by James Estep
22. The Street to Hue
Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy was not a street at all but a coastal area in the northern part of the republic bordered generally by the city of Quang Tri on the north, the ancient imperial capital of Hue on the south, Highway One on the west, and the South China Sea on the east.
As Fall notes in his book, this area was usually a hotbed of insurgent activity, controlled initially by the Viet Minh and later by the Viet Cong and NVA. In Tet’s aftermath, the enemy used the street—so named by the French Expeditionary Force during the first Indochina war—to reinforce and resupply its 5th and 6th Regiments, which had captured Hue on 31 January. Later it served as a route of withdrawal for these units. Allied responsibility for interdicting this route of resupply and regress rested with elements of the First Air Cav. We were one of those elements.
In these waning days of February, we worked the street generally from the city of Hai Lang in Quang Tri Province to the village of My Chanh in Thua Thien Province, conducting usually fruitless search-and-destroy missions during the day and trick-or-treating Highway One at night. On one of the first search-and-destroy forays, I accompanied One Six as they worked the area east of Highway One between Hai Lang to the north and the river Hoi Dao—which was little more than a stream—to the south. It was another walk in the weeds.
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, we halted our futile trek, taking a break next to a cluster of hutches, under a dark overcast sky that continued its constant drizzle.
“Coffee, Willie,” I said in jest to Dubray, who was again filling in for Anderson.
“Coming up, sir.”
“Hey, Willie, I was just joking.”
“It ain’t no problem, sir. ‘Sides, I’m wanting a little myself. This here weather’s chilling me something awful. Need something hot.”
I smiled. Goddamn, you’re a better man than me, William Ambrose Dubray. When this is all over, and you get back to Arkansas, I hope every good thing in your world happens. “Okay, as you wish. Carry on, Willie.”
Blair looked on as Dubray took one of his makeshift Cration-can stoves from a cargo pocket, lit a heat tab and dropped it in, and then put a partially filled canteen cup of water over it.
“Willie, I never thought I’d say it, but you’re right,” Blair said. “I Corps’ climate does call for something hot. And I never thought I’d say it, but a couple of porksausage patties would taste kind of good right now. Jesus, this weather!”
Dubray smiled mightily. “Well, I ain’t got no porkers, but I got a can of ham slices. Want to share ‘em?”
“Yeah, Willie, I’d be honored,” Blair said, grinning.
“You think the sun’s ever gonna shine again, sir?” Lieutenant Norwalk said.
“Beats the shit out of me, Bill. Hope so. We could use a little drying out.”
He looked at me in silence for a moment, as if thinking “a little drying out” was a major understatement. Then he said, “I don’t know, sir. Never seen anything like it in my life. You know, back in the States, in the spring and summer it’d rain like hell, but then the sun would come out. Or it’d rain for a while, and then you’d have these drizzling skies for a day or so. But here, it comes down in buckets intermittently and then just dribbles forever!”
“Yeah, I know, Bill. And we’re nigh constantly soaked. By the way, you checking your people’s feet?”
“Yes, sir. Squad leaders are doing it, and I’m checking theirs. No problems so far. Every other stitch on us is wet, but we’re making sure all our men have dry socks once a day … on those days the log bird flies.”
Yeah, and that’s a problem. Cav’s lost too many of their birds from rockets at Evans. Whereas they logged us nearly every night and morning on the plain, they’re skipping many a night up here.
“Shit, I don’t know, sir,” Norwalk continued. “Wish the Army would come up with something ‘sides the poncho to keep a man dry.” He paused, smiling. “Funny, isn’t it. They give you a shelter half to make a tent, and it’s not worth a simple shit—and a poncho to keep you dry, and it won’t, but it makes a super tent.”
“Yeah, I often wondered who sold the pup tent to the Army. It’s undoubtedly the most worthless piece of gear in the inventory, yet it seems to have been around forever,” I replied.
“Coffee’s hot, sir,” Sweet Willie announced a few minutes later.
So, on a dismal afternoon in I Corps, the four of us sat in Quang Trios wet sand sipping coffee from Willie’s canteen cup as he and Blair shared a can of ham slices and a pecan roll.
“Heard about Sergeant Major Cooper, sir?” Dubray asked.
“Captain, exSergeant Major Cooper? No, not recently. Why do you ask, Willie?”
“He’s dead.”
Shit, not Cooper!
“Where? What happened? Where did you hear this, Willie?”
“One of the fellows what was coming back from An Khe the other day, he say Ser … uh … Captain Cooper was shot while he was commanding a mech company down south. Say Charlie put a round right through his heart.”
“Damn, hate to hear that,” Norwalk said. “I liked the Coop. Gonna miss his cocktail parties.”
“Yeah. Hell of a note,” I said. What else was there to say?
“I saw one of our own get it the other day, sir,” Norwalk said. “First time, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.”
“Where was that, Bill?” I asked, baffled by his remark. I knew we hadn’t lost anyone.
“Last day at Evans. You know, when we were pulling the roadclearing detail.”
“Oh, yeah. Providing security for the engineers opening the highway in the morning, you mean.”
He nodded. “Right. Anyway, had some of my people on their dump and the rest of the platoon trailing their sweepers on each side of the road, forty, fifty meters back. And suddenly we heard a boom! And the guy sweeping the right side of the road was no more. Don’t know what he stepped on or why his detector didn’t pick it up, but it sure made a mess of him. And shit, sir, he was just a kid.”
“They all are, Bill.”
But it ages them fast. How old are you, Lieutenant? Twenty-three? Twenty-three and referring to a younger dead soldier as a kid! War’s made you older than your years, Bill.
“Well, what say, Bill, we ‘bout ready to continue our stroll north?”
He nodded, got to his feet, and signaled his soldiers to do likewise. And once again we began our sluggish, phlegmatic movement northward toward Hai Lang. Twenty minutes later, Blair handed me his handset. “Our Three’s on the line, sir.”
“Comanche, are you in a posture for a pickup? Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Negative. Have two of my subs working sector.
The other’s at last night’s NDP adjacent to the big red.”
“This is Arizona Three. How long to consolidate? Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. About six zero.”
“Okay, Comanche, I’ll be inbound with four, plus two, plus two in six zero. Make that sixteen hundred hours for the pickup. Gonna put you in at point of origin PORE, I spell Papa, Oscar, Romeo, Echo, left three eight, up one three. How copy? Over.”
“This is Comanche Six. Roger. Papa Oscar PORE, left three eight, up one three.”
“This is Arizona Three. Good copy. Got reports of some activity west of the ville there. Want you to check it out and then sweep generally northeast. You can log somewhere in that vicinity tonight.”
Taking Dubray’s handset from him and signaling Norwalk’s RTO, who was standing but a few feet from me, to disregard, I made a net call to assemble the troops.
That afternoon’s assault on the village of Thon Truong Tho and its aftermath were uneventful. Byson set us down in the lowlying foothills along the river Khe on the western side of the village. As the hooks ascended, we received a couple of sniper rounds fired by a very poor marksman; that was all we heard from Charlie that day. The villagers of Thon Truong Tho looked more like lost souls than the enemy. In fact,
they looked very much like the villagers of Happy Valley, with that surreal aura of fear about them as if the ax were about to fall. Perhaps it already had, during General Giap’s recent offensive.
After moving through the village, we continued northeast for a kilometer or so and then set up our NDP next to a cemetery, a short distance from the republic’s little-used railway. Cemeteries were often the best defensive setting in paddy country, since they were usually higher and dryer than the surrounding terrain. Of course, one had to use care in digging his foxhole.
“And how is morale tonight?” I asked, opening our regular planning parley.
“Lower than whale shit, sir,” the Bull said gloomily.
“And that’s at the bottom of the ocean,” Halloway remarked, completing Sullivan’s assessment.
“Not to worry, men. The one thing you can count on is that nothing stays the same. If the sun’s shining, sooner or later it’s gonna rain. And if it’s raining, sooner or later …”
My remark brought forth little more than dutiful, strained smiles.
The weather and lack of contact were not setting well with Charlie Company’s rank and file. There was little I could do about either.
“Well, anyway, turning to tomorrow’s op, we’ll be doing ‘bout the same thing we did today—most of the day, that is, disregarding our little Thon Truong Tho excursion. But let’s flip-flop—One Six works the western side of the highway, Two Six the eastern. Okay?”
Norwalk and O’Brien nodded.
Turning to Lieutenant Halloway, I said, “And, Bob, your folk can nap the day away here—after trick-or-treating the highway tonight, of course.”
“Of course,” he replied, smiling.
“And where are our trick or treats tonight?” Lieutenant Moseley asked, unfolding his map.
Later, while waiting for a log bird that would never come, Sergeant Sullivan and I talked briefly.
“How was your day, Top?”
“Wet. Yours?”
“Ditto.”
“Tagged along with Two Six today,” he said. “And, sir, you might want to spend some time with that young platoon leader of yours, O’Brien.”
“Why is that, Top?”
“Hell, I don’t know what it is about him. It’s not that he don’t want to do well or ain’t trying. It’s just that … that he’s so goddamn young or something. Naples running the platoon while his boss is asking everything but telling nobody to do anything.”
“Well, hell, Top, we were all young once. And asking’s the best way to learn. He’ll come along; just give him time,” I said, echoing Norwalk’s advice.
“Yeah, guess so. But damn, he’s so … so young! So goddamn gullible.”
Smiling, he added, “Know what he kind of reminds me of, Six? Kind of reminds me of an earlier Willie Dubray in officer’s clothing.”
I laughed softly.
“Know what he told me today?”
I shook my head.
“Told me he didn’t like this place. Well, of course, I was surprised—hell, shocked—to hear that. Can you believe it, sir? He doesn’t like this place! So I asked him why on earth not, and he says ‘cause it’s not what he expected.” And I asked him what it was that he expected.”
He paused and started to laugh. “Know what he says? Says, ‘Well, … uh … kind of thought it’d be more like camping.” Camping! You know, where’s the campfire, and when are we gonna sing ‘On top of Old Smoky’?”
“Okay, Top, I get the message,” I said, unable to control my laughter, I’ll tag along with Two Six tomorrow.”
“Hey, Six,” the Bull said after a brief lull, “you like this place? I mean, are you enjoying your command here, even in I Corps’ dark and dreary mist?”
“Hell, yes! Like you say, I’d much rather be here than on that golf course, Top.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said in a serious tone. “Ought to enjoy it; it’ll probably be the last one you’ll ever have.”
I was startled by his remark. “What do you mean, Top? You know something I don’t? Did my court-martial papers come down with last night’s mail?”
Smiling, he said, “Naw, nothing like that. You’ll go on to be Six at other echelons, but you’ll never again be commanding soldiers. You’ll be commanding other commanders, and their soldiers through them. Company command is the first and, in many ways, the last real command an officer gets, especially in the infantry. Ought to enjoy it.”
And, I would discover in years to come, that, as usual, the Bull was right.
The following morning I, along with Blair, Anderson, and Lieutenant Moseley and his recon sergeant, accompanied Two Six on its sally east of Highway One. The platoon was to make a large circular sweep of an area south of the one that One Six had worked the day before. Around midday, we came across a couple of deserted hutches virtually hidden by a small grove of bamboo and tropical foliage. In the process of clearing the area, one of Two Six’s soldiers discovered a five-hundred-pound bomb under a rice bin, haphazardly covered by some matting and rice straw.
Second It. Richard O’Brien felt we should destroy the bomb in place.
“Let’s blow it, sir,” he said.
“And just how,” I asked, “do you propose to do that, Dick?” We carried no explosives, detonators, or time fuse for that sort of thing.
“Well, we can put a claymore up against it, or maybe tie a couple grenades to it, see. Then we tie a long piece of string or maybe some commo wire to the pins, move over there behind that paddy dike, give the wire a tug, and watch the fireworks! What do you think?”
What I thought was can you really be this naive? Do you have any idea of the lethal radius of a five-hundred-pound bomb? My first sergeant is right. You’re not learning the trade quickly enough. Then I noted Blair and Anderson, staring at the ground, to conceal the smirks on their faces, and I said, “I don’t think so, Dick. For reasons that we’ll talk about another time.”
“Well, hell, maybe if we fell back a ways and hit it with a LAW,” he said, now seeing the fallacies of his proposal, but, observing the faces of those around him, not wanting to admit his mistake.
“No!”
“Could work,” Moseley said, tongue in cheek, as O’Brien strolled back toward the rice bin. “Might I suggest we move downrange a klick or so and leave your young lieutenant here holding the string.”
I didn’t smile.
“Want me to call battalion, sir?” Blair asked. “See if they can get a demolitions team in to us?”
“No, not yet.”
Lieutenant O’Brien did have a point. Charlie was obviously the new owner of this piece of Uncle Sam’s ordnance, and if we ignored it, it would eventually be used against us. However, if I called a demolitions team forward, it would take hours.
Talking it over with Lieutenant Moseley, we decided to keep moving and then to hit the hutches with an artillery strike after we were out of harm’s way. This might detonate the bomb or at least sensitize it so it would explode prematurely when Charlie tried to move it—in which case we’d kill four or five of his men while ensuring the thing was not used against us.
Twenty minutes or so later, Moseley requested his mission. We stopped in place briefly and watched the rounds impact, hoping for a secondary explosion. There was none.
As we continued our movement eastward, I overheard Anderson offhandedly ask, “Wonder if the LT’s a West Pointer?”
“Naw, Ivy League. You can bet on it,” Blair responded. “Only an Ivy Leaguer thinks on that plane.”
The log bird flew that night, bringing with it steak and, for the first time in what seemed a long time, a ration of beer and coke.
“How’d Two Six’s op go today, Six?” the Bull asked, passing me a beer.
“Just another fruitless walk in the rain, Top.”
He grinned, obviously having heard of O’Brien’s proposal for ridding ourselves of an unwanted five-hundred-pounder. “And how did our new lieutenant do?”
“Moseley? S
uper. He’s filling Slim’s boots without missing a step.
Couldn’t be happ …”
“No, damn it! You know who I mean, sir. Our camper. Lieutenant O’Brien.”
“Oh. Well, he’s coming along. Just takes time.” Smiling, I added,
“But, Top, in the meantime, I’m sure as hell glad he’s got Sergeant Naple as his number two.”
He laughed. “I copy that, Six.”
“Anything on the admin side tonight?” I asked, thinking of little else to say.
“Normal stuff. Pay complaint in Three Six. Letter of indebtedness in One Six … uh … Edgerton. Talked with him about it. Says his wife’s running up the bills in his name. Letter says if they don’t receive payment in ten days, they’re gonna serve a warrant on him. ‘Course, that worries the shit out of Edgerton. Says, ‘Well, serve me, Top! I’d be more than happy to go home and get this thing cleared up.” Anyway, I’ll have the XO get the standard ‘although the U.S. Army is not a collection agency, we will so on and so forth’ letter out for your signature. And Dejohn’s sister was killed in an auto accident. Got him out on the evening log bird.”
We talked a bit longer as the late afternoon faded to dusk. Then, getting to my feet, I said, “Think I’ll mosey over to Two Six’s part of the world, Top.”
He nodded understandingly.
Second Platoon had rigged themselves a three-poncho CP. One covered their position on a relatively flat plain about three feet above the ground. The other two, snapped to the first, extended downward and outward, their bottoms staked into Vietnam’s terra firma. Inside, O’Brien, Naple, and their RTO sat huddled around a single candle, which offered little heat but did give the appearance of warmth and dryness.
“Come on in, sir,” O’Brien said. “Got a fire in the fireplace.”
“Thanks,” I said, bending over and crawling inside. It appeared that he and Naple were sharing their CP, and the two of them knew I took a dim view of platoon leaders and platoon sergeants sharing the same defensive position. But I said nothing. O’Brien had been chastened enough for one day. Then, perhaps this wasn’t the case. Perhaps Naple was simply taking the time to talk to, to teach, his young lieutenant. No matter.