by Dennis Foley
“They any good yet?” Hollister asked.
“The teams are new. Lots of experience scattered around the troops we have been getting, but they’re far from teams yet. First team we put together isn’t even five weeks old yet, and I’ve still got twenty bodies going through the Recondo School at Nha Trang. The new ones we get in will follow them. That means it’s three weeks of school and a week or so of slack on either side to get ’em there and back.
“We’re less than fifty percent strength, even counting the troops in Nha Trang.”
The major pulled off his sunglasses and threw them angrily across the top of his field table. “All I want to do is get these guys into shape to operate without losing a team. I’m afraid it’s going to happen. We’re in the wrong place. And that’s why you are here.”
“Because we are in the wrong place, sir?” Hollister asked, puzzled.
“Because the only way we can compensate for the lack of security is to make these teams harder than anvils and slicker than snot.”
Hollister nodded in agreement, but still hadn’t heard the answer to his question.
“There are damn few officers that have any LRP experience, and I bitched and bitched until they diverted you.” Sangean’s tone changed. “I know you were looking forward to honchoing a rifle company. But this is where the army needs you right now. I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not. I’m sure that probably pisses you off. But you’re a big boy.”
There was little Hollister could say. Complaining about being yanked off orders to a division wouldn’t accomplish much. It was done. At least he was with LRPs—the only two jobs he wanted were LRPs and commanding a rifle company. So he wasn’t as upset as Sangean guessed.
“I got lots of good troops here. And that’s all. I got shit for junior officers—not their fault. Second lieutenants don’t get much chance to get experience. The NCOs are a mixed bag. Some are great, and others escaped from other jobs to get here. We’re going to have to weed ’em out while we’re trying to whip this company into shape.
“Topping all that off, there’s no Intelligence in the entire Corps area that’s any good, and we haven’t got a sliver of information on just what we are up against. Put that against the fact that we have a company that is just a few weeks old and in that time we have become a thorn in the butt of everyone on the Field Force staff except Colonel Downing and you have Juliet Company. So welcome aboard, Hollister.”
Shaking his head at all the bad news, Hollister replied, “Thank you, sir. I don’t know what to say. It’s a little much to take all at once.”
“Don’t say anything. Just know that if I had time, I’d give you more time. But for now you’re my Operations officer, and that means Operations and training. If we don’t train ’em, we’ll bury ’em. You up to it, Ranger?”
That was all Hollister needed to hear: that his new boss had a job for him and confidence in him. It was the stuff that made Hollister operate. He stood up. “Yessir. When do I start?”
The next three days were filled with finding his way around, getting his issue gear, meeting people in the company, and trying to figure out just what was going on.
One of the first surprises was that the LRP teams were prisoners. Sangean had explained to him that their operations, which were normally classified as Secret or Top Secret, frequently exceeded the security clearances of the soldiers assigned to Juliet Company. Some of the soldiers had minor juvenile records and couldn’t get high-enough clearances, and others were waiting for the lengthy background checks to be completed. But Sangean couldn’t wait and had elected to restrict the movements of the troops when they were off duty. That meant they weren’t allowed out of the compound without an NCO escort and when they went on leave or R&R they had to be brought in and debriefed and then warned about discussing classified information. It made for some grumbling, but most of them went along, understanding the need. After all, any information they leaked would only come back to haunt them.
A small building next to the CP served as quarters for Hollister, Major Sangean, and Captain Cates, the air force LNO. It was a single room with four bare walls, topped at waist level by screened and louvered uppers. The louvers were rotting, and the screening had rips in it the size of small windows. There was just no way to protect the structures from the damage the elements did to them.
Each man took a corner of the building and treated it as if there were actual walls separating them. Their furnishings were nonexistent. Metal army bunks and wooden footlockers made up the complete list of amenities they could call their own.
By the second night, Hollister realized that Sangean was in the habit of going to bed very late. He stayed up reading maps, manuals, books on tactics, and the after-action reports of his LRP and other in-country teams. He supported his long hours with cup after cup of strong mess-hall coffee and an occasional shot of George Dickel, a bottle of which he kept on the top of his footlocker.
Though Sangean was an open nerve ending, it never showed in his treatment of anyone in the company. He was civil, though not very conversational. His troops were his, and he protected them like a mother bear. He had little tolerance for outsiders who shorted his troops or failed to give all their attention to matters concerning his company. He trusted no one outside Juliet Company and took only slight comfort in not letting anyone know what his patrols were up to. As a result he was constantly being sniped at by other units like the 25th Division, whose members often complained to their common headquarters, IIFFV, about Sangean’s lack of cooperation.
Sangean explained to IIFFV that the 25th’s problem was that they didn’t like the idea of just supplying food, water, fuel, housing, and perimeter security for Juliet Company without being able to tell them what to do. He explained it as a power issue. He said Colonel Downing backed him up.
Hollister liked the fact that Sangean’s priorities were his troops and getting the job done. He had seen and heard of too many commanders who had all their energies focused on themselves, at the expense of the troops and the mission. In every case it ended in disaster for someone—rarely the commander.
“I’m not going to tell you how to run your patrol,” Hollister said, handing Sergeant Harrold a beer from a homemade cooler on the back steps of the mess hall.
“Sir, it’s gonna be kinda hard forgettin’ I got me a captain taggin’—ah, I mean, observin’.”
The beer spewed from the can’s rusted top as Hollister opened his beer and passed the church key to Harrold. He smiled at the young redheaded sergeant’s habit of tapping the top of the beer can a few times with the opener. It was some myth passed around among teenagers that promised less foam. Hollister had always thought it was crap.
He didn’t want to spoil Harrold’s ritual, so he said nothing. He was sure he liked Harrold, even though he was a brand-new sergeant with only six months in Vietnam. He had volunteered for Juliet Company after serving as a squad leader in a rifle company of the 173d Airborne Brigade.
“Why J Company?”
Harrold looked up at Hollister and passed back the opener. “Well, sir … I don’t mean no kinda disrespect or nothin’, but the Old Man, I mean the CO of my rifle company, wanted me to come be his RTO and driver. And shoot, sir, I ain’t no kinda CP gofer. I’d be feelin’ much better to stay in a rifle platoon. The cap’n wasn’t happy to hear that, and my platoon leader kinda got a case of the hips at me. So I heard Juliet Company was looking for field troops. And I guess that’s how I got here.”
Sergeant Harrold looked at Hollister for his reaction.
“Well, that’s as good a reason as I had. You see, I was tapped to be a headquarters briefer back on my first tour myself.”
Harrold grinned and raised his beer with a slight salute at the top of the arc to his lips. “All right, sir.”
“So where do you want me?”
“Sir, I don’t rightly know till I find out our next mission. Could make a lotta difference.”
Hollister raised his can in recog
nition. “Good answer. I can see we’re going to get along fine. So what do you say we check out what’s up next for your team … Ah?”
“Three-Three, sir. Team Three of the Third Platoon.”
“Right. Three-Three.”
There was almost no paperwork. Juliet Company had been formed as if by fiat. The Field Force commander was a lieutenant general and could simply create the unit out of his own resources. No one at Field Force Headquarters had any idea what to do with them.
The southern half of South Vietnam had so many different varieties of enemy forces and problems for the Americans and South Viets that it was just assumed that once organized they would know what to do. It was the first thing Hollister found out about J Company—it was probably the wrong unit for the AO. Not enough terrain features existed to conceal their movements while on the ground or to protect their intentions when being inserted by chopper.
He searched the limited paperwork and found that while the small missions were typical of almost any infantry unit—raids, ambushes, prisoner snatch operations, sensor emplacements, and trail watches—there was a missing big picture. He wondered where they fit into the war. Was there a specific chunk of the war General Westmoreland and the Field Force commander wanted Sangean and Hollister to tackle? If so, no one had told him.
“We don’t have a general mission that’s any more specific than assuming responsibility of a major piece of Vietnam and saturating it with patrols to develop the situation,” Major Sangean said as he pushed a plug of chewing tobacco into the space in his cheek and opened the map case on top of his footlocker.
To get a better look, Hollister took a seat on an M60 ammunition can that had been appropriated for just that purpose. “So, what do we own?”
Major Sangean tapped an area only three miles east of the Cambodian border, between two distinctive bends in the line that separated the two countries. One was called the “Angel’s Wing,” the other the “Parrot’s Beak.”
“We own just about everything on this map sheet. West of the Twenty-fifth’s AO to—” He looked up to make a point of his next words. “—and including the border itself. Most of it is reeds and abandoned rice fields that are too risky to farm. There’s hardly a terrain feature higher than a rice-paddy dike, and the ones that are end up being somebody’s home.”
“Looks like a tabletop with clumps of vegetation but too far apart for our business,” Hollister said.
“I’d rather be working in the trees—War Zone D, the Hobo Woods. Anything’s better than this,” Major Sangean responded.
“So how do we get around it?”
“We have got to be smarter and move faster.” Sangean raised his hand. “Now don’t say anything. I know, I know. LRPs don’t move fast; they move skillfully. Well, here if you aren’t fast getting in, getting moved, and getting out, you’ll be found and you’ll be killed.”
“You’ll get no argument with me, sir. How about support?”
“We’re real weak on that. We get supported by whatever is in the AO they send us to. That means we are never in an area long enough to get to know the guys yanking lanyards and pickling off rockets for us.
“We could be supported by the Twenty-fifth Division, the First Division, the One hundred ninety-ninth Brigade, or the Eleventh Armored Cav on any given day.”
“Not good,” Hollister said, almost below his breath. “Not good at all. I just don’t like the idea of trying to train someone to shoot between the uprights when they don’t know the game. Most people don’t have any idea what LRPs do, and while you’re getting shot at is no time for them to learn.”
Sangean kicked the screen door open with his foot and squirted a pencil-thin stream of tobacco juice out into the dirt. “That’s why I got you.”
Hollister tried to sit in the back of the room and not make the others uncomfortable. It had been different when he was a lieutenant. Troops were quicker to accept lieutenants who tagged along on patrols, but the rank of captain intimidated some of them. His mind wandered to the first day he saw a captain in his basic training company. Hollister knew that a captain was the lowest rank that really had power. A company commander could bust a soldier in rank, fine him, and restrict him to the barracks under Article 15 without even having to buck it up the chain of command.
SFC Kurzikowski, a man easing out of his forties, was competent in his job. His combat patch tagged him as a veteran of earlier service with the 101st Airborne Brigade, whose reputation gave him a leg up with Hollister.
Kurzikowski ignored the fact that his new boss was in the room receiving the patrol order and delivered the information as if he had personally checked out every fact in his notes. After a few days of watching what Kurzikowski had been able to do, Hollister figured he probably had checked it all personally.
“Now the information may be sheer bullshit, but if it is right, you guys will bag some bad guys and be back here for heavy beer drinking in a day,” Kurzikowski announced.
“Where did you get the report?” Sergeant Harrold asked.
“Some canal digger came into an ARVŅ outpost and said the VC were kicking the gates out of the irrigation canals he had been digging. Seems that they flood a canal this guy is working on during the early evening and then drag small skiffs loaded with supplies down it. With the water they can cut a chogie and be across what woulda been a hard hump in no time.”
Kurzikowski drew an imaginary circle on the map behind him, indicating the huge open area that would have been much more difficult to cross at night on foot carrying heavy loads.
Hollister looked at the same area on the map on his lap. Tree lines, canals, mile-long rice-paddy dikes, rail spurs—it appeared to him that he had to accept a new way of thinking about the linear nature of movement and concealment on his new battlefield.
As Kurzikowski continued, slipping into the details of the upcoming combat patrol, Hollister could feel his gut tightening up. He knew it would get progressively worse as he got closer to the shooting.
Sergeant Harrold tried to look comfortable inspecting Hollister’s equipment as they stood in a single line with their gear on and weapons at the ready. Hollister had insisted it was Harrold’s patrol, and he wanted to see how things were done in Juliet Company. So Hollister would go along without rank.
With less than a week back in Vietnam, Hollister knew he was really back when he leaned forward under the weight of his heavy rucksack and headed for the Huey lift helicopter. His skin started to burn from the camouflage stick he had applied to his face, neck, and hands.
He would be a scout grenadier for Sergeant Harrold’s six-man patrol. The deceptively small M79 grenade launcher in his right hand reminded him of the battle-damaged one he had cut down his last time in-country. That one had been shorter, lighter, and less of a nuisance, but he only used it to mark targets and as a signaling device. The one he was carrying would be used to fire high-explosive rounds, shotgun rounds, and fléchette rounds.
Fléchettes were new to him. The round had a tightly packed warhead of bradlike pins sharpened at one end and flattened at the other—like tiny arrows. When fired, the “nails,” as they were called by the troops, would straighten out in flight and penetrate softer targets with a tight pattern. A man in its path could expect to be punctured once in every four square inches of body surface exposed to the nails.
Hollister also carried flare rounds. They were a smaller-caliber round originally designed for flare pistols. But some enterprising soldier had figured out that they would fit into the barrel of the M79, and the loss in accuracy was unimportant since flares only needed to be fired aloft to get their job done.
The chopper was showing its age. Hollister guessed it had been in-country since the D Model had been introduced to Vietnam—at least two years. In that time a lift ship could stack up lots of air miles, a frightening number of combat sorties, and could have ferried thousands of soldiers into terrifying landing zones.
Hollister tried to tell himself that the appeara
nce of the body-and-fender work on a Huey was no indicator of the ship’s airworthiness. The very strictly applied maintenance schedules required so much periodic inspection and replacement of parts and major components that a chopper could be brand-new—flightwise—but look like something from a demolition derby on the outside.
Still, Hollister would have been happier to see a chopper that looked as if it had just come off the assembly line at Bell Helicopter.
His stomach grew even tighter as the pilot increased the rpm on the main rotor. All the chatter among the troops dropped off to none. Hollister knew that each man was silently preparing himself for the unknown and cutting deals with his own God about his survival.
The first chopper lift that had taken Hollister into enemy territory had been over two years earlier. It had been chaotic and very confusing. When the choppers landed on the beach at Tuy Hoa to pick up his company, they weren’t sure how many troops each chopper could lift. Back then the ACL of a chopper was very unpredictable and varied widely from chopper to chopper on any given day. So Hollister’s platoon had been broken down into five-man chalks. Even then, some of his soldiers were turned away from choppers that couldn’t lift them, only to run frantically to choppers ahead or behind them and find that they, too, could not take them. Once Hollister’s platoon was on the ground, he discovered that two of his sergeants and one RTO had been left behind at the pickup zone. Since that day he had been very conscious of the helicopter’s few shortcomings. He had learned to respect its vulnerabilities and never trust his soldiers’ lives to the choppers.
“Lock and load!” yelled Sergeant Harrold as the chopper lifted off the OLD WARRIOR emblem.
Each man yanked back on his charging handle and chambered a round into his M16. Hollister slipped an HE round into the M79 and put the weapon on safe, still holding the muzzle so that it always faced out the chopper’s open door.
He looked around at the others. Each man sat on the edge of the deck with his feet dangling out and down toward the skids. All were looking down as the sprawling red-brown base camp zipped by below the aircraft.