by Tom Clancy
As the Marines began to climb into the boats, my mind fixed on the likelihood that many of them would be killed or wounded in this risky attack. Even though the Marines assured me we were doing the right thing, and I certainly agreed with them, I knew that any deaths would be on my conscience.
What unfolded next was just amazing — a scene right out of a pirate movie.
The Marines sailed onto the lake. Soon they’d chased down the VC boats, started firing, and then boarded them. Moments later, they’d taken down every enemy boat and killed or captured every single VC… all without a single Marine or civilian casualty.
Afterward, a few prisoners suddenly fell “very ill” with a high mortality rate disease. Our Marines were not happy they had used civilians as human shields.
By then I’d experienced dozens of incidents that made me proud of these courageous fighters, but this one definitely made the top of the list.
Because of the demonstrated competence and fighting ability of VNMC units, American commanders gave them ever tougher jobs. In July, U.S. units in II CTZ began moving their operations out toward the Western Highlands, where there was especially heavy fighting, leaving the coastal plain more exposed. This move was feasible only because the VNMC were available to pick up much of the action.
II CTZ headquarters specifically proposed that the Marines begin more aggressive night operations (promising full support, to include helicopter lift and fire support — a big plus in the eyes of the Marines). The Vietnamese were game for that.
The proposed operations involved a series of night helo raids, to be triggered by hot intelligence… a challenging but exciting mission for the VNMC (we had no night vision goggles then). It also excited me. By then I was confident I had my act together where fighting was concerned. I had become good at it.
We ended up conducting four of these raids. I was the adviser on three of them, but only one resulted in enemy contact.
That raid began on the twenty-fifth of July with an urgent call from U.S. Army command: A hot intelligence tip claimed that a squad-sized VC unit was moving a U.S. Army POW through the villages, using him for propaganda and recruiting. Army command thought a well-conducted raid might successfully rescue him. Since we were the only unit able to react quickly enough, we were tapped to conduct it.
The Army immediately sent an intel team to brief us: The tip had come from a local villager who had additionally reported that the VC squad was heading for a deserted village along the coast to spend the night. The intel team were not certain about the accuracy of the tip, but it seemed worth a serious follow-up. They then provided a description of the prisoner and his suspected identity.
We quickly began planning.
Raid planning had to be very precise and exacting, taking deception into account (we knew the VC were watching), and intel had to be very good. We worked hard on all this.
We decided on a raid force of eighty Marines. In order to deceive watchers, this force would move as part of a larger unit headed out that day for a routine relief of one of our mountain village outposts. The raid force would peel off from the larger unit in a remote area of the bush on the approach to the mountain villages and wait at a prearranged landing zone for night pickup by U.S. choppers. We coordinated all this with the pilots to minimize their time on the ground in the remote landing zone.
In those days we didn’t yet have M-16s, so we took Thompson submachine guns, grease guns, carbines — all automatic weapons — with extra ammo magazines, to ensure plenty of firepower for this relatively small force operating in very hostile territory. We wanted to make the raid as violent as possible. Our idea was to really shock them, hit them fast when they were sleeping (or so we hoped), and just open up. Machine guns would cover our flanks.
We knew the deserted village that was our objective from previous sweeps in the area. It was on the coast of the South China Sea and had a several-hundred-foot-high rocky ridge projecting out into the water to its north. We decided to land the helos up on the rocks; small, cleared areas there could take one helo at a time; and landing on the side of the ridge away from the village would mask the noise. We could then climb down the rocks and attack the village from the sea side — an unexpected route. (We were assuming that the enemy would be orienting their defenses inland.) There was one potential problem: Though we could cut off the north-south routes out of the village (the routes along the coast), we could not do much to cover escape routes to the west, which went out into vast, open rice paddies that led to more villages and wooded areas. Since our assault was going in from east to west, we didn’t want to put teams out west of the town into our potential fire zones. Instead, we hoped to put teams quickly into the western side of the village. This was another reason for instant violence. Without that, the VC might be able to melt away into the paddies.
The move out and helo lift went perfectly. The pilots flew well out to sea (thus promoting surprise) and came into the ridge area from the north as planned. We did have problems when some of the LZs proved too small for a helo landing, requiring troops to jump out of the helos from four or five feet up. A few of the guys got a little banged up with twisted ankles and the like, but not enough to take them out of action.
Our climb down the jagged rocks was tricky and painfully slow, but everyone got down with only a few bruises and cuts and moved quickly to our objective rallying point at the base of the rocks. From there we dispatched the four-man security teams that would cut off the village from the north and south. To avoid premature discovery, we tried to synchronize our movements to place the security teams and the assault force in position at the same time.
I moved with the attack force down the beach toward a long, north-south-running sand dune we were using as our line of deployment. This was an ideal place for launching the assault. It was about a hundred meters from the edge of the village and allowed us to come up on line for the attack from a covered and concealed position, with the crashing surf providing noise cover.
Things went well as we moved to our release points and began coming on line at the base of the dune. I hoped both of our main assumptions were correct — that the enemy’s defense would be oriented inland and that we were facing only a squad-sized unit.
Both assumptions were wrong.
We weren’t facing a squad but a reinforced company; and their defense was either oriented toward the sea or out over a full 360 degrees.
We crossed the crest of the sand dune and slowly started down, waiting for the signal to start the assault — the firing of the machine guns on our flanks. This was to lead us by fire to the edge of the village, then the machine guns would displace forward to join the attack and protect our flanks.
But before that happened, the enemy spotted us and opened up with machine guns and everything else they had. We immediately responded and went into the assault.
As we raced down the dune firing away, I saw the enemy tracers streaming over our heads, flying everywhere. Too many for just a squad, I realized. I also realized that their defense was facing the sea… and us. I could tell it was a well-organized defense, with the fires interlocking — a wall of flame, not something you want to move into — but, fortunately, all the fire was high. This can happen when a defense is oriented on a piece of terrain, like the dune, that slopes upward. In those seconds it took us to close on their lines, I said a quick prayer of thanks for that. Another prayer of thanks came a couple of seconds later, when it became clear that our fire, unlike the enemy’s, was effective, and their line was breaking.
As they retreated back into the village huts, we began a house-to-house fight, trying to stay on line so no enemy would get behind us. This meant we had to scrap our plan to race some troops through the village to the western end to cover the paddies, but there were too many bad guys and too many places to hide to take a chance with fire from our rear.
Meanwhile, I could also hear firing from our security teams covering the north-south trails.
The systema
tic clearing of the village took the remainder of the night (we fired flares to illuminate the area).
We were scheduled for a helo pickup at first light, and I hoped we wouldn’t be hit by VC reinforcements before then (though we had a plan to bring in a reaction force of Vietnamese Marines if we ran into a tough spot).
By sunrise, we had cleared the village, consolidated our position, and secured the landing zone for the helos.
The Vietnamese Marine captain who was our raid force commander then received the reports: We had taken a considerable number of wounded, but remarkably none had been killed, and none of the wounded had life-threatening injuries. We counted nineteen enemy killed and thirty-two captured. From these we learned that the American POW had indeed been with them, but he had been moved out across the paddies when the shooting started.
I immediately requested that air observers try to pick up any fleeing VC, but they saw nothing, and when our reaction force came in to search the area later that morning they also had no luck. A disappointing end to an extremely well-executed raid.
The key to the Vietnamese Marines’ success was their superb set of battalion and company commanders. At one time or other, I operated with most of the infantry companies, so I had a good sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
Only one commander failed to reach the high operational standards I’d learned to expect. His leadership ability was poor and his tactical skills were marginal. He was also unusually vain and prissy for a Marine (he always had much more “stuff” with him than the normally lean-traveling Marines); he seemed to have the “privileged” attitude that you more usually found in ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers. But his major problem was his inability to handle more than one thing at a time — a critical requirement for a combat leader. A combat commander in a fight has to do twenty things at once. This almost cost me and his men our lives.
At that time, we were operating among the deserted villages near the coast, continuously moving a company through them to keep the VC from establishing a base of operations — and to keep the former inhabitants from sneaking back home. Though we rotated companies every couple of weeks to give them a break, junior advisers were scarce, and I stayed out to join each company returning to the area. [16] After a while, some company commander must have noticed that I was looking haggard and mentioned to the battalion commander that I should get a break. I didn’t like that idea. A lot was going on out there that only an adviser could take care of.
But on the next turnover the commander ordered me to come back to base. “You come in with the company coming in,” he told me, “and we’ll just put a company out there without an adviser.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m staying. We can’t have a company out there with no adviser.”
“Well, look,” he said, “come in with a company. Get cleaned up. Take a break. We’ve got mail back here for you. Just take a day, at least, and then you can go back out. We’ll hold a platoon commander and a squad back from the company going out to accompany you back to the unit.”
“Okay, I’ll come in and take a day,” I said. I had to admit that a break was tempting; it didn’t seem like there was a hell of a lot going on; and a day was not a long time.
I had one major concern, however. The company going out was the one commanded by the weak officer. It was actually a good company with good platoon commanders, but the short time I’d already spent with them had given me worries about his competence in a tough situation on his own.
At any rate, I came in and cleaned up, got my gear squared away, ate a decent meal, got caught up on my mail, and had a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
About midday, I got together with the lieutenant platoon leader to go over the patrol route and review the procedures for our move. This was bad guy land, and we took no chances. I was impressed with this savvy young man; he was mature and proficient beyond his years.
We met early the next morning at the agreed time and departed friendly lines.
As we got closer to the company’s position, we heard firing. That was a surprise. There had been no reports of their contact with the enemy; and when I called back to battalion to check, they didn’t have any reports, either. Since it was obvious we had to find out what was going on, we stopped the patrol close to their lines and got hold of the company commander on the radio.
“I have VC on three sides and am under heavy fire,” he told us. The volume of fire we could hear seemed to confirm this.
A lot of questions instantly ran through my head: The VC and the NVA were a very sophisticated enemy. They almost always initiated contact — always probing and testing to see how good you were. If you responded and you nailed them hard, they’d break off quickly and fade away. But if they saw they weren’t getting hit hard, they’d press the attack and bring in reinforcements, hoping for an easy kill. My experience was that if we burned them right at the start, they’d break off. No way were they going to get into a pitched battle with somebody who seemed have their stuff together and could get on them quickly with fires. For that reason, I always tried to get artillery and air on them as soon as they hit.
But that was clearly not happening here. “Why?” I asked myself.
The bad guys could certainly see that they were facing a good company that was well dug in. But they were not getting pounded. There were no helicopters, observer aircraft, or jet fighters up there, and no artillery slamming in. And when they realized that, they said, “These guys don’t have it together, or else maybe they don’t have access to their heavy stuff. And we have enough forces in position to take them on. Let’s do it.”
The company had dug in at a deserted hamlet. Because they were surrounded on three sides, the only clear route in was from the west. So we had to carefully work our way around to that side and then slowly close on the company position. The young lieutenant platoon commander handled this tricky move extremely well. We could have easily run into the VC or (just as bad) been mistaken for them and drawn friendly fire, but his coordination and deft handling of our patrol were superb.
When we finally entered the company lines, the scene was intense. Marines were firing from cover at the attacking and ever-probing enemy. The fighting was at close quarters; the enemy were everywhere. (What I didn’t realize then was that the fighting had also been going on for quite some time. This fact came back to bite me.)
As I made my way through the mud huts to the company command post, the lieutenant broke off to join his platoon. They could use him… and I had a sudden wish that he was the company commander.
At the command group, several Marines were chattering away on radios propped up against the mud walls of the huts. From what I could tell, the company commander was talking to his platoon commanders and seemed to have the defense under control. Yet I still couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t reported the contact or requested fire support. The fighting was heavy and the VC were obviously working to encircle him.
About the time I was approaching the command group, the company commander decided to call in artillery. But typically for him, it was an afterthought. He hadn’t given any specific direction to the forward artillery observer, who was — as it happened — confused about our coordinates. As it also happened, I had just checked the coordinates of our position, and when I heard the Vietnamese artillery forward observer calling in the fire mission, it dawned on me that he was giving our location and not the enemy’s.
I grabbed my radio handset and called a “check fire” back to our U.S. artillery adviser, but was too late. The “shot out” return call indicated rounds were on the way. “Get down!” I yelled, as two rounds whistled in and exploded behind us. Remarkably, they hit in the open to our rear, and the Marines, under cover, were not hurt.
At this point, the U.S. Marine artillery adviser, our battalion senior adviser, and the task force senior adviser were all screaming on my radio, trying to find out what was going on; and from the activity on their radios, the Vietnamese chain o
f command was equally energized. I tried giving my command a quick explanation, asking them for time to sort this mess out, but they were not having it. Since they were hearing about the problem from me, I had to be the problem. But at least they trusted me enough to listen to my requests for help, and I managed to get control of things enough to have them bring in an Air Force spotter plane over our position and cancel the artillery mission until I was ready for it.
Since the company seemed well organized in their defense, I was confident there wasn’t an immediate problem with the maneuver units.
I then grabbed the company commander and asked him for a heads-up.
“We’ve been hit three or four times,” he said. “Each time has been harder and from more directions than the last.” Though he had, as I had thought, concentrated on the fight and maneuvering of his units without also reporting his situation or calling in fire support or air observers, I felt I could get these last under control when he hit me with an “Oh, by the way”: “My men are very low on ammunition.”
At first I wondered when he intended to do something about this (that should have been done long before I showed up), but it was quickly obvious he was dumping the problem on me.
“How low?” I asked.
“A few rounds per man,” he answered.
“Great!” I thought.
Fortunately, the VC fire was dying off just then. They seemed to be regrouping.
I immediately put in an emergency request for ammo, which drew more yelling from the rear echelon, who were still on my ass for what was happening.
“What kind of ammo do you need and how much?” They asked after they’d calmed down a little. But they were still thinking that this should be a “by the book” request. I didn’t have time for that.
“Thirty caliber, forty-five… just get anything you can out here.” The Marines of course had a grab bag of old weapons, and no M-16s. “I can’t give you an ammo request. This is an emergency. We’re down to three or four rounds per man and we’re getting hit hard.”