As the helo lifted off, the VC, unseen in the jungle, started firing at it. The pilot threw on full power and tried to pull the aircraft straight up. The ARVN soldiers on the defensive perimeter began shooting into the jungle. I watched in horror as I realized what was happening. The young Marine gunner, seeing muzzle flashes from the perimeter, assumed he had spotted the VC and started blazing away. As the drone of the helos faded over the ridge, I heard shouts and screaming. I headed toward the commotion. A soldier was hunched on the ground holding his right hand, which hung from a scrap of flesh where a bullet had torn away his wrist. Two other men lay dead. The Vietnamese looked at me, hurt, shocked. “Why you do this?” a noncom asked. “Why shoot us?” I had no answer. War is hell? Terrible things happen? Slowly but steadily, I had been gaining the confidence of these men, becoming something more than a tourist shadowing their daily encounters with death. And now this bloody blunder had undermined their belief in me. During a long, lonely night, my worst since we had taken that first casualty, I had trouble erasing the look of betrayal on the Vietnamese soldiers’ faces.
We were ambushed almost daily, usually in the morning, soon after we got under way. The point squad took the brunt of the casualties. We switched companies around, giving everybody an equal chance at being blown away. I tried repeatedly to get Captain Hieu to have at least the men on the point wear armored vests. “Armored” was something of a misnomer. The vests were crisscrossed layers of densely woven nylon. Still, they offered good protection. The Vietnamese were small, Hieu pointed out, and the vests were heavy and uncomfortable in the sweltering jungle. Still, I kept badgering him. The next time we were standing over one of his men writhing in agony, I finally persuaded Hieu to have the point squad use the vests.
We had been out for nearly two months. I had seen men hurt. I had seen men die. But I had yet to see the enemy. After a firefight, we would pursue the VC in the direction of the incoming fire, blasting away at an invisible foe. Sometimes we spotted bloodstains, and I would dutifully enter into my notebook, “VC cas unconfirmed.” One day after we had been attacked again, I became annoyed because the ARVN troops just stood around. My Benning syndrome kicked in. Don’t just stand there, do something. “Follow Me!” I picked up a trail of blood and headed into the jungle, glancing over my shoulder. Suddenly, I realized I was alone. No one had followed me.
“Captain, come back!” the men shouted. The greatest shame that could befall Hieu was to lose his American. I might be following a trail of pig blood, a VC trick, the men warned me. I turned back. Still, I found it maddening to be ambushed, to lose men day after day to this phantom enemy who hit and ran and hit again, with seeming impunity, never taking a stand, never giving us anything to shoot at. I often wondered if we were achieving anything. How did we fight foes who blended in with local peasants who were sympathetic or too frightened to betray them? How did we measure progress? There was no front, no ground gained or lost, just endless, bloody slogging along a trail leading nowhere.
On March 18, the rain momentarily ceased and the day turned fair. We had been under way for less than an hour when enemy fire erupted, and, from the head of the column, I heard our return fire. The shooting ended in the usual sudden incongruous silence, but this time without the screams and groans of our casualties. Instead, I heard laughter. A couple of ARVN came to me, gesturing me forward. At the head of the column stood a private giggling nervously. He was wearing an armored vest with a dent punched in the back, a flattened bullet still embedded in the thick nylon layering. From his few words of English, I pieced together what had happened. He had been point man, breaking the trail for the column. When the firing started, he rose and turned around to signal to the rest of the squad where the enemy was. At that moment, he took a slug in the back which, but for the vest, would almost certainly have killed him. I pried out the spent bullet and passed it around to the Vietnamese, who fingered it with exclamations of awe. My stock was back on the rise. I was a leader of wisdom and foresight. The only problem now was that during the next supply delivery, I could not get enough vests for all the men who wanted them.
Toward the end of March, our mission changed. We were to build a new base camp at a place called Be Luong on a hill in the southeast corner of the A Shau Valley overlooking a confluence of streams. I had a chain saw airlifted in, which dazzled the Vietnamese, who had never seen one before. Until now, they had used axes or dynamite to cut down trees. One day, as the camp went up, I kept hearing an oddly regular bang, bang, bang of rifle fire. I tracked it down and found two ARVN troops methodically loading and firing clip after clip of ammunition from their M-1s into a tree. What were they doing? I wanted to know. Dynamite was too valuable, they explained. They were shooting down the tree. These moments tested an advisor’s diplomatic skills. A straight U.S. Army chewing-out would be counterproductive. At an appropriate point, I mentioned to Captain Hieu that cartridges cost eight cents apiece. Hieu thought for a moment, then his eyes brightened and he expressed an opinion with which I instantly concurred. The men must not commit such waste. Trees should be cut down, not shot down. I have always liked the maxim that there is no end to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.
One day the resupply helo delivered, along with our rations, a blond-haired, sturdily built artillery officer, First Lieutenant Alton J. Sheek. Sheek was a welcome sight, since he was to be my assistant battalion advisor and was another American to talk to in this lonely world. He was a quiet man with a reserved manner and proved to be all soldier, solid and reliable.
Along with fortifications at Be Luong, the ARVN constructed a cozy bunker of coconut logs for Captain Hieu, Sheek, Staff Sergeant Wesley Atwood, who had replaced Sergeant Sink, and me. By now, Hieu and I got along extremely well. As soon as he concluded that I was not an American know-it-all, Hieu warmed to me. My Vietnamese was limited, but his English was good enough to sustain a conversation. We never talked about the politics of the war. We talked about our families. Hieu showed me pictures of his wife and five children. After a while, I knew his plans for each child. Hieu was especially curious about America, and as I explained the wonders of the Interstate system and fast food, he would exclaim, “True? True?” I came to consider him a good friend, and was sure he felt the same way. I had crossed a cultural divide. I was no longer excess baggage to be pampered and protected. I was accepted by him and his troops. He told me that the men knew I was a new husband and about to become a father, and they were touched that at such a time in my life I was far from home, sharing their lot.
Unfortunately, soon after the Be Luong base camp was finished, Hieu got orders. His replacement was Captain Kheim, uncharacteristically big and blustery for a Vietnamese. I felt the loss of Hieu deeply. Besides being a friend, he was an able leader, respected by his men. And something told me that Kheim was going to be neither of these. Hieu left, and thirty years would pass. But I would see him again.
It was pleasant to be out of the line of fire for a while. I carried a little AM radio, and at night I could pick up a distant English-language broadcast. On Saturday night, the station played country-and-western music. Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” was a big hit at the time, and something about the melody appealed to the Vietnamese. They asked me to translate the lyrics. I told them the sad tale of the west Texas cowboy who falls in love with a Mexican girl. He goes into a bar where one of the patrons mocks his love for a Mexican, and the cowpoke shoots his tormentor. As a posse tracks down and kills our hero, we hear the tragic refrain, “I feel the bullet go deep in my side. From out of nowhere, Felina is calling. One little kiss and Felina goodbye.” Every verse ended with an aye-aye-aye that the Vietnamese loved. Soon I was leading them in choruses of “El Paso.”
A Marine captain, his name lost to memory, became my closest link to the world I had left. Every two weeks, when his helo was due in, my anticipation was almost sexual. This flier brought my latest batch of paperbacks, my carton of Salems, and my mail—and I was anti
cipating a letter from Alma telling me that I had become a father. I never had a real conversation with the Marine, since he stayed in the cockpit high over the troop compartment, engine running at full power, ready for a hasty exit. I would stand up on the tire, he would lean out, and we would shout to each other over the engine’s roar. He was a big, bluff man with a reassuring smile that said, you boys get into trouble, you know I’ll get you out. For a few lonely Americans wandering around in an alien wilderness, this Marine represented home. My attachment to him and his helo took on the desperation of a man clinging to a life raft.
However rough the routine, I never felt physically better in my life. I looked gaunt, but was in superb condition. I had lost twenty-five pounds of German beer blubber and Fort Devens cheeseburger fat in the steam-baths of the A Shau Valley. And rice starts to agree with you when you eat it three times a day, twenty-one times a week. At first, the glutinous blobs had repelled me. In time, I became quite fond of rice dishes of every kind. Our dining followed a pattern. The menu was hearty the first days after a resupply, when we had fresh vegetables, meat on the hoof, and poultry on the run. The animals were slaughtered and the meat cut into small pieces, cooked in pots, and stored in ammunition cans still greasy from the Cosmoline coating on the inside. The cans had a warning printed on them: “Do not use as food container.” After a while, pork au Cosmoline tasted fine. Either this diet explains my present good health or something is lurking somewhere in my system waiting to destroy me. After a few days, the meat would run out, then the vegetables, and the last few days before resupply we lived on rice alone. If the rice ran out, the war was over. The Vietnamese would endure almost any hardship except rice deprivation. They would not move without it. Rice nourished the Oriental body and spirit, and when the rice sacks began to empty, I started scanning the terrain nervously for a landing zone where our Marine savior could deliver the next shipment.
My only diversions were writing letters and reading. I recorded in my notebook everything that I read, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Hersey’s The Child Buyer, Stegner’s Shooting Star, Ryan’s The Longest Day, and enough pulp whodunits to stack the bookshelves of a half-dozen motel offices.
During March, I had a temporary respite from the camp and patrolling. I was called to Quang Tri, our regimental headquarters. I was to report the 2d Battalion’s progress and to learn the latest strategic fashions concocted by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s whiz kids back at the Pentagon. Quang Tri was not quite going home, it was not even Saigon, but it meant the familiarity of American faces and voices and not being shot at for a while. My American superior at Quang Tri, the advisor to the entire ARVN 3d Regiment, was Major George B. Price, a bold, brassy guy with a booming voice and near-lethal self-confidence. Price was tall, powerful, athletic, and articulate—he never stopped talking. In Army parlance, he was a “burner,” a guy going places. He evidently came by his theatricality and voice genetically. George’s sister was the opera star Leontyne Price. He became another mentor in my career, a black officer, one career generation ahead of me, who was making it himself (he retired as a brigadier general) and was generous in helping younger blacks along the way.
On this visit, I became acquainted with the latest Pentagon theory, the “oil slick.” By securing one hamlet, we would generate security in neighboring hamlets, a benign slick spreading stability to areas threatened by the VC. What I remember most about those few days in Quang Tri, however, was not fashionable strategies, but George Price taking me to the officers’ mess for a real American breakfast—eggs, bacon, pancakes, cereal. By now, however, my stomach had taken out Vietnamese citizenship, and this rich American diet made me sick.
I was counting the days on two timetables, when I would become a father and when I would go home. The tape recorders Alma and I had gotten for Christmas had proved inconvenient and inadequate for expressing our feelings. We had fallen back on timeless letter writing. What Alma did not tell me in her letters, thinking that I had enough trouble, was the race situation back home. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black weekly, had designated Birmingham the “worst big city in the U.S.A.” The honor was not bestowed lightly. While I was in Vietnam, there occurred the eighteenth bombing of black neighborhoods in Birmingham (“Bombingham,” as blacks then called it). While I was fighting the VC, a young Baptist minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been arrested for leading a protest march on Birmingham’s city hall, after which he issued a document arousing America’s conscience, his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” While I was patrolling the A Shau Valley for communists, R.C., my father-in-law, sat up nights, a shotgun across his lap, ready to defend his home against fellow Americans of a different color. I never knew that my folks had called Alma and pleaded with her to get out of Birmingham. I knew almost nothing of all this. Little news penetrated the A Shau Valley, and Alma wanted her letters to support me with her love, not alarm me with her concerns.
As for my impending fatherhood, Alma and I had worked out a signal. When the baby arrived, she was to write me and print on the envelope “Baby Letter.” I had already asked regimental headquarters at Quang Tri to be on the lookout for this letter and to open it and radio the contents to me the minute it arrived. Something about the imminent arrival of a new, innocent life in the midst of this small hell made my own life seem more valuable, my own survival more critical.
I had lost confidence in Hieu’s replacement. Captain Kheim failed to connect with his men and did not know how to use advisors. I discussed the problem with Alton Sheek. Kheim was a kind of officer we both knew, an insecure man who expressed his authority by barking foolish orders rather than exercising sound judgment.
On April 3, I was in my Be Luong bunker stretched out on a bamboo shelf bed, trying to read a paperback by candlelight. Sheek was out with the men, and Kheim was asleep. In the distance I heard the crump of mortar fire and went outside to see where it was coming from. The VC were trying to drop a calling card on the new camp, but did not have the address right yet. The rounds were exploding in the jungle, missing us widely.
Captain Kheim came bounding out of the bunker and gave the order to return fire. I told him that this response might not be wise. We were on a hilltop. We had cleared the surrounding trees, and our fire would reveal our exposed position. They were not hitting us, I said, because they could not see any better in the dark than we could. No, Kheim said, doctrine called for returning fire.
Out went a few rounds. Within a minute, a huge white flash exploded about twenty feet above my head. Instinctively, I hit the dirt and scrambled back into the bunker before the next mortar round could find us. I checked myself. I was all right, but outside, I could hear shouts and moaning, and I went back to help.
The next morning, I saw exactly what had happened. The VC round had struck a branch of a tree that I had been standing under. Shrapnel had scattered to the left and right of me, wounding a half-dozen men on either side, but leaving me unscathed. If the round had not hit the branch, it would have hit me, and I almost certainly would have been killed. The men wounded in this attack included Kheim, who, by his rashness, had acted as the VC’s spotter. His leg wound was just serious enough that he had to be evacuated and replaced, no great loss to the profession of arms. Kheim was succeeded by Captain Quang, a capable officer, though he was a bit reserved toward his advisors. I admired Quang, but we never struck friendly sparks the way Vo Cong Hieu and I had.
The day after the mortar attack a resupply helicopter hovered into view over the camp. In the mail was a letter from my mother. I planted myself under a tree and read the usual family chitchat. “Oh, by the way,” Mom had written, “we are absolutely delighted about the baby.”
What baby? What had happened to the baby letter? Was Alma all right? Was it a boy or a girl? I had the radio operator raise the base camp on the ancient AN/GRC-9, and we managed to get patched through to Quang Tri. The letter had suffered from something not unhea
rd of in military operations, a failure of communication. The envelope, clearly marked, was sitting in a stack of undelivered mail. “Tell them I want it read now,” I told the radio operator, and that was how I learned of the early arrival of Michael Kevin Powell, born March 23, 1963, in the Holy Family Catholic Hospital in Birmingham. He was reverse-named after Kevin Michael Schwar, one of the sons of our Fort Bragg Samaritans, Joe and Pat Schwar.
My emotions at this time were an odd mixture—elation that I had a healthy son and a strong wife; bewilderment as I looked around at the alien world in which this had happened to me; and a nagging anxiety. I had come so close to being killed, to never knowing I had become a father. A family back home was depending on me, including a small new person. I wanted desperately to see this child. I had to make it through the year.
Quang was technically the battalion commander, and he was a good soldier. But since I was senior in terms of service with the unit and had the confidence of the men, something curious began to happen. The sergeant major was a lean, leathery veteran of the French colonial army, the ARVN equivalent of tough old Sergeant Edwards back in Gelnhausen. He trusted me, and we began playing a little game, with me pretending I was not in charge, the sergeant major pretending he was not taking orders directly from me. I was supposed to be an advisor, not the leader. Nevertheless, the two of us were in quiet collusion. Leadership, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And I had been drawn in to fill a void.
The ARVN soldiers were courageous and willing but not always easy to train. I instructed. They smiled, nodded, and often ignored what I said. I drilled them for hours on how to unload a helicopter. The key was speed. The helicopter was vulnerable. It drew fire. We needed to unload it as fast as possible. The quickest way was for two men to jump inside the aircraft as soon as it landed and start throwing out the cargo. The rest of the squad should form a line from the helo into the jungle, passing the supplies from man to man, bucket-brigade style, and stockpiling them under cover of the trees. I scratched an outline of a helicopter into the dirt, and we drilled again and again. Aircraft lands. Two men inside. Others form line. Pass supplies. Over and over.
My American Journey Page 12