15 Months in SOG

by Thom Nicholson

  “New toy’s a-comin’.”

  “How’s that?” I asked the operations officer, or S-3, Major Skelton, who stopped by my chair on his way out of the mess hall. I was just finishing up my breakfast, canned tomato juice heavily laced with Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce, which disguised the tinny aftertaste of the tomato juice to the point that it was almost bearable. Normally, I love tomato juice, but in Vietnam it took half a bottle of hot stuff to make it palatable.

  All the canned beverages we got in Vietnam tasted, well, metallic. Perhaps it was the long ride on rolling ships, or the fierce Vietnamese sun that beat down on the pallets of soda, beer, and juice back at the distribution centers while they awaited transport to the numerous camps. Whatever the reason, what we finally drank was a disgrace to the manufacturer’s efforts.

  I finished my glass with a shudder and looked up at the bemused face of our S-3, who had the unenviable responsibility of telling those of us who did, what it was that those who didn’t, wanted us to do next.

  “I just got a message from MAC-SOG in Saigon.” Major Skelton watched as I gulped down the last of the fiery red breakfast drink. “They’ve come up with a new gadget, and they want us to try it out in the field. You’re elected. Put a couple of recon teams on alert, and a security detail.”

  “How big a security?” I hoped he would say the whole company. I needed to get everyone in the bush for a spell. The soldiers had had it too soft for the previous few weeks.

  The seasoned S-3 hemmed and hawed for a second. “I don’t suppose you’ll need more than a squad. This thing won’t last more than four or five days, and I’m gonna put you in Area 92. It’s been quiet there for the last month, so you’ll most likely not have any problems with the pie plate.”

  “What the hell is a pie plate?” I supposed it was some new type of land mine or movement sensor.

  “Nick, you’ll never believe it. Be at the heliport at 1600, and you’ll see. Come by the TOC at 1300, and I’ll give you your AO briefing. Your people better plan on insertion around the day after tomorrow.”

  Major Skelton turned to leave and then turned back. “Oh, yeah. You’d better go in with them. We’ll want a senior field commander’s evaluation of the gizmo to send back to Saigon.”

  “Christ fire, Major. I just got back in camp. ’Sides, I sure get nervous with less than a company of soldiers around me in Injun country.”

  “TS, soldier. What do you think the taxpayer’s spending all that money on you for? He wants full value for his buck. That takes some sacrifice by us poor mud-eaters.”

  Major Skelton moved away, pleased with his attempt at humor at my expense. As a rule, majors are notoriously grim. They’re too busy scheming to become lieutenant colonels to enjoy the nuances of a good joke. Major Skelton didn’t hear my acerbic reply, which was intentionally very quiet: “What’s this ‘us’ crap? You got a bird in your pocket?” We captains have a talent for the witty repartée. Comes with our natural good looks and superior brainpower.

  I really liked Major Skelton and didn’t want to put him down, so I grabbed a foil pack of dried prunes and headed back to the company orderly room to put the necessary people on mission alert. I would take my two newest recon teams, and ten men from the platoon who had been in camp the longest. It wasn’t long before they were scattered to the four winds assembling the myriad of items needed before they could go into the badlands.

  If the previous month was any indication, the AO was a relatively safe place to go. The periodic recon patrols in the area found very little sign of enemy activity, and contacts were few and far between. Since I had been struggling with a touch of upset stomach, I really wasn’t too anxious to charge all over hell’s half-acre fighting bad guys.

  One part of the briefing had stressed that we were to take a five-gallon can of water for every two men. That meant we weren’t going to be moving around much and that we were going to be someplace without water close by. I was a bit uneasy about that, but when I started to question the reasoning, Major Skelton just said to wait until 1600 hours at the heliport and all would be clear. By then, my curiosity was piqued, so I was on time for the surprise that was coming by helicopter.

  Sure enough, at 1600 hours, the faint fump, fump, fump indicated the approach of an incoming helicopter, and shortly, I saw a big chopper headed our way. As it got nearer, I could make out that it was a CH-47, the army’s big transport helicopter. The twin rotors were carving great chunks of air as the olive-drab aircraft worked its way toward the tarmac where I waited with Major Skelton and several interested onlookers.

  Slung underneath the chopper, spinning like a bicycle wheel laid on its side, was a weird object. Even from a distance it looked big. The nearer the chopper got, the bigger it became.

  “She-it fire, Major S,” I exclaimed. “What on God’s green earth is that?” By now, everybody in camp who didn’t have anything to do was headed to the chopper pad to take a look at the thing coming our way.

  “The folks down in Saigon have given it the code name Pie Plate,” Major Skelton replied. “They want us to give it a field test. That’s where you come in.”

  Suddenly, I got a sinking feeling in my gut. “I have a suspicion I’m not gonna like what you say next, Major. So go ahead, what am I supposed to do with that thing?”

  The big chopper flared in to deposit the object at the far end of the tarmac. I almost didn’t hear Skelton’s reply over the noise of the rotors. He had to shout it in my ear: “We’re gonna drop that thing in a treetop somewhere, and you’ll use it for a portable patrol base.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I screamed. “You gotta be shittin’ me!” My world had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

  Major Skelton watched as the gauntlet of emotions flamed across my face while the chopper hovered, disconnected the sling holding the device, and thundered again into the humid air, leaving an explosion of dust in its wake that settled on the object and the onlookers alike.

  Finally, he spoke again. “Not in the least, Dai Uy. We’re gonna drop that thing in a tree somewhere, and you’re gonna run operations off it. Then we’ll pick it up, bring it back, and write the report some desk puke in Saigon wants, and hope we never see it again.”

  The thing was appropriately named pie plate. It was made of PSP, or perforated steel planking, which looked exactly like its name: a twenty-four-inch-wide plank of steel, about a quarter-inch thick and ten feet long. The steel is waffled for strength, and two-inch-diameter holes are punched throughout to reduce its weight. The engineers use the stuff to lay down as hard cover over dirt runways.

  Some bright boy must have come up with the idea of welding the stuff together to form a circle, about twenty-four feet in diameter, and setting it on eight steel pipes that radiated from the center and reached about ten feet past the edge of the steel plate.

  The legs were slightly bent, so the whole thing looked like an inverted pie plate on ten-foot-long spider legs. Strung between the legs just like a spider’s web were five lengths of thin steel cable, starting about two feet from the outer edge of the plate and circling it. Every two feet another cable was welded to the legs.

  I walked around the thing, looking as dumbfounded as a hillbilly in Las Vegas, trying to visualize it in a tree. Major Skelton tried to make it easy for me.

  “The theory is simple. We drop it in the top of a tree. The steel and cables rest on the branches. The tree limbs support the weight of the thing. You drop off the insertion chopper onto the pie plate, and then you simply rappel down ropes to the ground. Run your patrols and come back, where you then climb up the ropes, pull them up after you, and there you are. Safe and snug as a squirrel in his nest. High off the ground, away from Charlie, hidden, yet easy to find from the air.”

  He smiled at me as if I were a half-wit cousin. “Now what could be easier than that?”

  “Pardon me, Major,” I snarled with barely an attempt to maintain military courtesy, “but I’ve hunted squirrels in Arkansas all my
growing-up life. Nothing I loved better than for them to run into their nest. Then all I had to do was plink away until I shot ’em all out. Hell of a lot easier than trying to hit them on the run.”

  I waited for his reply, but he just shrugged his shoulders and walked over for a closer look at the pie plate. Then he strolled away, with me right behind him.

  Anxious to convince him of the folly he was proposing, I headed back to the TOC. “We’ll be sitting ducks up there for Charlie. He figures out where we are, and a ton of lead is gonna be headed up my ass. Not some headquarters quack’s down in Saigon, but my ass, mine. And that’s a painful way to get a Purple Heart.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to make sure Mr. Charles doesn’t see where you’re headed when you start for home.”

  It was all I could do to keep from screaming. “Of course, we’ll just ask him to shut his eyes and count to a hundred while we hide each night. There’s no such thing as making sure when Mr. Charlie’s involved.”

  “Sorry, Nick. Them’s the orders.” Skelton was decent enough to sound contrite. “I’ll pick a spot where the jungle is triple-thick canopy, and where activity has been light. Then it’s up to you, and good luck.”

  “All right,” I groused unhappily. “I just wish the asshole who thought this one up was gonna be there with me when Charlie goes squirrel huntin’ with me as the squirrel.”

  True to his word, Major Skelton found a perfect place to put the thing. I watched from my transport chopper as the CH-47 dropped the plate over a big tree on top of a hill right in the middle of heavy jungle somewhere close to the Laos border. We were higher than any other hills nearby, so nobody could get above us.

  The plate appeared to be nice and steady as my chopper hovered over its middle. The men in the chopper with me followed as I dropped off. Quickly, I directed them to move to the edge of the metal disk so the cargo chopper could leave and the one carrying the recon teams could land. As they jumped on the plate, with the water, rations, and ammo for twenty men adding to the total weight, the platform settled deeper into the top of the tree. I began to wonder if it would ever stop going down, but, after settling five feet or so into the foliage, it did.

  Once my heart slowed down to a calm five hundred beats a minute or so, I had to admit that if we were as invisible from the ground as we were from anyone who climbed up another tree to look for us, then we were well hidden.

  The choppers faded into the dusk and silence returned to the area. We liked to insert just as the sun was setting. It made Charlie’s job, finding us, just that much harder. The usual drill was to move a few hundred yards away from the LZ, set up an ambush, and hunker down until morning. Then, we would be off and running the operation.

  The night was quiet and uneventful. I stayed awake a long time, listening to the night noises to find out if bad guys were camped under us, just waiting for daylight and target practice.

  Eventually, I drifted into a troubled and dream-filled sleep, which seemed to consist of me hobbling through life without an ass to sit on. Seen from the top of a hundred-foot tree, the sunrise was pretty spectacular.

  As soon as it was light enough to see, I decided to rappel down a ways and check out the ground. I took the two recon team leaders with me. Quietly, we dropped the rappelling ropes over the side and stepped off the edge of the plate. The first ten feet were tough going; the jumble of compressed branches took some effort, a lot of sweat, numerous curse words, and way too much noise to get through.

  After what seemed an eternity, we dropped through the first tree canopy and into the second. Our main tree was over a hundred feet high, with most of its branches in the top thirty feet of the trunk. At about sixty feet up, we hit the second layer of tree canopy and descended through it with much less difficulty. We hit the bottom layer of the triple-canopy jungle about thirty feet up, and stopped for a look around.

  By that time, I could see the ground, and it appeared no unwanted visitors were camped around the base of our tree. I looked up and the forest seemed undisturbed. Not a sign of the huge steel platform resting in the topmost branches was visible. Maybe the thing was going to work out all right.

  “Look over to the north,” I whispered to the two recon leaders. “That gully yonder is rocky and steep. Use it as the route away from and back to the tree. That way you won’t be leaving footprints all over the area as you come and go.”

  They both nodded that they understood. “I’m going back up,” I whispered after a last look around. “I’ll send the teams down, one at a time, starting with Sidewinder, and then Python.” The two recon leaders settled into the branches to await their teams’ arrival before going the final distance to the ground.

  The night before, I’d reviewed the recon plan with the two teams. Each would leave in its own direction, loop out for one day, then come in the next. At the end of four days, we’d have a 360-degree recon coverage of the area and could be picked up at daylight on the morning of the fifth day. If the recon teams found anything of interest that required additional firepower, I’d insert the remaining ten men I had with me. Otherwise, I planned to keep them up in the tree, away from the ground, and out of trouble.

  The climb back up made the trip down seem like a walk in the park. I was sweating like a hog in a heat wave by the time I reached the Eagle’s Nest, as we had covernamed the pie plate. I sent over the five men from Sidewinder, and then those from Python. As the teams reached the ground, each leader called me on the PRC-25 radios they carried. “Eagle Six, this is Sidewinder One-zero. Departing azimuth nine-zero. Over.” As commander of the nest my call sign was Eagle Six.

  “Eagle Six, Roger. Hourly check-in until RON (remain overnight) location. Then radio silence until 0500. Eagle Six out.”

  “Python One-zero, Wilco. Out.”

  A few minutes later, Team Python took off at a 270 azimuth, and we who were left behind settled in for a two-day wait. That is, unless a team’s luck was bad and they ran into VC or NVA. Then it would be run, shoot, pray, and shag ass back to the tree. I had warned the team leaders that I wouldn’t let them up the ropes, which I’d pulled about thirty feet off the ground so they couldn’t be seen by passersby, until I was sure no bad guys could see the team members disappear into the trees.

  I went over to my squad NCO, a bright young kid we called Sergeant Wojo, as his name had about thirty letters in it. “I want you to make damn sure none of your squad has a loaded weapon. You check every damned rifle personally. Spot check all day long. Then again, every rifle at dark. I don’t want some jerkoff firing a round by accident and telling everyone within two miles we’re here.” Wojo was a chunky Polish kid from New Jersey, and a rock-solid soldier. His head looked like it had been shaved, his hair was cut so short. He was young for an NCO, but he was a good kid, and tried hard. “Roger, Dai Uy, I gotcha.”

  By the end of the first day, the novelty of our new home had worn off, and several real problems were developing. I was surprised nobody thought of them, including me.

  One, where do ten men relieve themselves a hundred feet up in a tree?

  Two, how about the trash generated by ten men eating packaged foodstuff?

  Three, where do ten men go to stretch their legs? Talk? Sleep?

  The answer to question three was easy: I let two men at a time walk back and forth while whispering to each other; I had the others lie on their bedrolls, clustered around the edge, with their heads all pointing out from the center.

  Question two wasn’t all that hard. I couldn’t let any trash accumulate and fall on the ground, where it might be found by the bad guys, so everyone had to eat in the center of the platform and then put the trash into an empty rations box. By the end of the mission, I had three boxes full of trash.

  Question one was the tough one. I didn’t want the men taking a wizz off the edge of the platform, although by the time it had passed through the many layers of leaves, it would have probably been reduced to a fine mist. It was the smell I worried about. The urine fr
om a dozen men would stink like blazes by the end of the mission. Anyone within a hundred yards of the tree would know something was going on. So, I had them fill the water cans as we emptied them of water. By the end of the mission, I had better than twenty gallons of urine to take out.

  The really difficult one was the other waste product we humans produce. In desperation, I had the men erect a little cubicle at one edge, using branches and a poncho. Then we started filling the rest of the empty food boxes with solid waste. By the time we were ready to leave, we ended up with five boxes of putrid, smelly crap.

  The rest of the time, we monitored the radio, stayed in touch with the recon teams, checked in and out at the assigned times with Prairie Fire control, and waited for the time to pass. Every four hours or so, I sent a couple of men down to the thirty-foot level to look around, as well as to burn off energy. We didn’t see or hear anything, but I still felt awfully vulnerable in our perch in the trees. My nights were neither restful nor short.

  The second night, both recon teams climbed up from below, tired and dirty from sneaking through the bush. We fed and rested the men who were doing all the work, then sent them out the third morning to cover the other two legs of the search pattern.

  It rained for a while that afternoon, giving those of us on the platform a chance to grab a hasty shower, and we certainly needed it. Then, the wind picked up a bit, which caused the Eagle’s Nest to settle another foot into the treetop. It was in so deep by then that we couldn’t see above the top leaves. It made for a claustrophobic last day.

  However, that’s not what made the last day memorable.

  The day prior to our departure started off quietly enough, although by that time, the stench from the waste boxes was searing the membranes in our noses. Any NVA downwind must have scratched their heads in wonder. Were the trees farting? The cloudy sky meant a cooler day. Even so, the platform got plenty hot in the bright afternoon sun. At the noon check-in, I made arrangements for an early morning pickup the next day. As the afternoon wore on, I started looking ahead to a hot shower and meals. The LRRP (long-range recon patrol) rations we were eating, although filling, left much to be desired in terms of gastronomic satisfaction.