15 Months in SOG

by Thom Nicholson

  The idea of finding and destroying a big supply dump or a truck park was exciting because it meant a tangible result for all the patrolling as opposed to our just shooting at unseen soldiers in the brush. To blow up a truck, now, that would be something. We had standing rewards, like R & R leaves, cash, chrome-plated pistols, and presentation knives for outstanding accomplishments in the field. I was anxious to get my unit into a situation where we could earn some of these goodies.

  We hadn’t received much recognition for the fight at the old fort. Although my company did not arrive until the attackers had already broken off their assault, I believed our approach had hastened their departure. Despite my opinion, the fact that I had taken three casualties without any significant body count had generated a mild reproach from the bean counters at higher HQ. I resolved in the future to be more creative on counting dead enemy bodies even if I was not sure there were any to count. Absurd as it seems, almost no matter how screwed up an operation, if you claimed a large body count, the big brass ended up happy.

  I discussed the pending operation with Major Skelton. We decided to send in two platoons, with the rest of the company on standby at the launch site as reinforcement in case the men on the ground ran into anything big. I would go in with the first group, and let Lieutenant McMurray command the rest of the company at the launch site. That would allow me a chance to wet my feet as commander, and be on top of any situation that arose. It was my first chance to become involved in a cross-border mission, and I wasn’t about to spend it at the backup site.

  We launched just before dark from Camp Eagle, where the 101st had their helicopter brigade. We had to use the Vietnamese Air Force special operations choppers for transport, flying the whole company up from Da Nang a platoon at a time. The plan was to insert the 1st and 2d Platoons, and then go back to Da Nang, remain overnight and the next morning fly the rest of the company to Camp Eagle. Those of us in the first launch would be on our own until the rest of the company arrived at Eagle and could come to our support.

  The mission was planned for five days, so I packed accordingly. My load was similar to that carried by all the Americans in the unit. What the Yards carried wasn’t too different, although we Americans usually carried a bit more of everything because we were bigger.

  I wore the standard tiger suit of green and black stripes that was designed to make the wearer less visible in the jungle. My face was covered in black greasepaint to hide the pale skin. I hated the stuff. It seemed to hatch a crop of zits whenever I wore it for any length of time. I envied the darker skinned members of my unit, with their natural camouflage. Even the black Americans had to wear some of the oil-based camouflage, usually a loam or green color, to break the outline of their face. Everybody hated the stuff.

  My combat pack was filled with dehydrated LURP rations, a poncho for rain protection, a liner for the cool mornings, batteries for my flashlight, a half-gallon of water in a plastic canteen, an extra pair of socks, a 1:50,000 map of the area, a small hammock made from parachute silk, and a medic kit that I filled with the supplies I thought might come in handy if I or someone else got shot.

  On my web gear, I had attached a quart canteen, a compass, my flashlight, a yellow smoke grenade, a Willy Peter (white phosphorus) grenade, and a small pouch holding twelve of those special golf ball–size M-26A1 minigrenades. I also had my big pistol, a Browning Hi-Power 9mm, and my bowie knife. I carried my prized M-16A2 assault rifle, with collapsing stock and twelve-inch barrel, and 240 rounds of ammo, loaded in twelve magazines. In each of my leg pockets, I stuffed six 40mm M-79 grenade-launcher rounds for the sawed-off “thumper,” my pet name for the standard M-79, 40mm grenade launcher, which I had modified by cutting off the barrel and stock until it looked like an oversize pistol. The M-79 had an effective range of three hundred yards, and the exploding grenade had a lethal radius of ten meters. The little weapon was a great persuader when confronting bad guys in bunkers or to discourage them from getting too close while chasing you in the bush. The krump! of an M-79 round going off was a common occurrence in a firefight since every squad had at least one M-79 assigned to it.

  I had VC sandals to wear if we got on the road. That way anyone who spotted our tracks might mistake our sign for VC and not American troops. Taped to one ankle was a five-shot .32 automatic, a last-resort weapon, and on the other was a six-inch throwing knife. In one pocket was a leather-covered lead sap that might come in handy if we had to subdue an NVA prisoner. In another pocket, I stuffed candy, gum, and toilet paper. Finally, I had those navy binoculars hung around my neck.

  In one shirt pocket, I carried the SOI (signal operating instructions) so I could send messages in the correct code and answer any radio challenges with the correct response. Otherwise, they might think we were VC trying to send a false message. I also carried several small packets of powdered coffee that came in the standard-issue C rations. Used like smokeless tobacco, stuffed between lip and gum, the impact of the coffee’s caffeine being absorbed into the bloodstream jarred you awake, no matter how tired you happened to be. There were times you just could not sleep, not if you wanted to see the sun rise.

  Finally, each man was required to carry a small can of serum albumin taped to the top of his web gear, right behind the neck. That way, it could always be found in the dark. Serum albumin was used to expand the volume of blood in the veins of wounded soldiers as a defense against the shock caused by rapid loss of blood that usually accompanied a gunshot wound. As many men died from going into shock as from the physical damage of the bullet. We were trained to inject the serum into our own veins if nobody was around to help. The container was about the size of a soup can and, taped to the back of the web gear, it made a passable pillow during rest stops.

  As I stepped onto the landing pad, the setting sun blazed a rusty red, thanks to the dust kicked up by the flashing rotors of the waiting choppers. Loaded as I was, I weighed in at about three hundred pounds. Needless to say, I waddled rather than gracefully sprinted to the doorway of the first chopper in line. I wanted to turn and wave at McMurray, watching from the edge of the landing pad, much in the spirit of John Wayne, but that would have required too much effort.

  Thanks to a helping pull by the crew chief, an oily, grimy little ARVN buck sergeant, I clambered onto the big, black CH-34 chopper and collapsed on the first seat. The aluminum frame and canvas seat groaned, but held me. The helmeted head of the pilot nodded down at me as the final man scrambled on board, and the silvery Plexiglas visor reflected my image back at me. I assumed he was looking for the “go” sign, so I gave him the thumbs-up. In a moment, we were airborne, whapping through the muggy evening air toward Laos and the setting sun.

  My tension and excitement continued to build as the dark green hills grew closer. In no time, we flew beyond the flat, water-covered rice paddies, with the setting sun reflecting a thousand shards of light from the surface, and crossed over the first of the tree-covered mountains.

  Without warning, the pilot made a great swoop and started to descend toward a small hill, the top blasted bare of trees from some long-ago bomb strike. Before I could gather my thoughts, the pilot skillfully flared the old bird on the landing zone, and out we went. I waddled toward the tree line and directed my men to fan out in a hasty defensive perimeter. I shucked my pack and web gear next to Pham and turned back toward the LZ.

  It was my intention to return to the center of the LZ and direct the remaining troops to different sectors of the hilltop. But I stepped on a ground-hornets’ nest, and was immediately in trouble. I screamed like I’d been shot as several of the little airborne killers stung my lower legs. Fortunately, the noise of the arriving chopper drowned me out. One of the little devils got into my pants leg and lanced me a couple of more times before I trapped him between my bare skin and the fabric. I squashed the little bugger into a greasy smear and jerked down my pants to rub ointment on the burning lesions. The incoming soldiers were treated to the sight of their fearless commander
giving them a moon shot, right in the middle of the war zone.

  By the time I treated myself for the hornet stings, everyone had landed, and the Kingbees roared off to fake a landing on another hill some distance away. That was supposed to deceive the bad guys as to our true location. It was standard procedure for insertions, but I often wondered if it was worth the effort.

  In the darkening silence, I rounded everyone up. We moved off the hill in the direction of the road, which I had spotted from the air just before we landed. The jungle was thick and darned near impenetrable, so we progressed slowly. My leg was burning from the hornet’s assault, but I attempted to shrug off the pain, while soundly cursing the “Viet Cong hornets.”

  The darkness settled in quickly in the heavy brush. We went into a cold RON. No fires or noise. The night passed slowly. Thanks to the pain of my “wounds,” I stayed awake most of the time.

  As soon as the first pink blush of dawn made things visible, we moved out, still headed toward the road. So far, we had seen no sign of the bad guys, and we did not appear to have any trackers on our trail. Maybe the fake landings had confused the enemy as to our true location after all.

  The going was rough, and progress was slow. The steamy jungle restricted our movement toward the target, which wasn’t all that far away, at least as the crow flies. Fighting the heat, sticker bushes called wait-a-minute bushes, and nasty little stinging flies all the way, it was nearly noon before the lead squad whispered back that the road was just ahead.

  It was an eerie feeling, coming upon the freshly cut roadway, right smack in the middle of the dense, uninhabitable jungle. The damp foliage was menacingly dark as I spread the platoon out on either side of the freshly slashed roadway, and we started moving north toward the source of all our troubles, North Vietnam.

  Surprisingly, we found nothing nor saw anything of interest, even though we cautiously followed the road all day. Every place that even suggested it might be a likely place to put a truck park or supply area, I stopped and investigated. It was as if the NVA had built the road and then abandoned it. Not even a tire track was found. We did spot a couple of footprints, which heightened our tension, but we never saw a single sign of vehicle traffic.

  We continued until nearly dark, when I set up another ambush along the road. We settled in for another cold RON. I got on the radio to the relay plane and reported the lack of contact. Every operation across the border had a Covey, a highflying radio-relay aircraft, on station during daylight hours. The returning orders from Covey said to march on the next day, following the road, and to keep our eyes open for any sign of use by the enemy.

  The next day was a repeat. We moved slowly, ever deeper into the jungle, away from the border without seeing any indication of activity or use. We had covered fifteen miles or better by then, and I was convinced the road was intended for use sometime in the future even if we hadn’t seen any concrete sign that it had ever been used. Everyone was frustrated by the hard going without contact.

  That night, we could faintly hear the sound of engines way off to the west, over a ridge from where we were positioned. At the morning check-in, I reported the noise and requested permission to leave the road and move cross-country toward the source. I was convinced the road we were following was a dead end. The road was well constructed and expertly camouflaged, but not yet being used. Small trees had been bent over any bare spots left in the jungle where big trees had been chopped down. In a few weeks, the rapid jungle growth would completely cover the roadway from the air. But already, the canopy of trees and brush was so dense that we rarely saw the sky from the ground.

  Covey relayed the approval of my request to move toward the sounds we had heard during the night. “There’s bad weather on the way in from the South China Sea,” the radio operator added. “Be prepared to extract at 1900 hours tonight, unless you find something hot.”

  I acknowledged and moved the platoons out, straight west, through the jungle. “We’re jerking the string on this operation tonight,” I told Turin and Cable, my platoon leaders. “If we don’t find anything by five o’clock, we’ll find us a good LZ and call in the birds to take us home.” Neither soldier argued the call. We were all tired and discouraged by the lack of success. The short, dark Turin and his taller blond friend Cable headed back to their platoons.

  After a hot, tiring day of hacking our way west, I called it quits. We didn’t find any sign of another road, and the harsh up-and-down terrain, combined with the heavy jungle growth, slowed our progress to a crawl.

  “Okay,” I panted at the five o’clock rest stop. “Head for this hill,” I pointed on the map to the chosen spot. “I’ll call in the pickup choppers while we get an LZ cut.”

  As we turned in the direction of the pickup point, I alerted Covey that we were headed for the LZ site and gave him the grid coordinates from the map. He rogered and promised to alert the pickup choppers to stand by.

  One of the point squad soldiers came back and directed me to the front of the platoon. Sergeant Bledsoe was there. He was sweating like a stuck pig in a barbecue pit. “Sir, there’s a trail headed the way we’re goin’. You wanta follow it?” He pointed at a rather wide path worn or cut through the brush.

  We hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any bad guys, and everyone was just about bushed. I okayed the request, even though it was a risk to walk down any trail in the jungle. “Don’t get careless,” I warned the point squad sergeant, unnecessarily. He had more to lose than I did, if he got careless. Bledsoe was one of my younger platoon sergeants, but an experienced Special Forces NCO. He just nodded and headed his men out, and I fell in at the end of the first platoon, with Pham, my ever-faithful radio operator, still beside me.

  The day was ending as we moved down the trail toward the hill I had chosen to use as the LZ. I started off walking along the edge of the trail, as per SOP (standard operating procedure). Before long, I was right in the center of the trail, where the walking was easiest. I started forward to tell Bledsoe that we would be leaving the trail in a moment, to head uphill. I was coming up behind him at the front of the unit when it happened.

  Why they were there, neither I nor probably they had the faintest idea. But the NVA outpost was at a bend in the trail and no more aware that we were strolling around the neighborhood than we were about them. The fellow sitting on top of the dirt-and-log bunker must have been stunned at the sight of Americans walking right toward him as if out on a Sunday stroll. He froze for so long that I was completely exposed to him before he sprang into action.

  The thought that he had a tall American right in his sights must have made him flinch as he pulled the trigger on his AK-47. The first I knew about him, he was spraying bullets all around me, and the rest of the platoon was diving into the brush left and right of the trail. For what seemed like an awfully long time, I gaped at the presumptuous little NVA soldier, who wore a wide grin as he filled the air around me full of screaming lead. A bullet that passes close to your ear makes a most discouraging snap! as it goes by. The best I can describe it is like someone cracking a bullwhip in your face. I’ll be damned if I can figure out how he could miss me, as close as I was to him, but he did. I should be grateful he slept through marksmanship class in basic training.

  Without knowing quite how I did it, I leaped about twenty feet into the brush from a standing start, sprawling beside my men, who had prudently headed there at the first shot. Screaming at the troops on the other side to fire against the bunker, I got the men on my side of the trail moving around to the right, planning to envelop the enemy position. The three enemy in the bunker were shooting in our general direction as fast as they could squeeze the triggers on their weapons. The trees were taking all the punishment, and we scrambled as fast as possible away from the enemy’s fire.

  There was high ground to the right, and the ten or so men with me were soon above and beside the bunker, even though we couldn’t see it for all the brush in the way. Cautiously, we eased down toward the sound of the ha
mmering guns.

  “There it is, Dai Uy.” Pham had spotted the bunker, dug into the ground and well camouflaged. I could see the flash of red fire from the muzzles of their rifles as the doomed men inside fired down the road at where we had disappeared. “Thumpers,” I whispered to the men carrying M-79s like mine, “fire on my command. The rest of you assault as soon as the grenades go off.” Three of us aimed the deadly little 40mm grenade launchers at the bunker. “Fire, fire,” I screamed. Thump! Thump! Thump! and then Krump! Krump! Krump! The noise of the 40mm grenades drowned out the shouts of the assaulting soldiers, following me right at the dust and smoke that enveloped the bunker.

  A single man staggered out the back of the bunker and started to hotfoot it down the trail. A dozen M-16 bullets knocked him flopping to the ground. The other two NVA soldiers never emerged from the bunker. One of the Yards threw a grenade into the front firing hole and the resulting ker-rump collapsed the structure in a billow of dust and wood chips.

  We were in deep shit, and headed south; any NVA within two miles would be hustling our way to see what was going on. Without my urging, which I was doing plenty of, we scrambled up the hill where we planned to make the LZ. The men immediately moved into a defensive perimeter around the top, and Sergeant Bledsoe started to clear an LZ for helicopter landings. A couple of grenades at the base of the smaller trees dropped them out of the way, and the bigger ones fell to the blocks of C-4 explosives some of the men carried for just such a purpose.

  I called for an emergency extract, and we settled down to wait for the choppers. Since they had only fifty miles to come, we would be gone in thirty minutes. My right leg was hurting like hell warmed over. I supposed one of the hornet stings was acting up. I sat down on a blasted tree stump and pulled up my pants leg. There was blood all over my right calf. The NVA had come closer to me than I thought. A piece of copper casing had spun off a bullet that must have hit at my feet, and cut into the muscle, slicing a deep gouge out of the flesh. It was bloody and it hurt, but it was only a minor injury, considering what might have been.