by Tom Clancy
An officer lying next to me during one exchange of fire was hit by a round that penetrated only about an inch deep into his thigh — evidence that the enemy was shooting at us from a great distance, desperately hoping to keep us off their back. He easily popped it out.
After a time, intelligence reports from prisoner interrogations and accounts of villagers who had made their way out of the battle area began to filter down to us. The enemy unit we were chasing was identified as the 22nd NVA Regiment, augmented with some local VC elements. Badly mauled, the remnants were cut off by other U.S. and South Vietnamese units and further hammered as they fled for the hills to the west.
Some reports claimed the NVA commander was a woman, but that was never verified. We often got similarly crazy reports: A commander was seen riding a white horse or was a Chinese officer or a Russian. I put this report in the same category.
Our mission ended when we reached Highway 1, the western boundary of our assigned zone of action — now cleared. The enemy escaping to the west were now in zones of other units. We’d suffered a few wounded and bagged a number of the enemy; but, overall, the fighting was a lot lighter than we’d anticipated. Our troops were drained from several days of continuous movement and running firefights, but even more from the horrible sights they’d witnessed. The small boy, though, was still with us, cared for by the Marines. He never spoke a word. Later, we turned him over to civilians on Highway 1 who knew him.
Much of Highway 1—as the main thoroughfare of South Vietnam — was a commercial strip, with small shops, cafes, market stalls, and restaurants all along it. Normally there was heavy traffic on the highway; but this had been swelled by crowds of refugees who had fled the fighting, many of them injured.
As we started heading south along the highway, we came upon an ARVN mechanized unit at a semidestroyed railroad station who didn’t look like they’d done any fighting. When our Marines spotted the unit, I sensed some bad blood; but didn’t think much about it.
Meanwhile, we learned that trucks were on the way to take us back to our original bases to the south. Since no one knew exactly when they would arrive, the commanders decided to let the troops take advantage of the cafes and soup stalls along the road for a rare time-out from more serious business. Hoa invited me to join him for noodle soup and a beer in one of the shops. It sounded great.
Hoa and I were enjoying our bowls and beers when we noticed Marines in combat gear moving past the shop’s open entrance, stealthily creeping forward as though to an enemy target. Curious, we went to the doorway to see what was going on. Kinh was directing the Marines, getting them in position for an attack.
“Kinh,” I called to him, “what’s going on?” But he ignored me.
Suddenly the street erupted in fire.
Hoa and I ducked down inside the shop, and I grabbed my radio to find out what was going on. The shopkeeper repeatedly motioned for us to get into the family protection bunker he had built into the floor. “No, no, you go in,” we told him. We had to try to sort out what was happening.
When I contacted Bob Hamilton, he told me that the Marines seemed to be deliberately attacking another South Vietnamese unit. I could see from the doorway that the Marines were firing at the ARVN mechanized unit we’d seen earlier. By now the firing was heavy and rounds were zinging all over. We were at the point of contact between the two units.
The task force senior adviser came up on the radio, really energized. “I’ve got the U.S. Army adviser of the ARVN unit on the radio net,” he told me. I acknowledged that. “What we’ve got to do is get our units to stop this intramural firefight,” he continued.
“I’ll go out into the street to try,” I said. I thought that if I went out and both sides saw my uniform, they might stop this thing.
“I’ll go with you,” Hoa said. I passed that on to the senior adviser.
I also linked up with the Army adviser to the ARVN unit. But when he chimed in that he didn’t get paid to stop friendly firefights and refused to leave his bunker, I decided I wouldn’t get anywhere arguing with him. I had better things to do.
When Hoa and I looked out into the street again, we realized that many of the rounds whizzing past were.50 caliber rounds from the ARVN armored personnel carriers. And the Marines were firing recoilless rifles. Really heavy stuff was whizzing back and forth through the space we intended to occupy. We looked at each other, shrugged, then went slowly out into the street yelling in Vietnamese: “Cease fire!”
As we moved farther out into the street, and the guys on both side saw who we were, they all sobered up, and the fire began to drop off a little… though not before some.50 caliber slugs had zinged by my ear. At that moment, a figure came running toward us from the ARVN unit and met us midway. It was a black U.S. Army staff sergeant, one of the advisers.
“I was cleaning up,” he said, “when I heard the firing. I rushed out as soon as I could.”
When I told him what his officer had said, he rolled his eyes. “It figures,” he said.
The three of us then huddled between the forces, yelling to our respective sides to stop firing. After a few minutes, thankfully, the shooting stopped.
The situation remained tense until Major Voung and the other Vietnamese commanders (as well as Bob Hamilton) came screaming up the road in jeeps and drove into the railroad station. Moments later, a helicopter landed. A Vietnamese major general climbed out and joined them — obviously sent there to sort out the mess and get the units separated. When Major Voung passed us on the way in, he looked angrier than I had ever seen him.
We waited to hear what was being decided inside. The discussion was obviously heated; and there was a lot of yelling.
While this was going on, Hoa had a few moments free to explain what was going on. “We’ve hated these guys for a long time,” he told me. “Years ago, the ARVN unit bugged out in a firefight and abandoned us. Seeing them spurred the old hatred; and some of the troops got into a brawl that boiled over into this mess.”
A little later, I began to sense something was coming to a head. Kinh was moving troops around, positioning our battalion to surround the train station. When he completed this movement, he went inside and whispered something to Major Voung. The major immediately stopped the discussions. “The station is surrounded,” he announced. “The Marines will attack unless the commander and executive officer of the ARVN unit are turned over to the Marines for execution.”
The major general couldn’t allow that. But the situation was almost out of his control; and Kinh wanted to attack in the worst way. Voung remained open to reason, though, and, after a lot of jawboning, he was persuaded to back off.
The arrival of our trucks helped the situation. The troops were anxious to get back to our bases. And so we boarded the trucks — to my enormous relief — and got out of there. We arrived back home late that night; and I slept until midmorning.
After breakfast, when I joined Bob Hamilton in his bunker, he told me he was putting me in for a Navy and Marine Corps Medal (given for heroism in noncombat situations, normally for saving lives).
“Thanks,” I told him, “I appreciate it. But the Army staff sergeant should also be nominated for the Soldier’s Medal [the Army equivalent].”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, after I’d described what happened.
Though I never received the medal, I did get a letter some months after I left Vietnam from a U.S. Army colonel, the senior adviser of the 22nd ARVN Division. “Your timely intervention during this confrontation,” the last paragraph said, “prevented a situation which could have been extremely embarrassing to the Vietnamese government.”
It was obvious the brass wanted to bury the incident without the publicity of awarding medals. That was fine with me.
MEDEVAC ONE
In the tenth month of his one-year tour, Zinni was with the 4th Battalion, operating in a remote and heavily vegetated area of the hills near the Central Highlands in II CTZ. It had been a good ten months; he
was thinking about extending for another six.
He was caught up in this conflict. It had become his life. He knew this was where he belonged. He knew exactly why he was there and what he was doing… and felt absolutely confident about that. He knew he could handle himself in a firefight, or in any other tactical situation he might encounter. He had a very close relationship with the Vietnamese Marines. They were his buddies and friends; he’d seen a lot of them die. “My purpose for being was right there,” he explains now.
The bad news: He felt terrible. The rigors of constant field operations had taken its toll. Though other advisers were commenting on his weight loss — about forty pounds (and he was small to start with) — that didn’t bother him much. They had all lost weight. He was sick with something he couldn’t shake. All the advisers had bouts of dysentery, but his latest round didn’t go away. His urine had turned black as coffee, his skin was turning yellow, sleeping was difficult, he was having trouble eating (everything he tried made him nauseous), and he was growing weaker by the day. Something had to be done. But what? He wanted to hang on until he got back to a rear area, but he knew he needed to see an American doctor (the Vietnamese doctor had given him shots that had no effect). He thought an American doctor would have medicine that would work better and get him back to full strength faster.
One day the patrol he was with passed close to an American Army forward logistic base set up on a mountaintop (making it easy to defend and to support troops in the field by helo).
“I’d like to go up to the base and pick up some medicine,” he told the patrol leader.
“Let’s go,” he agreed.
As they approached the hilltop position, the soldiers providing security challenged them. “I’m an American Marine,” Zinni announced. That did not compute with them. He was accompanied by Vietnamese troops; he was wearing a Vietnamese Marine uniform, tiger stripes, and a green beret; and he was carrying a grease gun. Since the Army troops didn’t know that Marines were in their Corps area and were unfamiliar with advisers, they decided not to take any chances. They didn’t ask for the Marines’ weapons, which remained slung, but they weren’t about to welcome them like friends.
“I need to see a doctor,” Zinni told them.
They contacted their officer, who told them it was okay to take him to the medical aid station — but under guard. They did that.
As they approached the field hospital, a voice yelled out to Zinni. “Stop. Hold it where you are.”
A captain with medical insignia came out of a tent with a bottle and handed it to Zinni. “Piss into this.”
As black urine filled the vial, he said, “I don’t know who or what you are; but if you’re an American, your tour is over and I’m medevacing you.”
“I can’t go now,” Zinni answered. “Just give me some pills, and I’ll be okay.”
He gave Zinni a quick visual once-over. “Listen,” he said, “if you don’t get to a hospital soon, you could die.”
That got Zinni’s attention.
As the doctor went about arranging a helicopter evacuation to the U.S. Army hospital at Qui Nhon, Zinni called the task force headquarters to tell them what was happening, then turned his gear over to the Vietnamese Marine captain who was the patrol leader.
“I’ll be back,” Zinni told him, and as the helo came into the landing zone near the aid station, he and the captain said good-bye.
When he arrived at the hospital at Qui Nhon, he was immediately put through a series of tests. At that point, force of will failed him, and his body gave out completely. He could no longer eat. Simply looking at food sickened him. The little strength keeping him going in the field was now gone. He didn’t have energy enough even to get out of bed.
A doctor brought in his test results. “You now weigh 123 pounds,” the doctor told him. “You have a severe case of hepatitis, dysentery, mononucleosis, and probably malaria. The good news,” he continued, “is that all of them require the same treatment — lots of rest and food, even if you have to force it down.”
He was put on intravenous hookups to increase his strength and fed six meals a day. The medics brought tempting cheeseburgers, fries, and milk shakes at all hours, but stomaching more than a few bites of anything proved nearly impossible.
Tony Zinni was a very unhappy young Marine. He wanted in the worst way to get back to the advisory unit; and lying in a hospital bed was not his idea of how he wanted to spend his time.
His mood was not much improved when he started feeling a little better. “Well, let’s see what I can do,” he said to himself and tried some push-ups near his bed. He collapsed after three.
The biggest blow came a few days after that. “You’re going to be evacuated to the Naval Hospital on Guam,” the doctor told him, “and then back to the States.” That was when he realized that return to the Marine Advisory Unit was not in the cards.
An Air Force evacuation plane carried Zinni and a number of other evacuees to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where they spent Christmas Day. Another plane carried him to Guam, where he spent several weeks regaining enough strength for his return to the United States.
The stay at Guam was even more difficult than at Qui Nhon. Though the staff was caring and supportive, Zinni felt isolated — the only patient on an officers’ ward. His morale plummeted further as the Tet Offensive unfolded in all its gut-wrenching fury. The VC and NVA were mounting coordinated attacks against the major cities of Vietnam. And all Zinni could do was lie in his bed and impotently watch the TV.
The Vietnamese Marines, always at the heart of the action, were fighting in Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon.
On one occasion, Zinni watched his Marines bring a captured VC before the Saigon police chief, where he was summarily executed. Zinni had accompanied one of the Marines he saw there, a platoon commander from the 4th Battalion, on many operations.
Other Marines went on to fight in the desperate battle for Hue City, distinguishing themselves in the hard fighting to take the city and its citadel.
Eventually, he was brought home to a hospital near Philadelphia, and was soon well enough to be made an outpatient — meaning that he only had to report in every day; otherwise, he could stay at home with his parents (where Debbie, his wife, joined him).
It took a while to decompress. On the drive home, on his first night out of the hospital, he gave his brother a scare. “Why are we going down a road at night unarmed and with no security?” he asked him.
In February 1968, he received orders to Quantico as an instructor at the Basic School, where the Marine Corps trains its new officers. He spent the next two years teaching scouting, patrolling, and counterinsurgency tactics at the Basic School, then attended the career-level school for captains, graduating in the summer of 1970. During that time, he also worked hard (running, lifting weights) to recover the strength he had lost. By 1970, he had fully recovered, and was ready to return to Vietnam.
He received orders for the 1st Marine Division based in Danang, and once again prepared to go to war, assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, known as “the Pacifiers.”
THE PACIFIERS
During the process of Vietnamization, it was expected that the NVA would try to press the withdrawing American forces and cause serious harm. To counter that threat, the division wanted a quick reaction force — a powerful unit that could act as a “fire brigade,” troubleshooter (something like the Vietnamese Marines, but with a far more localized area of operations), and rescue unit (that could bail out anybody who needed rescuing).
That job went to “the Pacifiers” (the code name for their special mission). The Pacifiers, as their official description put it, provided “a swift striking, highly mobile heliborne task force which is able to react to any situation on short notice.”
The battalion was under direct control of the 1st Marine Division and had a dedicated air package that consisted of command and control helos, troop transports, helo gunships, observer aircraft,
and attack aircraft. Its four companies rotated through four levels of alert. The highest was Pacifier 1—requiring a company to be ready to lift out on ten minutes’ notice. The second level was one hour, the third twelve hours, and the fourth twenty-four hours.
A company usually stayed on Pacifier 1 for a couple of weeks, and it was tough. Pacifier 2 was tough, too. Pacifier 3 was a little easier, and you provided security for the division headquarters. And if you were on Pacifier 4, you provided security for the base camp.
The battalion’s rifle companies were very large and specially organized. Unlike most other units, they were kept at Table of Organization strength, with the full complement of officers and NCOs — over 260 Marines and sailors. This was probably two to three times the size of other rifle companies during the Vietnam War.
In addition, they had extra machine-gun and mortar squads, as well as some experimental weapons, such as an automatic grenade launcher (the XM-174, called “the Super-Blooper” by the troops) and a flamethrower (the XM-202).[20] And each company had its own engineer unit, scouts, Kit Carson Scouts,[21] and scout dog units.
Pacifier units were only committed on hot intelligence of enemy contact, or to rescue crews from downed aircraft, with the mobility of the helos being the key to their movements. They did not pursue the enemy on foot unless in direct contact. And in order to facilitate identification from the air, each platoon had their own color patches sewn on their helmets.
Tony Zinni continues:
The battalion’s commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Bernard E. “Mick” Trainor (later a lieutenant general and noted journalist), one of the smartest officers the Corps has ever produced. Trainor would demonstrate his tactical skill and genius many times while I was with the battalion.
When we met, he jumped on the fact that I had been to school and had a previous tour as an adviser. He wanted me to be his assistant operations officer. I begged and pleaded for a company; I did not want a staff job. I wanted to be out in the field doing real work. He agreed to think about it.