Comanche Six: Company Commander in Vietnam

by James Estep

  “Want a beer, sir?” Naple asked. “We got a couple the nondrinkers turned in.”

  “No thanks. Had one.”

  Turning to the platoon’s RTO, Naple asked, “Nadolski, you change your battery yet?”

  “Naw, Sarge. Willie ain’t got ‘em broke down.”

  “Think he has now. You run along and see, okay?”

  Specialist Nadolski looked at Sergeant Naple inquisitively for a moment and then, after looking at me and back to Naple, said, “Uh … yeah, probably does.” As he departed, Naple crawled out behind him, saying,

  “Think I’ll go check the line, sir.”

  “Well, how do you like the Nam, Dick?” I asked.

  “It’s okay, sir. Of course, I still have a lot to learn.”

  That’s true.

  “Mean … uh … that was a pretty dumb idea I had today, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Not the brightest, Dick, but don’t worry about it. Shit, it’s a small thing and it’s in the past, okay?”

  “Yeah … uh … yes, sir, but the men are all laughing about it behind my back. Don’t know what I was thinking of at the time.”

  “Hey, Lieutenant, put it behind you. Tomorrow someone else will do something less than brilliant, and the company will be laughing at him.

  Might very well be me.”

  “Kind of doubt that, sir.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t. Hell, we were all second lieutenants at one time, and we all made mistakes. And those that went on to make good first lieutenants—and captains and colonels and generals—were the ones who learned to put their mistakes behind them and get on with the business of soldiering.”

  He flashed me an unconvincing smile, sighed, and said, “Well, yeah. Guess so.”

  “Dick, you know what I was called when I was butter bar?”

  He shook his head.

  “‘Shape Charge.” Or Lieutenant ‘Shape Charge,’ depending on who was addressing me or talking about me. Want to know why?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, after I got out of OCS, I reported in to the Fifth Special Forces, which at the time was undergoing predeployment training, getting ready to come over here. And one block of this training concerned demolitions. Well, one day, after a brief description of the forty-pound shape charge—during which I was either napping, or not listening, or simply unable to grasp what was said—when the instructor asked if there were any questions, I, for reasons only God knows, raised my hand and asked how you held the charge when firing it.”

  O’Brien looked at me in utter disbelief and then, brightening, said, “You’ve got to be kidding! Really?”

  “Absolutely. And you can well imagine what I suffered for a while after asking that dumbest of dumb questions. Hell, your idea today pales in comparison! But as you can see, Dick, I survived that and other similar dumb things said and mistakes made. And you can, too. And you will. Tell you what an old major told me one time. Said, ‘Jim, you don’t have to be the brightest or best-educated officer to outshine those around you. All you got to do, before you go to sleep each night, is take a few minutes to think about what you did that day, starting from when you got up, and then plan what you’re gonna do the next, starting when you get up. Takes no more time than a good prayer and might well pay bigger dividends.’”

  Smiling broadly, O’Brien said, “How do you hold a forty-pound shape when you fire it? Damn, sir!”

  “Hey, Lieutenant O’Brien, gotta promise not to tell anybody about that, okay?”

  “Of course not, sir!”

  But of course he would. And that was okay. Hell, it’s not that unbelievable. Could’ve even happened. Probably did to someone, sometime.

  Getting up to leave, I asked, “By the way, Dick, where’d you go to school?”

  “Brown, sir. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason. Just wondered …”

  “Roger that, sir, and … uh … Thanks.”

  “Me, too, Dick.” better blow the candle; it’s getting dark. Enjoyed the visit.”

  “And how did you find Two Six?” the Bull asked when I returned to our piece of the perimeter.

  “In high spirits, Top.”

  “And the young lieutenant?”

  “Surviving and doing fine with his new command. Still lessons to be learned, but it takes time.”

  It would, but in the end O’Brien would do well. As was the case with Sweet Willie, the war would serve him well. He would be a better man for having been part of it. Twenty years later, damn few other graduates of Brown University could tell about their experiences in a land called Indochina.

  As Charlie Company, and other companies of the battalion, and other battalions of the division, worked the street to Hue, severing the enemy’s supply lines to the city, the battle for the city raged on. By any account, it was the longest and nastiest of Tet’s many battles.

  Solidly entrenched within the walls of the Citadel, Hue’s inner city, the enemy fought on. Reluctant to destroy one of their few real cultural treasures, Saigon’s government had initially demurred in employing air and artillery strikes against the Citadel, and our leaders had acquiesced to their desires.

  And while these powers dallied about the destruction of stone walls, North Vietnamese cadres methodically murdered three thousand men, women, and children—and Marines, paratroopers, ARVN soldiers, and Cav troopers continued to die.

  In February’s waning days, after air and artillery were finally brought to bear on the inner city, and after the Cav had fielded sufficient troops to stop the resupply of enemy forces therein, we began to notice a shift in our encounters with the enemy. Whereas before we had oriented our main effort northward, we now found our foe approaching us from the south. Charlie was no longer trying to sneak into Hue. He was trying to sneak out.

  “Sir,” Blair said, scurrying up beside me as we trudged along one of Thua Thien’s winding rice-paddy dikes, accompanying Three Six on a business-as-usual search-and-destroy trek.

  “Three’s on the horn, right?” I answered.

  “No, sir. Captain Carroll’s been hit! They killed him, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Just heard it. They got into something east of us, and his RTO said couple of their men were killed and Carroll was down. Next transmission, he told Major Byson their Six was dead.”

  “Let me listen in, please,” I said, grabbing his handset.

  Runner, this is Arizona Six. What’s the status on your Six? Over,”

  Colonel Lich was saying in a very concerned voice.

  “Runner Two Six … Uh, killed in action. Over.”

  There was a long pause before Colonel Lich again came on the air and, with a discernible sigh, said, “Okay. You’re in command. I’m en route. Out.”

  Bob Carroll had been a close friend, and his death saddened me, as it did his soldiers. But he was not the first company commander, nor would he be the last, to die in a war that others would later call a company commander’s war. Vietnam, unlike most of our nation’s wars, was a war without fronts, a war fought in the enemy’s lair by widely scattered infantry companies. Like cavalry troops on our western plains a century before, the soldiers of these companies fought alone.

  A short while later we took a break next to another nameless and virtually deserted village. It had stopped drizzling, but the sky remained overcast, dark, and low. A misty wetness enveloped us.

  “Too bad about Carroll,” Lieutenant Halloway remarked as we sat on a lowlying mud-and-stone wall at village’s edge.

  “And his soldiers,” I muttered in return. “Not too far from us—a couple, three klicks east of here.”

  “That’s Blue Max supporting ‘em now, sir,” Moseley said, pointing to a pair of Cobra attack helicopters that were alternately making firing runs on an unseen target to the east of us. Moments after each completed its pass, we’d hear the muffled reports of their rockets and 40-mm impacting. “And they’re not gonna be supporting them much longer if this ceiling keeps dropping,” he
added, dryly.

  “Wonder what they ran into?” Halloway asked.

  “Who knows,” I replied. “Damn, wish we’d run into something. We’re just not making contact up here like we did on the plain, Bob.”

  “That’s ‘cause the plain—the mountain—was our playpen. The street is Charlie’s,” he responded. “Just takes time to figure out the lay of the land, Six. Once we do, we’ll be scoring same as we did down south.”

  “Hope you’re right. Only concern is that Charlie’s had a twenty-, twenty-five-year head start on figuring the lay of the land around here.”

  Lieutenant Moseley, changing the course of our conversation, commented,

  “Appears the Marines are about to wind it up in Hue. Least that’s what the papers are saying.”

  “About time,” Halloway said. “How long they been at it now? A month?”

  “Nearly,” I said.

  “Got a letter from my wife yesterday. She said they must have a TV cameraman assigned to every other soldier and Marine fighting in Hue. Said it’s as much a part of the evening news as the weather. You know, ‘And now, turning to the battle for Hue’.”

  As he talked, I idly watched his RTO clean his disassembled M-16. “That couldn’t wait till tonight, Torres?” I asked.

  “No, sir. Weather’s hard on her. She needs a lot of TLC in weather like this.”

  Smiling, Halloway said, “Cleanest weapon in the United States Army, sir. Seems to always be in pieces before him. And every two, three days, he extracts, cleans, oils, and reinserts each of the three hundred rounds.”

  “Two hundred and seventy, LT,” Torres said, correcting his platoon leader. “Fifteen magazines, eighteen rounds per. Ought to always go two rounds shy if you want your magazine to feed properly.”

  “Whatever,” Halloway said. “Anyway, I’m not faulting you for your paranoia. Hell, might save your life some day.”

  “Might save yours, Robert,” I said.

  As we got to our feet to continue our wanderings in and about Thua Thien Province, it started to drizzle again.

  The following morning, after the log bird had departed and we were finishing up our C&D of hard-boiled eggs, bread, oranges, and coffee, Major Byson’s command-and-control helicopter set down unannounced on our LZ. Meeting him as he dismounted the communication-laden Huey, I saluted and said, “Ready, sir!”

  Smiling, he returned my salute. “Tall Comanche, are you in a posture for a pickup?”

  “Your timing couldn’t have been better, sir,” I said. “We were just about to split up and begin today’s walk in the sand.”

  “Great. If the ceiling holds, got three hooks coming in here at 0900.”

  “Our LZ’s gonna be green, sir?”

  “Should be,” he responded. “It’s Evans.”

  “Evans, sir?” the Bull asked, joining us.

  “Just for the day, First Sergeant,” Byson replied. “The colonel wants to get you in for a shower and a little drying out. Then it’s back to the war, okay?”

  “Okay, sir!” Sullivan responded. “And please pass along my thanks to the colonel. Snuffie can sure as hell use a little drying out. Clean jungles, I suppose?”

  “It’s all taken care of. Trains will just do the uniform dump there instead of out here.”

  Then the major turned to more serious matters. “Listen, I know the weather’s miserable, and the sun rarely shines, but your sufferings have not been for naught. The battle for Hue, for all practical purposes, is pretty much history. Marines are still mopping up in the Citadel, and they may be doing that for some time yet, but Charlie’s beaten—royally! And the reason he lost the battle is because you and others in the Cav have been suffering out here, denying him the ability to reinforce. Of course, it’s been costly. Battalion’s taken some bad hits lately.”

  “Yeah, sorry to hear ‘bout Bob Carroll,” I said.

  He merely nodded and continued his discourse. “Anyway, as you probably know, the traffic out of Hue is heading north now, so I want you all to keep yourselves oriented south. Within the next couple days or so, we’re gonna start working the middle of the street. Gonna get into Charlie’s twenty-year lair and pacify the street like we did Bong Son’s plain.”

  This was all well and good, but at the moment a shower and a change of uniforms were top priority.

  Thirty minutes or so after Major Byson took off, we heard the inbound CH-47s. Twenty minutes later we were at Evans, and soon after that, with our feet ankle deep in mud, we were in a GP medium tent, under a shower head dispensing cold water. And it was great!

  Outside the tent, Willie and our trains folk busied themselves outfitting us with clean, dry uniforms. After donning these, we were trucked to battalion’s portion of Evans and fed a hot lunch. Then, after cleaning their weapons and caring for their gear, the soldiers of Charlie Company were given the run of the camp for a couple of hours to visit the PX, steam bath, special services, and so forth. Many simply napped the day away.

  At three-thirty that afternoon we were trucked back to the camp’s pickup zone, where we were to board three hooks, which would fly us to a secure LZ astride Highway One a couple kilometers from our NDP of the night before. But there were only two hooks on the PZ—and four sticks and Major Patrick J. Byson, map in hand.

  “Change of mission, Jim,” he said, as I jumped from the deuce-and-a-half. “Navaho’s got a good contact going to the southeast of us. Probably more of Hue’s recent visitors trying to find their way home.”

  As we unfolded our maps, I signaled Moseley and Halloway to join us. Moseley, as the attached FO, had to be apprised of the company’s tactical scheme, and, Reserve or not, Halloway was my senior lieutenant and must be able to assume the reins of command at a moment’s notice. Sergeant Sullivan joined us because he wanted to.

  “They’re in the foothills a couple klicks west of the highway, right about here,” Byson said, pointing to his map. “Ran straight into Delta Company, which was working that side of the big red. They’re trying to disengage—pretty much succeeded in doing so. My concern is that with Delta in the high country west of ‘em, they’ll try to work their way around them and then get back on their trek through this next valley to the north.”

  My two officers and I nodded in agreement. The Bull grunted.

  “So,” Byson continued, “gonna put your folk in blocking positions up the valley ‘long about here.” He pointed to the plot of our blocking position and then to an LZ a short distance north of it at a higher elevation.

  “If there are no questions, let’s get this show on the road,” he concluded. He raised his arm and, with his index finger extended, began rotating his hand in a circular motion, signaling the helicopters’ pilots to start their engines.

  “Now?” I asked a bit frantically, hearing the Hueys begin their prestart whining.

  Major Byson looked at me in surprise and said, “Of course, now. Get your people on the helicopters.”

  “Uh … yes, sir, but can’t we have a little time to put an assault order together?”

  “I’ll take care of it, sir,” the 1st Sergeant said, interrupting me.

  “Who does the assault?”

  “Uh … One Six,” I responded. “It’s their turn, right?”

  Lieutenant Halloway nodded.

  Then, turning from us and walking toward a loosely assembled Charlie Company, Sullivan yelled, “Platoon sergeants, front and center, on a run!” He talked to his sergeants for perhaps ten seconds, and in not very much more time than that our soldiers were loading their assigned helicopters in an orderly fashion. Walking toward our slick alongside Lieutenant Norwalk, I commented,

  “Goddamn, Top can put an air-assault order together in a hurry. Wonder what he says to ‘em?”

  Norwalk knowingly, somewhat dryly replied, “Sir, I think he says, ‘Get on the helicopters.’”

  Our touchdown in Thua Thien’s foothills above Highway One was without mishap, and after the hooks had off-loaded the remainder of the
company, we began moving downward from the hill’s pinnacle, Two Six leading. The valley lay before us. Arriving on a gently sloping, horseshoe-shaped ridge overlooking the upper valley, we stopped and established a hasty perimeter. Then we sat down to plan how best to accomplish the task given us.

  The offshoot of this hurried planning session was that we would block in much the same manner that we had on Binh Loc’s outskirts months before. Two Six would position themselves on the rightsouthern-prong of the horseshoe; One Six on the left; and Three Six, Four Six, and the headquarters section in the center.

  While the line platoons set about preparing their elongated defensive perimeters, Four Six began clearing an area large enough to land a single Huey. Although we doubted we’d be logged that night, we needed an LZ in case we suffered wounded or required class V resupply.

  In truth, we’d probably have cleared an area anyway; Cav troopers just don’t feel comfortable without an LZ close at hand. Besides, it was no great feat to chop out an LZ. The entire ridge line was only lightly vegetated with lowlying shrubbery and elephant grass. In fact, from our position at the middle of the horseshoe, we could see several of One Six’s and Two Six’s soldiers to the north and south of us, digging their holes.

  Dusk settled over the valley. A short time later, we were pleasantly surprised when Dubray, monitoring the log net, announced, “Log bird inbound, Top.”

  “Well, sonofabitch! Will wonders never cease?” the Bull said.

  Turning to Anderson, I said, “Andy, give One Six and Two Six a call and tell ‘em to start getting their people over here as soon as possible. Want to get ‘em fed and back in position before dark.”

  They came, a squad at a time, wolfed down their meals, picked up their rucks, and trudged back to their positions so others in their platoon could come forward to do the same. They were wet again and muddy from digging their defenses in Vietnam’s soil, and tired, because you’re always tired in the Nam. As the men walked by me at the end of a three-mermite chow line, they’d smile and say things like, “How’s it going, sir?” and, “Good evening, sir,” and, “When we gonna go back to our mountain, sir?”