by Bing West
Braun’s reputation for effectiveness attracted senior officers. In early June of 1966, Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt visited Braun. Walt commanded the Marines in Vietnam, a battalion of whom were working in Braun’s district, which was called Binh Son.
Binh Son is far from the seats of Vietnamese power. It lies in Quang Ngai, the southernmost of five violent provinces called I (“Eye”) Corps, three hundred miles to the north of Saigon and four hundred miles to the south of Hanoi. Quang Ngai is one of the few provinces in North or South Vietnam where, even in times of peace, the population has had to struggle against starvation. Unyielding jungle and sharp mountain ranges penned the rice farmers and their families along the narrow green plain bordering the sea, where there was not enough land for a growing population.
Hunger fed politics, and in 1930 famine struck Quang Ngai when a high wind washed the rivers across the rice crops and drove the fish from shore. The French colonial government allowed the local Vietnamese satraps to collect their normal rice taxes from a starving people. Secret antigovernment societies flourished during the next ten years, and the people strongly supported the Viet Minh in their struggle against the French after World War II.
In 1960 the Viet Cong movement started to gain momentum, and four years later the Viet Cong could realistically claim control over most of Quang Ngai’s villages and over all the jungle, allowing their main forces to establish a huge base camp in the mountains. The main VC forces then turned on the South Vietnamese regular forces. The latter, so organizationally muscle-bound that they had been unable to wrestle the guerrillas for control of the rural population, found they lacked the strength to win the conventional battles they had been structured to fight. In a series of brilliant battles and marches, the Viet Cong main forces bloodied and befuddled the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units and threatened to seize the capital city of Quang Ngai.
Against that background came the introduction of American combat troops into southern I Corps. Near Quang Ngai’s northern border, in Binh Son district, stretched a barren coastal sand spit four miles long. There in March of 1965 troops from the 1st Marine Division splashed ashore unopposed and began to lay the steel matting for the jets which would fly in close support of the infantry. During the next year the Americans built and expanded their airfield, called Chulai, and clashed with the Viet Cong main forces in several sharp but inconclusive battles. In the populated sections of Binh Son and other districts, the Marines built battalion outposts. General Walt made it a habit to ask district advisers like Braun what he thought of the U.S. battalions.
Braun told Walt that the Marines would be more effective if they worked with the Vietnamese instead of just beating the bushes on their own looking for the VC. Walt asked for a specific recommendation.
“Well, General,” Braun replied, “I’d like to see us try a combined unit, a group of Marines and Viets who would eat, sleep, patrol and fight as one unit—not two.”
“If you had them, where would you put them?” Walt asked.
“There’s a big village not far from here. It sits along a river which the Cong use to move supplies back up into the mountains. As a matter of fact, it’s just south of Chulai airfield. The government forces were chased out of the village a couple of years ago. A platoon of Cong live there regularly now, and sometimes a company or more come in to resupply or rest.”
“Why pick there to start?” Walt asked.
“I didn’t, sir. The district chief did. He has this outstanding police chief who’s being bad-mouthed by some of the local politicians. These pols make the Mafia look like a bunch of Trappist monks. The district chief’s afraid this police chief will say the hell with it and transfer to another district. But his family’s from this village and his mother still lives there. The district chief says he’ll stick around if we make a play for that village. The police want some Americans along if they’re going in there. They don’t think too much of the local troops in this district.”
“How many Marines do you want?”
“The police chief would like a full squad, sir, between twelve and fourteen.”
“I’ll see that he gets them,” Walt replied. “By the way, what’s the name of that village?”
“We call it Been Knee-ah, sir.”
The residents of Binh Nghia lived in seven separate hamlets, four of which were called Binh Yen Noi and three called My Hué. Sometimes the villagers distinguished numerically among them by referring to My Hué 1 or My Hué 2, etc. It is a large village, encompassing four square miles of land, bordered on the east and south by a tidal river, and on the west and north by an expanse of sand dunes. While the village is clean and neat, its five thousand inhabitants are not rich. The soil is shallow and sandy, and in the fall the brackish overflow from the river leaves a salt crust upon the rice stalks. The scrub grows spindly and keeps the cows and other foraging animals thin. Fish is the final foe of famine for many villagers, but the sea bottom is sandy and weeks can go by without a good catch.
Binh Nghia belonged to the Viet Cong. By 1964 the National Liberation Front was the full-time government in five of the village’s seven hamlets and controlled boat traffic moving toward the fishing beds at sea. The village chief and hamlet elders walked three miles each afternoon so they could sleep inside the district compound. In the fall of the following year came the Big Flood of I Corps, an inundation by the rain and sea which exceeded any catastrophe in living memory. Binh Nghia was cut off from outside military aid as bridges were washed away and roads flooded under. The regular military forces of the Saigon government were occupied with guarding and repairing the district towns and the province capital city, leaving the village militia to cope by themselves. Two strong local-force Viet Cong companies roamed from outlying hamlet to hamlet, village to village, destroying or dislocating the Popular Forces (PF) militia and declaring the villages liberated. Binh Nghia proved no exception. By 1965 the government of South Vietnam (GVN) had conceded all its seven hamlets to the Viet Cong.
Not so the two dozen militiamen whose families still lived in the village. With no place to go and no reason to run farther than they had to, they had flocked to the top of a steep hill surrounded by open rice paddies, about a half-mile outside the village. During the daytime, when there was some assurance of reinforcements from the district, they would dart forward, nosing around the edges of the nearest hamlet, sniping at any exposed VC cadres. At night, knowing they were without support, untrained and cherishing no hope of success, they abandoned the village to huddle at the top of the hill. There they awaited the night when the enemy, annoyed by their pestering defiance, would choose to accept the dozen or more casualties necessary to assault and finish them.
To the men of the 1st Marine Division who were stationed in the district, Binh Nghia was just another village, with nothing peculiar to mark it. If the Marines approached on a large-unit sweep, they would find no traces of the enemy. If they happened to pass through one of its hamlets on a small patrol, they would likely receive some harassing fire from distant treelines. The villagers were uncommunicative, but not sullen. Among the Americans, Binh Nghia had no special reputation.
Still, when the call went out for volunteers to live with the Vietnamese forces in the village, the response was enthusiastic. General Walt had asked the commander of the Marine battalion in the district to select twelve men. The first rifle company polled produced over one hundred volunteers. The primary reason was comfort. For the Marine riflemen, assignment to the village would be an escape from the routine harassments of duty in a rifle company. Many thought they would be out of the dust or mud. They would sleep on cots instead of the bare ground. There would be no more jungles to hack through or mountains to climb—no more leeches, vipers or trench foot. There would be no first sergeant barking at stragglers. Life in the village would be sweet and easy. Or so it was rumored.
General Walt had laid down two stipulations concerning the volunteers. First, they had to be seasoned combat
veterans. That was not a difficult requirement to meet. The Marines had been fighting the 2d NVA (North Vietnamese Army) Division on and off since midspring, and most of the riflemen had been engaged in at least three rough operations. Second, Walt asked the battalion officers to send only men who could get along with the villagers. Major Braun had been emphatic on that point, and it slowed the selection procedure. It took eight days to pick twelve men. The officers were aware from their own surveys that over 40 percent of the Marines disliked the Vietnamese. The problem was particularly acute among the small-unit leaders—the lieutenants and sergeants—whose opinions had considerable effect on their men. In addressing the problem, the Marine command had written that its surveys “suggest that of our squad leaders graduating from NCO Leadership School less than one in five marches (sic) forth with a positive attitude toward the ARVN and PF, and that probably one-third go forth with a strong dislike for the local people. This is not just academic. It is costing us lives.”
The noncommissioned officer chosen to lead the volunteer squad was known to like the Vietnamese. His name was William Beebe and he was a career Marine. Only twenty-one, he had been in the service for four years, although he was still a corporal. Of medium build but with powerful, tattooed arms, Beebe was a scrapper and a stickler for alertness in the field. On large-unit sweeps, his squad frequently took the point and scouted ahead, with Beebe easily distinguishable from his men by his habit of shouting and waving his arms. He was forever signaling his men to spread out and pay attention to where they were walking.
But Beebe had another side. He disliked rules and details, and somehow he could not imagine himself making out pay rosters and guard rosters and equipment rosters the way the first sergeant did. When not on an operation, he would run the risk of buying a bottle of local whiskey for his squad. Hard liquor in Vietnam was against regulations, and Beebe had been caught and fined more than once. While his tactical performance was excellent, his relaxed attitude toward garrison regulations had prevented his promotion to sergeant. The village volunteers thought they had the right kind of leader in Beebe. Life in the village would be sweet and easy.
2
On June 10, 1966, a dozen Marines left behind an American base camp with its thick barbed wire and canvas cots, solid bunkers, soupy ice cream and endless guard rosters, and went to live with some Vietnamese in the Vietnamese village of Binh Nghia.
Their destination that day was the stumpy hill where the village militia, called Popular Forces or PFs, huddled each night. The Marines never climbed that hill. At its base, they were met by Lam, who had with him fifteen police and eighteen PFs. Lam had decided to abandon the hill outpost because it took twenty minutes to walk from there to the nearest hamlet. With the arrival of the Marines, Lam felt his force was strong enough to move closer to the village.
The police chief had selected as his new headquarters a three-room adobe villa which sat at the outskirts of the third and largest of the hamlets called Binh Yen Noi. The villa, which had been deserted by a rich landowner in 1950 when the Viet Minh had first taken the village, looked south across a wide expanse of paddies. Its backyard was a short expanse of shrubbery which ended near the back door of a thatched house.
After explaining that the first order of business was turning the villa into a fort, Lam asked if the Marines could provide the necessary materials. Beebe replied that he personally could requisition none, and since his company commander was leaving shortly, tiny supplies requested by the company would take weeks and perhaps months before arriving. Unfazed, Lam said they could build their own defenses without outside help. He promptly called a meeting of the villagers, explained that his men and the Americans had come to stay, and asked for volunteers to build the outpost. About forty villagers responded, a majority of whom were related to the PFs.
Beebe expected the police would force the other villagers to cooperate. Instead, Lam himself set to work and his men followed. All that first day under the hot sun the combined force and the villagers toiled, digging a wide moat around the villa, filling sandbags and propping them up as an inside wall, splitting sections of bamboo into thousands of short, sharp stakes and studding the moat walls with them, erecting a high, spindly bamboo fence thirty yards outside the moat on the theory that the wood would cause the premature detonation of recoilless rifle rounds aimed at the fort. They worked with shovels, hoes, axes and knives. Slats were not nailed to the rickety fence; they were tied with bamboo cord. The mud scooped out of the moat served both to fill the sandbags and to cement them in place. Several Vietnamese, obviously specialists at the task, were busy sinking a deep well in what had been the courtyard of the villa. Boys and some young women spent the day shuffling back and forth from the nearby treeline to the open fort, carrying buckets of fresh water. The boys liked to follow after the Americans, although they would jump to carry water to any policeman who shouted at them. They paid no attention to the local PFs, however, and dawdled when asked to bring them water. It was obvious the villagers did not respect the Popular Forces.
At twilight, Lam called a halt to the work. Most of the villagers went home, the women in one group shuffling ahead to prepare the evening meal, the men in another group ambling slowly behind and talking animatedly among themselves. A few women stayed at the fort, bustling about in a clatter of pans, shrieking to each other, preparing fires and setting plates down in the dirt. Then they, too, departed and a quiet peace fell over the scene, as the men scooped rice and chunks of meat from the simmering pots and sprawled among the sandbags to enjoy the evening meal. There was no wind and the crickets were starting to chirp. Across the paddies in front of the fort the sky was pink and red and soft.
While the Marines enjoyed the meal and the sunset, Beebe conferred in private with Lam. By the time he rejoined the Marines, several of them had fallen asleep.
“Let’s wake up,” he said. “Here’s the word. We’re expected to go out tonight. The police will pull guard here. All we have to do is patrol with the PFs.”
“All?” Lance Corporal Gerald Faircloth said. “All? We spend the day like a bunch of ditchdiggers and now we’re supposed to have patrol duty at night too?”
“Shut up, Faircloth,” Beebe said. “We haven’t been here long enough for you to start bitching. The police aren’t infantry. They can take care of the fort, but that’s all. It’s up to us and the PFs to handle the patrols. Anyways, only four of us have to go out tonight. You’re one of them.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Faircloth asked.
Faircloth was a hard young man, not given to smiling or socializing easily. He stayed to himself and bothered no one. And on the other hand, no one pushed him. Tall and wiry, he had the hand-and-eye coordination of a basketball forward. He was an expert with a LAW, or Light Anti-Armor Weapon, a three-foot piece of fiberglass tubing enclosing a self-propelled rocket which could stop a tank or blow up a bunker. On operations, Faircloth had been his company’s antibunker specialist. Beebe wanted Faircloth along on the first village patrol.
For the patrol’s point man, Beebe selected Corporal Phillip Brannon, an experienced tactician with an outgoing personality. Unlike Faircloth, Brannon enjoyed joking and horseplay and by his grinning, gangling manner invited practical jokes and childish horseplay. Not that he was all fun and games. He claimed that back home in West Texas he had hit a running jack rabbit at seventy yards with a .22 rifle, and those who had watched him fire his M-14 automatic rifle believed him. Not that Brannon was given to bragging. Self-deprecatory in his humor, he had the knack of communicating with the Vietnamese despite a limited vocabulary. Brannon loved to pantomime, and by exaggerated motions of clumsiness and wry expressions of face, he evoked the language of laughter. But Beebe had not placed him at point because he made people laugh; Brannon walked first because he carried a fast rifle.
Beebe himself was going on the patrol, and PFC L. L. Page pestered him to be the fourth Marine. Page was the youngest of the group, of average he
ight and less physically tough than most of the volunteers. Beebe felt responsible for him. Page had desperately wanted to go to the village, and Beebe thought it was a good idea because Page, with his unassuming manner and lack of egotism, wore well in close quarters. Beebe had argued with the battalion officers that he could teach Page tactics while they were in the village. So Page went on the first patrol.
Wanting the PFs to make a good impression, Lam had asked Nguyen Suong to go on the patrol. The Popular Forces had no formal rank structure and the district chief had never even appointed a leader for those at Binh Nghia, supposedly because he did not want to waste a good man on a suicidal assignment. Suong had gradually emerged as the unofficial PF leader. Of medium build and mean eyes, Suong was distinguishable mainly by his gold front tooth and the sharp creases in his green utility uniform. His neat dress deceived the Marines.
“He doesn’t look like a field soldier to me,” Brannon said. “He’s too clean.”
Lam insisted otherwise.
“Well,” Beebe said, “let’s get going and find out what has people so shaken up about this ville.”
The four Marines stood in a group waiting while Suong talked rapidly and forcefully to two PFs. The PFs were shaking their heads and replying nervously, but Suong kept jabbing his finger at them and answering in strong tones. Beebe looked quizzically at Lam.
“Those two have not seen much combat,” Lam said. “Suong say to them that they be safe with Marines.”
Finally, one of the PFs walked reluctantly past the Marines and stood in front of them. He was to be the guide. Brannon stepped up behind him. Each time the PF would turn nervously around, Brannon winked and smiled. The PF did not seem encouraged. Beebe stood behind Brannon, followed by Suong, Page, another PF and Faircloth.