by James Estep
“No, sir, I can’t really envision that. I see the whole thing just kind of petering out, just dying a slow and uneventful death. You know, sort of like Britain’s experience with the CTs in Malaysia, well, Malaya at the time. Hey!” he said, suddenly brightening. “Maybe that’s what we should do, sir! Know what the Brits did in Malaysia?”
I shook my head. As far as I could recall, they pretty well whipped the CTs (Communist terrorists—Malaysia’s Viet Cong).
“Well,” he continued, “after fighting the CTs for years and finally concluding they were at a Mexican standoff—you know, with neither side able to defeat the other—the Brits suddenly announced to the world that they had won, period. Said they had won the war, the emergency was over, the colony was to be granted independence, and they were going home. And they did! It was that simple. When they discovered they couldn’t beat the CTs, they just said they already had and then packed their rucks and left!”
The two of us started laughing.
“Yes, sir, LBJ ought to read more British history. Hell, he could solve this thing the same way, right? Hey, sir, couldn’t you just see him there on TV, you know, ‘Ma fellow ‘Mericans, we’ve won! We’ve arrived at the end of the tunnel, turned off the light, and now ah’m gonna bring our ‘Merican boys home, so them little Asian boys can continue’. huh?”
Our laughter set a poor example in after-dark noise discipline. But no matter how hard we tried to suppress it, neither of us could.
“Of course, there’d still be a lot of VC in Vietnam,” Mac added, same as there’s still a lot of CTs in Malaysia, right?”
“Guess so,” I replied, wiping my eyes. “But tell me, Mac, how the hell did we get around to LBJ and Malaysian history?”
“Think it started when you asked if I planned to stay in, and I guess I took the long way ‘round the hutch in saying no,” he said, still laughing.
“Well,” I responded, soberly, seriously, “you may change your mind, and I really hope you do, Mac. ‘Cause you’re one hell of a combat leader.
And, by the way, whether you stay in or not, I mean regardless of what you might do in the future, that’s something no one can ever take from you.”
“Thanks, sir,” he said, then got up and strolled into the night, back to his place of rest in Vietnam’s sod. Only six more such holes to dig.
One Six and Two Six, working the mountain the next day, surprisingly came up dry, no contact whatsoever. But Three Six, while walking the valley floor, unexpectedly came upon three NVA napping in a grove of palms. One of the three was quick enough to get away with his life; the other two became part of the war’s body count.
We moved our NDP again that night and then continued our operational routine the following day with One Six and Three Six on the mountain and Two Six in the valley. The command section accompanied One Six.
It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when a single unsuspecting NVA soldier walked into our ambush.
“Thank God,” I said to Sergeant Sullivan, who was sitting beside me when we heard the familiar boom! of the claymore’s detonation.
“Thought we were gonna go two days in a row without a hit in the high country.”
“Yeah, and you know what snuffie’s beginning to say,” he replied, smiling. “A day without a hit is like a day without sunshine.”
“Goddamn, he’s a mess, ain’t he?” the Bull observed as we surveyed the ambush site. The hit man, perhaps because there was only one enemy soldier to contend with, had waited until the last possible moment before detonating his claymore, thus ensuring a kill. The mine’s force had virtually severed its victim at the waist, with only the spinal column and shreds of flesh connecting his upper and lower torsos. It was a quick, merciful death.
After reporting our kill to battalion, we began our descent down the mountain. As we did so, I radioed Halloway, telling him to remain in position for another twenty to thirty minutes and then follow us.
Within minutes after we joined Two Six in our NDP, Major Byson called.
“Comanche, this is Arizona Three. Are you in posture to move within one zero? Over.”
“Uh … negative. Still have my Three Six on the hump. They should close my location within two zero or so. Over.”
“This is Arizona Three. Okay, tell ‘em to hustle it up. I’m inbound with four, plus two, plus two in two zero. Arclight opened up a large bunker complex on the side of a mountain to the northeast of you, and you’re the closest and fastest thing we can get on top of it. How copy?”
“This is Comanche Six. Roger, solid copy. We’ll be ready.”
En route to our objective, Major Byson informed us we would have to work our way into the bunker complex from the valley below since he simply couldn’t find a suitable LZ atop the mountain. This was an atypical method of air-assaulting a target inasmuch as one of the division’s tactical strengths lies in its ability to land a force above the enemy and then attack downward. It never ceased to amaze us that, regardless of how many times we so conducted our assaults, the NVA, I suppose being set in their ways, continued to defend downward, in the opposite direction from which we were attacking.
Overflying the B-52 (Arclight) strike before landing, we saw it had made an ugly mess of the untouched tropical rain forest. The double-and triple-forested canopy had been torn asunder, revealing a maze of giant teak trees and other jungle vegetation lying in disarray. Yet in another, somewhat morbid sense, the strike was beautiful! Beautiful in its manifestation of destructive power, in the near-perfect symmetrical pattern its bomb craters formed upon the face of the mountain below.
“Comanche, this is Arizona Three. We’ve seen some movement in the strike area, so I’d like you to get up there as quickly as possible.
You’ve got Blue Max and red leg on call, but don’t think you’re gonna need ‘em. Charlie’s probably still in a post-arclight daze … you know, walking around with his head on backwards, mumbling to himself. So the sooner you get up there, the less time he’ll have to recock his brains.”
I rogered his transmission and, noting that we were speedily approaching the LZ, quickly passed the headset back to the crew chief. Then I mounted the skids of the Huey (located approximately three feet below each of the aircraft’s doorless door frames). The rest of those on board followed suit. We grasped the aircraft’s door frame or floor attachments with our inboard hands while holding our weapons in our outboard hands. We were now just seconds from touchdown, coming in low and fast, the Huey’s fifty-to sixty-knot backwash creating a comical pattern of moving wrinkles on even the youngest of our faces.
Suddenly the Huey slowed and flared, tail down, preparing to land. When it was within three feet or so of the ground, we jumped.
Simultaneously, the helicopter flared again, this time in a nose-down attitude, immediately picking up forward airspeed. In seconds it was gone, having never touched the earth. If one learns little else in the Cav, he quickly becomes adept at swiftly off-loading a UH-ID Iroquois slick.
One Six, having conducted the assault, speedily secured the LZ, permitting me to signal Byson that we were green. Moments later the Chinooks landed with the rest of the company. It takes longer for thirty or forty armed cavalrymen to disembark these huge troop-transport helicopters—perhaps five or six seconds.
The platoon leaders and I hurriedly planned our incursion into the strike area, wanting to get in and out as quickly as possible since darkness would be upon us within a couple of hours. Having noted during our flyover several trails that seemed to lead from the valley floor up the mountain, we decided to approach the strike area from two directions.
Two Six would attempt to access it on the left, while Three Six did the same on the right. We would accompany Three Six. One Six, already in position around the LZ, was to remain in place, securing the landing zone as our NDP. They would, of course, be augmented in this task by Four Six.
We had been climbing for thirty to forty minutes when our trail fizzled out, and we had to sta
rt chopping our way through the dense foliage. I was the fourth or fifth man in the file. Suddenly, a dazed NVA soldier plunged at us from the thick uphill vegetation, less than ten feet to our right!
Our reaction was simply a matter of reflex. I habitually carried my CAR-15 (a shortened version of the M-16) in my right hand, its muzzle pointed forward, my finger in the trigger guard and thumb on the safety selector, the weapon’s weight supported by a carrying strap across my right shoulder. Spinning to the right, I fired at the charging blur before me! The soldier in front of me did the same. The dead man’s forward momentum carried him crashing through us, throwing me to the ground. Quickly, but a bit tremulously, I got to my feet.
“You okay, sir?” Sergeant Buckley, the man who had been in front of me, calmly asked.
“Uh … yeah, sure. No problem,” I replied, hopefully with more conviction than I felt.
“Must’ve been a crazy whose brains were scrambled by one of those five-hundred-pounders,” someone commented.
Sergeant Buckley had turned his attention to our lifeless intruder, an officer of the People’s Army of North Vietnam, in whose outstretched hand was a tightly gripped P-38 Walthers pistol. Buckley looked at the weapon, then at me.
“Hey, Sergeant,” I said unhesitatingly, “it’s yours. No doubt in my military mind that you were the one who got him, and God bless you for it.”
We began moving again and within a few minutes were in the strike area. Our progress then became far more difficult, for no jungle is quite so impenetrable as one that has been rearranged by an Arclight strike. Trees and foliage that had been growing as nature intended them to, vertically, were now a chaotic horizontal entanglement.
As we slowly worked our way through this wooded clutter, we were suddenly confronted by three unarmed NVA soldiers just standing there as if in a daze, staring at us. Momentarily, we stared back.
Three Six’s point man yelled, “Chu Hoi!” (surrender). They didn’t respond. Seconds passed. Then, as if in slow motion, one of the three enemy soldiers raised his arm, which he had held behind him, and in a wide overhand sweep threw a grenade into our midst! He was dead before he hit the ground, but his two companions, miraculously and instantaneously recovering from their post-Arclight trance, made good their escape.
As was often the case, the hand grenade was a dud. The luck of Charlie Company was holding.
After marrying up with Two Six, we jointly worked the bunker area for another half hour or so, counting the dead and occasionally recovering a weapon. It was dark by the time we rejoined One Six in our NDP. We were ready to drop, too tired to even talk.
But Major Byson wasn’t. “This is Arizona Three. Good show, Comanche. break. Be advised there’s gonna be another Arclight flown in your vicinity tonight. You’re well out of range, but it might spoil your sack time … break. Unless we find something on first-light recon in that area, I’ll probably be moving you again in the Alpha Mike. How’s your copy?”
An hour or so later, the world to the northeast of us exploded! We could only imagine the stark terror felt by those who found themselves on the business end of an Arclight mission. You could not hear or see the B-52s: they flew too high. With no warning the earth simply turned itself upside down.
That night’s target, the reverse slope of the mountain on which we had worked earlier in the day, was at least a mile from us and it was still a frightening experience—frightening but fascinating. The sky suddenly lit up in multiple brilliant-vermilion flashes, silhouetting the mountain to our front. Moments later, the crashing sound of these 500and 750-pound bombs reached us in an awesome, earthshattering shock wave.
We had been told that the U.S. Air Force considered the Arclight mission to be “demoralizing to an enemy force caught within its periphery.” This had to be the understatement of the year.
7. Area 506
The following morning we were picked up and inserted into area 506, so called because Route 506, an unpaved secondary road running east-west from Highway One into Binh Dinh’s mountains toward Konturn, was the only distinguishable cultural feature therein. In reality, however, it was distinguishable only as a thin red line on our 150,000 tactical maps; like much of the country’s secondary-road network, it was a communicable roadway in name only. Its surface was marred by artillery and bomb craters, its bridges had long since collapsed, and much of it had been overgrown with vegetation by the surrounding jungle as it went about reclaiming the land, inch by inch.
After an uneventful insertion on a green LZ, we established a company base astride Route 506 and began conducting “cloverleaf” operations.
This maneuver was generally regarded as defensive, not offensive, in nature, its primary objective being not to find and attack the enemy but to make sure the enemy was not about to find and attack us. it was a good technique to employ in a circumstance, such as this one, in which we didn’t know where to concentrate our offensive effortswhere the hunting in one direction looked no better or worse than in any other.
The operation derived its name from the diagram that depicts it, the company base being the clover’s stem, and the three platoons’ large circular sweeps outward from the base the clover’s leaves.
Our first day in area 506 was obviously going to be a day without sunshine. The last of the platoons returned from its cloverleaf maneuver in the early afternoon having found, like the two earlier returning platoons, no trace of our elusive foe. We were surprised as this point on Route 506, where it enters Binh Dinh’s mountain passes, was only six to eight kilometers northwest of “our” mountain where we had been consistently successful with our claymores.
The afternoon heat was blistering, and the previous day’s B-52 postmission assessment coupled with our cloverleaf walk in the weeds had nearly exhausted us. Since we seemed to be in no imminent danger, we decided to convert our cloverleaf base to an NDP, call the log bird in early, and get some rest. The decision was popular and, as events would unfold, auspicious. We would need the rest.
Most of the company napped away the afternoon. Shortly before dusk, the log bird dropped off a smattering of ammo, water, a hot, our rucks, and one can of beer and one of coke per company head count. All was once again right with our little piece of the republic.
But the First Air Cavalry was a large organization, and while we were at peace with the world astride Route 506, other cavalrymen were still at work. As we sat sipping our warm beer, an OH-6A Cayuse helicopter pilot was flying last-light recon. He was becoming increasingly interested in the side of a mountain only six to eight kilometers from where we sat.
Whoom! Whoom!
“Red leg going in. Not too far from us,” Sergeant Sullivan offhandedly commented.
Minutes passed as the Bull, Slim Brightly, and I chitchatted about unimportant things.
Whoom! Whoom! Whoom! Whoom!
“Sounds like one five five,” the Bull said. “Sounds like it’s going in on our mountain.”
“Maybe H&I, huh, Slim?” I asked.
“Naw, too much of it for H&I,” Slim replied, and he should know.
“Well, then, how about seeing if you can find out what’s going on, Lieutenant Brightly!” I said jokingly. “You know, get on the horn and talk some of your cannon-cocker lingo to your red-leg connections.”
“Roger that, Six,” he responded. Smiling, he got to his feet, muttering as if to himself, and putting his precious three-point-two elixir aside, the company’s attached forward observer hurried off to do his master’s bidding. “For an artilleryman’s duties amongst infantrymen are many and varied. He must, for example, count for them when the numbers surpass that of single digits; must read their mail and comic books to them and apprise them of the difference between a right and left piece of footwear. He must teach them to tell time.”
The Bull and I were laughing as he turned to leave.
“And when Mickey’s big hand is on the …”
“Hey, Slim, see if you can get a grid, okay?”
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��But of course, sir, and I shall even spell it for you.”
Whoom! Whoom! Whoom! Whoom!
The artillery fires continued to increase in tempo and were producing a fairly steady rumble to the southeast of us when Lieutenant Brightly, now all business, returned from his radio set.
“Got a grid, sir,” he said, “and it looks like our mountain.” He paused, flashlight in hand, as he plotted the grid coordinates on his map. Then he replotted them. “Shit! If this grid is correct, I’ll bet we were within twenty fucking meters of this bunker complex on nearly that many fucking occasions.”
“That’s what it is?” I asked. “A bunker complex?”
“Yes, sir. Seems one of the Cav squadron’s birds was doing a routine last light, thought he saw some smoke or something, so he called in a couple rounds. Well, that opened the canopy up a bit, so he called for effect, and, hey, that really opened it up! Says he saw all kinds of bunkers with a bunch of gooks scrambling about ‘em.”
“Sonofabitch!” I said, looking at the plot on his map. “Target’s no more than a klick from Daisy!”
“Damn right, it’s not!” Slim retorted. “And that’s where we should be tonight, sir. Right at the base of that fucking mountain! It beats the shit out of me why battalion put us out here ‘stead of back there where we were killing gooks ‘bout every fucking day.”
“Well, you’re sure as hell right on that, sir!” the Bull interjected.
“We ain’t never had any luck in the 506. Sometimes I really question the operational thinking of some of those shits in the three section. I mean who sets their head space and timing? Ho Chi Minh?”
Someone else echoed the first sergeant’s sentiments. “Yeah, Top. It’s the fucking S-2! He keeps his head up his ass.”
As word of the discovery on “our” mountain spread throughout the company, it became apparent that the consensus sided with Slim and the Bull. And it was a shame we weren’t located at the base of the mountain as we had been on so many uneventful nights in the recent past. But what to do about it?