Therefore, the call sign was changed to Charlie Brown One-zero,” for all radio communication with the assessment team members on the ground. The Charlie Brown One-zero would be talking and running, as the four team members made a dash for their lives through the debris of an Arc Light strike. The speaker would be panting and puffing so hard he was difficult to understand over the radio.
It wasn’t unknown for a team to vanish before it reached the far end of the run, gobbled up by those left alive after the B-52s’ visit.
“Take two recon teams and a reaction platoon with you,” Major Skelton finished his instructions to me. “I’ll have the choppers here at 0700 tomorrow morning.”
I thought about complaining that two recon teams were insufficient for a BDA assignment; if the big bombers were in any way active, there might be two or three BDAs a day to complete.
Nobody wanted to run the damned things more than once a day; that was a given. Then I reconsidered. More than likely, the reaction platoon wouldn’t have much to do. Rarely did the BDA teams uncover anything after a B-52 strike that required a platoon insertion into the area. I could make additional teams from the soldiers of the platoon, and give a couple of my lieutenants something to write home about. I decided to take two extra lieutenants as supernumeraries. That way I could field five BDA teams, with myself and First Sergeant Fischer as the fifth and last to go out, if needed. Our call sign would be Charlie Brown Five.
I made the assignments that night, and received a positive reaction to my plan. One nice thing about young lieutenants, they were so gung ho dumb, they’d go anywhere. A person grew to love them, just like little puppies, not quite paper-trained.
We lifted off the helipad the next morning, loaded down with the tools of our trade and anything else that we thought would make our stay at the FOB comfortable. As the struggling chopper dipped its nose and gathered forward speed, I realized I was anticipating the coming mission. Damned if I wasn’t as eager as the ell-tees riding with me. I leaned over to Fischer, who was stoically puffing on a smelly cigar and watching the ground below. He was probably daydreaming of better times.
“By God, Top. I sorta hope we get a chance to make a run, don’t you?”
The wise old NCO just looked at me as if wondering, “Is this guy a candidate for the psycho ward or what?” He just grunted, probably hoping I would outgrow whatever was temporarily affecting my reasoning.
We arrived at the FOB, still tucked alongside the Marine position at Vandegrift. We were met by Sergeant Saal. He reported that the NVA had recently started to shell the base with long-range 122mm rockets.
“We’ve got a bomb shelter dug,” he told me. “Usually, it’s not needed. The NVA can’t get the right trajectory on their launchers to hit us.” FOB 1 was located on a slope at the top of the basin above the main compound, which was in the valley below. The Marines down there weren’t quite so lucky.
Saal continued, “It means if they pop off a few rounds, especially if it’s after dark, we can sit outside the shelter and watch the rockets go over and slam into the Marines below. When they hit something, it’s quite a show.”
“Better them than us, I reckon,” I replied. “Anything to make the time go by, right?”
Saal just laughed. “You’ll see. The Marine artillery that fires counterbattery is over there.” He pointed directly east of us. “When they shoot back, the shells go right overhead. It’s a blast.”
We settled in and put away a few cool ones while the trusty barbecue was heating up. After a delicious repast of barbecued Spam, beans, potato chips, and beer, we relaxed and watched the Marines, busy below us in the main camp. From our position, they looked like tiny ants hurrying about on ants’business.
Before long, the sound of men at ease ripped through the darkness. The beans were doing the job Mother Nature intended. All a person could do was ignore the lack of etiquette, suck on the cold beer, and dream of home. Mixed with the sounds of evening—bugs, noise from below, and jets high overhead flying off for the night interdiction raids on the supply lines of the enemy—it wasn’t all that unpleasant. I was just about ready to call it a day, when a siren cut through the din.
“Incoming, Captain,” Saal shouted. “Get to the bomb shelter.”
“I thought you said they couldn’t hit us?”
“Haven’t yet. You want to sit out here and see if they have figured it out?”
“Point well taken,” I agreed as we dashed to the heavily sandbagged dugout.
We hadn’t even made it inside when the first rocket arced overhead, several hundred feet above us, and dropped toward the massed humanity below. It hit with a loud boom! next to the piled supplies behind the main complex of buildings far below.
From where we were, the rocket looked like a giant roman candle, spewing red sparks as it rode through the sky. It was easy to follow its path toward the Marines huddled below. They must have felt like fish in a barrel, waiting for the impact.
The big rocket sounded like a runaway train rumbling through the dark sky. All in all, it was a spectacular way to end the evening. The Marine artillery promptly responded, shooting the big 155mm shells right over us toward the unseen enemy in Laos. The shells headed out and the rockets coming in passed overhead. The roar was like standing in a tunnel hearing semis whiz by at ninety miles an hour.
Several more rockets streaked over us, one impacting right on top of a crowded bunker, sending sandbags and timbers flying and causing two ambulances to race from the hospital area to the aid of the unlucky Marines inside. Their lights and sirens added to the carnival atmosphere. After the all-clear sounded, I made my good-nights and went to sleep, satisfied that I’d seen a real rocket attack, up close. Just like front row seats at the Fourth of July fireworks show back home when I was a boy. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking of the cost to the unlucky Marines below. It would only have interfered with my sleep. I suppose my callousness would have been less pronounced if they were army troops; it would have turned to pure outrage had it been Special Forces soldiers taking the pasting.
I woke up the next morning in a good mood, and we proceeded to get on with the business of BDA runs. For the next two days, things went smoothly. We only had two or three runs a day to make, and the enemy wasn’t a bit active in the area after the bomb runs. Most of the Arc Light strikes did more damage to the jungle vegetation than to the bad guys. Every now and then, one would catch the NVA, and I guess the carnage was horrendous. Most of the time, at least as I saw it, we were a day late and a dollar short with our intended targets. Like everything else wrong with the damned war, the bomb strikes had to be approved at both Washington and Saigon political levels. By the time the poor air force got approval for the strike, the enemy had moved on or died of old age. The men who risked their lives flying the overladen bombers off the ground and to the target in twenty-year-old planes to attack empty jungle didn’t get a say, unfortunately. Welcome to the war, air force.
You could say it’s similar to today, trying to build a dam or highway someplace. The paperwork takes longer than the project itself. I often wondered later if environmental impact studies were filed before we bombed the enemy jungle. I would not have put it past the bureaucrats running the war.
The first two days were easy, with very little to report from the bomb strikes. The third day was something else. Charlie Brown Two didn’t show up at the end of the bomb area. The chopper pilots had radio contact with him until about halfway through the run, and then silence. Repeated calls were not answered, and finally the choppers returned empty.
I met the first chopper back and talked to the pilot. He was a grizzled warrant officer (WO), the predominant rank of army aviators. Judging by the master aviator wings sewed over his left pocket, he’d been driving choppers a long time. He looked older than his years, the fatigue of a long flight on his face. His eyes squinted at me in the sunlight, showing the sun wrinkles around the sockets. He wiped a sheen of sweat off his upper lip with the sleeve o
f his green flight suit, the heavy kind, made of Nomex material, which was supposed to retard the flames of a crash. It was required wearing for the flyers, but it must have been like wearing long johns in the desert.
“I swear, Captain. We stayed right up till we were short of fuel. The team just never showed up. I flew down the entire length of the DZ callin’ on the radio. Not a peep. There was ground fire, though. Charlie was back in business, quicker than usual.”
“Well, shit fire,” I groused. “What the hell happened to them? You didn’t see any bodies?” The weary pilot shook his head. I looked at the rapidly setting sun. “It’s too late to make another run today, but you be here at first light tomorrow. I want to be over the last place you heard from them as soon as we can see. Okay?”
“Wilco, Captain.” Slowly, he climbed back inside the Plexiglas cockpit of his Huey and started the whining, turbojet engine. The choppers lifted off, heading for their pad, where the maintenance crews would spend the night working on them. Like most of the soldiers in Vietnam, the hard-working men who kept the “iron birds” flying didn’t get anywhere near the recognition and praise they deserved.
The old WO was as good as his word, and the next morning, we had twenty men in four choppers racing the rising sun to the spot where the BDA team had disappeared.
While I got on the radio, calling for the missing team, the choppers swooped down into the chewed-up jungle. Every man strained to catch some sign of the missing men. The pilot motioned me to put on the headphones hanging by my seat. Coming over the air was the welcome sound of the team leader’s voice. “This is Charlie Brown Two. Come in, Eagle flight.”
I grabbed the microphone. “Charlie Brown Two, this is Sneaky Six. Are you okay?”
“Roger, Six. We’re poppin’ yellow smoke. Do you identify?” I saw the bright yellow cloud of smoke rising into the sunshine about three hundred meters in front of us.
“Roger, Charlie Brown Two. You’re at our two o’clock. We’re on our way. What the hell happened to you anyway?”
“This is Charlie Brown Two. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you when we’re outta here. Now hurry up. Charlie has been all over this area all night.”
“Heads up,” I warned the pilot. “Could be a hot LZ.”
He nodded and spoke into the mike clipped to his flight helmet. The four choppers fanned out, and two went into an orbit over the other two, which spiraled down to an area where a bomb blast had knocked over all the vegetation.
As soon as we touched dirt, two men darted toward us, each carrying another man, fireman-style, across his back. They threw the wounded men into the doorway of the chopper and scrambled in the door. The pilots were watching the men run toward the waiting chopper, and as soon as their butts touched the floor, we were airborne. Not a shot was fired at us, and we were well on the way back to the FOB and safety.
I grabbed the team leader, Will Turin, and shook his hand. “Good job, Will. What the hell happened to you all?”
Lieutenant Turin wearily shook his dark-haired head. He was covered with dirt, dried sweat streaks down his cheeks. The dark circles under his eyes and the exhausted expression on his face revealed a long night, spent very much awake and plenty uptight.
“They hit us just about halfway down the lane. We had just started a new leg and got split up. The two Yards went one way, and my One-one and I went the other.” He paused and took a swig of water from the canteen I gave him. “All night, we laid low in a pile of knocked-down debris while the VC crawled all over the area looking for us. Then, this morning, they moved out and we found the two Yards, both wounded, hiding out and waiting to see if we showed up.”
I nodded. “Of course, one of the Montagnards was carrying the radio, wasn’t he?” I’d seen the One-one climb into the chopper. He didn’t have the all-important radio on his back.
My crestfallen ell-tee nodded, a little sheepishly. “Sorry, Dai Uy. We’d just switched off, taking turns. It’s damned hard to run the whole way with that heavy SOB of a radio on your back.”
I nodded. He was right, the damned thing was heavy. And carrying it while running was like having twenty-five pounds of sharp-angled steel strapped to your back, digging in painfully at every step.
“You were lucky, Lieutenant. That’s why we tell you to always have an American toting the radio. Live and learn, right?”
I smiled at the worn-out young officer. I doubt he ever let his Yards carry a radio again. At the same time, word would get out to the other Americans in my command, reinforcing my standing orders that only the Americans on the recon teams carry the radio on operations. I didn’t carry mine, of course, but then when I was out, there was always more than just one radio along.
We shipped the wounded men off to CCN and our hospital for indigenous personnel. I sent the rest of the Charlie Brown Two back as well. The team would not be fit for combat work for the rest of that mission anyway.
I still had four teams available, and the BDA mission was winding down. In fact, I started plotting how I could make a run, just to see what it was like. On the last day of the bombing raids against the area, I got my chance.
I’d sent out teams 1 and 3 the day before, and decided to schedule teams 4 and 5 for the final two runs, the last day. I could tell Sergeant Fischer wasn’t any too thrilled with my announcement of the schedule, but he was the consummate professional soldier and swallowed his resentment. He briefed the rest of us on what we would be doing. Since I was taking Pham and another of my bodyguards, Fischer was the only one who’d ever run a BDA before, and that had been during an earlier tour.
The key to the run is to make a zigzag sweep from side to side of the bomb zone, always moving toward the waiting helicopters at the far end of the run. You could never forget that the helicopter could only stay so long, and then it was gone, with you on board or not.
At two P.M. we were in the choppers, lazily circling about ten klicks south of the intended bomb drop zone.
“Here they come,” the air-control relay warned us. We couldn’t see or hear the high-flying bombers but I watched out the door of the chopper, eagerly awaiting the impact of the bombs.
Suddenly, the entire world turned to hell along the long axis of the bomb run. Explosion after explosion chased one another down the line. The three bombers were laying a carpet of 150 or more five-hundred-pound bombs into the drop zone. White shock waves rippled away from the blast, and trees and dirt rocketed into the sky as our choppers shuddered and rocked in the concussion of the bombs. The noise permeated our senses, overwhelming the racket of the helicopters.
It seemed to go on and on, yet in less than a minute, it was over, and a pall of dirty gray smoke and dust obscured the area of the bomb drop. Our choppers turned toward the melee, and the pucker factor kicked in. Hurriedly we checked our weapons and gear. In another moment, we would be on the ground.
Too soon, we hammered in, whap, whap, whap, jumped out, and received the thumbs-up salute from the pilot, who was watching to insure we got away from his whirling blades, and then whop, whop, whop, our ride was gone. We were alone, on the ground, with who knows how many nasty VC anxious for our heads. Suddenly, for whatever foolish reason imaginable, I thought of how different the sounds are that a helicopter makes when it’s coming for you as opposed to when it’s leaving you behind in harm’s way again.
I immediately felt very lonely and very vulnerable. Fischer pulled out his compass and took a quick look at the azimuth he wanted to take for the first leg of our zigzag.
“Come on, Captain,” he growled, letting me know just how much he appreciated me cutting him in on my little party. “Let’s get the fuck outta here before we get our asses shot off. Head for that big tree blown down over there.” He pointed at a 150-foot tree that had been blasted off at ground level and was sticking upside down at the edge of a big bomb crater.
The area was stirred, as if a giant tornado had swooped across the land. Trees and brush were piled up in giant clumps, like the afterma
th of a careless job of raking by some monstrous gardener. Holes were blasted out of the ground about every hundred feet or so, the dirt piled around the edge like a humongous mole’s hole. And the area was quiet, too quiet. I didn’t hear a sound except for the rasping of my breath.
We started the first leg, skirting downed trees, shattered limbs and trunks that had been tossed about like used match-sticks. At the end of the first leg, I was gasping for breath. The going was anything but easy, and we had a long, long way to go. The four of us spread out a bit, and we pushed off on the second leg.
For the next half hour, it was a marathon of fighting our way through the debris of the bombing, trying to stay on line, and worrying with every step that the next thing we saw would be a thousand nasty-tempered NVA soldiers.
Our survey legs were nice, crisp forty-five-degree offsets at the start. By halfway through, they were widening out, and by three-quarters of the way down, we were hi-diddle-diddle, straight down the middle. Even so, I was sweating out the concern that we might not reach the end of the run before the choppers had to leave.
When we finally reached the waiting choppers, I was so tired I could barely drag myself on board. I was afraid I’d need to have someone get out and push on my butt as I crawled on for the ride home.
I was soaked in sweat, emotionally drained, and dirty as a pig. And I hadn’t seem a damn thing except dirt, brush, and splintered wood. One of the Yards said he spotted some damaged supplies from a destroyed bunker so that’s what we turned in. “Numerous bunkers destroyed, with associated supplies.” A million-dollar bomb run was in the books. Only ten thousand more to go.
Everyone was happy, and I had my fling at being a BDA hero. I had my only “Run for your life, Charlie Brown,” experience of the war. That was fine with me.
13
Pie (Plate) in the Sky
or
Where Do You Pee, up in a Tree?
15 Months in SOG Page 15