Ghosts and Shadows

by Phil Ball

  Chapter 13

  Mai Loc, Tokyo, Da Nang, Mai Loc

  After six months in the mountainous jungle of Northern I Corps, at a different overnight position practically every night, the village of Mai Loc was a welcome change of pace. Finally we were to get our very own base camp again and were able to stay put for a while. Nobody would say for sure how long we were going to stay, but rumors and estimates ranged from two weeks to three months. It was too good to be true, a village with a small civilian population (about 150 people total) living in a rather normal fashion. It meant that the war had not yet destroyed this remote section of land and it might not be bad duty for us. We would have to wait and see, but for now things looked very comfortable and extremely promising to us dirty old grunts used to living like animals.

  From Cam Lo we walked south on Route #558 about six or seven kilometers, definitely a full day’s march. The single-lane dirt road was badly in need of repairs, having had very little vehicle traffic on it at all; it was used mostly by pedestrians and water buffalo coming and going to market in Cam Lo. It was odd at first, just being in the presence of Vietnamese civilians. Where we had come from was free fire zones, which literally meant anyone out there was considered the enemy. As we humped up Route #558 that afternoon we were exposed to the other side of the war, and for most of us it was the first time. The South Vietnamese people—peasants, farmers, regular folks who were just trying to scratch out a meager living from the countryside, the real reason we were here in the first place—were walking side by side with us, carrying loads on their backs heavier than any one of us macho Marines would even think about carrying. Mai Loc was to be the beginning of a new phase in my Vietnam experience. I only wish I had been more prepared for it and capable of seeing more clearly the reality of the situation. Instead, I had the attitude that all gooks were the enemy and the only good gook was a dead one.

  First and 2nd Platoons with the Company CP group stopped at an old French plantation on the outskirts of the village and let 3rd Platoon go on into Mai Loc. The plantation house had long since been reduced to rubble, but the remnants of a long, beautiful lawn with dozens of fruit trees conjured up pictures of a once-beautiful setting. This region had a reputation for being quite friendly, without a lot of enemy activity, due mostly to the barrier created by Route #9 just to the north and the large number of Marines in the areas around Cam Lo, the Rockpile and Camp Carroll.

  We entered Mai Loc and saw a cluster of bamboo and grass huts that appeared to have been there forever. We had been told not to speak to anyone, but to be cordial and polite as we passed through the open-air market next to the muddy road. The village chief stood in the doorway of his hooch and smiled as we passed. Lieutenant Knight stopped to introduce us, but we continued down the road to our compound.

  The old French fort west of town was to be our camp. It was beautiful to us, having a two-story, concrete pillbox-like structure standing solidly in the center of the perimeter of bunkers and fighting positions. Not exactly what we would build, but good enough. Approximately 75 meters across, the compound was surrounded by an earth dike; the bunkers were dug underneath it and the fighting positions on top. A seemingly impenetrable maze of barbed and concertina wire surrounded the dike and a very large mine field surrounded everything.

  Mai Loc was actually three separate villages. The ancient, traditional Mai Loc was the bamboo and grass hooches surrounding the marketplace and consisted of approximately 20 to 30 families, most of which were fatherless because of the war, but there were a lot of grandparents around. Many of the families owned a water buffalo and farmed a piece of land east of the village for rice.

  Across the road from our compound was a smaller, refugee village, a group of displaced peasants living in a sort of shanty town provided by the South Vietnam government, I believe. These folks were outcasts and second-class. They did not mix much with the people in Mai Loc proper.

  The third and last village was 1,000 meters north of the compound on the other side of the mine field. Hidden in the trees were a dozen or so hooches on stilts and inhabited by the strange and mysterious montagnards, sometimes called the Bru people. They were the true natives, different in many ways. I felt these folks were probably the most honorable of all, yet they were at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. Their men were definitely the best soldiers; fierce and brave, they would stay and fight when the others fled.

  We ran daily patrols and nightly ambushes in and around the Mai Loc vicinity. We worked hard to get the badly neglected compound whipped into shape, reinforcing bunkers and enlarging nearly everything to accommodate our bigger American bodies. We became very familiar with the area and the Vietnamese soldiers, but had little contact with the civilians.

  Operation Dragon was a pacification program where we would work to restore the hearts and minds of the civilian population, as well as teach the local militia (RFs and PFs, regional forces and popular forces) to fight themselves in preparation for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces some day. Mai Loc had approximately 30 teenage boys who were RFs or PFs, and they drew a monthly check from the South Vietnamese government. They had old rifles and very little ammo, but the thing they lacked most was heart. They had little or no training in the military, and they didn’t seem to want any, either. For the most part they were perfectly content to sit back and let us do all the fighting and dying for them. We had a problem with their attitude right from the start.

  What we learned about the RFs and PFs we did not like. They were childish, often playing around too much. They were as old as some of us Marines, but they were immature, caring more about how they looked, their hair, and getting dirty than defending their country in war. Some of them might have been as young as 16, but most were 17 and 18 years old, a fact that was hard for us frustrated Marines to believe.

  Another problem we had with them was that they would steal everything that was not nailed down. It didn’t seem to matter what it was; if it belonged to a Marine, they wanted it. Whenever they were inside the compound we had to assign one grunt to watch the gear and we could not turn our back on them for a minute for fear they would walk off with the place.

  None of them spoke much English and we didn’t speak Vietnamese, but we managed to get by with a few common words and hand signals. Atwood and I befriended one of the PFs. We just called him Little John. He was a good-looking kid who wanted more than anything else to go to America. He seemed to worship the ground we walked on, while putting down his own race as inferior to us. Little John turned out to be our translator in many ways; we learned to communicate well with him, and he could speak to the Vietnamese people for us or tell us what they were saying. He also proved to be a very brave soldier in the months to come.

  On November 14, 1968, we packed up and moved out of Mai Loc with hopes of returning in a couple weeks. We joined Fox Company’s 1st and 2nd Platoons along with nearly our entire battalion. We began a forced march south to hook up with a couple of companies from 3/3 and 3/4. They had engaged a large NVA force north of LZ Stud (now known as Vandergrift Combat Base or LZ Vandergrift) and we were to get on-line and sweep the area, several kilometers wide, between Vandergrift and Mai Loc. This particular region was known to hold a lot of Viet Cong with NVA, and booby traps were the weapon of choice. We had not had much experience with booby traps or VC in our travels as a grunt outfit, so this was going to be a totally new kind of war for most of us.

  The terrain was unbelievably hostile, not so much for high mountains like other places we had been, but for the unusually thick, impenetrable brush. As far as the eye could see, it was a solid mass of growth, approximately five to 10 meters tall. Twisted, tough old trees very close together seemed to grow out rather than up. Needle-sharp thorns as long as three inches threatened to rip flesh and penetrate to the bone, while a maze of vines wrapped around and through it all. We had a couple of tanks with us, but they stayed back, strictly for support fire. In order to find the enemy, we had to sweep on-line and co
ver every inch of ground visually. In effect, every fire team was walking point, side by side with everyone else. With three or four men in a team, we had to take turns cutting our way through the brush.

  We hadn’t been at it long the first day out and everyone was already complaining. The team to my immediate right was involved in something of a power struggle between a veteran team leader (a lance corporal) and a particular FNG. I heard the lance corporal continuously reprimand the PFC for following the trail of the team to their immediate right, instead of staying up with the rest of us and cutting his own path.

  The lance corporal was having a hell of a time with the guy and wound up walking point himself. The mouthy FNG fell in right behind him and continued to distract and harass the team leader. I felt kind of sorry for my salty buddy and yelled over, “Shut that motherfucker up or I’m comin’ over and do it myself.” I meant it, too. Without having visual contact, the FNG and I started having a swearing, very threatening conversation through 10 meters of heavy brush.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion. At first I thought the angry young PFC had tossed a frag at me or the lance corporal, but then I heard him screaming and crying out for help and realized someone had stepped on a mine. Like a very small child, the big, tough FNG was suddenly reduced to crying his eyes out and screaming bloody murder about the pain he had in his foot.

  It was the lance corporal I was concerned with, and as I struggled my way through the brush I called out to my friend, “You all right?” With all the screaming and carrying on I couldn’t hear if he replied or not. Again I told the FNG to shut up long enough for me to see if any real men were injured, but he continued to scream.

  I found my friend lying on his back, his eyes opened in a fixed stare. His face was ghostly white and he did not make a sound. His trousers were soaked with blood and both legs were ripped to shreds. He was obviously hurt very badly and was in a deep state of shock.

  The Corpsman arrived quickly and immediately went to work on him. One of the tanks rumbled up and stopped next to us and someone yelled, “Spread out!” This lance corporal, one of the nicest, quietest guys in the platoon, was absolutely silent as he lay there close to death, but the loud-mouthed FNG, who was barely wounded and hardly bleeding, was making all the noise. He cursed threats at the Doc because the lance corporal was getting most of the attention. It was a very ugly scene altogether, but both Marines got medevaced quickly and both received the necessary care and attention their wounds called for. The FNG was returned to the bush after only a few days in the rear, but the lance corporal was sent home and discharged early, with one leg amputated and the other one rendered useless.

  This turned out to be just the first of many booby traps we either uncovered or triggered accidentally, and many more WIAs occurred as well. The area east and south of Mai Loc proved to be thick with enemy bunkers and base camps, and most had been just recently evacuated. An enemy battalion was obviously in the area, but they were managing to stay one step ahead of us, waiting for the right time and place to fight us.

  On one occasion when 3-Alpha moved up a narrow draw with very heavy jungle and thick underbrush, we heard a commotion ahead of us. It sounded like people moving about in a hurry, scrambling for cover. We stopped to observe more sounds of farm animals (chickens and pigs), then Vietnamese voices could be heard in excited tones. We received permission from Lieutenant Knight to move forward with extreme caution, reminding us that there could be both VC and NVA in the area. If it were VC we wouldn’t know the difference between them and civilians, but because this was a free fire zone, anyone out here should be considered to be the enemy. The free fire zone issue was not quite clear in this particular region, which was believed to be uninhabited. We assumed no civilians would live out here. We were wrong.

  Atwood, Hillbilly’s gun team, and I moved slowly in the direction of the movement. I sneaked out in front a little to get a better look when suddenly a Vietnamese man, dressed in civilian clothing (black pajamas) ran across the trail not five meters directly in front of me. Instinctively and without hesitation, firing from the hip I squeezed off a long burst of M-16 fire at him. The man stumbled and flipped head over heels, somersaulting into the brush on the opposite side. Like a chain reaction, everyone around me opened fire, too. In the hail of gunfire and grenades I heard more voices, this time mostly women it seemed, screaming and crying out, “No VC, No VC, No VC!”

  “Cease fire goddamn it.” As quickly as it began, it stopped.

  A dozen or more civilians/VC suspects came crawling out with their hands held high. Several women and children appeared with older papa-sans, but there were also a few military-age males in the group. After some initial interrogations, these folks were apparently not a threat, and had probably just moved out here to try to escape the war and the refugee camps. I couldn’t blame them.

  They really had a nice place set up here. Carved from the base and trunk of a very large tree, they had a three-story home, including basement and bunker, virtually completely concealed from the outside world. They had animals and a small garden, and everything necessary to be self-sufficient. They were not heavily armed, but they did have a couple of rifles. They couldn’t really have defended themselves against us or the NVA/VC. They probably played both sides and did what they had to do to survive, but we got orders to evacuate them just the same. “For their own good,” said the battalion commander.

  They did not want to leave their home, but offered little resistance. A couple of big helicopter transports were brought in. Most of the civilians were scared to death to get on board, but after some coaxing and prodding, we managed to complete the mission. Everything went, including the animals. We then blew the place sky-high with C-4 plastic explosive.

  Very little enemy contact was made on Operation Roa Vinh. Whatever happened to that enemy battalion, I don’t know. Third Platoon returned to our compound at Mai Loc around the first of December and took up where we left off with the local militia. We were extremely fortunate in getting our relatively cushy duty assignment at Mai Loc, while 1st and 2nd Platoons of Fox Company, as well as the rest of the battalion, Echo, Golf, and Hotel Company were being run all over Northern I Corps, due to the recent expansion of our designated AO.

  Marine Corps policy in Vietnam was that officers spent only half their 13-month tour with us grunts. The other half was spent behind a desk in the rear. This policy only inflamed the already very fragile relationship between enlisted men and officers. It seemed terribly unfair, but in December, my eighth month in-country, I saw a third change in our platoon command. Although Lieutenant Knight had been with us only about three-and-a-half months, without warning he left one day and was replaced by a total stranger. Some of us had grown very fond of Knight, so when the new 2nd lieutenant showed up, we deeply resented him from the start. For one thing he looked like he was only 16 years old, a very young-looking face and body, and we immediately dubbed him “Schoolboy.” He looked frail and small and tried to make up for his stature by talking tough, something we could all see right through. He had some very large boots to fill in Lieutenant Knight, and I must say he had the energy and enthusiasm to do it quite well after all. Perhaps Schoolboy’s saving grace was the fact that he was willing to listen to Hamilton and more or less let him call the shots at first.

  One of Schoolboy’s first changes in policy was to move one squad out of the overcrowded compound, and put us in the refugee village permanently. Right across the road from the compound, we were out of range of our superior’s watchful eyes, yet close enough to get some backup if we should need help. 3-Alpha set up house in two hooches the people made available to us and we settled right in as neighbors. The civilians were actually glad to have us, I think, 24-hour bodyguards against the enemy threat and the cowboys. Cowboys were South Vietnamese hoodlums in uniform, RFs and PFs or even ARVNs from Cam Lo, who terrorized the public on a regular basis. They would show up out of nowhere and simply take whatever they wanted, mercilessly be
ating anyone who dared to stand up to them. You could usually tell a cowboy from his dress: he looked like a sharp, squared-away soldier, with clean, camouflaged utilities tapered to fit his thin, wiry, adolescent-looking physique. But underneath this facade was a ruthless mercenary, willing to kill or torture his own people for a buck.

  As time passed, we really got to know nearly everyone in the village and we soon gained their respect by assuring them that we were there to help. We continued our patrols and ambushes throughout the area, rotating days and nights with Bravo and Charlie squads. We really had more free time than we knew what to do with, so we wound up spending a hell of a lot of time just wallowing away the hours drinking warm tiger beer and rice wine (sake), and indulging in the finer herbs the region had to offer. In the tiny one-room hooch closest to the road lived a woman (mama-san) with a small child. Her husband had been killed in the war, as was the case with nearly every woman in the village, and she owned a modest little store that she operated from beneath an awning. We bought tiger beer by the quart and sake by the water glass, and spent many an afternoon sitting at the rundown picnic table under that awning.

  The rest of the villagers seemed to look down on the mama-san because she let us spend so much time at her house. Rarely, if ever, did any Marines actually enter the hooch, and for the most part I think she was respected by all of us. I don’t know if her neighbors didn’t like her before we arrived or if they shunned her because of us, but she really didn’t seem to mind what they thought of her and made a modest living selling her black-market goods to us and taking care of her baby. There was never any hanky-panky as far as I know; most of us grunts developed a friendship with her that was mutually respectful.