by James Estep
As an added incentive, within days of our arrival a helicopter landed at Ha Thanh, disembarking the newest members of our team. Clad, as were we, in “tiger” fatigues with green berets atop their heads, were three young and very attractive Vietnamese nurses. In the coming months, they would share our hardships, pain, and laughter as well as be a source of comfort and encouragement to the district’s medically deprived.
Our camp was atop a small hill adjacent to the district headquarters on the western side of the village. The hilltop was barren except for a single mud-walled, corrugated-tin-roofed barnlike structure that sat in the middle of it.
There was much to be done. The airstrip, located outside our campsite at the base of the hill on its northern side, had to be extended, since it was then little more than a duplicate of ARO’s runway, capable of receiving only rotary-wing aircraft. But the airstrip was of secondary importance. Our first priority was construction of the camp itself, a task that had to be performed from the outside first. Since we were vulnerable to an attack, we had to start on our defensive barriers around the hill before worrying about our living quarters.
Surrounding the base of the hill, we laid ten meters of tanglefoot (barbed wire strung randomly at ankle level). Up the hill, this was followed by a pyramid of triple concertina anchored on each side by double-apron barbed-wire fence. Then there were more tanglefoot and a second run of concertina and double apron, still more tanglefoot, and finally a third run of concertina and double apron. At critical junctures within this wire barrier surrounding our defensive perimeter, Sergeant Luden positioned command-detonated claymore mines and fugas. (Fugas was a napalm mixture contained in a fifty-five-gallon drum, the bottom of which was slightly submerged in the ground while its top faced upward and outward at an angle pointing toward the enemy. At the base of the drum, Ken rigged a command-detonated shaped charge that would blow both bottom and top off the drum when fired, igniting the napalm in the process and throwing it in a fiery arc for a distance of thirty to forty meters. In short, our fugas devices were stationary, homemade napalm bombs.)
Behind this wire barrier, around the hilltop’s military crest, the strike force dug its fighting trenches. At several points on or behind these trenches, we constructed our two-man covered positions. In addition to our assigned M-16 rifle and .45-caliber pistol, each of these positions normally housed a .30caliber A6 machine gun and an M-79 grenade launcher (as well as a hodgepodge of backup weapons that, depending on the preference of the individual concerned, might include a .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun, a .30caliber M-1 rifle or M-2 carbine, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and an abundance of both frag and smoke grenades). Completing the camp’s defensive infrastructure atop the hill, we dug an underground communications bunker and constructed two 81-mm mortar positions with their adjoining ammunition bunkers.
Our defenses were somewhat augmented by four mountaintop observation posts (OPs) a short distance to the west, northwest, north, and northeast of us. These OPs were manned by Son Ha’s regional popular force, a paramilitary organization composed primarily of Hre Montagnards and commonly referred to as “Ruff Puffs.” Unfortunately, our only means of communicating with these positions was through district headquarters, at best a time-consuming process.
Our mission in Son Ha was simple: pacify the district. And pacification was a simple process: protect and assist the populace on the one hand while destroying the enemy on the other.
A week or so after arriving at Ha Thanh, we conducted our first full-scale offensive operation, a two-company foray to the north of the camp. Sergeant Morgan led one of the companies and Captain Crawford the other. (Captain Crawford had replaced Captain Peterson upon our departure from ARO.) The two companies departed Ha Thanh around ten o’clock in the morning, and all went well until midafternoon, when Morgan’s company found itself in trouble.
As Ken Luden, Sergeant Boyde, the team’s weapons specialist, and I sat in our tented open-air team house, discussing where next to go on the camp’s defenses, Phil Sanford ran out of our nearly completed commo bunker and, in a concerned voice, said, “Morgan’s in a bind, sir! Says he’s surrounded and can’t extract himself! Got two dead on the ground, more wounded.
“He’s in a firefight?” I asked excitedly, then said to myself, well, that’s brilliant, Lieutenant. What the hell do you think they’re in with two dead on the ground?
“Yes, sir! Ambushed! Crawford’s moving in to assist him, but he has a way to go.” He paused, then said, “Hell, they’re not too far from us. Here’s his plot.”
He showed us Morgan’s plot on the map he always kept within arm’s reach of his radios.
“Let’s go talk to the Dai uy,” I said.
Running toward the commo bunker, I thought, damn, the enemy! A firefight! We just got here, and we’re in a firefight! Three months at ARO, and, except for an occasional sniper round, we never heard a shot fired in anger.
“Outbound Six, this is Base Five. Over,” I said into the mike attached to our SSB base-station receiver.
“This is Outbound Six,” Captain Crawford responded immediately, in a seemingly fatigued voice. “We’re on the move. What do you got …”
“This is Base Five. Outbound Alpha One says he’s in trouble. Can we assist?”
Crawford replied, “Think we can get to him before you. Moving toward him fast as we can from the southeast. Don’t know what he’s into, but if you assist, try to come in from the west. Might be able to catch ‘em between us. Use your own discretion and keep me informed. Out.”
I liked Captain Crawford. Few commanders would tell a butter-bar second lieutenant to use his own discretion. Of course, being a butter-bar, I interpreted that to mean “do whatever you want.”
“Okay, Sergeant Luden, Sergeant Boyde, saddle up 403d Company. We’re moving!”
The two of them smiled broadly, obviously as enthused as I was over the possibility of actually, finally engaging our evasive enemy.
None of the three of us, or Phil Sanford looking on, commented on the very apparent fact that the camp would be virtually defenseless if we sallied forth with the third of our three strike force companies. But that was really of secondary importance. We had some of our own in trouble to the north.
Within ten minutes we had assembled as much of 403d Company as could be found on short notice, approximately forty men, and began moving north across the valley’s lush, green rice paddies and then into the lowlying hills beyond. After accessing the concealment afforded by the vegetation of these foothills, we began maneuvering eastward toward Sergeant Morgan’s last reported location. Hopefully, we’d be entering the contested area from the west as Crawford approached it from the southeast. We had little trouble orienting ourselves in the right direction. We simply followed the sound of gunfire.
The sun had been shining and the sky nearly cloudless when we left Ha Thanh. Now, as was often the case in the Nam, it began to rain. Not a monsoon downpour, just an annoying, body-soaking drizzle. We continued moving, the gunfire becoming increasingly louder.
As we emerged from a tree line we saw in front of us, across a wide valley with a stream at its base, the hill that Morgan was supposedly on. But he wasn’t. Charlie was!
Captain Crawford, as he predicted, had beaten us—only to find that Sergeant Morgan had already succeeded in extricating himself from his precarious locale. Having joined forces with Crawford at the base of the hill (the hill’s right, or southern, flank from our perspective), the two of them were now exchanging fire with the enemy above.
For a fleeting few moments I had visions of conducting a classical textbook “fire-and-maneuver” assault against the enemy atop the hill to our front. Let’s see, I thought quickly, I’ll leave half the force here in the tree line. They’ll lay down a good base of fire while the rest of us, using my OCS-taught fire-and-maneuver techniques, assault the hilltop. Yeah! The final coordination line will be the … uh … enemy hill’s tree line. Right. When we reach that point, our base-of-
fire element will shift their fires to the … uh … left.
Sure, that’s best. Keep their fires away from Crawford and Morgan on the right. I’ll signal the shift with a smoke grenade. Then, we in the assaulting element will close and…
Pop! Pop! Pop! Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
We were under fire! The enemy, having become aware of our presence on his flank, was redirecting his fire and throwing everything he had at us!
My schoolbook fire-and-maneuver scheme was doomed the moment Charlie fired his first round, Because before Luden, Boyde, or I could utter a single word, our strikers ran—every single one of them. But not to the rear! As one they charged the enemy to their front, firing their weapons and, in a death-defying chorus, screaming a waffior’s challenge at the top of their lungs. It was all we could do to keep up with them.
Damn! I guess these “Danang cowboys,” these ex-prisoners, have just answered the question I asked Grimshaw that first night at ARO. They’re fighters!
We ran down the hill, jumping the small stream at its base. Bullets ricocheted off rocks at our feet and took large chunks of bark out of trees at the water’s edge. I looked wide eyed at Sergeant Boyde, running beside me.
“Sonofabitch!” he yelled. “This is just like the movies!”
Suddenly, the striker running in front of us caught a round in the side of his skull. In horror, I saw the other side of his head burst open, splattering the tree beside him with blood, bone, hair, and purplish fragments of his brain. It was a ghastly split-second image that would remain with me a long time.
We continued onward, upward. But by the time we reached the hill’s tree line, the fight was over. Charlie had picked up his marbles and retired from the scene to fight another day. Finding nothing in the tree line, we moved back down the hill and joined Captain Crawford and Sergeant Morgan in the paddy below. Then, as a light rain continued to fall, we wrapped our dead in ponchos, strung them beneath bamboo carrying poles, and began our trek back to Ha Thanh.
Walking beside me, Ken Luden commented, “Hey, sir, think we’re in a new ball game here. Charlie’s gonna fight for this place!”
“Yeah, think you’re right, Ken. Sure as hell ain’t ARO.”
And it wasn’t. Our operations differed greatly from those we had conducted at ARO. Certainly there was no need to make two-week forays in Son Ha, since virtually the entire district was within two days’ walking distance of Ha Thanh. We at times ventured forth on three-or four-day patrols, but these operations were atypical. Instead, after discovering our comings and goings were always watched during the day, we normally departed Ha Thanh as stealthily and silently as possible at two or three o’clock in the morning, conducted our operation, and then returned to our campsite by nightfall.
Moreover, the nature of these operations differed greatly. At times they were strictly offensive, the best example of which was the search-and-destroy mission. On other occasions they were humanitarian, an operation such as a MEDCAP (medical civic action patrol). And at times they were a combination of the two, usually in the form of a cordon and search of a village. During a cordon and search we would surround a contested village at night, enter it at first light in the morning, and then kill or capture Charlie if we found him—and treat his family if we didn’t.
Throughout our tenure at Ha Thanh, we attempted to keep at least one such sortie on the move constantly. We did not always succeed in doing so, nor did we always succeed in accomplishing what we set out to do on any given operation. As I suppose was the case with most A detachments in the Nam, we had our fair share of glistening successes and glaring defeats. On one venture we might kill some of Charlie, and on the next he might kill some of us. Or, as we’d later say in the Cav, “Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you!”
In the fall of 1965, we sat atop our campsite at Ha Thanh, waiting for the sky to fall. The repercussions of a battle in the la Drang Valley, nearly a hundred miles to the southwest, were being felt in Son Ha District. America’s involvement in Vietnam was escalating rapidly. Now U.S. warplanes were routinely bombing North Vietnam as part of the Air Force’s ill-advised Rolling Thunder campaign; our forces totaled nearly 130,000 men; and U.S. ground forces, the infantry cutting edge of this commitment, were engaging the enemy in direct combat.
The first, and in one little-known respect the last, of these engagements occurred in October and November during the First Air Cavalry’s Pleiku campaign, a campaign that later became known as the battle of la Drang. la Drang had its impact on us only because the battle ended in such a debacle for the north. General Giap’s greater strategic intent in his Dong Xuan (winter-spring) offensive, in addition to destroying a major U.S. force, was to score a spectacular victory by splitting the republic in two from the coastal city of Qui Nhon west to the Cambodian border. Failing in this, allied intelligence feared that rather than abort his plan, the general might look elsewhere to sever the country, perhaps where the country was narrower and where no U.S. forces were stationed.
By late November or early December, intelligence sources reported the North Vietnamese might well have found such a place in Quang Ngai Province.
A military situation map of Vietnam in early 1965 would show that on a direct line running west from the coastal city of Quang Ngai across the country to the Laotian border, there were only two friendly outposts: an ARVN infantry battalion at Ba Gia, located between us and Quang Ngai, and our camp at Ha Thanh. But by the fall of that year, Ba Gia was no more. It had been overrun, literally eradicated in a predawn attack months before. And that was somewhat frightening, since it had been defended by an entire battalion reinforced with two 105-mm howitzers—both of which might now be pointed at us in Ha Thanh. Moreover, Ba Gia’s attackers had defeated in detail a second ARVN battalion sent forth from Quang Ngai to reoccupy the garrison. And “defeat in detail” in this instance means Charlie tore the battalion to shreds! The rout was so complete that ARVN commanders tore their insignia of rank from their uniforms and, as common privates, tried to evade capture, leaving their American advisors to fend for themselves.
So Ba Gia was never reoccupied. Now there was only one outpost between Quang Ngai and the Laotian border—us.
As fall progressed, intelligence sources continued to identify new enemy units infiltrating into the district, first companies, then battalions, and finally regiments. In fact, at times it was difficult to believe that Son Ha District was actually large enough to hold all the enemy. Some of these sources said were there. We were convinced that all these enemy soldiers had but one mission order from General Giap: annihilate Ha Thanh; take no prisoners.
We patrolled by day, while the Air Force illuminated our camp at night and flew countless close tactical air sorties against real and suspected enemy emplacements, day and night. On occasion, VNAF (Vietnam’s air force) assisted in these missions and, contrary to all we had been told, were very good at it. In fact, they were at times more daring and accurate than their U.S. counterparts. Still the enemy made no deliberate, determined attack on our camp.
With the passage of time, we began to breathe easier. Until we awoke one morning to discover that OP 66, our most eastward observation post, had been overrun the night before. OP 66, a site garrisoned by perhaps half that many Ruff Puffs, had sat astride the Son Ha-Quang Ngai highway (an unimproved dirt road) about midway between Ha Thanh and the now-deserted garrison at Ba Gia. Its fall, coupled with the aforementioned intelligence indicators, convinced our C detachment it was now time to commit its newly formed Nung Mike force to the defense of Ha Thanh. Then we really had a fight on our hands.
It was a dark, overcast, and drizzly afternoon, typical of the monsoon season, when the Mike force arrived at Ha Thanh aboard their Marine H-34 helicopters. Roaring up the valley in file, the helicopters were in fact flying NOE (nap of the earth), not because it was tactically sound or technically innovative to do so but because the low overhanging ceiling prevented them from flying at any greater altitude. Settling
on our unimproved runway, they off-loaded the Mike force. The confrontation between the Chinese Nungs of the Mike force and the Vietnamese of our strike force began before the last H-34 had disappeared into the valley’s mist.
The confrontation between the Nungs’ taskmaster, an Australian warrant named Gundy, and me began almost immediately.
Setting my own faults aside for the moment, and they are many, let me say that Gundy was an arrogant, egotistical cretin, so much so that even his fellow Aussies, the most loyal of nationalists, avoided him whenever possible. On reflection, I don’t suppose that bothered Gundy, since, as he often told anyone willing to listen, he didn’t really consider himself an Australian; he thought of himself only as a Nung. Within an hour of so of his arrival, while he and I were in our underground communications bunker arguing—discussing—how best to defend the camp, we suddenly heard a .30caliber A6 machine gun begin firing.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
“Fuck me, mate, this is it!” Gundy yelled, excitedly. “Guess we Nungs got here just in time, what say?”
“I think not,” I replied, unsure of whether I was referring to the timeliness of the Nungs’ arrival or his assessment of the tactical situation.
Seizing our weapons, we ran up the bunker’s sandbagged stairs, emerging under the dull and dreary overcast sky to find the Nungs lined up on one side of the camp preparing to do battle, with our strikers aligning the other. The two forces were yelling and cursing in Vietnamese and Chinese, while Sergeants Luden and Warner stood between them, trying to defuse the situation.
Evidently, one of our strikers had fired a machine gun in the air amid a rampant verbal fray between the two groups, a fray that had broken out when the Nungs attempted to fill defensive positions previously occupied by our strikers. The striker, a man named Phan, the commander of 403d Company and one of the bravest of our brave, might have fired the machine gun in an attempt to restore order-and later that was his defensive plea. On the other hand, he might have fired it as a face-saving, fight-provoking gesture. (On reflection, I think the latter was the case.) Warrant Gundy was enraged, to put it mildly, and started yelling about courts-martial, dawn executions, official reprimands, and so forth.