across the DMZ. Then came a complete mental disconnect, for I began to realize just what they were-headlights. And if they were, then all of us were dead mennot tonight, maybe, but in a few days at the very least.
The rest of my tank crew had been trying to sleep, but had never really dozed off. None of us were ready to sleep on a night in which Charlie had a free timeout in the game. We were all just a little jumpy-this place would do that to you. Suddenly they all joined me, standing on the fenders next to the turret, wondering what it was that I had spotted.
Bob Truitt, my gunner, had already dropped down into the turret to swing the main gun in the direction of the faint lights. He located them in his sights then switched to the more powerful telescope. "Holy shit!" he muttered, his head up against the eyepiece.
It took each of my three crewmen a while to reach the same, hard-to-believe, conclusion. We were looking at an end
less freeway of trucks driving due south, right down the beach.
Until now, Charlie wouldn't so much as smoke a cigarette at night. But after LBJ's order to restrict any offensive actions against North Vietnam, the NVA knew we couldn't shoot at them. So there they were, driving boldly down the coast and rubbing it ever so sweetly in our faces.
The sheer gall they were exhibiting really fried us. "Those little bastards!" I said through clenched teeth.
"The fuckin' nerve!" said Steele.
None of us could believe-or wanted to believe-they were so bold as to turn on the headlights of a goddamn convoy of trucks. It didn't take a brain surgeon to guess what those trucks were loaded with-ammunition, food, and supplies-courtesy of the President of the United States. It would be only days before the lethal contents of those trucks would be put to use on our side of the DMZ.
And so we sat, wide awake, mesmerized by the latest twist of a mismanaged war, wishing for permission to pump a couple of HE (high explosive) rounds into their smart asses. We were staring into our own death, almost powerless to prevent it. It seemed to be getting colder, but it wasn't. I began to feel sorry for my crew and myself; I could see how it was affecting them. How did I get into such a stupid situation? I began to wonder. It had been only nine months ago, on a similar dark, cold morning, that things went out of control-but all of that now seemed like years ago.
Nine months before, it had been an unusually chilly Southern California morning much like this on the DMZ. While chilly isn't strange for Southern California in February, that particular morning the air was damned near freezing. Odder still was that no one recognized the frigid cold snap for the harbinger it was. Recognition would come only days later. That morning's briskness was a silent starting gun for a series of events that would forever change me and most of the men around me.
To a casual passerby in that predawn darkness, as if any civilian would even be awake at 5 a.m., we must have appeared in the dark, cold air like a giant phantom locomotive, idling motionless at a station, steam venting from its vitals. But it wasn't steam. It was the combined breath of eighty men standing silently at attention waiting for the engineer's throttle. The engineer was a staff sergeant left over from the Korean War.
I'm freezing! I thought to myself. Come on, forget the headcount, and let's get going.
None of us had bothered to put on a field jacket, for once it warmed up, it would be something you would have to lug around the rest of the day. But that morning we had all been caught by surprise by just how cold it was. Five minutes of standing stationary had us all shivering, dying to get to the warm confines and hot coffee of the mess hall.
It was our next-to-last day before graduating the two-week NCO (non-commissioned officers') Training School at Los Pulgas, or simply Pulgas, as all Marines referred to it. It was one of several camps that made up the huge sprawling Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base on the California coast about forty miles north of San Diego.
Once fed and warmed with a couple cups of caffeine, we made our way back to our all-too-familiar classroom, glad to be out of the cold for a second time that morning. The classroom filled the entire interior of a Quonset hut whose concrete floor had long ago been bleached white from years of washing with lye soap. Quonset huts were the pre-fabs of their day. Their curved metal sides served as both wall and roof, making them look more like miniature airplane hangers than the barracks they really were-a throwback to what we young Leathernecks called the "Old Corps."
Crammed inside the hut were eighty wooden desk-chairs, each showing decades of abuse by a thousand NCO classes before ours. The building, in fact, looked every bit as weathered and worn as the sergeant major who ran the school.
Our class was made up of corporals from all over Pendleton. We had been sent by various unit commanders who thought we showed promise for future responsibility and higher rank. Many of us found ourselves outside our own units for the first time. People surrounded me from every MOS (military occupation specialty) imaginable. There were mechanics, truck drivers, artillerymen, amtrac crewmen, and cooks. I was one of three men with an MOS of 1811-tank crewman. Although there were a myriad jobs represented in the room, more than half the class was composed of 0300s, Marine riflemen-the backbone of the Marine Corps. Any other job existed merely to support them.
The NCO training program had been a little too much like boot camp-that beginning ten-week initiation that, once we completed it, earned us the title "Marine."
Most of us had put boot camp behind us at least a year and a half earlier. Yet here we were, facing it again. The previous thirteen days found us treated more like new recruits than the veteran Marines we thought we were. But it was part of a leadership program that was essential to advancing in rank: Before a man could start giving orders, he had to learn to take them.
My normal billet was at Las Flores, another of Pendleton's many camps. Flores was the home of the armored units of the 5th Marine Division, to which I had been assigned for the previous thirteen months after graduating from tank school. Living up to its Spanish name, Las Flores was indeed the flower of Camp Pendleton. The newest of all the bases, it looked less like a traditional Marine camp and more like a series of college dorms. The envy of Pendleton, it made my stay at Pulgas only that much harder to endure.
I'd been doing well in NCO School; I was in the upper twenty percent of a class due to graduate the next day. Things were finally winding down a little; it had been a tough two weeks. That day's schedule called for an all-morning lecture, which meant that we would be sitting inside, thank God. The topic was Marine Corps history, something the Corps holds in very high esteem. A history lesson would start with the Corp's founding in a Philadelphia tavern in 1775 and take us right up to present day. Most of us would never make it to World War II.
Two hours into the lesson found us finishing the Corps' exploits in the Caribbean between the two world wars. A loud crash sounded from the back of the room, startling everyone, including our instructor. It was the school's sergeant major, slamming open the door.
"Sergeant Lewis!" he growled, staring at our history teacher. "I will take over now." His startling entry got everyone's attention instantly. It was the very effect he desired, the way of a sergeant major. The door slammed for the second time as it shut behind him while he strutted up the aisle.
Staff Sergeant Lewis stepped aside without a word, and the sergeant major centered himself in the front of the room. We hadn't seen much of him since the first day we arrived, when he had "greeted" us. It was an address that only reinforced my limited experience with sergeant majors. Eighteen months in the Corps had taught me that changing one's direction was easier than crossing paths with a sergeant major. Simply fall within a sergeant major's field of view and you could easily find yourself assigned to any number of mindless jobs, like painting the rocks around a building or grooming the pebble walkways with a rake.
They were always tough old birds, and this one was no different. His chest was bedecked with half a dozen rows of ribbons that, to the trained eye, showed that he had served in China before World War II and fought in "The Big One" before serving in Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, and a half dozen other garden spots around the globe. His weathered face revealed the hardship of thirty-plus years in "my Marine Corps"-a phrase he used often, as in, "You don't do that in my Marine Corp"-as if he owned it. But one ribbon on the top of endless rows-a Purple Heart with several stars across it-meant that he had been wounded in combat several times and probably did own a piece of the Corps. Next to it were a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, both medals for valor in combat.
Those of us sitting in the classroom could only look down at our solitary "fire watch" ribbon. We were "Snuffles," still wet behind the ears, with no combat experience. To say we were intimidated would be a gross understatement.
This sergeant major was born in the Old Corps, a reference to the endless Marine beach landings that were the legacy of World War II and Korea. Old Corps was a term of respect for
those who served before us and who were now our mentors.
Thirty years of smoking and bellowing commands gave him a rough, raspy voice that only added to the impact of anything he had to say. And like all sergeant majors, he had a quality the Corps called "command presence," whose immediate impact almost paralyzed young Marines like us. His announcement to the class was direct and to the point-the only way a sergeant major knows how to speak. It would have an impact upon the rumors that would start right after his departure.
The sergeant major raised his clipboard and called out the names of three corporals. "Pack up your gear and report back to your unit immediately!"
Seventy-seven heads scanned the room as one, searching for the three men he had just named. On everyone's mind was the same question: What in hell had those guys done to get thrown out of NCO School one day short of graduation?
But nobody said a word. In the Marine Corps, you never asked why, you only reacted. We could only look with pity at the three bewildered faces as the three Marines packed their gear. NCO School wasn't something to be taken lightly. Each of our parent units expected us to graduate from the program. I couldn't imagine reporting back to my tank unit and having to tell SSgt. Robert Embesi, my platoon sergeant, that I had flunked out! I would find myself assigned, suddenly and forever, to wherever a body was needed for some shit detail. And every other corporal in that room, no matter what kind of unit he came from, had a Staff Sergeant Embesi to answer to.
The unlucky three weren't moving fast enough for the sergeant major's liking.
"Move it, Marines!" he boomed. "You've got five minutes to pack all your gear-and you won't be coming back! I will see you in my office in six minutes! Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir!" they replied in unison, not realizing the slip they had just uttered by addressing him as "sir." A sergeant major's presence was often so commanding that "sir" often seemed the natural reply, albeit the wrong one.
Praying for Slack: A Marine Corps Tank Commander in Viet Nam Page 1